The Last Time I Saw You

by Elizabeth Berg

  FIFTEEN

  “NOW, THERE’S SOMEONE I CAN GET ALONG WITH,” EINER tells Mary Alice, as he watches Pete wend his way through the crowd toward the bar.

  “He is a nice guy,” Mary Alice says.

  “Should have hung around with him when you were in high school!”

  “Well.” She smiles at Einer. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Einer’s having a great time. She hasn’t seen him so enlivened since… since she doesn’t know when. She herself is not exactly thrilled with the way things are going. She’d hoped—expected, really—that she’d be eating dinner with Lester, but there he is sitting next to none other than Candy Sullivan. Well, that’s the end of that. Candy is wearing a simple white dress that sets off… everything. She remains a dazzlingly beautiful woman. Her hair is in a loose upsweep, and she wears a large pair of diamond studs that twinkle every time she moves. Her shoulders are bare, her arms, but she has a gossamer wrap draped loosely about them. Mary Alice sighs the tiniest of sighs. She can’t justify getting angry: Candy doesn’t know she has feelings for Lester; and what man could resist her? Moreover, Candy Sullivan never did a single nasty thing to her in high school and, on one momentous day, actually chose Mary Alice first to be on her field hockey team in gym class. There was a collective gasp when she did that, and at the time Mary Alice wondered if her being picked first wasn’t as bad as being picked last—different stares, different whispers, but stares and whispers all the same.

  No, and she doesn’t blame Lester, who sits with his chair turned at an angle toward Candy, his legs outstretched, his arms crossed. Mary Alice puts a great deal of stock in body language, and would like to think that Lester’s crossed arms indicate a certain unwillingness to let Candy in. But look at his face: open, friendly, and awfully attentive to whatever Candy is saying. At the moment, their conversation is exclusionary; everyone else at the table is talking to each other. Nance and Buddy Dunsmore. Sheila Grommer, class secretary. Linny Waterman, who, as captain of the cheerleading squad, wore a star on the sleeve of her sweater and could do multiple backflips and impossibly high jumps. Marshall Kind, whose father more than once got kicked out of his son’s wrestling matches for arguing with the refs. Erik Betterman, a huge, burly guy who was rumored to be a fool over his ancient cat. Mary Alice remembers every single one of them. Still the popular table, except that Lester and Pete Decker ought to change places.

  Einer rises a little ways out of his wheelchair to reach for the salt, and Mary Alice watches carefully. She won’t help him unless she has to; she appreciates the fact that his own memories have erased many of his years, if only in his mind. After she “dances” with him, she suspects he’ll have his choice of partners. The truth is, he looks adorable, his tightly knotted tie and gold cuff links, his stick-out ears and duck-fluff hair. She bets someone will end up in his lap.

  Mary Alice sighs and contemplates her hands, clasped together in her lap. She and Lester had had such a lovely time together this afternoon. They had talked easily, their conversation running smooth and lively and seemingly unstoppable. They are aligned politically; they both like pancake breakfasts; he likes Beethoven over Mozart, just as she does. They both like line dancing, though Lester says he’s better at watching it than doing it. And when it came to high school memories, well! Didn’t they understand each other in that regard! The name-calling, the spitballs, the nasty notes shoved into locker doors, the “accidental” knocking of books from their arms, the churlish comments about them in slam books. Yet both of them had let go of all that, had in fact let go of it long before they graduated. “Did you even care?” Lester had asked, and Mary Alice had thought for a while before she’d answered. Finally, she’d nodded and said, “Yes. But I cared about other things more. The world was quite a bit bigger than the halls of Whitley High School.”

  “It sure was,” Lester said.

  He had told her about his wife, briefly, mostly by way of explaining why he’d devoted himself more to work than to pursuing a relationship. There’d been one time when they were standing in the middle of the field—which, as promised, had been full of red-winged blackbirds—and Lester’s hand had rested on Mary Alice’s shoulder when he showed her one of the birds sitting motionless on a wire and looking up at the sky. “It’s like he’s contemplating the cloud formations,” Mary Alice said, and Lester laughed and said, “It’s true! I have never seen a bird do that. Have you?” Mary Alice turned toward him and allowed as how she had not. Their faces were very close together then, and the moment was charged not so much with any kind of sexual energy as with ease. Lester asked if she’d ever been bird-watching in a more formal way, if she’d ever risen before dawn, slung binoculars around her neck, and headed out to join a group that moved together like one organism, whispering and pointing and then going out for a breakfast that felt more like lunch. No, she said, she had never done that. And he said, well she really ought to. That moment hung in the air, it felt like an invitation from Lester was forthcoming, inevitable; and then she made a mistake. She looked at her watch, which prompted him to look at his own and say that they’d better get going. No, that’s not what I meant! she wanted to say. I was looking because I wanted more time!

  But she’d figured she’d have an opportunity to bring up the subject again. He’d said, “See you at dinner?” and the late afternoon had been gilding the side of his face and making the tips of his eyelashes seem to glow; and besides looking handsome, he’d looked kind and capable and rich in the soul, and she’d said yes, she would see him at dinner. Yes, she’d said, and she’d wondered how she would look to him in her new dress.

  She went home and got ready in a kind of grounded ecstasy, and applied a little makeup to the best of her ability. And she thought she looked quite nice. She looked in the full-length mirror at her front and back and sides; and she approved of herself in a way that was new to her. She sang “It Had to Be You” under her breath, and laughed at herself for her presumptuousness, then decided she wasn’t being presumptuous at all, she was just being hopeful—realistic, even!—and responding to the encouragement she’d been given.

  She called Einer before she left home, telling him she was on the way to pick him up, and he could release Rita to leave for her dinner date with the man she’d met in the grocery store. Rita had promised to come back in a couple of hours; she and Mary Alice had incorrectly assumed that Einer wouldn’t want to stay for long at the reunion.

  When Mary Alice arrived to pick up Einer, he was still in his bathrobe. He told her he was sorry, but he had to use the bathroom before he finished getting dressed. Finished? Mary Alice had thought. You haven’t even started! But she stood in her heels and perfume, clutching the little evening bag she’d borrowed from her sister, and Einer shuffled to the bathroom at his turtle pace, the newspaper under his arm, and what could she do? The choice was to be furious and unhappy or to make herself useful. She’d put her purse on the nightstand and turned down Einer’s bedcovers invitingly and plumped his pillows. She’d gone down to the kitchen to get a glass of water to put on his nightstand. Then she’d sat at the foot of his bed with her back straight, her knees together, breathing in and breathing out and feeling grateful that she never had to give her bowels a second thought. Einer farted explosively several times, and then called out “Sorry!”

  “It’s all right!” she called back.

  “I’m having a little trouble getting going!”

  “Take your time,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s okay; take your time,” she said, and looked out the window at the darkening sky. She would not give him a suppository. Absolutely not.

  As it happened, Einer succeeded on his own (“Now you’re talking!” she heard him mutter), and soon he came shuffling out of the bathroom. He dressed slowly and with great deliberation, and then he fussed with the knot in his tie, and then he combed and combed his sparse hair while he squinted into the mirror. Next he deliberated over which cologne to wear, citru
s or spice? By then it was all she could do not to drag him out of his room by the scruff of his neck. “Women like citrus,” she told him, and he looked at her doubtfully, but then shrugged and put on that scent.

  At last, he was ready, and she helped him out and into the car, and they headed for the hotel. And then what? A freight train!

  Once Mary Alice walked into the hotel, she calmed down and was most accommodating to Pete Decker, who asked if he might sit with them. She’d always found him lovely to look at, the photo of him had looked nice on her bedroom wall, but a crush? No. Despite what her sister thought, she had never had a crush on Pete Decker. No reason for him not to sit with them, though. He was still lovely to look at.

  Mary Alice had told Einer on the way over that she wanted to talk to Ben Small because she did want to talk to Ben Small, but only because she was curious about whether or not he’d ever become an actor. But now look.

  She turns and glances again at Lester, who is still engrossed in conversation with Candy. What are they talking about? Each so serious. She doubts he’s even noticed that she is here.

  Pete comes back to the table and delivers the drinks, and Mary Alice takes such a large first gulp of hers, it gives her the hiccups. She’s embarrassed by this, but Ben Small puts his hand on her arm, nicely, and she leans back in her chair and smiles. Then she hiccups again and he laughs and so does she. What can you do? Love the one you’re with. The main courses are placed before them by grim-faced waitstaff who are banging the platters down in a way that is not exactly gracious: Here! Here! Here’s your food! They want to get this dinner over with, it’s clear; and so does Mary Alice. Because although she has missed her opportunity to have dinner with Lester, there’s still the rest of the night to come; the DJ is already setting up for the dance in the corner of the ballroom. In third grade, Mary Alice once asked the most popular boy in the school to dance. And what do you think he said? Okay, that’s what he said.

  There is the sound of a spoon against a water glass, and the loud chatter in the room gradually quiets. Pam Pottsman is over by the DJ, and she takes his microphone. “May I have your attention?” she says. “Now, I know you just got your dinners, and I want you to go ahead and enjoy them. But I have a surprise. I think most of you know that Walter Vogel has passed on; his class photo is over on the memorial table, you probably saw it. And gosh, we all remember Walter Vogel, don’t we?” She leads the audience in a confused kind of applause.

  Mary Alice has not yet looked at the memorial table, and she suspects she is not the only one who is putting off doing so. But she has no memory of Walter Vogel. Not one memory. Walter Vogel, she thinks. Walter Vogel. And then she remembers: a thin boy in ill-fitting clothes who had seemed pathologically shy—he’d never talk to or even look at anyone. He lived alone with his father; his mother was dead, and there were rumors that his father beat him with a board. He did poorly in school; Mary Alice remembers that he had a driver’s license long before the rest of them, because he’d been left back a few times. Unike her or Lester, Walter wasn’t picked on. He was simply ignored. Unseen, really.

  Pam continues talking exuberantly into the microphone, though it’s obvious she’s not quite sure what she’s doing—or should do. “Right! Okay! So, Walter Vogel, he… You know, he was quite the… And of course I think he also played on the basketball team! Walter unfortunately died of cancer two years ago, and—” She looks off to the side, where a young man stands in the shadows. “Pardon?… Oh, I’m so sorry, it was three years ago, but anyway, the good news is that his son, who was the one who got the invitation to the reunion and then called and told me about his dad’s passing, he has come here tonight, and he would like to say a few words. It’s just a wonderful surprise for all of us, and, well, here he is, Ron Vogel. Walter’s son.”

  The young man steps into the light, and now Mary Alice remembers his father clearly; his son is his spitting image. Ron is wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, a sweatshirt jacket, heavy work boots. “Okay,” he says. “Well, first off I just want to say thank you to everyone for letting me talk to you. Which I did not plan to do, to be honest. But I remembered you all were going to be here tonight, and I thought… Well, I just wanted to come over.

  “My dad, he was not an easy guy. I guess that’s what you’d say. He was a hard dude to live with, he wasn’t so nice to us kids. He was real nice to my mom, he always was, he treated her like she was a princess or something.

  “What I really wanted from my dad was a way to know him. I never did know him, he wouldn’t hardly ever talk to me. Or anybody, for that matter. He never did. But I think you all must have known him. He used to talk about this group of guys he hung around with in high school. Glory days, you know, that is the one thing he would talk about is this group of guys he hung around with in high school. Pete Decker is the guy he talked about most, he just loved Pete Decker. Is Pete Decker here tonight?”

  “Over here,” Pete says. He’s smiling, but his eyebrows are furrowed, and Mary Alice suspects he, too, is trying to remember who Walter Vogel was.

  Ron says, “Hey, Pete! Good to meet you, man! Wow. Okay, so… I just want to… I just want to thank all of you, really, for being such an important part of my dad’s life. It’s good to know he had a time when he was… you know…

  “Well, I’ll let you get back to your party now, and thank you very much.”

  “Hold on!” Pete says. He gets up and heads over to where Ron is standing. He puts his arm around the younger man’s shoulders and takes the microphone from him. “I did know your dad, we all did, and we all really liked him, too. And I’ll tell you, back in those days, one of the things he talked about most was how he couldn’t wait to get married and have a kid. We got a six-pack one night, and we went down by the river, did he ever tell you about that night?”

  Ron shakes his head no.

  “Well, I’ll tell you about it. So… we got a six-pack, your dad talked some guy going into the liquor store into buying us a six-pack. I was too chicken to do it, so your dad did it. We drove over to the river and drank it, and your dad opened up about what he hoped would happen in his life. And you know, he didn’t say one word about jobs or money or status or any of that stuff. What he really wanted was a son. He said he wanted to make sure his son got taught the things he’d never been given the opportunity to learn. He said he could hardly wait to see his boy grow up in front of him, his own son would be… would be just the best thing that ever happened to him. He could not wait for you to arrive. And I was… you know, I was still young and a little wild, and the last thing on my mind was marriage and family. But when I heard him talk about it that way, even I wanted it.”

  A few people laugh, and Pete holds up his hand. “No, really. The way he described it made me want it, too. So your dad knew exactly what he wanted to do. He had big plans. But as I’m sure you know, Ron, sometimes things in real life don’t work out the way they do in our imaginations. And men aren’t always so good at showing emotion, at showing appreciation for the things that mean the most to them. We feel those things, but we don’t show them. Although I think your generation is a lot better at that. I guess our generation was told that real men don’t do this and real men don’t do that, but your generation, you know better. And that’s good. It’s important to tell the people closest to you how much you care, and not to take them for granted. Because otherwise you might lose them.”

  Mary Alice steals a look over at Nora, who is staring into her lap.

  Pete takes his arm from around the younger man’s shoulders and faces him. “I guess there’s a lot we don’t do in our lives, no matter who we are. I guess there’s a lot of important things we mess up. But I want you to know that, even if your dad didn’t share much of himself with you, he wanted to. I hope that counts for something. And I want to tell you, too, that I was proud to call Walter my friend.” Pete offers his hand to the young man, who shakes it, and everyone applauds. Then he starts back to the table, refusing to meet anyone’
s eyes. Ron calls out a final “Thank you!” and leaves the room.

  Immediately afterward, Mary Alice hears the questions start: “Who was he?” “Our class?” She hears someone else say, “Not on the basketball team. He wasn’t on any team.” And she hears, “Pete Decker and Walter Vogel? No way.”

  When Pete sits back down, Mary Alice puts her hand over his, and when he looks up, she nods.

  By the time they are through with the entrees, both Einer and Pete have finished their second martinis, and Einer is slumped decidedly to the left, though he keeps telling Mary Alice that it’s only because he’s trying to hear Pete better. Mary Alice has mostly talked to Ben Small, who did try to be an actor in New York, but mostly ended up working as a waiter in a deli that got shut down for having rats in the kitchen, and that was the final straw: Ben left behind the city and his dreams of becoming an actor. She’s enjoying talking to Ben, but she’s having trouble hearing him, because the music is so loud. And then there’s the exuberance displayed by Einer talking to Pete. Once she heard Einer say, “Right back at it!” and now he lifts himself partway out of his chair to yell, “Well, son, that’s exactly what I’m saying! You decide what’s worth fighting for, and what isn’t! That’s the critical decision you got to make! And once you make it, why, then you stand up and be a man!”

  “Einer,” Mary Alice says.

  “What?”

  Pete looks over at his wife, then at Mary Alice. “You know what? He’s right.” He says loudly to Einer, “You are absolutely right!” and begins to pound his fist lightly against his thigh.