The Last Time I Saw You

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Well, why’d he even come?” Judy asks, and no one answers.

  Then, “Terrorist plot?” someone says, and everyone laughs, if ruefully.

  “Well, the hell with Donnie Funderman,” Pam says. “Let’s start.” She looks down at her list. “Okay. The first question is, What scared you about coming here tonight?”

  “How I’d look to everybody!” Nance says immediately, and a number of people nod their heads, agreeing with her.

  “Who’d not be here because they died,” Ron Rubin says. “I guess everybody thinks about that, but it was on my mind particularly because I almost died not long ago. I wasn’t going to tell anybody because it’s not exactly… I mean, I thought I might get lucky tonight and I didn’t want anybody thinking I’d keel over on them. In fact, just in case I do get lucky, I want everyone, especially Sally Harding, to know I’m fine now.” He looks over at Sally and winks, and she smiles and winks back. “Six months ago,” Ron says, “I had a stroke.”

  Steve Hoffman puts his hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Whoa,” he says. Then it gets very quiet.

  “Aw, come on, didn’t anybody else have a stroke?” Ron asks, and no one raises his or her hand.

  “Heart attack?” he asks, almost gaily, and two hands go up, two men. “Okay, then!” Ron says. “Well, so, like I said, I had a stroke. I was cleaning the leaves out of my gutters, up on a ladder, you know, and I got this really weird feeling. I came down the ladder, and the whole way down I was feeling more and more numb on one side. By the time I reached the ground, I was listing way over and my mouth was drooping and I thought, damn it, something’s really wrong. And then I realized what was happening. I sat on the ground and called my ex-wife, who’s a nurse. When she answered and I told her what was going on, she said, ‘Call 911, you idiot!’ and I said, ‘No, I’d rather ride over with you.’ We’re still real good friends, and she only lives a couple of blocks away. I figured, if I’m going to die, I don’t want to be with strangers. So she said she’d come, and I leaned against the house to wait. I looked up at the sky, and it was a real pretty blue with a kind of zigzag cloud I’d never seen before, and it occurred to me that every day of my life, there had been a different kind of sky overhead, and I was sorry I hadn’t paid more attention. Then I saw the pack of cigarettes in my pocket and I thought, Well, either I’m going to die or I’m going to quit smoking. Either way, I’m having these last two cigarettes. So I smoked ’em, and then my wife came and we went to the hospital. On the way, I told her everything wrong in our marriage had been my fault. And she started crying and said cut it out or we’d get in an accident and both of us would die. ‘I mean it,’ I said, and she said, no, it was her fault, too, and she was sorry and she would always love me even if I was a ghost. But of course I didn’t die. And after I got out of the hospital we got a little more estranged again. Still friends, but… you know. And here I am. Here I am with you guys again. And goddamn, I’m glad to be here! Sally, I’m really glad you’re here, too.”

  “Well, I’ve had a hip replaced,” she says, and everyone laughs.

  But Dorothy has been deeply moved by Ron’s story, and she gets out of her chair and goes over to him and puts her hands on either side of his face and gives him a little kiss. He puts his hands over hers when she does this, and she is surprised and gratified by their warmth. “Ron Rubin,” she says. And he says, “Dorothy Shauman,” and smiles. “You’re all right,” he says, and she says thank you and goes back to her chair.

  “Don’t let’s do health anymore,” someone says. Dorothy agrees. She visited the memorial table, she saw those photos of classmates who are no longer with them. Vietnam. Disease. Accidents. There was a bouquet of flowers there, a black ribbon around the vase. Dorothy looked carefully at each photo, into the eyes of the unsuspecting young person. She looked at their collars and their ears and their shiny hair. It’s good we don’t know our own futures, she thought. It’s merciful. A couple of other people came up to the table when Dorothy was there, and she moved away before they could say anything. There was nothing to say.

  So yes, they should move on from this morose topic. Imagine if, when they were kids, they’d gone on and on over health concerns, their measles and mumps, their skinned knees and broken wrists and cavities. Yeah, I was really worried about a staph infection with that skinned knee! Or Broken wrist, man alive, what a problem. I have to write with my left hand! I can’t take a bath! Can’t play volleyball! What will happen to me? No. They did not complain when they were kids, with rare exception. They just went on with their temporary ailments, waiting to get right again. They got their casts signed and made it fun!

  It’s different now; Dorothy and her peers are on the other side of the incline. When something happens, they do not assume they’ll get right again. They fear getting worse. And they wait for the next thing, and finally for the inevitable tap on the shoulder, that icy singling out.

  When they were in their forties, Dorothy and Judy and Linda had made a vow never to talk about health problems the way their mothers did. “Well, I just don’t know what to do about my gallbladder,” Judy had said that day, joking around. And now look. Just a week ago, she said that very same thing to Dorothy, and it wasn’t funny at all. Dorothy thought, Are you sure it’s your gallbladder? Are you sure it’s not your pancreas? And then she started thinking about how she could not go on without Judy and Linda in her life, but at some point in the not-so-distant future, she’d have to. Or they’d have to go on without her. Unless they all died in a car wreck together, that actually might not be so bad. Bam! Done.

  “Okay,” Pam says. “Here comes the next question. Does anyone have any dirt on any of the teachers?”

  “I screwed Miss Woodman in the art supply closet,” Sam Noerper says, and a few people, including Dorothy, gasp.

  Tommy Metito says, “I got her, too. Same place. A tube of oil paint came undone beneath her and she got cerulean blue all over her ass.”

  “Are you kidding?” Pam says.

  Marjorie Dunn says, “I had sex with her, too.”

  “You so did not!” Linda says, and Marjorie laughs and says, “You’re right. I didn’t. But I did have sex with Mr. Garvis, that real young math teacher who came for the latter half of our senior year, but it was after graduation.”

  “But this is awful!” Dorothy says. “I had no idea!”

  “Oh, come on,” Buddy says. “Teachers used to flirt all the time. Remember how Mademoiselle Florin used to sit on the top of her desk and cross her legs and her skirt used to ride up real high?”

  “Noooo,” Dorothy says.

  “Well, she did it in our class,” Buddy says. “Remember, guys?”

  A few members of the Lettermen’s Club look at each other and nod, grinning.

  “Okay, moving on,” Pam says. “Here’s the next question. Did your life turn out to be anything like you thought it would be?”

  Silence.

  “Anybody?” Pam asks.

  Jenny Freeman, who was always so quiet, always the great observer, speaks up now. “Not mine. All I ever wanted was to get married and have children. I thought it was a noble goal. But then the women’s movement came along, and I felt compelled to work outside the house. It sounded great, you know, live up to your potential, everybody pitch in, it’s going to be Equal City. Which, actually, it was not, and is not, but at the time I bought into it. When my second was two months old, I put her in day care and I got my real estate license and I got a job. I walked around in this horrible mustard-colored blazer, selling houses. Paid a fortune to get my face put on a bus stop bench. I sold a million houses, I swear, I made a lot of money. And I so regret doing it, because I don’t feel like I ever got to know my daughter, not like I did my son. I had a red phone, it was a separate business line, and every time it rang, I’d stop whatever I was doing and talk to some client. I was afraid not to answer that goddamn phone, I might miss out! And the irony is, I did miss out. I’ve never been able to achieve the kind of relations
hip with my daughter that I have with my son.”

  “Oh well,” Pam says. “That’s girls, isn’t it? Boys are just easier.”

  “No,” Jenny says. “It’s that I wasn’t available to her. I can remember her trying to talk to me when she was growing up and I was always putting her off. The truth is, I was an awful mother.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Judy says. “You set a good example for your daughter by having a successful career!”

  “No, I didn’t,” Jenny says. “I was a fucking anxious wreck. I was always tired, always feeling so much pressure. I quit cooking, which I really used to enjoy, especially baking, I used to love to bake. But after I started working, I used to have a fit if I got a notice to make something for a bake sale. Have you seen what bake sales have become, by the way? Nobody makes anything. It’s all supermarket crap! Remember when everything used to be homemade? Remember the pies and the banana breads and the cookies, all tied up in ribbons? Remember the cakewalks?”

  “Yeah,” Judy says. “And remember when women used to medicate themselves in order to get through a day because they were so damn bored? You’re being too hard on yourself.”

  “My daughter has been institutionalized three times for drugs. She’s had four abortions. I can’t… We don’t really talk. She lives with a man I can’t stand; I don’t think he treats her right. I go to visit her and I want to be nonjudgmental and loving and try to repair our relationship but her apartment just reeks of cigarettes and dirty dishes and garbage overflowing from this big can they keep in the kitchen, and the cats are eating from it and…” She starts to cry and then laugh, saying, “Oh, I can’t believe I said all this. I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” Karen Komall says, little Karen, who never measured more than four feet eleven and was regarded as a kind of pet for the student body. Everybody liked Karen, she was such a sweet girl. She ended up marrying her high school sweetheart, Tim Swift, who is one of the guys on the dead table. Vietnam. “I had a lot of problems with my son,” she said. “A lot. It’s hard to raise a son without a father. But he’s okay now. It took a long time, but he’s really got his life on track, now. If there’s anything I’ve learned about life, it’s that things always change. Which, for me, means that there’s always hope. I’ll give you my email—I’ll be glad to talk to you about this anytime.”

  Jenny nods. “Thank you. I’m so… Thank you. Okay. Let’s change the subject!”

  Annie—Anne—Denato says, “Well, I have a question. What did everyone hope to find, coming here tonight? And I’ll answer first. I wanted a chance to show how much I’ve changed. I wanted you all to know how much you misjudged me.”

  “We did misjudge you,” Nance says. “I for one am sorry. I knew you were smart, but you were…”

  “I know,” Anne says. “I had reasons for being that way. If you guys had had any idea of what went on in my house… My father did a number on me, okay? But I’m past it. I’m past all that stuff, I’m really happy now, I’m successful, and I wanted you all to know it. And yet, being here makes me feel like that girl in high school all over again.

  “You know, when I told one of my colleagues I was coming to my fortieth high school reunion, he said, ‘Don’t go.’ We’re good friends; he knows what life was like for me in high school. But anyway, he said so many people who go to reunions think that doing so can somehow change what happened to them. That the person you’ve become might erase the person you were then. But of course that doesn’t happen. In some respects, this reunion has shown me that it’s not that you can’t go home again; it’s that you can never leave.” She swallows what’s left of her drink and then offers a big smile. “Well, but here we all are, talking to each other in a way that’s not bullshit. I say that counts for a lot. What about the rest of you? What did you want to find here?”

  “Dorothy came for only one reason,” Judy says, and Dorothy’s eyes grow round and she says, “Judy!”

  “I didn’t say who,” Judy says, but then Pam says, “Well, who is it?” and Judy says, “Pete Decker,” and there it is, right out in the open for everyone to know.

  “He’s married, isn’t he?” Ron asks, and Tom Gunderson says, “Getting divorced.”

  “Fair game then,” Ron says, and winks at Dorothy.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” Dorothy says, and Judy says, “Oh, Dorothy, sit down!”

  “I have to pee!”

  Pam picks up her purse. “Maybe we should all go, so none of us misses anything.”

  “If we all go, the momentum will be lost,” Linda says.

  “She’s right,” Judy says. And then, “Sit down, Dorothy.”

  “I’m not sitting down,” Dorothy says, and Linda says, “Sit down!” so she does. Then she says, “Okay, I have a question. Who do you think is going to hook up tonight, besides Lester Hessenpfeffer and Candy Sullivan?”

  “Lester and Candy?” Anne asks.

  Dorothy nods gravely. “Somebody saw them on the elevator going up. They’ve been gone for a long time.”

  Susie Black says, “I don’t think I’m going to hook up with anyone, but I did get kissed in the hallway. And you know who it was? It was Bill Anderson.”

  Bill Anderson! Dorothy thinks. He stayed for such a little while, she doesn’t think he even finished his dinner. He was a wreck, nothing like his former self, Dorothy couldn’t imagine what had happened to make him that way and wasn’t inclined to ask. He was sort of scary, sitting alone at a table by the bar, staring off into space. Dorothy avoided him because he looked so sad and odd. It seemed like most people did. Susie had gained quite a bit of weight, but she still had a little left of what used to make her so cute. Still with the big blue eyes, the high cheekbones.

  “It was the most extraordinary thing,” she says. “The sweetest thing. We walked past each other in the hall—I was coming back from the bathroom and he was leaving, and we nodded at each other. Then he called my name, and I turned around, and he asked if I had a minute. Sure, I said. So he came up and stood real close and looked me right in the eyes for a long time. Then he told me he’d had a crush on me in high school, that he had loved me for years and he’d kept my picture in his helmet when he went to Vietnam. He said he’d wanted to ask me to the prom senior year, but he was too scared. And you know, I sat alone on prom night. Well, not alone, I sat watching television with my parents, which was worse than sitting alone. I said, ‘Oh, Bill, I would have gone with you,’ and he said, ‘You would?’ and I said ‘Yeah, I thought you were really cute!’ and he said, ‘You did?’ and I said ‘Yeah, in fact I had a crush on you.’ Which I did, I liked how shy and mysterious Bill was, I liked that. And he was really cute, that black hair, those green eyes. Real tall, and he had a little dimple in his left cheek. He said, ‘You had a crush on me?’ and I said yeah, and he said, ‘Huh. I wish you’d told me.’ And I said, ‘Me, too.’ And then he put his finger under my chin just like in the movies and gave me the most gentle kiss. And I thought about how we were both pretty good-looking in high school and now we’re both kind of wrecked, and here we were, sharing a smooch in the hallway under bad fluorescent lighting, and I thought we were more beautiful than we had ever been. You know?”

  “Why don’t you call him?” Betty says.

  “I thought of that. I asked for his number and he said he’d rather not give it to me. He said he had a lot of problems; he wasn’t really able to be with a woman. Wasn’t able to be with anyone, really.”

  She shrugs, and Dorothy can see that she’s close to tears. “It’s too late. It really is. He was such a sweet guy, too. I knew him, and he was just so sweet.” She shakes her head. “Man oh man. There’s just a million ways a life can go. Isn’t there?”

  EIGHTEEN

  LESTER AND CANDY ARE LYING ON THEIR BACKS ON HER hotel bed. The lights in the room are out, but the drapes are open, revealing the bright moon and the many stars. Esther the bulldog lies between them at shoulder level, her head on her paws, her forehead wrinkl
ed and worried looking. Lester and Candy are fully clothed, on top of the covers, and Candy is holding Lester’s handkerchief pressed against her nose. After a moment, she says, “Okay, I think I’m done crying now. Sorry.”

  Lester looks over at her. “Oh, no; don’t apologize. I’m honored! Truly. My wife used to say that to cry in front of someone was to offer them a compliment.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else did she used to say?”

  He looks out at the night sky. “Well, she called stars silent commentators. Ancient, silent commentators.”

  “Huh. That’s nice. What else?”

  Lester’s chest hurts now, but he says in as easy a tone as he can muster, “Oh, she said a lot of things.” He thinks about how, after the reconciliation that came after their first major argument, he told Kathleen he feared he’d lost her forever. And she said, “You know that song ‘Till the End of Time’? Please review the lyrics, and then report back to me.” But what he tells Candy is, “She used to say this all the time: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em harder.’”

  Candy laughs, and it makes Lester’s spirits rise. Then she props herself up on one elbow and says, “I’m sorry. I’ve taken you away from the party.”

  “You didn’t take me away. I wanted to come with you. For one thing, duty called. A dog with love handles is a dog that needs attention!”

  “Oh, I was so scared she had a tumor. What a relief that she’s only fat! I love fat!”

  Lester rubs the top of Esther’s head briskly. She licks him and snorts happily into his hand. Her tail is wagging so fast it’s nearly a blur. “Don’t you listen to her; you’re gorgeous,” Lester tells the dog. “Liz Taylor should have such beauty marks!” And then, to Candy, “You’re gorgeous, too, by the way.”

  He sees her pull back slightly into herself, the automatic response of many pretty women who have been complimented too many times for reasons more suspect than sincere. “Oh, well, money helps,” she tells him. “I’m on a first-name basis with more than a few plastic surgeons. I think I alone support many branches of the cosmetics industry.”