by Jancee Dunn
As I filled my cart, I hummed along to the Phil Collins tune playing softly in the background. I had always hated Phil, but suddenly he sounded good to me. Was it actually decent music, or was it simply nostalgia? Or because I had a crush, did the whole world, including Phil Collins, seem more appealing?
I had just stopped to inspect the cheap nail polishes when I glanced up and saw the top of a familiar head in the bandage aisle. It was Dawn. Wasn’t there a CVS closer to her house? I slowly put my basket down. If I walked out casually with my eyes forward, it would be plausible that I hadn’t spotted her. I arranged my face into a preoccupied Oh, I forgot something expression and headed decisively for the exit.
Halfway to the doors, I stopped. What was I doing? I could handle this. I had planned to call her, especially because I found that I really did miss her. If I smoothed things over now, we could spend the next week together and perhaps even go to the historical home in Morristown that we had planned to tour. There was a kitchen garden that we wanted to see, and for an extra ten dollars you could have tea in the parlor, which was done up for the holidays. Dawn loved those sorts of activities as much as I did. She wouldn’t smirk at the period dress of the guides and would happily watch an hourlong candle-dipping demonstration.
I smiled and walked over to her. She was heaping boxes of Loony Tunes bandages into her basket with a concentrated expression and jumped when she saw me.
“Oh, hi,” she said. She did not smile. She wasn’t going to make this easy. A vein in my left eyelid began to twitch crazily, and I hoped she wouldn’t notice.
She looked down at the bandages. “I probably go through a box of these things a day,” she said. “Sometimes I think my kids just make up injuries because they like to wear them.”
“Listen, Dawn,” I said. “I’m glad I ran into you. I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ve been so upset since I saw you at the track, and I want you to know that I understood everything you said.”
She stared at me, not speaking.
I took a deep breath. “I really miss you, and I’m only here for a few more days and then I go back to New York. I was hoping we could do all the fun things together that we planned. Remember the Thayer House Mansion? We could go have tea, and I think there’s a textile exhibit, and…”
She stood motionless, her lips pursed.
“Dawn,” I went on, my voice rising. “I really am sorry. I know I hurt your feelings, but I want to make it up to you. I can be a good friend to you, the kind that you want.”
She looked momentarily stricken. I knew then that I had broken her down, and my breath came more easily.
I went on. “What are you doing now? Let’s go have coffee at that place you like, and we can talk.”
She stared at me evenly. “You know, Lily,” she said in a tired voice that was almost a monotone, “it took me a long time to separate myself from the girl that I was in high school. And I really liked who I was becoming. And somehow you managed to undo it in one night.”
A bright red spot appeared on each of her cheeks. “We’ve had fun together, but somehow I’ve always had this feeling that you thought you were doing me a favor,” she said. “You’re quick to remind me that you’re from the city, painting this hip picture of yourself, but in reality, you’re not happy, and I am. You think you hide how you feel, that little bit of contempt, but I watch your face when I talk about the kids, or my husband, or what I do all day. Well, guess what? I like living in the suburbs. This isn’t a compromise for me. I even like my minivan.”
“I don’t look down on you,” I said.
“You did then and you do now,” she said, distractedly pushing some hair out of her eyes. “And the great thing about being an adult is that I don’t have to participate anymore. In school, you’re with the same people for twelve years and you have to find a way to make it work. Well, I don’t have to do that now.”
I stared at her, incredulous, tears gathering in my throat. Biddable Dawn, with her #1 MOM key chain, was dismissing me. She looked at me sympathetically. “I’m sorry, Lily. I know deep down that you care. I really hope that you’ll be happy.”
I tried to speak but only managed a weak croak as the tears rose from my throat to my eyes. Her words stung because they were true.
I fumbled in my purse for my keys and turned to walk quickly to the car.
chapter thirty-one
Ginny was back, this time for a pre-Christmas visit. She always spent the actual holiday with Raymond’s family, so she usually came home for a long weekend beforehand and left the kids with him.
I sat in the kitchen and pretended to busy myself as I listened to their latest phone conversation. “Well, I told you not to buy whole-bean, didn’t I?” she said. “Are you sure the grinder’s broken? No. No, it’s a valid question. Sometimes you get impatient and you declare something is on the fritz when with a little investigation…”
Ginny glanced at me and pressed the receiver close to her ear, but Raymond’s angry voice was still audible.
“I resent that,” she said calmly. “I resent that. You’re transferring your aggression to me when you should be frustrated that you didn’t get the coffee ground yourself when we were at Whole Foods.” Angry voice. “Right. You know, I’ll be honest, I actually don’t taste a difference when you grind it right before we drink it.” Pause. “Well, yes, I know. But it’s really time-intensive, and I just think that in the future we should save ourselves a lot of frustration and get it ground at the store.” She frowned and tried to motion me out of the room, but I stayed.
“Well, maybe you can use the blender to grind it. I think there’s a grind setting. Or try the food processor, that might be better.”
I just couldn’t imagine her and Raymond having sex, and I was cursed with being able to imagine, in living color, sex between any two people on earth. But I could easily imagine them filling their days with these sorts of conversations.
“And please remind Irina that both kids have Creative Play class today.”
“Creative Play?” I whispered as she narrowed her eyes at me. “You need an organized class for that?”
“It’s at three. Yes. Thank you.” Ginny and Raymond were elaborately polite with each other, but there was a touch of antipathy behind their clipped pleases and thank-yous.
She hung up and turned to me. “I really amuse you, don’t I?” she said.
I nodded. “You do.”
My parents walked briskly downstairs to get breakfast before heading out to Community Cleanup Day.
“What a treat to have you here again, honey,” said my mother, hugging Ginny.
“I cut out something for you from the paper,” my father told her. “Something about your town that I thought you’d be interested in. Madison’s growing real quick, the article says.”
Ginny nodded as she carefully sliced a bagel. “The private biotech sector is really expanding. It’s probably about that. The university has been seeding a lot of biotech start-ups, so those jobs have been booming.”
My father blinked a few times. He didn’t know enough about the biotech industry to make a pronouncement. Ginny glanced at him and quickly said, “I notice there has been a lot of construction around here, too. When I drove in I couldn’t believe how torn up the road was near Boonton.”
“They’re putting in another superstore,” he said. “It’s called a Super Stop and Shop. What happens if you just want to get a goddamn carton of milk? They’re no fools, they put the milk in the back, and then you need a sherpa guide to get you out of there.” Now he was on familiar territory. “Bigger supermarkets, bigger cars, bigger food to put in giant refrigerators. You know the DiMartolos who are putting that addition on their house? I’m walking by one morning and I got to talking to the contractor. Good guy. I say, ‘What’s going on?’ He tells me they’re putting in a laundry room on both floors so they don’t have to walk down the stairs.” His mouth drew down in disgust. “No wonder everyone has big fat backsides in this count
ry.”
My mother grabbed her purse from the front closet and gave us a kiss. “Listen, girls,” she said. “We’ll be back late this afternoon and then we’ll have an early dinner together.” She gulped some coffee and looked at her watch. “It’ll be just the four of us, like old times.”
They bustled out and Ginny and I took our coffee into the living room. She nestled into the couch. “So tell me all about Christian,” she said. “I’ve heard little bits on the phone, but I want the whole story.”
Glowingly, I told her everything for the next hour while she nodded and refilled her coffee twice. I had just spent another weekend at his parents’ house and had met a few more of his friends. When I finished she looked out the window. At length she said carefully, “You know, you sound just like you did when you were a teenager.”
I smiled. “Well, I probably have that same kind of excitement that I did when we were kids. You remember that feeling.”
“Yes, we talked about it.” She hesitated. “But I’m picking up on the bad parts of being that age. The insecurity, the nervousness. I’m wondering if you’re not seeing him through your teenage eyes, rather than seeing him for what he is now.” Her clear eyes searched my face. “I’m a little worried about you,” she said. “I think you’re regressing. It’s more than spending all that time holed up in your room, or eavesdropping on my phone conversations.”
“I only did that once.”
“You drive like a teenager now, racing as fast as you can to a red light and then stomping on the brakes. You’re getting surly with the folks.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
I shrugged, determined not to let her know that I was bothered. “What’s wrong with taking a break? What’s wrong with revisiting the happiest time in my life? Why wouldn’t you want to return to a more innocent time?”
She flapped her hand impatiently. “No time period was ever innocent, and certainly not the eighties. That’s the biggest fallacy in the world. I hate the whole marketing of decades, anyway. They’re just artificial constructs.” She regarded me. “And it wasn’t an innocent time for you. You seemed pretty miserable to me, and you were a popular girl. I recall lots of crying in your room at night. You struggled with your grades, you were constantly warring with your friends.”
She sat forward. “In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, you really only liked your last year of high school. I wrote a paper related to this, it’s what I called the ‘peak-and-end effect.’ When people are asked to reflect on some episode, say high school, they tend to focus more heavily on a peak experience during that episode, like the senior prom, or on how that episode ended. They tend to be foggy on the rest of the moments. I remember one study looked at people who had gotten colonoscopies. One group got shorter procedures, the other group got longer procedures, but with less pain at the end. Overall, both procedures actually involved the same amount of pain, but guess what?”
I stared at her until I realized that she actually wanted me to say “What?”
“What?” I said.
“People thought they felt more pain during the shorter procedure. Why? Because the longer procedure had a more comfortable ending. We really tend to remember endings at the expense of everything else. Everyone knows how Casablanca ended, but how did it begin?”
I knew she wasn’t asking me because she was immersed in lecture mode. Not that I could have answered, anyway. Didn’t it open with a German officer meeting another officer at the airport? Or maybe it was a French officer. Or a French officer meeting a German officer.
“I just feel like you’re using your present needs to fill in blanks in the past,” she was saying. “Memory is like a shuffled deck of cards, and you just sort of…no, no, that’s not the right analogy.” She sighed impatiently. “Planning the future is essential to living. I just read this study of—”
I inspected my nails. “Ginny,” I interrupted coolly, “do you know how exhausting it is when you cite studies in what should be a normal conversation?”
“I’m just saying that by recreating the past, you’re only creating a fragmented picture. And by failing to understand how tenuous your grasp of the past is, you misinterpret what the future is going to be, so you misinterpret the sources of your potential happiness. And this Christian, who doesn’t sound much like a grown-up, by the way—rootless, impulsive, resistant to any sort of commitment including picking up the phone—I suspect that what really made you happy was the longing for him rather than the actual man himself. In fact, one of my colleagues calls this—”
I flopped down on the couch, trying to distract her. “Ginny, please, with the studies,” I moaned.
But she would not be deterred. “What is so scary about the future?” She looked at me. “You know what? I think the first step is taking an accurate look at the past.” She clapped her hands. “I know. Where’s your journal? Let’s have a look. Let’s see it with adult eyes. I assume enough time has passed that you’re okay with my reading it?”
“Please,” I said. “Like you haven’t read it before.”
She smiled. “I did, once. But I’m telling you the truth when I say that I felt too guilty to read it again.”
In the meantime I could still quote from the notebook that contained Ginny’s scribblings. It was less diary entries than dreadful poetry that I memorized and recited to my friends. One stanza in particular was a guaranteed crowd-pleaser:
A faded brown rose am I
I am a bride’s boquet [sic]
Tossed aside after the rice has long been thrown
Pain is a consolation; such a fragile thread we hang by
The sorrow in my heart is a hundred flowers screaming
In dumb repose you cannot hear
Sheepishly, I thought of my friends howling. There was something earnest about Ginny that I should have left alone.
“So,” she said, standing up. “Where is it? I’m not trying to torture you. I think you have a completely distorted view of your past. Prove me wrong.”
I remained seated. “I don’t know where it is,” I confessed. “I haven’t read it in fifteen years, probably. It was always under my mattress.”
She folded her arms. “Where could it be?” she muttered. She jumped up and went to my bedroom, me trailing behind her. “Is it okay if I look?” she asked.
I nodded. I was actually eager for her to find it.
She tore through my closet, my bedside table, my dresser, getting distracted a few times by the artifacts. “What is this?” she asked, puzzled, examining a laminated card. “‘License to fart,’” she read slowly.
“It was from Spencer Gifts,” I explained. “See the front? It was issued by the Mayor of Gas Town. Sandy gave it to me.”
She tossed it back into the drawer. “I don’t know why you hold on to this stuff.”
We ransacked the room. Nothing. Ginny thought for a minute and said, “I know. I know where it is. It’s in the attic.”
“No, I’ve looked up there already,” I said. But she was already in the hallway, pulling down the creaky ladder that led upstairs. I followed her, inflamed by the same sense of dramatic purpose that we had as kids, when Ginny would urgently announce, “We’re collecting all the caterpillars in the yard, right now, let’s go,” and off we’d rush with buckets as if we were being timed.
She disappeared up the stairs while I helpfully volunteered to hold the ladder. “I’m not going to think about the spiders,” she called. Silence. “Here are some boxes, filled with…it looks like stuffed animals. These are all my things, I think.” The ceiling creaked as she moved around. “Here’s another box. This is…yes, this is my stuff, too.”
For twenty minutes I sat, waiting, as I heard the sound of rummaging and boxes being moved. Then: “Lily,” she said sharply. “Is it a black and red notebook?”
I stood rigid as excitement flooded me. “Yes! Bring it down.”
She carefully stepped down the ladder. “It was in one of my boxes, for some reason
,” she said, handing the dusty notebook over. “Ugh, I’m going to wash my hands.”
I impatiently opened it up as she disappeared into the bathroom. Written on the first page was “Ginny, go ahead and read this if you dare. I’m sure it’s much more interesting than your sucky life.” Hastily I flipped past it as she returned.
“Now,” she said, sitting on my bed. “Let’s look at this lost artifact.” I sat next to her and read the second page aloud:
Today is my sixteenth birthday. I got a ton of presents, I was psyched! I got Atari (and a Space Invaders cartridge) a bottle of Babe perfume, a subscription to Seventeen, and a pot of Indian Earth which I have been wanting forever.
“I bought you the Indian Earth,” Ginny said. “Remember, it was that powder that dyed your face orange? It came in a fake earthenware pot.”
“And you were supposed to apply it on your entire face, but I just put it on my cheeks, so that I had two orange spots.”
Ginny laughed. “I saved up my babysitting money to get you that.” Again I was overwhelmed by an urge to cry.
She crossed her legs and grabbed a pillow, slumber-party-style. “Skip ahead,” she urged.
I flipped through a few pages, past my painstaking transcription of “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (“Not only under the ground are the brains of men / eaten by maggots”), past my blackly underlined quotes from self-pitying Smiths lyrics (“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt”).
Then I picked a random page and read:
Another totally beat weekend. I drank an entire bottle of Boone’s Farm at Vanessa’s party and I was the most wasted I’ve ever been. I puked in my bed and had to clean it up early in the morning before the parents were up. And I hate Cheryl, she found out I told Lynn what she said about her. Of course I denied it but now Cheryl keeps calling my house and when I answer, she whispers, Liar. You can hear laughing in the background and then they hang up. I’m scared to go to school now because Cheryl is in three of my classes but I already took all of my sick days.