I just opened an envelope in the mail and found a mimeographed sheet smelling like a school test and announcing the twentieth year reunion of my high school class. No Host Cocktail Party. Buffet Dinner. Family Picnic. Dancing. In August. Class of ’58. Edison High. Stockton. My stomach is lurching. My dignity feels wobbly. I don’t want to go if I’m going to be one of those without the strength to stay grown up and transcendent.
I hadn’t gone to the tenth year reunion. The friends I really wanted to see, I was seeing, right? But I’ve been having dreams about the people in high school, and wake up with an urge to talk to them, find out how they turned out. “Did you grow up? I grew up.” There are parts of myself that those people have in their keeping—they’re holding things for me—different from what my new friends hold.
“When I think of you, I remember the hateful look you gave me on the day we signed yearbooks. That face has popped into my mind a few times a year for twenty years. Why did you look at me that way?” I’d like to be able to say that at the No Host Cocktail Party. And to someone else: “I remember you winking at me across the physics lab.”
I dreamed that the girl who never talked in all the years of school spoke to me: “Your house has moles living in it.” Then my cat said, “I am a cat and not a car. Quit driving me around.” Are there truths to be found?
Another reason I hadn’t gone to my tenth was an item in the registration form: “List your publications.” Who’s on the reunion committee anyway? Somebody must have grown up to become a personnel officer at a university. To make a list, it takes more than an article and one poem. Cutthroat competitors. With no snooty questions asked, maybe the classmates with interesting jail records would show up. We are not the class to be jailed for political activities or white collar crimes but for burglary, armed robbery, and crimes of passion. “Reunions are planned by the people who were popular. They want the chance to put us down again,” says a friend (Punahou Academy ’68), preparing for her tenth.
But surely, I am not going to show up this year just because I now have a “list.” And there is more to the questionnaire: “What’s the greatest happiness you’ve had in the last twenty years? What do you regret the most?” I should write across the paper, “These questions are too hard. Can I come anyway?” No, you can’t answer, “None of your business.” It is their business; these are the people who formed your growing up.
I have a friend (Roosevelt High ’62) who refused to go to his tenth because he had to check “married,” “separated,” “divorced,” or “single.” He could not bear to mark “divorced.” Family Picnic.
But another divorced friend’s reunion (Roosevelt ’57) turned out to be so much fun that the class decided to meet again the very next weekend—without the spouses, a come-without-the-spouse party. And when my brother (Edison ’60) and sister-in-law (Edison ’62) went to her reunion, there was an Old Flames Dance; you asked a Secret Love to dance. Working out the regrets, people went home with other people’s spouses. Fifteen divorces and remarriages by summer’s end.
At my husband Earll’s (Bishop O’Dowd ’56) reunion, there was an uncomfortableness as to whether to call the married priests Father or Mister or what.
What if you can’t explain yourself over the loud music? Twenty years of transcendence blown away at the No Host Cocktail. Cocktails—another skill I haven’t learned, like the dude in the old cowboy movies who ordered milk or lemonade or sarsaparilla. They’ll have disco dancing. Never been to a disco either. Not cool after all these years.
In high school, we did not choose our friends. I sort of ended up with certain people, and then wondered why we went together. If she’s the pretty one, then I must be the homely one. (When I asked my sister [Edison ’59] about my “image,” she said, “Well, when I think of the way you look in the halls, I picture you with your slip hanging.” Not well-groomed.) We were incomplete, and made complementary friendships, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Or more like the Cisco Kid and Pancho. Friendships among equals is a possibility I have found as an adult.
No, my motive for going would not be because of my “list.” I was writing in high school. Writing did not protect me then, and it won’t protect me now. I came from a school—no, it’s not the school—it’s the times; we are of a time when people don’t read.
There’s a race thing too. Suddenly the colored girls would walk up, and my colored girlfriend would talk and move differently. Well, they’re athletes, I thought; they go to the same parties. Some years, the only place I ever considered sitting for lunch was the Chinese table. There were more of us than places at that table. Hurry and get to the cafeteria early, or go late when somebody may have finished and left a seat. Or skip lunch. We will eat with whom at the Buffet Dinner?
Earll says that he may have to work in August, and not be able to escort me. Alone at the Dance. Again.
One day, in high school, I was walking home with a popular girl. (It was poor to be seen walking to or from school by oneself.) And another popular girl, who had her own car, asked my friend to ride with her. “No, thanks,” said my friend. “We’ll walk.” And the girl with the car stamped her foot, and said, “Come here! We ride home with one another.” Meaning the members of their gang, I guess. The popular-girl gang. “I remember you shouting her away from me,” I could say at the reunion, not, I swear, to accuse so much as to get the facts straight. Nobody had come right out and said that there were very exclusive groups of friends. They were not called “groups” or “crowds” or “gangs” or “cliques” or anything. (“Clicks,” the kids today say.) “Were you in a group? Which one was I in?”
My son, who is a freshman (Roosevelt, Class of ’81), says he can’t make friends outside of his group. “My old friends feel left out, and then they ice me out.”
What a test of character the reunion will be. I’m not worried about looks. My woman friends and I are sure that we look physically better at thirty-eight than at eighteen. By going to the reunion, I’ll be able to update the looks of those people who are always eighteen in my dreams.
John Gregory Dunne (Portsmouth Priory ’50) said to his wife, Joan Didion (McClatchy High ’52), “It is your obligation as an American writer to go to your high school reunion.” And she went. She said she dreamed about the people for a long time afterward.
I have improved: I don’t wear slips anymore. I got tired of hanging around homely people. It would be nice to go to a reunion where we look at one another and know without explanations how much we improved in twenty years of life. And know that we had something to do with one another’s outcomes, companions in time for a while, lucky to meet again. I wouldn’t miss such a get-together for anything.