At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to my high school reunion. I mean, here it had been ten years and I still wasn’t out of college yet, still working as a bartender while everyone else was probably off becoming millionaires by now. I’d heard that Eddie MacEldowney had some fancy job in the State Department and Milo Smith was working at some brokerage outfit on Wall Street. Not that I’d want either of those jobs. Law? Finance? Not my style. But still, in that kind of context, it wasn’t going to sound so hot for me to say “Oh, me? I’m tending bar. Still picking up classes for my bachelor’s …” I imagined people smiling politely, then seeing somebody else across the room and moving along.
High school reunions are always like that. At least that’s what everybody was saying—Nick and Phyllis and Reuben, all of them—and I figured they were right. People were going to be very busy checking out each other’s credentials, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to subject myself to that, to their expectations, their sets of values, their ideas of what makes a life.
But I finally decided, Fuck it. I was just too curious not to go. I wanted to know what happened to those guys. Donny Lee Harrington. Buzzy Kaser. The Wall twins. Sharon Carraher. Those were some pretty great kids, in high school. Some of the things we did together, I still get a kick from thinking about. The time we stole the Christ Child from the crèche in front of the Catholic church and left it on the steps of the Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers. The time we put detergent in the Cascades, and the whole damned waterfall turned into one big foaming bathtub. And some of the parties we had, especially when somebody’s parents were out of town. We had a lot of fun in high school. We were like a pack of animals—everybody moving one way, then another way, then another—we were one big family, one big herd. I loved feeling part of something like that, instead of just me by myself, alone.
Of course there were parts that weren’t so much fun—getting caught breaking and entering, once even shoplifting. But none of us were ever serious criminals in the making, we were just kids with too much energy taking dares from each other. At least I guessed that’s who we were. That’s why I decided to go back: Line everyone up against the wall—OK, you guys. How many of you are here tonight on parole? Who knows? Get us all together again, maybe the Cascades would mysteriously start to foam in our honor.
And besides, I wanted to see Patty. Wanted to know what had happened to her. I hadn’t seen her since the Christmas of our sophomore year at Western, just before I split. Hadn’t even talked to her since I left her there on her doorstep and took off into the night. That felt like unfinished business with Patty. Which is what it always was with her, in a way, right from the start: unfinished. But I wondered if she still thought about me, like I sometimes thought about her. Not that I sat around mooning about her, but sometimes when I thought about her it did make me smile in a sad kind of way. I figured she was probably married by now, had a couple of kids. She probably had some great job. That was good. I hoped the best for her. I didn’t have any big ideas about us getting back together, I just wanted to see how she was doing. Maybe pay my respects to what we’d had. And maybe, in paying respects, to feel a little of that feeling again. Just a little. For maybe a moment.
So a couple of days before the reunion, I decided to go after all. I still felt kind of weird about it, still felt like there was a pretty good chance I’d come away feeling like a doofus, but there was nothing new in that. Feeling like a doofus was always an option for me, anyway. And Nick assured me I’d be OK so long as I wore his magic tie—a fat old forties thing, really nice, that he said would protect me from the power of the past, especially against the truly awesome forces of old girlfriends. So I packed the tie, called my parents, got Phyllis to cover me at Charlie’s and drove up on Friday night.
I don’t like the drive from Chicago to Jackson. Besides the fact that I always feel like I’m on a collision course with my past, I don’t like the aesthetics: All those cornfields look alike. I always think of how they look in November at twilight—row after row of broken-down stalks stretching as far as you can see, covered with a light dusting of snow. Off in the distance there’s a farmhouse with a yellow light in the window. Inside there are people and the smells of food cooking. Maybe there’s a fire, and a dog. But I am always out in the field, a long ways away, looking at it. Even in July, that’s the way that landscape feels to me. The sky is always gunmetal gray.
That’s why I decided to drive it at night, so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Just put on some tunes and crank up the sound and coast along through the dark. I could be anywhere, who knew? It reminded me of the days when I wandered around the country by bus pretending I was Jack Kerouac or something, half stoned all the time. A part of me still loves that feeling, floating in limbo in the dark, unconnected to anything except my bag, my books and my music. But I have a tendency to get bored with that kind of stuff faster these days. More and more I’m starting to feel like I ought to be getting someplace in my life, like floating in limbo in the dark isn’t quite the thing anymore.
I like my life in Chicago. I like the people I know. They’re more complicated than the people I grew up around. Like Phyllis. Ran away from home at sixteen to get away from her father who kept chasing her around the house with an enema bag. Actually working as a model by the time she was seventeen. Hooked on coke by eighteen, clean by twenty, a mother by twenty-two with no sign of the father in sight. Now managing Charlie’s Saloon. This woman has been around the block and there’s nothing going to get her down, she just keeps moving on. She makes you feel like anything’s possible, just by continuing to put one foot in front of the other.
And then there’s Nick. Old Nick. Old better-get-hold-of-yourself-pretty-quick-or-you’re-gonna-die-in-a-gutter Nick. It’s the booze that’s going to get him, if he doesn’t die of AIDS first, the way he fucks around. But you can’t help loving him, he needs to be loved so much. Besides the fact he’s hilarious. We keep telling him he ought to go audition for Second City or one of these other comedy troupes, he could be a star in no time. But he just can’t get himself to it. He’d rather pop another beer, tell another story. Seduce another woman.
And then, of course, there’s Reuben. Reuben, the diva of Douglas Street. The biggest, blackest, most outrageous queen in all of Chicago. How this man will wear the makeup and nails and wigs and strut his ass at the Lucky Horseshoe. At first I have to admit I didn’t know what to make of him, I thought he was sort of ridiculous. But then, as I got to know him, I realized his dress-up was just a reflection of how he felt inside, and I could relate to that. I can relate to feeling like there’s more than one of you inside. And I think it’s sort of brave of him to dare to give both those people a life. Besides, he keeps us all from taking ourselves too goddamn seriously. Not that we’re inclined, as a group, to take ourselves too seriously. But we can always count on Reuben, if things start getting too much the same, to come up with a new outfit at least.
It’s good to have a life at last that’s out in the real world instead of the middle of some cornfield. And I love being in the city, always having people around. No matter what time it is, no matter where you are, there’s almost always someone else there—driving by, walking by, sitting at the next table. I really get off on watching them all. I have this whole collection of them across the alley from me—it’s like an Advent calendar, a different scene in each window. I know these people’s comings and goings, their habits, even their private habits that maybe no one else knows about. Like for instance I know this one guy is seeing two women at the same time, and I can tell from the way they cook for him they don’t know about each other. And I couldn’t count how many times I’ve watched this other pair making love. Of course, sometimes it can get to you—you can start to feel like everyone else in the city is a couple and you’re the only one by yourself. But whenever I get to feeling like that, I just go down to the Loop and walk around among all the buildings. I love those monster buildings, and the canyons they create between them. If I’m feeling sorry for myself, I just go walk in those canyons awhile and my problems start to feel kind of small.
So I’m happy enough with my life. But every now and then I do have to wonder, is this as good as it gets? I mean, what’s going to happen to us? In ten years, let’s say, or fifteen. Nick will probably be dead. Phyllis’s daughter will be leaving home, and Phyllis will be alone. Reuben will be an aging queen, not a ripe young thing anymore. And as Reuben reminds us every day, nobody, nobody is interested in an aging queen.
And where am I going to be? Still watching other people’s love lives out of my back window? Still tending bar at Charlie’s? Maybe I will have finished my bachelor’s and moved along to a master’s, taking one course a semester to keep myself convinced I’m actually headed in some direction. Or maybe I will have just given up, just accepted the fact that mixing drinks is what I’m made for. And maybe that would be OK.
But I did always think I’d like to try teaching.
Kids, I think. Little kids.
I always start thinking this way when I know I’m going to see my father. And what always fucks me up is, I don’t know whether it’s him or me talking. Sometimes I get myself all worked up over where I’m going in life and then I realize that every thought I’ve had has been his voice, him talking in my head.
And then I think, I don’t have to do what he says.
But then I think, What if I want to?
But no, that was my father’s idea.
Or at least I thought it was his idea; maybe it was my idea.
And on and on and on it goes, and where it stops, nobody knows.
When I got as far as Kalamazoo I pulled off the highway and went into town to drive around the campus and stop at the grill I used to hang out at. I knew there wouldn’t be anyone there that I’d recognize, but I wanted to see if my initials were still carved into the booth there. There’d been this one booth I used to hang out at during my last days at Western, after I’d stopped going to classes, and I’d branded it with my initials—using the diagonal stem on the R as the start of the Y, then carving a circle around it. It took me a couple of days, while I was just hanging around feeling bummed. And I figured that since this trip was about my past, I’d stop and see if my artwork was still there. But the place had been turned into a pizza parlor, all lit up with fluorescent lights, and the booths were all molded plastic. Orange and gray. They were orange and gray. It’s funny what people think are improvements. But it did sort of depress me, too, to think there was nothing left of me there. Not even my crummy initials.
I hopped back in my Honda and drove as fast as I could to Battle Creek, then slowed down and opened the windows to see if I could smell the baking grain even from the highway. I wondered if people from Battle Creek smelled like baking grain themselves. If you met one in Alabama, would you know they were from Battle Creek? And what would Alabama smell like to them? Anything at all? I bet their noses were so screwed up by smelling cereal all the time, they couldn’t even smell anymore. Did florists do badly in Battle Creek?
Then I was back on the road again, tunneling through the darkness on 1-94 and singin’ along with the Boss: “… take a look around, this is your hometown …” And finally there it was: Jackson. Garden spot of southern Michigan, home of the Cascades, and site of the largest prison in the world, beneath one roof. My hometown. I hadn’t been there since Christmas. I pulled off the highway at 127 and took West Avenue up to Morrell, then headed out Francis Street toward home.
I pulled up in front of the house about nine. The light was on in the living room, another one under the kitchen stairs. My mom would be watching TV, my dad would be down in the basement, probably fixing a broken toaster. There was a comfort in it, the sameness, that made me kind of squirm. I could almost smell the basement from here—oil and must and paint thinner. It smelled like my father to me, in a way. It put me right back down there with him, watching him fiddle around with a screwdriver, whistling, sweat running off his temple. Now, if we twist this a little bit further … He’d talk like that all the time he was working, pretending to be talking to me, but he was really just talking to himself and I happened to be there. Lately I’d come to think that he really had liked my company, even if he hadn’t quite known what to do with it. But still, I couldn’t forget that feeling of being there but not being there, of feeling like I was playing second fiddle to a toaster.
I grabbed my duffel bag and stepped up onto the porch. Sure enough, my mom was on the couch, watching Larry King Live. I could tell she was more or less just waiting for me to arrive; she had the remote control in her hand ready to shut the thing off. It reminded me of the way she used to wait up for me at night, when I was out on a date: She’d sit there in the dark and just wait, like she didn’t have anything else to do. I opened the door and she looked up and smiled, then dropped the remote on the couch and came to meet me at the door. She looked shorter, or maybe wider. Her hair was a slightly brassier version of what it used to be naturally and the curly do she’d taken up with made her look fatter, I thought. Her bifocals hung from her neck on a chain. She came toward me with her arms extended like she was going to hug me. I almost started to back away, but then she grasped me by the elbows and gave me her usual hearty shake.
“You’re so tall!” she said. As if she hadn’t seen me since I was a kid. “Ken!” she called. “Rob’s here! Come up!” She turned back to me. “How was your trip?”
How are you supposed to answer that question? My trip was boring. My trip was spectacular. Succulent. Sinful. Erotic. Cosmic. What did she want to hear anyway? I told her it was OK.
My dad appeared from under the stairs, ducking to get through the door even though he didn’t have to, wiping his hands on his pants. He had a big grin on his face. “How you doin’, son?” he said. He shook my hand, clapped me on the shoulder. Now, how was I supposed to answer that question? Doing great! Or, Doing shit! Or, Doing nothing at all! What do you think of that! I told him I was OK.
We went into the living room. My mom and dad sat on the beige couch, I sat in the tweed recliner. My mom killed the TV with the remote, and there we were, in silence, just sitting there, staring at each other. I felt like I was on Meet the Press. I expected them to ask me about land reform or taxes. But it was really good to see them too.
“So how are things in Chicago?” My dad.
“OK,” I said. Then I realized “OK” was the only word I’d spoken since I arrived. “Fine,” I said. “It’s great. They’re great.”
“Your Sox are doing good,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not bad …”
“Are you hungry?” said my mom. “Want me to fix you a sandwich? I’ve got some ham salad all made, your favorite …”
“Nah,” I said. Then I thought, what else? “Yeah,” I corrected myself. “OK.”
“Oh!” she said, sort of surprised. “Oh, great!” She clapped her hands and dropped them in her lap, then pushed herself to her feet. “You want some chips?”
“Sure,” I said. “Chips are fine.”
“Pickle?”
“Pickle,” I nodded. “Pickle is good.”
She hurried out of the room. “You want milk?” she said, popping back in. “Or beer! My goodness—milk! You’re a full-grown man. You want a beer?” she said.
I nodded.
“Hey, Linda!” My dad. “What about me?” Then they had to negotiate his sandwich, his potato chips and pickles. It was quite a brouhaha. But finally it was just me and my dad, sitting across the room from each other.
“So how you doin’?” he said. “Everything OK? No problems?”
I shook my head, smiled. “Everything’s fine.”
He nodded rhythmically. “Good, good. You sure?” I’m sure.
“Good.”
“I’m taking Learning Theory this summer.”
“Learning Theory, eh?” he said. “Learning anything?”
I shrugged. “Theoretically.”
He laughed and nodded, didn’t pursue it.
“I’ll have my degree by the turn of the century,” I said. Joking, sort of apologizing. “If everything goes all right.”
He kept on nodding, didn’t respond.
I cleared my throat, resettled my weight. “So how are things at the store?”
He spread his hands, shook his head, smiled like an umpire pleased to say “Safe.”
“Hezekiah still helping out?” I went to high school with Hezekiah. Dumb as dirt, sweet as sugar. I sat next to him in study hall, the times I showed up in study hall.
“Still there,” said my dad.
“Do you know if he’s going to the reunion?”
“I think so,” he said. “Said he’d like to see you. Everybody’d like to see you. You’ll come into the store tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling wary. I looked forward to going into the store to see the folks I worked with there when I was in junior high and high school, but I dreaded the conversation that I always had with my dad there. I felt myself tense up for fear he was going to start in now, already, before I even got my pickle. When are you going to come back to Jackson and take this store off my hands, eh, Rob? Why do you think I built this store? From the very first day? For you. Hey, your brother’s not interested. Come back home. I took a deep breath. If he started, I was going to recite the words with him. But my mom came back with the sandwiches.
“So!” she said, setting a plate on the table/lamp combo at my elbow. “Meet any nice girls since we saw you last?” She gave me a mischievous grin.
“Nobody special,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Better get cracking,” she said. “Or all the good ones will be gone!” She put a paper napkin on the arm of my chair and patted it.
“For Christ’s sake, Linda,” said my dad. “He’s only twenty-seven. Give him a chance to have some fun.”
My mom looked sort of hurt by that, or maybe it was my imagination. I never understood my parents’ relationship. In some ways it seemed like no relationship—he spent his evenings in the basement being Mr. Fix-It, she spent her evenings in front of TV, then they went to bed together. In a way, I guess it wasn’t so bad. I mean, they always had that comfort of knowing where the other one was, of knowing they weren’t alone. There’s something really nice about that, about having somebody else in the house even if you’re not in the same room. But still. The same thing every night? Him in the basement, her in the living room? They hardly even spoke to each other. I wondered if they ever made love when they finally went to bed. I used to wonder if they ever fooled around with anyone else. I guess everybody wonders if their parents ever fool around. I was pretty sure, though, my parents never did—with anyone else, I mean. They were too much into routine.
We talked about my brother and his girlfriend in San Diego. They were thinking about getting married after living together for five years. Then we talked about my cousins awhile, and how well Stan was doing at MIT. Then we talked about who had come into the store. And by eleven o’clock I was fluent in the ebb and flow of Jackson life. Then we watched the news and they went to bed.
I figured it was probably too late to call anybody, and I didn’t know who I’d call anyway. Didn’t know who was still in town, didn’t know who was coming back, or where I’d be able to reach them. But if anybody was up and about, the Hunt Club would probably be where they’d be. I knew it was a long shot, but I was too restless just to hang out at the house and watch some boring old movie, so I hopped in my car and headed out.
There was no one I knew at the Hunt Club, just as I’d figured, but I had a beer anyway and a couple of cigarettes and watched a little TV. Then I climbed back in my car and went touring around the town. Drove down Michigan Avenue, the main drag; it was really spooky. All lit up by streetlights, as if they expected traffic, but nobody in sight. Most of the stores were boarded up. It looked sort of like a downtown version of those broken-down cornfields—bleakness everywhere—but there was no farmhouse on the horizon.
I drove up Wildwood past the old high school, took a turn around the parking lot, then drove past Patty’s house. It felt like being in high school again, driving past her house late at night. I used to do that all the time just to feel her presence, to know she was sleeping, peaceful. Patty was the closest I’d ever come to being in love, so far: We’d gone together all through high school. Well, at least the last two years. If you could call it “going together.” It was more like a series of breakups with just enough “going together” between to give us something to break up again. I didn’t know what it was about us. I was always so jealous of her, always so afraid she was going to be fooling around with somebody else. If she so much as talked to another guy, I got fucked up about it. So she talked to other guys all the time. Maybe she’d always been that way, and that’s why I hooked up with her. Or maybe, when she saw what it did to me, she did it again and again, to see me dance at the end of her string. I don’t know. It was all fucked up.
But it was also incredibly sweet. There was something so delicate between us, sometimes it really scared me. I’d never had anyone treat me like that—so gentle, so soft, so warm. Sometimes she made me feel so weak, I got scared I was going to come apart in her hands like a soggy Kleenex. Then I’d feel this roiling inside of me, like a storm building up in my stomach, and it would build and build and before you knew it we’d be having another fight about some guy she’d been flirting with. It was all incredibly dramatic. It kept us occupied and interested for a couple of years, and more. And, I sometimes think, distracted. But distracted from what, I’m not quite sure.
All I knew was, I missed her now. Not her so much, not Patty herself. But I missed what we’d had together. The quiet parts, between the fights, before the roiling started again. I wanted to have that in my life. Just that. Just simple companionship, love. It seemed to me if you had that, you didn’t need money or position or whatever else people thought they needed. Just someone to live with, watch TV with, eat with, sleep with, have a life with. Easy, comfortable, side-by-side.
There’s this one couple in the city I watch. The girl used to work at a clothing store around the corner from me. The guy has some kind of office job, wears a suit every day. I see them all the time on the street, and just the way they move together—they are so entirely at ease with each other. There is no hurry to get things said. Maybe they’re really dull people who just don’t have anything to say. Even so. Whenever I see them I drink them in, almost like I’m thirsty. Recently I noticed the girl is pregnant, just beginning to show. I saw them one morning at brunch, saw him lay his hand on her belly while he was reading the menu, just absently stroking its roundness, and it almost made me cry.
Sometimes I get that easy feeling when I’ve just had sex with a girl, a woman, and we’re lying in bed, smoking and talking, entwined with the sheets and each other. Sometimes I feel as loose and relaxed as the smoke uncurling toward the ceiling. Lazy, unhurried. There. It isn’t the real thing, exactly, but it seems to be the best I can do, so I do it a lot. And it does give me what I need, for a moment. But it’s always gone the next morning, or the next day, or the next week. One girl I saw for a while said every time we got together, it felt like we went back to square one and started all over again. I didn’t tell her the reason was I simply didn’t love her, that I wasn’t even sure I liked her. Maybe I should have told her that, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I didn’t say anything, just didn’t respond, and eventually she moved back in with her previous boyfriend, the sculptor.
That’s the way it happened, a lot, even with women I really liked. One woman I did get sort of close with, this woman who had two kids, said sometimes I felt to her like one of her kids, constantly tugging at her sleeve, needing something from her, but I couldn’t make it clear what I needed. I knew the feeling she described, knew how it felt from my end. It was that feeling of straining against something, a leash, and the tightness it made in my throat, almost like a piece of food was stuck in there, or a piece of my heart. It felt like I was ready to cry if I only knew what to cry about. But I guess I made her feel like I was asking her for something—no, nagging her for something—and eventually she moved on. To Houston, I think, or maybe Dallas, and married a businessman.
Sooner or later, they always moved on. To the casual observer I was just doing what every other bartender in town was doing—meeting and laying as many beautiful women as I could. And sometimes I sort of liked to pretend that I was just a guy on the prowl, intentionally avoiding getting hooked, like a clever old fish. It was good for my image to pretend that. And good for my self-image too. But that woman, Susan, was right. I did always snap back to square one. Or I didn’t snap back, exactly—it was more like I was reeled back in. So I knew there was something else going on. I knew there was something that wasn’t working, I just didn’t know what it was.
I got back home about one a.m., had another beer, checked out the movies and went up to bed. I stopped at Danny’s old room and looked in. Most of the traces of him were gone—the posters, the rocks he’d collected. The whole room had been done over like something out of a magazine—pastel carpet, sheer drapes, flowered wallpaper. I guess this was what my mom puttered at while Dad was puttering downstairs. It looked pretty good, I was impressed—the colors, the balance of everything—she’d always been good at making things pleasant. I’d always especially liked that about her, that she was always taking care to see that people were comfortable. Like the first thing she did when I got home was make me a ham salad sandwich, my favorite. She was always tending to people that way. She was never so happy as when she knew she’d made somebody happy.
But when I went into my room, it felt weird to see it was the same as it had always been. My bats were still in the corner, exactly where I’d left them. The turtle tank was by the window—no turtle now, but ready for one if I decided to move back in. It was like a museum exhibit. Kind of a neat exhibit, actually. The Pink Floyd poster. The swim team clippings. The acid wash clothes in the closet with all those useless zippers and buttons and flaps. Seeing all that stuff again was sort of like seeing old friends. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that my parents had somehow given Danny permission to leave home and make a life for himself in California and they were trying to keep me there by keeping my room intact. Trying to make me feel at home so I’d come back and take over the store and live out their lives for them. Or at least live out the life they imagined for me.
Once or twice I’d actually thought maybe I ought to take over the store. A part of me would have loved to have a life that unruffled, unstirred-up. Just putt-putt-putter my way through the years. Maybe take up golf, maybe join the Rotary Club. It wasn’t like I was getting anywhere doing what I was doing, really. And at least there would have been some kind of security in the store. Maybe running the store would have made me feel like I had a place in the world, even if it wasn’t my place, exactly. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever really considered it seriously. But sometimes it seemed to me like I should. Just because if I’d done it, I guess, it would have made my parents so happy. And maybe after all these years, it would have been nice to make my parents happy for a change.