I’d never met Geneva Wisenkorn despite our residing at opposite ends of the same hallway. Our introduction came in the form of a note slipped under my door announcing, “I found something that belongs to you. Are you home?” followed by an email address and phone, office, and mobile numbers.
My wallet? My keys? I checked my pocketbook. All there. Had a misdelivered piece of mail or dropped glove been traced back to me? I went to my laptop and wrote to this seemingly thoughtful stranger, asking what possession of mine she’d found.
She wrote back immediately. “A high school yearbook. We need to talk!”
No, we didn’t. I hit reply and wrote, “Thanks anyway, but I recycled that,” then added a postscript—“It has no meaning or value, sentimental or otherwise”—in case she was looking for a reward.
“Contact info?” she answered.
My first mistake: I sent it. Immediately, my phone rang. After my wary “Hello,” I heard, “I think you’ll be very interested in what I have to say.”
I asked how she knew the yearbook, which I now decided I needed back, belonged to me.
“Because I found it with magazines that had your name on the subscription labels.”
I said, “I’d never forgive myself if a yearbook with all that personal stuff written in it got into the hands of a stranger.”
“Then why’d you throw it out?”
“I thought it would go to some landfill! Or get turned into whatever recycled paper gets turned into.”
“I know the rules. If it’s trash left at the curbside or at the dump, the possessor has relegated ownership.”
The possessor has relegated ownership? Was I talking to this ragpicker’s lawyer?
“Finders keepers, in other words?”
“Precisely.”
I tried again. “Maybe there is some law on the books about garbage rights, but the polite thing, the neighborly thing, would be to return the yearbook, which any jury would see had personal content.”
“A jury? Are you going to call a lawyer? Or 911? I’d like to hear that conversation.”
“Why contact me in the first place?” I asked. “You found the yearbook. Why not just keep it? I’d never know.”
“Because I wanted to go about this in the most professional manner possible. Believe me, intellectual property can be a real shitstorm. We should talk—face-to-face, I mean. I want to get this settled before I leave for my writers’ retreat.”
Get what settled? So far, it was just a question of the keeping or the giving back. In case she thought she had leverage—that she’d expose my mother’s poison pen—I said, “You realize that the owner of the book is dead and it’s too late to embarrass her?”
“Embarrass her? I’m stunned you would say that! Your mother wasn’t writing for her own amusement. There’s no question she had a future audience in mind.”
Did she? What audience? Who else could possibly care? “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“Permission.”
Was I catching on? Not yet. She asked again if we could talk face-to-face. I said, “Is this really necessary.”
“Be there in a jiff,” she said.
She rang my doorbell forty minutes later, finding me newly annoyed with her interpretation of a “jiff.” Her breathing was labored from the short walk, no doubt attributable to her extreme bulk. I recognized her—having shared elevator rides or exchanged nods in the mailroom—due to her colorful, bigger-than-life appearance and persona. She was large, wide, round-faced, with black curls that tumbled around her face, eyeglasses upswept, employing rhinestones. Her outfit could be called a dress if one were kind. It had no shape, only volume, in blocks of red, yellow, and black. She might be forty; she might be fifty. I couldn’t tell.
“Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t want to come empty-handed.” She passed me an open shoebox lined messily with wax paper that contained several layers of cookies. “I figured who doesn’t like chocolate chip? They should be cooling on a rack.”
No yearbook in sight, however. “Cookies,” I said. “Really, you shouldn’t have.”
“They’re Pillsbury slice and bake. I always keep a package in my fridge.”
“Come in,” I said.
As soon as she stepped into my living room, I could see she was puzzled. Is there another room? Who lives like this? She looked around, asked if the hallway . . . went anywhere?
“To the bedroom and bath. And my kitchen, of course.”
“It’s very . . . cute. What do you do?”
Even though I’d progressed no further than registration, I said, “I’m studying to be a chocolatier.”
“Where?”
“Online.”
She couldn’t have looked less impressed. “Are there jobs doing that? And do they pay?”
With that, I officially categorized Geneva as a boundary-challenged chatterbox whom I didn’t want to be chummy with. “Haven’t we just met?” I asked.
“I know! Very bad habit, asking personal questions. It’s not so much nosiness but a failure to know what’s personal and what’s just conversation. I get it from my mother, who thinks it’s perfectly polite to ask a near stranger why they didn’t have children or how much they paid for their co-op or how much they tipped the doorman or, once . . . oh, never mind. I need more people who can tell me when I’ve crossed the line.”
We were still standing. I motioned toward the couch and said I was going to put some of these cookies on a plate.
“No! The cookies are for you,” she said. “I have that highly annoying type 2 diabetes. If I lose weight, they tell me I’ll shake it. No cookie, but do you have vodka?”
I did. I poured us each a glass and returned. She raised hers, and said, “To your mother, the most committed yearbook advisor who ever lived.”
After my half-hearted clink, I said, “I don’t understand why you’d want someone else’s yearbook from a class she didn’t graduate in.”
“I ate it up! It’s fascinating. It’s got a point of view and—what the fuck!—an attitude! I can’t wait to hear more about her.”
“Such as?”
“Husband, marriage, interests, hobbies, wardrobe. Crushes, boyfriends, lovers?”
“Okay. This just got creepy. I’m her daughter. She left it to me in her will, and now I’m asking for it back.”
“Why?”
Why? Did I not just say why?
“It tells a story,” Geneva continued. “Correction: It tells a hundred stories. I remember the exact moment I knew this had my name on it: next to one girl’s picture, a pretty brunette with a perfect flip, under ‘Future,’ she had ‘beautician.’ Your mother drew an arrow across the page to a good-looking guy, thin face, Italian last name, whom she married. What do you think his future was?”
“I have no idea.”
“Ballroom dance. Guess how that turned out, at least according to your mother’s note. You can bet the ‘D’ stands for divorced and the ‘H’ is for homosexual.”
I said, “No, it didn’t. ‘H’ meant ‘home’ or ‘here’—that they still lived in Pickering.”
The expression greeting that remark clearly meant Poor you; born yesterday.
Next I tried, “Let’s just say my mother would be flattered that a total stranger finds the yearbook so interesting. Fine. You’ll read and enjoy it, and when you’re done, you’ll return it.”
“I don’t think you understand.” Then, as if it explained and justified everything: “I’m a filmmaker.”
I swallowed the rest of my vodka and poured a refill. “Are you saying you’d like to turn the yearbook into a movie, because I don’t see—”
“Not a feature film. A documentary that explores what happened to the class of nineteen sixty-eight—where are they now? Who’s married, divorced, happy, straight, gay, dead, cryogenically frozen? Dreams fulfilled—or dashed!”
“But who wants to watch a documentary about small-town nobodies?”
“People love reunions! We all have reunion hopes, don’t we? Go to your reunion, find your old boyfriend, and run off together!”
I told her that it wasn’t just my permission she needed but also my father’s. I threw in my sister’s, too, and my father’s cousin Julian’s, a lawyer, knowing not one of us would give this cockamamie plan a green light.
She said, “Let me remind you: I rescued this from the rubbish heap. But I’m all about collaboration. Sure, ask your relatives how they’d feel about an award-winning filmmaker putting Pinkerton High School on the map.”
“Pickering. If . . . just if this went forward, and you found some of the graduates, would they see what my mother wrote about them? Because she’d turn over in her grave.”
Her expression said it all: What a wonderful idea! Hadn’t thought of that but wow! Just the tension this project was missing!
A threat of last resort: “If I told the building super that you picked through everyone’s garbage, word would get around.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because it’s disgusting! People throw away personal stuff. They declutter!”
“And you know what I’d say to that? ‘I’m a documentary filmmaker, which makes me a researcher, even a scavenger. More power to me.’”
I asked what these award-winning documentaries were.
“Too many to name.”
“Any one I might have seen?”
“Most recently: on TV, last Passover.”
“Passover?” I repeated.
“On the Jewish Channel.”
I said I had basic cable, which didn’t include the Jewish Channel. What was the film about?
“The last matzo factory in Brooklyn.” She handed me her empty glass. “I thought you’d be thrilled. The documentary-watching world will get to know a woman who otherwise lived in near obscurity. I’m hoping to find archival footage of her—the teacher all the boys and probably half the girls were in love with! No wonder she kept going to reunions!”
What to digest first—that this woman was going to make a movie about a New Hampshire yearbook? Or that my mother was a sex object?
I said, “I never got the idea from her notes that anything like that was going on.”
“Don’t get huffy. Of course you wouldn’t see that. She’s your mother.”
I asked if she’d forgotten that New Hampshire was the center of the universe every four years, with reporters flocking there for the presidential primary. Granite Staters are always being filmed. It’s ho-hum. Good luck finding people who aren’t sick of having a microphone stuck in their faces.
When this seemed to have the desired dampening effect, I added, “Maybe you’ll need to find a yearbook from a state that gets less attention.”
From a pocket within the folds of her voluminous dress, she produced a phone. I could tell without a view of the screen that she was Googling something.
“I’ll admit,” she finally said, “that I wasn’t factoring in the primary, but it could be just the thing that could get me the money I need.”
Money? I told her I didn’t follow.
“New Hampshire is one of the original thirteen colonies,” she announced.
Was she thinking she’d find yearbooks from the other twelve colonies? “Do you mean a yearbook series?”
“No! I was just thinking grants: Frontline. The National Endowment for the Arts. Daughters of the American Revolution. Kickstarter. Dartmouth.”
“Dartmouth?”
“New Hampshire, right? I’d release it in an off year just as residents were missing all the attention.”
She rose, nodded grandly, turned at the door, and said, “We both know your mother would be all for it.”
What kind of bargaining chip did I have? Geneva had the yearbook in her possession. And I, who didn’t believe in visitations from the other side, found myself wondering whether this was exactly what my mother would have wanted.