The Big Chill soundtrack was all the rage in my freshman dorm, which means I often find myself reminiscing about 1984 whenever I hear the Temptations, even though “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” came out in 1966, the year I was born. While this doesn’t say much for the music of my own college years—Frankie Goes to Hollywood, anyone?—it does say something about the way my generation co-opts its nostalgia, à la carte, from others.
Sometimes we even co-opt the very co-option of our nostalgia, hosting “Big Chill” weekends with our college roommates, reuniting not because one of us has died or committed suicide, as in the movie, but because we’re trying to mimic that same sense of warmth and well-being in the bosom of old friends we experienced vicariously while watching the film, back when we were young and naive and hanging around our freshman dorm rooms listening to Procul Harum, wondering which of these people will I be dancing around the kitchen doing the dishes with at my Big Chill weekend?
For me that bosom ended up being a group of seven women, who were all either roommates or blockmates (as rooming groups who wanted to live near one another were called) during our sophomore and junior years at Harvard. Actually, four of them continued being roommates their senior year as well, after two of them took the semester off and I was banished from the smaller group, which was why I was surprised to receive the e-mail announcing our first reunion weekend, ten years after graduation. This reunion (and the invitation to it) took place back in 1998, when e-mail was just gaining speed—albeit slowly, over scratchy modem phone lines; at the time, I still shared an e-mail address with my husband. “Your college roommates are hosting a Big Chill weekend,” my husband said, reading the subject header.
“And they invited me?”
He checked the body of the e-mail to make sure. “That’s what it looks like.”
“Hmm,” I said, feeling the sting of that earlier rejection as if no time had passed at all. As if my husband and children were just visitors in my world and I was still the odd woman out, shivering in the cold.
“Are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
For several weeks, I tortured myself over this decision, going back and forth, back and forth, until finally, in the craziest flame of an e-mail I have ever written, before or since, I took some of them to task, eleven years after the fact, for throwing me to the wolves way back when, saying, in essence, that I’d no sooner attend their Big Chill weekend than I would dive headfirst into molten lava. Or some such nonsense.
The group of girls—we called ourselves women back then, though we were barely out of training bras—originally formed the way most groups do: haphazardly and by dint of association. Clara4 was my conduit. We’d met during our senior year of high school, when both of us were visiting the college after receiving our letters of acceptance. Clara hailed from the Midwest, one of those statuesque and stunning, Ayn-Rand-reading moody Catholic girls who inspire poetry and the kind of reckless behavior that her family’s invention, the Breathalyzer, was meant to temper.
Clara was the first to sew the pant legs of her jeans tight around the calves, the height of fashion in 1984, and she taught this suburban ingénue, who’d arrived freshman year with untenably bobbed hair and all the wrong clothes—a pair of black-and-white-checked polyester pants; an electric blue, polyester dress with rhinestone spaghetti straps; a neon green polyester sweater with fake pearl buttons that I actually convinced myself looked extremely collegiate the day I bought it—the value of cotton, wool, and understatement.
When it came time to choose rooming groups for sophomore year, Clara asked me to join her. While freshmen at Harvard are randomly assigned to dormitories in Harvard Yard, sophomores, juniors, and seniors all live in “houses”—large dormitories, each with its own dining hall—scattered around campus. The house becomes the center of its inhabitants’ social lives, the place where they sleep, eat, study (each house has its own library), and hold parties on the weekend.
Nowadays, house assignments are randomized, but back then rooming groups chose their houses at the end of freshman year according to type—the jock house (Kirkland); the preppy house (Eliot); the nerd house (Lowell); the artsy house (Adams, where we ended up); and so on and so forth—such that picking one’s roommates and deciding where to live became fraught with existential questions: Who am I? Where do I fit in?
Not knowing the answers to these questions yet myself, I would have been only too happy to have spent the rest of my college years simply basking in Clara’s glow, sifting with her through the rubble of vintage stores to find the gems; reading her cast-off Russian novels; entertaining her rejected suitors, who were only too eager to try to get closer to her through me. But Clara’s glow was potent. It attracted everyone. So I found myself at the end of freshman year agreeing to room with three other women, all friends of Clara, whom I barely knew.
There was Rose, a dark-haired girl from Riverdale, New York, who fell easily into the role of den mother. She was modest, temperate, and politically savvy, a volunteer for all the right causes, wise beyond her years. Rose was the one you’d go to for advice, or if something particularly bad had happened to you, because you knew she wouldn’t try to fix things with false sympathy or platitudes. She understood, implicitly, that some things were beyond words, and she knew just where and how to place her arm over your shoulder so that it felt neither intrusive nor withholding.
Serena, from Washington, D.C., was a porcelain-skinned sensualist who introduced us all to the wonders of the cervical cap and wore clothing only when necessary. She kept the same boyfriend throughout her college years, and even with the door to her bedroom shut, which it often wasn’t, the two of them could be heard in the throes of loud and vigorous lovemaking. Serena adored being in the water, and she couldn’t understand why anyone else wouldn’t choose to skinny-dip in the Adams House Pool every day.
Ashley, the daughter of pro-choice Republicans from Miami, resembled Britney Spears during her “Oops I Did It Again” phase. I’d often see her strolling through Harvard Yard late at night in her tennis shoes and pink sweaters, lacrosse stick and library books slung over her shoulder, in search of distraction. Ashley, who had a special fondness for afternoon soap operas, was our resident party girl, but she had her limits: she once refused to have sex with our upstairs neighbor, a gorgeous Argentine, when in the throes of an assignation with him she said, “Wait a minute, what’s my last name?” and he couldn’t produce the answer.
The two other members of our group, Addie and Ursula, I met only after we were all living in Adams House and had decided to block together with them during our junior year. Adams House, back then, was filled with clove cigarette–¥smoking, polymorphously perverse, LSD-dropping devotees of Derrida. Addie and Ursula didn’t exactly fit that mold, but they did seem, at least at first, interchangeable: both were Deadheads who favored Indian-print T-shirts; both sported manes of long, straight blond hair; both were fine-boned WASPs who cared not a hoot about their families’ listings in the Social Register; both worked on PCs when everyone else was buying those first Macs, the kind without hard drives that crashed if your paper was longer than ten pages, prompting the screen—and all of your hard work—to be replaced by a menacing cartoon bomb.
After I got to know them, however, I wondered how I’d ever conflated them together. Addie, the shyer and quieter of the two, hailed from Philadelphia, the only child of a couple who divorced when she was quite young. When she wasn’t visiting her lawyer father in Washington, D.C., she lived in Philly with her mother, a viola da gamba musician who ran around the country performing at Renaissance festivals. Addie, a gifted visual artist, was the only person I’d ever met who’d tripped on acid with her friends before going through adolescence. She was also fiercely loyal to her high school boyfriend who, though a music student at another college, lived in her room. Addie, more than any of us, seemed uniquely suited to going through life as one half of a dyad.
Ursula was socially gregarious and quietly brilliant. The daughter of well-respected book editors, she grew up in the exurbs outside New York City with a brief detour through the halls of Exeter. She didn’t get kicked out. She just couldn’t deal with the prep school scene, and she returned back to her local public high school to finish her education. Of all of us, she seemed the most grounded, the most comfortable with herself, her body, her place in the world. Unlike the rest of us—particularly unlike me—she had nothing to prove. To anyone. After getting accepted to Harvard, she decided to defer for a year, which she spent following the Grateful Dead around the country. Her relationships with men were monogamous and mature; her ego never required stroking; she could always be counted on for a lively conversation with a cold beer or an insight into the plot of a book that seemed inscrutable. She read Ulysses for fun. And she liked it.
Though I might not have chosen this particular group of women on my own, had Clara not pulled me into it, once there, I was grateful to be included. We had one of the biggest suites in all of Adams House, A-17, where we threw legendary, ecstasy-fueled parties; we laughed often and deeply; we were supportive of one another, at least at first. If I had to pin down my own role in the group back then, I’d call myself, depending on how magnanimous I was feeling, either the jester or the fool: I was naive, I made social gaffes, I was unlucky in love, all of which provided excellent fodder for not only my roommates’ late-night conversations but also their playful castigation.
We had our frictions, of course, as any group will have. Serena and Rose were deeply involved in the campus antiapartheid movement, but I refused to wear the black armbands Serena was handing out in the dining hall. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe apartheid in South Africa was wrong or that Harvard’s divestiture of its considerable assets in the country might help to end it, it was just that I didn’t think my wearing a black armband would make a difference. Taking over Derek Bok’s office? Sure. Shantytowns? Build ’em. But I’ve never been comfortable wearing my politics on my sleeve, either literally or figuratively.
Serena vehemently disagreed with my position, and she often took me to task for my lack of active political engagement. One evening, she and Rose held a secret antiapartheid meeting in our common room to plan the building of a shantytown in the middle of Harvard Yard. The meeting was so secret, in fact, that when I turned the key in the lock of our front door, after arriving home late one night from the library, I was told I’d have to leave the premises.
“But I have a Shakespeare paper due tomorrow,” I said to the black-armband-wearing student blocking my entry. It was a fifteen-pager, on the nature of betrayal in King Lear and Julius Caesar. I’d composed it in longhand at the library—the 1986 equivalent of backing up documents on a hard drive—but I needed to type the thing into the computer. I had the typing all planned out: since the paper had to be fifteen pages and the Mac usually crashed after nine, I’d trick my computer into thinking I was actually producing three five-page papers to keep the little cartoon bomb at bay.
“Sorry,” said the student. “No outsiders.”
“Outsiders? But this is my room,” I said. I waved to catch the eye of Serena, who was sitting amid the enormous crowd. She shrugged her shoulders, raised her eyebrows, and held her palms upward, as if to say, if only you’d taken an active stance against racism this wouldn’t be happening, before the door slammed shut in my face.
Since I had the key, I simply opened up the door again and asked how much longer my living room would be filled with agitators. The student said she wasn’t sure, but it could go all night. “All night?” I said, wondering (a) where I would sleep; and (b) whether students fighting for the equality of black South Africans should really be in the business of casting out the natives from their homeland.
It was finally agreed that I could fetch my pillow and toothbrush, so long as I promised not to return until morning. Luckily, our next-door neighbor was not only not using his PC that night, a new IBM with its own 20 megabyte hard drive, he was also feeling libidinous, so despite being unceremoniously tossed out of my room, I still had a place to sleep and a robust hard drive to borrow.
But beyond these minor scuffles, the seven of us seemed well suited enough that if you’d asked me, on the eve of the housing lottery back in the spring of 1987, whether I could feel that Et tu, Brute moment coming, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.
They sent Serena. Or Serena sent herself. Or, well, actually, it was never really made clear how, when, and why the decision to send an emissary had been reached, only that it had, in the passive tense, been reached. “Hi,” Serena said, stepping into my room, fresh from either a swim or a postcoital shower, one could never be sure, but I remember her hair was damp, her pale skin flushed. That was the year Ashley and I were sharing a room, but Ashley, who had suddenly expanded beyond pastel clothing, questioning everything about who she was, where she was from, and where she was going, had taken her soul-searching semester off, so I had the place all to myself. Clara, too, had decided to take time off, so it would just be Ursula, Rose, Addie, Serena, and me blocking together.
“Hi,” I said, my voice rising at the end of the diphthong. Of all the roommates, Serena was the one with whom I was the least close, and we were not in the habit of chewing the fat late at night. This was nobody’s fault; it just was.
She’d been meaning to come talk to me all week, she said, but she’d been nervous about saying what she had to say.
While Serena paused to collect her thoughts, I scanned through my conscience, trying to remember what, if anything, I might have said or done that could have been construed as injurious. I was hardly a saint. I gossiped as much as anyone, and I sometimes had sex with other people’s boyfriends, and I often borrowed clothes for longer than necessary, but I couldn’t conjure any crime with regard to Serena. I knew I wasn’t her favorite—that spot was reserved for Rose—but I was not aware of how deeply I’d fallen out of her favor until she explained that it had been decided, again in the passive tense, that the rooming group would be better off without me.
“Really?” I said. My heart froze. My eyes slowly started to water. “Why?”
What a dumb question, I thought, even as I was asking it. Why? Why? How could such a thing ever be explained? The love was gone, end of story. I’d been on the receiving end of that question too many times to have expected a logical answer: the friend who’d wanted to know why I’d stopped playing hopscotch with her; the other who’d asked why I didn’t want to come over to her house to play; the sleepover date who’d wondered why I’d joined the Tibbar club—rabbit spelled backward—if their unwritten rules practically required, along with wearing red bandanas and doing penny drops at recess, a rejection of her. Because, I’d told them all. Just because.
Serena, however, had come prepared with an answer. “Because,” she said, “we think you’re overconcerned with money.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure what this meant. I was the only one of our group who hadn’t gone to private school before Harvard, so I was, it’s pretty safe to say, the least moneyed. I was hardly poor either, but I was also the kind of person who, when offered unpaid summer internships, had to either turn them down or work a second shift as a waitress in order to accept them, because summers, insisted my parents—themselves the children of Depression-era struggling immigrants—were meant to be spent making enough money to survive the rest of the year. “What do you mean?”
“You think about money a lot,” she said.
Well, yes, I thought. That’s true. I do think about money a lot, but only because I don’t usually have any. It was a luxury not to have to think about money.
The conversation went on for much longer—around an hour or so, if I had to estimate—but I can’t recall a single line of it other than the one about money. I kept turning it over in my head. Did I talk about money more than other people? Was it bad to be concerned with money? Was Serena referring to my fascination with the children of extreme wealth at our college, the ones who’d gone to schools with pretty names—St. Paul’s, Andover, Deerfield—and were themselves given otherworldly monikers such as Thorn, Struan, and Alistair?5 What did it mean that someone saw me as a person who was “overconcerned” with money? Was that just Serena’s phrase, or did everyone see me thus?
I wondered about Serena’s own relationship to money. I’d assumed she came from some, since she graduated from one of the top private schools in the country, but she presented herself as having less. I came from less but presented myself as having more: a transparent attempt to fit in, learned from my own parents, who’d often take my whole rooming group out for brunch when they came for a visit, even though such shows of largesse probably killed their food budget for the month. Was this what was bothering Serena, the disjunction between my family’s appearance and our reality? And why was it okay for her to pretend to be less well-off but not for me to pretend to be more?
The next day, reeling from the rejection, I entered the housing lottery as a single. I sat apart from my roommates, in the dining hall in which it was held, and waited for my number to be called. Adams House did have a few single rooms available to seniors, and I was hoping to snag one, but before my name was picked, all of the singles had already been taken.
Trixie, a girl with asymmetrical hair, ran up to me. She was wearing one of her typical outfits, kind of punk-meets-Madonna-meets-Edie Sedgwick in her later years, with fishnet stockings and pointy boots. “So should we go for it?” she asked. Trixie and I, though barely acquaintances, had hatched a last-ditch plan the night before, just after Serena appeared in my room like the bomb on my Mac: if we were unable to procure singles for ourselves in the lottery, we would join forces, pretending to be roommates so that she and her boyfriend, Matt, could live together in a double, while I moved in with Josh, Matt’s roommate. At the time we’d made the plan it had seemed perfectly logical. I knew Josh well enough; Harvard did not officially allow males and females to live together; Trixie and Matt were determined to cohabitate; Josh always had good pot. But now that all the singles were gone, and we were about to announce our fake alliance, the plan seemed deeply flawed.
What if we got caught? What if Josh and I didn’t get along? What if Trixie and Matt broke up? What if Josh was a slob? What if this silly transgression kept me from graduating?
That summer, when I wasn’t slaving away during the day as an unpaid intern or working the dinner shift at a sushi and steak restaurant, I spent what was left of my free time worrying about my rooming situation, licking my wounds, trying not to think about money, and periodically having sex with Serena’s boyfriend.
Oh, please. You would have too.
That September, Josh and I moved into a sun-splashed corner suite overlooking the Harvard Lampoon castle and Mount Auburn Street. We each had our own private bedroom off the common room, and we shared a bathroom, which I noticed, to my great relief, Josh liked to keep as tidy as I did. I nearly chastised myself for spending so much time agonizing over our living arrangements until the giant green garbage bag arrived.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“Pot,” said Josh.
The bag, it should be noted, was nearly my height. By my estimation, you’d have to smoke a joint an hour for several years to finish it off. “Where’d you get that much pot?” I said.
“That’s not your concern,” he said, slipping into his room to weigh and measure out dime bags. On his desk, along with a scale and little Baggies, were stacks of perforated blotter pads of LSD.
“Wait, you’re a dealer?” I said.
“Come on,” Josh said with a smile. “You didn’t know?”
“I knew you always seemed to have an endless supply, but no, I guess it never occurred to me that you were a dealer.” Once a suburban ingénue, always a suburban ingénue.
Josh shook his head at my stupidity and laughed. “How do you think I was able to afford all my equipment?” He did have an impressive stereo system: flat speakers stretching from floor to ceiling, a floating turntable, microphones and tape decks and a high-end CD player—still an expensive novelty back then—and stacks and stacks of the latest music.
I’d never before thought about where it had all come from. Neither the equipment nor the drugs nor anything the kids around me seemed to have in such copious supply. So many Harvard students seemed to have so much, nothing they ever owned or did with it or snorted it through ever surprised me. One time, a guy I barely knew drove me and several others into Boston in his brand-new BMW, treated us all to a lobster and champagne dinner at Locke-Ober, then capped off the evening with a cocaine-fueled, all-night bacchanal in his dorm room. Another time, a friend of a friend sent a bus to Cambridge to shuttle sixty or so of us down to Newport, Rhode Island, for an end-of-the-year celebration, held in a Gatsby-esque mansion overlooking the ocean, replete with a ballroom to rival Versailles’ paved in black-and-white-checkered marble that reminded me of the pants I’d brought with me to college. “Where do you want us to sleep?” I’d asked the host around 3:00 A.M., to which he responded, flinging open a door leading to a hallway choked with guest rooms, as if proffering a deck of cards, “Pick a room. Any room.”
But Josh and I, I would learn, had grown up similarly: middle-class Jewish families, suburban public schools, some grease in the wheels but never enough. And while I didn’t condone his profession, let’s just say I was in a position, theoretically, to understand it. Waitressing was hardly fun, and it brought in a lot less money. Plus Josh was free to choose any summer internship he pleased. Heck, he could have spent every summer listening to his expensive stereo and reading his beloved Heidegger, and he still would have been less “overconcerned” with money than I was with my sixteen-hour days.
But theory is not practice, and living with the campus drug dealer was not a picnic. The doorbell rang at all hours. I was always nervous that Josh—and therefore I, for not reporting him—would get arrested. I’d often come home from the library late at night to find my living room filled with students or random locals, their shirts tie-dyed, their pupils dilated, staring at Pee-wee’s Playhouse or listening to Jefferson Airplane at ear-splitting decibels, dancing around in ecstatic circles, watching their hands leaving trails. “Isn’t it beautiful?” they’d exclaim, and I’d say, “Yeah, it’s beautiful, but if you could just turn it down a teeny, tiny notch so I can study…,” and before I could say please, they’d turn to Josh and say, “Wow, your roommate’s a real bummer.”
Sometimes there were freak-outs. “My girlfriend just gave birth to a baby in a toilet. We didn’t even know she was pregnant!” one customer, a local Cambridge kid, the otherwise highly intelligent son of a philosophy professor, once cried. This turned out not to have been a hallucination but an actual baby in a toilet. I heard he later killed himself—not in our living room, thank god—while sucking on a tube of nitrous with a plastic bag draped over his head. Another buyer spent several hours explaining, in excruciating detail, his aversions to both food and excrement, which he viewed with equal revulsion. Josh himself could tumble into deep troughs of hallucinogenic despair, cheered only by the sight of his pet python devouring a mouse.
Outside it might have been 1987, the final go-go days of Reaganomics before the stock market took its Black Monday nosedive, but inside my room it was perpetually 1968. Even then I could tell that this was sad, that—my roommate situation notwithstanding—I would never be able to feel the same kind of nostalgia for my college years as the characters in The Big Chill because the experience itself was removed from reality, filtered through the past, then manufactured, like LSD.
After skipping the first few roommate reunions, I finally felt bold enough, distant enough from our shared past, to bury the hatchet and attend one. I even offered to host it at my parents’ house on the Delaware shore. Everything was going swimmingly that weekend: Serena and I were getting along; our kids were playing well together; even the weather was agreeable. Then, the morning we were packing up to leave, I was told that the East Coasters would be splitting the cost of the West Coasters’ plane fares, as they did every year.
“Huh?” I said. I knew every year the reunion was held on a different coast, but I figured that this was the understood cost of participation: once every two years, half the group would spend more than the other half to participate, but it would all even out in the end. If you couldn’t afford it, I thought, you didn’t go that particular year, end of story. To complicate matters, some of the women—we were all now definitely women—had purchased their tickets using miles, which meant a convoluted algorithm had to be invented to figure out each person’s cost of lost opportunity. I reminded the group that I’d hosted us gratis. That our presence had meant my parents, who counted on rental income from the house to pay the mortgage, would not be earning any that particular week. That this was the first reunion I’d ever attended (and probably, judging by this nonsense, I thought, my last).
Once again the issue of money had reared its head, but this time we were all, more or less, feeling the pinch, paying for babysitters and preschools and little shoes and rents and mortgages we could ill afford, all while earning less, in adjusted income, than our parents. While the Big Chill generation may have been able to wax nostalgic over their bohemian past, they did so in a well-appointed house that was big enough to host all of them. Our generation, meanwhile, not only has little in the way of cultural wealth over which to get misty-eyed, we are also the first generation of Americans to be less well-off than our parents, whose homes we borrow in order to host our reunion weekends because our own homes, which many of us don’t even own, are too small. Which means all of us in my former rooming group are now at least concerned with—if not “overconcerned” with—money. None of us has the luxury not to be.
Even so, my questioning of the groupthink socialism raised a few eyebrows. I felt exactly as I had when I’d refused to wear the antiapartheid armband back in 1986: sure that my reasoning carried just as much logic as my roommates’, yet made to feel, once again, like the fool. And though I enjoyed the company of many of the women individually and stayed in touch with a few, the experience of the group as a whole, I decided, wasn’t worth the cost of the airfare. Mine or anyone else’s.
Then Addie’s husband, Tim, died, and all bets were off. Just after the second anniversary of his death, Addie invited the group up to her cottage in the Catskills, where Tim had died in his sleep, and those of us who could go went. The house only had two bedrooms, she said, but we’d manage.
Addie and I had grown quite close during the previous two years, after I suggested that we meet once a week, every week, for lunch following her husband’s death. Our offices were close enough to one another, I said. It would be easy. And though we’d previously had lunch dates here and there, it had been a long time since we’d been intimate friends.
Addie and I, along with Ursula, had actually moved to Paris together after graduation, but since then our lives had diverged. Addie had moved back to the States, while I’d worked four more years abroad. She spent long hours flexing her artistic muscles in the independent film world, while I traded the insanity of war photography for a steady job in television. I gave birth to a couple of children; she decided she never wanted any. The week I relinquished the safety net of my TV job for the rickety bridge of full-time writing, Addie landed a position as a staff editor on my former show. We literally just kept missing each other, sometimes by days.
But when we ran into each other on the street near our new offices a few years later—Addie had now left her network job to begin working as a union rep for film editors; I’d rented a writing studio outside my apartment—it felt as if fate had finally handed us the means to reconnect. Soon thereafter her husband died. Then we began having lunch every Monday.
We talked mostly about the present at first and about her: her loneliness; her grief; the seemingly insurmountable task of conquering them. Then, as time wore on, we began tiptoeing our way around the past. “Remember Josh and his python?” I said. Addie, who’d actually dated Josh during the year I lived with him, smiled, then winced. She hadn’t agreed with the way things had gone down, way back when, she said. She’d always felt bad about it.
“Forget about it,” I said. “It’s over and done.” It had been nineteen years since my banishment from the group, and I was finally, thrillingly, over it.
That hot July weekend in the Catskills we were five. Clara, our former moody beauty, had to stay back in Philly with her daughters and her husband for reasons I no longer recall. After several incarnations, Clara had wound up as a landscape architect. And though she’s still as physically stunning—if not more so—as she was at eighteen, her dark moods no longer threaten to swallow her. In fact she is, though none of us, including her, would have ever predicted it, one of the happier members of our group.
Serena, now a researcher at Johns Hopkins, also stayed home with her family. I don’t remember what the actual reason was either, but I think it was that her partner, a professional singer, had said she would be on the road that weekend, leaving Serena to care for their two children. Turned out the summer before our senior year, when I was having revenge sex with her boyfriend, Serena was exploring her attraction to women, which didn’t make my actions that summer any less treacherous, but still. I liked to think of it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for my conscience, which had been feeling worse ever since Serena called several years ago, sometime after my crazy e-mail, to say she was sorry. Her apology was heartfelt and sincere, and I was grateful for it. Years later, as my father would lie dying in the cancer ward at Johns Hopkins, it would be Serena who’d rush over to hold my hand.
The rest of our group arrived Friday night and settled in for the weekend. Since I was the one with the seven-week-old baby, I was put in the second bedroom upstairs, across from Addie’s. The others said they’d camp out in the living room. The door to Addie’s room was ajar as I lugged both baby and his gear up into the guest room, and I felt a distinct chill as I passed by her room and stole a peek inside to see the bed where Addie’s forty-year-old husband had died, alone in his sleep, of an epileptic seizure. A film production electrician for the majority of his professional life, he’d been going upstate one night a week to take a course in water management. He’d wanted a change, he told Addie, perhaps a chance to live full-time in the country. Addie had been encouraging, saying she would follow him wherever he went. But he’d gone off, alone, she lamented, to the one place she couldn’t join him.
We all die alone, I kept telling her, but of course I knew what she meant. We are social creatures, we humans. We form dyads. We create groups. We believe, in the depths of our souls, that together we are better than apart.
We cooked a big dinner Saturday night, serving it on the screened-in porch in the vain hope of finding cool air. As we ate and drank and wiped our brows, we began opening up about our lives.
Ursula was trying to decide whether or not to divorce her husband. She talked about her Al-Anon meetings. About the times she feared her spouse had driven under the influence with the kids. About the mess her marriage had become. She worried that her job as a nonprofit consultant—her most recent battle had been to thwart the introduction of abstinence-only curricula in the California public schools—would not pay the mortgage if she got divorced. She seemed, for the first time since I’d known her, unmoored. As brilliant as she was at deconstructing the plots of difficult novels, her own life’s narrative had her stumped.
Rose, as per her usual maternal self, offered Ursula empathy and wisdom, both with regard to the schism and with the issues of dividing up real estate. Though she’d never officially married, Rose had had a long-term relationship and owned a home with a man for many years before the whole thing disintegrated. She’d wondered at the time whether it might have been easier, in certain ways, to go through an actual divorce, to somehow formally mark the pain of the rupture. “At least you have your kids,” she said to Ursula, trying her best to hide the anguish I knew, from previous discussions, she felt at having reached forty without having had a child of her own. She’d devoted her entire adulthood to working tirelessly for reproductive health, choice, and rights, and now her own window of choice was shutting. The mother of all of us had no one of her own to mother.
As if on cue, my son Leo, the product of one careless night, woke up from his nap screaming. “You know,” I said, struggling to undo the clasp on my nursing bra, “sometimes I wouldn’t mind a few moments of childlessness.”
Rose smiled. Leo latched on.
“No kidding,” said Ashley. “Me too.” Ashley had gone through the most radical transformation of us all. Turning her back on what she saw as the empty values of her upbringing—competitive sports, competitive schools, competitive food, clothing, and housing—she and her husband had retreated into the woods, living off the grid in a teepee at first, then in a yurt when the children were born, then, after outgrowing the yurt, in a small cob house, which they built with their own hands out of mud, sand, and straw.
I’d flown out to visit her several years earlier, when she still lived in the yurt, and what struck me most was not necessarily the peace and tranquility of the place, which she had in spades compared to my hustle-bustle life in New York, but the hours of Ashley’s day that had to be spent maintaining this simple lifestyle, whether through chopping wood or tending the garden or fetching eggs or scooping out the waste from the composting toilet. Self-sustaining living had at first been her husband’s passion and profession, his raison d’être, but through osmosis and necessity, it had become Ashley’s occupation as well. And as the five of us went around the table, discussing our professional feats and failures, the reality of this suddenly struck her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “All of you have jobs! Real jobs and real identities apart from your families. How is it that I’m the only one of us who doesn’t?”
We tried to point out that her lifestyle was her job, but she wasn’t buying it. “I spend every day taking care of my kids,” she said. It was nice having all that time with them and lack of structure, she explained, but…Her voice trailed off. Then, perking up, she told us about her decision to unschool them.
“Unschool?” we all said. We knew she homeschooled her children, but none of us had ever heard of unschooling.
It was a movement she’d read about before the children were born, Ashley explained. Letting children learn not from lessons but from simple everyday interactions with their environment.
“But what do they actually do all day?” one of us wondered.
“Mostly they just play in the woods,” she said.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Technically,” said Ashley, “yes.”
As she elaborated, I could tell by our expressions, by the way we shifted uneasily in our seats, that none of us agreed with such a radical choice—while we were not exactly Harvard women, we were women who’d gone to Harvard—but I saw it as a testament to how far we’d come as a group that no one felt the need to castigate Ashley for not wearing the armband. Much of what she said about pressure and stress made sense. None of us with children in regular schools could honestly say we were happy with the hours of homework our kids were burdened with every night. They’re like those 1984 Macs: it’s only a matter of time before their brains sprout bombs.
Meanwhile, as Ashley kept talking, telling us about her meditation classes and her colorful neighbors and her quest for spirituality, I kept thinking about that scene in The Big Chill when Tom Berenger takes William Hurt to task for the person he’d become. “We go back a long way,” his character, Sam Weber, says, “and I’m not gonna piss that away ’cause you’re higher than a kite,” to which Hurt, as Nick, snaps, “Wrong, a long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time; you don’t know anything about me.” When I’d first heard that line uttered, in 1983, it struck me as callous, cold, something only Nick would say. But now, twenty-three years later, I realized I myself was capable of saying such words. Moreover, they’d be true.
For my fortieth birthday, a few months earlier, my friend Jennifer had asked me to put together a group of twelve women I love. For the most part, the women I love are not only jesters like me, but they are women with whom I stay in regular contact, whose lives look the most like mine: kids, husbands, careers, adulterous fantasies, the usual boring struggles faced by those of us knuckleheaded enough to try to make a go of it in New York without a banker’s salary. Actually, one of the women I invited was a banker, but we didn’t hold it against her. Two of the women had even overlapped for a year with me in Adams House, but I am two years older, so it would have been uncool to hang out with them then, though today I count them as two of my closest confidantes.
I’d considered inviting Addie to that birthday gathering, but I realized my friendship with her is its own entity, with its own set of rules, wholly separate from both my current group and the shared group of our past. We are our own dyad. And that seems to be enough for both of us.
After our dinner on the screened-in porch, after we’d depleted our bank of stories and had caught up, more or less, with one another’s lives, we carried our plates into the kitchen and started to clean up. I don’t remember what was on the stereo at the time, but I know we didn’t dance to it. And we didn’t sing. And we didn’t wax nostalgic for the group we once were. We just wiped the surfaces clean and took whatever small pleasures we could from those particular women at that particular moment in time, knowing that twenty-four hours later, regardless of our feelings on the matter, we’d be back out in the cold world.