four

Verity had accepted much about her life, and with a fair amount of grace considering the void that it was. She accepted her father’s unconventional means of dealing with his divorce, she accepted the divorce itself, and she accepted the double duty it demanded on birthdays and at certain family events. Verity even reconciled herself to her career, such as it was, as a cash register operator, or “clerk” as the bookstore called it, which bestowed further Bartleby-esque desperation upon the job. Five years after that inauspicious meeting at the swinger party, she and Charlie were what her dad embarrassingly referred to as “an item,” despite a series of personal and professional setbacks that resulted in Charlie’s permanent residence in his parents’ duplex apartment, and she accepted this. So I’m a clerk and the daughter of a swinging retired dentist, so what? I accept all that, yet at the same time these are things that are difficult to brag about at a high school reunion, she thought, staring at the envelope on the table, nestled amid the rest of the day’s bills and junk mail.

“Do you know what today is?” she asked Charlie.

“Sure. May twenty-ninth. Ascension Day: the anniversary of when our Lord returned to the mothership.”

“Of course; I’d forgotten. But it’s also the day that marks the beginning of the end. Take a look at what I just got in the mail this afternoon.” She tossed the envelope in his lap and turned to her friend, the refrigerator.

“Ah, yes. Your fifteenth-year high school reunion.” He lay back on her sofa and read over the card. “I blew mine off. Wonder where all those jag-offs are now? Oh, well. It’s easy to cast aspersions on the rabble from the triumphant summit of my childhood bedroom.”

Verity found the enemy of womankind, low-fat yogurt, in the back of the bottom shelf, a spot ordinarily reserved for her simulated pudding treats. “I hate you, refrigerator.”

“Are we going? I think it would be fun,” he said. “After all, you can learn a lot about a person when you see her in her old high school setting.”

“You want to learn something about me? Here.” She retrieved the 1988 Downers Grove South High School senior yearbook from her bookshelf and opened to the appropriate page.

“Geez,” he said, studying it.

“Believe me, I know.”

“Where did I get the idea that you were a cheerleader?”

She shrugged. “Masturbatory beer commercial fantasies?”

He read the notations under her picture. “Hmm . . . AV Club, Home Ec . . . Good God: Mock UN, too? They should have just put ‘awaiting the Internet’ by your name.” Charlie knew what he was talking about; his own high school experience had included Chess Team and Future Scientists of America. “On the other hand, even then you had those sexy cat’s-eye glasses. I’ve always had a thing for cute, new-wave nerd girls.”

High school . . . sock hops and whatnot. Verity could not recall if they had actually called their dances “sock hops”; perhaps they were “mixers” or “canteens.” Her group of friends, the band geeks and drama club fags—an affectionate slam among friends, connoting nerdliness more so than sexual orientation—had loved the sock hops, and would pogo to anything the DJ played, even Cinderella or Bruce Springsteen. With teenage cynicism they had scoffed at the pep rallies, the sentimentality of year-end student council speeches, and any sport that required a ball and strategy. This was how she remembered those years, in isolated chunks, in earthworm segments, chopped off at both ends, wriggling for a while, then lying still. She had not hated high school, just plodded through it, a four-year bog, hoping for something more interesting on the other side of the swamp.

“I’m not sure going to this reunion is such a hot idea,” she said.

Charlie sat up on the sofa. His shirt had become untucked and revealed a cute mound of beer belly. “I can understand that you don’t want to go, but what about me? What about me getting to see Downers Grove South High School and all those people you always talked about, and your locker, and where you changed into your AV Club uniform?” His eyes rolled back in his head, rhapsodic over the image.

Attending a school with the word Downers in the name should have prepared her for the days of slog she now enjoyed at the bookstore and for acting as quasi caretaker of her lonely dad in his weird dating scene, but one of Verity’s earthworm memories was her optimism that real life would improve after high school.

“Let’s go,” urged Charlie. “It’s not until August, and that will give me plenty of time to make up a plausible career to tell your friends about. Maybe I’ll say I’m a Web developer.”

“But you don’t know any of them and I haven’t exactly kept in touch the last fifteen years myself.”

“All the more reason to go. Plus nobody will know I’m lying about my job. I think you could probably tell the truth about your career; it’s okay.”

“What career? I’m two steps away from pushing around a grocery cart piled high with garbage bags of salvaged treasure.”

“But still, I don’t think anyone would make fun of you.”

“No, you’re probably right,” she admitted. “There’s nothing to make fun of, because there’s nothing there. I’m the most un-person on the planet.”

“You know,” he said, “I looked forward to lying and bragging at all my own reunions, but I chickened out of attending each time. Don’t deprive me of this one opportunity to make something of myself. Come on; it’ll be fun. We need some fun.” He dragged out the last word, and Verity fiddled with the fraying hem of her blouse.

“We have fun,” she said. “Didn’t we just go to one of those alkie promo nights at Tuman’s Tavern?”

“Yeah, but there weren’t any blond identical twins to be found anywhere. Just a guy in a blue grizzly bear costume handing out glow-in-the-dark key chains.”

Charlie was a good boyfriend in all the important ways and she felt guilty for dragging him down to her fundamentally morose level. She looked at his eager face, at the pit stains on his too-small baseball jersey, and told him she’d think about it.

Mr. and Mrs. Brown had decided to name their son “Charlie” and drew no associations from the lovable loser of Peanuts fame and their thirty-five-year-old son, currently back home with his collection of software T-shirts and his Klingon bible and hundred-sided dice. At the swinger party years ago, he had told Verity about his job as a programmer, flaunted his geek pride in being a “dot-com thousandaire.” Cool, she’d said, wondering how the urn episode would affect this burgeoning relationship. He shrugged self-deprecatingly, honesty winning out: At least, he’d said, I’m a thousandaire on paper. It was hard not to fall for earnestness coupled with nerdly good looks. She sat on the thrift-hell sofa and curled into his armpit. The shirt bore a crusty yellow sheen, but Verity didn’t mind.

He said, “I stole your last pudding treat.”

“That’s okay. I guess I shouldn’t buy them—what the hell are they even made of?—but they’re my guilty pleasure.”

He chuffed her lightly on the shoulder. “That’s silly, guilty pleasure. Who in the world is above their own taste?”

Verity picked velour lint dreads out of her sofa and said nothing. That was a silly phrase, and not among her usual arsenal of rhetoric. How could she be above her own taste? She lived in an apartment full of junk, each piece of furniture and clothing, each semifunctional appliance, each weird and wonderful tchotchke rescued from garage sales, thrift stores, church bazaars—all of it cataloged, fairly neat, and loved.

Charlie checked his watch. Verity worked the second shift at the bookstore on Thursday nights and would have to leave soon. He’d take the Chicago Avenue bus with her and then get off downtown to transfer to the Red Line for the long trip home to Rogers Park. His mother was making turkey meat loaf tonight, and his stomach started to growl. Verity, in no rush to get to work, curled closer to him and nuzzled his neck.

Charlie was aware of a sudden and urgent stirring in his trousers. How could this be happening mere moments after thinking of meat loaf and his mother? What kind of a sicko was he?

“Meat loaf,” he muttered, instructing his brain to send the appropriate message into his pants.

“Excuse me?” said Verity. She had felt the sudden and urgent stirring as well.

“Meat loaf,” he said louder, staring at his lap.

She grinned. “That isn’t even a single entendre, bub,” she said and nuzzled all thoughts of meat loaf and mama right out of him.

         

Barnes & Noble sat on a corner downtown near the Water Tower, and its three floors remained busy from open to close. A seven-year veteran of the store, Verity had once thought of Barnes & Noble as a stepping-stone to grad school or even owning her own bookshop. She now thought of it as a building she would enter every day until she died of despair.

It was typical of Charlie to ride all the way with her to work, then take another train home. Tex always said, “That guy is a real gentleman.” She knew he was a real gentleman, a real gentleman who lived with his parents.

Team Leader Joe approached the checkout desk and chastised her for sitting on a stool behind the counter. “I think we’ve discussed—oh, maybe a hundred times now—that it does not look very businesslike for the team to be perceived as slacking off. It creates a sense of unease in the guests when they see seated clerks.” Exasperated, he ran a hand through his perm and stomped off. Verity rose from her stool and silently grabbed her own throat and choked herself. A guest with book in hand watched warily.

“Easy, there,” cautioned fellow clerk Bob. “Our workman’s comp doesn’t cover self-inflicted strangulation.”

“How about murder?” asked Verity. The guest handed her the book and looked for affirmation in her eyes, as did so many who bought this, Dr. Phil’s latest.

“I get the feeling we have a Dr. Phil book quota, like cops giving out speeding tickets at the end of the month,” she muttered.

The guest departed and Bob sneered at the Dr. Phil display dump. “I’d like to kick that mustache into the back of his skull. Self Matters. Please. Since when?”

Bob—unkindly known as Van Gogh around the staff room due to an ear wound sustained during Vietnam—made Verity’s tenure at the store less demoralizing. His dislike of the customers, his refusal to call them “guests,” the obscenities he jotted down and passed to her whenever someone asked for the inspirational books, his homemade T-shirt that read “I served in Quang Tri ’68 and all I got was this stupid T-shirt and my ear blown off,” and the misanthropy that extended to all except his wife, two of his children, and Verity Presti, combined to form an acid-tongued, blowhard personality with a soft, marshmallow filling. Had he advertised for love in the personals and carried around an urn of cigarette ashes, Verity would have called him paternal.

“Bob, I’m going to have a thrombo. I just got an invitation to my fifteenth-year high school reunion,” she blurted.

“Do not go,” Bob said. “Case closed, thrombo averted.”

She sank back onto the prohibited stool and gently banged her head on the counter. “Suddenly, I feel old.”

“Oh, get outta here. I’m the one who’s now wearing bifocals whenever I’m awake, which is really breaking down my elaborate denial mojo about getting older. You’re just gearing up for a nightmare, midlife crisis-inducing class reunion. Don’t go if it bothers you so much.”

“I don’t want to, but Charlie does. He thinks it’ll be fun.”

“Well, yeah, it’s always fun to go to other people’s reunions and laugh at the losers and get tanked. It’s not fun for the reunionees.”

“No kidding. My great passion in life is thrifting, Bob. That’s not the kind of thing you can bring up at a reunion. ‘What have you been doing all these years?’ ‘Oh, well, I picked up this fantastic portable bowling alley at the Salvation Army and I also have a closet full of crocheted beer-can hats.’ It is impressive, yes, but only to a small portion of society.”

“You don’t have to impress those jackasses! Who the hell are they?”

She sighed and picked at her cuticles. “I know, I know. But here’s the thing: I don’t feel like explaining myself to people I haven’t seen in fifteen years. Nobody would understand that I’m satisfied just being a bookstore clerk.”

Bob looked over his bifocals at her.

“I am satisfied,” she insisted. “I mean, fine: I may have considered getting my master’s in English literature once, but the thought of scrutinizing Pope, Swift, and Johnson day and night charmeth me nay. I’m not good at it and I wouldn’t fit in with literary types.” She gestured around the store at the customers to make her point. As she did so, a man approached the counter with a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul. He stared at her while she rang up his purchase, then said, “Thanks, chubs,” when she handed him his receipt.

Outraged, Bob tried to hop the counter, hit his knee, and let loose a flood of vulgarities. Verity told him to forget it; he was on disciplinary probation for chasing customers out of the store, and she didn’t want him to lose his job.

Her imagination clicked on; the old creative AV enthusiast with perfect attendance woke up. As she watched the customer walk away, she wondered if it was possible to look up his address from his credit card information. She would show up at his front door dressed in a nice suit as if she was someone important and then she would walk in and shoot him in the stomach. She’d choose a small-caliber gun, perhaps a .22; he wouldn’t die, but the impact would put him on the floor and make a mess of his insides and his carpeting. Then she could drag him to the banister of his staircase, handcuff him to the railings, and call his wife to inform her that her husband had been shot and was near death. Then she would rip the phone out of the wall and go home.

Bob said, “Chicken Soup for the Soul, my ass. I’d like to take a pot of boiling chicken soup and shove it down his fucking throat. Anyway, Verity honey, I can’t see you in the competitive world of grad school. You’re way too nice.”

         

Charlie saw a beautiful woman on the El ride home, the kind of woman he could instantly fall in love with if he was not already in love with Verity. She had dark hair past her shoulders, thick and wavy but not at all like his own fright wig. He wanted to say she had nut-brown skin but decided that sounded unflattering and maybe even racist; it drew attention to the fact that she was black—not that it mattered—but maybe dwelling on her race was not good form. But then neither was leering at her, and he felt ashamed and guilty for being so hormone-driven, and he looked out the window as punishment.

Yet she was so beautiful. He stole another look; he could not help himself. As the train jounced along he felt his jowls jiggling. Halfhearted anger boiled in him at the thought that a gorgeous woman like that could never love an ugly mug like him, which was beside the point as he already loved someone else and she loved him, and God knows Verity was beautiful, just in a different way.

The woman on the train must have felt neurotic eyes burning into the back of her head; perhaps the hair on her lovely, slender neck stood up, a psychic warning that someone mentally unwell was afoot. She turned slightly to look at Charlie, but he immediately hid his face in his book, afraid she would think he was leering, or that she would see his dead tooth.

He got off the El at Jarvis and walked home. He had eaten a cheeseburger at lunch and now had cheerleader fat guilt. Also those chocolate doughnuts that looked so good in the staff cafeteria that morning didn’t really look that good after sitting on his desk all day, but he had eaten them anyway. Diet pills didn’t seem to help with the stress-eating that came with temping at some hellhole place that had no intention of hiring you. He once asked Verity to find him a book at the store, It’s Not What You’re Eating, It’s What’s Eating You, but she just looked at him like he was crazy or must be joking, so he pretended he was joking because, let’s be honest, who wants to date a man who reads obesity self-help books? Life as a shut-in seemed more and more attractive. Charlie mused about potential strategies he might try in order to qualify for Meals on Wheels and never have to leave the house again.

“Charlie!” his mother bellowed the second he set foot over the threshold. “You left your room a disaster area! If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: just make the bed, just clean up once in a while.”

He took off his shoes and placed them next to his father’s orthopedic clogs. “Sorry. I was running late.”

“What’s new at sea? They’re catching fish,” she replied.

A man had been murdered in their apartment more than fifty years ago, at least as the Rogers Park lore would have it. This went a long way toward explaining his home’s omnipresent negative atmosphere, his mother’s unprovoked aggression, and the reason his life was going nowhere. Ghosts could do that to you—hold you back, haunt and torment the living, of whom they were so envious; he’d read about it. The day after he became a dot-com casualty and moved back into his parents’ apartment, he saw the apparition disappear into the vent above the stove and his father said, “He’s been lonely here. Misery loves company.”

He turned toward the stairs, but stopped when he heard the unmistakable sound of an oven mitt being thrown down, gauntlet-style. “Now where are you going? We’re eating in five seconds.”

He said, “Just going to change my shirt and wash my hands.”

“Thank God I did the laundry, or else you wouldn’t have a clean shirt to change into, not that I mind.”

Charlie did not know what this meant. Should he not change his shirt, not go upstairs? For guidance he looked to his father, who was carefully laying a game of solitaire on the family room table, an exemplar of ostentatious nonintervention.

“The turkey meat loaf is getting cold!” his mother screamed, and threw the oven mitts in the air.

         

Team Leader Joe announced in an uncharacteristic display of generosity and morale-building sentiment, “Free fishwiches on your break.”

Verity’s dinner hour came at eight and by that time the lone fishwich left on the plate had assumed the condition and color of a corpse in livor mortis. But it was free, and she could not resist the siren song of free food left out on a table. She ate her meal, chewing the fish a disconcerting number of times until it finally collapsed into a manageable bolus of gristle, and withdrew from her cardigan pocket the reunion announcement. Funny how simply reading certain words could resurrect memories and emotions she assumed were dead—but to her dismay she found them neatly recorded and wriggling like maggots in her brain.

The memories of Downers Grove South, Craig and Carolyn, Will and Stan, faded as Team Leader Joe barged into the staff room. “There’s a lady out here asking for you.” Team Leader Joe had a “thing” about friends coming to visit his team at the workplace, but this old broad outside looked like she had money to burn and plus she was holding a giant box of Godiva chocolates and two copies of Who Moved My Cheese?

Verity recognized the woman at the register giving Bob the once-over as one of her dad’s swinger friends from Downers. Verity braced herself for the fake smile and extremely awkward hug. She knew Fran was going to make conversation. Suburban etiquette demanded it.

“So nice to see you again, dear. Tex told me you worked here, so I thought I’d pop in,” she said. “What do you think of this for his birthday?” She pointed to Who Moved My Cheese?

“It’s a very popular book,” Verity said.

“Yes, and since he’s contemplating so many lifestyle changes right now, I thought it was appropriate that we each had a copy. Of course,” she added, eyes straying to the Dr. Phil dump, “maybe a different one would be better. Perhaps we could browse the self-help books together.”

“I’m not allowed to leave my worker containment field.”

Fran paused, then firmly pushed the books toward the register. “About those lifestyle changes? Your dad has intimated that he’s ready to settle down.”

For years Verity had tried to erect a blockade from her mind to her mouth, but she imploded it constantly. “Please don’t say ‘intimated’ in the same sentence as ‘dad.’ It’s like saying ‘grandpa’ and ‘thong.’ I can’t even wrap my brain around it.” Bob, flaunting store policy, pulled up a stool to watch the show.

Fran misinterpreted Verity’s attitude and said, “Oh, don’t worry, dear. I have no intention of taking Thelma’s place. Gone, but not forgotten, I know all that.”

Verity detected vinegar in Fran’s words, but smiled suddenly, seeing an out. She said, “My mother’s not dead.”

“Well, not in the important sense, of course. We all stay alive if someone we love remembers—”

“No, no,” she clarified, “she’s really not dead, just divorced. She lives in Downers Grove with my stepfather in a restored Georgian colonial. My dad carries around old cigarette ashes in an urn because he can’t accept it. It’s nothing to worry about; he’s not a kook or anything.”

Fran goggled while something dry and unpleasant got caught in her throat. The corners of her lips fought the tremors laying siege to them, but eventually surrendered, and she finally mumbled, “I . . . I don’t understand.”

“Trust me,” Verity said, “no one does.”

Bob rang up the woman’s items before she could escape, and, head swimming, she clutched her packages and stumbled drunkenly, soused on too much information, toward the escalator.

Staving off Bob’s rash of prying questions, Verity said, “Don’t ask. She’s just one of Dad’s ravenous middle-aged girlfriends. According to sources”—Verity shuddered—“Fran’s the most amorous of the bunch.”

Bob watched Fran negotiate the escalator, her face still frozen in a palsied grimace. He said, “I’d rather have a lap dance from Trent Lott.”

Verity straightened up the magazines and Godiva chocolate bars littering the desk, muttering, “I don’t know. Maybe he is a kook.”

He said, “Honey, if my wife died, I’d carry her ashes around in an urn, too.”

She said, “Yes, but my mother—”

“I know, I know, she’s not dead. But all the same, it’s a kind of romantic notion your father has, if slightly twisted. Think you’ll be in trouble for outing the urn?”

Oh, she’d be in big trouble with Tex now, for sure. Nothing ensured his success with the ladies like the widower-with-ashes routine.