The Last Time I Saw You

  “You know what, Einer?” she told him. “I had a very happy childhood.” And when he frowned, deepening his already deep wrinkles, she said, “I did!”

  Oh, it’s true that Mary Alice had had her moments, growing up; sometimes she sat outside Sarah Jane’s bedroom door listening to her gab on the phone and wondering if anyone would ever call her and inspire her to talk in that excited, girlfriendy way, full of gasps and exclamations; or in that low, seductive voice Sarah Jane used when she talked to boys.

  As it happened, no one did call her. “Well, why don’t you call someone?” her mother used to ask, and Mary Alice couldn’t explain why not. It was…It was that something had to happen before you called, and that something had simply never happened to Mary Alice. So she learned—and came to like, really—a certain self-reliance. The world engaged and excited her; she looked forward to each day despite the injustices she endured in high school. She had been lucky to have a friend in her ninth-grade English teacher, a gay man, she realizes now, who’d told her that high school was good for getting a ticket into college, and that was all. Unless you counted the macaroni and cheese this school’s cafeteria served twice a month. That was good, too. Otherwise, put everything in perspective, he’d told her. Life is long; you’ll be fine, he’d said, and she was.

  Mary Alice now works at a day-care center, in the toddler room. Her specialty is kids who bite—she somehow gets them not to. If a child bites someone, she takes them into the corner and talks to them in a very quiet voice and they almost never bite again. The other workers call her the Toddler Whisperer.

  She has a way with children in general, she’s discovered; she, more than anyone else at the center, can make them laugh, and there is no tonic like the sound of children laughing. No pleasure quite so pure. She doesn’t make much money, but she’s happy surrounded by children and glue and blunt-nosed scissors and fat crayons and Play-Doh. She likes the stuffed animals, the colorful balls, the blocks. In the reading corner are an oversize rocking chair and kids’ books galore—the illustrations are marvelous, and the stories more intriguing than one might suspect. She likes watching children press their small hands against the sides of the day care’s gigantic aquarium and talk earnestly to the fish; and she likes watching them play in the housekeeping corner, roughly dressing and undressing dolls and adorning themselves with costume jewelry and making dinners of plastic peas and pork chops. And if you smack your lips and tell them you like their cooking, oh, how pleased they are!

  She is heartened by the way the children care for one another: the bending down of one toddler to stare solicitously into the face of another, the outright expessions of concern: Do you feel sad? Are you going to cry? Do you want a hug? She likes the art projects, the finger paintings and Popsicle stick sculptures, the Mother’s and Father’s Day cards so loaded with glue and glitter they flop over in the hand. She likes when the children use cotton balls to make Santa’s beard and it looks instead like an odd kind of acne—invariably, the children are as sparing with cotton balls as they are generous with glitter.

  She likes taking children for a walk on any kind of day: even a dreary, rainy day offers distinct pleasures, if only in displaying rainbows in oily puddles. She never would have considered working in day care if she hadn’t been let go from her job in Cincinnati; now she’s glad she did get fired. She has learned from the inside out the meaning of small pleasures, and she keeps her needs small, too.

  Mary Alice used to long for a husband; she used to date a little bit and dream, dream a little bit and date; she had a list of names she would have bestowed upon her children, had she been lucky enough to have them, and had her husband agreed with her choices. Moselle had been her favorite for a girl, after the river. For a boy, she had liked Amos best; she thought it was an awfully friendly name. But the longing for a family of her own has stopped. In the gentlest and most good-natured of ways, she has given up on the prospect of being married or even living with a man. She did get one proposal, on her thirty-ninth birthday, but it was from a widower with four children under six. She felt bad for him, but they didn’t love each other, not by a long shot. In fact, the night he proposed, they were at the Wagon Wheel Steakhouse, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off their waitress, a buxom blonde with a sexy cigarette voice who had no interest in him other than knowing what kind of salad dressing he preferred.

  Mary Alice has a body pillow named David. Her sister, Sarah Jane, gave it to her for Christmas many years ago as a kind of jokey imperative, but now she says she’s jealous of Mary Alice for getting to sleep with a body pillow rather than a real live man like her husband, who is guilty of every bed-partner crime known to man. Forever encroaching on her side. Farting. Drooling on the lacy pillowcases. Snoring so loudly Sarah Jane can sometimes hear him from the guest room, where she retreats at least two nights a week so that she can get some rest. She says her husband has violent dreams that sometimes have him kicking her. And eating crackers in bed, he actually does that. He eats crackers with cheese and red onion and horseradish mustard.

  Last Sunday afternoon, Sarah Jane had driven the thirty miles from her house in Dayton to visit Mary Alice. While Mary Alice claimed her old place on the top porch step, Sarah Jane sat gently rocking herself on the porch swing, embroidering a face on David, giving him eyelashes to die for. She also brought over some lovely plaid pajamas she’d made for him. She included long sleeves that had been filled with cotton batting, in case Mary Alice wanted the feel of “arms” around her. Mary Alice mostly uses David to back up against and has no use for arms at all, but she didn’t tell her sister that. She told her it was a very good idea.

  Mary Alice wonders sometimes if Sarah Jane doesn’t waste far too much time worrying about her; it makes Mary Alice worry about Sarah Jane. “You don’t need to keep coming up with things for me,” she wants to tell her sister. “You don’t have to bore your husband at the dinner table with your concerns about your old maid sister.” But in the way of most families, Mary Alice only accepts with gratitude the inappropriate gifts Sarah Jane gives her, aware of the fact that she undoubtedly gives Sarah Jane things her sister would happily do without.

  While Sarah Jane sat working on David’s face, Mary Alice told her about receiving the invitation to the high school reunion. Her sister stopped rocking, stopped sewing. “God help us,” she said.

  Mary Alice knew her sister had not enjoyed her own experience at their high school. Sarah Jane was five years older than Mary Alice, so they’d not been at that school at the same time, but they’d had many of the same teachers and knew many of the same people. Sarah Jane had been more popular than Mary Alice—she’d been blessed with better looks, and she knew better than Mary Alice how to behave in various situations. But to say she had been more popular than her sister was not to say she’d been popular per se. She’d been accepted, but she’d not been in. Sarah Jane was the kind of girl who was allowed to sit at the popular kids’ table because she would go and get more catsup for them or take individual blame for what was a group infraction. She would spend hours decorating the gym for dances where the elite were honored and from which she was often excluded, for lack of a date.

  When she was in high school, Mary Alice had occasionally confided in Sarah Jane about the kind of treatment she endured—the way she was mostly ignored except when she was teased. Once, on Valentine’s Day, she’d found fake dog shit put into a candy box and left in her locker. Mary Alice had thought that was kind of funny. It was actually almost flattering, because it was the kind of weird thing some of the popular kids did to each other. She didn’t tell Sarah Jane that, though. It used to make Sarah Jane crazy that Mary Alice was so unperturbed about the way kids treated her. Sarah Jane tried to help Mary Alice by offering makeovers or trips to the mall to enliven her wardrobe, but it was no use. Mary Alice made a fair amount of money delivering newspapers, but she would never use any of it on clothes or makeup. At first, she spent it on supplies for her microscope: slide covers and p
robes and fixatives—Mary Alice had from the age of nine been a card-carrying member of the Junior Scientists of America Club. By the time she was in high school, she spent all her money on record albums and on paperback books—she couldn’t get enough of either. Why moon about not being invited to a party when you could listen to Bob Dylan? What date could compete with Nine Stories? She held out hope that, when she got to college, she’d be appreciated, and in some respects, she was right: she was appreciated when she was in college. She wasn’t popular, but she was appreciated.

  “So are you going?” Sarah Jane asked. She kept her voice light, but Mary Alice figured her sister’s blood was boiling.

  “I thought I might.”

  There was a thick silence until Mary Alice finally sighed and said, “What.”

  Sarah Jane looked up. “What? I didn’t say anything!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, Mary Alice, I mean… What can you possibly gain?”

  “I don’t know. These are people I used to know, so long ago! I’m curious to see how they turned out.”

  “I can tell you how they turned out. They were assholes then, and they’ll be assholes now.”

  “Oh come on. People grow up.”

  Sarah Jane sniffed. “Some people do.” She stabbed at the fabric with her needle. Then she gasped and looked wide-eyed at Mary Alice. “You aren’t going there to see some secret crush, are you?”

  “No,” Mary Alice said. “Not at all. No.”

  “Oh, my God. You are, too! You’re going to see Pete Decker, aren’t you? That guy whose pictures from the newspaper you had up on your bedroom wall. Pete Decker, right? The football player, the prom king, president of the student council.”

  “Vice president,” Mary Alice said. “Tom Gunderson was president.”

  “Mary Alice, listen to me, for once in your life. Believe me when I tell you: It is not a good idea to go to this thing. Everybody thinks things will be different at a reunion, but they’re not: everybody just gets right back into their old roles from high school. It’s awful. Those people won’t want to see you now any more than they did then. They won’t give you a second chance, believe me.”

  “You went to your fifth- and tenth-year reunions,” Mary Alice said, and Sarah Jane said, a little too loudly, “Right! So I know what it’s like! I was an idiot to go twice. A masochist! I should have brought Richard, because all I did both times—both times!—was sit at a table and eat maraschino cherries from watered-down drinks. I’ll probably get cancer from all the red dye I consumed at those reunions.”

  Mary Alice spoke gently. “It’s the fortieth reunion, Sarah Jane. And it’s the last. It will be my only chance to ever go to a high school reunion. However imperfect it might have been, that time in high school is part of my life. I want to go and somehow revisit it. And I think it will be different.”

  Sarah Jane waved her arm. “Fine. Go, then. I’m just thinking of you. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

  “Oh, they never hurt me.”

  Sarah Jane stared at her until finally Mary Alice said, “Look. I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’ll be fine.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  Mary Alice laughed. “No, that’s okay.”

  “Well, are you bringing Marion at least? You’ll need an ally, Mary Alice. You’ll need someone from your life now who really cares about you. You’ll need someone who can defend you if… something happens.”

  Marion, a tall, pleasant-looking Polish man, is the owner of a construction company the next town over. He likes Mary Alice a lot, and occasionally they go out to eat or to a movie. But Marion doesn’t speak much English. They mostly communicate with smiles and gestures, which actually suits Mary Alice fine. It seems graceful and kind, the way they talk. It seems of the essence, somehow. But she told her sister, “No. I’m going alone.” Even as she said this, though, a little doubt crept in and she began to wonder. Was it so bad to go alone? Should someone go with her, just in case? But just in case what? What could possibly happen that would be so harmful?

  Her sister is set on not believing it, but Mary Alice feels both secure and happy. She thinks she was born content, and she’s grateful for that. She’s not an insensitive person, but she has learned not to let hurt take up residence inside her. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but she learned long ago that she doesn’t have to buy into what someone else says or thinks about her.

  So yes, she is going to the reunion. She has narrowed her choices for what to wear down to two outfits: either a charcoal gray suit with a silvery blue blouse, a pearl necklace, and matching stud earrings, or a long black skirt with silver stars on it—she bought that skirt at a recycled clothing shop on a day she was feeling a little wild. It would be worn with a three-quarter-sleeved black V-necked top, the top quite low. Mary Alice hunched over to hide her breasts in high school, but now she does not hide them because they are beautiful—she blushes every time she thinks of Marion telling her that one night when they were making out in his construction truck. Just a little, they were making out. Each seemed afraid of going very far physically, though not afraid afraid. It was more like a don’t-let’s-break-this-thing-that’s-not-broken fear. But that night Marion had kissed her breasts so sweetly and then looked up at her and sighed. He’d sat up and made a cupped-hand, up-and-down motion and said, “Beautiful. Still on high.” When she got home, she’d stood naked before her bathroom mirror and thought, He’s right. And she’d experienced a small rush of surprise, of delight, as if she’d walked into her bedroom and found a gift on her pillow.

  “Well… thank you,” she’d told Marion. What does one say in a situation like that? Mary Alice had never understood combining talking with sex. Do whatever you’re doing and then talk, is what she thinks. Otherwise, it’s like trying to listen to two conversations at once. In college, she once watched a porn movie with a couple of her dorm mates. One scene showed a woman lying beneath a man saying, “Oh, do it to me, do it to me, fuck me hard,” and Mary Alice had no idea why the man didn’t rear up and say, “I am!”

  Mary Alice stares out Einer’s bedroom window and decides that she’ll wear the low-cut top and the starry skirt, and she thinks with it she’ll wear big silver hoop earrings and many silver bangle bracelets. But then she worries how her glasses will look with that. Oh, enough! She’ll decide what to wear on the night she’s getting ready for the reunion: an answer will come to her.

  Einer has taken one more bite than she asked him to, and she rewards him with a kiss on the top of his head. Then she helps him out onto the porch and begins to read the newspaper’s front-page stories to him—he can no longer see to read. She’s barely gotten through a paragraph when he starts in: “Oh, what the hell is Congress doing? In my day, a man had a thing between his ears called a brain, and guess what? He used it!” He’ll settle down by the time she gets to the advice columns. They like to talk about what advice they’d give before Mary Alice reads the answers the columnist actually wrote.

  Today, when she gets to the advice columns, she makes up a question. She keeps her eyes on the newspaper, as though she is reading, and says, “I am a middle-aged woman who has been invited to a high school reunion. I was not very popular in school and was often picked on. Should I expect that I might have a good time anyway?” She lets the question hang in the air, then says, “Hmmm. What do you think?”

  Einer scrunches forward. “Don’t you even think about going. Don’t give those bastards the pleasure of your company.”

  “That’s what you’d tell her?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  She looks away, and he says, “Everything’s shot but my mind. You of all people ought to know that. Don’t forget my wife taught music at that high school. She knew what went on. She used to tell me about how those kids treated you and your sister. So, they’re having a reunion, are they? Coming back to the old hometown they couldn’t wait to get away from. You’re not going
, are you?”

  “Well, yes. I am.”

  He grunts, adjusts himself in his chair. Then he leans forward and says, “I’m going with you, then,” and she laughs, though a part of her thinks, Well, why not? This could be exactly what she needs: an ally who won’t get in the way of anything.

  “When we’re there, if anyone says one snide thing to you, you help me out of my chair and I’ll give them what for.”

  “Okay, Einer.”

  “I’m serious about this. You think I’m kidding? I’m serious! Where is it, anyway? At the school?”

  “No, it’s at the Westmore Hotel, out on Thirty-three.”

  “That’s not but ten, fifteen minutes away. Short drive.”

  “Right.”

  “When is it?”

  “Next weekend.”

  “Well, if I’m still here, I’m going.”

  “You’ll be here,” she says, though she’s aware that he might not be, actually.

  He sits back in his chair. “Punks,” he mutters.

  “Some of them were nice,” Mary Alice says. “A lot of them were.”

  “Yeah. We’ll sit at their table. All two of them.”

  Rita, Einer’s caregiver, pulls up to the curb, and Mary Alice goes to help her carry in groceries.

  “You will not believe what happened at the grocery store,” Rita says. “I met the nicest man, over by the lettuce; he was all confused about what kind to buy. I helped him out and then we just got to talking, you know? When I said I had to go, he asked for my number, and I gave it to him. Oh, I hope he calls. I hope he does! Do you know how long it’s been since I went out with a man?”

  Mary Alice doesn’t answer, thinking the question is rhetorical, but then when Rita says, “Do you?” Mary Alice dutifully responds, “No. How long has it been?”