“Yeah, actually, I did know that. He usually wrote about white people, though.”
“It was the times,” she said. “He was better off passing for white, in his way. He could get his book read more widely, I guess. It’s better now, don’t you think?”
“How do you mean?”
“The world’s improved. Things have changed for the better, a little.”
“Maybe, a little.”
“It wasn’t all just talk.”
The crowd was moving faster now, toward our meal, and though I was following along like a good sheep, I wasn’t able to follow Ginnie’s line of thought.
“What are you getting at, Gin?”
“Just thinking about the sixties, those days. The things we marched for, and protested about; things really did change, we really did stop a war.”
“I suppose.”
We were jostled close together; her eyes looked wide and blue and empty and yet fathomless. Freckles or not, she looked suddenly old. I didn’t know she was the oldest person in the room, that she had a month to live, when she said, “I’m dreamin’, aren’t I? It really isn’t much better. We didn’t really accomplish much, did we?”
“We’re just another generation, Ginnie. Like most generations, we thought we were special.”
“And weren’t?”
“Maybe we were. Maybe we weren’t. But I know one thing we most certainly were.”
“Yeah? What?”
“Kids.”
They alternated serving plates of rare roast beef with well-done, giving you the opportunity to barter with your neighbor; we sat in the huge dining room, passing plates around, children in coats and ties and fancy dresses, exchanging food as if in the high school cafeteria. (“Trade you my dessert for your roll.”) Like all children, we weren’t content with what we were given; we had to change things to our liking.
“You know, we did change things,” I said to Ginnie, who was sitting beside me, with whom I’d swapped my well-done beef for her rare (she wasn’t eating the beef anyway, as she was strictly veggie).
“What?” she said, through a mouthful of lettuce. I’d given her my salad for her cherry cobbler. She was busy eating and had already forgotten our “heavy” conversation out in the herd.
“We changed the world,” I said, “but not to make things better for the common man. Just for ourselves.”
That got her going.
“What about Vietnam?” she said. “It wasn’t rich kids dying over there, you know.”
“No, it was some middle-class kids and lots of poor kids. White and black alike. Most males of the ‘love’ generation were at least threatened by that war, Ginnie. Guys my age were against the war because they were afraid of getting drafted. So they protested. A purely selfish move.”
Smiling with cute smugness, Ginnie pointed a lettuce-tipped fork at me, thinking she had me. “You protested after you went to Vietnam. After you got back. Was that a purely selfish move?”
“A partly selfish move. We were after better benefits from the V.A., as well as wanting to end the war. And, besides, I wasn’t a kid anymore.”
“So automatically you were unselfish, being an adult.”
“That’s a position I’d rather not try to defend,” I said, working on the lumpy mashed potatoes; the dark gravy was also lumpy. More cafeteria nostalgia.
She sighed. “You’re right. Why argue about it? We were as self-centered a generation as this self-centered country has ever known.”
“You obviously haven’t heard of MTV.”
With a gentle, short-lived laugh, she said, “This generation isn’t as smug as we were. They don’t think they know it all, like we did.”
“Unfortunately, they don’t seem to want to know it all, either. They don’t seem to want to know anything, much.”
“You’re sounding like an old man, Mal.”
“There’s a reason for that. Ginnie, tell me. Are you happy?”
She was working on her mashed potatoes now. She shrugged, forced a little smile. “I’m happy. Business is good — though I haven’t made my million yet.”
“What the hell,” I said.
“Goals were made to be ignored,” she said, shrugging yet again. You shrug a lot at class reunions; people ask you that sort of question.
“Or,” she said, “anyway, adjusted.”
“Is money still your main goal?”
Shrug.
“What about your personal life, Gin? How goes it?”
She told me she was married, but not living with her husband; she gave me no details, other than she had a little girl, four, named Malinda — Mal for short. And so on.
Upstairs, after the banquet, in the ballroom there was a dance. Crusin’, a popular local oldies band, began cranking ’em out: “Wooly Bully,” “Time Won’t Let Me,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” They had a good, big, authentic sound, but they were loud, and another sign of how old we were getting was that some of us complained. Not me. I just sat out in the bar and drank too many Pabsts and talked to everybody I hadn’t known very well in high school but who suddenly were back-slapping old pals. My whole crowd had stayed home — in their new homes; out-of-state success stories, they left me here alone to swap memories with a guy from study hall named Joey Something, who if I remember right said nary a word for two semesters, and now was the successful — and vocal — owner of three gas stations; half a dozen heavyset women who turned out to be “whatever happened to” half a dozen svelte attractive girls, former cheerleaders, prom queens and the like; half a dozen svelte attractive women who had once been wallflowers and, having bloomed late, were tasting the revenge of living well, and thinly; a great big fat guy who used to be a little bitty skinny guy, and grew after graduation, in various directions; several people who told me who they were, and summoned a mental picture of who they’d been, but I’ll be damned if I could spot who they used to be in the faces they wore now; a good number of people who hadn’t changed much, really, though potbellies were the plague of the males, all in all the women holding up better. It was an evening of cruel thoughts (“Thank God I didn’t end up with her — to think she turned me down for the prom!”), bittersweet regrets (“Why didn’t I date her — she liked me, and I shunned her, and now she’s beautiful!”), petty jealousy (“How could a jerk like him end up with a dish like her?”), pure jealousy (“He must be worth half a million by now — and I gave the son of a bitch his history answers!”), and genuine sorrow (“I wish John were alive and here...”).
Ginnie had split off from me as soon as we got upstairs, wanting to go in and dance; the blare of the music had sent me to this small table in the bar area, where friends came and went, and most of the evening I spent with Michael Lange, a guy I’d been in chorus with. He used to wear a suit to school and carry a briefcase; he’d left the briefcase home tonight, and brought a mustache, but otherwise looked the same — of course, he’d looked thirty-five in high school, so maybe we just caught up with him. He was into computers, but I liked him anyway, though I understood little of what he said; as the evening wore on, and Michael drank a few too many Dos Equis, he began understanding little of what he was saying himself. No matter. I wasn’t listening.
I was watching as Ginnie, over by the ladies restroom, was having a rather heated argument with an attractive woman whom I hadn’t placed. Ginnie was pointing a finger at the woman, and the woman was pointing a finger back; they weren’t shouting, but it was intense.
Their arguing had caught my attention, but it was the woman who maintained that attention. She was about five-six, had black punky hair and cute features and a sweet little shape; she was not wearing a prom gown, but a wide-shouldered designer number, Zebra stripes above, black skirt below, really striking. She had red lipstick so dark it was damn near black, and green glittery eyeshadow.