I wore black silk pants and a lacy blouse. I got a few compliments. When people compliment you now, they don’t say you look good, they say you look good for your age.
It was BYOB and I hadn’t brought a bottle, so I drank cranberry juice and soda all night because setups were free. Nobody but the bartender and Shelia knew the difference. Nobody ever does. People who are getting drunk always assume you are, too.
Shelia showed me pictures of her girls. She and Danny have twins, Mavis and Alice. I love the names — imperfect rhyme for non-identical twins.
I showed Shelia pictures of my store.
“I’d be a terrible parent,” Addie tells Shelia. “I worry too much.”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Shelia says. “We’re all terrible parents.”
I don’t know who started the rumor, but people were saying you were coming, you were there. I kept looking around for you, wondering if I would recognize you. Have you changed much? I imagined you showing up late. You’d have just gotten into town; you’d be starving. You would ask me to come with you to the buffet. A Comfort Sweet lady in a brown uniform would be refilling the artichoke dip, stirring white sludge into white sludge. You’d say, too loud, “Are we supposed to make a meal on this stuff?” We would heap our plates with cheese cubes and meatballs and find a place to sit. We would try to talk but the music would drown us out. You would eat all the meatballs. You’d feed me cheese cubes on a toothpick. Finally the DJ would take a break and the blare would die down and I would work up the nerve to tell you what I’d come to the reunion to tell you, what I’m writing now to tell you. You’d stop eating. Your face would go blank. I wouldn’t know what you were thinking.
The music would start up again, a slow song. We would dance to keep from talking. And people would see us dancing and say to each other, “Roland and Addie, at last,” not knowing we’d already had our at-last.
But you didn’t come. Why not?
So there I was, full of my news and no one to tell it to. Stranded with people like Little Bit, still so tiny I could pick her up. Even in stacked heels she could barely reach the bar to check her tiny pint of rum. She asked me all the usual questions (did she have a checklist in her tiny purse?) — marriage, family, why hadn’t I come back for the last reunion or the one before that? “J.C. and I would never miss one,” she said, meaning J.C. Green, her husband, who was on the dance floor shaking his ass and doing the arm motions to “YMCA.”
Danny and Addie and Shelia all dance together to “Build Me Up, Buttercup.” “What I want to know,” Danny says, “is why this class can’t hire a DJ who doesn’t suck.”
Remember Roy, our class president? Roy G. Bivens, like the spectrum? After he got good and drunk, he borrowed the DJ’s microphone and gave a speech. Good old Roy, so goofy and proud. “Aren’t we a good-looking bunch?” he said, though surely our class hasn’t lived up to his expectations. No doctors or politicians or astronauts or actors. One athlete, but he died. One lawyer, but he was disbarred. We’re a class of booksellers, set-builders, medical assistants, mechanics, mill workers, heating and air conditioning crack-asses. We have an average of two point five children. Half of us either stayed in Carswell or moved back after college. Most who left didn’t go far.
Still, when Roy smiles his class-president smile and says he’s glad we came, we can’t help but feel okay. Special, even, for having bothered to get dressed up and come out to see each other.
There’s something I need to tell you. I should have told you a long time ago. I’d hoped to tell you in person at the reunion.
The child, your child, the one you thought I wasn’t going to have? I had him. Ten years ago in September. I don’t know where he is now, but I’m told he’s with good parents. Better, I’m sure, than we could have been. I’ve thought of looking for him, but everyone says it’s too soon. I have never been known for my timing.
Sorry for the long letter. Call me and I’ll tell you everything.
Love, Addie
At midnight the DJ summons everyone to the dance floor, and people line up and put their hands on each other’s backs to form a love train, love train. Addie stands behind Shelia and latches on and they go chugging around the room. And maybe it’s the song, or all the cranberry fizzes, or sheer relief at having made it through the reunion without having to confront Roland, but Addie doesn’t want to let go. She doesn’t want the train to stop moving.
Claree, Knitting
Claree knits to keep her fingers limber. On the backs of her hands are thousands of tiny creases; she doesn’t know when they happened. The hands of an old woman. At least she doesn’t have liver spots like some of her friends.
Her friends are all grandmothers now. They’re always telling stories about their grandchildren, at church, at Biscuit King, in the grocery store. They act like the only reason to have children is to have grandchildren. They open their pocketbooks and take out pictures. Claree smiles and pretends to be happy for them. They mean no harm.
Sam’s Margaret isn’t able to have children. Neither is Addie, but for different reasons: no husband, and now, she says, too old. “Some single women adopt,” Claree has pointed out more than once.
Knit four, yarn over, purl two.
She has always been careful with her hands, putting on lotion after washing dishes, keeping her nails trimmed and filed in perfect crescents, keeping the cuticles pushed back. If you’re careful with things they’re supposed to last longer. But she is only sixty-two and her hands hurt, so much sometimes that she’s afraid to use them, afraid of the mess she’ll make. She rubs ointment on them — a friend told her about a brand that doesn’t smell like Bengay. She massages them. Wears gloves to bed at night. During the day, she knits.
Slip two, yarn over, knit two together, purl one.
No grandchildren. How can she not in her deepest-down heart take that as a judgment?
She is working with a fluffy pink yarn Addie sent, starting a complicated lace pattern. Addie says the yarn was made by a woman in Chatham County who raises her own sheep. Always the romantic, Addie.
Sometimes Claree thinks about the child she lost. This was four years after Sam. She and Bryce hadn’t planned another child and couldn’t afford one, so at the time she’d told herself it was just as well. A girl, she was sure, another daughter. One who would have grown up to be clever and good like her other children, but quieter, more content, more like Claree. One who would have stayed close to home, married a local boy, had a child. A grandson for Bryce.
What does the Bible say? Thou shalt not feel sorry for thyself.
Repeat row five.
Even though thou must live the rest of thy days alone.
When Bryce died, she thought at first she should keep the house exactly as it had been, his chair and ottoman in the middle of the living room, the TV under the picture window. Then she realized it didn’t matter — no one was around to notice if she changed things. The TV went first. She moved it to the den, then got rid of it altogether. Now she listens to the radio. She keeps it tuned to WCSL. The announcers can be irritating but they’re company. She likes the call-in shows best, Talk of the Town, The Birthday Club. She always calls in for Addie and Sam on their birthdays, to hear their names read on the air. Last year Addie’s name was picked in the drawing, a steak dinner for two at John Wayne’s. But Addie was on one of her vegetarian diets, so she told Claree, “You use the coupon. Take a friend.”