Then she goes outside and is surprised to see the sun is already setting. It’s an orange sunset today, fiery and rude, a light that makes her glow, brings out the more subtle hues in her new scarf.
KODACHROME
It is possible to anticipate something ferociously, then one day forget that it’s happening at all. Part of this is the passage to adulthood; birthdays fade in importance, holidays become something to be endured. I know there are grown-ups who still become excited about Christmas, although I find them suspect. Part of the reason I agreed with Gabe to raise Penelope and Justin as Jews is because I wanted to be done with Christmas. The tree, the stockings, the crash that happens in every household sometime between 11 A.M. and 4 P.M. on December twenty-fifth, when it’s all done and the first toy has broken and the kids are frayed from sugar and overstimulation.
Yet Christmas is back in our lives, with a vengeance. I made the mistake of having a holiday open house two years ago, in part to showcase what my father has done with the house, and it became a tradition, just that fast. Even this year, as I prepared to take office, I was still expected to put out platters of smoked salmon and cold turkey, make or procure cheese straws. Inevitably, I feel Gabe looking over my shoulder-not scolding, but disappointed that I would break a promise. However, I made the promise to a living man. His death invalidated all promises as far as I’m concerned. Heck, if I had been the one to abandon him by dying, he would have been married within the year, probably to some happy-to-stay-at-home little lady. His presence was especially strong at this year’s Christmas party, but perhaps that was because Bash, much to my annoyance, conned AJ into inviting him. Only Bash, no Lucinda. I’m not sure what he thought he was doing, but I was careful not to go anywhere alone in the house, not to drop my guard for a second.
Where was I? Oh, anticipation. Yes, it’s in adult life that we begin to lose track of things that once shaped our years, those little peaks of celebration-birthday, Christmas-and find ourselves living mostly in the valleys, and content to do so. This jadedness begins happening earlier than we might realize. In the fall of 1976, Life magazine had come to Wilde Lake High School and posed the then freshmen in the bleachers for what was to be a cover story about the Class of 1984, the year in which AJ and his friends would graduate from college. For weeks, they spoke about it constantly. Would the photo be big enough to show everyone? If so, would they be recognizable? And the accompanying article itself? Would they be interviewed, would they be identified as the best and the brightest? Why wasn’t the reporter more interested in them, so clearly the stars of the school?
Magazines worked exceedingly slowly then and by the time the article was published, almost everyone had forgotten it. When it showed up on newsstands in the fall of 1977, it was more like a hangover: bleary, vague, unpleasant.
The first disappointment was that my brother’s class was not on the cover. Instead, there was a girl in a sky-blue rugby shirt, caught midcheer under the heading: THE NEW YOUTH. Other words on the cover included TOUGH, CARING, WARY, PRACTICAL, and SUPERCOOL. Even at the time, I was not convinced that these things were particularly “new.” To be tough, caring, wary, practical, and supercool was to be an adolescent, then and always. But it was the fashion, then, to keep creating this narrative of innocence and a subsequent fall from grace. People were innocent before the JFK assassination, before Charles Manson, before Vietnam, before Altamont, before Watergate. It’s true, the concept of childhood is relatively modern, but I can’t imagine there was ever a time in which people were born anything but innocent. I don’t believe in innate evil. On the rare occasion that I’ve met a true sociopath, the person has been beyond evil. They want what they want and they don’t care how they get it. (This always makes me think of Pinkalicious, a book beloved by my twins: sociopaths get what they get and they do get upset.) Anyway, I hadn’t consciously worked this out when I saw the cover of Life magazine, but I think my letdown was more than disappointment that my brother wasn’t there. I was, as always, looking for guidance and gurus, information about this strange world that awaited me. Grown-ups were forever saying, “If you’re like this now, imagine when you’re a teenager.” Even my father said it. He and Teensy made my still far-off adolescence sound as if I were on the verge of becoming a werewolf. I was going to be wild, unpredictable, dangerous.
But also: Tough, Caring, Wary, Supercool, and Practical.
Okay, maybe not practical. But AJ was, as were his friends. Now in their sophomore year, they were doing practice runs for the PSAT, in hopes of scoring high enough in their junior year to win National Merit scholarships. They were beginning to game the college application process, ensuring they had a balance of extracurricular interests, visiting the guidance counselor and coming away with glossy brochures. Future generations would be more practical still. They would have to be. Whereas it was considered ambitious to set one’s sights on Stanford, as Davey had as a freshman, it verges on impossible dreaming now. Last year, Stanford admitted slightly more than 5 percent of applicants. Harvard was at 5.9 percent. Yale, AJ’s alma mater, was 6.26 percent. I used to tell myself that my twins, if they fancied Yale, at least had a sort of double legacy with their father and uncle. But maybe I shouldn’t count on that anymore.
At any rate-because AJ and his crew had serious plans for their future, they were dismayed when they read the actual article. A series of unattributed quotes grouped under headings-“Sex,” “Alcohol and Drugs,” “The Future,” “Clothes”-it coalesced into a portrait of aimless, disaffected youths. (“Pot is, like, everywhere.”) AJ was now appalled that he and his friends were so easily identified in the group photo that accompanied the article, front and center in the bleachers. For several days at dinner, he held forth about how the piece had been unfair and slanted. He worried that it could affect his chances at the college of his choice, or cost him the summer job he coveted, as an intern at the Columbia Flier. Finally, our father said to him: “Why not write a letter to the editor, making all these arguments? Or, better still, write your own piece, tell the truth as you see it.”
The gauntlet thrown, AJ did just that. He wrote an article for the Flier, in which he described his friends and their interests. He broke down their days, hour by hour, detailing the life of the overscheduled child long before such a concept was fashionable. (He conveniently left out the information that they did, in fact, smoke pot all the time.) The piece, which appeared under the headline THE CLASS OF ’84 HAS ITS SAY, argued that AJ and his friends were making their way in the world, as every generation had, and were entitled to their mistakes and missteps. “The influences that will shape us are unknown at this point,” AJ wrote. “We will probably never go to war-it’s unlikely there will ever be a war again that involves Western countries.” (Yes, people believed that in 1977.) “We will almost certainly enjoy a higher standard of living than our parents, and isn’t that what they want for us? But how will we get there? What is the path we will take? Most of us have learned life from the Game of Life, and the only thing we know for certain is that taking the shortcut that allows you to bypass college means you will have less earning power. But, according to the rules, anyone can end up on the Poor Farm with just one bad spin.”