All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [16]
Over the past decade, though, much of the news they’ve sent in has been announcing their marriages, and then, en suite, their children. I probably report these domestic events with less enthusiasm than other class secretaries do. Even in this unconventional group, it seems like a failure to have not been able to be both creatively successful and effortlessly accomplish the conventional spouse and kids.
I suppose if I’d wanted to have a lifetime partner, someone I could rely on, I should have looked around more carefully when I was in college; by far the highest-quality pool of men I’ve ever splashed around with were the ones I met in Middletown. Plus, it seems that meeting someone early on, practically growing up together, is the secret to a lasting relationship: after fifty-five years, my parents still laugh at each other’s jokes. Kristin, a dear friend since we were ten, is happy with the guy she met working in a pizzeria during college. My oldest sister, Cindy, met her husband, Brad, when they were fourteen; after thirty years, they hug each other with tears in their eyes if they’ve been apart for more than three days. Those couples are like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, with a lot more in common in the middle than on the sides. They’re hard acts to follow.
Not that I should’ve married one of those glorious Wesleyan guys right after graduation—I had too much of the world to experience, not to mention too many interesting men to meet. But at the time, I was more intent on competing with the men I found interesting than eventually marrying one of them, which may have been an unfortunate ripple effect of seventies-era feminism, or just bad timing.
Someone waves at me; I recognize the couple, and greet and hug them. One of the advantages of being class secretary, twenty years later, is that everyone knows you. You’re retroactively popular.
They tell me I look good and heard I had a book out, so at least I’m passing in this crowd, not obviously someone who is still living in the same apartment she rented in the hippie Haight Ashbury a year after she graduated, someone who could barely buy the plane ticket to the reunion, much less make a sizable contribution to the alumni fund. (Despite all my women’s studies classes, I never paid much attention to making real money, always assuming I’d marry someone who’d bring home the bacon while I’d write witty essays about why I stopped being a vegetarian.) I’m staying in a dorm room, not a hotel, which seems to concretize—to use a very Wesleyan word—the fact that I haven’t quite made it into successful adulthood. But perhaps because I’ve recorded all my classmates’ accomplishments, I’m more keenly aware of them. Maybe everyone feels like I do when reading the class notes, the way you feel fat and frumpy after browsing through a copy of Vogue.
The undercurrent of insecurity persists at the cocktail hour, as I casually listen to what my classmates are up to—where they live and where they summer, where they send their kids to school. Part of me realizes, as I eventually realized twenty years ago, that much of that cool confidence is an illusion. When I finally have a few real conversations with my classmates, it becomes clear that several of them have lives that are as messy and uncertain as mine—a divorced social worker with two kids, an environmentalist struggling to make a business out of his ideals, an artist who hates selling real estate to get by, a heartsick dad whose wife just left him and took along the kids they adopted.
The ones who seem the most successful at second glance are the ones who seem to have figured out, with some equanimity, that midlife is never all you expected it would be, especially when your college years were so bright, but getting older brings a few satisfactions of its own. Instead of comforting me, this just adds to the list of things I’ve failed at: marriage, having children, making money, and