Ann Landi

Fiction

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“So anyway, if we have the thing on a Friday, Nancy Lipkin won’t come because she’s still Orthodox, but Michelle will be able to make it because she’s free on Friday but busy with the fam on Saturday,” Wendy Greenwood was saying.

I reached over to the nightstand for my second bloody. It wasn’t yet noon. Still trying to place Wendy from more than two decades ago, vaguely remembering an email from maybe a month earlier. In fact, at that moment, I was not sure about any of these people.

“Did you look at the reunions page on Facebook yet?” 

“No, I, um. Busy. But Friday’s fine.” Details came tumbling back like the ice cubes clicking in my glass. Wendy put on her eye makeup in the girls’ room, one eye at a time. Liner, bright blue shadow, mascara on one, then over to the other, done in three minutes. She’d had an asymmetric cut, chin-length brown hair that swung across one cheek like a scythe. Michelle, the only one of those three I liked, was always dieting, every damn diet you could think of; she’d gone to Vassar, after early admission, and was scared witless, afraid she wasn’t smart enough. Nancy was a pill. She faked sick days to study for exams and wore pale pink lipstick, one shade lighter than Pepto Bismol.

As if in response, my stomach made a gentle burbling sound. I gnawed at the ends of the celery stick. It was heartening to know I was still observing the amenities, adding celery, horseradish, and an olive to the second bloody. Greens and fiber. Good for me!

“Since you’re still in the city, and you mentioned a place in Chelsea, I’m hoping you’ll scout it out,” said Wendy.

 “Alix, are you still with me?” Same voice, perhaps a half-register lower, slightly sultry and nasal. She’d been caught in the stairwell, making out with Morgan Ryan, and both were suspended for a day or a week, I couldn’t remember exactly. It was a very strict school, gray and green uniforms, intense SAT drills, and four years of Latin or French. Madame Guibert yelling at us to pull our compact mirrors from our purses: “Just look at your lazy American mouths! Les bouches! Make zem work!”

“Yes, of course,” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up straight. My knees looked white and alien, like large pale mushroom caps. The cat slid between my calves, mewling. We called him “Hey Cat.” Had I fed him that morning? “I’ll head over there in a day or two and see if they have the private dining room available. And if it’s big enough.”

“You’re the best, Alix. You always were.”

“It’s going to be a little steep per person,” I was adding, but the abrupt beep on my cell told me she was gone.

More came to light after I took a groggy sweat-soaked nap and checked out the FB page. The twenty-fifth reunion of graduates of the Slade-Barnes Academy was next month. Seventeen out of a graduating class of thirty-three had so far responded in the affirmative. Ages ago, around the holidays, before Jeff moved out, I’d shown some small interest in helping pull it all together. Wendy, the former class president, bossy and mean, was in charge. 

*

The Blank Slate was on 23^rd and Eighth Avenue, down a few steps between a pair of potted ficus trees, which always seemed to be incredibly healthy whereas the ones we had lugged up two flights to our brownstone apartment in Brooklyn died within weeks. Or perhaps the restaurant replaced them at frequent intervals. I checked to see if they were plastic or fabric. They were real.  A sleek zinc bar led to a rather old-style dining room with white tablecloths and antique farm tools on the walls. It wasn’t the hippest place in the neighborhood, but it was cheery and comfortable, overlooking a small narrow garden in the back. I remembered the private dining room, certainly big enough to hold thirty or more, which was about the number Jeff and I had entertained at our rehearsal dinner.

Of all the restaurants in Manhattan. What the fuck was I thinking?

A girl in a black pencil skirt and a sleeveless white blouse led me to the private room, and flicked on the lights, throwing soft beams onto five round tables. It was big enough for forty, she told me, offering paper menus and a sheet detailing the waiver and deposits and so on and so forth. 

“Um, I think we’re going to need a lectern,” I said. 

We’d had a violin-and-oboe duet in the corner, my mother’s idea, and my parents were paying. So Jeff couldn’t really object. His pale, widowed mom was so sad, and so broke, but she did supply flowers, beautiful showy bouquets of lilacs and irises, from her garden in New Jersey. In those days we all got on, swimmingly.

“We can get one of those,” she said, nodding, and made a note on her clipboard.

I checked my watch. Quarter past noon. “I’ll have a glass of wine at the bar and look these over.” I squinted at the top menu as if it were a legal document, notice of filing for divorce perhaps.

“Don’t I know you?” she asked with a lift of precise black eyebrows.

“Yes, I came here occasionally for lunch.” With a writer now and then, before the magazine folded. The girl would still have been in grade school when we’d had our rehearsal dinner. Time wasn’t flying, it was disappearing in huge, unwieldy chunks.

*

In the end, there were thirty-four at the reunion, including spouses, on a warm and humid June evening, and a battering ram of noise slammed me when I entered the room; I’d forgotten the bad acoustics. It took a moment to adjust, for my eyes to flick like a secret-service agent’s from one body and face to another, to make sense of the early middle-aged crowd with whom I’d spent four years a lifetime ago. In a corner was a large, framed portrait of the dead girl, Amy Ingalls, who was never really a friend, but I’d read about the car crash in one of the infrequent alumni bulletins. Now smiling for eternity in a red velvet headband and huge hoop earrings. So much optimism, so little style. I sucked on my lower lip: Keep it in check, Alix. Don’t be mean.

Most obvious was Susan Fleischman, at six feet-plus in heels, my best friend in high school, star of our lackluster gym program, the gym itself located a mile away from the school on upper Broadway. We lost touch somewhere around junior year in college, never to pick up the thread, even for weddings or babies. We had once long, long ago promised to write when we each lost our virginity, but by then, eight months into freshman year, I was much too wrapped up in my very first hot-and-heavy real romance to care much about what was new in Susan’s world. No animus between us, only fond memories. Fridays, when school ended at 1 p.m., we had lunch at her apartment, where her mother’s housekeeper gave us Camel Lights and told us everything she knew about men, which was a lot. Slouching against the counter (she would never sit with us), Inez was beautiful and fierce.

Susan gave me a hug, then pulled away for a look. Her grip on my upper arms could leave bruises. She was resplendent in a glittery tailored pantsuit. That and the gold earrings, the manicured nails, and a big band of stones on her left hand screamed Scarsdale or Cherry Hill. 

“Just look at you,” she said. “My God, you turned out well. Love the cut!”

I was too dazed to return the compliment. She was the kind of woman we used to see at Loehmann’s, when we went with our moms, who were fleetingly friends. She was her mother. Not an uncommon evolution but nonetheless unsettling when encountered in the flesh.

I could feel the goofy smile curdling on my face, but was saved the pain of reciprocity when I looked over her shoulder. “Is that….?”

She followed my gaze to the woman in the wheelchair.

“Yeah, Anne. Horrible, huh?”

Anne Silver, the matzoh heiress, had held her sweet sixteen at her family’s fourteen-room apartment in the San Remo. Except for the den, the main rooms had been cordoned off with velvet ropes, at least the night of the party. She’d proudly had a nose job junior year.

“What happened?”

“I don’t really know. Something to do with a spinal injury. We weren’t that close.…”

“And you?” I asked.

She smiled, same horsy white teeth, possibly even whiter. “I am so happy. I’ve never been this happy in my whole life” She gave me a little shove. “You’ll hear more later. Go, go see Anne.”

I really didn’t want to go see Anne, who anyway had a gaggle around her and was nodding her head solemnly. I never even liked Anne, but certainly I didn’t wish a wheelchair on anyone. In my peripheral vision, smartphones glowed with photos held up for inspection and laughter. “Oh, how cute!” echoed a hundred times. I had a photo of Hey Cat as my wallpaper, almost no saved photos, the power off.

I plucked another glass of white wine from a passing tray. One thing I had discovered as an alcoholic-in-training: a couple of drinks—okay, a few drinks—didn’t dull but rather sharpened recent memories: Jeff’s sorrowful narrow face as he announced he’d met someone, the way his lower lip drooped like a dog’s. He was a dog. “What do you mean, met someone?” as if we’d only been casually dating instead of married for thirteen years. My own fury, a bud vase flung just a foot from his head, the careful split-second calculation between what to throw—the bud vase or a genuine Dansk globe, both on the bookcase in the bedroom. We were aspiring to Mid-Century Modern. We had good things, expensive things, things that would have to be divvied up and carted off. We’d lost a baby at five months six years ago, not quite a baby, but a small humanoid, female, pinkish brick in color. I wish he’d told the doctors we didn’t want to see her.  

My Jeffer. Asshole! He was trashing more than a third of my life, if you counted two years of living together.

And then I spotted Pearly Chen, a scholarship student, with what had to be her husband; they were a matched set of gleaming blue-black hair and wide faces, almost the same height. I remembered how she smelled of the egg-and-scallion sandwiches her mother made her for lunch (they were too poor even to afford cafeteria lunches), and now she was….exquisite! Porcelain skin, pouty red mouth, a little hint of cleavage between the lapels of her black velvet jacket.

“This is my husband, Jim.” She pushed against him.

“That’s wonderful! What do you do, where are you?”

“We’re both pediatricians,” she said. “We live in Queens. Two kids.” She already had her phone in hand and quickly scrolled to gap-toothed boy twins, maybe nine or ten.

“Adorable!”

“And you?” She leaned forward earnestly. “You were going to be a writer, right?”

“Yeah, well, sort of. Still working on that.”

“Married?”

“Yes. An assho—associate professor, gender studies, NYU.”

Who ran off with a graduate student. How fucking tired is that for a plot line?

“Excuse me,” I said. “I really should say hello to Sally.”

Sally had done the best she could with a build like a fireplug on steroids and wild frizzy hair. Her moustache was gone, and she looked Lower East Side cool in red satin coveralls and a matching baseball cap with rhinestones on the brim. No surprise that she now seemed out, and clearly even she, the one we called the “Mutant,” had a partner: a pale slip of gossamer girlhood, easily twenty years younger. Sally gently swung her lover’s hand back and forth between them. “Shultzie! You came!”

“Frankenfreak! You came out!”

She moved as if to punch my arm, then suddenly withdrew the fist. “So what are you doing now? You were the really smart one, smarter even than Liver Lips Lipkin. You could have done anything you wanted with your life….”

“I wouldn’t say they were exactly liver-colored, as I recall….”

But any further debate ended as Wendy Greenwood took to the lectern, leaning into the mike. “Can everybody hear me? Okay, okay. We need to take our seats now so that we have time to eat and then time for the summing-up.” Still so bossy. I knew from Facebook that she was principal at a school in Westchester. That part fit.

I looked again at the paper in my pocket. I was at Table 4, next to the lectern, and no sooner had I found my place card than I noticed that Kenny Chang would be at the seat next to me. Kenny Chang! This had to be Greenwood’s doing. Her idea of a joke. Kenny Chang had grabbed my yearbook at the graduation party and slunk off to a corner of the assembly room. When I looked later, he’d scribbled with a Sharpie pen inside the entire back cover, a long fatuous love letter about how he’d pined for me for years and never dared approach. He ruined my yearbook. Memory pinged. Greenwood knew because she was chair of the yearbook committee and I’d asked later, nearly crying with rage and shame, if there was any way I could get a new back cover, or maybe have it rebound. I didn’t want a new yearbook, because so many had already signed their best wishes. She glanced at the tender missive and then said, “Get a grip. Just paste something over it.”

I was calculating how to maneuver around the people taking their seats and change the card for one at a chair opposite when Kenny himself came rushing toward me. Kenny!? Easily six feet now—one of those boys who got a late growth spurt, I surmised—and totally sharp in a crisp dark blue blazer and white tee. The acne had left no scars on his smoothly shaven face, and he wore a diamond stud in one ear.

“Alix!” A bear hug, a whiff of something woodsy. “How are you, how are you!” He pulled out my chair, and my lower anatomy moved smoothly, as if on oiled gears.

“I didn’t recognize you,” I said lamely. “I thought you were someone’s husband.”

“Yes.” He laughed. “I was for about ten minutes fifteen years ago. Nothing since. Way, way too busy with work, which means a lot of travel for my company. What about you?”

“Yes. Well. Sort of.”

“Sort of?” How had I never noticed his blue eyes?

“Divorcing. Early stages. Somewhat like cancer. There might still be hope.” There was no hope, but I forced a wobbly smile. 

“Oh, sorry. Tough time, a rough passage. I remember.”

“And what are you doing these days?” I pointed to the bottle of Pinot Gris as the waiter offered a choice of that or a Cabernet.  

Kenny held his hand over his glass. “I had a martini at the bar. I don’t do well with alcohol. Chinks can’t drink. Heh heh.”

I didn’t think I remembered how to bat my eyes, but they did so involuntarily. “You’re looking great.”

“Yeah, well, I invented an app. It’s doing pretty good.”

“Hmmmmm.” I studied his slender hands.

“And you were going to be a writer? Did that happen? I still remember your poem from Mrs. Sweeney’s class, the one about Emily Dickinson, I think.”

“’Because I could not stop for death—he kindly stopped for me.’”

“No, it didn’t go like that. It was something else….”

“Kidding.” Even after nearly three glasses of wine, I could remember it: 

Miss Emily Blake died last Tuesday.

Quietly, quietly.

A cloud rolled by.

A baby cried.

The breezes sighed.

And Miss Emily died.

Quietly, quietly.

Mrs. Sweeney thought it was brilliant and read it aloud to the entire class. I knew it was sophomoric, but then so was I. I loved poetry and wrote it throughout college, and then at a certain point the words seemed to be crashing into each other in unexpected ways, and what I wrote stopped making sense and seemed unbearably adolescent, like crying my eyes out in the university chapel late at night, after I broke up with Boyfriend #1, to the sturm und drang of someone practicing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue on the organ. I had vowed I would never have that kind of breakdown again, and for 23 years had sloughed off more than a few messed-up liaisons as if they were no more than annoying cases of dandruff. And now….

“I’m in journalism, kind of.”

“You are a very sort-of, kind-of lady.”

“No, never a lady.” I shot him a flirty glance, but I was beginning to think the flirt app had been uninstalled. It felt like for good. Salads arrived, microgreens with a drizzle of something spit-colored. “I was with a travel magazine. It folded six months ago. I’ve been freelancing. A little.” And Jeff would be paying a painful amount of alimony on an academic’s salary. A nice chunk of support, according to the one lawyer I’d briefly consulted, still in a state of disbelief. I would probably get the apartment because adultery was still grounds in New York State. Bad timing, Jeffer. You should have waited till the little googoo-eyed slut landed a job. Or I found another.

It seemed time to turn to the people on our left and right. Next to me was Roseanne Ellis, who had the same gentle mournful face and massive breasts. Even her hair had not changed much—still shoulder-length, dirty blonde with bangs. She told me she was single, teaching biochem at Connecticut College, raising French bulldogs. We didn’t get far when the guy to her left, husband of Jo Abrams, once the most beautiful girl in the class, leaned in. “I overheard you saying you worked for a travel magazine,” he said. “I just got back from an amazing trip to the Yucatan. I think I could write about it….”

“Well, I’m not technically an editor anymore, and the magazine folded. Freelancing is tough, especially for travel.” He had such kind, pleading eyes. “But give me your card before we leave in case I hear of anything.”

More chatter and the wait staff gliding smoothly among tables, setting down and removing my salmon, half-finished. Did I feel Kenny’s hand brush my thigh? Hard to tell in my woozy state. When the waiter leaned in to refill my wineglass, I also put my hand over it. I could get sick, really embarrassingly sick, if I kept this up. I went to the ladies’ room and devoted a few minutes to a pee and deep breathing. On my return, I surveyed the scene before sitting down. “Do you believe how politically correct this all is?” I said to Kenny. “We could be the poster class for multiculturalism.”

“Not really,” said Kenny, slipping an arm around the back of my chair. I was conscious of the small space between my bare skin and his blazer sleeve, a little pocket of warmth. “No blacks, no Native Americans, no Indians or Pakistanis.”

“You’re right. No Eskimos or Mongoloids—er, Mongolians—either.”

“And no trannies or Latinos.”

“No ex-cons.”

“As far as we know,” he said, touching my shoulder with one finger. I turned. He smiled, and I ducked my head.

And then Wendy was at the lectern. “Okay, kids, it’s that time. Each of you has five minutes to sum up the last twenty-five years. That’s one minute for each half-a-decade, so choose those words carefully. When I call your name, please get on up here.” She, Wendy, had decided the order, and Susan Fleischman, now Susan Fleischman-Manter, was first. I wasn’t too far off the mark. First stop, Mt. Holyoke, then Fordham law, where she met her husband, and then Short Hills, NJ. “I’m a stay-at-home mom, but I do a lot of volunteering for literacy. My favorite thing in the world is Sunday mornings with a cappuccino, and my three kids, all hanging out in the conservatory.”

I looked at Kenny and mouthed “conservatory?”

He nodded. Such thick eyelashes around those blue eyes. “It’s the big thing now in our demographic. Don’t you read the ‘Design’ section of the Times?”

And then came Amy Vogel, the closest thing we had to a celebrity, according to Wendy, because her husband’s screenplay had won an Oscar two years ago. They lived in Malibu; she was a dedicated gardener and yoga mom. I remembered her saying to me once, “I don’t look that great in these uniforms, but I am drop-dead gorgeous when I’m naked.” 

And more. So many more. But some mercifully took less than five minutes. There were careers, kids, divorces, breast cancer, prostate cancer. A novel published, a farm foreclosed on, adopted babies, a surrogate baby. Some consulted notecards, of which I had none. After ten or so presentations, it was all so boring. And my little life too, my squalid midlife troubles, weren’t they every bit as tedious?

And then Anne Silver glided in her motorized chair to the foot of the lectern. Wendy gave her a pass-along mic. She tilted her disk-shaped face with its perfect nose toward the light, looking like a sundial with bangs and a French twist. “I know you’re all wondering how it happened, and some of you already heard about it, so I’ll keep it simple. I had an accident riding in Central Park ten years ago. A bad fall….it could have happened to anyone. Five weeks in the hospital, and my Benjamin was there every day.” She blew a kiss toward a far table. “But my life is so much richer and happier since I found Jesus.”

My hands flew to cover my eyes. I quickly moved my fingers sideways and massaged my temples instead, feigning a headache.

Kenny leaned in close and whispered. “Jesus? I thought she was Jewish.”

I nodded. “More Jewish than matzoh meal.”

And then it was my turn. I wobbled my way to the lectern, my heels suddenly higher than I remembered. Grasping the edges for balance, I looked out coolly, focusing first on Sally, then on Susan, and then I picked out Morgan, choosing just a few faces to address, as I had been taught by my mother, a motivational speaker. “Well, as you all know, I went to Smith. Where I majored in English lit with a minor in Italian. You could still do that in those days. Smith had—maybe still has—a wonderful junior year abroad program, and so I went to Florence and Rome. In Roma, I met the most extraordinary young man, an heir to old Italian aristocracy, with a profile straight out of Bernini….e che sprezzatura! We had a wonderful summer at his family’s villa in the Cinqueterre.” My r’s were rolling like the green hills of Tuscany. “Straight out of the Garden of the Finzi Continis. We rode bikes and swam in the Ligurian Sea, and even once made love in a hayloft. But it was not to be. He was devoutly Catholic. And his family would never let him marry a nice Jewish girl.” I looked down, sucking in a sad breath. “So I finished at Smith, and then went on for my MFA at Columbia. One day I was having lunch at Tom’s Restaurant—some of you may remember that one from Sex and the City—and they were shooting an episode of Law and Order SUV and the director asked to sit down at my table because the place was packed. We got to talking, and he wanted to know if I would read a few lines and take a screen test for a bit part in one of the episodes. He said I’d be perfect for the part of a college student who was one of a group of college-age hookers. Well, one thing led to another and the next thing I know I’m on the West Coast, where I got small parts in Primal Fear and then L.A. Confidential….I could perhaps have pursued a career in Hollywood, but that would have meant sucking up to a bunch of creeps….you all know now how it is. Even Gwyneth….”

People were starting to catch on. There were nervous titters. I wound down quickly. “And then I got married, had a miscarriage, and lost my job. And now I’m getting a divorce. The end.” I pushed away from the lectern.

Perhaps there was scattered applause. I didn’t know because of the blood banging in my ears. Kenny stood and held out my chair for me again and then leaned over. “You were fabulous. You are fabulous.” Then he added, “But it’s Law and Order SVU and the Columbia hookers were in the old Law and Order. I watch on YouTube late at night.”

I flagged down a waitress and ordered a Grand Marnier. “I’ll have to put that on a separate tab,” she said. Kenny made a scribbling gesture. “Put it on mine.”

And then another half hour or so, including Kenny’s description of how he was building a company around his lucrative app, which could be used to estimate the calorie counts in restaurant menus, or something like that. And it was over. My pulse had settled; my lips were sticky with liqueur. My old classmates and their assorted partners were getting up from their tables and mingling in a low-energy sort of way. Sally came over and gave me a real arm punch. “You were fantastic!”

“Well, I gotta go,” I said to no one in particular. 

“Let me drive you,” Kenny said. “I have a car just a block away.”

“I’m in Park Slope. It’s a long trip.”

“I’m in the Heights.”

“Still a long trip.” I was tempted, but Caution, that gentle and wise god occasionally sent by my mom, said, Take it slow.

“I’d like to see you again.”

“I’m still feeling awfully raw.” It was probably the first honest thing I’d said all evening.

“Okay, a drink maybe.” We exchanged cards.

“Yes. Maybe.”

On the way out of the restaurant, I noticed Frank Peabody seated on the smoker’s bench next to the stairs, puffing on a Marlboro Light. He shook the pack at me. “Want one?”

“Yeah, sure…. No, I’m sorry. I don’t think so.” I didn’t need dizziness on top of the buzz, and I had a long train ride ahead of me.

“That was quite an evening. I don’t think I could ever go through that again.” He took a drag. “People only go to these things to compare notes, to see who’s doing better or worse. Or who survived.” He sounded bitter.

Frank had kept it short at the lectern. Something about a wife and three kids in Teaneck, rock climbing on weekends. His sports-writing job was on the line at a newspaper in New Jersey.

“Tough times for print,” I said.

“It has been for a while.” He snuffed out his butt in the ficus pot. “Do you ever feel like you’re in the wrong life?”

“All the time, baby, all the time.” I fingered Kenny’s card in my pocket. Then I leaned over and kissed Frank impulsively on the top of his shiny bald head. “You take care.” 

He looked me up and down, making a quick appraisal. Either for inebriation or availability.  “Can I get you a cab? Or walk you to the train?”

“Um, no,” I said. “That was pretty intense. I think I’d like to be alone.”

In fact, it occurred to me, as a breeze ruffled my hair, lifting my skirt ever so gently, cooling my damp face, I might really enjoy being alone. At least for now. The breeze was off the Hudson and had that oily, early-summer, slightly fishy smell. I inhaled deeply, exhaled, inhaled again. Filling my ribcage with hope, a “thing with feathers.”

Ann Landi is a semi-retired art critic/journalist (ARTnews, The Wall Street Journal) who has only recently turned her hand to fiction. EAst Coast born and raised (with a heart that still remains very much in Manhattan), she now lives in Taos, NM.

Photo Credit: Marcia K. Bilyk is an essayist, photographer, and retired pastor. She lives in rural New Jersey with her husband and two dogs. Her photos have appeared in The Sun, Gothamist, Brevity, Humana Obscura, Adirondack Review, Split Rock Review, Burning Wood Literary Journal, Tiferet Journal, Adirondack Review, Brevity, and elsewhere.