Live a Little (26 page)

Phil looks at me. “Nice, Raquel. Real classy. Did you have to drive, or does he have his learner’s permit?”

Ouch.

The thing is, Phil has a point. One I (theoretically) agree with. Bringing your daughter’s surfing instructor to your high school reunion? Tacky. Perhaps even a little desperate. Clearly a transparent grab for undeserved attention. Verdict? Downright embarrassing. In my defense, I’d had no intention of bringing Duke Dunne; Sue was my date. But Sue—wimp! flake!—came down with food poisoning, and Duke materialized just as he’d threatened and . . . let’s say the offer was hard to refuse.

The scene played out something like this: Fortysomething woman prepares for twenty-fifth-year high school reunion. Discarded garments litter room, which has started to resemble post-Katrina New Orleans. Medicinal highball teeters on top of serum jar promising to “radically reduce the ruinous ravages of photoradiation.” Right. Phone jangles. Woman in question hops toward bed, legs pinned by neck-to-toe body stocking. Plumbs pile. Collapses on pile. Finds phone. Listens with incredulity as best friend relays tale of bad potato salad and gastric misery.

“I can’t go alone!” Fortysomething wails. “Everyone will think I’m separated!”

“You
are
separated.” Best Friend has annoying habit of sticking to facts.

“Who will I make fun of people with?” Almost a bleat.

Best Friend pauses. “Your mother?”

Before Fortysomething can inveigh against the infinite cruelty of such a suggestion, doorbell rings. Fortysomething tells Best Friend to wait and executes lurching crab scuttle toward sound. Realization settles on Fortysomething that perhaps she should have bought recommended girdle size for weight range, instead of more respectable letter two, okay, three letters lower on alphabetical scale.

Opens door. Absorbs shaggy hair, edible complexion, aquamarine eyes, carved biceps, ragged daypack, impish grin.

“Yes?” Uses door to shield Lycra-sheathed body, which bears unnerving resemblance to uncooked bockwurst.

“Raquel? Hey!”

Edible launches self at Fortysomething. Bear hug. Awkward nose bump. Illegal placement of hand on rump. Fortysomething recovers enough to tell Best Friend she’ll call her back and don bathrobe while Edible blithely visits guest toilet.

“Did I miss something, or did you just show up here out of the blue?” Fortysomething demands upon Edible’s return. She knows she is supposed to sound furious. She finds it hard not to stare. That ice-cut dip where his waist joins his pelvis. . . is it possible that he modified it surgically somehow, to get it to look like that? Iliac crest—the words float into her mind with the annihilating gentleness of an anthrax spore alighting on virgin lung tissue.

Iliac crest.

“Plan change. No bookings this week.” The aquamarine eyes clear-cut a swath down the front of the frumpy robe. Guiltless smile. Hands cross over unyielding chest in supplication. “I know. My bad.”

And this, my friends, is how I reunited with the Class of 1980 on the arm of Duke Dunne instead of Sue Banicek, Phil Rose, or a down-market male escort with a chest wax and a signed photo of Ricky Martin at his bedside.

Now: I straighten my spine and give Phil the oh-how-youslay-me eyeball. “Duke’s just a friend. It’s not like we’re dating or anything.” I pause to enjoy the minute crumpling of Phil’s snarky smile, which begins at the word “friend” and culminates at the word “dating.” “We’re married, remember? We don’t date other people.” I snap my fingers, which, after three Screaming Orgasms—apparently the leading alcoholic beverage circa 1980— is relatively challenging. “Oh yeah. You forgot that one, not me.”

Before Phil can respond, the band segues from its rousing cover of Billy Joel’s “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” into an almost painfully reverent rendition of “Biggest Part of Me.” That this conversation should take place at the exact moment when David Pack is wailing about the part of himself that is, well, the biggest, is nothing less than I deserve, given my own moral transgressions of the past year.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” I snatch a glass of something frothy from a passing tray and gulp at it.

Phil tugs at the hem of his sweater, a design that would have been passably stylish if not rendered in the same brown worn by San Francisco bus drivers. “The kids,” he says without elaborating.

“The kids?” The idea of his students—products of trust-fund perpetuation, all—coming together to save our dodgy marriage is not only disturbing, it’s embarrassing.

Oh.

In a flash, I realize that Taylor and Micah have, with Phil’s lukewarm acquiescence, engineered this meeting. Our family script has been turned on its head, with me playing the hormone-addled wayward female and Phil taking on the meaty role of wronged husband while our children star as maternal nurturance and paternal discipline, respectively.

“They told you to come here?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Duke and several of my high school peers flinging back tequila shots. Misty has moved in for the kill, her eggplant mascara fluttering thickly in the ballroom glow like fresh roadkill under a streetlamp.

Phil emits a short stress-relieving burp and pats his tummy. “They told me you’d be here. They said you were embarrassed to come alone and my showing up would make you realize I’m serious about getting back together.” My husband glances at Duke, who appears to be slurping another shot, this time out of—oh no, say it isn’t so—Misty’s belly button. “You do look sort of embarrassed, Quel,” he says with a smile so evil, I actually take a step back.

“Attention! Hey, everybody! Hey!
Quiet!
” Class president, field hockey captain, and Desert Storm veteran Carolyn Tibbetts has commandeered the onstage microphone. I swear to God, the bitch looks exactly the same as she did in high school: smooth skin, ramrod posture, swingy hair.

War as anti-aging weapon?

“Thank you all for coming. It’s great to see so many familiar faces out there, and so many spouses and, um, partners as well.” Everybody titters and stares at Jeremy Bench and his equally buff, well-preserved boyfriend. Even though there were half a dozen out-of-the-closet gays and lesbians in my liberal Bay Area high school class, none of them was the captain of the water polo and baseball teams and master blow-job technician Christie Mueller’s steady (a fact that seems less inexplicable now).

“Before we move on to the raffle, there’s the little matter of homecoming king and queen, kids. So, we’ve tallied the votes . . .”

I tune out Carolyn Tibbetts’s bossy contralto and try to focus on my husband, who skulks in an ambiguous position between me and a knot of unfamiliar long-haired women in prairie skirts who may or may not be the first documented Bay Area Mennonites. Part of me wants Phil to go away so I can maintain the illusion that I, like Duke, am still clinging to the clammy residue of high school. The other part wants Phil to take me home so we can catch the tail end of
Saturday Night Live
and finish the last of those brownie bites from Costco together.

“Rachel Schultz, where are you?” Carolyn shields her eyes and peers at the crowd. I feel the crowd of people thickening and pushing at me, clawing at my clothes in a way I’d expect if I were, say, Madonna but, as a normal citizen, only makes me anxious and potentially incontinent. “C’mon, Rach,” someone behind me says. “Get up there, homecoming queen!” “She’s so much thinner than in high school,” I hear someone else whisper. “She probably had plastic surgery,” a voice responds. “I read about it in
People.
All the celebs do.” “She came with
both
her husbands,” says somebody else. “More power to her,” says another.

“Rachel Schultz!” Carolyn calls again. “Don’t be shy. Come on down.” Carolyn peers at the card again. “And the 1980, twenty-five-year class reunion homecoming king is Jeremy Bench!”

I stumble toward the stage in a daze. As I ascend, I am reminded of the scene in
Carrie
where the mean girls, not satisfied with pelting the poor girl with tampons, dump pigs’ blood on Sissy Spacek as she accepts the homecoming-queen crown alongside the spiral-permed guy who played the Greatest American Hero. I don’t
think
I was that unpopular in high school, but lack of proof or revenge-ready telepathic ability forces me to identify the nearest exit signs.

Carolyn, I see, has a false leg that is made up to look like a real nylon-clad foot and strut, complete with crimson toenails and bulbous field hockey–primed calves. She jams a rhinestone tiara on my head. I make eye contact with Phil, who manages to look proud, appalled, and amused at the same time. I realize with a jolt of intense wretchedness that, along with Sue, Phil is the one I would have liked to share the absurdity of this moment with. He’s the only one who would appreciate, for instance, that extremely gone-to-seed 1980 homecoming king Troy Somethingorother is silently weeping behind a ficus plant, his throne having been usurped by a fag investment banker with a $2.3 million condo in the Castro.

Someone clasps my hand. It is Jeremy Bench. His tanned skin has a Marlboro Man patina. He wears a simple titanium wedding band on his left hand and smells clean and powerfully musky, as if he applied eau de goat’s pituitary directly to his pulse points. I make a note to ask him about the anti-aging benefits of said.

“You look great, Rachel,” he says, doing the Princess Diana wave at the crowd. “I saw your show at the Waxman gallery.”

“Well, thanks.” Does Duke have to stand so close to Phil, or—gawd—slap him on the back like that?

“How are you doing?” Hushed, awed, “I am blissfully cancer free and you’re not” voice.

“Good, actually. I’m in remission.”
Liar, liar . . . hey, what happened to Phil’s spare tire?
My (sort of) husband is looking strangely svelte, I realize. Or perhaps it’s the onstage angle?

Jeremy raises my hand in mock triumph and grins. “Revenge of the nerds,” he murmurs.

“Chinese? Thai? Falafel?” I flip through the envelope of takeout menus that has, as of late, come to comprise our four squares.

“Whatever.” Taylor flicks
America’s Next Top Model
up another notch so that we can all enjoy Tyra verbally bludgeoning the slightly cross-eyed girl from Wichita.

Micah glances up from his calculus text. “Let’s have burritos. I’ll pick them up as soon as I finish this.”

Taylor ups the volume again. Tyra’s gingery weave swirls around her head, which seems to float three feet above everybody else’s. Having dipped my toes into the tantalizing pool of televised celebrity, I think it is entirely possible she spends the entire show standing on a box, or the bit players have conceded to having their feet lopped off to enhance her superior image.

Cynicism, the new black.

“Tay, can you turn that down a bit?” I dump Crystal Light into the pitcher.

The volume shoots upward.

“Taylor! What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

I go to the TV and manually lower the volume. My head is splitting, and I still have to design the fund-raiser mailing I promised Kendall, the BC support-group leader. Taylor has been simmering ever since I got home from the reunion last night. Instead of speculating as to the reason(s), I buried myself in household minutiae, hoping her resentment had nothing to do with me and was just garden-variety teen angst.

My daughter tears her gaze away from the TV. “You aren’t even trying to work things out with Dad! Why don’t you just get a divorce and, like, go have a midlife crisis at Club Med or something?”

So, not the garden variety. Clearly, Taylor’s interpretation of remission hews quite closely to meaning number three in my dictionary: “a release from debt, penalty, or obligation.” From treating me civilly, I mean.

“Does this have something to do with the reunion?” I say.

“Dad
wants
to make things right. It’s
you
who won’t listen to
him
!”

“Tay, not to condescend, but there’s a little more at stake here than simply
making things right.
Not to mention that this is between me and him.” I stir the remaining packet of sugar and chemicals carefully into the water. The crystals sparkle. I seem to recall someone at the last BC support group warning us off artificial red #7. The thing is, how would you even know it’s in there? Wouldn’t they call it something else, something more wholesome-sounding, so you wouldn’t sip it and think,
Cancer
?

Taylor slaps her hand against her leg in frustration. “Why are you
doing
this to us?” she cries.

Micah shakes his head, picks up the car keys, and heads outside. So much for backup.

Taylor continues, “I just want to say, screwing a guy half your age is, like, totally pathetic.”

“That’s enough,” I say sharply.
How does she know I’m considering, uh, screwing anybody? For that matter, how does she know Duke is even in this hemisphere?

Mindful of my face’s usual transparency, I try to radiate indignance and also celibacy. Think: Outraged Bride of God.

“When you talk like that, Tay, you only degrade yourself,” I murmur. The nuns would be proud.

“What a bunch of crap,” Taylor says. Then, with satisfaction, “Chloe Hughes’s mom told her you brought a”—nose wrinkling in disgust—“
date
to the reunion! And he was, like,
nineteen.
And he did shots! And you danced with him right in front of Dad! Chloe said you looked like Big Bird doing the chicken dance!”