The High School Reunion

I graduated from Wahlert High School twenty-five years ago this last May. Still, sometimes it still seems like it was not that long ago although it doesn’t feel like yesterday anymore. This weekend while we were back visiting my family and seeing friends, there was a reunion. I had tried to convince a few friends I haven’t seen since my wedding to Will to come but they begged off for various reasons. Truthfully, nearly all of my high school friends are simply not the home-town types. They all went away to university and moved farther away for careers and whatnot after that. They aren’t necessarily the family/homebody types although some did marry and some more started families. We were the types of kids who didn’t party really and found entertainment in the oddest of ways and places. We belonged to the band and orchestra and school newspaper. The clubs we joined were of a more intellectual nature and I can’t think off-hand if any of us managed to stick with a team sport for more than our freshman year. No one who was anyone in our high school knew who we were or cared to know, really. But isn’t every high school like that. And every college? And once you are out in the “grown-up” world these social hierarchies don’t disappear. The neighborhood you live in. The place where you work. The playgroup your toddlers are in and the school PTA you were guilted into joining. They will all have their cliques of “popular” people who find you wanting in some rather unimportant way or another. I guess as human beings we just have this need to be liked and admired or envied that leads some of us to form groups with the unspoken purpose of excluding others and some of us to feel unworthy when overlooked .

I ran into my first former classmates in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I had thought to call my old friend (and third cousin) Julie and hook up with her and whoever else on Friday evening, but after taking the kids swimming at the hotel and then dinner at my folks, we barely managed to meet my sister, Kate, on time for drinks in the hotel bar. Nine o’clock swiftly became 1:30 in the morning as we rounded off our night in East Dubuque at a local place where my brother-in-law cooks and tends bar as a side job. Back at the hotel, as we were making our way towards our suite on the third floor, we passed two drunken women at the snack machines loudly joking about their need for sausage. Later in the room, my husband commented on the “sausage” thing, and I replied that they can’t all be as lucky as I am. The next morning as we were waiting for the elevator, another loud-spoken woman approached and I knew the voice somehow. It struck some long-forgotten nerve. Funny how the most annoying people have voices to match their irritating personalities. It wasn’t until I got a good look at her face in the elevator that I was sure I had gone to school with her, but it was when she began idly, and again quite shrilly, chatting up a very young man in a tux that I was sure of who she was.

She was a cheerleader all through our high school days and possessed all the physical characteristics that were important back in the late seventies and early eighties. She was short. Thin. Blonde. And could fake idiocy without a trace of resentment. My only real memory of her was in the freshman locker bay after lunch one day. She was decked out in her cheer outfit and walking around with her shoelaces flapping. She never tied her own shoes. “I don’t know how,” she would simper like a southern belle from Gone with the Wind, again at quite an impressive volume for someone who was not much more than a midget, until some boy would tire of the charade and acquiesce to her ploy. I saw her again that evening at the lounge where the reunion was held. She flounced in fashionably late in a summery dress that was out of place in mid-October Iowa but then dress weather appropriate wouldn’t have gotten her the same attention, I suspect. My friend (and also another cousin), Gwen, pointed her out and I told them the story of the elevator. I also told them the joke that Rob had told me after I remarked to him that she was the woman from earlier. “What do some women wear behind their ears to attract a man’s attention?” I didn’t know. “Their heels.” Sums up Shoelace girl and her crowd fairly succinctly.

It was a pleasant evening. We arrived too early and very few people were there yet. Checking in with two of my former classmates at the door, I was asked to update my address. Seems they had lost track of me. I didn’t recognize either of them nor did their name tags provide much of a clue. My classmates who have appointed themselves the supreme planners of all reunions instituted a rather quaint practice of printing up name tags with women’s married names on them and nary a sign of who they actually were once. Of course this made those of us who remained single for ten or more years after graduating stick out, but I am thinking that was the point anyway.

The first person I recognized was Clete. We were friends from the end of senior year and for a few years after until we lost touch. His hair was shorter but he looked the same. Same smile. Same quiet manner. We chatted about superficial things. Jobs. Kids. Family in the area. After Rob wondered that my widowhood hadn’t come up and what that conversation might have sounded like, already knowing really because we have both had those types of conversations. But, I saw no need to lead the conversation in that direction. Clete is a nice guy but we are not friends anymore. We are two people who were once friends and are now just two people who share a pleasant conversation every five years. Julie and Gwen came next. I saw Julie first and saw as I approached that she was with Gwen and another woman, Sue. We ended up sharing a table for a bit and being a bit catty as our former class queens and other minor royalty sat at the table nearby. I had already seen most of these women earlier and had noted that they looked the same but with facial features more pronounced by the carving out that time imposes. They were all dressed liked middle-aged women who hoped that they were still as hot as they had been at eighteen. But they weren’t. No one is. And those of us who were never hot at any age have the consolation of not having to inflict such things on ourselves now. That longing for our youthful beauty. The truth is that youth itself was the beautiful thing if we had only known it at the time.

I don’t know all their names. I didn’t back then either. If you weren’t my friend, I didn’t really pay all that much attention. I was either hunched over a spiral writing stories and poems and letters or I was nose deep in a book. If I wasn’t doing that, I was daydreaming about the future. I was always far away.

I was even a bit far away that night, thinking about home and the novel I am starting to work on next week and about Rob.

Before we left the reunion - early, as we had a flight to catch Sunday morning in Cedar Rapids - I had to make a stop in the washroom. Rob was waiting for me when I emerged and I was obliged to run a short gauntlet of well-dressed women who, according to my husband, nearly broke their necks sizing me up as I flew past. He thought they were wondering who I was. Was indeed. Weren’t they surprised when they finally found out?