The Kissing List (17 page)

You are genuinely happy for Rhadika. You are! You also recall your AP English teacher, the extraordinary Mrs. Pearlman, who wore high heels, showing you that poem by William Carlos Williams:

But never mind. Rhadika continues:

Junior high? How is junior high relevant to the year that Rhadika told her boss hasta luego and bought a longboard? What do thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, those years that everyone tries to forget or at least excise from family albums, have to do with trading blue suits for board shorts?

Yikes! (You have not divested yourself of all your teenage speak.) She is writing about your shared past, and already—based upon the little information you’ve gleaned from her e-mail—you’re convinced she’s going to get it wrong. Take Christine Thompkins. She wasn’t Rhadika’s enemy, as far as you can remember. Indeed, if she was anyone’s enemy, she was
yours, not that you thought of her as such at the time, but she did beat you soundly in the race for seventh-grade president. God, what were you thinking when you took on Christine? You’d gone to the tiny feeder elementary instead of the big one in the foothills where the kids were already drinking and making out in sixth grade. You didn’t have a pair of Levi’s or an alligator shirt; you didn’t have a boyfriend (Christine was already dating the most popular boy, who happened to be running for seventh-grade vice president); you didn’t have straight hair or a membership at the country club; and most important, you weren’t a cheerleader (Christine was). This, in fact, was the first of many poignant, misguided decisions you made: going out for seventh-grade cheerleader. At the tryouts, all the girls wore white shirts tucked into blue shorts (to match the school’s colors), whereas you wore your favorite pink culottes and a polka-dot T-shirt and performed a cheer your aunt had done a million years ago as a teenager:

It’s not that you still wish your foray into cheerleading had a
Pretty in Pink
ending, though at the time, Molly Ringwald was your favorite actress, and the highest compliment someone could pay was to note the resemblance. You didn’t quite play
the part of the nerd in junior high and high school, though you definitely disappeared in the crowd scenes. Would the attention of a popular boy have changed this? Teenage self-perception is more ironclad than a battleship. You doubt a missile attack could have penetrated your insecurities. Besides which, actual attention from a real boy made you cringe. Take your secret admirer—the boy wonder who sleuthed out your locker combination (how he accomplished this still puzzles you) and began leaving little anonymous notes and drawings taped to the inside of your locker door:

His other missives? They’ve vanished from your memory, except for one that had something to do with wanting to be the pillow under your head. (Now, unfortunately, this reminds you of what Prince Charles said to Camilla about wanting to become a certain form of feminine hygiene.) Eventually your secret admirer called, announcing in a disguised voice (disguised how? You have no idea.) that he would unmask himself at the Christmas dance.

Junior high dances! Remember how you and your girlfriends circled up and danced with each other, pretending to have a riotous time while periodically stealing glances to see whether any guys were approaching. Remember how you
towered over all the boys and slouched to make yourself shorter the handful of times you were asked to slow dance. Remember the first time a boy put his hands on your butt in ninth grade, and your body felt like a container you were spilling from. Afterward, you migrated in herds to the Copper Creek, where you and your friends, who never had enough money for pizza, ordered Cokes and 7
UP
s with extra ice and tried to spot your crushes but never ever talked to them.

For the big seventh-grade Christmas dance, your mom bought you a mushroom-shaped dress made from pastel pink parachute material from Jay Jacobs. It stands out in your memory because it was one of the few times your mom brought you a whole outfit, and you loved it. Your hair was cut in the asymmetrical style that was popular in the eighties (buzzed above one ear, big and poufy above the other), and Mom gave you the green light on baby blue eye shadow, pink lip gloss, and the small, dangly sombrero-hat earrings that your grandparents brought back from Mexico. (Anything besides studs required special permission.)

After spending most of the dance furtively checking out the popular guys with dark hair, intense eyes, and actual pectoral muscles (not that you noticed such things at the time, but these characteristics probably contributed to their popularity), growing jittery the few times their heads turned in your direction, your secret admirer appeared before one of the last slow dances, one of those aching power ballads. You immediately recognized him from the windowless basement art room, where you and your friends ate lunch to avoid the indecipherable hierarchy of
the cafeteria. He had black hair, big glasses with brown frames. He wasn’t a mystery. He was just like you.

“I’m your secret admirer, Calvin Hill,” he said, his voice breaking. “May I have this dance?” He smiled and shoved his hands into his jeans before he seemed to realize that dancing would involve his hands and pulled them out again.

“Sure,” you said. His tie was patterned with red and green Santa Clauses, and he smelled of shoe polish and peppermint. This was the first time you realized how much skill was involved in slow dancing—maintaining a safe distance from his torso while simultaneously keeping your hands hovering on the outer surface of his white button-down. Twice you stepped on his left foot. Once your knees buckled, and you nearly toppled over.

Afterward, did you hug or just shake hands? You try to call the moment to mind but fail. You hope you had the good manners to say thank you and good-bye, but you can’t be sure. When your parents picked you up, the small of your back still felt damp from where he held you. What ever happened to Calvin Hill? After that night you have no more memory of him. Did his family move away? Did he start avoiding you?

Recently, though, you have been startled by the numerous blank spaces in your recollection of the past, you who once prided yourself on being able to rattle off every single thing you received for Christmas (even stocking stuffers like Hello Kitty erasers, plaid socks, and Jockey for girls) between the ages of eight and twelve. Case in point: that guy on Obama’s White House staff who graduated the same year you did and even
allegedly played for the boys’ basketball team. You study his portrait in the
New York Times Magazine
, but you still draw a blank, can’t visualize him in the pack of tall guys with big hands whom you adored. You fret: What else has gotten untethered from its moorings? How many memories of people and experiences, emotions and events drift like lost ships on the high seas because their lines have grown too old and frayed to hold on to?

Does Rhadika remember the guy whom no one remembers—an informal poll of your friends turns up nothing—the guy who has entered an orbit never even imagined by the popular kids—the football players, the cheerleaders, the soccer player who got into Stanford and then bragged that he’d probably have invitations from all the Ivies because he was that good with a ball, and subsequently got NEGed everywhere (remember how frighteningly thin those rejection letters were)? Probably the guy who is now Obama’s right-hand man, and whose name you still can’t bring to mind without Google, is not thinking, “Nah nah nah nah nah.”

You’d like to talk to him and to Calvin Hill, and the soccer player, and all the other kids whom you passed wordlessly in the hallway. You’d like to know what those claustrophobic years were like for them. Back then, you divided the world into hardworking versus brilliant, smart versus intellectual, partier versus straight, good kids versus bad kids. Your categories were so fucking narrow! You joked with your friends, “These are the best years of our lives,” as though everyone else was having a grand old time. It never occurred to you that the soccer player might have felt just as miserable as you did when Yale wrote,
“We regret to inform you …” Or that Calvin Hill might have spent the rest of junior high and high school feeling sorry for you. Maybe he could see how lonely you were: having a sweetheart at the tender age of thirteen might have helped you blossom. Or maybe breaking into your locker was just one episode in a series of gutsy things he did to woo other girls. It’s also possible the whole incident has simply vanished, been buried beneath twenty years of more memorable experiences: seeing his college girlfriend’s long black hair spread across a feather pillow, watching the sun burst out from a quilt of clouds on a backpacking trip through the River of No Return, standing to applaud his son’s debut performance as Puck in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
 …

Obama’s right-hand man has probably forgotten you too.

You wonder what else you have misremembered or been too immersed in your own experience to see. The mother of a friend sends you photos from May Queen, your high school formal, and studying these three pictures—perhaps for the first time, you’re not sure—it’s hard to deny those weren’t pretty good years, not the best, but not the worst either. The pictures make it look like a teen flick, with the boys in white tails and black tuxedos with red cummerbunds, except for one feathered-hair rebel who is dressed in Levi’s and a blue sports coat, and girls in outfits ranging from puffy satin confections to floral dresses with drop waists. A girl whom you could never figure out because she was smart and quiet but also once suggested floating a picnic table down the river has on white saltwater sandals. You love that choice. Everyone is decorated: with
sprays of white and pink flowers, buttonhole roses, a burst of yellow forsythia. Once again, you show verve and a grave misunderstanding of school fashion by wearing a peach-colored culottes romper and a wide white stretchy belt.

The shocking thing about seeing these photos is how little you remember of the evening: not the dinner at Ginny Simm’s house, a friend who predated Rhadika, a friend whom you loved because she looked like Laura from
Little House on the Prairie
and once wrote a forty-five-page sequel to
Little Women
; not how this motley group of kids came to have dinner at Ginny’s house, since by senior year you and Ginny had drifted into different social spheres. Heck, you don’t even remember your date’s first name, just his last, Leavitt, though you do recall asking ______ Leavitt to the dance (it was Sadie Hawkins style) and the machinations you had to go through to first disinvite another fellow who flirted shamelessly with you but clearly preferred another girl. The dance is also a blank—did you slow dance? If so, did you like it? You do have a shard of recollection that you and Leavitt hung out with his friends afterward. You know for sure that you didn’t kiss, but you have a hunch that you came close, that there were some awkward moments when you were both aware of your bodies’ proximities, where you both wondered what to do.

Is
not
kissing and telling as much a foul as kissing and telling?

Because Rhadika is in these photos you forward them to her. After several days, she e-mails back with some choice
comments about late-eighties fashion—Rhadika is a very good writer even in the usually sloppy mode of e-mail. She adds: “I seem to recall we got really drunk that night.”

Wait, what? You don’t remember drinking that night. It is a point of old nerdy pride that you rarely drank in high school—once the summer before senior year with the boy from down the street (who will remain nameless) who sometimes goaded you, the Goody Two-Shoes, into doing slightly forbidden things like biking out to the airport after dark and crawling under the fence to watch the planes take off and land. That time, it was champagne, not an ideal first alcoholic beverage because it’s easy to drink too much. Another time it was beer with the boys from the basketball team. You didn’t really like the taste, but that didn’t stop you from having a draft at the ACTU (the neon
C
and
S
were burned out) with a kid whom you kissed on the golf course in the rich part of town. Finally, there were the wine coolers you drank in the parking lot at the school-sponsored all-night graduation party, organized, you suppose, with the idea of keeping drinking to a minimum. (Dear Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, remember that I was pretty good most of the time.)

For the record, you’re sure, or 85 percent sure, that you did not get
really drunk
after the May Queen dance with ____ Leavitt, whom you did not kiss, but maybe wanted to, and Rhadika and her date, who, you’ve heard via your mother, has become something of a Republican bigwig in local politics. (Ah, the deliciousness of liberal Rhadika attending May Queen
with a budding Republican!) Either 85 or 80 percent sure, which is pretty sure. You begin to wonder what else Rhadika is writing about junior high and high school, all those years you faithfully shared a locker. Will she tell the world you were messy? (You were.) Will she remember how the two of you decided you were weird on the outside (because you wore men’s V-neck sweaters backwards, the aforementioned culottes, and dresses fashioned out of dyed pillowcases) and she was weird on the inside (because she wore jeans and Izods with her collar popped but wrote strange, moving poems). Will she quote the words of your theme song by Tom Petty: “Hey! Don’t come around here no more … I’ve given up. Stop! I’ve given up waiting any longer.” Will she describe the legend of the purple jelly bean, the details of which you have forgotten? Will she recall what she did for you on your Sweet Sixteen—the vases of daffodils waiting for you in each classroom, so that by the end of the day you could not carry them all. Like love, they seemed boundless.