your wife to get it for you. She didn’t mind and you knew she secretly enjoyed seeing what kinds of moldy fruits, green meats, soft cheeses gone hard, and funky condiments she’d find. One Christmas Eve she held out a bottle of something you couldn’t identify and said, “I didn’t think soy sauce could actually curdle.” You’ve not looked in the refrigerator since she died.
You set down Owen on the kitchen floor. “Open the fridge, honey, and get the milk.”
“Meeelk,” he says.
“Yes, in the fridge. I’m in desperate need.”
“Not dursty.”
“I am.”
“Cha-cha.”
“Okay, you can have some. It’s in the fridge, too.”
As soon as he opens the door, you expect a load of condiments or overloaded plates or containers to come crashing down all around his feet. Broken glass, ketchup, pickles, and rancid food smells.
But nothing happens. Owen just stands there. “Cha-cha.”
You peer in over his shoulder. The refrigerator is relatively clean. You step back to get a look, thinking that they might have bought a new one.
“Cha-cha.”
“Sorry, looks like they’re all out.”
“Cha-cha!”
“Yes, yes, I know.” You scoop him up and give him the tickle treatment. A classic move of distraction. Instead of giggling he’s pulling at his ears again. Suddenly you see them. Fleas in his hair. “For chrissake’s,” you say aloud.
“Keees?”
“Christ,” you say, but there’s no time to explain. You take him back upstairs. “It’s into the bathtub for you, mister.”
After a good scrub and rechecking the bed for bugs, you get him to sleep without trouble. Now it’s time: you find the yearbooks behind other books on the bottom shelf.
The first thing you do is look for a clue as to who sent you a mysterious email a couple of weeks ago: How have you been? Hopefully shitty. See, its come to my attention that I never got to kick your ass. I know your coming to the reunion, so don’t try to deny it. Never forget The Single Finger. The note, signed U R FUCT, came from an email address you could only trace to somewhere in the Chicago area. Why did you ever bother to post your email address? For some reason you are more concerned with this person’s inability to use the apostrophe than his (or her?) beating you up. Although you never had many enemies in school or even now, you still scan the pages for any reference to “The Single Finger” in the handwriting of the people who signed your yearbook.
No luck. But you do find your entry in the “senior summaries.” Goal: “To become a private investigator in Hawaii and to own a Ferrari.” Jesus. Favorite teacher: “Mrs. Steffen.” What? You remember hating her for making you write a paper on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” What was the point, you told her, of reading this poem about the beach—if you want to experience the beach, wouldn’t it be better simply to go to the beach? Your favorite memory: “Prom with LW and cross-country championship junior year.” You glance over old classmates’ summaries; under a name you recognize as a guy who ODed in college you read his goal: “To succeed.”
You flip a few pages and find your senior photo. Major nerd. Does somebody want to smash your face for being a nerd? Then looking at the other headshots, you conclude that everyone is a nerd. The 80’s was a decade of nerdism—even the cool kids were nerds. But today everyone, including the nerds, is cool. You turn the pages and quickly realize there are a lot of faces you don’t want to ever see again. Dicks and bitches. Of the latter, though, you have to admit looking at some of their photos now does trigger the memory of innumerable masturbation sessions. There were those times, even after college, when you weren’t dating anyone—you’d pull out the yearbook and imagine alternate lives with girls who you had crushes on in high school. It was beyond pathetic but it filled in the outline of loneliness.
You find the photos of the small clique of friends you had. At times a close group—advanced placement class takers but also dope-smokers and band members and cheerleaders. You remember an excerpt from Carmen’s valedictorian speech word for word: We should all be very proud of ourselves and our accomplishments given that it is hard to soar like eagles when we were led by a turkey. The eagle was a reference to your school’s mascot and the turkey was a reference to the principal. Carmen was probably the only student whose parents had to have a conference with the principal after their child graduated. But her parents didn’t mind. In fact none of your parents would have minded. Since your class had been in elementary school, parents had talked about how special all of you were. They even differentiated you from siblings a year or two older or younger. You heard your mother once tell another mother on the phone, “He’s going to do something spectacular in the sciences, don’t ask me what, yes, I simply know it, biology, I think.” You could picture the mother on the other end of the line nodding her head into the phone. Sadly, you did nothing in the sciences and the only biology you have is a tiny grasp of the workings of your colon because you were diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome three years ago.
“Class of ‘88,” your mother says, startling you, “you were special.” You didn’t even notice her come in—and since when is she a mind reader?
“Were special?” you say.
“Still are.”
You suppose she is right, but not for the old reasons.
“Your sister’s class was smart, but they didn’t have the same ambition as yours.”
“Do you remember when you tried to get me into gifted?”
“That program was a joke,” she says. “You were gifted, you just didn’t test well.”
You debate about whether or not to tell her, and then you just say it, “I intentionally screwed up the test.”
“What are you talking about? I had them give it to you twice.”
“I screwed up the second one too.”
“What?”
“I know you wanted me to be gifted, but I didn’t want to be gifted.”
“But you were gifted.”
You note the past tense but don’t say anything. Then you wonder if you want Owen to be gifted. Then another thought which you voice aloud: “What if Owen turns out to be retarded?”
She assures you that he’s normal and bright and perfect.
“But will he test well?” you say.
She smiles now, thinking that you’re kidding.
“Oh, look,” she says, and points at a group photo of the pom-pom squad. “Isn’t that Lane?”
“It’s Julia.”
“Really?”
“Lane was on the tennis team, Julia was in poms.”
“I could never keep your harem straight.”
“It wasn’t a harem, Mom.”
“Well, there certainly were a lot of girls.”
“They were just friends, except for Lane.”
“I didn’t like her very much.”
“I know,” you say and then add, “in the end I didn’t like her either.”
“Carmen—she would have been a better first girlfriend for you.”
This is probably true, except for the fact that you could never get yourself to be attracted to her.
“What’s she doing now?”
You tell her you don’t know and that, in