and smother him with kisses.
He screams again, with upraised arms.
“Who’s my favorite boy!”
“Ma-ma, Ma-ma!”
You hold him—“Da-da, here, honey, Da-da”—tight enough to squeeze out his breath. “Quiches!” you say, imitating your wife’s pronunciation of kisses. “Quiches!” and you kiss the boy’s head until he sleepily giggles himself out of hysteria.
You look at your watch: 5:53. About the standard time. In the dark, you carry him downstairs. He enjoys making coffee with you because he likes the smell of the grounds.
An hour of playing with toys and an hour of walking around the neighborhood and you expect your mother to be up and about, but she’s not.
Owen needs a change of scene and you want some air, so you decide to take your parents’ car for a drive. As long as you’re back for brunch around noon, nobody will care.
You head toward downtown. Twenty years ago, Algonquin wasn’t much of a suburb, and even though it’s grown from 3,000 to 30,000 inhabitants, it’s still not much of one now. You recall what Mom used to say about Algonquin—that it’s most renowned for once harboring Chicago’s mafia, including Al Capone who had a summer bungalow along the Fox River that runs north-south through town; and that it’s second most renowned for a long, sloping hill that runs parallel to the river, north up Route 31 to Crystal Lake. The mile-long hill at a 30 degree grade used to serve as a dramatic test run for cars in the 1920s. At least, that’s what she always told you.
Owen is asleep by the time you pull onto Route 31, the main thoroughfare which is a clogged single-lane in each direction, a way to creep from one Chicago suburb to the next. Not far from the hill, Route 31 intersects Route 62 marking the center of Algonquin. You drive past the old town hall, which now looks empty, on the corner. When you were a kid, the town hall, which also housed the library and had a pool in the back, was the downtown, excepting a couple of divey pubs, a greasy spoon, a gas station, and a used car lot. There was one McDonald’s in town, built when you were a sophomore, and the closest grocery store was ten miles away in the neighboring village of Dundee. You made that grocery run innumerable times, a seemingly long car ride without seatbelts, sitting in the back of the race-car red Duster, fighting with Elizabeth mostly out of boredom.
Elizabeth is such a pretty name. Whatever happened to the Elizabeth you knew as a kid, the one who read David Copperfield when she was six years old? Oh yes, she’s still your younger sister, and she still lives in a suburb forty minutes south, Geneva. Suddenly you’re aware of all the funny names of suburbs: Elgin (the forgotten clock and watch company), Palatine (something to do with the Romans?), Schaumburg (“mountain of foam,” if your German is correct), Cicero, Harvard, Homer Glen, Sleepy Hollow, Libertyville, etc. Algonquin might be the best of them, in name, if nothing else. The Native Americans and the famous roundtable of writers and artists in New York City. And yet, you don’t feel any special kinship to your hometown. It hasn’t been your home for ages, and with three big box stores, seven supermarkets, and miles of subdivisions, it no longer resembles the place you once lived in. So be it. Change is the only constant, they say, and they are always right whoever they are. And besides you enjoy change. Never living in one place for more than two or three years, you’ve moved eight times (last time you bothered to count) since graduation. Elizabeth, on the other hand, has lived in Geneva for more than a decade, and although she’s three years younger than you, she’s been married for almost fifteen years to her college sweetheart, George.
If you are going to go through with this blast into the past tonight, you might as well scope out the venue: Harry D. Jacobs High. You take a left onto Route 62, hit Randall Road, and it’ll be on the right about a mile down. Once in middle of a cornfield, it’s now surrounded by wall-to-wall tract homes, large, well-meaning tract homes, actually. You see the sign in the distance. Underneath Harry D. Jacobs High School, Est. 1978, there’s a stream of gold words on an LED sign…Welcome Back Class of 1988! ... Reunion Weekend!…September 12 & 13….
As you approach you realize the long driveway to the school is no longer there. You slow down to where it used to be and park the car on the shoulder. Cars drive past doing sixty-five. You turn around and check on Owen in the backseat; he’s snoring. Are you really going to do this? When you first heard of a possible twenty-year reunion, more than a year ago, you asked your wife what she thought. “You can go as long as I don’t have to,” she said, and then later when you brought it up again, “What—are you expecting to have the best moments of your life there?” You never answered her. You should have. You should have said that the best moments of your life were with her—especially that first year together and then right around Owen’s first birthday, when you and she finally felt like real parents, real adults and couldn’t get over how lucky you were to have such a sweet baby, and how you agreed wholly when one day she said, Sometimes it scares me how much I love our boy, sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode. The only other moments that come close to these are some great talks with The Professor in grad school in Memphis. Countless times you two pulled all-night drinking and writing sessions, feeding off each other’s giddiness. Wishing you could hold onto those conversations, one night you tape-recorded the whole thing. The writing ceased around midnight, then there was some driving around midtown and Beale Street, grocery shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, drinking on the rooftop of your apartment building, going out in a desperate effort to seduce a couple of Russian undergrads (or were they high school girls?) at a dilapidated mansion-cum-bar called The Castle, and finally passing out on The Professor’s front porch. You thought it’d be a terrible recording, a bunch of drunken nonsense, and most of it was, but there were some gems in there too—moments of “unbridled fucking genius” as The Professor calls them.
When you recently asked him about the reunion, he said, “Why not go, it’ll be a kind of experiment.”
“What kind?”
He mock-scratched his chin, a telltale sign that he was nearly drunk. “Social psychological—no—social anthropological.”
“What?”
“Oh come on, it’ll be like traveling in time but without the time machine. Think of the ramifications of examining your life narrative as compared to others’ life narratives. A real biological confrontation. A fucking pivotal intertwining of your carefully constructed self identity vis-à-vis socially preponderant standards of success and accomplishment. Your situational identity and your personal identity will be at loggerheads.”
“If you say so,” you said and finished your beer. “By the way, wasn’t your thirtieth a couple of years ago?
“Last year, actually.”
“I don’t remember you going.”
“Of course not,” said The Professor, “you think I wanted to subject myself to some asshole’s, no, some group of assholes’s Durkheimian-cum-Peter-Panian trip down memory lame.”
“I’d have thought you’d want the experience for research material?”
“Anecdotal at best, and I have enough from my tenth and twentieth. At the tenth, people had barely gotten their personal identities established—a lot of poorly veiled one-upmanship. The women who were hot in high school were still hot and the men who were fated to go bald were already bald. Frankly the men were uniformly boring and mostly wanted to get their pee-pees wet. Anyway, by the twentieth, people were well ensconced in their situational identities—”
“Their what?”
“Their lives, friend. Lives. I’ll admit there were anthropological issues concerning community and a great deal of souls in need of community and trying, ever so slightly, to get some by mining their high school days for a community that never really existed. All this, mind you, around a table of raw vegetables, ranch dip, and Danish butter cookies. Fucking light beer. Everyone expressed happy indifference toward each other. If they were truly happy with their lives, their spouses, the kids, then they were happy and didn’t need to talk to you to compare notes. If they were unhappy, then they’d learned