High School Reunion Plus the -ILF Hierarchy

The reunion was pur-ty fun.

As much for being part of a day that was filled with little adventures as for anything else: I was in full Art Photo mode; everything I gazed at was a small visual poem.

Sunday trains are sporadic, so I got into the City early. Walked from Grand Central to the restaurant in Chelsea. Manhattan smelled like Venice in the six weeks following a bubonic plague outbreak after all the corpses have been shoveled into shallow graves. But the day was bright and sunny, it all looked fabulous.





If you went to Hunter in the 1960s, you either became a lawyer or a shrink.

There were a few exceptions. Like me. Hard to describe what I became. When asked, I answered, “Entertainment journalist,” the mica flake that glitters a bit more brightly than all the other things I became but loans itself to EZ, single-second summary. And makes me sound like Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill!

Terri, Best Friend in the photo above, studied architecture. Though I don’t think she ever practiced. Instead, she married, had babies, agonized over her dysfunctional parents and her dysfunctional sisters, gloried—though it was a hollow victory because honestly, how inconsequential were they?—over her apparent normality when compared to those dysfunctional parents and sisters.

I was sorry to learn that her father had been dysfunctional. He taught me to ride a bicycle, which was the first sporty thing I ever learned to do.

The person who looked the best was Ann _____, a gawky, punctilious girl in high school who now exudes self-confidence and savoir faire and yet somehow manages to look exactly the same as she looked in high school!



I would have recognized her on the street. (She’s the one on the right.)

She told me she would not have recognized me.

###

The one who broke my heart was Eve, the daughter of a high-power lawyer. I remember being invited over to Eve’s spacious Park Avenue apartment for birthday parties. Heavy window drapery ensured perpetual gloom, and there were plastic runners protecting the expensive carpets.

“So you became… a lawyer, right?” I asked.

She laughed, shook her head. “After I graduated from Princeton, I had two choices. I had been accepted at Yale law school but I’d also been accepted into a history PhD program at Cambridge. I wanted to be a lawyer. I told my father, and he said, ‘You can’t be a lawyer. Your brother is going to be a lawyer and take over my practice.’ The ridiculous thing, of course, is that my brother had no interest whatsoever in becoming a lawyer.”

“OhmyGawd,” I said. “That’s like something out of a Marge Piercy novel! Did you ever talk to him again?”

“It took a few years. But, eventually.”

I was going to say something about history being a far nobler pursuit anyway when she continued, “I ended up getting an MBA and becoming a banker.”

Becoming a banker is something so far out of my comfort zone that all I could do was change the subject. What do bankers do? Design check registers? Issue arbitrary decrees about mortgage rates?

“Did you have children?”

She nodded. “Three. One died in an accident. One is severely autistic. And I don’t talk much to my daughter although now that she has children…”

Ouch.

###

What was really interesting was seeing the way we’d all aged. We’re all in our late 60s. I suppose to Max and Robin and their friends, we all look—old. Old is monochromatic!

But we didn’t all look old to me!

Some of us looked quite chipper!

Insert multi-sentence diatribe on the evils of vanity here.

But I suppose because I was once a model and therefore dipped by my heel into the culture of narcissism at an impressionable age, appearance is important to me. Not yours, I hasten to say. But my own.

Some years after my modeling career had ended, and I was volunteering as a nurse with the Berkeley Women's Feminist Health Collective, I was attacked by a sister volunteer at one of the criticism/self-criticism sessions we were forced to participate in weekly. The Berkeley Women's Feminist Health Collective was organized on Marxist/Leninist lines!

“Look at you,” my sister volunteer sneered. “You’re wearing eyeliner! And mascara. You’ve got earrings on. You are embracing your slave chains!”

I drew myself up to my full height—which was considerably taller than her squat, hunched-shouldered self—and intoned in my plummiest Broadway stage voice, “I would be into ornamentation even if I were floating genderless in the primordial ooze!”

Which shut her right up. Not because of the righteousness of my retort but because she didn’t know what “primordial” meant.

Anyway, on my walk back to Grand Central, I passed an expensive car stashed right next to a fire hydrant on Park Avenue. Whoa! thought I. Ticket city!

As I watched, a group of extremely attractive people in their 30s issued from the Hotel Mondrian chorusing, “Happy Birthday!”

Attractive people in their 30s who didn’t give a fuck about a $125 ticket.

One of the men caught my eye. We nodded to each other. “Happy birthday,” I said.

“How did you know…?”

“Your friends are saying, ‘Happy birthday!’”

He raised his eyebrows. “You notice things.” He stared at me appraisingly for a couple of seconds. “Would you like to join us?”

What was he thinking?

That I was a MILF¹?

Dream on, boyfriend! I thought. I’m a GILF². Or maybe a GGILF³.

But I didn’t laugh. Just smiled and said, “No thank you.”

He kept staring for a couple of seconds more, then smiled and saluted me. They drove away.

_{1 Mother I’d Like to Fuck
2 Grandmother I’d Like to Fuck
3 Great Grandmother I’d Like to Fuck}