All Over the Map (5 page)

Dennis twitters like a bird to collect us for breakfast, and we gather back on a big smooth rock in a circle. I’m surprised at how glad I am to see these people and give everyone a big hug. Over heaping bowls of granola and powdered milk, everyone reads what he or she has written. I’m quite moved at how Tina describes losing her friend, saying this challenge of being in the wilderness is making her feel like herself again. The Realtor does a sensitive postmortem on her last relationship. Gretchen is delighted with herself for making it through the solo, and she seems visibly stronger. Even the CEO of the institutional food company is sweet and self-revealing. I’m the last one to speak, and everyone looks at me expectantly, but I don’t want to share what I’ve written. No way.

“But you’re a
writer,”
the venture capitalist insists. I shake my head no, embarrassed. Dennis insists that I
have
to read, since I’m part of the group. So I pull out my piece of paper: “Daniel, Josh, the film major guy, Kent, the short guy from Psi U, Eric …” The group is silent.

Then at last Tina laughs a little. “That’s it? A list? We’re spilling our guts here, and you came up with a
list?”

I shrug and mumble something about not being able to muster up anything else.

“Okay, well, there must be some reason you wrote the list,” says the Realtor. “You must have been thinking about your relationships or something. Why don’t you tell us about what was going on in your head?”

“I don’t know,” I say, furiously stirring my instant coffee. I’m on the spot and have to come up with something. So I tell them I was just thinking about the crazy string of guys I’ve been with, marveling at what ridiculous situations I get myself into.

“Such as?” Tina asks.

The men in the group start examining their spoons and the ants on the rock.

I start telling them about how I can’t seem to meet the right guy, how somehow I end up on spectacularly bad dates. I laugh. “Just bad luck, I guess.” Tina and the Realtor nod along, they know about bad dates. Tina raises her eyebrows, waiting to hear more. Encouraged and wanting to lighten the mood and shift attention away from me and how I feel about my list, which is not so great, I launch into stories about my most disastrous dates. There was the guy who pulled over on the side of the road and told me his ex-wife had a temporary restraining order against him and he’d spent time in Atascadero—not a nice hotel in Carmel, ha ha, but the California facility for the criminally insane. And the chef who got so drunk he actually left skid marks on my couch. In the midst of telling these stories, which always vastly amuse my friends—the worse the date, the better, as far as the retelling is concerned—I pause and see that no one in this group, not even Tina, is laughing. They’re digging around in their oatmeal as if there’s gold hidden in there.

I wipe my eyes, look around at the landscape, and comment on how lovely the sky is this morning. Gretchen puts an arm around my shoulders briefly, and then we do the dishes.

For the last two days, we explore the canyons with only a day pack, feeling light as lizards as we scramble on rocks in the sun. We jump into cool sandstone pools and find a shady arch to nap under. The final night, after hiking fifteen miles, we ascend a 1,000-foot mesa in the dark. We manage it slowly, giving helping hands, taking breaks. I find a wellspring of strength in myself, not in climbing the mountain but in patiently encouraging the slowest hiker from behind, singing Aretha Franklin and punk-rock songs to keep her spirits up for the last grueling hour. When we finally reach the top of the mesa at midnight, we throw down our sleeping bags and sleep huddled together in the wind.

The trip ends up having some lasting effects on the group. Gretchen, the timid college grad, having hiked her way through some self-esteem issues, goes to New York City for a master’s degree, loses weight, and transforms into a chic, pale-skinned intellectual. The socks manager quits smoking for good and gets involved in an Audubon program, making a bunch of new friends. The skinny Realtor finds a rich new boyfriend and gains a few pounds. The institutional food manager buys a vacation home and retires part-time, spending more time with his grandchild. The computer guy gets a new job and a girlfriend. Dennis and the venture capitalist break up with their respective partners, take a trip around the world together, and get married, inviting us all to come play paintball at their wedding, which I do not attend. I have an X-ray taken of my spine; the seventy-five-pound
pack has compressed two discs, apparently permanently, and my doctor tells me I can never backpack again and that I should take up yoga.

On the bus ride back to the motel, I’m not sure what this trip has accomplished for me. It’s has gotten me out of the house and into the wide wilderness; it’s distracted me a bit, but I haven’t managed to venture very far into my internal landscape. I’m not sure I feel any better about my situation than when I set out. I suspect that when I get home I’m just going to want to pick up and leave again.

As we ride the bus back from the wilderness to the motel for a shower, we pass the turnoff to a campground in Canyonlands National Park, where my parents are, coincidentally, vacationing this weekend. At seventy-four, my mother, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, is no longer backpacking, but she still sets out with my dad to find the scenery they love. I hope that when I’m her age, I will be as willing to get outside and as content to sit in the sun, accepting my limitations, contemplating the canyons. I admire that toughness in her, and that softness.

J
une is lush and leafy in the Connecticut countryside, moistly warm and smelling like summer the way San Francisco never does. The minute I arrive at Wesleyan University in Middletown, I want to take off my shoes and run down a grassy hill. I want to dance outdoors to African drums, eat a steamed cheeseburger at a diner, thumb through random books in the library stacks, and walk around the cemetery drinking beer from a brown paper bag, reading old tombstone inscriptions. I want to be my college self for a while, with everything to look forward to, every possibility spread out before me, like a fat catalogue of classes.

I’m here for my twentieth college reunion and wander around the stately campus, with its ivy and dark red bricks, 1970s-era dorms, and modern concrete arts center, which, though familiar, seems as foreign a landscape as when I first arrived from Colorado. I came here as a chubby seventeen-year-old from Littleton, wearing a blouse I’d sewn in home ec class with little pink flowers sprinkled on a western yoke, and spent most of my first year trying too hard to catch up with the fast company, prep school
kids and punk-rock New Yorkers. I had wanted to go far from Colorado, to have a completely different experience, but I’d had no idea just how far away it would be.

Now the recent graduates all look as if they’re about fifteen, wearing private galleries of tattoos, taking themselves very seriously, gesticulating while they speak. I remember being that earnest, drinking too many cups of coffee too late at night, smoking clove cigarettes, arguing about something very important and abstract, no doubt related to feminism, such as whether we’re all eventually headed toward androgyny or if you have to be a lesbian to really be a feminist (I remember announcing to my mother that I was a “theoretical lesbian” who just preferred sleeping with men, which didn’t much alarm her). I felt that my brain was on fire in those days, and only constant conversation and massive amounts of reading—along with a few hits of pot—would keep it stoked.

Crossing the campus, I run across bald-headed dads and weary-looking moms who capably keep half an eye on their children while talking animatedly to other moms, women they haven’t seen since senior year. It takes me a while to realize that these nearly middle-aged people are from my class, i.e., my age. Everywhere are tidy groups of alumni in summer outfits, khakis with webbed belts, white sweaters slung around tanned shoulders. I half expected everyone to be wearing the same jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops they wore the day after graduation, to have untamed hair and skinny midriffs, looking as if they just stepped out of dance class. Instead, they look so grown-up and responsible, so purposeful and prosperous, so paired off.

Seeing them, I feel as if I’ve truly arrived in the heart of the
strange territory that is forty and hope these people, who seem to have figured it all out, will give me some clues. I’m among my peers, who had similar opportunities and went to the same freshman orientation but who look so much more settled than I am. Forty doesn’t appear to be so foreign to them: their lives are full of milestones—jobs, marriages, moves, birth announcements, kindergarten, grammar school—that have clearly marked the path along the way. They look satisfied and well tended, exuding a quiet air of accomplishment (though here in academia I have to remind myself that reunion attendees suffer from selection bias—no one who has made a real mess of his life shows up).

For the most part, it’s an air they’ve earned; I know because for years I have been the class secretary and recorded every award, entrepreneurial success, artistic achievement, or PhD my fellow classmates have amassed. It is an impressive group, full of creative thinkers, scientists, and humanitarians. They are people I am proud to know; some of my richest and most enduring friendships began here. The cliché about Wesleyan was always that the student population was “diverse,” and they have indeed proven themselves to be a group of individuals with singular talents. They are always writing in, apologizing for their slight contributions to the notes, saying they’ve done nothing recently but open a low-income mental health center or taken a little theater piece to Broadway or become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

Over the past decade, though, much of the news they’ve sent in has been announcing their marriages, and then, en suite, their children. I probably report these domestic events with less enthusiasm than other class secretaries do. Even in this unconventional
group, it seems like a failure to have not been able to be both creatively successful and effortlessly accomplish the conventional spouse and kids.

I suppose if I’d wanted to have a lifetime partner, someone I could rely on, I should have looked around more carefully when I was in college; by far the highest-quality pool of men I’ve ever splashed around with were the ones I met in Middletown. Plus, it seems that meeting someone early on, practically growing up together, is the secret to a lasting relationship: after fifty-five years, my parents still laugh at each other’s jokes. Kristin, a dear friend since we were ten, is happy with the guy she met working in a pizzeria during college. My oldest sister, Cindy, met her husband, Brad, when they were fourteen; after thirty years, they hug each other with tears in their eyes if they’ve been apart for more than three days. Those couples are like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, with a lot more in common in the middle than on the sides. They’re hard acts to follow.

Not that I should’ve married one of those glorious Wesleyan guys right after graduation—I had too much of the world to experience, not to mention too many interesting men to meet. But at the time, I was more intent on competing with the men I found interesting than eventually marrying one of them, which may have been an unfortunate ripple effect of seventies-era feminism, or just bad timing.

Someone waves at me; I recognize the couple, and greet and hug them. One of the advantages of being class secretary, twenty years later, is that everyone knows you. You’re retroactively popular.

They tell me I look good and heard I had a book out, so at least I’m passing in this crowd, not obviously someone who is still living in the same apartment she rented in the hippie Haight Ashbury a year after she graduated, someone who could barely buy the plane ticket to the reunion, much less make a sizable contribution to the alumni fund. (Despite all my women’s studies classes, I never paid much attention to making real money, always assuming I’d marry someone who’d bring home the bacon while I’d write witty essays about why I stopped being a vegetarian.) I’m staying in a dorm room, not a hotel, which seems to concretize—to use a very Wesleyan word—the fact that I haven’t quite made it into successful adulthood. But perhaps because I’ve recorded all my classmates’ accomplishments, I’m more keenly aware of them. Maybe everyone feels like I do when reading the class notes, the way you feel fat and frumpy after browsing through a copy of
Vogue
.

The undercurrent of insecurity persists at the cocktail hour, as I casually listen to what my classmates are up to—where they live and where they summer, where they send their kids to school. Part of me realizes, as I eventually realized twenty years ago, that much of that cool confidence is an illusion. When I finally have a few real conversations with my classmates, it becomes clear that several of them have lives that are as messy and uncertain as mine—a divorced social worker with two kids, an environmentalist struggling to make a business out of his ideals, an artist who hates selling real estate to get by, a heartsick dad whose wife just left him and took along the kids they adopted.