August 30, 2007

• Every year some of us from high school go to dinner together.  We do this every summer and have been since the 80s.  I was one of the last to join in and the number has dwindled but basically it’s the same core people, and half of them were on rally.  I was not. 

  In the sixth grade I had a fight with a girl who WAS rally and who still epitomizes all that can be bad about a rally girl.  She is a gossip.  She is conniving, and I don’t trust her.  She is still making it her business to run the world, and thank God for we wouldn’t be having a reunion next year, if she weren’t the same bossy bitch she always was.  Anyway, I had to sit next to her tonight.  She called me twice to see if I was coming, wanting me to call her back.  I have never called her and I would never call her.  I just realized she had been pumping me about the breakup of my friendship with the realtor (who lived across the street from me my whole childhood and who these people all knew because she was in the class behind us). 

  That was Tuesday.  This is Thursday and I have recovered, mostly.  I spent the afternoon with the youngest who is back from Idaho where she lived in the woods for six weeks blazing trails and wiping with moss.  They had no showers and had to drink water from the creek to which they added iodine, I think she said.  She is here with her girlfriend, who I adore, but they are moving to San Francisco so the girlfriend can go to art school.  The mother picked out an expensive apartment without consulting my daughter, one which will take the girlfriend’s dog.  It is way more money than my daughter can afford and the mother signed a year’s lease for them.  My daughter has never committed to anyone or anything that long so this should be interesting.

  I and everyone in the family are concerned that she is choosing not to go to college.  She has been working on and off and traveling.  She spent the summer in Europe and showed me the pictures today.  I am terribly proud of her adventurous spirit, which she said she got from me.  She is the only one who totally takes after her father, physically, and when I teased her today that the only thing she got from me was my bad sense of direction, she corrected me.  It suddenly occurred to me that maybe she wanted to take after me. She grew up hearing a lot of negative things about me from her dad so all these years I kind of thought she preferred taking after him. 

  But, anyway, I was at my ex-mother-in-law’s, dropping my daughter off, when she suggested I see the movie they had made.  It was from 1976 when a friend of the family  followed us all around with a video camera.  She was a friend of mine, too, so I was comfortable in front of the camera.  She came to my job, my house, my husband’s job, his brother’s house; the whole family was in this movie.  Even my two springer spaniels had leading roles.  It was such a trip to see myself then and remember the rental house where we lived before we had kids.

  All this history showing up in one week feels like a bit much.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  I looked really good, though, and I’m glad my kids could see the two of us together and happy.  After the movie was over his mother got up and went into her bedroom.  She came back with a beautiful picture of our firstborn in my arms that I had given her for Christmas.  I assume she still has ambivalent feelings about my leaving so I was especially grateful for the gift. 

  It’s such a mix of emotion and times.  You could see in the movie that I thought I was hot shit, way more than the rest of them.  But at the table the other night I was sitting in the corner, the rally girls talking about their old uniforms and parties and the hangers-on remembering their wild times.  I went once and hated it but every time they’d remember another hilarious antic they’d say, “Prudy, you were there, right?”  And I’d say I didn’t remember.  But I did remember.  I was remembering the hellish life my mother provided and the kind of underground person I used to be.  I’m glad I saw the movie.

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