“After you get her settled, come back out.” Charlie almost had to yell to make himself audible above the music. “It’s completely safe, you know that, right?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather not leave her alone, but stay out and enjoy yourself.” I was sure this was what he’d do anyway, without my encouragement, but I wanted to be generous toward him for a change, to give his pleasure my blessings. I’d heard some of the men talking about heading over to the eating clubs—Charlie had belonged to one called Cottage—and I was just as happy to miss this portion of the evening. The eating clubs seemed to me like nothing more than pretentious fraternities (as the place where upperclassmen ate their meals and held parties, they occupied a row of mansions on Prospect Avenue, and to join, a student “bickered,” a process that appeared negligibly different from rushing), but the clubs inspired such passionate feelings that surely I was missing something. As an undergraduate, Charlie had served as Cottage’s bicker chair, and all this time later, the only bill in which he took real interest—he’d make a point of asking if I’d paid it—was the club’s annual dues, then eighty-five dollars. Cottage had started admitting women in 1986, following a lawsuit filed by a female student, and while Charlie was disdainful of this woman’s “strident feminism,” he didn’t seem to mind that Cottage had gone coed.
Standing beneath the twentieth-reunion tent while the band played “Dancing in the Street,” Charlie said, “You sure you don’t want to come back out? It’ll be more fun with you around.”
It was such a kind, plain statement that I felt my breath catch. I did not see myself as fun anymore, certainly not from Charlie’s perspective. I stepped forward and kissed him on the lips. “I wish I could. Don’t forget to pace yourself—there’ll be a lot going on tomorrow, too.”
He gave a salute. “Bring Ella over here to say good night.”
Eventually, after I’d pried Ella from her new friends and she’d kissed Charlie on the cheek, we walked back to the dorm. As we went down a flight of stairs and under an arch, she said dreamily, “I
THE P-RADE—the heart and soul of Reunions—started around two on Saturday. Thousands of us had lined up by class year on Cannon Green, and as we waited, there was much rowdiness, much drinking of beer (Princetonians are the only people I’ve ever encountered who can drink as much as Wisconsonians and still remain agreeable and upright), and classmates were constantly running into one another and exchanging excited greetings. It was a sunny day in the high seventies—the weather was always of great interest beforehand, whether it would be brutally hot or torrentially rainy—and by the time the parade finally started, the energy of the crowd was uncontainable. Leading the parade were members of the class of ’63, who were celebrating their twenty-fifth reunion—the year considered to be a pinnacle of sorts, though really, I thought, these men were only forty-seven! I looked for Joe Thayer; amid the chaos of bodies and noise and sunshine, I didn’t find him. Next came the oldest graduate who’d made it back—in this case, a gentleman named Edwin Parrish, from the class of 1910—who had the honor of holding a particular silver cane; Mr. Parrish rode in a golf cart driven by a current student, and as he passed, people roared their approval. After the oldest graduate, the order continued chronologically, oldest first, and each class was announced with a class-year banner that ran between poles, the fabric black with orange trim, the numbers orange. For the older classes, known as the Old Guard, the banners were carried by undergraduates or alumni’s grandchildren; for the subsequent classes, they’d be carried by the alumni themselves. Many of the Old Guard were ferried by golf cart, and in some cases, it was not the men but their widows who rode, a sight that I was scarcely the only one to find poignant; I noticed people all around me tearing up. When a member of an older class was walking—a remarkably spry fellow from the class of 1916, who had to be well into his nineties, was practically tap- dancing—the crowd would cheer at a deafening level. In every direction, as far as you looked, there were orange warm-up suits, orange and black blazers and pants and T-shirts, baseball caps, straw boaters encircled by orange and black ribbons, children and adults alike wearing furry tiger tails. Some graduates drove antique cars that they honked jovially, and in celebration of themselves, the major reunion classes had arranged for special performers— brass bands from local high schools, a belly dancer, even a fire-eater—who preceded the class. Charlie leaned over, grinning, and said, “Rich people are bizarre, huh?” This was, of course, my drunken comment to him at Halcyon, and as he squeezed my hand then dropped it to applaud for the class of 1943, I thought that at least in one way, I had not been wrong when I agreed to marry him: He had made my life more colorful.
We waited, and waited some more, and then the class of ’65 passed by, the class of ’66, the class of ’67—they were to our left, they’d been beside us all this time—and at last it was our turn. We fell into step behind them, and Ella got Charlie to start up a ’68 locomotive:
“Then you better get a good draw time,” Charlie replied.
“And you better work hard in school,” I added.
BECAUSE I TRIED to be an organized person, I had always appreciated organization in others, and I must say this: Princeton reunions were spectacularly well executed. All those tents and temporary fences and folding chairs and tables, the beer kegs and matching outfits, the academic talks and the a cappella groups performing around campus at thoughtfully scheduled intervals! The planning that went into the weekend boggled the mind, yet it all proceeded beautifully, seamlessly. For kids, two movies were being screened that night in McCosh 10,
“I was enjoying talking to her,” I said.
“They’re playing ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ and you’d rather discuss a fourth-grade curriculum?”
The band was actually near the end of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and they segued into “Twist and Shout,” which Charlie knew all the words to and animatedly serenaded me with, pointing at me, contorting his face into soulful expressions: “You know you twist so fine (twist so fine) / Come on and twist a little closer, now (twist a little closer)—” He beckoned with one finger, and when I stepped forward, he twirled me. For the “shake it up” part at the end, he raised his arms above his head and really shook them—he wore the orange warm-up pants and a white polo shirt, and there were large sweat spots beneath his arms. At the conclusion to the song, he pulled me to him, grabbing my rear end, kissing me hard on the mouth, and he said, “You want to go fuck in the dorm really fast before Ella gets back?”
He grinned. “Why not? Won’t take long, I promise.” And then he reached up and squeezed my left breast. “It’ll
