The white cotton ones.
I dropped my clothes on the floor. I swallowed hard. Suddenly, staring down at Jane’s rolled-up underwear, I felt like crying. I took a deep breath. I remembered the first time I’d ever seen her. She’d been wearing white panties and a pair of jeans with a rip in the crotch to school. I had been sitting across from her in the library and I had been able to see that white peeking through the hole in the blue, and nothing had ever turned me on so much in my life.
My eyes were wet as I bent over, reached into the hamper for the panties. I picked them up gingerly, handling them as though they were breakable, and carefully unrolled them. They felt damp to my touch, and when I lifted them to my face, the cotton smelled faintly of her.
“Jane,” I whispered, and it felt good to say her name.
I whispered it again. “Jane,” I said. “Jane…”
Ten
Jane had been gone for three weeks.
I settled into my chair and looked at the calendar I’d tacked up on the wall to my left. There were fifteen red X’s drawn through the month’s workdays.
As I did each morning, I crossed out another date, today’s date. My eye was drawn back to that first X — September 3. I had not heard from Jane since she’d left. She had not called to see how I was; she had not sent me a letter to tell me that she was all right. I’d expected to hear from her, if not for sentimental reasons, then for practical reasons. I figured there were logistical things she’d need to discuss — belongings she’d forgotten and wanted me to send, mail she wanted forwarded — but she had cut off all contact cold.
I worried about her, and more than once, I thought about going to the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, or even calling her parents, just to make sure she was okay, but I never did. I guess I was afraid to.
Although I could tell from the drastic decrease in mail that she had put in a change-of-address request at the post office, she still occasionally received bills or letters or junk mail, and I saved it all for her.
Just in case.
After work, I stopped by Von’s for milk and bread, but I felt so depressed that I ended up buying half a gallon of chocolate ice cream and a bag of Doritos as well. All of the checkout stands were crowded, so I picked the one with the shortest line. The cashier was young and pretty, a slim brunette, and she was bantering happily and easily with the man ahead of me as she ran his items over the scanner. I watched the two of them with envy. I wished I had the ability to start up a conversation with a perfect stranger, to discuss the weather or current events or whatever it was that people talked about, but even in my imagination I was unable to do it. I just could not seem to think of what to say.
Jane had been the one to start the first conversation between us. If the responsibility had been left up to me, we probably never would have gotten together.
When I reached the cashier, she smiled at me. “Hello,” she said. “How are you today?”
“Fine,” I told her.
I watched in silence as she rang up my items on the cash register. “Six forty-three,” she said.
Silently, I handed her the money.
I’d never thought about it before, but as I put the ice cream in the freezer, the Doritos and bread in the cupboard, I realized that there’d always been something within me that distanced people. Even my relationships with my grandparents were overly formal; we never hugged or kissed, though they were naturally affectionate. Ditto with my parents. Throughout my life, our “friends of the family,” my parents’ friends, had always been nice to me, cordial to me, but I never got the impression that any of them liked me.
They didn’t dislike me.
They just didn’t notice me.
I was a nobody, a nothing.
Had it always been this way? I wondered. It was possible. I had always had friends in elementary school, junior high school, high school, but never very many of them, and as I thought back now, I realized that nearly all of them had been, like myself, totally nondescript.
On an impulse, I went into the bedroom, opened the closet door, and found the pile of sealed boxes under my hanging clothes — the record of my past. Dragging the boxes to the center of the room, I ripped off the masking tape and opened their tops one by one, digging through the contents of each until I found my high school yearbooks.
I took the books out, began looking through them. I hadn’t seen the yearbooks since high school, and it was strange to see again those places, those faces, those fashions and hairstyles from half a decade back. It made me feel old and a little sad.
But it also made me feel more than a little uneasy.
As I’d suspected, there were no photographs of me or my friends in any of the sports, clubs, or dance pictures. There were not even any of us in the random shots of the campus that were sprinkled throughout the books. We were nowhere to be seen. It was as though my friends and I had not even existed, as though we had not eaten lunch at the school or walked across campus from class to class.
I looked up the names of John Parker and Brent Burke, my two best friends, in the section of the senior yearbook dedicated to individual photographs of each class member. They were there, but they looked different than I recalled, the cast of their features slightly off. I stared at the pages, flipping back and forth from Brent to John and back again. I had remembered them as looking more interesting than they apparently had, more intelligent, more alive, but it seemed my memory had altered the facts. For there they were, staring blandly into the camera five years ago and out of the pages at me now, their faces devoid of even the slightest hint of character.
I turned to the blank green pages at the front of the book to see what they’d written to me on this, the eve of our graduation.
“I’m glad I got to know you. Have a great summer. John.”
“Have a cool summer and good luck. Brent.”
These were my best friends? I closed the yearbook, licked my dry lips. Their comments were just as impersonal as those of everyone else.
I sat there for a moment in the middle of the floor, staring at the opposite wall. Was this what it was like for people with Alzheimer’s? Or people going crazy? I took a deep breath, trying to gather my courage to open the yearbook again. Had it been them or myself? I wondered. Or both? Was I now as big a blank to them as they were to me, merely a name from the past and a hazily remembered face? I opened the yearbook again, turned to my own photo, stared, at my picture. I found my visage not bland, not blank, not nondescript, but interesting and intelligent.
Maybe I had grown more average over the years, I thought absurdly. Maybe it was a disease and I’d caught it from John and Brent.
No. I wished it were something as simple as that. But there was something far more comprehensive, far more frightening here.
I skimmed the rest of the yearbook, scanning the pages, and a familiar envelope fell from between the last page and the back cover. Inside the envelope were my grades. I opened the envelope, scanned the thin translucent sheets of paper. My senior year: all C’s. Junior year: the same.
I hadn’t been average in English, I knew. I’d always been an above-average writer.
But my grades did not reflect that.
I had gotten C’s across the board.
A wave of cold passed over me, and I dropped the yearbook and hurried out of the bedroom. I went into the kitchen, took a beer out of the refrigerator, popped open the top and chugged it down. The apartment seemed silent again. I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the sink, staring at the door of the refrigerator.
How deep did this thing go?
