Reunion redux: Drama, closure, and mystery plots

Elizabeth Zelvin

Back in the fall, I wrote a post I called The Joys of Reunion, describing how my junior high school class from Queens rediscovered one another 51 years after graduation. It ain’t over, far from it, and I can’t resist writing a follow-up.

We’ve had several get-togethers in addition to the continued barrage of emails that have us what some classmates are calling “addicted” or “hooked.” One was a poetry reading in New York at a progressive bookstore—did you know there are still people out there talking about “the Revolution”? Another was a party at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, which I remember back in the Fifties as being so snooty that Jews (like most of us in the class) were not welcome, and the first African-American to win the national women’s singles title (Althea Gibson in 1957, the year we graduated) was not allowed to shower in the clubhouse. (I hasten to add the place has changed a lot!) We had an all-girls dinner at which, as I’d expected, the conversation became even more intimate than in the mixed group, ranging from first menses to widowhood.

Musical aptitude brought us together in “the orchestra class,” and the teacher we all adored was our music teacher, the father of one of our classmates. He helped us all choose instruments: I wanted to play the flute, but couldn’t coax so much as a squeak out of it, so I ended up as a cellist. He made sure we joined the All-City Orchestra, even though we were younger and less skilled than the other members, because he wanted us to have the experience of playing onstage at Carnegie Hall. That performance remains a vivid memory for those of us who participated. He also charmed us by talking to us in a forthright manner that most adults didn’t in the Fifties. For example, I remember being deliciously shocked and skeptical when he explained the Oedipus complex. I’d never heard of before, my mother the lawyer not being a believer in the unconscious.

Apparently it is rare for a junior high school group to have a reunion, though, as everyone knows, it’s common among high school and college classes. It’s not only the time span that's remarkable, although we’ve certainly seen enormous changes in the half century between then and now. These are the people who knew me, and I them, when we were eleven and twelve years old, that crucial moment on the brink of puberty. One thing that’s changed a lot is the frankness between men and women. So I got to tell the cutest boy in the class how cute I thought he was. That was fun! And I learned he not only thought I was the smartest girl, but he thought I was attractive back then. Man, I wish I’d known that fifty years ago, but it was good news even so belatedly. In fact, it was healing.

One of my most painful memories of junior high was the fiasco of the ninth grade prom. The prom back then, especially in junior high, was not the wedding-level gala proms have become. There was a dance in a hotel ballroom, somebody’s father drove you and your date to and from the event, and if you were lucky you got a chaste peck on the cheek or perhaps the lips (depending on whose father was waiting in the car) at the end of the evening. Most of the invitations were issued at my thirteenth birthday party, which happened to fall in mid-April. For the girls, there was great cachet in being asked to the prom, especially by one of the boys we considered cute. As the evening wore on, everybody but the birthday girl paired off, and I felt worse and worse. Finally, a boy invited me. He was rather a sullen kid, whom I didn’t know well, but I was relieved and grateful I had a date—until he marched up to me in class the next day and rescinded the invitation. (All ended well when someone else invited me—a very nice guy whose path since then has included coming out.)

When we started sleuthing on the Internet to find our long lost classmates, we had trouble locating the boy who’d uninvited me to the prom. And as more people remembered what had happened, the emails included a certain amount of joking about whether we should punish him by not trying to find him. I dealt with the painful memory the way any mystery writer would: I wrote a revenge-fantasy short story. (I changed the circumstances: in the story, the girl gets stood up at the last minute.) Well, it’s a good thing I wrote it fast, because we’ve found the guy. And you know what? He apologized handsomely. The way he remembered it, he hadn’t rejected me because of some flaw in me (and do you know any thirteen-year-old girl in the world who wouldn’t take it that way?)—he’d “chickened out.” What a healing revelation that was. He admitted without prompting that he was “not a well behaved boy” at that time and assured me he’d become “more of a gentleman” in the fifty years since. My heart melted. My first thought was, “How incredibly sweet!” My second: “Thank God I’ve already written the story!”

The Joy of Reunion

Elizabeth Zelvin

It all started with an email from a friend I haven’t seen in fifty years, though she lives only a subway ride away—the same ride I used to take as a high school girl from Queens making weekly pilgrimages to Manhattan, where I live now. She’s a lawyer, and she told me that a mutual friend had died. He and I had remained friends, having much in common. Like me, he was a therapist and a poet—though the third string to his bow was not mystery writing but standup comedy. We weren’t in constant contact, but we always had a long phone conversation around our birthdays, two days apart, in mid-April. This year, I was surprised he didn’t respond to my book announcement or show up at my launch party. The latter was actually on my birthday, and for the first time in decades, he didn’t call or answer my emails. (I don’t phone if I can help it, but that’s another story.)

As my lawyer friend told me, he had a good excuse: he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the fall and died a week before our birthdays. I felt terribly sad not only about losing him but that he’d chosen not to let me know he was ill. Apart from the bad news, I was delighted to be in touch with her again. We had spent two years together in an extraordinary group of boys and girls at Parsons Junior High in Queens (two years after Simon and Garfunkel) designated the SP orchestra class. That meant we did three years of junior high in two, skipping eighth grade, had tested high for musical aptitude, and all had IQs of over 130.

There’s nothing like a death to make you realize you’d better stop putting off getting together. So one thing led to another, we found 10 out of 17 girls and 13 out of 19 guys, and we've already had two gatherings in New York. Sadly, one woman and one man have died. In other words, at 51 years since graduation, it’s high time, and it’s a good thing we’re seizing the moment.

In the old days before the Internet, a reunion was a one-shot event. You got all dressed up, traveled to some hotel ballroom, and spent an evening saying, “Hiiiii! How are you?” and thinking, Good grief, he’s lost all his hair! Thanks to email, the reunion was in full swing a month before the dinner. By the time we met in person, we'd already done enough catching up to be dining and partying not just with fondly remembered childhood friends but with friends indeed.

There is nothing more delicious than fifty-year-old gossip. Among the hot questions were who took whom to the prom, who kissed whom at Spin the Bottle, who became a hippie, who came out. Some confessed to secret crushes. Others reported fascinating career paths. The guy who died developed the eponymous Chaikin's algorithm, a way to draw curves on the computer. The woman who died co-founded a journal of radical Asian scholars. The one who left academia to manage hedge funds has a new marriage and a baby the age of my granddaughter. So far, I’m the only one who’s written a novel, but I’m happy to hear there are mystery lovers among us. In an amazing stroke of networking luck for me, one’s the mom of a major Hollywood producer, and she’s offered to pass on my book. I’ve always wondered who those 30-year-old heads of studios were. Now you know, she says. They’re the kids of people you’ve known since you were kids. So if I become the next Charlaine Harris (I can dream, can’t I?), it’ll be thanks to the SP orchestra class at Parsons Junior High.

Note:In the class picture, I'm fifth from the left in the third row. In the snapshot below, I'm on the left in the second row.