40. Reunion

Do you listen to This American Life?

Hello again, wonderful readers. Thank you for your patience as I navigated a grueling semester. I plan to write with more regularity this summer. I’m excited to be back!

In a recent episode of This American Life, “The Lives of Others,” we hear the story of Sarah, a free-spirited woman who attends her 10th reunion at Oberlin College. The night takes her to a party hosted by current students, and Sarah sleeps with the host: Dan. In the morning Dan asks her last name and when she reveals it—Blust—he flips out. It turns out that long after Sarah had moved out, Dan lived in her residence hall, Keep Cottage. By chance, back when Dan was a freshman, he found a photo she’d left behind in Keep and invented a short story about Sarah Blust, imagining, and authoring, the life of a woman he didn’t know.

I heard this episode just a few weeks before I attended my own 5^th reunion at Yale, and the story primed me for the inevitably weird interactions that accompany the convergence of graduates and current students in a formative environment. I worked reunions while in college, so I’d gotten a preview of the disorienting experience. For two weeks over the summer, I reported to the residence halls at 7am to clean dorm rooms, make beds, and arrange three rolled white towels into a little Y, in preparation for alums to relive the experience of sleeping on stiff twin XL mattresses. At the end of each day, we’d sneak plates of food from the buffets (the 50^th reunion had steak and lobster, the 5th reunion, an encore of the dining hall’s greatest hits) and people-watch from the corners of the courtyard.

It was a running joke to poke particular fun at the 5^th reunion attendees. They were getting hammered every night and having one-night stands, slinking back across the courtyard the next morning while we stripped their linens and organized their room keys. We snickered about how they were behaving like undergrads, like us—shouldn’t they have grown out of that by now, these 27-year-olds with lives and careers?

But five years later, we were in their shoes. And we had not grown out of it.

New Haven rolled out a string of glorious sunny days for our reunion in early June. The overtones of the weekend were of homecoming. The undertones were of finding a partner (whether for a night, or for life). It was a second chance for those of us who hadn’t coupled up as undergrads like our peers who returned to campus five years later, fingers asparkle.

On the first night of reunion, I saw a classmate who, rather than writing his pronouns on his name tag, as was suggested, had scrawled “single.”

On the second night of reunion, a “Singles List” came out. If you were available and wanted your classmates to know it, you filled out a google form and received a sheet of hundreds of names, clues as to whom you might have a shot with.

Throughout the whole weekend, alcohol flowed freely. Open bars lubricated a barbecue lunch cookout, a tour of a multimillion-dollar student center, and, of course, the evenings of mingling and dancing and shooting our shots.

I understood what the reunion was—a calculated effort by the university to remind us how much we’d loved our Bright College Years and to get us to cough up donations to the alumni fund. If you found your future spouse, even better! That made you more likely to become a lifelong benefactor. 

But in practice, reunion was a rare opportunity to reconnect. Having moved 3,000 miles away from many of my college friends, this weekend was a chance for me to see most of them at once, in the place where we’d forged our relationships.

Beneath a massive white tent erected in a college courtyard, each night I flitted between close friends and acquaintances I had failed to keep up with. I asked and answered the same barrage of predictable questions: Where are you living? What do you do now? Dating anyone?

It was natural to slip into conversation with the people I’d known well in school, the ones I still texted and visited in New York. But I was struck, and a little embarrassed, by how many people I’d forgotten about completely. People I recognized, had maybe taken a class with, seen at a party, spotted in a dining hall, but who remained strangers and, for the last five years, had gone on living their lives, lives I knew nothing about. I talked to some of them—about journalism and freelancing, about injuries and running, about returning to school and camping and the poison oak rash I’d gotten on my butt the previous weekend—but I felt a distance between us, everyone’s attention wandering over to who they might talk to next. 

I had not come to my reunion with the intention of finding a life partner, or even a hookup, but that horny, hungry energy sharpened our eyes to everyone around us. One of my friends had been “laying groundwork” with old flames since Thursday. I’d been putting in none of that work, and by the last night, Saturday, I had not kindled that steamy energy with any of my classmates.

I had, however, noticed a cute bartender, a current student, who had cheerfully served me a few too many whiskey sours. So at the last call on the last night, emboldened by alcohol, my best friend turned hype-man, and the fuck-it energy that comes from dropping your phone on the dance floor and breaking the touchscreen, I went to ask her out.

“What should I say?” I asked my friend, shouting over the music on the dance floor. “You should ask if she listens to This American Life,” he said. 

Two minutes later I was back at the bar, botching my drink order in my nervousness, then blurting, “Do you listen to This American Life?”

“Yeah,” she said, and smiled.

Elated, I continued, “Did you listen to the most recent episode about the woman who comes back for her 10^th college reunion?”

She hadn’t. Gulp.

Suddenly I was scrambling. I hadn’t prepared for this scenario. But I barreled ahead, explaining the Sarah Blust story when I should have just nixed it, surely freaking this young woman out in the process of telling her about an older alum who hooks up with a student a decade her junior. When I finally finished the explanation, my face hot, I said “This is forward,” (lol), “but I think you’re cute and cool, and I’m wondering what you’re doing after your shift.”

“I’m gonna go home,” she said gently, letting me down. I must have grimaced, as she then offered some consoling flattery, telling me she’d thought I was cool and gorgeous, that she’d noticed me over the last few days. But by this point, the man to my left was getting impatient, and he demanded his whiskey coke. She slid my drink toward me. I picked it up and left the bar.

It had been a long shot, and I hadn’t expected it to work. But I still wanted it to. I wanted to be Sarah Blust. Less so because she “gets the girl” and more so because being Sarah Blust lets you become a story. Being Sarah Blust lets you pretend.

What I remember feeling acutely devastated about, as my college graduation approached, was that I was about to be erased from a place that had opened my world, a place that, at the time, was my world. Sarah Blust had survived this erasure; Dan found an artifact of her story and reimagined it, and Sarah, unbeknownst to her, still existed as a character in her college world. 

Part of the allure of reunion weekend, living in the dorms and staying out way too late and eating Wenzels (a grinder sandwich of chicken and hot sauce, the drunk food of choice in New Haven), is the gift of three days of suspended time where you can just barely make believe you’re still a fresh-faced coed. No one wants to say that in earnest because no one wants to admit there’s a chance those were some of the best years of life. I don’t believe they were the best years of my life. I am having a best year now. I have best years ahead. But I do believe that my college experience was singular.

Never again do we live in such close proximity to our friends, which I remembered one morning of the reunion weekend, as I brushed my teeth in a communal bathroom while two people showered and two people shat. 

I had spent a lot of the weekend feeling far away from people. Imagining a chasm because I hadn’t been keeping up, so I assumed I couldn’t keep up—how would we possibly bridge the last five years in a weekend? But that mindset had me keeping people at arm’s length. It had me keeping them frozen as the 22-year- olds I knew five years prior. It had me pretending—briefly pursuing a student bartender because it made me feel like I still belonged in this place, like I hadn’t aged out of this era. 

The rest of the night, I felt more myself, more my age. I danced hard, and someone I hadn’t talked to since graduating came up to me and told me I looked really happy. “I am,” I said. 

Once the music stopped, I followed a parade of people to an afterparty at the massive stone tomb of a secret society, Book & Snake, and waited outside the iron gates to see if I’d be admitted as the literal gatekeepers selectively plucked people from the crowd and creaked the gate open, allowing only them to enter. I was not among the chosen. At first, I was pissed off at the same people still playing their same game of exclusivity from five years ago. And then I was relieved—to have graduated from that game of who’s who. 

I walked back across the campus with my friends who had been barricaded on the outside of the gates with me. We paused on a street corner, not crossing and not crossing for many light cycles, joking about books and snakes, basking in the feeling of closeness I had missed and craved all weekend. No performance or pretending, not trying to be Sarah Blust or myself five years ago, just myself as I am now. Finally, we crossed the street in the cooling New England night, and I walked up the stairs to my stiff twin XL bed with the knowledge that none of this is mine anymore. But for a brief moment, it was. 

Fortnightly (lol) Faves

1. Becca Schuh’s phenomenal essay for Dirt, “Bad Waitress.” It’s long, but so worth the time.

2. This Megan Fernandes poem I’m obsessed with: “On Your Departure to California.”

3. Tommy Orange’s There There, which I finished on the plane and wept until the flight attendant came and asked for my drink order. The novel came out a few years ago, and I’m late to the party, but it’s such an astonishing read, and I recommend it immediately.

4. This essay in The Atlantic on why everyone is watching TV with subtitles. I watch movies and television almost exclusively with subtitles and have generally thought of them as curb cuts, an accessibility feature that benefits everyone, but honestly, this piece made me think about them slightly differently. I probably won’t stop, though, cause I love to read a screen :)

5. This Jon Mooallem story in the NYT Magazine on how we think about and remember the pandemic, which I read when it came out and revisited this past week after I mentioned it to a friend.