A Glint of Moonlight

The desire to channel my inner dachshund and roll around on my back in the grass is overwhelming. Gray stone buildings with castle turrets and lead glass windows hug my moonlit patch of green, and I feel more at ease in the world than I have in years. I want to inhale the scent of earth deep into my lungs and breathe it out again through my pores. I want to feel the prickle of each blade of grass against my skin. And if there are creatures I might hear chomping at the clover or crawling along the grass blades, so much the better. I will be one with them all — and not just because of the two glasses of wine I had with dinner hours ago or the shot of whiskey I carry with me now in a plastic cup. The authentic me, the me from before, is here somewhere, loamy and fecund and calling for resurrection. Which is the best explanation I have for why, at just after 11 p.m. at my 25th college reunion, I am lying in the grass when a voice I haven’t heard in 26 years calls my name.

“Stella? What are you doing down there?”

I bolt up and pat the ground for inspiration. I’ve spent years imagining what it would be like when Iris and I finally met again, but none of the scenarios have started like this.

“I am …” Looking for the back of my earring? Collecting worms for a fishing expedition? “… immersing myself in the grass,” I say at last. And then I tilt my head sideways and deliver what my husband calls my Katharine Hepburn laugh, high-pitched and a little fake (and utterly charming, if you ask me). “I am the grass.”

Iris smiles, revealing a still-crooked eye tooth. “You haven’t changed a bit, Stella Bella.”

I know better. Still, the chorus of angels that lives behind my ribcage rises in song at her use of my old nickname, and the muscles that have guarded my heart for more than two decades begin to relax.

 

I may not remember the first time I met Iris, but I’ll never forget the second. It was day two of freshman orientation at our small East Coast women’s college. We’d just finished another round of community building and meetings in the oldest academic building on campus, and we were about to catch the bus for a barbecue at our co-ed partner college two miles away. As an 18-year-old heterosexual woman raised on Pride and Prejudice and ’80s rom-coms, I had no problem believing that whatever happened that afternoon could determine the course of my entire life, so of course I popped into the bathroom for a mirror check before heading to the bus. When the bathroom door opened again seconds later, I ducked into one of the two stalls. The politics of my new home were something I was just starting to figure out, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be caught touching up the makeup that I was pretending not to wear. It was hard enough getting used to thinking of myself as a woman, not a girl.

“Enough already about gym credits and how to make an appointment with your dean,” the new arrival grumbled.

I peeked through the gap between the metal stall door and frame to see who it was. Razor sharp bob, pastel pink lipstick. Preppy in a way my Midwestern self had never imagined was possible in real life.

“I’ve been looking forward to this barbecue since we got here. Women are great and all, but I have needs.” The woman pulled a tube of lip gloss out of her purse and leaned in toward the mirror. Then she held up a hand and waved. “You do know I can see you.”

I jerked back. I definitely would not have been standing there with my eyeballs pressed against the gap if I’d known. That’s when I remembered her name: Iris. Delaware. Pre-med. With a California roommate. We were in the same dorm. I considered adding “rude” to my list-of-knowing, seeing as how she’d just called me out for hiding when everyone knew the decent thing to do was look the other way, but Iris was turning out to be more interesting than I’d expected.

I heard Iris cranking the arm of the paper towel dispenser, pulling off a towel. “Stella, right? You about through?”

“Yep,” I said. Abandoning all pretense, I left the stall without flushing.

Standing next to Iris at the mirror, I dug in the pocket of my cut-offs for the Estée Lauder “free gift with purchase” tube of lipstick I carried with me everywhere I went. Iris watched as I dotted my lips with the bright coral color that was the perfect complement to my vintage cotton shirt with gathered shoulders and delicate peach flowers.

“That’s a great color for you,” she said. But if this was her way of hinting that I should offer her the tube to try herself, I chose not to understand. “I never would have applied here if it hadn’t been for the Bi-Co,” she continued. “Don’t get me wrong, women’s colleges are great, but I’m not waiting four years before I go on another date. Having men in the vicinity is vital.”

I’d barely had one proper boyfriend in high school and there was nothing vital about him. I considered myself an independent: It would be nice to have a man, but I didn’t actually need one. That said, I was standing in a bathroom putting on lipstick and blotting the sides of my nose with a paper towel. I wasn’t not interested.

If everything in the next five minutes had gone the boring, entirely expected way things usually do, Iris and I would have spent the next year brushing our teeth together in the communal bathroom, maybe even meeting up for the occasional meal in the dining hall, but we never would have become us.

Iris reached for the bathroom door handle, a large knob in a brass plate with a keyhole. Like everything in the building but the bathroom stalls themselves, it was grand with history. “What the — ?” Iris threw her shoulder into it this time, but the door didn’t budge.

“Hello?” I called through the keyhole of the inexplicably jammed door. “Anyone there?” But when I peered through the hole, all I saw was one very empty hallway. I took my own turn rattling the handle, pushing against the door. I’d have been inclined to say there had to be someone out there roaming the halls — we couldn’t have been in the bathroom more than five minutes — but it was a Sunday afternoon before the start of the academic year. Did someone have to be out there?

“We’re going to miss the bus,” Iris said after another round of shouting and door-pounding. “I think it’s a plot.” She leaned her back against the door and said, with complete seriousness, “You know, lock up the pretty people, reduce the competition.”

We both snorted with laughter.

Preppy Iris from Delaware was growing on me for sure.

Luckily for us, there was a window along the exterior wall that stretched from the top of a brass-colored radiator nearly to the ceiling. I folded back the lower of the two tiers of shutters and, together, Iris and I hoisted open the window. “Not exactly an easy jump,” I said, leaning over the radiator and sticking my head outside. Technically, we were on the first floor of the building, but we’d also walked up at least ten steps to get in the front door. We were talking high-dive material. And instead of water, a row of squat, very prickly-looking bushes hugged the wall of the building.

“We could always wait for maintenance to find us on Monday morning,” Iris said, with no conviction whatsoever. She was already climbing up on the radiator. If anyone was going to wait for maintenance, it would be me, and only me. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

I was surprised to discover I couldn’t think of a thing.

Minutes later, Iris and I were both on the ground, laughing like this was exactly the way we’d planned for the afternoon to go. The bush directly beneath the window was smooshed, its talons having marked up the backs of my legs when I dropped down instead of jumping out, the way Iris had instructed me to do, but the unqualified botanist in me was sure it would survive. Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at the barbecue, still laughing — because wasn’t it all hysterical? Getting locked in a bathroom like that? Missing the bus and not having a clue where to go? Iris wove a tender piece of green-leafed twig through my barrette. “A shrub memento,” she said, putting a second piece in her pocket because it wouldn’t stay tucked beneath her headband. “To mark the day.” The shrub was a boxwood, I learned later, the kind that smells at least a little bit like cat pee.

 

Iris doesn’t look the same, I think now, studying her 40-something face in the moonlight. She looks better. She is elegant in her miraculously unwrinkled linen tunic over slim pants. Thanks to Instagram — because yes, I check in on her at least once a year — I know that she’s a psychiatrist with her own practice in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband and two ethereal children. The husband — an attorney according to his LinkedIn — looks smarmy and self-important. Thank goodness; otherwise all that perfection might have been insufferable.

At least she didn’t marry Him.

I watch as the woman whose picture still appears in my brain catalogue under “best friend” takes in my flowing silk pants, the bright scarf draped around my neck, the delicate gold chain at my throat. “It’s like I never left,” she says, although she can’t possibly believe it.

“I was thinking about going back to the dorm,” Iris says then, “see who I remember. Want to come?”

Before I can answer, a shadow blob bounces toward us on the sidewalk, and two middle-aged women skip into the circle of light from the lamppost. There’s Brooke, who is an economist at the Federal Reserve in her regular life — and one of my favorite people on earth. And Caitlyn, who is one of the only people from our graduating class I try to forget about between reunions — and definitely not one of my favorite people on earth. Both women are shoeless and wearing what I assume are the flowers from dinner tucked behind their ears. They are radiant and exuberant, looking ever so more like themselves than they did when they first arrived.

“We’ve been looking all over for you!” Brooke gushes, her face animated. It is Brooke who stepped in when Iris decided not to come back to school for our senior year. Brooke who has flown into St. Louis for my kids’ births, my dad’s death. Brooke who calls and texts and — is. “We thought you might want to come with us to — ” Brooke’s smile flattens when she recognizes Iris.

I try using mental telepathy to communicate, Don’t worry, I’m fine, but Caitlyn has glommed onto Iris and is screeching too loudly for me to concentrate.

“Iris!” Caitlyn sends a barrage of air kisses Iris’s way. “I’m so glad you came! I was just telling Jeremy I can’t wait until we’re all back on the Cape this summer.”

And there it is, one perfect sentence that sums up why I dislike Caitlyn the way I do, no matter how many times Brooke tries to convince me she’s actually really nice. When Caitlyn turned 21, she gave her entire trust fund to charity because she wanted to get back at her parents; for what I don’t know. I’d never been able to wrap my head around how someone I’d seen picking her zits in the bathroom was 1) that rich and had 2) just given away more money than my parents were likely to earn in their entire lives. But if Caitlyn had simply made me mad, or even disgusted, I might have gotten over it eventually. It’s the fact that she also made me jealous that was unforgiveable.

“Come with us to the dance party,” Caitlyn insists. “You, too, Stella.”

“Or maybe we let these two get reacquainted,” Brooke says. As she links her arm through Caitlyn’s, her eyes never leave mine. It is as if she’s waiting for a sign that this is what I want.

Caitlyn squeals, “That’s right! I forgot you two used to be friends.”

“We can all catch up in the morning over strawberries,” I say, referring to the college tradition of marking significant events with strawberries and cream. Then I resist the urge to pry Caitlyn’s hands off Brooke and shout to the hills how she used to belt out Andrew Lloyd Webber’s greatest hits from the showers of our communal bathrooms.

I wait until Brooke and Caitlyn have receded into the darkness before turning to face Iris. “You and Caitlyn are friends now?”

“Isn’t she terrific?” Iris’s face is serious. “Remember how much we used to like her?”

In all the times I’d wanted to be Caitlyn, I’m sure I never liked her. And I thought Iris hadn’t either. I wait for Iris to give me the punchline so I can laugh, but all she says is, “She works with Art. That’s my — ”

I know who Art is. He’s the guy whose wedding I was supposed to attend as maid of honor. The guy whose family vacations my family was supposed to be sharing. I take off walking, fast.

Iris has to trot to catch up. “One day Art came home from work and said a woman I’d gone to school with had applied for a position at his firm. He asked if I knew her and a few months later we were all hanging out with our kids. It’s not like I planned it.”

 

Iris and I spent the summer between our junior and senior years of college in Boston. I was 20, soon to be 21. There were no classes, no papers, nothing to do but nanny (me) and wait tables (her). We were giddy with plans and possibilities. And then Iris’s boyfriend came to visit from Washington, D.C. “He’s a good one,” Iris told me. “You two should hang out while I’m at work. I’ll catch you after.”

He picked me up in a red Mazda. We saw Like Water for Chocolate in one of the old theatres downtown. The only thing I remember about the movie was the warmth of his hand at the back of my neck, the whisper of his breath. Too close. Fingers in my hair. Down my back.

What about Iris?

What about Iris?

Spilling into the muggy night, Iris’s boyfriend and I fell onto, into each other. We made it to his car, sucking, rubbing. It took him climbing on top of me before I pushed him away. Tugging, gasping. I need to pee. My head banged against the door. Enough. There were lights outside the window. People. I’ve got to go.

I waited to call Iris until the Monday after that night at the movies, when I knew her boyfriend would have gone back to D.C. She didn’t answer, so I called her again on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I left a message on her machine. Hey. On Thursday, I left another. We need to talk. On Friday, I took the bus to her house and banged on her door. She was out, her housemate said; he didn’t know when she’d be back.

On Saturday, I wrote the letter.

He started it. I tried to get him to stop.

I was desperate with the need to explain.

It didn’t mean anything.

To justify.

It was supposed to be our summer but all you thought about was him. All you talked about was him.

To beg.

I’m sorry. Please forgive me.

Then there were the things I couldn’t say:

How good his attention felt.

How maybe a part of me was jealous and wanted to get back at her.

I never found out what her boyfriend told Iris about what happened that night at the movies because she never called, never wrote. He could have blamed me or said nothing at all. All I knew was that Iris didn’t come back to college that fall. A friend of a friend said she and her boyfriend left for Europe at the end of the summer.

 

Iris and I are standing outside Old Library, a collegiate gothic beauty that is one of my favorite buildings on campus, when she takes my hand and twirls me under her arm, strains of 1980s Madonna thrumming from the building’s interior courtyard. We have ended up at the reunion dance party after all. But instead of joining the group, we walk through Old Library’s labyrinth of faculty offices and classrooms to a small arched door that looks like it should lead to a utility closet. I don’t really expect it to open, but when it does, revealing the stairs to the roof, it feels like a good omen. We emerge onto the rooftop balcony as the Spice Girls give way to Ace of Base, and we have a terrific view of the euphoric hopping, singing, and mostly shirtless crowd at the dance party below. (Our college parties have a reputation for women stripping to their bras — to celebrate our liberation from the patriarchy, of course.)

“Are you sure we shouldn’t go down and show them how it’s done?” Iris asks. She is not dancing exactly, but her body has inhabited the rhythm of the music; it hums.

“No, thanks.” I sit down on the low stone wall that runs the length of the balcony. I have no interest in displaying the concentric circles of fat that push up and out of my pants like one of those Fisher Price multi-colored ring sets for babies.

Iris sits beside me on the ledge. “You were always so cautious. Never one to rush into things.”

I’d like to take this as a compliment, but old insecurities rise beneath the surface and I doubt that’s the way she intended it. “Not everyone is born knowing she wants to be a doctor.” So far I’ve gone through stints as a historian, a math teacher, a musician, and an accountant. At 46, I’ve got two teenagers who cringe when I speak and a husband I have no idea how to appreciate. I am plotting my next reinvention.

“I just knew you’d be a spy,” Iris says, “after all those years taking Russian. Or — wait a minute — ” she grins and waggles one eyebrow. “Are you a spy?”

My therapist says I should figure out what I want and stop worrying so much about everyone else, but what I want most is to be is the kind of woman who doesn’t need a therapist. I think someday I’ll go back to school. Or open a bakery. I’d be open to spying, too, if my Russian weren’t so rusty.

In the pause between “I’m Too Sexy” and “Everybody Dance Now,” a woman who is younger than us by at least three reunion cycles joins Iris and me on the balcony overlooking the dance party. Her name is Esma and she lives in West Philly with her surgeon-in-training husband and their infant son. “I didn’t expect to find anyone up here,” she says. “Most people don’t know they leave the door to the roof unlocked sometimes.”

I want to tell her that Iris and I are not most people, but this feels unnecessarily antagonistic. Then Esma tells us she got her Ph.D. in history at Wisconsin and is finishing her first year in a tenure-track position at Temple. In an instant, this woman I have only just met and who, by all accounts, is perfectly nice, comes to represent everything I am not, everything I did not, and everything I will not. And I don’t like her one bit.

“My friends are on their way,” Esma says. “One of them had to go back to the dorms to put their toddler to bed. Their husband was supposed to take care of everything, but he just called and said he can’t get their daughter to stop screaming.”

Get used to it, I think.

“Another one of my friends is finishing up a work meeting. She left the office early so she could be here for reunion dinner, and now her boss is making her Zoom.”

Blah, blah, blah.

“Then there’s my partner,” Esma says. “He hasn’t contacted me one single time since I’ve been here to let me know how things are going. And we have a baby!”

That’s when I notice the tag sticking up from the back of Esma’s shirt, the torn cuticles around her otherwise perfect manicure. The barest twinge of empathy creeps along my chest. Parenting teenagers is a thankless hell of confusion and self-doubt with zero adoration or spontaneous hugs. It’s a million times worse than the baby stage, five hundred thousand times worse than the toddler stage. Esma is just getting started. Iris and I could lie and say everything is going to be fine, that Esma and her friends will get the jobs, the promotions they deserve, that their precious babies will never grow into teenagers who despise them, that their partners will always have their backs, but that would be cruel. I catch Iris’s eye, and I am certain that she is thinking the same thing I am.

Thankfully, Esma’s friends arrive before the silence stretches into something embarrassing. As she waves goodbye, the D.J. blasts the distinctive opening guitar riff to “Closer to Fine.” The college has two school songs, the official Greek hymn praising Athena, and the unofficial Indigo Girls classic that covers everything else. There isn’t anyone within earshot who doesn’t stop what they’re doing and begin to sing.

Iris and I clamber back down the stairs, through the building, and out into the night. Beneath the cloak of a 200-year-old oak tree, we join hands and begin to spin, galloping sideways, hair whipping, until we fall, dizzy and sated, onto the grass. When the song ends, a passel or clutch or parliament or murder — what do you call a group of women, anyway? — storms the green outside the Old Library and begins to cheer in Greek. We are transformed and lightened. We are the moonbeams of the night.

An old friend from Russian class comes by to say hello, along with a woman so smart she’d left me crushing in history sophomore year. The former debate team captain who teaches carpentry to kids. The Polish woman I’d once spent the night with outside, staring up at the stars.

Partner … money … Pulitzer … abroad … Snippets of conversations caught and spun from person to person. Our numbers grow. Rehab … perimenopause … bankruptcy … divorce …

When the tower clock above us insists it is two in the morning, we scoff. We throw back our heads and chortle. All we’d once imagined for ourselves is suddenly a little less impossible once again.

“With five kids, I spend all my time in the kitchen,” says a woman with purple hair and a septum ring. “Why not write a cookbook?”

“I make smells.”

“… race cars.”

Yoga … teenagers … music … books …

“Did you see … ?”

“Did you hear … ?”

“… best orgasm I ever had.”

I think of the college’s head of admissions when I was a student, a woman I’d once seen sitting cross-legged on the floor of her office, surrounded by stacks of applications and exclaiming over a girl — woman — from rural Wyoming who was a National Merit Finalist and champion turkey-raiser who made all her own clothes and could recite one entire book of the Faerie Queene from memory. I wonder what she would make of us now.

When the crowd thins, Iris and I leave, too. We walk past the library that’s actually a library, past the campus center, to the top of the hill overlooking the soccer fields. There we stop at the point where a canopy of oaks leads to a stone bench: Senior Row. The last time Iris and I stood here together, we’d just finished our junior-year finals. Packed and ready for our summer in Boston, we were seniors, self-proclaimed ones anyway, and we could walk the stretch of trees beginning to end without the risk of superstitious retaliation. Maybe we should have waited until grades were posted. Or until school began again in August, when there could be no question of our senior status. Or maybe what we should have done was weave a spell: turn around three times, hop on one foot, pat our heads while rubbing our stomachs, and repeat a string of magic words.

Now, holding my shoes in my left hand, I reach for Iris with my right. Together we begin the walk one more time. The breeze is almost refreshing. The bunion on my left big toe almost doesn’t hurt. I could almost banish the memories of that long-ago night and send them streaming from my hair, down and out and away forever. We make our way toward a line of hammocks that wasn’t here when we were in college. As Iris climbs in and I scoot in beside her, I catch the still familiar hint of ginger with a tang of lemon off her skin. I wait for the sound of Iris’s breath to quiet the racket in my head. I wait for the courage to say, “I’m sorry.” For her to say, “I forgive you,” and “Can we try again?” But my lips are dry and there’s a crook in my neck, and so I say nothing, and neither does she.

In less than 12 hours, I will be back home. My kids will devour the packages of Tastykakes and Herr’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips I have tucked into my carry-on. My husband will ask the dutiful questions about who I saw and what I did and then he and I will pick up where we left off, arguing about social media time limits for the kids and whose turn it is to make dinner. It will be as if I never left.