Still Here

My daughter was recently complaining about her chemistry class. Do you remember chemistry class? Does anyone remember chemistry class? I took chemistry almost forty years ago. I suppose I can be forgiven for not remembering how to use a bunsen burner.

The one thing I do remember is where I sat in chemistry class — the row furthest to the right, near the front since I was nearsighted and at the time too self-conscious to wear the thick plastic-rimmed glasses provided for free by my father’s union. To my left sitting in the next row was Christine, Chrissie to her friends. I never called her Chrissie. We weren’t friends.

I remember one day Chrissie arrived in chemistry class having shed the single curl that had previously framed each side her face. The same style the majority of the class wore and a style I slavishly followed despite the effort — and hairspray — needed to bend my stubbornly pin-straight hair into a sad approximation of Chrissie’s perfect flip. But then Chrissie shocked us all by abandoning our collective hairdo for an edgier bi-level cut. “Why would she do that?” we all wondered. “It’s kinda ugly, isn’t it?” But a possibly questionable hair style choice couldn’t keep someone like Chrissie down. By the end of that semester, I’d say about half the class had copied her style, myself included.

Every high school class has a queen bee, and I suppose I was fortunate that our queen bee, Chrissie, wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the “mean girls” from the movies. She was smart, hardworking. A cheerleader, of course. She was not a bully to those girls several tiers below her in the popularity rung. She was never cruel to me. I don’t think she said much to me in our four years together. I was as invisible to her as I’m sure girls lower than me on the oh-so-important popularity ladder were invisible to me. I watched from the sidelines as she had a big sweet sixteen party I wasn’t invited to and was ferried around town in her older boyfriend’s car. Instead of proms, I went to sleepovers with other girls of my ilk. My braces eventually came off. I went away to college and made friends with some of the popular girls. I went to keg parties and kissed boys. I was fine.

I ran into Chrissie the summer before I went to law school. She remembered me. She was nice. All the cool swagger I'd acquired over the previous four years evaporated immediately and I transformed into the invisible nerd ghost from chemistry class. But it was fine. Despite embarrassing myself in front of the homecoming queen, I went to law school, graduated, got a job, found some cool NYC friends and went to trendy bars and even kissed a boy or two. It was one of those boys — a football player from my old high school — that, over the din of mid-90s pulsating dance music, told me about Chrissie.

She had died. Some kind of cancer.

Which was sad, of course, but didn’t stop me from making out with the former football star and gyrating to songs my daughter would now think were lame.

The next day, after my hangover cleared, I let his words sink in. Chrissie was dead.

If my high school class had to vote for who they would've liked to see make it past age thirty, me or Chrissie, there is no doubt who they would've picked. I guess I’m lucky that that’s not how life works.

As years passed and others in both my close and not so close orbits were felled by fate, including, quite tragically, that same football player, I didn’t allow myself to contemplate those forbidden thoughts: Why him? Why her? Why not me? I’ve survived enough years on this earth to know that there is no answer to such questions. Because it’s not fair that Chrissie never got to commiserate with her own daughter about the horrors of the chemistry regents exam or that the cute football player never tossed a ball with his own son. The fact that I'm blessed to have a daughter to roll her eyes at me is something I should thank God for every day. But of course, I don’t. I mean, who does? What with work and laundry and figuring out what to make for dinner again, I don’t stop often enough to smell the roses and count my blessings. In that I suspect I am not alone.

Tomorrow I am going to the beach and I am going to stick my feet in the sand. I will undoubtably say or do something that my daughter will find embarrassing. But I am not going to get annoyed. I am going to wring every bit of enjoyment I can out of our day at the beach. And I will say a little prayer for all those who have entered my close and not so close orbits and can no longer feel the sand between their toes. And I will push aside all the minutia of daily living that I allow to occupy too much space in my head, and try — for at least this one day — to feel truly grateful that I am still here.