The Class of ’57

They had believed then, not least the Statler boys, in that season before the long corrosion of years had set itself like rust upon the bright machinery of intention, before marriages and mortgages and funerals and the slow attrition of Monday mornings had worn grooves into them deeper than rivers wear the earth, they had believed — as only the young can believe with that terrible and holy arrogance born from ignorance of time — that the world itself waited trembling just beyond the football field and the water tower and the courthouse square, waited for them particularly, for Tommy and Nancy and Harvey and Margaret and all the others standing there beneath the swollen June twilight while the principal’s voice droned on into the humid air alive with gnats and honeysuckle and the smell of cut grass beginning already to brown at the edges beneath summer’s first hard heat, and their parents sat fanning themselves with commencement programs while somewhere beyond the schoolyard the freight train moved westward through fields darkening toward evening carrying with it unknown cities and futures and destinies vast enough, they thought, to contain every dream they had ever dared utter aloud and the secret ones also.

Especially the secret ones.

And then Tommy stood beneath strings of faded pennants at the used-car lot out by the highway between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand, across from the Travelodge Motel, where the asphalt softened in August and the Ford Fairlane 500s and Pontiac GTOs sat in resigned rows gleaming falsely beneath dust and sunlight, and he moved among them in his short-sleeved shirt and loosened tie with the desperate cheerful patience of a man who long ago had ceased believing in transformation and settled instead for transaction, for manageable salvations measured monthly with signatures and down payments, while Nancy in the beauty shop arranged the dead hair of aging women into shapes meant to resemble youth, the sharp medicinal odour of peroxide and hot curling irons enveloping her day after day until she herself seemed preserved within it like something pickled against decay, and Harvey beneath the dim fly-specked windows of the grocery store lifted crates and weighed potatoes and extended credit to men he knew would never repay him because he remembered when their fathers had stood where they stood then, all of them bound together in that old endless county ledger where debt and kinship and memory became at last indistinguishable.

And Margaret — who never cared, they said, though perhaps it was only that she had cared once beyond endurance and afterward found herself unable to return wholly from whatever silent interior country sorrow had driven her into — moved through the town untouched by gossip or ambition either one, as though already half departed from the visible world while still inhabiting it bodily, and Jerry drove the Sears truck through rain and harvest dust and winter darkness alike with the radio murmuring static and hockey scores beside him and thermos coffee cooling untouched at his elbow while mile after mile unwound beneath the tires like some endless sentence God Himself had forgotten to finish, and Charlotte, whose laughter in those years had already carried that bright metallic edge of hunger mistaken by men for glamour, moved then from cocktail lounges to motel bars to country clubs always seeking in the faces of men some doorway through which escape might finally enter her life embodied as money or desire or merely attention prolonged past midnight.

Paul sold life insurance because death, unlike dreams, remained dependable, and part-time real estate because land at least could still be touched and measured and transferred hand to hand unlike hope which dissolved upon examination, while Helen beneath the restaurant lights called everyone honey in a voice gone automatic from repetition and Frank fed the mill not merely his labour but his hearing and his spine and finally those inward unnamed portions of himself which no wage could compensate once surrendered, and Jenett remained year after year inside the third-grade classroom with its chalk dust and blunt pencils and maps curling from the walls, watching generations of children pass through her hands while she herself appeared fixed outside time altogether, preserved like a Pleistocene bug trapped in amber at the precise intersection between duty and resignation.

And Bob worked for the city among forms and permits and grievances accumulating endlessly like dead leaves in courthouse gutters, and Jack peered through microscopes in laboratory silence searching perhaps not for scientific truth at all but for evidence that beneath the chaos of human living some order still persisted invisible yet absolute, and Peggy every Sunday put dimes and quarters in her mite box and pressed hymns from the organ in the Presbyterian church while sunlight fell through stained glass upon the bowed heads of congregants already thinking about unpaid bills and roast beef and the secret disappointments waiting with their shoes beside the bed at home, and all the while the years passed not dramatically but stealthily, accumulating in the body unnoticed until one morning a man bent to tie his shoe and heard in his own bones the dry clicking sound his father’s bones once had made.

Because the tragedy, if tragedy it could be called, was never that they failed extraordinarily but that they succeeded ordinarily, which was far more common and therefore lonelier; for Betty with her trailer park and Jan carrying Tupperware from kitchen to kitchen and Randy vanished into war beneath foreign rains while Mary waited in welfare offices among crying children and old magazines and Charlie at John Deere fastening the same bolts day after day until repetition itself became a species of prayer, all of them had once stood beneath the gymnasium banners believing themselves singular souls destined for singular fates, not understanding that adulthood was composed chiefly of recurrence, of dishes washed and bills paid and small griefs endured privately in parked automobiles before supper.

And Joe had taken Freddie’s wife not because of passion alone but because people, lonely and frightened by the narrowing corridors of their own lives, would sometimes seize destructively at whatever briefly reflected back to them the vanished image of possibility, and Charlotte married the millionaire at last with diamonds bright upon her wrists though perhaps even then she lay awake listening to his breathing and understanding dimly that wealth altered circumstance more readily than emptiness, and Freddie one wet November evening placed the pistol against his temple while the television flickered idiotically in the corner because there were silences into which a man might fall so completely that death itself began to resemble not terror but merely the final available form of rest.

John prospered in cattle and Ray drowned in debt and where Mavis disappeared nobody now could rightly say because every town eventually sacrificed certain names to oblivion as the riverbank sacrificed soil little by little each season until trees once rooted there stood suddenly exposed, and Linda married Sonny and Brenda married me and our children grew and our parents diminished and the class photograph faded there upon the hallway wall while one by one the faces within it ceased representing the future and became instead evidence of time’s irrevocable passage, those boys with brilliantined hair and those girls smiling shyly beneath curled bangs all staring outward still from that lost year of 1957 with expressions of such radiant certainty that to behold them then in memory felt almost unbearable.

Because they had dreamed then, all of them together, not wisely perhaps nor even specifically but with the immense blind conviction of youth itself, and if the world did not change according to those dreams neither did the dreams entirely perish, but lingered on beneath the accumulated sediment of living like old river channels buried underground yet still flowing invisibly in darkness, so that even decades later sometimes late at night when the house had gone silent and the freight train sounded again beyond the fields and one lay awake beside the sleeping body of the person chosen decades ago almost accidentally and therefore permanently, the past returned not as memory exactly but as atmosphere, as weather, as the scent of cut grass and mimeograph ink and summer dust rising beneath stadium lights, and for one unbearable instant the years collapsed together and the Class of ’57 stood once more upon the threshold of the world believing with all the furious innocence they had possessed that life awaited them still, immense and shining and about to begin — though now more than half of them were gone into the earth already, their names spoken only at reunions growing smaller each decade, or carved into granite beneath dates that had once seemed impossibly distant when they first stepped blinking out into the summer of 1957 believing old age belonged always to somebody else.

But the Class of ’57 — peepers through keyholes and riflers of drawers, the children and grandchildren of a yeomanry that had cleared the forests and drained the swamps and fought in the wars and subdued the Cherokee — had its dreams. Oh, the Class of ’57 had its dreams.