Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

If I pleaded with him annoyingly enough, harped at him cutely enough, he would sometimes relent and let us borrow it, so long as we used our allowances to buy the film, develop it, and swore cross-our-hearts that we would be super-duper watchful with it. Friday afternoons we became screenwriters, directors, actors, stuntmen, choreographers, costumers, editors, property masters, producers, and sisters that should have been but weren't, turning a short roll down a small hill into a three-minute experimental investigation into the notion of motion; a Barbie, a can of lighter fluid, and a pile of twigs into a blazing vision of daring Joan stuck on the stake, praying without moving her lips as she liquefied blackly. And once, lacking a male lead for the love scene we had composed, Aleyt put on a black construction-paper mustache and we smooched. It felt very good and very strange and we had never kissed anyone on the lips before and, by the following April, Aleyt had unpigtailed herself, lengthened her gauche jeans, and started plumping out less humdrum tube-tops. Boys caught her scent.

There was never a specific day we deliberately became less than friends. We never had what you might call a falling out. We still saw each other through the summer, through eleventh and twelfth grades, too, but always less and less, always as increasing strangers, passing each other in the halls with artificially cheery smiles, chatting each other up among colorful sweaters piled on display tables at the Gap, bumping into one another (Aleyt nearly always hand-in-hand with some polite boyfriend with a Lutheran aura and vaguely glassy eyes) at the hamburger joint, the mandatory pep rally, the town library, the lavatory tampon dispenser, yet I kept a soft spot for her, never wished anything but good for her, failed to remember her for months at a time only for her presence to materialize before me in the midst of a tricky math problem or handful of Raisinettes at the movie theater.

And then she left me. Aleyt dropped out of my frame of reference. My viewfinder went vacant.

Her profile on the website proclaimed she had traveled east for college, studied film and psych at Sarah Lawrence, alighted briefly in the Village to see if she could make a go of it there and, when she realized she couldn't, flew back here, where a few years later she wound up marrying a cop with a buzz cut. They churned out three children, now all grown and gone.

I got up to refill my bowl of ice cream, ate it leaning against the kitchen counter, paid a visit to the bathroom, paced up and down the hall two or three times to rouse my legs, took my place before the computer screen, got up to refill my bowl of ice cream, ate it leaning against the kitchen counter, stood in my living room with the lights off and my eyes shut, listening, mostly to the creamy pulse behind my lids, took my place before the computer screen, and, without a single further thought, clicked on Aleyt's email address, typed her a fast message, and hit send.

I told her I was glad to discover she was doing well, I was doing okay myself, I would really like to hear from her sometime and imagine together the size of the numbers that had collected between us. I didn't tell her it was unlikely we still had anything in common, anything whatsoever, unlikely we ever had had anything in common, even back in tenth grade, if we had taken the time to think about it — apart, perhaps, from a certain fascination with my dad's camera and a certain frenzied need to claim friendship at any cost, and that, I've learned since, is precisely as sad as it sounds.

Next morning Aleyt's reply was waiting for me. She couldn't believe it, she wrote, she simply couldn't believe it, she was so glad to come across my name in her inbox, how weird it seemed, how familiar, how many memories it brought back, how many years had rushed us since high school, more than thirty of them, and what was I doing these days, where was I living, what was I thinking about, because wouldn't it be great to get together for a cup of coffee someday? It would be. I don't know why, but it really would be. I don't believe I believed we could rekindle an extinguished familiarity. I wasn't that naïve. I believe I believed, instead, that I just wanted to know what Aleyt would look like and be like, how at least one story in my life had drawn toward a finale, what it would feel like to complete some kind of circle, knowing, naturally, how homiletic all that sounded, how in real life the only circles are the snaky species that can never quite seem to locate their own tails.

Two more exchanges and we had set a date for Saturday at four at a local coffeehouse. That's when Aleyt's husband Jerry usually slipped out for a couple of brewskies with the boys. I showed up at three forty-five, a blindingly bitter day outside, the first of my school's winter vacation, early sunset already buttering the blue atmosphere with night cold. I ordered a latté and a slice of banana-nut bread, and I curled up with the Star Tribune in a cubbyhole toward the front packed with two oversized plush, homey, purple chairs that had been painstakingly manufactured to look like they had seen much better days.

Next thing, someone was palming me on the shoulder, saying Moira, is that YOU? , and my heart knocked and I looked up and saw a woman I had never seen before, or maybe a woman I had seen before, it was difficult to tell which, it had been a very long time — a woman, in any case, whose identity blurred in and out of focus like jumpy video footage. She had quadrupled in heft, thickened into middle age, her hair wasn't blond but black, wasn't long but bobbed, her complexion had mottled, roughed up, reddened, olived, her eyes had darkened, and her nose was someone else's. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, a wide squinty smile, and a heavy red holiday sweater with a herd of happy green reindeer cantering across from front to back and around from back to front again.

It IS you ! she exclaimed. It IS! OH! MY! GOD!

There were only a handful of other patrons, an elderly parkaed man with cadaverous cheeks and an aluminum cane no doubt out for his daily excursion, a clique of cute college co-eds caffeinating over a shared computer, a trio of galpals in their early thirties passing time passing around photos of some exotic cruise they had taken to San Juan or Saint Maarten and chirping at the glossy results with glee. They all stopped what they were doing to see what we were doing without making it appear that that's what they were doing, and I was on my feet, my newspaper flapping down behind me, and Aleyt and I were bear-hugging like people in sitcoms and L.A. bistros do, exaggeratedly familiar with each other while not really familiar at all, a display of practiced friendship-fervor you want to be ten times truer than it is, though you think maybe you're at least fooling those around you, if nothing else, though you know you're not, no, not at all, not for a second.

Aleyt went up to the counter to order. I took my seat and commenced rearranging myself, head weightless as helium. The others around us coasted back to their own continents. Above the parking lot and brick buildings outside, the sun wasn't so much setting as dissolving into a nordic yellowgray haze. Aleyt returned holding a Toffee Nut Crème and a napkin-skirted Brownie Immorality before her. She had bought me a second tall latté, too. She set her loot on the pale wood palette-shaped table and collapsed across from me. Lounging back, studying me, she took a big bite of sugar, chocolate, butter, eggs, and walnuts, smacked away, and, mouth full, teeth gunked, half-cleared her throat and said: You look soooooo good, girl. You know what I'm going to do here? I'm going to just sit back while you tell me every thing. I'm all ears, honey. All ears.