A fifth-year reunion, I recently learned, is just the epilogue of a campus novel that no one is likely to write. There was an impromptu party for the always functionally married but newly engaged couple of the group, with a cake from the diner and a centerpiece of prettily wilting pansies the local florist donated. We toasted them with a faux champagne that popped and fizzed like the real thing, which we found at the last minute when we decided we were too law-abiding to drink in public on the porch of the old student center, even though five, six, seven years ago it would have been unquestionably worth the risk. A mid-afternoon open container—Isn’t it a civil infraction in New Hampshire? Oh, how we’d grown . . .
I did one moderately risky thing, though, in service to a metaphor: paddleboarding fully clothed up the Connecticut River, keeping pace with my roommate’s rented kayak and wavering while the wake from a passing powerboat rocked my board and threatened my nervous poise. It wasn’t so bad, really—maintaining balance while standing on the water’s surface was almost as easy as I was trying to make it look. And wasn’t it also a literal exercise of the mundane bravery fledgling adulthood demands? What is “maintaining balance” on the bouncing river of life if not five years of paying rent, keeping a pet alive, and holding down a job?
Even the romantic developments that dominated our discussions had the air of denouement. My roommate, a graduate student, and our lawyer friend both had promising-sounding boyfriends: professionals who respect them and laugh at their jokes. When none of our exes arrived on campus for the weekend, we declared total territorial victory. In the middle of the green one night, a friend from my freshman dorm confessed to her longtime crush and found out he’d liked her too. But when he finally texted her at 2 a.m. to “meet up,” she ignored him, having long since graduated from hookup culture.
To further the plot where we could, the newly engaged couple and I spread a rumor at the second of several class receptions that my other roommate, a beat reporter, and her boyfriend had eloped and told no one. We counted at least two men there from our class whose hair had already gone gray and several more who’d sprouted paunches. We marveled at how unchanged all the women were by comparison: We dressed a little better and, even with weightier responsibilities, managed to worry less than we had back then, although we really did look the same.
Rationalizations, for instance, easily quieted our professional anxieties. The beat reporter and I reassured each other that we have far more fun at work every day than classmate consultants whose salaries surpass ours by head-spinning ratios. And whose once impressive-sounding vocabularies—But what actually is “strategic planning”? my roommate pressed one, whom she’d briefly dated—have dulled, painfully.
So had the light in the eyes of the dark-haired boy with the long nose and the runner’s physique whom I thought I loved for a week at the very start of freshman year. Back then he wore the tender, lost expression of a small-town track champion and valedictorian, forced to surrender his fiefdom. Revisiting the details that consumed our earlier lives would have been reason enough for the epilogic return trip: a farewell to the ones you aren’t going to fall in love with, to all the jobs you aren’t going to have, to everyone it’s already too late for you to be.
Because of who I am now, I gave my business card to a classmate who wrote his senior paper on radical Islam and sparsely, cryptically described a career that brings him occasionally to the D.C. area. In a white brick waterfront house with black mullions, between the end of campus and the country club, a Democratic senator with well-known national ambitions appealed to members of her class, 1988, for campaign donations. I walked by twice, but felt too weighed down with nostalgia to try to talk my way in.
The weekend’s real work came later: After paddling the Connecticut, we lay in the sun on the riverbank and wondered who we’d be five years from now. The couples would be parents, the graduate student a full professor, the lawyer picking up the check. “Since none of us has changed at all yet, not really, everyone will have to be significantly different by then,” teased one roommate, anticipating a sequel.
