“Yes,” Elizabeth said, and picked up the bill.
Tib tried to stir her peach daiquiri with its mint sprig, but it slipped out of her fingers and sank to the bottom of the glass. “He really only took me to be nice.”
“I know,” Elizabeth had said. “Now how much do I owe? Six-fifty for the crepes and two for the wine cooler. Do they add on the tip here?”
“I need another job application,” Elizabeth said to the girl.
“Sure thing.” When the girl walked over to the files to get it, Elizabeth could see that she was wearing flat-heeled shoes like she had worn in college. Elizabeth thanked her and put the application in her purse.
She walked up past her dorm. The worm was still lying there. The sidewalk around it was almost dry, and the worm was a darker red than it should have been. “I should have put it in the grass,” she said out loud. She knew it was dead, but she picked it up and put it in the grass anyway, so no one would step on it. It was cold to the touch.
Sandy Konkel came over in the afternoon wearing a gray polyester pantsuit. She had a wet high-school letter jacket over her head. “John loaned me his jacket,” she said. “I wasn’t going to wear a coat this morning, but John told me I was going to get drenched. Which I was.”
“You might want to put it on,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sorry it’s so cold in here. I think there’s something wrong with the furnace.”
“I’m fine,” Sandy said. “You know, I wrote that article on your husband being the new assistant dean, and I asked him about you, but he didn’t say anything about your having gone to college here.”
She had a thick notebook with her. She opened it at tabbed sections. “We might as well get this alum stuff out of the way first, and then we can talk. This alum-rep job is a real pain, but I must admit I get kind of a kick out of finding out what happened to everybody. Let’s see,” she said, thumbing through the sections. “Found, lost, hopelessly lost, deceased. I think you’re one of the hopelessly lost. Right? Okay.” She dug a pencil out of her purse. “You were Elizabeth Wilson.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I was.” She had taken off her light sweater and put on a heavy wool one when she got home, but she was still cold. She rubbed her hands along her upper arms. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Sure,” she said. She followed Elizabeth to the kitchen and asked her questions about Paul and his job and whether they had any children while Elizabeth made coffee and put out the cream and sugar and a plate of the cookies she had baked for after the concert.
“I’ll read you some names off the hopelessly lost list, and if you know what happened to them, just stop me. Carolyn Waugh, Pam Callison, Linda Bohlender.” She was several names past Cheryl Tibner before Elizabeth realized that was Tib.
“I saw Tib in Denver this summer,” she said. “Her married name’s Scates, but she’s getting a divorce, and I don’t know if she’s going to go back to her maiden name or not.”
“What’s she doing?” Sandy said.
She’s drinking too much, Elizabeth thought, and she let her hair grow out, and she’s too thin. “She’s working for a stockbroker,” she said, and went to get the address Tib had given her. Sandy wrote it down and then flipped to the tabbed section marked “Found” and entered the name and address again.
“Would you like some more coffee, Mrs. Konkel?” Elizabeth said.
“You still don’t remember me, do you?” Sandy said. She stood up and took off her jacket. She was wearing a short-sleeved gray knit shell underneath it. “I was Karen Zamora’s roommate. Sondra Dickeson?”
Sondra Dickeson. She had had pale-blond hair that she wore in a pageboy, and a winter-white cashmere sweater and a matching white skirt with a kick pleat. She had worn it with black heels and a string of real pearls.
Sandy laughed. “You should see the expression on your face. You remember me now, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t … I should have …”
“Listen, it’s okay,” she said. She took a sip of coffee. “At least you didn’t say, ‘How could you let yourself go like that?’ like Janice Brubaker did.” She bit into a cookie. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me whatever became of Sondra Dickeson? It’s a great story.”
“What happened to her?” Elizabeth said. She felt suddenly colder. She poured herself another cup of coffee and sat back down, wrapping her hands around the cup for warmth.
Sandy finished the cookie and took another one. “Well, if you remember, I was kind of a snot in those days. I was going to this Sigma Chi dinner dance with Chuck Pagano. Do you remember him? Well, anyway, we were going to this dance clear out in the country somewhere, and he stopped the car and got all clutchy-grabby, and I got mad because he was messing up my hair and my makeup so I got out of the car. And he drove off. So there I was, standing in the middle of nowhere in a formal and high heels. I hadn’t even grabbed my purse or anything, and it’s getting dark, and Sondra Dickeson is such a snot that it never even occurs to her to walk back to town or try to find a phone or something. No, she just stands there like an idiot in her brocade formal and her orchid corsage and her dyed satin pumps and thinks, ‘He can’t do this to me. Who does he think he is?’ ”
She was talking about herself as if she had been another person, which Elizabeth supposed she had been, an ice-blond with a pageboy and a formal like the one Elizabeth had loaned Tib for the Harvest Ball, a rust satin bodice and a bell skirt out of sculptured rust brocade. After the dance Elizabeth had given it to the Salvation Army.
“Did Chuck come back?” she said.
“Yes,” Sandy said, frowning, and then grinned. “But not soon enough. Anyway, it’s almost dark and along comes this truck with no lights on, and this guy leans out and says, ‘Hiya, gorgeous. Wanta ride?’ ” She smiled at her coffee cup as if she could still hear him saying it. “He was awful. His hair was down to his ears and his fingernails were black. He wiped his hand on his shirt and helped me up into the truck. He practically pulled my arm out of its socket, and then he said, ‘I thought there for a minute I was going to have to go around behind and shove. You know, you’re lucky I came along. I’m not usually out after dark on account of my lights being out, but I had a flat tire.’ ”
She’s happy, Elizabeth thought, putting her hand over the top of her cup to try to warm herself with the steam.
“And he took me home and I thanked him and the next week he showed up at the Phi house and asked me out for a date, and I was so surprised that I went, and I married him, and we have four kids.”
The furnace kicked on, and Elizabeth could feel the air coming out of the vent under the table, but it felt cold. “You went out with him?” she said.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? I mean, at that age all you can think about is your precious self. You’re so worried about getting laughed at or getting hurt, you can’t even see anybody else. When my sorority sister told me he was downstairs, all I could think of was how he must look, his hair all slicked back with water and cleaning those black fingernails with a penknife, and what everybody would say. I almost told her to tell him I wasn’t there.”
“What if you had done that?”
“I guess I’d still be Sondra Dickeson, the snot, a fate worse than death.”
“A fate worse than death,” Elizabeth said, almost to herself, but Sandy didn’t hear her. She was plunging along, telling the story that she got to tell everytime somebody new moved to town, and no wonder she liked being alum rep.
“My sorority sister said, ‘He’s really got intestinal fortitude coming here like this, thinking you’d go out with him,’ and I thought about him, sitting down there being laughed at, being hurt, and I told my roommate to go to hell and went downstairs and that was that.” She looked at the kitchen clock. “Good lord, is it that late? I’m going to have to go pick up the kids pretty soon.” She ran her finger down the hopelessly lost list. “How about Dallas Tindall, May Matsumoto, Ralph DeArvill?”