On the plus side, the only person in the family who knew my address was Suzie, and she had come to the realization that giving it out would be a really fucking bad idea! My dad had our phone number, but it was unlisted, so nobody else could get it. He didn’t call. Suzie told us that Mom was trying to enlist our aunts and uncles on her side of the fight, which probably wouldn’t work out so well, since they were all on Dad’s side of the family. I hadn’t seen or heard from them since the wedding, either, so presumably I was not one of the good guys as far as they were concerned.
Suzie asked me if I wanted to use this chance to get back together with my dad, but I killed that idea real damn quick! I didn’t have any use for him either. After putting up with this since I was fourteen, he had burned all his bridges with me. I knew that he loved Mom far more than he loved us kids. What if he decided that the way to get back in her good graces was to hurt my baby? I couldn’t believe that he would actually have the gumption to stay away from her for good. They’d get back together. No way was I about to chance it. I just didn’t trust him anymore.
What a damn nightmare!
There was nothing to do but slap a smile on my face and pretend everything was just peachy. On the plus side, it had been forever since I had really been involved with my family, other than my sister, so I still didn’t have anything to do with them. It was simply depressing, but it didn’t have any day to day impact on me. Marilyn worked at keeping my spirits up, and watching Charlie and Dum-Dum was amusing in its own right. I argued several times with my wife over which one of them was smarter, occasionally on different sides of the question. How much trouble could a 20 month old boy get into? The answer — an immense quantity!
Two weeks after the graduation we had our official house warming party. Everybody from the Buckman Group was there, along with their families (not including Missy’s ex-husband), along with Andrea and Taylor and their families, Bill Marsbury and his foremen, some friends of Marilyn’s from her church, Tusker and Tessa and Bucky, and Barry Bonham and his family. We just kind of threw it open to anybody who wanted to come. Suzie showed up, too. The weather was fine and we held it out on the back deck, which was brand new, and did hamburgers and hot dogs on an immense Weber gas fired grill Marilyn got me as a pre-Father’s Day gift. That and a couple of galvanized steel tubs full of ice, beer and soda, and a bunch of lawn chairs, was all we needed to have a very nice time. Even Dum-Dum got in the act. Somebody, probably one of the little kids, managed to let her out into the back yard without being put on her tie-out, and she ran romping all over the yard until Jake suckered her with a hamburger and we could grab her and re-incarcerate her in the laundry room. We already had the back yard staked off for a potential future swimming pool and fence, but wanted to delay that for another year.
Marilyn was still making noises about another baby, which I had resigned myself to. I agreed that the next vacation was going to be a family vacation, maybe to Disney World in the fall, when Charlie turned two, and then over the winter we’d do a parent’s vacation, and start working on our next child then. That got her so excited I got very lucky that night! If somebody had invented Viagra back then, I could have used it!
And then we had the next big event of the summer. Why I agreed to it I will never know. Marilyn certainly wanted to go, and Tusker and Tessa were behind it, and they talked Marilyn into pushing it. I think she actually got me to agree when I wasn’t wearing any pants, so by all rights, the contract was illegal and invalid. Still, I couldn’t get out of it.
It was 1983, and it was the 10th Reunion of the Graduating Class of 1973 at Towson High School.
I had only gone to my 20th reunion before, and that was because we had planned to be visiting Maryland that week anyway. On my first trip through, Towson High was something that I endured and survived. I hadn’t even bought a high school ring until my mother found out and forced me to buy one. Certainly by the time the reunions started, I was hundreds of miles away, and had absolutely nothing in common with my old life.
I didn’t have any excuses this time. I had missed the 5th reunion because I was living in North Carolina at the time, but now I was only 20 miles away or so. Either Tusker or Tessa must have given my new address to the planning committee, since we found several invitations and reminders in the mail. Marilyn wrote them a check for two tickets without even asking me if I wanted to go.
It’s no use arguing with Marilyn when she gets something into her head. For proof of that, we only had to go back to Suzie’s graduation. This wasn’t going to be that bad, but it was probably going to be pointless. “Honey, it’s been ten years. Nobody will even remember who the fuck I was.”
“Tusker and Tessa will remember you!”
“That’s it! Nobody else will know me, that’s for sure,” I replied.
“How do you know that!?”
I just smiled at her and shook my head. “Honey, I wasn’t even there half the time. The last couple of years, I spent half the day over at Towson State. Trust me; nobody will know who I am.”
“Well, I want to go, so you have to go.”
Why she wanted to go to a reunion of a school she had never attended mystified me, but so much about my wife always would mystify me. I sort of liked it most of the time. I just smiled and shrugged. “Okay, we’ll go. We can stay for an hour or so, and after we get tired of the blank stares at my name badge, we can leave and go out for dinner or something.”
Marilyn squealed happily and kissed me on the cheek, and then scampered off to call Tessa and tell her that we would be going. I just rolled my eyes.
The morning of the reunion, I told Marilyn that we would go, but to dress for going out to a nice dinner afterwards. I would dress casually — chinos and a dress shirt, no tie — and toss a sport coat in the back of the car. Marilyn decided on a button front long denim skirt and a peasant top. She wore some high heeled sandals to look classy, but she kept laughing about how we would end up staying the day at the reunion. She was up to something, but I had no idea what.
The one thing I definitely wanted to do was to take my new toy. I had been over to Tusk Cycles a few months ago when one of his customers drove up in a Mercedes Benz 380 SL, a new one, and I saw it through his front window. Memories came flooding back of the 380, which I thought at the time was one of the most beautiful cars ever made. Even the way they built the hard top, with the lowered center section, looked exotic. I just stared at it through the window while my buddy dealt with his customer. The next day I drove down to Towson and went to the Mercedes Benz dealership.
They had one in the showroom, and it was like getting an instant erection! Back before, the idea that I could ever actually afford one of these cars was like the idea that I could ever actually become an astronaut and go to the moon. They only built them in the late Seventies through the mid Eighties, and I always stared when I saw one. To me, they were the sexiest car around. I wanted to have a mid-life crisis so I could solve it by buying a sports car; never mind that I was nowhere near mid-life.
I left the dealership that day, but came back about a week later, and this time I convinced myself to take a test drive. I wasn’t going to actually buy one, but it wouldn’t hurt to drive one. The sales rep must have thought I was nuts, or maybe he had seen this before. I took the drive, which was sort of like a mechanical wet dream, and then left the dealership again. A week later I was out with Marilyn and Charlie and I stopped into the dealership again to show her the car. I think the cat was out of the bag when the salesman smiled and said, “Welcome back, Mister Buckman.”