When they climbed back into the truck, Jimmy said, “Just this.” And he leaned and took Mason’s shoulder. “Life on Earth,” Jimmy said into the windshield of stars. And the band had its third and final name.
FIVE
High School
Marci was together. That had been the word for her in high school. She was organized and looked organized, wearing her smart dark-brown hair in a part around her pretty face. She had been elected class historian and then did all the work for Matt Brand, who was president of everything. In the fall of her senior year, she dated Jimmy Brand because he was the first focused boy she’d met, and he was kind and solicitous and gave her some of his writing. She was impatient with being sixteen and then seventeen; she’d read about it, adolescence, and stood outside of it, waiting for herself. They would kiss on her front porch like a couple out of yesteryear, and then she’d find flowers in pop bottles there in the morning. His mother’s gerbera daisies. He talked to her, laid out his plans; he loved drama, reading the plays. He spent the night at her house twice that last spring, but only on the couch after close sessions kissing. A couple times she’d whispered, “You can,” moving his hand under her shirt, and he had lifted his palm to hold her as if in measurement so that the light touch burned her, but he wouldn’t press, and she was confused by the ache—was it affection? His mouth against hers, she remembered him saying, “High school.” And she could feel both of their mouths smile. She knew then, years ago, but she didn’t ask him or say. It was okay, and it was okay now.
Then at year’s end Matt Brand was killed, and a week later Jimmy Brand left Oakpine. The funeral was tough, and when Jimmy left, Marci knew that something real, something not high school had happened. She received two letters from Jimmy, one that summer and one later the next fall when she was starting to see Craig Ralston. They both were full of thanks and affection, and in the last he said, “Thank you for kissing me,” and they were both signed “With love.” She still had them somewhere. Then her life unfolded a week at a time: with Craig and their travels and return to town, work in the community and getting the store going, and then Larry as a baby and the new house and their plans and comforts and what. And now Marci was still together, the organizing force at the museum, and known for it, but with Mason back in town, the high school wise man, and Jimmy back in town to die, Marci felt the old adrenaline, threads of it. Here we are, she thought. It’s all high school. Everything is everlastingly high school. Marci thought it first when she was fourteen and about to enter Oakpine High in the ninth grade and somebody had broken up with someone (she could remember the names), and for a week it was a federal case, a walking tragedy, and then somebody else got a necklace with a little Woolworth’s ring, and all the talking went marching off in another direction. And every day she dressed for school, she felt like a chapter from a book, knowing what would be said about her by Kathleen or the other girls in the old lunchroom, every half hour had its half hour telling. And her studies were all a federal case, the emergency run-up to the chemistry test, the aching essays for Mr. Lanniton in history, worse than a job. And not dating was a federal case, and then dating was a federal case, the only boy she kissed, really kissed was Jimmy Brand because he was the only interesting kid in the place, or so she said, interesting being her word. And her crush on him, and the way he looked out for her and gave her the few poems and the surprise flowers in pop bottles on her porch some mornings, was a federal case.
To think about him at times was to start or say stupidly and unbidden, “Oh my,” and even her husband, Craig, knew now what it was after thirty years. Every two years or so Marci would start and shake her head or say those words, and Craig’s hand would come to her shoulder, perhaps the only thing in the freaking world that is not high school, that understanding. And raising Larry, year after year, in a village of folks who knew him, a whole town like a high school. A day running errands, the grocer, the cleaners, stopping by the hardware for Larry to say hi to daddy was like walking the halls, class, class, locker, locker, did you hear this? Or this? And somebody’s pregnant, like high school, and someone gets a new car, all the way from Casper, or a parent is dead and those two are breaking up, my god, oh high school, old Oakpine, the Oakpine Cougars, red and black, and underneath an entire nation of activity the old school song, “Our memories linger after, sing the praise and voices raise to Oakpine . . .”