Roadtrip

I spent the evening with an old friend last week, "friend" being the operative word, and after a few bottles of wine and a shot of Tina Fey, we got out the ol' laptop and started dishing on those poor misguided souls who'd attended our 90th high school reunion. Not that we cared.

We were appalled. Who were all these old fat white people and what were they doing at this party? After a few more bottles, we congratulated ourselves on our decision not to attend the wake after all. Of course, had we graced the mourners with our presence, it was obvious we would've won hands down. What "winning" entailed was anybody's guess. We were content to gloat from afar, while, having run out of cheaper options, we contemplated breaking open the ol' Brunello di Montalcino 1999.

Or not.

I'll say it again, in case you weren't listening, and who in their right mind would be. Ours was the pivotal generation for women. The point where two roads diverged. The first road being the traditional lives our mothers and their mothers and their mothers' mothers had lived since the beginning of time. The second being the new road, the road untraveled, the road of freedom from all that had gone before.

What a long strange trip it's been.

And here's the thing. Right there, in our own high school graduating class, the two roads collided head-on. KA-BAM!! Like an all-girl softball game had been called and teams were drawn up even as we popped our zits and ratted our hair and argued over which Beatle was the favorite.

"All you aspiring wives-and-mothers, line your lily-white asses up over here! And all you aspiring to be anything but wives-and-mothers, get your lesbo-communist asses over there!"

Not that I had anything against wives-and-mothers. Okay, I did. But aside from despising the wife-and-mother thing with the intensity of a thousand suns, I wanted to, not necessarily in order of importance:

1. have orgasms
2. play guitar
3. get high
4. dance

Also:

5. live alone in my own apartment
6. drive alone in my own car
7. smoke
8. swear
9. fit into boys' jeans
10. have lovers and orgasms, both multiple (did I already mention this?)

Oh, and:

11. get a college degree so I could do all of the above

While others of my peer group were busy wiving and mothering, I worked on my list. By the time I hit thirty, I'd pretty much accomplished everything I'd set out to do. And then some. And then some wiseass little voice in my ear started in:

"You're thirty, you lesbo communist, what've you got to show for yourself?"

I thought for a minute.

"I'm thin," I said.

"So's your wallet," said the wiseass little voice. "Anything else?"

"I've got calluses."

"Where, on your ass?"

"On my fingers. From playing guitar."

"From playing with yourself, you mean."

"Fuck you."

"No, fuck you. That's the operative word here, LC. You're fucked. No money, no career, no credit, no prospects, nobody and nothing to show for yourself. And you're almost forty. Make that fifty. You are fucked, my friend, eff-you-see-kayed! And another thing..."

I was about to tell that wiseass little voice that I'd do it all again, pretty much exactly the same way, that this wasn't one of those "If I knew then what I know now" type of deals, je ne regrette pas. Instead I did some drugs and watched a rerun, doesn't matter which one, only that it had happened previously.

And I would. Do it all again. Pretty much exactly the same way. We choose what we choose, for any number of reasons. But that's the key, isn't it? As women we are finally free to choose. Which road, which bend in the road, which side road, which wayside rest.

So there we are, a couple of old friends, staring at all those former classmates, and we don't recognize anyone. No one. Not a single person. Plus, they all look alike. There's a sameness to them that's downright eerie. The Stepford Reunion. Now we're on a mission. We click on nametags to enlarge them, then get out the ol' high school yearbook for identification purposes. It's like a shakedown, "Where were you in the spring of '68?"

Not that we cared.

Of course nobody looks the way they used to. Except for that girl who'd obviously had work done. Bitch. By now we're two sheets and waxing philosophical, so I throw in my two cents and tell my old friend about the list, the one that started with orgasms and ended with...orgasms. But let's not go there.

Because in the end it's all about choices. We could've chosen to be wives-and-mothers. We could've chosen to go to the reunion. In either case, we didn't. We could've easily made the trip, it wasn't that far. Not in dog years. In people years it was a lifetime. Many, many, many lifetimes. Too much work to make up the distance. And no desire to.