Forward to the Past
If you try sometimes you get what you need

by B.J. Roche '78

Cynthia Fisher

Sometimes when I'm talking to my friend Corey on the phone we start to wander away from kids and husbands and toward the future. We talk jobs, investments, and often enough, real estate. "We're going to have to start thinking about these things," one of us says, "you know, so we can all be living near each other when we're old."

     Raised on the Massachusetts coast, and mindful of the stats about the longevity of women, we talk now about post-husband, Golden-Girl lives—in Florida, of course, or the Carolinas or Georgia. Or long, flat stretches of the Mississippi coast, where, we hear, you can live on peanuts. Okay, so it's not the Hamptons, but it's warm and it's cheap. We wonder if there are any large Victorians down that way, that maybe a few of us could Martha-Stewartize and all move back in together. Maybe Charlotte would want to join us.

     Yipes. Could it be that we'll all end up the way we started out—living together like a cranky tribe? After all these years, the careers, the children, the loves, the travels, the losses, it will, in the end, come back to this: haggling over who made the $4.57 phone call to Denver on March 12 and complaining about the wet towels left on the upstairs bathroom floor.

     That life had its moments when we were 20; what will it be like when we are 70? How different will it be, tallying up who's supposed to buy the next gallon of milk, now that some of us are lactose-intolerant, others never touch anything stronger than skim, and still others won't drink anything produced with the bovine growth hormone? We used to live off nuts and seeds, now we'll be asking waitresses to make sure there's none in the bread.

     Of course we're getting ahead of ourselves. First, the roommate interview. Remember them? Will the interview ritual now include an examination of one's finances and medical records?

     And such complicated relationships. Back then we were just starting out. The world was supposed to be fair. Who knew whose stars would rise and whose would fall? Or that everybody would end up taking lumps, just at different times from everybody else? Who could know what we would be in for as the breathtaking ordinariness of life unfolded: the births, the deaths, the breakups, the disappointments? The number of times you'd have to eat it, pick yourself up and move yourself on?

     Still, back with our old roomies, we could revert to old patterns, the way we do with our own parents. We could be small. It is, after all, so much more fun to be small. But the jealousies will be different: Instead of who's getting better grades, the status will go to those whose grandchildren got into Harvard. Who still has all their original parts.

     We'll likely have a little more respect for one another's privacy: Technology has given us great new ways to ensure that we don't have to screw up each other's phone messages or listen to each other's Stevie Wonder collection. And there may be someone out there who doesn't get the creeps watching the Stones on public television, but she's not living in my house.

     Drugs? You bet. Only they'll be the kind you advertise: Maalox, Rogaine and Viagra (for our gentlemen callers), estrogen replacements, and of course, Prozac.

     Of course some things could never be the same as when we were young. Could we ever find another town that actually has a street called Potwine Lane? Would we want to? And those trips to Mahar to catch the midnight showing of 2,001 A Space Odyssey? Ix-nay, who stays up that late anymore?

     Besides, it'll be 2019, what's the big whoop?