All Over the Map by Laura Fraser Read Free Book Online

opportunities and went to the same freshman orientation but who look so much more settled than I am. Forty doesn’t appear to be so foreign to them: their lives are full of milestones—jobs, marriages, moves, birth announcements, kindergarten, grammar school—that have clearly marked the path along the way. They look satisfied and well tended, exuding a quiet air of accomplishment (though here in academia I have to remind myself that reunion attendees suffer from selection bias—no one who has made a real mess of his life shows up).
    For the most part, it’s an air they’ve earned; I know because for years I have been the class secretary and recorded every award, entrepreneurial success, artistic achievement, or PhD my fellow classmates have amassed. It is an impressive group, full of creative thinkers, scientists, and humanitarians. They are people I am proud to know; some of my richest and most enduring friendships began here. The cliché about Wesleyan was always that the student population was “diverse,” and they have indeed proven themselves to be a group of individuals with singular talents. They are always writing in, apologizing for their slight contributions to the notes, saying they’ve done nothing recently but open a low-income mental health center or taken a little theater piece to Broadway or become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
    Over the past decade, though, much of the news they’ve sent in has been announcing their marriages, and then, en suite, their children. I probably report these domestic events with less enthusiasm than other class secretaries do. Even in this unconventionalgroup, it seems like a failure to have not been able to be both creatively successful and effortlessly accomplish the conventional spouse and kids.
    I suppose if I’d wanted to have a lifetime partner, someone I could rely on, I should have looked around more carefully when I was in college; by far the highest-quality pool of men I’ve ever splashed around with were the ones I met in Middletown. Plus, it seems that meeting someone early on, practically growing up together, is the secret to a lasting relationship: after fifty-five years, my parents still laugh at each other’s jokes. Kristin, a dear friend since we were ten, is happy with the guy she met working in a pizzeria during college. My oldest sister, Cindy, met her husband, Brad, when they were fourteen; after thirty years, they hug each other with tears in their eyes if they’ve been apart for more than three days. Those couples are like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram, with a lot more in common in the middle than on the sides. They’re hard acts to follow.
    Not that I should’ve married one of those glorious Wesleyan guys right after graduation—I had too much of the world to experience, not to mention too many interesting men to meet. But at the time, I was more intent on competing with the men I found interesting than eventually marrying one of them, which may have been an unfortunate ripple effect of seventies-era feminism, or just bad timing.
    Someone waves at me; I recognize the couple, and greet and hug them. One of the advantages of being class secretary, twenty years later, is that everyone knows you. You’re retroactively popular.
    They tell me I look good and heard I had a book out, so at least I’m passing in this crowd, not obviously someone who is still living in the same apartment she rented in the hippie Haight Ashbury a year after she graduated, someone who could barely buy the plane ticket to the reunion, much less make a sizable contribution to the alumni fund. (Despite all my women’s studies classes, I never paid much attention to making real money, always assuming I’d marry someone who’d bring home the bacon while I’d write witty essays about why I stopped being a vegetarian.) I’m staying in a dorm room, not a hotel, which seems to concretize—to use a very Wesleyan word—the fact that I haven’t quite made it