All Over the Map by Laura Fraser Read Free Book Online Page A

into successful adulthood. But perhaps because I’ve recorded all my classmates’ accomplishments, I’m more keenly aware of them. Maybe everyone feels like I do when reading the class notes, the way you feel fat and frumpy after browsing through a copy of
Vogue
.
    The undercurrent of insecurity persists at the cocktail hour, as I casually listen to what my classmates are up to—where they live and where they summer, where they send their kids to school. Part of me realizes, as I eventually realized twenty years ago, that much of that cool confidence is an illusion. When I finally have a few real conversations with my classmates, it becomes clear that several of them have lives that are as messy and uncertain as mine—a divorced social worker with two kids, an environmentalist struggling to make a business out of his ideals, an artist who hates selling real estate to get by, a heartsick dad whose wife just left him and took along the kids they adopted.
    The ones who seem the most successful at second glance arethe ones who seem to have figured out, with some equanimity, that midlife is never all you expected it would be, especially when your college years were so bright, but getting older brings a few satisfactions of its own. Instead of comforting me, this just adds to the list of things I’ve failed at: marriage, having children, making money, and now, having a mature perspective about it all.
    As the evening wears on, it strikes me that while most of the men are as clever and confident as they were in college, full of ironic observations and witty word play, several of the women seem to have sipped some of the same punch I did that gives you a sneaking suspicion that you’re a disappointment at forty, that things haven’t turned out the way you might have hoped.
    I run into Kate, with her mesmerizing blue eyes, who was a brilliant actress in college, talking with Chloe, who manages to run an environmental nonprofit while raising three children. Chloe asks Kate if she’s still acting, and Kate shrugs it off. “Not with the kids.” She seems content, but as she moves on to greet someone else, I ask Chloe if she thinks that deep down, Kate is genuinely happy exploring other talents—or whether she’s acting.
    “Hard to say,” says Chloe, as we watch Kate sparkling in the center of another little group. Chloe shakes her head. “Everyone was in love with her in college.”
    “And with you,” I say.
    Chloe laughs and Ellen comes up, someone I envied for her effortless beauty and long-term boyfriend, whom she married after college. She was fun: we traipsed around a carnival doing interviews with the hard-living carnies to make a documentaryfor film class and once secretly drank bottles from our birth year from her parents’ stash (since she’s a few months older than me, we had to pop open both the ’60 and ’61 Bordeaux, a first experience with French wine that definitely beat my first experience with sex). She and her boyfriend were both talented writers. Now she tells me she’s read my book and marvels that I have done so well in my career, getting so much published. “You have such a great life,” she says, almost wistfully, “traveling all over the world and writing about it.”
    “It’s true,” says Chloe. “The farthest we ever travel is to Long Island.”
    This makes me uncomfortable, because while I’m grateful that I’ve had adventures, I’m also thinking that
they
have such great lives, with their smart husbands and adorable kids and ability to work part-time. It’s not that the grass is greener, it’s that you can never be on both sides of the lawn at the same time. Ellen tells us an idea for an article and asks if I think she could get it published in a women’s magazine. Of course, I say, that’s a piece of cake for someone like you. I can’t fathom why she sounds so uncertain. She sighs. “It’s been hard for me to get back into that world, I’ve been so busy with the