
In The End by Leslie Pietrzyk
We put Janet Shaw in charge of keeping the records and lists and spreadsheets, then she went and died in May. Now it’s June, and no lists. No Iowa City City High Class of ‘83 master plan for the August reunion. No nothing. It’s as if our 287 proud graduates vanished as cleanly as did Janet Shaw, age fifty-eight.
The seven of us remaining Reunion Committee members (Jill, Deb, Cathy, Lois, Cammie, Lisa, Liz) texted, emailed, WhatsApp-ed, Zoomed, and even talked on the actual phone asking, now what? In the end, we simply didn’t know now what. There was no spouse taking care of Janet’s legal paperwork (someone remembered hearing she divorced back in 2002 or 03 or 04), nor a heartbroken and/or dutiful son or daughter responsible for organizing the personal remnants of Janet’s life: managing furniture, clothes, automatic Hulu renewals, lawn service, the thousand things a person can’t possibly realize she leaves behind, like, say, the high school reunion lists. A solitary post on Janet’s Facebook page announced her death, and three days later came this painfully impersonal email from a niece or nephew named Skyy:
Your [sic] getting this message because you’re [sic] in Janet Shaw’s contact list so you will likely be sorry to hear that my Dear Aunt Janet passed on the 12th suddenly due to stroke. No memorial service is scheduled at this time. You may make a donation to a Charity of you’re [sic] choice in her honour.
We studied the message carefully, wondering if the two y’s in “Skyy” were proper spelling or yet another agonizing error, if Skyy was British or pretentious (“honour”).
Ultimately, the word “likely” was the most unsettling, suggesting we consider how our own contact lists were an unkempt web of mostly unimportant and forgotten people who “likely” would have no idea who we were if our niece? nephew? sent notification of our death. That HELOC loan officer. The furniture rep on the reupholstering. The neighbor from two neighborhoods ago who hosted the block party. So many insurance agents, former dentists. People unnecessary to our lives beyond functionary roles, locked into our gmail. We vowed to de-clutter our inbox, basement, garage, closets, and drawers, and a couple of us actually loaded a garbage bag with old T-shirts and donated a dozen books to the library book sale, but mostly we googled <professional organizers> and bookmarked some sites. So we understood the big picture problem.
Still. This class reunion loomed. The lists had disappeared. Janet Shaw had disappeared, which was sad, obviously—but since she lived in another state, and we hadn’t seen her in recent years, and being sad was sad, our focus gravitated to the missing lists. How startling that something so dull, so practical might—poof—disappear.
We emailed Skyy several times, each of us reaching out with kind questions about the missing list and Janet’s computer files, hoping to “work together,” stressing that Janet would “want the reunion to carry on.” No response. Initially, we supposed something like throes of grief or the tangle of legal paperwork, but later it was hard to avoid negative assumptions about the overall irresponsibility and laziness of young people. Still later, privately, we could believe we dreamed the entirety: Janet’s spreadsheets; her careful coding of maiden and married names, of whose spouse/guest; the lists of addresses and emails and venue contracts and contacts and menus and entrée selections. Had we dreamed Janet? Her phone number was disconnected. Our emails bounced back. We had never understood what no spouse, no child, no family might mean for a woman, and now that we did, some of us were, well, further unsettled.
She must have had friends.
We were her friends. We cheered at football games and wrestling matches; road-tripped to volleyball state tournaments; sang soprano in the chorus; voted for Janet to win class president over that know-it-all Tom Holtz and cried when she didn’t. She floated through the same car parties at the Res we did, drinking keg beer, skinny dipping, flirting with someone’s boyfriend, toking up, bumming cigarettes, puking in the bushes, missing curfew and getting grounded. We sat in front of or behind her in biology class or English or French; our lockers lined the same dim hall that smelled like cafeteria sloppy joes; we parked our rattly or sixteenth-birthday-new cars in the jock lot. We detasseled corn the summer we were fifteen, then worked minimum wage in the mall at KarmelKorn or Gallenkamp Shoes or the movie theatre or A&W, and we think her parents hosted a graduation cookout at City Park that everyone went to. If we could find our yearbooks, we’re sure she signed them, as we signed hers, swapping a tiny heart for the U in “luv,” always a 4 in “4ever.”
Not our fault how forty years happens.
Five members of the Reunion Committee either never left or returned to the Iowa City area, so we decide to meet for dinner at Pagliai’s Pizza to talk about what’s to be done. The other two drive in from Des Moines and from outside Chicago. It’s okay: they have the excuse of aging parents to visit in Oaknoll, a sister in nearby Cedar Rapids. We’re all busy—but enough with texts and emails. Let’s see each other. And enough with meeting at the Red Lobster in Coralville, more conveniently located, with a huge parking lot.
Everyone’s bringing whatever exists piecemeal on their computers and phones: attachments to old emails, deleted files retrieved from the trash bin, a text where Janet mentioned that Sue Carter’s married name is Kedzierski. We’ll piece together new lists, griping how we don’t understand Google Docs and Dropbox and the dozen other options our grandchildren shame us about with their eyerolls.
Meeting at eight-thirty for pizza means young families will be home already, tucking the little ones into bed. Meeting on Tuesday means no weekend high school kids and their pre-party screeching. We were the high school kids once, and once we were the young families. Now we’re people who slip in at eight-thirty, avoiding crowds, unnoticed.
Pagliai’s Pizza isn’t the kind of restaurant that changes. Opened in 1957 in an already-old building at the edge of what we grew up calling “downtown,” Pagliai’s has been kept in a family who likes things the way they are. Its neon sign is iconic Iowa City, glowing through summer dusk and winter gloom: italic black letters backlit by silky red, bannered across white. The storefront of picture windows gleams like that painting of the lonely city people hunched over coffee in the diner. It’s a clean place, but stickiness endures: booths and menus are wiped as you watch, but nothing removes a certain thin layer of ancient grime. In contrast, the pizza ovens in the open kitchen sparkle silvery under fluorescents bright enough for surgery. Like most people, we prefer the black vinyl booths of the back room, where overhead lighting casts a comforting yet melancholy yellow. Everyone believes they’re their best self under Pagliai’s glow.
There’s never been anything fancy or modern about this pizza; the recipes come from great- or great-great-grandparents, with no compelling reason to change beyond adding gluten-free crust several years ago. They don’t even deal with salads.
We walk in knowing what we’ll order: sausage and double cheese and veggie special and carafes of house red. We giggle about getting IDed, but “we ID everyone and mean it,” and the leggy, pony-tailed high school girl taking our order has a perky lilt as she says, “Right away, ladies.”
No one else is here. The seven of us are squeezed into the round booth in the far corner, where we always sat, extra chairs jammed round. Back then we spilled into adjacent booths, but not tonight. It’s like this table’s been waiting for us. Someone wonders if the wads of Dentyne gum we pressed underneath the tabletop when the pizza arrived might be here; if this is the same flimsy silverware, the same plastic glasses ringed with hard water residue. We’ve all been here since high school, of course—it’s the best pizza in Iowa City—but maybe it’s because we haven’t been here together. Maybe, tonight, the pizza will taste how it used to taste?
Someone asks, “Do City High kids still hang out here?” and we could text our grandchildren or ask the server or talk it over, but the question stays pleasantly unanswered, words floating through air.
More words: “I can’t believe nothing’s changed.”
Another question: “Why’d we stop doing this?”
The wine arrives, brought by Kira, who introduces herself as the assistant manager. We assume she’s twenty-one, though to us she looks about sixteen with her crooked lipstick. No one can possibly be their right age anymore, including us. Kira pours wine into juice glasses, evening the levels. We ladies clink, touching each glass, missing no one. “To Janet,” someone says, and we clink again.
We’re here to talk about Janet, and now we have to. Someone says, “Remember how tired Janet looked on Zoom that one time?” Nods and agreeable murmurs, though some of us aren’t sure which that “one time” was, and we know Zoom makes everyone look tired.
Someone says, “At least she went sudden. That’s how to do it.” We agree, then disagree, because saying goodbye is also how to do it, listening to a loved one’s voice, a hand to hold, the chance to request your favorite song at your memorial.
“Always live like you’re dying,” someone says. We ponder, parsing the meaning, wishing for more than what the statement sounds like: an affirmation taped to a mirror, a fortune from a stale cookie.
The conversation turns. “Look, you know I’m sorry she’s gone,” someone says, “but also, come on. We’re screwed without those lists.”
“What kind of name is Skyy?”
“People hack computers all the time. Some guy in a basement’s probably hacking my phone right now. And no one can hack our lists?”
That’s supposed to be funny though no one laughs.
“You know, I’m kind of furious she didn’t have a husband who knew her passwords,” someone says.
“Or a boyfriend.”
“Or girlfriend.”
We bitch more, then here come the pizzas, covering our whole table. We shuffle wine and water glasses to the side, shove away sheaves of undated print-outs and tuck away phones with open emails, remove the mess of half-lists of classmates and their nicknames and some phone numbers that might be important.
The pizza’s cut into the symmetrical wedges we remember and tastes like it’s supposed to, thin and cracker-crisp, the cheese pleasingly speckled with browned spots, tomato sauce that’s airy and sweet. Most of us don’t allow much pizza these days, though forty years ago, our diet was pizza, Big Macs, Taco Grande sanchos, and Coke.
“I forgot this,” someone says. “Can you believe I forgot this? Can you believe it?”
We can’t but we can: we forgot it, too. This pizza is fucking fantastic. We’re all thinking those exact words.
Someone says, “It’s not that people die. They die all the time. I mean, my mother died when I was sixteen. I know all this, about how these things happen.”
“That was awful,” someone says.
“Losing your mother, what a sad thing.”
“Unreal. She seems so young now.”
“So, yeah. That’s not what we’re talking about here, right, people dying?”
“The shock of someone’s mother. We were shocked.”
“Remember that social studies teacher killed in the car accident?” someone adds. “Sophomore year? How shocking that was?”
“Then remember that bad sub who came in, that guy who was obsessed with the Spanish-American War?”
“The Spanish-American War never came up in any conversation in my whole life, not even on Jeopardy, which I watch practically every night.”
“We got a day off school.”
“What was his name?”
“The sub or the dead teacher?”
“Remember that girl who disappeared?”
It’s one of those extra-quiet silences, everyone all at once caught chewing. We eat slowly now, carefully, uninterested in choking to death on veggie pizza. We think about things like that, not obsessively like that sub did about the Spanish-American War, just more often than we used to.
“That girl wasn’t in City High, right?” someone says.
“She would have been in our class though.”
“Was she on the list? Remember how Janet said we should decide how to honor the dead grads? They were a separate list. Anyone have a copy of the dead grads list?”
“Wasn’t it candles? Who’s supposed to buy candles? Or their picture from the yearbook?”
“Yearbook pictures are for everyone, for all of us. Janet said to make copies from her yearbook.”
“Didn’t I say I’d do candles? I did, didn’t I?”
We all nod. It should be such a simple task, the simplest thing. Like bringing napkins and plastic cups to a potluck.
“Whose yearbook now? Who has theirs?”
“Somewhere.”
“Aren’t they all online?”
“Told you we should’ve paid that reunion company to organize for us—if someone there dies, someone else steps in. It’s seamless. All guaranteed.”
Early in the process we had a two-day Midwestern-type email flurry about keeping costs down that ended happily with Janet volunteering to organize. She wrote, “Guess that layoff was a blessing in disguise. I’ve got all the time in the world right now.”
“But wait. That girl who disappeared. Did they ever find her? They had to, right?”
“She’s got to be dead.”
“We’d know if they found her, right?”
“Diana? Was that her name?”
“Dana.”
“Donna.”
“Donna Gilmore. I think one of her brothers played basketball with my brother.”
It’s not possible, but honestly, everyone at the table reaches for another piece of pizza, even the people who said they’d only eat one piece (not that we believed them).
“Haven’t thought about her in forever.”
“Should she be on the list?” someone asks. “Isn’t she one of us?”
“Is she?”
“I know Janet had this all figured out. She’s so organized. Was. Was so organized. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“And the lists are gone, too.”
“Does it hurt to add that disappeared girl to the list?” someone asks. “Probably she’s got friends who remember her who’ll be at the reunion.”
“She had red hair.”
“Wasn’t she buying candy or something like that?
“Yeah, that happened when I was at Mark Twain Elementary. The teacher made us all draw pictures someone took to her family. I drew the Ferris wheel at City Park, I don’t know why. Maybe to be cheerful? The teacher liked it and put mine on top of the stack.”
“If we had Janet’s list, we could see who’s coming and who might remember this Donna girl. I don’t know her because all that happened before we got to Iowa City.”
“Then the rest of her family moved away, I think. Or something. I can’t remember exactly.”
“So even if she was here, she wouldn’t have graduated with our class.”
“If she was here and hadn’t disappeared, maybe her family wouldn’t have moved away,” several of us protest. “Who’d want to stay living here after that?”
“I think there was a moment of silence at graduation to honor her? What about doing that?”
“Seems like kind of a lot.”
“Her mother went crazy,” someone adds.
“Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you have to? I mean, your daughter’s gone? And you never know for sure why or how?”
We have daughters and sons and husbands, and one of us has a wife. What happened to Janet won’t happen to us. What happened to Donna won’t happen to us.
“How does a girl disappear?”
“Just add her. It’s easier.”
“And Janet,” someone says. “Guess now she’s on the dead grads list.”
No one wants to speak. In the background, the Pagliai’s phone rings, and one of the high school kids takes a to-go order for a large cheese and onion pizza. We’re sort of sorry the order isn’t more complicated, longer, gobbling up time and space. We don’t know what we think. Forty years is nearly four of Donna’s lifetimes.
“Oh, Janet,” someone sighs. “All this would be so much easier with your computer files.”
In the end, there are two pieces of pizza left over, and we imagine that if Janet had been here with us tonight, they’d have been her pieces, assuming she liked sausage.
In the end, we add Donna to the list because why not? Too young for a spouse or child, too young to create lifelong friends, too young to get much of anything of her own, so we’ll give her this. A name on a list at a fortieth high school reunion, a flickering candle someone’s been assigned to pick up at Menards, awkward conversation as people scrape up a memory about her red hair. She deserves more, though we mean, we deserve more.
“Donna never knew computers were invented,” someone observes. “She wouldn’t even get why we’re so stressed out right now.”
We’re the last ones lingering in Pagliai’s, and the high school girls are itchy, thumbs skimming the surface of their phones with plans and things to do that want to start now, that can barely wait until they’re off the clock. But we take our time, getting this right.
In the end, the Reunion Committee cobbles together a decent list, one that will get us all through the City High Class of ‘83 40th High School Reunion. We agree that someone else will be doing fifty, not us.
We pay our check, leave a memorable tip in cash for overstaying, and say no to boxing up those two last slices. We gush thanks to the high school girls, to responsible Kira, to the guys making pizza, again and again as our voices veer loud and sloppy, and not because of the wine. We talk over each other, words piling like wood stacked for a bonfire, getting bright and brassy because we want these people to hear everything we’re saying.
“Thank you,” we cry. “We came here all the time when we went to City High. This was our favorite place. This is the best pizza in the world. That’s our favorite booth. Thank you! Thank you! We love Pagliai’s. Don’t ever change.”
The girls set aside their phones. “Thank you,” they coo. “Have a nice night. Drive safe. Come back again. See you soon. Bye! Bye!” They’re babies, these girls, speaking the language of adults. The glass door falls shut behind us, and Kira or someone flips the sign to CLOSED.
June night air drapes velvety against our skin. It’s hardest to say goodbye at night. Remember how we’d sit extra-long in the car in the driveway at two a.m. on a summer night because no one wanted to leave? Yes, there are stars on this clear night tonight, and a plump full or almost-full moon, and someone once taught us basic constellations a long, long time ago, so we point out the Big Dipper and we talk about Orion, but no one spots it. We study how that moon shines, like surely it’s alive. Like how can it not be? There’s that sliver of a moment we’re about to break for our separate cars and our own lives, but something catches onto us, that same unfathomable instinct that tells wolves they’re bonded for life, and we’ll never remember if someone is first or if we all are, but here we are, our old, tired, silver heads thrown back, howling at the moon, at the darkness, at things unknown and unknowable. In the end, what we do is howl.
Leslie Pietrzyk has published three novels and two linked story collections, Admit This to No One (Unnamed Press, 2021) and This Angel on My Chest (Drue Heinz Literature Prize; UPittsburgh Press, 2015). Fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, and Cincinnati Review.
11 October 2024
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