Living Out Loud Read Online Free

something else. To be honest, I am much morelike 1966 than I would have been likely to admit ten years ago. Perhaps it was the beer, but some of the others seemed to be letting down their defenses, too.
    Ed remembered that when he had had to think of his most embarrassing moment for a Dale Carnegie course, it was something that had happened in elementary school. (“You’re not going to put it in?” he asked plaintively, a lifetime after it happened, and so I said I would not.) And Jim, the host of the party, suddenly said as he saw Robert and me trading wisecracks, “You guys and your clique,” making me think, for the first time, really of how thoughtlessly hurtful we were then, too. I suppose in a way it was like many reunions. We talked about the time we Crazy-Foamed the gym, went on class picnics to Naylor’s Run and dared to go to the public-school canteen. There were children to discuss, and deaths and divorces. Most of the men still lived in the area. Most of the women had moved away. Most of the men came with their wives. Most of the women came alone.
    And yet I felt that it was a different kind of occasion, at least for me. Steve had brought photographs from class trips and parties, and in one of them there I was in the front in a plaid dress, my bangs cut too short, my new front teeth a little too big for my face, and it was like looking at one of those photographs of an embryo. On Jim’s back porch I looked around and I saw so many prototypes: my first close friendship, my first jealousies, my first boyfriend—all the things that break you in for all the things that are yet to come. I felt like Emily in
Our Town
.
    Robert and I talked a lot about Martha. It turned out that over the years he had never forgotten her. He was crushed that she had not been able to come up from Florida where she is a teacher. Besides, he said, she still has his tie clip. But it wasn’t really Martha he was talking about as much as a basic model he learned then. He liked her and she liked him. It was onlylater that he, I, and all the rest of us learned that is the basic model, but it sometimes it comes with fins and a sunroof, with games and insecurities and baggage that are just barely burgeoning when you are thirteen years old.
    On the stereo was a song, a 45, that we must have played thousands of times in my living room: “She Loves You” by the Beatles. “With a love like that, you know you should be glad.” Robert played the drums. I sang. He made a grab for me, and I slipped past him. “Same old Robert,” I said to Donna.

CATS

    T he cats came with the house. They lived in the backyards, tiger gray, orange marmalade, calico, black. They slithered through the evergreens at the back perimeter, and during mating season their screams were terrible. Sometimes I shook black pepper along the property line, and for a night or two all was still. Then the rain came and they were back.
    The cats came because of the woman next door. She and her husband, said to be bedridden, had lived on the third floor for many years. Every evening after dinner she went into the alley with a foil pie plate heaped with cat food and scraps: cabbage, rice, the noodles from chicken noodle soup, whatever they had had for dinner. Before she would even get to the bottom of the stairs the cats would begin to assemble, narrowing their eyes. She would talk to them roughly in a voice like sandpaper, coarse from years of cigarettesmoke. “Damn cats,” she grumbled as she bent to put the food down.
    She had only two interests besides the cats: my son and her own. She and her husband had one grown child. I never heard her say a bad word about him. He had reportedly walked and talked early, been as beautiful as a child star, never given a bit of trouble. He always sent a large card on Mother’s Day, and each Christmas a poinsettia came, wrapped in green foil with a red bow. He was in the military, stationed here and there. During the time we lived next door