A pink enough dress

A gaggle of eleven young women gambols into the mood-lighted restaurant where I am having my birthday dinner with my parents, younger brother, and Amber. One of them is in a pink, silky dress that resembles a slip, which flows over her underdeveloped, under-supported figure. She sits at the head of the table while her compatriots seat themselves along her sides as her court.

Pink Dress looks fifteen at most, grinning innocence. As a man turning forty-one in days, I do not allow my eyes to linger long on their table. How creepy that would appear. They are celebrating, and my interest is more in stealing morsels -- descriptors they possess and plot threads they imply -- and going on my way.

They are unaccompanied by what I would consider proper adults or any male peers. Given the proximity to Vassar and the higher price of the entrees, their provenance is no mystery. Smooth skin and exuberance aside, I am underestimating their ages at least by a few years.

A young blonde woman places a gold plastic tiara on Pink Dress's chestnut hair. It must be her birthday as well. What does that make her? Nineteen? Surely not twenty-one.

Years ago -- five perhaps -- I went to a training at a local college. My supervisors, himself a year my junior, noted that women in college all began to resemble children to him at some point. He was not sad or sorry about this, only observing the strangeness of this otherwise unnoticed mile marker. I concurred, trying to recall the last time they had even looked otherwise. It must have been my late twenties.

I don't want this celebratory near-child near my bedroom. I want to be her, pretty, young, and privileged for a while. Surrounded by such cheerful company, all dressed in a way suggesting blithe excitement rather than elegance or even the awareness of sartorial restraint -- it is hasty in pretending at adulthood. It would not stick out at a junior prom.

I want to try out her life for a few days and, between the appetizers and salad course, am jealous that I cannot. I had the opportunity to go to Vassar, but I did not have the funds or faith that a Vassar degree would serve as investment enough to hedge that bet. I joke to Amber on our drive home that my only chance would have been my Vassar wife getting me a job at her daddy's investment or law firm.

It is regret, though not the worst of them. I have instructed gifted kids on that campus. I have presented for years at their No Such Convention. I always felt a bit low born when weaving between their student body when going to a lecture hall to speak on Gef the Talking Mongoose. What Vassar students I knew as collegiate peers always had the air of tourists slumming it with the proles, aware that they could rise above us with a phone call or credit card.

I did fall uttering in love with a Bardian, a fractional difference from a Vassarite to most, and she loved me in return as best she could. Still, she is the only person in my life whom I had accused of treating me as her "dirty little secret." What Bard Kids I pass in town now provoke fond amusement at their baffled haughtiness at the townies. I never applied to Bard, much as I tendered it in my teens and twenties, so I cannot envisage a life there that I missed out on by attending SUNYs.

Whenever I use the sole bathroom this borderline fancy restaurant offers, I encounter two or three of the Vassarites giggling into their hands in escaping, embarrassed to see anyone waiting while they did God knows what in the bathroom together. Obnoxious but still almost adorable, as people their age should be.

Two of my more favored students at present are nineteen, staying with my facility as long as they can before the Department of Corrections absorbs them for years more incarceration. My students and these Vassarites -- willowy, pale, and fashionable -- barely seem like the same species. If the two ever met on the street, I would fear for the Vassarite's continued bodily integrity.

My parents handed me four blue snowball-wrapped gifts as we entered, along with a card. As I sit beside a Christmas tree littered with what I assume to be fake presents, I keep my boxes close. I unwrapped these periodically through the meal: a carbon fiber and iridescent titanium, limited edition fountain pen, and three pieces of Mothman memorabilia. I am delighted by these, though the pen (which I explicitly asked for by sending my mother a link) and a book of Mothman clippings and evidence especially. I suspect the Vassarites would barely understand, let alone appreciate, these items. I, too, am in a far taxon from Pink Dress and her flock.

"How old are you?" my mother asks, genuinely not sure of the answer. "Forty-two?"

"I'll be forty-one in a few days."

"You know why that makes me sad?"

"Because it makes you feel old that your middle son is going to be forty-one?" It would not be that she cares about my age directly; being forty-one isn't that much of a death sentence. I have taken to avoiding the topic of aging with her, as she has had a head start in it bothering her.

She agrees that is the reason and returns to her surf and turf.

When I began my relationship with my Bardian, I was working at a boarding school for the learning-disabled children of the wealthy. The Bardian was eighteen and -- bless her -- only felt it a quarter of the time. I then had responsibility for -- though did not give grades to -- a few students older than her. I had to rationalize why it was not sketchy that I snuck her into my dorm apartment for overnight stays while considering my students sexless teen goblins. It was sketchy, and my rationalizing boiled down to that a brilliant Bard freshman and my boarding school seniors had differences enough -- and that my Bardian was only my romantic, not professional, obligation. My mid-twenties attraction was to her, not eighteen-year-olds (also, she listed herself as twenty-five where we met, and I would have been overjoyed if that had been the case).

I have been going back through my journal from the beginning and responding. I find the boy who would have been these Vassarites' peer full of qualities that now make me cringe. He is pretentious from insecurity and inexperience. He is too inclined to overwrite, using fancy words where a simple one better fits. He is codependent, and clings to an unhealthy pseudo-relationship with a woman who does not want him, merely does not want to let him go. He is months from making a decision (or allowing a decision to be made) that will alter his life in ways I regret. I want to shake him, force a couple of prescriptions down his gullet, and throw him into therapy to work out issues of treating coping mechanisms to unrealized mental illness as though they were superpowers.

And I envy him utterly. He is going to screw up hard. He is going to lose chances because he can't let go. He has no idea how good he has it, surrounded by constant (albeit flakey) friends, full of hope and potential, going on adventures weekly. If I cannot slip into Pink Dress's dorm and classes for a week with her covey, then let me tug at the threads of Fate of who I was and sightsee the maybes of what might have been. Not to stay. I want to return to Amber and my books. I like my life in Red Hook, though I would not mind visiting the choices that could have gotten me here by other roads. I don't want to give into toxic speculation, but this "what if" does befit a writer -- one who has nearly complete confidence that neither body-swapping nor time travel is a possibility.

I am making this birthday dinner sound somber. It was anything but. Like Proust's madeleine, it took maybe twelve spaced glances at the table of Vassarites to set me into these contemplations. (Some credit may be due to poor sleep provoking morning depression. Amber asked if I was depressed about my birthday, but I did not think so. Forty was a cliff to scale, but forty-one is an increment; try me again in nine years.) We overate -- the Quackenbush way when there is something worth celebrating --- and talked of our recent lives. It was an evening sixty-one-year-old Thomm should cherish in reflection.

last watched: Hawkeye
reading: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas