Anneli Rufus

How much better if I had known from the start, if someone had said, This is what is different about you. It would have been so simple, would have explained anything. But no one ever said. That is the point. We will not, cannot, hail each other on the street and ask, Are you this way? We will not take each other into confidence on line at Safeway.

Being as we are is just a way to be, like being good at sports or being born in Greenland. If only it was not dorky to quote Robert Frost, if he was Sufi or had died young in the Spanish Civil War, then we could seize as our motto the final three lines of “The Road Not Taken”: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — /I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.

This way to be, this way we are, gets us into trouble. We are a minority, the community that is an anticommunity. The culture that will not on principle join hands. Remote on principle from one another — this is in our charter and we would not have it any other way — each of us swims alone through a sea of social types. Talkers. Lunchers. Touchers.

Nonloners. The world at large. The mob.

The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally.

They take offense. Feel hurt. Get angry. They do not blame owls for coming out at night, yet they blame us for being as we are. Because it involves them, or at least they believe it does, they assemble the troops and call us names. Crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Aloof. Afraid. Lacking in social skills. Bizarre. Unable to connect. Incapable of love. Freaks. Geeks. Sad. Lonely. Selfish. Secretive. Ungrateful. Unfriendly. Serial killers.

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They bridle when we turn down invitations. They know we are making up excuses, but they can’t handle the truth.

They cannot fathom loners any more than birds can fathom lips. The mob makes definitions and assigns identities based on the sorts of clues loners do not provide. We are elusive, not given to dressing and behaving such that we would be in stadiums raising giant foam-rubber hands proclaiming anything. We frustrate our observers, try their patience, make ourselves amorphous. Make ourselves either unintentionally scary or invisible. With the blithe assurance of a majority the mob nods knowingly when Justin stays home alone on Christmas Day. He is depressed, they say, or else he has something to hide. The clerk who goes home after work to have a bubble bath instead of joining the gang at the bar is declared undeserving of a raise, afraid of men, afraid of women, too smart, too stupid, scary, a pervert.

The mob posts jokes on the Net — for instance, a page called “The Loner’s Home Companion,” which begins: “Ever had lots of spare time, a .357 Magnum burning a hole in your pocket, and an unhealthy obsession with Heather Locklear …?” And like the mock interview with “a loner” who muses: “I spend most of my free time by myself. I steer clear of crowds and social functions … I’m just a normal, average guy who will go to great lengths to avoid unnecessary human contact. Is that so wrong? No, it’s not. Human beings are nasty, disgusting, germ-infested vermin.”

The l-word as we hear it most often today sounds nasty. It is the sound of a nervous music, a whine of mistrust, the hiss of fear, the dull growl of incomprehension. Animals make that sound when foreign species invade their dens, or when they find a rogue within the herd. Loners live among the mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming. When the mob gets too close, the truth is revealed. Running or walking away, chased or free, any which way, we tell the mob in effect I don’t need you.

Hell hath no fury like a majority scorned.

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Yet here we are, not, lonely, having the time of our lives amid their smear campaign.

We are the ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to contemplate and how to create. Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions.

A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required. We are the ones who would rather see films than talk about them. Would rather write plays than act in them. Rather walk Angkor Wat and Portobello Road alone. Rather run cross-country than in a relay race, rather surf than play volleyball. Rather cruise museums alone than with someone who lingers over early bronzes and tells us why we should adore Frida Kahlo.

Alone we are alive.

Alone does not necessarily mean in solitude: we are not just the lone figure on the far shore. This is a populous world and we are most often alone in a crowd. It is a state less of body than mind. The word alone should not, for us, ring cold and hollow but hot. Pulsing with potentiality. Alone as in distinct. Alone as in, Alone in his field. As in, Stand alone. As in, like it or not, Leave me alone. This word wants rescuing, this word wants pride. This word wants to be washed and shined.

There are books, out there, about solitude. They give instructions on being alone. These books talk of “stealing away,” of “retreats” and of “seeking sanctuary.” They pose solitude as novelty and a desperate act: the work of thieves and refugees. But for loners, the idea of solitude is not some stark departure from our normal state. We do not need writers to tell us how how lovely apartness is, how sacred it was to the sages, what it did for Thoreau, that we must demand it. Those books are not for loners, not really. This is not one of those books.

By the way, I am sane. People whose job it is to know these things have told me so.

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We loners do not know each other by sight. Every day we pass our brethren in the street unwitting. Sure, you might notice the solitary figure on the subway car and think, Aha. But we do not exchange glances or high-fives or have our own slang or symbols. What would those be, anyway? The Tarot’s Hermit card? A stick figure wearing a party hat? A tiny, tightly rolled scroll in a silver capsule like Jewish mezuzahs, inscribed with the names of famous loners? Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Alec Guinness, Erik Satie, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Stanley Kubrick, James Michener, Greta Garbo, John Lennon, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Janet Reno, St. Anthony. Batman. Even that would be reductive. Would leave out so much.

Because it is all too easy to generalize. About them. About us. If this is a manifesto, it speaks for all of those — and we know who we are — for whom no one has yet spoken and who, by nature, do not seek to call attention to themselves. As a journalist, I have covered hundreds of subjects, reported on thousands of people, ways of life, cultures, subcultures, cults, habits, hobbies, ripples, rites, beginnings, ends. Towns where on certain days every year snakes deluge the streets, then slither off at dusk. Towns whose most famous incidents are massacres. Towns whose churches are built under the surface of the earth, whose hotels are carved out of ice, whose residents are waiting for spacecraft to land. Towns burned to the ground and towns drowned. And yet, in all this, never did I hear the voices or see phalanxes of what is as surely my own kind as rock-’n'-roll fans or Jews or people from Los Angeles. No one had linked us, threaded us like beads on one strand. Someone should. Because we have a point. We form a chorus, but the oddest chorus in the world, a willful antichorus. In saying entirely different things, usually not saying them aloud to anyone at all, we are saying a lot.

Which is why a manifesto for loners cannot pretend to speak for every last loner word for word. Generalization is impossible. It is an insult. Instead what you will find here — the fact, opinion, research, interview, reportage, analysis and observation — is a periscope. This is the world from here. Held up to every loner’s eye, the view will be the same but different.

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The mob wants friends along when doing errands, working out at the gym, at the movies. The mob depends on advice. Eating alone in decent restaurants horrifies the mob, saddens the mob, embarrasses the mob. The mob wants friends.

The mob needs to be loved.

It lives to be loved.

Or hated, with that conjoined fervor with which mobs face their enemies. Both love and hate are all about engagement. About being linked with humanity generally, as a policy. Loners have nothing against love but are more careful about it. Sometimes just one fantastic someone is enough. As a minority, we puzzle over nonloners, their strange values. Why do they require constant affirmation, validation, company, support? Are they babies or what? What bothers them about being alone? What are they so afraid of? Why can’t they be more like us?

Well, they cannot, nor can we be like them. Behavioral geneticists claim that human temperaments and talents — skills, preferences, modes — are inborn, like eye color. This science is comforting insofar as it frees our parents from feeling that having loners as children is their “fault,” that they “did something” to “cause” this.

Was I born this way? Or am I a loner because I am an only child? My friend Elaine is one of seven children and she is the most lonerish loner I have ever met. Stephen Zanichkowsky is a loner. His memoir, “Fourteen,” is about growing up with thirteen siblings.

Does it matter how I got this way? Not if I am happy. I am. Loners need no more to be cured, nor can be cured — the word is gross in this usage — than gays and lesbians. Or people who love golf.

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Down the years, around the world, they form a shining line — of course in single file. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. Isaac Newton, who as a boy would rather tinker and solve math problems than play. René Descartes, the pioneering mathematician and philosopher who did his best work alone in his bed and said, “I think, therefore I am.” Kipling. Thoreau. Beatrix Potter, who had animals for childhood friends instead of children. Dickinson, who stayed home for sixteen years and wrote two thousand poems of startling passion. Lawrence of Arabia.

Crazy Horse, whom his own Sioux tribe called “The Strange Man” but loved him for his laconic air of mystery. Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived as a hermit. Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented TV single-handedly. Silent Spring author Rachel Carson. James Michener. Alec Guinness. Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1932, “Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated.” The same Einstein who observed wryly, “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.”

All those for whom two was a crowd. Who braved the ridicule, rising time and again to the clear view through their own eyes, the wonder and horror they found and explored in themselves. Of course I would not meet them. We are not the type who meet. We do not wish to, in the flesh. We do not need to.

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Nonloners borrow a term from Jung and call us introverts. They think it makes them sound intelligent to say so. At the dawn of the 20th century, Jung devised it along with “extravert.” (He spelled it with an a.) Humankind, Jung asserted, is divided into these two types, extraverts comprising three-fourths of the total. The difference between the two, he said, lies in the way they perceive and interpret information.

Extraverts concern themselves with facts, with the objective, Jung said. By contrast, the introvert concerns himself with the subjective. Confronted with an identical scenario, the extravert will deduce its meaning based on what can be seen and what is recognized as true. The introvert, meanwhile, conjures a complex meaning based on individual and largely immaterial details. Impressions and opinions. He feels his own deduction to be correct, Jung wrote in 1921, yet the introvert “is not in the least clear where and how they link up with the world of reality.”

Acknowledging “the normal bias of the extraverted attitude against the nature of the introvert,” Jung added that, for the latter, “work goes slowly and with difficulty. Either he is taciturn or he falls among people who cannot understand him; whereupon he proceeds to gather further proof of the unfathomable stupidity of man. If he should ever chance to be understood, he is credulously liable to overestimate. Ambitious women have only to understand how advantage may be taken of his uncritical attitude towards the object to make an easy prey of him; or he may develop into a misanthropic bachelor with a childlike heart. Then, too, his outward appearance is often gauche … or he may show a remarkable unconcern, an almost childlike naiveté.”

Yet introverts and loners are not one and the same thing. Surely some who gain information from within and not without still enjoy company. And what of all those countless scientific loners? All those loner hackers, loner programmers, loner inventors? Surely they rely on facts. My father was an engineer without a subjective bone in his body. Yet he was a loner all his life. He taped handmade signs on the door to his den, a door he always kept shut. Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Without Knocking. Confucius Say: Get the @#! Out of Here.

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On a visit to Las Vegas, I once ate breakfast alone at the Circus Circus buffet. I just wanted to see if it was possible, how it might be done. After waiting on line for my first serving of eggs, waffles, cantaloupe, hash browns and coffee, I made my way to a booth that had been designed to seat at least four. There weren’t any smaller ones, and the sea of tables crammed into the huge ring the booths made were too close together to bear. Jingly ambient music mingled with the clatter of dishes, the thud of ketchup bottles and mugs and the shrieking of children who have eaten too much syrup. Nibbling the waffles, I took out a book and began reading. Coffee. Eggs. Turned the page. It was hard to sit still. Something in the experience, in the very fact of sitting alone at a booth made for many, in a vast restaurant built to seat hundreds in a format that encourages eating fast, had an almost physical effect, a propulsion, as if the pink vinyl seat would eject me. Very deliberately I finished what was on my plate, left my book open, facedown, and went back on line for seconds. Slowly. Meaningfully. As if it was the most normal thing in the world.

But it was not. And I could feel that with every bite: that I was bucking a tide, that it took great will to stay. That I was dining on borrowed time.

And this is why loners love takeout.

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Civilization will go on whether you attend the block party or not. It will, whether you say hello and talk to anyone today or not. Whether you get married today or ever or have kids or not. Its momentum is strong. It will go on. Your participation is now optional.

From the book “Party of One” by Anneli Rufus. Copyright © 2003 by Anneli Rufus. Appears by permission of the publisher, Marlowe & Company.

“I want to be available to these families,” Seisler, now a Boston lawyer, says on the reality show. “I’m kind of curious as to what are these kids like.”

When a friend asks whether he plans to attend 74 birthday parties every year, Seisler demurs. “They’re not my kids,” he says.

Aren’t they?

The New York Times reported recently on a man whose donated sperm has produced 150 children, along with other donors who, thanks to data revealed by the DSR and similar sites, have “fathered” 50 or more.

Super-spawn stories are becoming common because sperm banks behave like corporations, says Rene Almeling, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale and the author of “Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm” (University of California, 2011).

“In this country, we have moved from very small-scale custom production of sperm to mass-manufacturing. The national supply of sperm is concentrated in a small number of large, for-profit companies,” Almeling says.

This is a recent development. For most of the 20th century, sperm donation was a boutique, on-demand affair. Typically, when a couple told their private doctor that they’d been unable to conceive, “the doctor would go out and yank a med student or medical resident off the rotation.” In exchange for a small fee, “that student would provide a sample which would be immediately transferred into the patient in the next room,” Almeling says.

The 1970s saw the first commercial sperm banks using frozen sperm. These boomed during the AIDS epidemic, when frozen sperm that had been tested comprehensively for diseases seemed safer to a frightened public — and government agencies — than fresh effluent.

This launched what Almeling calls “the mass manufacturing of sperm,” along with catalogs “that you can flip through online to select your donor based on race, hair color and SAT score.”

To maximize profits, sperm banks recruit desirable donors with high sperm counts. Almeling interviewed sperm-bank administrators who admitted that they routinely exclude candidates they consider “ugly.”

“Only a very small percentage of men are accepted as sperm donors. Sperm banks invest a lot of money in finding donors,” which entails medical screenings. To offset costs, “they usually ask each donor to donate once a week for a year. That’s how you end up with one donor producing hundreds of samples. That’s how you get these large caches of genetic material being shipped all over.”

In those boutique-donor days, secrecy and anonymity were paramount. In this new era of openness, more parents tell kids they were donor-conceived. And more kids grow up wanting to meet their donors.

“It’s a way of learning more about themselves,” says Alice Ruby, executive director of the Sperm Bank of California (TSBC), a Berkeley nonprofit whose voluntary Identity-Release Program, patented in 1983 and allowing donor-conceived adults to contact their donors, was the first of its kind worldwide.

“When people are struggling to conceive, often all they’re thinking about is bringing this cute baby into the world. We want to help people conceive, but we’re taking a long-term approach that they might not have the time or ability to take. We’re thinking: Once that cute baby grows up, what if he or she wants to know more?”

TSBC limits the use of each Identity-Release Program donor’s sperm to 10 families.

“Knowing that you’re potentially involved with 10 different families feels more manageable than being involved with 20 or more families,” Ruby says. The limit also controls for “any unexpected and unforeseeable health issues that might arise.”

Sperm banks interview donors about their families’ medical histories. But any self-reporting situation is susceptible to lies and honest ignorance. Who knows all about his own DNA?

“The danger of one man donating so much sperm is that half-siblings might unknowingly have children together. They would have a much higher risk of passing on a recessive disease than two people who are not related,” says genetics expert Ricki Lewis, who has authored several textbooks and the forthcoming “The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It” (St. Martin’s, 2012).

“A recessive disease is one that requires both parents to be carriers: Each parent has the mutation, but also a functioning copy of the gene in question too, so he or she is not sick. For a rare disease — say, one that affects one in 10,000 people, or even rarer — the chance of two people being carriers is very low. But if two people are half-siblings, and the sperm donor is a carrier of a recessive disease — and we probably all are — then each partner has a one-half chance of inheriting the mutation,” Lewis says.

Two unwitting half-sibs bearing a child with a recessive disease such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs “would be the short-term risk. Longer term, more people in the population would be carriers and, over time, certain inherited diseases would become more common.”

“If a man intentionally withholds information on a single-gene disease, that would be unethical,” Lewis asserts. “But Asperger’s and depression? Not so much. The man is selling something; a couple is buying something. Children never have a choice of who their natural parents are, so I don’t see too many ethical problems.”

Ben Seisler’s fiancée sort of does. Lauren, who is planning to start a family after her wedding, has just been informed that her future children already have dozens of half-siblings, like it or not.

“I don’t know how many children Ben’s sperm has created,” a grim-faced Lauren says in “Style Exposed: Sperm Donor.” “I never wanted to know.” She stopped counting at 25.

“I’m now starting to associate those numbers with people — with actual children — and it’s overwhelming.”

Meanwhile, Ben’s male buddy raises a beer and booms: “You have 70 kids, dude! That’s awesome.”

Would he have said the same thing were Seisler schizophrenic, a serial killer and/or hideous? Does Seisler’s sweet face, his solid build, his sense of humor, decent dress sense, employability and obvious intelligence make his mega-paternity more awesome?

Every ejaculation contains up to 500 million sperm. If he donated regularly for three years, we’re talking about enough little Ben Seislers to repopulate the earth. Assessing Seisler, are we allowed to say that seems okay? Probably not. But it’s not up to us. It’s up to those sperm-shoppers who choose Seisler. In any mode of conception short of rape, women vote with their wombs.

In “Style Exposed: Sperm Donor,” a Seattle single mom who used Seisler’s sperm to conceive two children explains that she selected his anonymous profile from a catalog because she wanted her babies’ biological father to be athletic and professional, to seem like a nice guy and to resemble her.

Looming behind any scenario in which millions of women shop for DNA from among millions of strangers based on characteristics such as looks, education, attainment, culture and class is the specter of eugenics: the pseudoscience — popular in early 20th-century America and Nazi Germany and elsewhere — of improving human populations via marriage restrictions, sterilization and selective impregnation. We don’t practice eugenics in this country anymore. Or do we? Is it the flip side of death panels?

Maybe. But were I sperm-shopping, would I want Ben Seisler’s sperm? Probably.

In a certain cheese shop in my town, there is a rack of rolls. Gleaming golden outside and airy, stretchy, satiny inside, they’re sourdough and only vaguely square as if cut by clowns. One fits in my palm, then my sweatshirt pocket, which it must because this is the acid test by which I define comfort food: It’s small. It’s portable. It can be consumed silently. My comfort food must never call attention to itself. It must be dazzlingly bland, like Zen koans. Rolls. Marshmallows. Mochi. One round bowl of rice.

For you, of course, it’s something else. Celery, say, or vindaloo or wings. A friend of mine craves slick, sticky, flamboyant food that she can stir with slow, exaggerated swirls to make a sucking sound. This is her comfort food.

When you begin to eat, your eyes, hands and mouth start the chain of command. Then the brain kicks in. Sugar and starch spur serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to increase a sense of well-being. (It’s what makes Prozac work.) Salty foods spur oxytocin, aka the “cuddle chemical,” a hormone that is also spiked by hugs and orgasm. Hence, potato chips. Mice unable to taste the difference between regular and extra-high-calorie food in a recent study preferred the high-calorie kind, which suggests that fattening food appeals simply because it is fattening. Which makes sense, given how much fuel our prehistoric ancestors burned crisscrossing savannahs, fleeing carnivores and chasing prey. Fat is a good balm for the fear of starvation.

There’s also how the brain links emotion, memory and sensory stimuli. Popsicles nibbled to break childhood fevers, pizza when your track team won, coconut on your honeymoon: The brain associates good experiences with specific flavors, fragrances and textures, coding them as harbingers of happiness. Henceforth, even when you neither have a fever nor have won a race, eating Popsicles still brings the rush of relief and pizza feels like a reward.

But buried in this (like the caramel at the heart of a Milk Dud) is the deeper question of what counts as comfort.

Neuroscientists define it as the opposite of stress. Whether with pharmaceuticals or firearms or flannel sheets or funnel cake, we seek to de-stress by any means necessary. The brain reaches its relaxed, restorative comfort state when we feel safe and/or when we receive rewards and/or when we feel part of something bigger than ourselves — a culture or a community.

Security, reward and connectedness: Each of these three feelings activates a different portion of the brain, and each of these is more or less crucial to each of us, which further explains why we don’t all relish the same comfort foods. A competitive person or one who feels chronically undervalued cherishes foods that the brain has coded as rewards. A loner finds no comfort in those foods the brain links with community. An abused person who lives in fear might hoard safety foods.

When we feel endangered, unsung and/or lonesome, we eat.

Food is a fort we build. Rolls in my pocket feel like ballast. As a former anorexic, I imagine they will keep me safe because they are small, round, clean, dry and can be eaten stealthily. Someone else might feel most secure when eating pudding, say, because she ate it in the playroom before knowing the meaning of pain.

Food is the gift we give ourselves. My husband beams as if it’s Christmas whenever Sriracha sauce or tonsil-searing salsa make him sweat. His Jewish/Danish DNA never predicted this. He grew up in a capsicum-free home. Yet kimchee signals “treat” to him, because hot-spicy foods were his private discovery, not something that was ever given to him but something he gave himself. They are his prize, and thus they comfort him in that explosive, pore-widening way by which hot saunas heal. (Which makes me think: Is it reincarnation? Given that some people find comfort in what they grew up with, and others specifically in what they didn’t grow up with, do we choose our comfort foods or do they choose us? Does this process parallel the ways in which we acquire other preferences — for bondage, say, or for stiletto heels or hairy men?)

Food is also the friend who never disappoints or ditches us. Psychologists call comfort food a “social surrogate” — in other words, not quite replacing real companions but reminding us of them. Participants in yet another recent study felt less lonely after writing about — and not even necessarily eating — comfort foods. The psychologists who designed that study theorized correctly that consuming comfort foods soothes us in the exact same ways as wearing our favorite clothes or watching our favorite TV shows. Reminding us of those who love us and/or look and talk like us, comfort food also reminds us of who we are. Away from home, we seek the foods of home.

Of course, all matters of psychology are unrelentingly complex. Comfort food feels good, but — for some of us — in that first rush is also a twinge: For some, comfort food invokes a special hot-faced shame because both food and comfort are so intimate, and using one to do the other borders on self-pleasure. From there, it’s just one small step to guilty pleasure, which is what most of us would call caramel corn and curly fries. Perhaps it’s because in this crowded, hard world, we have convinced ourselves that seeking comfort is itself embarrassing, as if need makes us weak. We are ashamed to crave the salty, starchy, soft, unctuous and sweet, because we tell ourselves we are too smart to want what the judgmental would call junk — although, surrounded by food that is market-tested to appeal to our most primal urges, we don’t stand a chance. If comfort food exposes those urges, a drive-thru window can become a harsh confessional.

So what’s your name?
D-E-R-R-I-C-K, like an oil derrick? No?
Where did you learn those acrobatics?
Aren’t you scared you’ll slip and snap your spine? Would you be paralyzed?
If you got paralyzed, what would you do for fun?
Really? So paralyzed guys can jack off?
Who do you have for civics? Mr. White? Get this. His wife miscarried last summer at Disneyland. No, really, on line for the Matterhorn! It’s true, they belong to our church, First Presbyterian!

It was all anthropology to her. But his answers were fast, so Rhonda liked him and of course he liked her — no, not that way. He was gay. Those two could talk on the phone for hours. He cracked her up because he was stupid but smart — knew all the movie stars’ birthdates but believed Los Angeles once had castles and kings and queens. He squared his jaw and said knights used to joust on the beach “in the old days.” Rhonda encouraged this but I told him it was ludicrous. He mimicked my voice, wee wee wee.

Because Rhonda was both of our best friends, we three spent all our time together. Derek had a car, so on Saturday nights we three drove up to Hollywood to drink coffee and watch the cross-dressing prostitutes. Look at those faaaags in their cheap nylons, Derek would say, like it was okay for him to say it. Faaaags. Queeeers. Derek and Rhonda swung down Sunset arm in arm with me trailing behind. Derek would whirl around on his deft penny-loafers and blink, putting his hand to his mouth as if just noticing that I was there. Well, I’ll be darned! It’s Roo! Rhonda would laugh. He was hilarious. He was hilarious about me. My feet. They’re like boats! My ears. My teeth. My virginity: Roo has never been popped! You will think I should have gone away or punched him out but never. Derek and Rhonda spoke a secret code. They riffed in it about movies and cars and me, and Rhonda would put her hand on Derek’s arm and say Dthgerthgek, sthgop thgeasthging hthgethgr, which meant: Derek, stop teasing her. But she was laughing. Because damn, Derek was funny. If things had gone differently he could have been in sitcoms. He could have been the comedian who did gymnastics.

All these years later I wonder sometimes if Rhonda was trying to get rid of me. I don’t blame her — if she was seeing how much she could let Derek say and do before I couldn’t take any more and split. I was not a perfect angel to her. Maybe she thought I had it coming. Derek liked to begin sentences with The reason Roo has never had a boyfriend is and finish them with whatever jumped into his head. Because her incisors are little and brown. Because she listens to top forty. Because she’s frigid. Because if a guy came to her house, her bald crazy dad would chase him away with a pitchfork.

In the car, on the freeway, he stroked the gearshift: Roo, come up front and make friends with thisssss. You might leeeearn something. He made girly pleasure noises. Just rub it here. And here, ahhh.

At the mall: You never buy anything that’s not on half-price sale, Roooo, youuuu cheap Jewwww.

He liked the rhyme. So did Rhonda, the way it made his lips a muzzle. So he drew it out. Oooooooo.

You wonder why I stayed. Because Rhonda was there. You ask was I a masochist. You ask how much in fact could Derek say and do before I went away and the answer is everything, anything. I would not ever go away, because Rhonda was there. I’m still trying to live down those things he said — examining my ears and teeth, are they okay, well sure but no but sure but are they really? You ask did I have no self-respect?

No, none, but still, did that give him the right?

At a school dance during our junior year, Derek was capering around to an Elton John song and pointing at me, saying sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Which was true. He seized me by the arm and led me to the stairs and said This is because I pity you. He kissed me. Dry and quick, but still. Then he told Rhonda and she rocked back and forth on her heels in that teenage-girl way, ha ha ha.

Only when Rhonda and I left for separate universities and Derek stayed in LA could I be certain never to see him again. They stayed in touch. He told Rhonda about the clubs in Hollywood. The guys. There’s this faaaag with a body like a pear who hangs out at the Glass House and when we tease him he shows us his fist and goes, “Want this, fuckahs?” And there’s this other guy with a forked dick. Rhonda always warned him to be safe. He told her sure but sometimes guys get high and stuff happens fast so shut up. She said You stupid shit, be safe. At first it was a joke but then it wasn’t. Mind your own business, Derek said. Reckless, spat Rhonda. Mind your own business, you boring bitch, he said and hung up. She never called back.

Fast-forward to the high-school reunion. Rhonda and I were wearing dance dresses again — hers light, mine dark, as always. Crossing the hotel lobby, we could see white mylar balloons trailing green ribbons — our class colors — in the ballroom. Music from our graduation year pumped through the speakers. Grown-up cheerleaders were shouting like nubile girls. Hiiii!

In the corridor stood an easel mounted with a posterboard on which were painted the words In Memoriam. It was a list of all our classmates who had died.

We already knew about some of them. The suicides: the guitarist who shot himself, the mother-of-four who drove off a pier into the sea. The former tennis star killed in a carjacking. The sick ones. Others surprised us. Her? But how? Was she that one who wore the same shirt every day? The list gave only names, not dates or reasons.

Rhonda stamped her foot and swore.

That stupid shit.

Derek was second from last on the list.

I warned that stupid shit.

The crowd was flowing through the doorway and pulling us in. Couples jived on the dance floor, women who wanted so hard to be recognized and wanted their viewers to think, Hey — she got hot! and sharp-suited ex-track stars with double chins.

Our ex-classmate Teresa elbowed her way up to us as we were leaving the buffet line.

You saw that about Derek. She jerked her chin toward the easel. She made a hugging gesture. He died in my arms.

When Derek got really sick with AIDS, Teresa let him stay in her apartment. Their families had been friends when we were kids, and the difference between her and me was that she could never tell when he was being mean.

She had the darkest red lipstick.

He had a vision at the end, she said, sipping Southern Comfort and Orange Crush — our unofficial class drink — as we found a table. She had a bracelet of shooting stars tattooed around one wrist. Sinking into her chair, she narrowed her eyes at Rhonda.

He described his vision out loud while it was happening. He said someone was waving to him from the window of a Porsche and it was you.

He was a gifted acrobat and a devoted son and he was dead so young and that was sad.

Stupid shit. Rhonda speared a broiled shrimp. What a completely fucked-up and pointless way to die. Her eyes were red and wet but her jaw jerked from side to side, its sinews making a pop-pop sound, the way they always did when she was mad.

Teresa turned her plate around as if it was a steering wheel. I mean, that’s funny, isn’t it? She flashed a smile at Rhonda that was not a smile. You of all people. In his last vision.

A new song started, and I feigned being absorbed in it, the way I used to in the car or on the beach, so that no one would pay me any mind. That ditz. She loves her top forty. Because no way should Rhonda and Teresa see, no way should anyone, what I was thinking. Yes, he was a gifted acrobat a gifted acrobat a gifted acrobat and so nice to his mom his mom his mom. But such an SOB to me — he knew. He knew. And now he couldn’t do that anymore. If I stared hard enough into the disco lights, no one could see me smile.

And we were all together, but apart.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Feeling happy when you hear of a death, even for an instant, flings you right beyond the pale. Beyond confession. Beyond civilization. Way beyond conversation. Some might say beyond humanity. And yet it happens. Frissons cannot lie. The tingling feels at first a little like relief, a soda-poppish hsssss. Then it sinks in, coldhotcold, like liquid spilled onto your pants. And once you know what it is you know what it is.

You think Wishes come true. You think Uh oh. You cringe. Taboo.

Once you know, you do not want to know. It is the last thing you would like to know. We blather about self-awareness — oh how Zen it is. Yet who I am is someone who rejoiced at knowing a young attractive man was dead.

Okay, just for a moment. Just a bit. And maybe again, like a flashback, once or twice afterward. Maybe it’s flashing back right now. But hey. You wrestle with that feeling, once you realize what it is. You blot it out, you mop it up. You try to sandblast it from your heart. And fill that blank space with responses that seem more acceptable. Picture a funeral. Fix your mind upon his mom. Hear yourself saying How sad.

Because if speaking ill of the dead is a sin, then how hot will you burn for one tiny smile?

They always tell you this: When someone dies, you will feel sad.

They warn you about sad. It seems so pure. Painful but clean as fire, the way it looks in movies — crying jags. And so you think you know. It has been drummed into your head by sad songs (last chance … last kiss … tell Laura I love her), sad films, fairy tales, King Lear. Sympathy cards glimpsed on the drugstore rack — why would you look closer at them, or open them, unless you had to — bear generic greetings, punishingly brief. By these scanty prompts you are prepped in the basics of grief — Grieving for Dummies.

And you trust that when the time comes, you will deal with it. You trust that the time will not come tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. And most likely it won’t. But then one day it does. And then it becomes real. Not a movie after which you can walk out of the theater into the sunshine, not a maudlin song you can switch off, but your life. Your life in death.

When that day came, you told yourself: And now I must be sad.

And, chances are, you were.

Sadder, quite likely, than you ever could have dreamed. You had no clue how bad it could be, how you could feel stabbed straight through the eyes, flayed in the wind, drowning in gelatin. It lasts.

But that is sorrow. And while you never dreamed that it could feel so bad, I’ll say this much for sorrow: At least you expected it.

What you did not expect, and what Hallmark never hints about, is all those other ways you feel when people die. Weird, messy, nasty, sticky, scary feelings that slop over the rim of sorrow, or poison it, or take its place.

You were not warned. You were not taught. No one ever sat you down and told you: Some deaths, someday, will make you sigh with sweet relief. Other deaths will make you say It’s all my fault! Sometimes regret will spin you in a lonely oxygenless orbit. No one ever sat you down and said: Some deaths will horrify you. Grisly things no one should see will imprint themselves on your eyes. There are such things as never and forever and too late. You never knew before that death does funny things to love, and love does funny things to death. They never said some deaths would shame you. Some would make you selfish. Some would silence you, as if you had come to live at the bottom of a well.

And some would make you glad.

You tell yourself: This is so infantile. Like cheering when the Wicked Witch of the West melts. You tell yourself: Be civilized. Grow up.

Characters in hardboiled crime novels are always braying, I’m glad he’s dead! But in that context it’s okay because they’re talking about scoundrels. The devil take him! The world’s a better place without Smitty! Fiction is full of jubilations over the deaths of crooks and slavedrivers and maniac kings. We have our own villains in real life, yet the mature strategy is to get away from them, to build a grown-up life among nice kind loved ones. Only a masochist wouldn’t try to flee, such that by the time your former tormentor dies, you are so far away in your new life, driving a Corvette or an Abrams tank or watching your children swim, that you’ll never even hear the news.

But now and then you do. And then, uh oh. Wishes come true. My friend Catrina was fifteen when she heard that two of her cousins had been in a car accident. One boy sustained massive head injuries and the other was killed.

And I thought, Whee! She stops herself. That’s terrible, isn’t it? Am I terrible? But they were both such bastards.

That stubborn, stubborn joy.

The joy that dare not speak its name.

The dead are gone and cannot speak up for themselves. They’re down — why kick them when they’re down? With death they have been dealt the cruelest blow. You hear others around you say: She was so brave. He was so young. She will be missed. He worked so hard. A shame! A life cut short! Death is so cruel.

This is no game of hopscotch you have won, no drinking-game or dormitory fight but something at once eternal and immaterial. What hubris to insert yourself into the picture, thinking you have “won.”

But I have, you say with that smile.

Because death is cruel, and life is too.

Louis Armstrong had a hit song in the ’30s which said it all. It went I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Teresa had brought Derek’s yearbook to the reunion, hoping that Rhonda would be there so that she could give it to her. I couldn’t just throw it away, could I? Teresa said in a high voice like a screen door slamming shut, draining her glass. But I kinda couldn’t keep it. All around us, our ex-classmates were dancing: divorced or depressed or bankrupt or alcoholic but luckier, no matter what, than Derek. Teresa fingered the book’s padded cover — those cost $2 more than regular covers but Derek had champagne taste — with its our-town design, a seagull and a lighthouse and a boat. She flipped to the page she had signed herself, that way-back June: just Have a bitchen summer! with a smiley face over the i. Then she flipped to the page Rhonda had filled with line after line of tight rounded script: Remember when we lost our flipflops on the Ferris wheel? Remember when we threw up after drinking Clamato? Remember your birthday when we went ballroom dancing? Remember when we saw the amputee? The yearbook was open on Teresa’s lap and she bounced her knee. See that? It’s yours now, it’s yours, she said and snapped it shut and thrust it at Rhonda. He’s yours. He was. Each of ours, and everyone’s, to do with as we wished.

Excerpted from “The Farewell Chronicles: How We Really Respond to Death.” Copyright ) 2005 by Anneli Rufus. Appears by permission of the publisher, Marlowe & Co., a division of Avalon Publishing Group.

That her mother — a thin woman who shunned food — brought home piles of dresses from the store to spare this child the shame of a communal fitting room strikes my mother as merciful.

At 30, illness nearly killed her but it left her slim. She marveled at her arms. And taught herself how not to eat. Today one of the worst things you could say to her is, “You look healthy.”

She says being fat ruined her life. Today when she sees fat women, she shudders. “Tragic,” she will murmur, or “I’ll never eat again.”

These days, fat children are everywhere I look. At schools, in restaurants, at the pool. Last week as I guided a friend around Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, it appeared that every third child had that shape, increasingly familiar: thick necks, big thighs, bellies bulging out over the waistbands of their jeans. Soft terraces.

For me it is a bizarre acid test. I was raised by a woman terrified I would be fat, though I was not. She scrutinized my meals, watching across her empty plate, and rushed out to buy products made with cyclamates when she heard they were being outlawed. I cannot see fat kids and not panic. The more I see, the more I fret. You could say that is my problem.

But it’s not.

Last week, studies in an edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to obesity indicated that 22 percent of Americans are obese. More than 50 percent of Americans are overweight, according to the studies, and obesity, defined as being more than 30 percent over ideal body weight, is the major cause of mortality in the United States. About one in eight Americans was considered obese in 1991; today it is one in five.

In 1997, 40 percent of American 5- to 8-year-olds were obese. Ten percent were obese in 1990, up from 5 percent in the late ’60s, according to a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. More TV, less P.E. and myriad ways to have sedentary fun have caused the young to expand at breakneck speed.

And I am wondering: Are these lives being ruined in unison, just as my mother’s was decades ago? She was always the only fat child in her class. In my day, in the ’70s, two or three made their hunched and solitary way along the crowded hall. Now hefty kids have lots of company. But does that help?

My friend’s son, at 11, outweighs me. He does not outweigh her, which matches what the New England Journal of Medicine says: Children of fat mothers are three times more likely to be fat themselves. While kicking a football around the park, Scott mentions unprovoked that he could stand to lose 25 pounds or so. Then he shrugs and keeps kicking, executing dives and phantom tackles. He relishes his bigness, tells how he intimidates his smaller classmates, even frightens girls.

Long after he has gone to bed his mother says, “Sometimes his size gets to him.” Not that much, she says. Not like hers got to her when she was 11 and in her yearbook Henry Ramos wrote, “You are nice for an elephant.” Her son suffers less than she did because he has a lot of friends as fat as he is, she says. Fatter.

In the awkward lull that follows I force my eyes down from kitchen shelves crammed with fudge sauce and Cap’n Crunch.

Scott eats no more than any ordinary kid, she says. I wonder. On the day I visit he has pancakes for breakfast. In his sack lunch go a steak sandwich, cookies, a Snapple. After school when his mom is at work he does homework while watching Jackie Chan kick butt in “Rush Hour” on TV. He makes a bowl of popcorn, adds butter, pours sugar over it. White crystals shimmer in the sun.

“This is my recipe,” he beams. He is smart and good-natured. His self-confidence seems real. He sees himself as a world traveler, an athlete and a math whiz. Which he is.

Is he OK? Emotionally, yes, as kids go. But, physically, no. Obesity can seriously cut your lifespan — just ask researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who contributed their own study last week to announce that fat kills.

Who denies that every child deserves high self-esteem? No one wants fat kids to feel bad about themselves. Look how my mother suffered. Billboards that glorify skinny bodies create hordes of bulimics. Kids have shot themselves after being taunted about their weight.

How do you let a child know he or she is loved and powerful and fine but also, ahem, may be on the road to major health problems? To having difficulty climbing stairs, fitting into theater seats, chasing buses? Is it wrong to discuss with them the possibility of losing weight? Is it wrong not to? That is the dilemma.

For dinner my friend heats up a casserole that is comprised of ground beef, cream-of-mushroom soup, cheese and tortillas fried in oil. Scott dislikes vegetables so she has chopped tomatoes fine and obscured them under the cheese. Then they bring out the ice cream.

Diets do not work, my friend says. She knows this from her own youth, and current research bears it out. The body will not stand that sense of deprivation, forced starvation, and fights back by lowering its metabolism. Which is why, after the diet ends, nearly all dieters quickly gain back what weight they lost.

“Nobody ever told me I was fine the way I was,” my friend says in a voice that stretches thin and cracks. “I tell my son which foods are good for him and let him choose.”

I want to laugh. If my mother had let me choose, at 11, I would have lived on Goober Grape and Hostess Sno-Balls. Her nightmare would have come true.

Parents in generations past said no so readily, shearing our desires off at the stalk. Last night in a public restroom I saw a woman on her hands and knees begging a toddler to please use the toilet.

“No,” the toddler said, and won.

And then there was 13-year-old Christina Corrigan of El Cerrito, Calif., who in 1996 died of heart failure at 680 pounds, amid a morass of feces and pizza boxes in a house she had not left for months. She had not been to school in more than a year. Charged with child endangerment, her distraught mother said she knew her daughter’s health was at risk but had not known what to do. Hoping Christina would decide on her own to stop eating so much, she brought home the fast foods that the girl wanted. (Following a trial that sparked heated debate, Marlene Corrigan was convicted of misdemeanor child abuse.)

Letting kids choose — giving them cash to let them buy their meals — makes many of them fat. Fifty percent of the Americans who eat out on an average day eat fast food. When the local high school lets out every day at 3, I watch a triple stream of kids pulsing through downtown Berkeley on their way to Taco Bell, Burger King and McDonald’s. Some of these kids already are huge.

Parents feel guilty about working, about not being home to make meals, “so they schmear their kids” with treats, says Judith Isaksen, a Berkeley therapist. “For a lot of reasons I am a fanatic about families sitting down for dinner together. But it’s rare. Kids eat in isolation in front of a TV or a computer, which is bound to make them fat.”

One of her young clients is a middle-school girl whom she describes as “extremely overweight.” The girl’s thin parents put her in therapy because they worried about what humiliations she might face at school. She has no friends.

When Isaksen asks her about her weight, “she is adamant about not caring. She insists that it is simply not an issue,” and is irritated that the therapist keeps bringing up the topic. The girl insists her weight has no effect on her life, at school or anywhere. She shrugs. She is, the therapist believes, a master of denial.

“And she walks in here every week eating what I consider a huge amount of food.” Huge bags of French fries. Towering ice-cream cones. Her parents give her money when they drop her off “and probably tell her something vague like, ‘Spend it wisely.’”

Isaksen’s young overweight clients know almost nothing about nutrition, she has discovered. She asks what their favorite foods are. Pizza, they say. Burgers. Duh. They go right out and get them. It is as if an entire generation has forgotten certain basic principles, the way Europe, after Rome fell, forgot how to write.

The fact that so many American kids are so big today is evidence of this country’s advertising skills, says Berkeley family physician Dr. Steven Hart. “Taste buds are exploitable.”

Hart, who admits he takes an aggressive attitude toward his patients’ weight, points out that about 15 years ago the average American ate a pound and a half of sugar every week. Now it’s over 3 pounds, much of it in processed foods like soda and hamburger buns.

This is, after all, a country in which fast-food chains are permitted to contribute to on-campus school lunches. One Big Mac has more fat grams “than you would want in a whole week,” says Hart.

A recent study found that fewer than one-fourth of North American children exercise even half an hour daily. The average child spends four hours a day watching TV, a blend of junk-food brainwashing and lethargy that infuriates Hart.

His youngest fat patients are years away from the mondo acne and excessive menstrual bleeding that often menace overweight teens.

“It’s hard for an 8-year-old to look at diabetes or joint disease seriously,” he says. Or heart disease, breast cancer, stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer. Obesity is an epidemic, says Hart. Self-esteem is all well and good, he adds, “but it’s a health issue.”

Other countries laugh at America the way kids used to laugh at my mother. This is the fat country. There is no other like it. Is it accidental that our current fads in income, shoes and cars tend toward the bulbous?

Watching fat children walk home with groups of friends I see them smile, the girls twirling in skin-tight tank tops. Some glide hand in hand with boyfriends. Are they ringing in a new aesthetic? More than ever, people of all sizes appear on TV — not as the butt of jokes anymore, either. Overweight is clearly no longer anathema, no longer an automatic road to loneliness and shame. This makes me shudder with relief.

Yet, the fact that so very many children in this country are obese — and fat kids tend to become fat adults — sends up a red flag. My mother would say they hate themselves. She would say each one hides a well of sorrow, dark and deep, that someone who was never a fat child cannot know. Maybe she was just born too early to escape that misery. Or maybe that misery now has more company.