“You’re throwing rainbows!” he hollered, wiping his forehead with his flannel shirt sleeve.

Nolan Ryan made a change-up look so easy. I could hurl a softball twice as far as most girls, faster too, but I couldn’t slow it down on purpose. It made me feel like a girl. The grass in the yard was moist, so I slipped and ran down the hill to get the ball from the edge of the creek where it was stuck in the shallow mud banks threatening to wash away into the river.

“Grab it like this.” Dad was across the yard again. I couldn’t see how he was holding the ball.
I ran to him as fast as I could. His stubby hand was wrapped around it, so natural, like it grew there. His top knuckles were on the laces, just the tips of the fingers across the white stitching. I took the ball from him, my fingers in all of the right places, copying his hold. I walked back to my side of the yard, eyes forward and narrowed, hand lightly squeezing the ball: This is how it should feel in your hands. This is how Dad throws a change. I threw it, grunting with the release and watched as it sailed, the same speed, the usual spin. It fell at his feet because he didn’t try to catch it this time. “I think it’s your wrist,” he offered. A long black stream of tobacco spit hit the ground.

“My hands are too small,” I said to my shoes.

It was on another of those hundreds of Fall days when Dad and I threw a ball in the yard until Mom yelled it was time to eat dinner and isn’t it too cold and dark for ya’ll to play, that I thought I had found a solution to why I couldn’t make a football spiral or a softball change speed.

“Do you ever wish I was boy?” I asked my dad.

He just looked down at me and said no of course not why would I ever wish that and what made you think that?

So I could be tough and not have to wear dresses and pink and so I could finally cut off the hair that fell below my waist. So I wouldn’t have to help the women wash dishes on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“I dunno,” I said.

I was sure I’d be the first professional woman playing baseball and football: a female Bo Jackson. I knew my life would not be complete until I had seen my last name across the back of a St. Louis Cardinals’ jersey, though I knew my last name wouldn’t even fit. I imagined the letters running across the back of my shoulders onto my arms, like R. HENDERSON or RODRIGUEZ. On a 49er’s jersey, though, the name might fit because the shoulder pads would offer more of a surface for the lettering.

“Someday I’ll play with the Cardinals.” I said to Dad.

“We’ll keep practicing, babe.”

* * *

I was five when my best friend told me she was going to play t-ball. I assumed I was signed-up too. The first game was in a week. I asked Dad about getting a new glove and some pants like John Kruk.

“You’re not playing t-ball,” he said.

I thought I was being punished.

“That game is for pussies. They’ll never learn to hit.”

Dad said there was no way in hell I was gonna play T-ball. I cried for a year, listening to Dad’s argument, finally internalizing that the only real way to learn to hit was from a ball being thrown, not some damn ball sitting on some damn tube. When my best friend asked why I wasn’t playing, I told her, “T-ball is for pussies.”

So Dad found a team thirty miles away, the next town over, that played “coach pitch” and he signed us up. And he coached me every summer, every sticky mid-western burnt corn summer. Every keep-your-eye-on-the-goddamned-ball-I’m-gonna-nail-your-feet-to-the-ground-use-two-hands-get-your-gate-down-you-kicked-ass-tonight-babe-Dad’s-so-proud-of-you summer.

* * *

It was Easter morning the next year and my family was gathered at my grandparents’ kitchen table waiting for my Uncle Jeff to walk in the door so we could all walk together across the yard to the Episcopal Church. He hadn’t come home the night before and the family cracked jokes about him finally having found a woman. The phone rang. Dad and my Uncle Jerome left in one car, my grandparents in another. I was six years old.

They found Jeff’s truck upside down on a creek levee only two miles from home. While my grandparents waited on the road with the county sheriff, and Jerome turned away, saying he just couldn’t do it, my Dad walked to the overturned truck and saw Jeff, smashed against the windshield, crushed against the dashboard. The county sheriff waited. That’s him, my dad told him.

The whole family stayed waiting in my grandparents’ yard as the old church bell rang. I was wearing a frilly dress that my mom and I had fought over for an hour earlier that morning, my long blonde hair combed and an Easter hat bobby pinned to my head. Grandma and Grandpa pulled into the driveway, then Dad and Jerome. Grandma got out of the car, one foot, then another. She paused. Then she rose from the car seat, her hand over her eyes and stood there, the other hand grasping the open door, until Grandpa came from the driver’s side and grabbed her round the waist and led her down a small slope in the yard. She walked that way a few steps, then she broke free. Grandma began trotting down the yard to the house where we were all waiting in a circle. Her purse bounced, dangling from her arm, forgotten. Halfway to us she stopped, her big plastic glasses moving with the scrunching of her face. “Jeffie’s dead.” she sobbed. “My baby is dead.”

He had been twenty-two, a first-baseman who broke rural high school batting records. I was just tall enough to peek over the side of his casket, just tall enough to smell the embalming fluids or make-up or the flowers of funerals, whatever that smell is. Dad lifted me; his hard calloused hands were vises around my waist. He held me so I could look in. It wasn’t my first funeral. I knew the orange make-up that would be covering his face. I knew he’d look like he had an inch of fake skin. Everyone said he looked so good but I never understood how someone could look good dead, covered in make-up. Beside Jeff’s left arm lay a wooden Louisville slugger with the graffiti of his teammates’ signatures running the length of it. The suit he was wearing was blue and ribbed. He looked strange not wearing cut-off shorts and high school mascot t-shirts. His fingers were laced together on top of a baseball, the red stitching like blood oozing from small cuts. I watched as my Mom reached in to pat his hands, her face drawn and tight, head nodding yes he was good yes he is dead yes. I reached out my hand, too. Dad adjusted his grip on me, suspended me over Jeff’s body, bird’s eye view, my long hair falling around my face. I touched his hands and the baseball; both were cold and hard.

His tombstone was nothing fancy. On either side of his name were my grandparents’ names, the dates of death left open. “Did Grandma and Grandpa die, too?” I asked my parents. It took years for me to understand the concept of a pre-paid burial plot. A bat and baseball were etched into the tombstone above the last name, HOLZHAUSER. I thought, When I die, they will put a baseball on my tombstone, too.

Jeff used to play wiffle ball in our yard with the neighbor boys. I was too young, too small to play, so I had to watch off in the distance, every once in a while racing our dog to retrieve the balls that flew too far. We developed this routine. It took place every night after school, and I began to take my position as a fan seriously. Digging through a box of my baby clothes, I found a baseball style t-shirt and wiggled my way into it, the arms were too tight and the bottom only covered some of my ribs. I couldn’t think of any teams that Dad liked that had the color pink on their jerseys. “Mom, what does this say?” I pointed to what was written across the front.

“Angel”

“Does it say California anywhere?”

“No.”

Dad and I didn’t like the Angels, at least he never said much about them, but I wore it anyway figuring it was the closest thing I had to a baseball shirt. I went to my bedroom and pulled my fake Cardinals batting helmet from the nail on the wall. My grandpa had bought it for me the last time we went to St. Louis. So I let the cheap plastic beat against my head and ran outside to watch the game from the cracked, sun baked porch. And I did this until I was old enough to convince the boys to let me play or Dad made them, it’s hard to say.

Dad told me once he played football in middle school and was sure he would’ve been great, but his family moved. They moved to where I grew up, and there wasn’t any football at my school, seeing as how it was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corn, soy beans, and flood water. Dad played baseball, too, and he played at my high school. But because his parents owned the bar in our town, they were too busy to come to games or pick him up after practice. He would walk home, eleven miles, or hitchhike. I always pictured my Dad, seventeen years old, eyes on his shoes, his hands minus thirty years’ of work gripping the knob of a baseball bat dragging it down a country highway. Maybe he stopped every once in a while to throw a rock straight into the air and bat it away, over the road as far as he could. Maybe he would take a few low practice swings on the newly planted corn. It’s possible he walked the railroad track to cut off a mile or two. Limestone bluffs as tall as silos on one side of the tracks, caves dotting the hillsides, the limestone too soft to resist weather. But on humid spring nights I still see my Dad, a poor country boy with a shock of brown hair, walking home at dusk, the fog from the river just starting to rise and creep through the fields. And my Daddy, a shadow of a man, walking home.

* * *

I would always try to be the last to leave after my softball games. The moisture would fall from the sky like heavy, slow rain around 8:30 every night; the thick mist hovering around the lights of the baseball fields formed one large bright and blurred foggy bundle of air. Whether I was wandering out in center field or talking to teammates, I was always stalling. Every game felt like the last game of my life. I never took it for granted. I’d hide in dew-covered metal bleachers and try to see the hills through the lights and the dense fog.

It would always happen that Mom would yell for me just when night was pushing the light of day deep down, over the horizon, behind a line of trees. I would run, still full of energy. In fact, more full of energy after a game than before. I would sprint to the truck, the whole time twisting my weak ankles as my rubber cleats clawed at the gravel for traction. I’d mount the tail gate of the truck like a pommel horse, swinging my legs and pointing my toes just like my gymnastic teacher instructed. I was graceful. I knew I was. I’d slow down my body like those guys on the rings just to show people how skilled I was at slinging myself into the back of Dad’s red Ford. I loved the thump my feet made as they hit the paint-chipped bed.

Mom would argue that I should ride in the cab, but Dad would usually give in and let me ride in the back of the truck. I’d grab an old folding lawn chair and prop the back up against the window. As we pulled out of the parking lot I’d give a last look to the ball field. As the field lights were shut down, my heart would flicker, and my excitement would fade to melancholy, though I had no word for the sadness I felt. I had a feeling I was a small part of something much bigger. What that was I wasn’t really sure.

Going fifty-five down Highway 94 I learned to love the chilly night air. This was the road my Dad used to walk. The dampness of the river air brought out a musky smell from the fields. I could close my eyes and know the difference: Soybeans, Soybeans, Corn, Corn, now Soybeans. Mom would try to check on me. “You okay?” she’d holler through the pane of the sliding window. I pretended not to hear her. I’d just stare at the sky, all the stars, and count the eyes of deer out in the fields.

The ride only took twelve minutes from the field to my house. That road that my dad walked for hours, kicking rocks, sticking his thumb out. When Dad would back us up into the driveway, I’d sigh. I exist in the world. A chorus of tree frogs, bull frogs, crickets sometimes so loud I couldn’t sleep. I was home. The moon floating on the river and in the sky. Ball glove still on my hand, rubber cleats slipping on the dew settled into the truck bed, hair matted from dirt and the wet of Midwest nights, I’d jump to the ground, to the same yard I had learned to catch and throw in and where Dad practiced with me until we had enough. I’d take a last long look at the sky on the way inside and run straight to bed without showering.

* * *
It was my junior year of high school. My grandpa had been sick for months and on peritoneal dialysis, so when he went back into the hospital that week, no one thought much of it. Then Mom drove up during softball practice one evening. She didn’t really look at me, just stared past me into the trees, out over the river bottoms. Without anyone saying a word to me, I grabbed my ball bag and told my coach, “I have to go.” He nodded, the first time I’d seen him not scowling.

Five o’clock the next morning, after sleeping in spurts on two orange plastic chairs pushed together in a waiting room, and sometimes under the couch, I was standing beside my grandpa, his body thin and covered by a white hospital sheet. When I saw that Dad was crying, my own eyes stung and began to blur. My parents shuffled me in front of them, right up close to the skinny hospital bed. Mom whispered in my ear, “Tell Grandpa you love him.” Dad put his lips to my other ear, “Tell Grandpa you’ll hit a homerun for him.” His skin was so pale I thought I could see through it. I was almost mad at Grandpa for putting me in such an awkward situation; I never really told anyone I loved them. But I knew if I didn’t say it now, there would never be another chance. I held his hand, “I’ll hit a homerun for you,” I said my voice wavering. His sun-spotted hand squeezed mine and I saw a weak smile through the plastic of the oxygen mask. His other hand reached for the mask and Dad told him no, to leave it on. I noticed the turquoise and silver ring Grandpa always wore was missing from his finger. He tried to say something anyway, but the noise of the oxygen mask was all I heard.

There were at least fifteen people standing around his bed when it all ended. Grandma held his hand as we all watched. The nurse inched through the crowd to stand with the doctor. The oxygen mask had been removed. All eyes were on Grandma and the woman nodded for final approval. Grandma nodded back. She pushed buttons on machines and they let out a sigh. My grandpa, Nelson (Buzzy) Holzhauser, lover of the St. Louis Cardinals and everything baseball, veteran of the Korean war, funniest story-teller in Portland, Missouri, the man who used a curse word every other word he spoke, now gasped for oxygen. The man who taught my dad how to play baseball struggled for life. His chest heaved so hard it made his whole body rise from the sterile white bed and come down with a thump, like someone lying under the bed trying to kick him out. Thump. Thump. He kept his head turned towards Grandma the best he could. It was all so absurd I was thinking. A whole family here, staring at this man fighting for his life. I felt dirty, terrible for staring wide-eyed at my grandpa. I was embarrassed that he was too weak to live. My body felt like it was bursting and I let out one huge sob, like a bark and decided to leave the room. Exhausted and confused, I stopped and stood behind the privacy curtain there in the ICU and pulled it tight around me like a blanket. I didn’t want Grandpa to see me there, if he could see at all, wherever he was in time and space. Through the one inch gap in the curtains, I watched my grandpa die.

He was buried beside Jeff. Ten years had gone by while my uncle waited for his parents to join him on the hill overlooking the river. Grandma gave me Grandpa’s favorite Cardinals jacket. Every summer it seemed, Grandpa had sponsored a Holzhauser family Cardinals game trip. We’d pack into several cars and make the two hour drive to St. Louis. During the 7th inning stretch, the Budweiser Clydesdales would pull the wagon around the field, full of wooden kegs of beer. Grandpa would raise his own plastic cup of the stuff and hoot and holler with the rest of the crowd. When Ozzie Smith would hit a homerun and do a back flip on his way to home plate, Grandpa would nudge me with his elbow, his crooked bottom teeth sticking out, “Aren’t you glad you’re taking gymnastics, too?” I would giggle like that was such a silly idea, but all I ever wanted was to play baseball-right there in Busch Stadium with Grandpa, Dad, Jeff everyone, watching me. I pictured myself walking up to the batter’s box, my specially made bat knocking the dirt from my metal cleats. Maybe the first pitch I would be too anxious, maybe a little too nervous to swing. I’d pull the next one away (oh, to be able to hit it wherever you liked!). And then the pitcher would try to throw me a change, but I would be ready, you see, watching the motionless laces as the ball floated through the air. I would crank it. Crack! That noise and the feeling of knowing that your mind and your muscles were all there at once, making something happen, the vibration of the bat that runs down your arms and into your chest. I would stand, the bat dangling in my left hand, watching as the tiny white ball flew into the upper deck. I wouldn’t walk around the bases because it seemed rude. I’d run, and just before home I’d do a back flip and cameras would flash and Grandpa and Dad would be right there, running out of the dugout or something. Dad would say, “Good job, babe” the wad of chewing tobacco trying to make its escape through his wide smile. And Grandpa would follow that with, “Hell of a hit, there, munchkin.” Jeff might just smile at me and tousle my hair. Maybe Grandma knew all of this, could see it in me somehow, and so she gave me my grandpa’s Cardinals jacket.

* * *

Once, after a soft-ball game, I raised my can of Mountain Dew in a victory toast. Surrounded by my team, a mob of fourteen year old girls with their hair in pony-tails and blue scrunchies, I said, “Guys, this moment in time will never happen again. We’ll never be able to come back and live this moment. We’ll never all be here together with these sodas, and our winning season, and this night again. This is a memory we can all share when we’re older, these are the things we’ll look back on and say remember when. Know what I mean?” Mouths puckered in attempts to understand what I was saying, cleats danced in the gravel as people shifted their weight from one foot to another.

“Kinda,” someone answered.

We toasted anyway and the group dispersed to find boyfriends and parents in the parking lot.

* * *

Grandma and Grandpa had Jeff’s baseball glove bronzed after he died. It still sits on a shelf in Grandma’s living room. His class ring dangles below the glove on a wooden peg next to his hat. His personal bat also sits below the mitt. Above them in a large frame is Jeff’s jersey, folded to show the number 25, retired by my high school, given to the family folded like this, like the flag Grandma got when Grandpa was buried. Also on the wall is a picture of Jerome, my other uncle. He’s pitching, his body stretched in all angles, the veins and tendons popping in his neck, the ball just leaving his fingertips. In twenty-three years these mementos have hung in the same spot, taking up more than half of a long wall. Another picture; my grandpa sitting on a metal folding chair, his Cardinals jacket on. He’s watching Jeff swing just outside the on deck circle.

* * *

The first phone call came in September of my senior year of high school, not too long after my parents found out I was a lesbian: a college asking me to play softball for them for a scholarship; they’d even pay for my books. Other colleges called and called, but I just said no thanks and hung up and cried at night. I had already decided to move Houston for college, to be with my girlfriend, and unfortunately, there was no softball team. My parents were furious about the news, screamed at me for hours, things like hell, dyke, disgusting and eat her out came from their mouths. Things they had never said, things I hadn’t had time to think about. They said other, more hurtful things, too.

“A lesbian?” Dad asked, his face reflecting the fire burning somewhere deep inside him.

“I guess.”

“You let her play too many sports!” Mom yelled at Dad. His defense was that she let me quit dance class too soon.

“What the fuck are you thinking? You’re fucking up your softball career!” He screamed in my face. “There’s no way you’ll go to the Olympics like that.”

My Dad, 240 pounds of muscle and country boy, fell into his favorite recliner, his hands covering his face, tears streaming down his forearms. Through his crying he coughed out, “What would your grandpa think?”

“I don’t care!” I said.

But I thought about giving up softball as much as I thought about the way my family looked at me now, like I was a freak, like they always knew something was wrong. What could I do with softball anyway? That’s what it all came down to. I always knew I could never make money from sports. It wasn’t fair. What was the point of knowing so much and getting so good when after college you had to get married and have babies? Boys were different. They could play ball their whole lives. They could play in college, and if they were good, they could play for millions of dollars a year. Their hard work could pay off. They could stand on the grass at Busch Stadium and have their grandpa and dad in the stands. I was fast, had a glove, could cover a large area, throw strikes from center field, colleges wanted me, but what after that? It didn’t matter, wouldn’t matter when I was thirty or even when I graduated at twenty-one. A career was more important than softball.

The first relationship where everything made sense was more important than a game, I told myself.

* * *

It was three years after grandpa died, two years after I started college, and it all felt too big. I was in Missouri, visiting. Earlier in the day, my parents and I had come into town and driven past the cemetery. I always looked at my last name on the headstones. Whoever had just mowed the cemetery had thrown all of the wreaths and flowers away. There was nothing decorating the grave.

As soon as we got to my parents’ house I went upstairs and found a softball, a new one. I found a marker, and I walked out the door before Mom and Dad could ask where I was going. I started walking towards the cemetery on a gravel road, tossing the softball and catching it. Gripping it like I might pitch a rise, now a drop, now a change. I wanted to throw it as far as I could, get it away from me, let it roll into the woods and decay. I wanted some kid to find it years from now just a lopsided ball of string, the cover lying open like flower petals on the ground under it. A ball of twine blooming from two pieces of leather.

When I got to the cemetery I felt stupid. What if someone saw me roaming around the graves? They’d call my parents and tell them I’d gone crazy or was about to vandalize something. I stood by the tombstone and ran my finger over the letters of my last name, then traced the baseball engraved in it. One of the few things I could remember from Jeff’s interment was that my cousin, who was eight, was wailing. It had made me cry harder when I saw her. I remembered Grandpa’s funeral better; the whole town had shown up, my Dad was a mess, my Mom held him during the service. It looked funny that this tiny woman held a man twice her size as he cried. My Dad cried twice that year; once for the death of his father, and once for the death of the person who he thought was his daughter. There was the twenty-one gun salute: Fire! Fire! Fire! with the smoke settling on the crowd like a cobweb, the rigid folding of the flag, Grandma, and the trumpeter, casting his sound out over our small river town.

I sat on the ground in front of the tombstone, in their laps, and felt the moisture of the grass seep into my pants. I took the marker from my pocket and wrote the number 25 on the softball. It was Jeff’s number, but as it turned out, it had also been Grandpa’s number, and my Uncle Jerome’s and, of course, mine. Then I wrote their names. Jerome Holzhauser, Jeff Holzhauser, Joe Holzhauser, my Dad, Buzzy Holzhauser, Great-grandpa Herman Holzhauser. Great-Great Grandpa Adolph Holzhauser (played professionally they tell me)-all ball players. And then something happened. It was something I’d thought about in fits and starts since I could remember. Who would pass on our name? Jeff was dead, Jerome was done having kids and had made a girl. My parents couldn’t have children, the reason they adopted me. That left me and my cousin Renee. She would marry a man and take his last name, there was no doubt. It was all up to me to give my children my last name. When I was younger I worried about getting married and giving up such a great last name. It was a name that people around our small part of the world knew. “Aren’t you that Holzhauser girl from Portland?” Or, “You act just like a Holzhauser.” I said once, when I was ten, that my husband would have to take my name. I’d have to have a son and give him my last name, teach him how to play ball. My worst fear was having a daughter who couldn’t play ball, couldn’t hold her own with the boys, like me. What if she threw like a girl? Was afraid to get dirty? No, there were no more like me, I was sure. I was better off having a boy: he’d keep the name, keep the tradition, have a much better chance of making it. So I wrote my initials on the softball, knowing damn well that all the weight was on my shoulders. I cried, remembering: do you ever wish I was a boy? I was the closest thing to a boy as a girl could get, but it wasn’t enough, would never be enough. I sobbed, the crying that sounds like dying, and dug my fingers into the damp earth.

I gathered some rocks from the driveway and made a small circle to keep the softball in place. I left the ball at the bottom of the headstone, between Grandpa and Jeff. Until Grandma found it a couple of days later, and called Mom, crying into the phone.

There are no fast-pitch teams for any woman over eighteen, just co-ed slow-pitch where everyone is drunk and laughing. Old fat men toss you the ball underhanded because they think you can’t catch or throw. I have to prove myself every time I walk onto a field. With every move I’m saying; I’ve played since I was six. Fastpitch. Scholarships. Dad. Holzhauser. I don’t throw like a girl. And those fat men usually say, “You throw pretty well, for a girl.” If I have a son, I’ll be the one to teach him how to play ball. I’ll also teach him to let the girls in town play, too. Because all girls don’t always throw like girls. And I’ll tell him that boys would throw like girls too, if they were never taught.

Because I won’t marry a man, I can keep my last name, pass it on to my children. And if they don’t play, if it doesn’t mean anything to them, the lights, the air, the dirt lines on their socks, the grit ground into their faces from the catcher’s mask, that moment when the bat hits the ball and you own the world, if they don’t understand these simple things, I just don’t know.

I played ball with my Dad less than a year ago. My parents accept my sexuality now and they love me now more than ever. Dad smiles because as hard as I try, I still can’t throw a change; he can. But I remind him I was always a catcher, never a pitcher. I throw hard, though. I throw as hard as I can until he says I’ve stung his hand. I don’t mind.

There is a picture of my great-grandpa, Herman Holzhauser, hanging between the doors of the bathrooms at the bar my grandparents owned in Portland Missouri. It was taken in 1927, a year before my grandpa was born. It’s not just a picture of him, but of Portland’s baseball team. He’s in the front, holding the bat upright, a team of eight more men behind him. I have a picture like that too, where I’m holding a bat, a huge smile on my face, the wind blowing the trees in the background. I’m holding a bat, too, but there’s no one behind me.

Memoirs: Issue 22

It doesn’t take long for the paranoia I feel at work to carry over into my sleep. It’s bad enough that I spend the whole day in the factory, now I have conveyor belt dreams at night. I have this re-occurring dream that I’m on the assembly line, and slowly everyone else leaves the line for lunch, or bathroom breaks. I’m left alone as the conveyor belt speeds up. Thousands of cards come down the line like an army of menacing Christmas greetings. I look at the hamster cage atop the factory, and see Mr. Tampoon leaning over his window, shaking his fist at me. The red light at the end of the assembly line goes on, signaling a back up of cards. I turn around and there’s Jane, silently baring her yellow teeth at me. This is when I wake up and scream.

My sister Anne yells, “Cut it out!” to me from her top bunk bed.

We’re both losing sleep. She has conveyor belt dreams too. Last night I woke up and caught her standing at her dresser like a zombie, shuffling papers and magazines. When I ask her what she’s doing, she tells me, “I’ll be done gluing these cards in a minute!” She doesn’t remember having done this when I tell her about it in the morning. She does confide in me that in all her factory dreams she gets fired.

I tell her, “Yeah, me too! I get fired every night!” During my waking hours at home, I have the sensation that everything is going by me on a conveyor belt. At supper every night I stab at my food with my fork as I swear I get the feeling that if I don’t eat the food off my plate fast enough, it will move on down the table and eventually end up on the floor to be gobbled up by our hovering cats and dog.

At work I try to keep my mind off being fired by studying some of the people. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re society’s rejects. My sister Anne, the Kennedy girls and I are unpopular high school students, but we maybe will have a decent future if we play our cards right. As for me, I figure working at Sunshine is part of the dues I must pay to later on become a famous movie star. Meanwhile, the other workers, “the lifers”, are either illegal immigrants, local people with no future, or high school dropouts.
I distract myself from this pondering about people around me by trying to find a boy who works here I could imagine I would marry. So far there is one guy I’ve noticed who would be tempting to any teenage girl. His name is Paul, and he is all the girls’ favorite. We think he looks like Rick Springfield from the soap opera General Hospital. His hair is dark, shiny and parted in the middle. But best of all it feathers back to perfection, like all the TV stars in Tiger Beat magazine. He keeps a comb in his back pocket and sometimes if we’re all lucky when he’s near us he’ll pull it out and slide it through both sides of his glossy locks. While our mouths drop he pauses a moment for effect, then slips the comb back into the rear pocket of his form fitting Levi’s jeans. I swear this little scene has caused more than a few of us to miss gluing and glittering cards coming down the belt. Eight hours a day, Paul wanders up and down the assembly lines; letting all us girls get a load of him. From what I can see he doesn’t do any real work other than push an empty hand truck around the factory and inspire the women and girls on the lines. Paul gets $3.35 an hour to look pretty. Jane has a special affection for Paul as well. She treats him so differently from us. We have to suppress our laughter as we watch her touch her patchwork hand to her two-tone neck as she speaks to Paul. She even smiles at him, which I believe is to her disadvantage. She touches her pink, plastic barrette, to draw Paul’s attention to her feminine side. Paul is only twenty years old, and Jane must be at least forty. She’s lucky she’s a woman with power and influence; otherwise she’d have no leverage with Paul. He does flirt back with her. He touches her blue smock, and Jane’s eyelids flutter as her eyes roll back in her head.

Mr. Tampoon has caught on to this flirtation conducted while on the Sunshine time clock. He never leaves his glass hamster cage atop the factory, so he calls for Jane over the loudspeaker. He catches her right in the middle of doing what looks like “The Dance of the Seven Veils” around Paul and his hand truck.

“Jane, report to the office!” booms twice over the factory’s old speaker system. For a second I see the fear in Jane’s eyes; the same fear I have everyday. Maybe like me, she feels like she’ll be fired. I’ve never danced around Paul, touching his Molson Golden t-shirt, keeping him from doing his job, whatever that might be, and still I believe that with every tick of the Sunshine clock, I come closer to my termination.

Jane’s eyes cloud over as she puts both hands in her blue smock pockets. With her head down she wends her way to the hamster cage at the to of the stairs. Paul leans on his hand truck, and winks at all of us. I don’t know why, but for a moment I want to hit Paul, right in the middle of his handsome, soap opera face.

Half an hour later, during afternoon break, I see Jane sitting alone on a three-legged chair leaned up against the cafeteria wall. Apparently, she hasn’t been fired. For someone who has definitely dodged a bullet, she doesn’t seem too happy. For the rest of the day whenever Paul is near our assembly line and Jane happens by, she just looks at him, turns and walks away.

This afternoon, right in the midst of Jane’s ruined romance, when I’m feeling safe that all the bad vibes are following her, I realize nothing good lasts forever. My comeuppance is working on the conveyor belt in front of me and their names are Sherrie and Vinny. Sherrie has just been brought over from another part of the factory to glue cards on the assembly line. She’s on the same belt as my sister Anne, while Vinny, a new guy, is placed at the end of their line to pack mailbags. Vinny graduated from high school this past June. He tells everyone he was a football player who missed a lot of his senior football season due to bad grades. Sherrie, it turns out never finished high school and I don’t think she ever will. The thing these two have in common is they both went to high school in the next town of Wilbraham. The awful thing for me and my sister is that my father teaches English at their school and he failed them both. He failed Sherrie twice. It’s nice to see my father has ruined other people’s lives, besides my sister’s and mine.

Sherrie looks like a female version of Moe from The Three Stooges” complete with a black bowl haircut. She also has a face full of freckles and a chipped front tooth and talks a blue streak. I bet my father failed her twice in English class because she never shut up and listened to him. According to my father, not listening to him is one step removed from criminal activity. I find out their link to my father when Sherrie starts going on and on about this “jerk,” “Mr. Spencer” who made her repeat the eleventh grade last year. Vinny hears this and tells her, “Yeah, he’s the same jerk who made me miss four big games last fall when he gave me an F!” I’m thinking that maybe it would be wise to not tell them he is our father.

A moment later though, Anne, who has heard all of this as well, blurts out, “Mr. Spencer is our Dad!” Then to make it worse, she turns and points to me; “Coree’s his daughter too!” Sherrie jumps off her pile of cardboard and screams, “No - Fucking - Way! You guys are Spencer’s Kids!? Jesus, Man, that guys hates me! Gave me an ‘F’ twice!”

Anne tells her, “Don’t feel bad - he hates us too!” Vinny, the failed football player, who isn’t working too far away from me loading mailbags, doesn’t say anything. He clenches his jaw and slams a mailbag onto a skid as sweat rolls down the side of his face.

Finally, noticing I’m staring at him, he erupts into a gap-toothed grin and says, “Man, I’m sorry. He’s really your dad?” Just when I think this could be a terrible situation; being surrounded by students my father failed, it turns into a rare moment of sympathy for my sister and me.

Sherrie can’t stop talking about this, “Jesus, man, you gotta live with that guy? Man, I could hardly sit in his classroom for fifty-five minutes a day!” Until this moment, I’ve only met students who worshipped and adored my father. These pet students were discussed nightly by my father around the dinner table. He’d get misty-eyed telling my sisters and me of their love of poetry, especially poetry he writes, their excellent use of grammar and most importantly, when he told them to “jump,”, they “jumped”! He’d invite the extra special ones to our house for cookouts, or possibly to serve as role models for us to aspire to. My sisters and I got to meet these legendary students the flesh. We’d watch my father show them his perfect technique on how to grill hamburgers and toast buns on both sides. I swear they stood with their hands clasped in front of their chins, watching every move my father made as if they’d be tested about this cookout on a pop quiz the following Monday. Meanwhile, my sisters and I would stand a good enough distance away, hands on our hips, or folded over our chests, with scowls on our faces.

Later on, these students would pull my sisters and me aside. We’d stare at them, squinting like Clint Eastwood did in “Dirty Harry”, while they told us, “You’re soooo lucky Mr. Spencer is your dad! He let us play cricket during English Lit!” It took working in this run-down sweatshop to realize there are kids out there who share the same opinion of him as my sisters and me.

Sherrie tells us, “I’m going to spend my lunch break looking through the whole factory for a sympathy card for you guys!” Sherrie does find one from a fresh batch of cards brought in from the printing press this morning. On the front of the card is a picture of Jesus with a shining halo surrounding his entire body. His hands are clasped together and he looks ready to weep. On the inside it says, “During this time of sorrow, remember you never walk alone.” There is something unholy about this card. All the colored dyes ran together, so Jesus’ hands are green and his face is purple. Maybe the card Sherrie gave us is just a blooper card, a fluke. By three o’clock this afternoon we realize this mistake is widespread. They have thousands of purple-faced Jesus sympathy cards. Someone goofed in the design and dye section of the factory, and Sunshine, being so frugal, decides to send them out to stores and millions of kids across the U.S. to sell to their family and neighbors. They’re packed into boxes and we glue them into sales booklets. I can’t wait until the Catholic Church gets a load of these.

My father might have failed Sherrie twice, but she’s not beaten down. In fact, I’m surprised my father wasn’t impressed with her energy level. Sherrie is Sunshine factory’s very own one-woman show, like Lily Tomlin on Saturday Night Live. While the rest of us walk a fine line between keeping up with production, and losing our jobs, Sherrie is able to talk non-stop; using full hand gestures, sometimes walking away from her spot on the line, and getting back without ever missing a card. She’s even picked up some Portuguese, much to the annoyance of the Portuguese women. Now Sherrie butts into both English and Portuguese conversations. Sherrie likes to talk to me, especially now that we have this new connection, my father.

“So what’s that drill sergeant up to lately?” she asks, “Does he kick your ass like he used to kick mine?”

“Well,” I say, “he does make us do calisthenics. And now he’s really into transcendental meditation and Middle Eastern Philosophy, like Pyramid Power. He tries to get my sisters and me to meditate with him, but so far we’ve only become addicted to rubbing the beads on the gigantic wooden Egyptian worry bead necklace hanging on our family room wall and eating pyramid chocolate we buy at the Candy Cupboard at East Field Mall.”

When Sherrie imitates a gopher popping out of it’s hole from her new favorite movie, “Caddy Shack”, I’m caught up watching her, which causes me to miss several cards coming down the line. Antigrassia pushes them back at me and says, “Loca Menina, las cartes!” Sherrie yells back at her, “Auntie Grassia, no problemo senora!”

We all soon discover that Sherrie has another talent other than gopher impressions and bi-lingual chatter. She knows all the songs with the word, “Sunshine” in them. She sings them loudly over the din of conveyor belts. She starts off with a John Denver hit; “Sunshine on my shoulder, makes me happy!” We all join her singing these songs, even me, although I do keep a lookout for Jane. I know ever since the first day with my timecard fiasco that she has made it her priority to catch me wasting time on the Sunshine clock. Jane keeps her silent, cold eye trained on the beacon of my blond shag-fro.

The following day we’re singing again. Right in the middle of the Stevie Wonder song, “You are the sunshine of my life, that’s why I’ll always be around,” Jane appears behind Sherrie. All of us stop singing, except Sherrie. She holds her balled-up fist like a microphone under her mouth and serenades Jane. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray…” Jane’s patchwork brown and white skin burns red. Sherrie gets louder and goofier. She gets down on one knee, kneeling on her pile of cardboard and throws out her arms like Al Jolson. The workers on either side of her are furiously gluing Sherrie’s cards and their own, while she continues this showdown with Jane. I glance up at the hamster cage office and see Mr. Tampoon leaning over his glass window. Even though he’s probably one hundred years old and more likely half deaf, he somehow catches on to the excitement going on below him.

Or maybe he has spies! Even cross-eyed, twisted neck, Jim wheels by on his forklift to get a sideways glance at this rare entertaining moment at Sunshine. It feels like high school, when sometimes a couple of boys will throw down their books and duke it out while all the rest of us kids stop everything between classes to gawk at them. I crane my neck and see Mr. Tampoon has now put his double-thick glasses on as he continues to look out his window. I’m afraid Sherrie might not be fired; she’ll just be killed. To put a more bizarre twist on this spectacle, Jane, who for a full five minutes has kept her gargoyle face stone still, actually cracks a smile just as Sherrie sings, “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love it here…Please don’t take my Sunshine cards away!” This smile of Jane’s consists of her two sad, always on the lookout for a new home, upper teeth, clenched over her lower lip. She then puts her hands into her smock pockets and heads off to the ladies room. She’ll probably splash cold water on her face, sit in her broken down bathroom stall office, and reassess her authority. Sherrie giggles - she may be a high school dropout - thanks in part to my father, but she will be heard. On the assembly line we’re all buzzing about how we were about to witness an honest to goodness on the job, “girl fight”. Then again, middle-aged Jane and Three Stooges look-alike Sherrie are the two most unlikely “girls”.

The next day, as my eyes burn watching the blur of greeting cards fly by, I’m jolted for a moment as I hear the now familiar lunch warning bell. It’s the kind of bell I imagine was used to announce air raids in Nazi-occupied Europe. Instead of scurrying off to find shelter in an underground bunker, here at Sunshine this bell creates a great deal of excitement as everyone feels the anticipation of a fun-filled half-hour spent eating with co-workers. To me, this bell is just another sound of doom I hear everyday that reminds me that in half-an-hour, not only will my peanut butter and jelly sandwich be gone, but I’ll be back at my spot on the assembly line, feeling my life being sucked down the Sunshine drain.

The middle-aged lifers are particularly agile when it comes to clocking out for lunch. They want every minute available to them to smoke an extra Parliament, or suck the salt off their fingers after consuming a vending machine bag of ruffles or Fritos. I have the terrible luck today to be caught behind Dolly. Dolly weighs at least 350 pounds. Everything about her is labored - her walking, her breathing, her 50 pound arm reaching for her timecard. She looks like a large Suzanne Somers with her bleached blond hair caught up in a jaunty side ponytail. Her daily sunshine uniform consists of brown elasticized elephant-wide bell-bottoms. God, I wish she realized the 70s are over. These dated pants are topped off with a “Kiss me, I’m Irish” sleeveless smock apron that has concentric sweat stains that travel from her armpits, and reach her waist. I don’t know if she wears the orthopedic shoes all the other lifers wear, because I’ve never seen under Dolly’s ultra-wide bell-bottoms. But I guess she’s got feet, cause right now she’s using them to shuffle slowly to the timecard box. My sister Anne and the Kennedy girls are probably halfway through their sandwiches while I’m stuck behind Dolly’s labored effort at movement. Dolly turns her thick, rubber tire neck and smiles at me. I blush. I smile back at her, but she caught me right t the moment when I’m mentally pretending I have a big rifle and I’m blowing her out of my way so I can have extra time with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Now I feel bad about my terrible thoughts. Curse this horrible conscious of mine!

It forces me to ask, “Do you need any help Dolly?”

For a second I wonder whose voice is saying this? It’s mine, and Dolly hears it too.

“Oh, love, yes, could you watch the bathroom door for me? I need to go and my family is already in the cafeteria.”

I look at Dolly’s gray eyes, surrounded by oily rings of black. Oh my God, all my life I’ve always wanted to be another Joan of Arc, or maybe a saintly person who didn’t die so horribly. I hit my religious peak about eight years ago, but not being an outstandingly good person; I never made it to martyrdom. Now here at Sunshine, I’m given the opportunity for greatness and sainthood. I grab at it, hoping to score points towards a movie career, an Olympic gold medal, or at least enough points to guarantee a spot in heaven. Although by now, my faith in the existence of heaven has wavered since I started working full time. My saintly task is to guard the outside bathroom door, because Dolly needs to use the handicapped stall that has the door removed. Sometimes twisted neck, cross-eyed Jim cleans the ladies room during lunch. I have to make sure he doesn’t walk in on Dolly.

Secretly, I think Jim goes out of his way to try and see women using the bathroom. I stand in front of the bathroom door, clutching my lunch bag. I’m almost in tears, the worst kind of tears, tears of frustration. How the hell did I get myself trapped in this position? Goddamn my goodness! I hate Dolly! I hate myself! I hate the Catholic Church for making me feel like I must sacrifice so much just for a movie career! I keep thinking if I do one more good deed, I’ll wake up the next morning looking like Cheryl Ladd. Then some Hollywood agent will come strutting through the factory, see my newfound beauty and cast me in the latest romantic movie, with Scott Baio as my love interest. I close my eyes thinking of my love scene with Scott, as I hear Dolly groaning in the bathroom. God, when is she going to finish? I feel faint from lack of lunch. I have the taste of Sunshine in my mouth, a bland mixture of dust and glue. I’ll never eat lunch at this rate. I panic silently. I’ve learned how to do this after years of practice. I can carry on regular life activities with a smile on my face, while my heart and brain pound so ferociously I think they’ll explode.

Cross-eyed Jim shows up. With his head twisted sideways, he looks like a lizard with safety glasses. He’s got his mop and with all the grace and charm he can muster, her pokes the mop handle at my shoulder and garbles, “Ga clean it!”

I tell him, “No! Dolly is in there! You can’t clean it until she’s done!” I throw up my arms to block the bathroom door. Jim tries to sidestep me. He almost gets past because I can never tell which direction he’s looking at. Luckily, he’s slow. For a split second his face is inches from mine. The smell of cigarettes flow out of every one of his blackened pores. The scent stings my eyes. Personally, I just can’t imagine his wanting to see Dolly squat over an open toilet. All this time, I’ve been trying to block out even the mere thought of Dolly being in the building with her pants down.

I tell Jim, who’s looking at me out of the side of his left eye, “Look, she’s probably almost finished. Go clean up the men’s room!” His left eye travels down and fixates on my sneakers, as if he expects a different response from my feet. When my feet don’t tell him, “Go ahead Jim, Dolly’s waiting for you!” He turns around, leans on his mop and pushes it to the men’s room.

Fifteen minutes before lunch ends, Dolly emerges, winded from the bathroom. “Thank you baby, you saved my life!” Her doughy, moist hand places a Tootsie roll in my hand.

I watch for a minute as Dolly shuffles her way back to the cafeteria. She’ll get there just in time to turn around and start her way back to the assembly lines. Dolly always has to make her way back to the conveyor belts at least 4 or 5 minutes early, just to get there at the same time as everyone else. I stare at the Tootsie roll in my hand and wonder if I have time to eat it and my sandwich? By the time I make up my mind I have only a couple minutes left. I open my paper bag, pull out my squished peanut butter and jelly sandwich and practically eat it with the plastic wrap still around it.

Ten minutes later, I see Dolly eat her lunch on the assembly line. She leans over the belt, with her corned beef sandwich, while people around her help her get her cards glued. Everyone here likes Dolly. They all try to ignore her body handicapped by 200 extra pounds of flesh. She spreads her cheer everywhere, as well as lots of candy. After her lunch she puts Tootsie rolls on the conveyor belt. We pick them up between all the cards and sales booklets.

Leaving the factory at the end of the day, my mother picks us up, and when we pull out we’re behind Dolly’s Grand Marquis. Dolly is on one side of the car and 5 of her family members are squeezed on the other. The side of the car where Dolly is seated is dragging only inches off the ground. Meanwhile, in our car, Anne, the Kennedy girls and I discuss the big, big TV event occurring tonight. We’ve seen commercials about it for months now. It’s called MTV. The advertisements show an astronaut putting an MTV flag on the moon. According to the commercials, after several nights of getting MTV for free, we’ll have to pay for it. My father has warned us that we better enjoy it while it’s free cause he’ll be damned if he’ll ever pay for TV. He has always considered TV an invasion of one’s home. It turned kids into freaks who demanded to get things they saw advertised on commercials like non-generic soda, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and expensive shampoo, plus conditioner. Despite these feelings my father hogged the TV most of the time. He made “TV tickets” for my sisters and me. We had to hand them to my father for the privilege of sitting next to him on our couch and watching golf or Masterpiece Theater with him. My sisters both complied and used the tickets he made out of index cards. Each one had his own official signature at the bottom, with “30 minutes viewing time” written in the middle. I tore mine up; put them back into the envelope they came in and gave them back to him. He accepted them and told me, “Great, you can just sit in the other room and count the flowers on the wallpaper while the rest of the family enjoys watching M*A*S*H.” Luckily, tonight my father fell asleep right in the middle of the Nightly News, still clutching a can of beer. This allowed me to sneak in to watch M-TV. I clapped my hands in front of his face to make sure he was out cold and then Anne changed the channel. Like we did in the late 60’s during the first moonwalk, my sisters and I hover in front of this box of magic waiting for it to enlighten us with our savage suburban ways.

The following day the factory is alive with excitement! MTV said it would change our lives and it has. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was as exciting as man landing on the moon! I can hardly keep up gluing and glittering my cards. I’m babbling to everyone on my assembly line about “The Buggles”, this new band that sang, “Video killed the Radio Star”! God, the 80’s are amazing! I’m ready to shake off the 70’s. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed to think I still own many Ronco disco records, and somewhere stuffed in our bedroom closet, my sister Anne has a handmade gold lame disco dress. We both agree that as soon as we get home all this stuff has to be destroyed, or really well hidden. Over night, I’ve decided after seeing MTV I would even give up a movie star career to become a singer in a new wave band! While standing on my pile of cardboard on the conveyor belt I have a vision of myself wearing a beautiful vintage, torn at the shoulder, diamond studded dress, with torn black hose. My hair is finally straight and spiked up in the middle, with a streak of purple on both sides. When I sing, a voice like Deborah Harry from Blondie comes out of my mouth. My audience, a bunch of screaming teenagers with spiked hair, ripped clothes, and steel-toed boots are reaching up to touch me. Then someone from this new wave audience grabs my elbow from behind. Only it’s real! I look at my arm and at the middle of it is Jane, clamped onto it like a leech, sucking my fantasies right out of me through my elbow. I don’t even get a word in on my behalf. Jane mutely pulls me off the line by my elbow. I keep it bent so she has something to hold onto, like a teacup. She escorts me like I’m a condemned prisoner down the conveyor belt line. I’m fired. I know it! But what did I do? I know I was daydreaming, but I didn’t miss any greeting cards. My arm was moving the entire time. I want to scream at her, “Stop you Awful, Awful Witch -I hate you!” But I just stare ahead as her two-tone hand grips me and my feet shuffle forward. I wish she’d say something, even talk about the hot weather we’ve been having. Eyes follow us, trying to see where I’m being taken. Jane stops at the end of another assembly line. She lets go of me and pulls an extremely young Portuguese girl off the last spot. The girl starts crying and the middle-aged woman next to her starts shouting in Portuguese. She must be the girl’s mother. The sounds coming from them are horrible, like a lone wolf in the wilderness calling out to her lost pup. The mother even reaches out to her kid, catching her hand on Jane’s blue smock sleeve. For a split second the mother turns back to the conveyor belt to smack a gluey greeting card into a passing sales booklet, then looks back in her daughter’s direction. Jane’s eyes remain fixed and unblinking as she escorts the girl back to my old spot. I take the girl’s place on the line. The mother turns her black, clouded eyes on me and hisses some guttural tongued curse on my frizzy, blond head. I try to tell her, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen!” Her response is to shove the cards and booklets at me, so they’re a piled-up mess by the time they reach me. If I was in hell before this, then I must have fallen through hell’s trapdoor and landed here.

The only good thing is now I’m again near Vinny, the ex-football player my father failed in English class. I haven’t worked near him in almost two weeks since he gets moved around a lot due to the lack of men available to pack and load mailbags.

After a few minutes of watching me with my head down he leans in towards me and says, “Don’t worry, the two of them were slowing down production, cause they were talking so much. Jane actually wanted to keep the girl with her mother, cause she’s only 14, but it was down to moving one of them, or firing the girl.” I can hear the girl sobbing 50 feet away. The little hand of guilt pushes on my forehead, making it pulse and throb with pain. I clutch my head with one hand and glue cards with the other. Dolly must have noticed this because she puts two lint covered Bayer aspirin on the conveyor belt, and when they come down to me I pop them into my mouth, fuzz and all.

While I try to figure out how to swallow the aspirin without water I gaze over to the water fountain 200 feet away, directly under Mr. Tampoon’s glass hamster cage office. I can’t leave the line unless I get Jane’s permission. For the first time I’m sorry she’s not nearby. The two fuzzy aspirin stick to my dry tongue. I’m completely unable to whip up a drop of saliva. I’m about to surrender to my headache and just spit out the aspirin when I see a large, male hand with dark, curly hairs on the knuckles. In the hand is a metal thermos cup of what looks like Hawaiian Punch. I’m saved. I peer up and see its Vinny who has come to my rescue. He’s looking right at me, with a slight grin on his face and a small line of sweat sliding down by one of his sideburns. No boy has ever given me anything before. I put my lips on the cup and drink it down. It is cold Hawaiian Punch. I think of how at one point today, during lunch, or maybe first break, Vinny must have had his lips on this same cup! If I didn’t have such a headache I’d be better able to enjoy the romance of all this. I drain the cup and hand it back. I barely squeak out, “Thank you.” For a split second I’m filled with horror. Did he hear me thank him?

I take a deep breath and blurt out, “Thank you Vinny!” It’s the first time I’ve said his name to him out loud and I want to get it right.

He laughs, “Hey it’s okay, I heard ya the first time Coree.” He pours himself a drink and slugs it back. He then hoists a mailbag onto a skid. He said my name - he knows my name! I’m not just that jerk, Mr. Spencer’s stupid kid! I miss gluing a few cards coming down the line when I stop for what feels like a full five minutes to watch as Vinny raises his arm to his face and wipes his mouth with the crook of his elbow. I’ve seen him do this before, but this is the closest I’ve ever been to him when he’s done it. “Hey -hey Coree, your cards are falling!” He says this as he stoops to pick up the birthday cards off the floor. My face is white hot. Suddenly I’ve forgotten how to glue cards, something I’ve been doing for close to a month now. This seems to only please the Portuguese mother next to me. I’d forgotten all about her for a brief time, but now like a dark rain cloud over my head she sputters at me in Portuguese. Why does she care? I’m on the end, she’s before me - I’m not messing her up. I look her square in the face and lightning flashing as two words fly out of my mouth, “STOP IT!” She must have understood these two English words, or maybe they’re the same in Portuguese because she squints at me, then turns away.

I take the cards from Vinny. He smiles at me and I notice he has a red mustache stain on his face from the Hawaiian Punch. I gasp, realizing I must have this same red stain around my mouth. On him it looks cute, but I’m sure I look like a dropout from clown school. I try to wipe my mouth on my shirt, but I know it will take a good dose of soap and water to fix my face.

An hour later, the Bayer aspirin hasn’t helped and the Portuguese girl doesn’t stop wailing. If people didn’t want me fired before, then I’m sure my causing this family to be separated will convince them I’m evil and must be stopped. The distraught mother tunes into her child’s sobs. I feel her turn to me, sweat sizzles on her face like drops of water jumping on a hot pancake griddle. I keep my head down. Tears are making their way to the surface of my eyeballs, and my thumbs are too busy to stick into my eyes to stop the flow.

To make matters worse, Vinny is amused by my predicament. “Hey man, you’re not gonna cry too, are you? Look it isn’t your fault. Those two were yak-yaking. Jane was down here all day, just staring at them. I’m glad you’re here instead of that kid.”

I raise my watery eyes to Vinny and say, “Like I said before, I’m sorry my dad failed ya in English class.”

Leaving work this evening Vinny winks at me as we punch out at the time clock and says, “I’ll see ya tomorrow Corky!” Corky? He’s even got a pet name for me!

The following morning, I fuss over myself so long in our one bathroom trying to get my hair to lie flat that my father is forced to bang on the door. “There are four other people living in this house. Do you hear me?”

I yell back, “I’ll be done in a minute!” As I see the doorknob rattle I tug at the hairbrush stuck in my hair. All this extra time spent on my hair and I actually look worse. I had tried to feather back my hair. Instead I’ve ended up with two gigantic banana curls, making me look like Nellie Olsen from Little House on the Prairie. Just as I slam the hairbrush onto the counter top to punish it for failing to make me pretty, my father flings open the door and yells, “Out!” He pokes his thumb, hitchhiker style, towards the hallway as if I didn’t know the way to exit the bathroom.

I decide to wear my favorite green knit cowl-neck shirt hoping to offset my hair tragedy. My father sees me and shakes his head, “What the hell are you doing, wearing a sweater in the middle of summer? It’ll make you sweat like a pig!”

I shout back, “It’s a shirt, not a sweater!”

He is right about the sweating like a pig though; my armpits are already damp and sticking to my “shirt”. It’s too late to change, so I continue to sweat in the backseat of our Pontiac on the way to the factory, wedged between the two Kennedy girls. Carol Kennedy is asleep with her head slumped on my shoulder, while Lori Kennedy picks fuzz off her peanut butter bread and sticks her hand out the window to let fuzz blow off her fingers. I’m a big bag of misery encased in a bad choice of a polyester knit cowl neck shirt and hair that looks like a crime scene.

By the time we get to the factory I can’t lift my arms because the sweat stains are so large. This causes me to itch. I’m doomed. My father was right, this isn’t a shirt, it’s a sweater! Not only do I look like I just crawled out of a swamp somewhere, today I find out I have competition for Vinny’s affection. As if to take advantage of my bad hair day and perspiration stains, Jane stops by our assembly line right before the second break. Maybe she wants to make Paul jealous. She zips over to Vinny’s mailbag table like she’s a magnet and he’s a refrigerator.

I push up my sleeves and scratch at my damp skin while watching Jane stand close to Vinny’s football player chest. She looks up at his face and flutters her three eyelashes at him. As horrified as I am watching this spectacle I can only imagine how unappetizing I appear at the moment. I keep trying to pat down my hair or push it behind my ears to keep it more flattened, but like a Jack-in-the-box it springs back up like a bad surprise. I look up to see Jane still circling Vinny. He catches my eye and smiles at me. Then he turns to her and tells her he’s awful thirsty - that some water would taste real good. Jane flies off, like a butterfly that has just pollinated her favorite flower and now her flower must be watered. She comes back with a Dixie cup of water for Vinny. As he drinks she watches his Adam’s apple throb up and down. I tell her I’m thirsty too. She looks at me like I just crawled out from under a pile of dusty cardboard to spoil her romance and she mumbles, “Get yourself water at break time.” At the 3:15 break, instead of getting water, I stop off into the bathroom to stuff stiff, brown paper towels under my armpits as sort of makeshift dress shields like I saw in one of Anne’s Seventeen magazine. After that I meet up in the cafeteria with Anne and the Kennedy girls. They tell me how lucky I am to be near such a handsome, young guy like Vinny. It’s like winning the lottery in this factory. Our days together are like one long eight-hour date with two breaks and lunch. Besides my paycheck, Vinny’s the only reason I look forward to work everyday.

The following week, right in the middle of gluing “Congratulations on your First Communion” cards into the sales booklets, there’s a loud bang, followed by a loss of all electricity. It’s so dark, I can’t see in front of me. The only thing that stands out at this moment is the open loading dock entrance where sunlight streams in. I am, along with everyone else, several hundred feet from this sunny opening, and there are many twists and turns around boxes, skids and conveyor belts to get out. A heavy mix of panicked Portuguese and English fill the air. Soon it turns to screams as one voice in the darkness says, “I hear that rats come out at night, when all the lights are out!”

We are to be led out of the factory, hand-in-hand, as we all try to seek the light at the end of the loading dock. I was hoping to hold Vinny’s hand, but the angry Portuguese mother next to me grabs my hand first and squeezes really hard. At first I think she might have found her chance to get back at me by crushing my hand, but I realize she just must be really scared cause she grabs me with both her hands and mutters, “Mi hija, mi hija.” I have no idea what she’s saying. Maybe she’s asking for help in Portuguese. Antigrassia grabs my other hand. Somehow she had found me even though she works on the assembly line behind me now. I don’t know why the two Portuguese women cling to me so tightly, other than their belief that because I’m so pale, I might actually glow in the dark, creating a lighted path for them to exit this black abyss. With the two of them groping me like a life preserver, I wade through the factory. I never come across any rats, but I do manage to trip over a bunch of boxes of greeting cards, lying in the middle of the floor. One thing about Sunshine is that it has messy piles of dumped greeting cards dating back to maybe the early 60’s. Messes here just lay where they fall, turning into archeological burial mounds of spider web covered holiday greetings. Soon this factory will be buried under its own product.

Once we are all outside, we stand in the parking lot. People pass around cigarettes and Dolly hands out Tootsie rolls and sour sucker balls. Mr. Tampoon had been the first person hustled out of this sinking ship. We see him sitting by himself, in his Lincoln Continental, smoking, with all the windows rolled up. Even outside of the factory he must always have glass separating himself from us. Meanwhile, we stand, stupidly staring at the darkened building, waiting for the miracle of electricity. Sherrie gets everyone jived-up by telling us in both English and broken Portuguese that snakes from the underbrush in the parking lot come out and sun themselves on the concrete late in the afternoon. This makes us all need more candy and cigarettes. Jane attempts to control us while we’re off the conveyor belts. She is lining us up the way we’re placed on the assembly lines. It’s not working. We’re like chickens let loose all over the barnyard. Mr. Tampoon glares at us from behind his car window. We’re hanging around, enjoying ourselves in the fresh air of the parking lot while we’re on the Sunshine clock. He rolls down his window and motions for Jane to come over. He can’t stand the sight of idyll idiots so he has Jane make us clean up the outside of the factory. Jane instructs us in her non-verbal method. She waves us over with her familiar two-tone hands. We stand there, puffing Marlboros and blandly sucking hard candies, watching Jane bend over and pick up an empty soda can. She holds it up for us all to see, then when all our eyes are trained on the cream soda can she carries it over to a rusted barrel, and drops it in. She looks at our blank monkey faces. We don’t move. We need another demonstration. She finds a potato chip bag -holds it up for us, then repeats her earlier motion of walking over to the barrel and dropping it in.

Sherrie is the only one catching onto this -she’s singing, “Let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in, the suuunshine in…”, while she picks up stray soda cans. When we join Sherrie we look like we’re on a chain gang picking up litter on the highway, held together by the invisible chain of our minimum wage job. The men of course do not join us girls. They sit on the hoods of their cars and smoke.

While I bend over picking up spent Marlboro butts, I think, “Why can’t they just let us go home? It’s already 4:10!” When I ask Sherrie about this she laughs so hard, flecks of sour candy spit fly from between her teeth. “Jesus Christ man, you’re an idiot for having a father who’s a teacher! Sunshine has us until 5pm -they’ll make us stand out here until then. No clockin’ out! No goin’ home!” Then she tells me, “Hey ya know what? Ya wanna know somethin’? Last year some lady, she had a long ponytail braid and it gets caught in the end of the conveyor belt. No one could turn the belt off fast enough. The lady, she got scalped! Yeah man, we were all screaming. The lady’s scalp came right off! Sunshine didn’t even let any of us go home. Kept us working here the whole day, even though lots of people were crying! Yeah, well the lady lived. Never did come back to work, so I don’t know if her hair ever grew back!” I don’t know whether to believe Sherrie or not. She seems to like to exaggerate. She did tell us about the snakes out here and so far I haven’t seen one lying out soaking up the sun, just all the guys lying on their cars, catching rays.

Twenty-five minutes before Sunshine officially closes, the electricity comes back on. The conveyor belts are turned on before we even get back inside. Cards are piled up at the end of each line. For the rest of the shift cards and booklets come down the belt at warp speed. In this last 25 minutes Mr. Tampoon wants to get two hours of work out of us. Everything around me is a blur. I glue cards and slap them down anywhere in the sales booklets: upside-down and sideways. For the first time all summer, it flashes through my brain that I can’t wait for eleventh grade to start this fall. At least you can’t be fired from high school. Never before did I look forward to the summer ending and school starting. Now it will be a relief to be slumped in my seat during Earth Science, daydreaming with the rest of my go-nowhere classmates. At least, instead of standing on a pile of cardboard, I’ll be going nowhere sitting down.

End of Part Two

Memoirs: Issue 22

Memoirs: Issue 21

Memoirs: Issue 20

It was the early 1970s and magic permeated the air on the 165 lush acres of upstate New York called Chillum Farm. The world belonged to us — a scruffy, skinny bunch of passionate hippies — and unconditional love and marijuana made anything possible. We planned to change the world by example, living simply with no electricity, plumbing or telephone, working the land and growing much of our own food, and sharing everything. Our lives ran happily on circuits-overload as we worked and partied till we dropped. Celebrating the demise of the nuclear family we created a dysfunctional one of our own. And like the typical American family we lived with hopes, dreams, tractors, sex, chain saws, gardens, animals, births, food, nudity, singing, and ultimately, relationships that went awry.

In this installment, Bobby Dubie pays a visit to the farm.

When I woke the morning after the summer solstice party and could focus, I glanced at Spindle’s bed and saw a mass of tangled blond hair. Looking more closely I saw that it was Patrick, sleeping, one arm thrown over Spindle. When I’d dragged my ass to bed after the rain dance, they were outside with the others. I smiled, slid out of bed, got dressed, and went down to the kitchen.

When they came down the stairs a while later, we greeted them with a sing-songy group chorus: “Good morning Spindle. Good morning Patrick.” Spindle’s face flushed, and Patrick grinned. He hung around that day, working in the garden with us, and stayed over again.

The following morning we woke to an unfamiliar sound on the roof. Rain. We ran outside in varying stages of undress to greet it. “Hallelujah!” The cry went from one to another of us as we danced around. This wasn’t some little shower; it was fucking pouring. “Oh thank you great spirit!” Bones cried happily as the beating rain soaked us. When we were thoroughly drenched and the need for caffeine overwhelmed the joy of standing in the rain, we ran back in to get our morning shot.

It rained all day and into the next. Patrick, still with us, picked a comfy corner of the new room and sat down to draw. I went looking for paper to write a letter. While digging through the corner cabinet in the living room I found a wedding photo. I had no idea who the couple was but it could have been me and the dc king, what with the tuxedo, white gown, and the hair, hers all pouffy, his close cropped. I carried the picture into the kitchen. “Who’s this?” I asked, waving it in front of Midge, who stood at the stove stirring a pot of soup.

She laughed. “It’s Bobby and Trudy. Isn’t that a riot? Look at them!”

“They look so straight,” I said, surprised.

“Yeah, well, the picture was taken a long time ago. They sure don’t look like that now.”

Spindle had told me about Bobby and Trudy Dubie. They were the trendsetters – the forerunners. The Chillums had met them in Syracuse where Bobby taught at the university. Before that, they’d been rabble-rousing grad students at the University of Texas in Austin, and after Syracuse, had lived in a canyon in New Mexico. Now they lived at the Chillum’s sister farm in Arkansas with other people named Dubie who all lived in little structures with strange names like yurt. Spindle and Shadow had visited them the previous winter. This guy Bobby Dubie was some hotshot in the Chillums’ eyes. They talked about him like he was some high priest or something. The straight arrow in the picture sure didn’t fit the reputation. I put it back and wrote my letter.

It rained for days. The garden soaked up the water hungrily, the plants grew, the creek swelled and rose, almost reaching the level of the little concrete bridge. The beige tinge disappeared and a green glow appeared through the rain. Then the sun came out, and so did we. Freed from our confinement, we ran to the garden and saw a new crop with our vegetables — weeds. I followed the others, picked a row, sat down on the damp earth and began weeding, hesitantly at first. I worried that I might pull up a veggie plant by mistake. Once I made the distinction I enjoyed the process – it was immediate gratification. I finished a row and surveyed my handiwork, beautiful dark earth punctuated by a straight row of leafy plants with nothing out of order.

It appeared we did a bang-up job with the rain dance. Rain, that precious commodity, was no longer precious. It now rained every day – some days we woke to sun and by afternoon it rained. We woke to rain and it cleared by afternoon. It rained all day. It rained all night. Water gathered in small lakes. Parched earth became mud. The creek overflowed. Patrick never left.

Shortly after the rain established permanent residency, we got word that none other than Bobby Dubie was coming to visit, soon. The family buzzed with excitement. I got nervous. I knew he was no longer that straight guy in the photo. But would he see me as some straight chick from Milwaukee?

The guy who showed up a few days later bore no trace of the tuxedoed man in the photo. The short military type hair he had then now exploded from his head. Dense, kinky, and black, it crowded his face with a big beard and mustache and a barely contained ponytail with corkscrew ends sticking out all over. That black mass sat on a small thin frame dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. His raspy voice came through lips almost hidden by all that hair. A man named Michael carrying a violin came with him. With lank brown hair, pasty skin, and glasses, he paled next to Bobby – who took up a lot of space for someone so small. The family gave Michael a warm welcome but greeted Bobby as they would a visiting guru.

At dinner Bobby reported on the Arkansas family, his raspy voice filling the corners of the new room: Eloise’s daughter Desha was the darling of several men because none of them knew if they were the father. Ken Dubie and Lorene had broken up for good. Scott was on the road. Yawn. I’d heard some of the names before but they meant nothing to me. While the family hung on every word, I feigned interest while poking my chopsticks around in my bowl trying to pick up one grain of brown rice at a time. Then I tuned out. After dinner and some dubie Michael picked up his violin, and man did he know how to make his fiddle sing. The rest of us danced around the room, sang, or banged out accompanying rhythms. Bones brought out her flute and she and Michael tuned right in to each other. Bobby caught my eye and smiled. I returned the smile; he was just my type, dark, wiry, and smart. But he was the great Bobby Dubie and I a mere acolyte. How could I come on to him?

Next morning, Shadow and Lem took Bobby out to walk the land. When they came back, he worked with us in the garden. We nodded to each other. I was shirtless and had been comfortable in half-naked mode for a while, but I immediately felt self-conscious. The guy had a real presence — he radiated confidence and righteousness. At lunch we talked about astrology and Midge told Bobby that she and I had the same birthday. “Oh, another Scorpio,” he said, looking at me appraisingly. I just nodded. I never knew how to respond to that. Identifying yourself as a Scorpio was sometimes akin to saying you ate men and little children – it raised the level of expectation peculiarly.

We had a spectacular Om that night – Bobby’s vibe definitely contributed, and everyone else’s energy reached a higher peak than I’d felt before. The power of the chanting knocked me out. Afterward, the intense staring at each other seemed not only okay, but a gift that let me see the others in a new light. I never realized how beautiful Spindle was until that moment when I saw her sitting across the low round table from me. Her long, brown hair hung around her face, shiny and straight. With her blue eyes charged like an electromagnetic field she glowed. No. She radiated. There was no trace of the pain she’d carried when I first arrived. Now, with one hand excitedly clutching Patrick’s and the other lovingly nestled in Joy’s, she owned the world. We held each other’s eyes, affirming our love and friendship anew, as sisters in this wonderful family.

I brought my eyes to Joy’s. As serene as ever, sitting between Shadow and Spindle, she looked deep into my soul. After a few moments of serious staring, she smiled calmly. She too looked beautiful. Her shoulder-length frizzy hair, loosened from it’s braided confinement, softened her sharp features. Behind that olive-skinned, muscular exterior lay so much more than she daily revealed. With time, I thought, we’ll be close too.

I turned my gaze to Midge, sitting by my side. We didn’t spend a lot of time in deep eyeball-to-eyeball; grinning was more our style with each other. My Scorpio sister’s green eyes sparkled and the small dimples under them crinkled with that wide smile she now flashed my way. Without her usual kerchief, her black hair hung in loose curls below her shoulders, outlining her narrow face. A bright aura of energy bounced around her. She turned her sparkle to Lem and I turned to Bobby.

I was so stoned from the magic of the moment that I engaged his look, briefly but confidently, before I turned away. I could feel Bones’s energy drawing me to her. Her light green eyes sucked me in. She often demanded emotional energy and had a frenetic air. Now she sat serenely, looking luminous, with her silky black hair grazing the back of the white embroidered shirt she wore.

These amazing women — I felt unbelievably fortunate to be part of this sisterhood, even if only for the summer. Was it the dubie? Was it the high from the Om? Was it the glow from the evening light? Did it matter?

At dinner I got a deeper sense of Bobby, listening to him talk about an acid trip and discussing Georgei Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic, whose books I had seen lying around the house. Bobby knew so much and expressed it with such emotion mixed with intelligence. After dinner Michael’s playing again inspired the rest of us to music making. I was banging on a pot when Bones came into the kitchen and announced, “You should see the sky, there are so many stars, it’s so far out.” Several people, including Bobby, got up and went outside. I followed. The night was breathtakingly clear. The northern sky pulsed with masses of sparkling dots. The only time I’d seen anything to equal it was the previous summer when Spindle and I had camped on a Mykonos beach.

“Isn’t that the Milky Way?” I asked, thinking I’d stick with something I was pretty sure of. Aside from the dippers, I didn’t know my constellations. “God, there’s so many of them, what are they all?” I directed my queries in Bobby’s direction.

He moved in behind me. “You see the little dipper?” I nodded. “Well, now go to the tip of the handle and look to the right; there’s five stars sort of shaped like an M. See it?” I nodded again. “That’s Cassiopeia. She was the wife of King Cepheus — he’s the boxy looking shape right in front of her. And she was the mother of Andromeda, which sits behind her.”

“Oh wow,” came my stoned reply. These star clusters taking on an identity was so far out. I felt intimate with the night.

“Now look way over here,” Bobby said, putting one hand on my shoulder to turn me around, and pointing with the other. “That big bright star over there . . .”

“I’m not sure where you mean.” He gently moved my head to the angle of his pointing arm. “See it?”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“That‘s you.”

“Huh?”

“That’s Antares. It’s the brightest star in Scorpio. It’s red.”

I stood there gazing up, a little glow warming my insides because he remembered that I was a Scorpio. I also felt a heat on the outside as his hand slowly slid from my shoulder, down the front of my yellow tank top. His other hand came down from the sky and joined the first. “Let’s go in,” he murmured in my ear, turning me toward the house.

A couple afternoons later I was on my bed rereading the macrobiotic guru George Osawa, trying again to take him seriously, when Bobby appeared in the doorway of the big room.

“Want to share a skinny dubie with a skinny Dubie?” he asked, holding out a thinly rolled joint as an offering.

We hadn’t spent any time alone together since that night of the stars. I had wanted to, but he was so in demand with the family, and he continued to intimidate me with his experience and legendary status. Now here we were, back at my bed. The sun coming through the window pointed to the spot next to me. He stretched out in it, lit the joint, took a drag, and passed it.

“Are you going back to Arkansas soon?” I asked, then inhaled deeply before returning the joint.

“Tomorrow,” he answered.

“Tomorrow!?” I gasped, and choked on some smoke.

“It’s time. There’s lots of work to be done at home.”

“But you just got here,” a little whine in my voice.

“I’ve been on the road too long. I need to get back. And you, what are you doing?” he asked.

“Sooner or later I’ll have to start thinking about going home. And school. And what I’ll take this fall.” I inched my leg a little closer to his.

“You’re going back?”

“Sure.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?” Our fingers touched as we exchanged the joint.

“What’s the point?”

“You mean of going back to Milwaukee or to school?”

“Both. Why do you want to go back there? And school is such bullshit.”

“I want to get my degree.”

“It’s a worthless piece of paper.” He had a Ph.D. in psychology. I had two-and-a-half years of jumbled undergraduate credits painstakingly acquired over the past nine years.

“But I need it so I can get a decent job.”

“Doing what–supporting the system?”

“No. I want to go into broadcast journalism.”

“Why, so you can tell lies to the American public? It’s such garbage.” He turned to look at me. “This is what’s real.”

“Well . . . reporting the news . . .” I trailed off lamely.

“Why leave here?”

“I have to go back to Milwaukee.”

“Why?”

“I live there.”

“You’re living here now. This is where life is happening, not in some television station in Milwaukee. Why not stay?”

Why not stay? Why not stay? It had never occurred to me. Did I need to be asked? Could I just stay? What about the rest of my life? What kind of life did I have left in Milwaukee anyway? Suddenly my stoned brain sort of short-circuited and I felt a peculiar thudding in my chest.

“Think about it,” Bobby said, and got up to find Shadow.

I watched his slender frame disappear down the hall, then I lay there for a while staring into the pink insulation, letting this new idea sink into my out-of-focus mind. Bobby’s announcement of his imminent departure, and the prospect of not getting laid again faded under the weight of this new possibility. I needed to talk about it. I went looking for Spindle. I found her in the garden thinning beets, the mid-afternoon sun beating down on her bare back. Plopping myself in the dirt between the rows of seedlings, I repeated the conversation to her.

“Why would you go back?” she wanted to know. “Of course you should stay. That would be so far out!” She threw her arms around me.

She spread the word that I was thinking of staying. Everyone agreed that it was a great idea. In their minds it became an immediate foregone conclusion. Maybe this was the place for me, but I needed to let the idea percolate. What was there for me in Milwaukee? Not my parents; they had moved to Florida a few weeks before I’d come east. Not my oldest brother and sister-in-law; they had been judgmental about my divorce and changing lifestyle, and there was nothing happening between us. I had two little nieces, but I didn’t see them much because of my relationship with their parents. Then there was my brother Arnie — I’d given up trying to be close with him. The way I saw it, none of them would miss me and I wouldn’t miss them. Not much happening with friends either. Divorcing the dc king had alienated the young Jewish marrieds of our circle, and the black activist had driven away most everyone else. I had a few new school friends, but mostly I just seemed to meet unavailable guys. I’d been living a life in transition there. I liked being in school but I was an A/C student – A’s for the political science and mass comm courses that I liked and Cs for the other stuff. And I still had a lot of the other stuff to get through. Bobby was probably right — it was all bullshit anyway.

Here there was no A/C distinction; I was learning something every day and loving it. I’d landed in a whole new world, filled with exciting discoveries and peopled by a loving family who accepted me unconditionally. I liked the freedom, and the hard work agreed with me. Maybe this was the place to be.

I let the idea seep in without committing, then a week or so later I was given a sign. A letter arrived from my brother Arnie: “Dear Sis, I have to move right away. Can I stay in your apartment till you get back? Please let me know as soon as you get this.” The urgency of his request compelled me to trot right down the road to the neighbors and call him collect.

“The place is yours,” I told him, knowing he’d be relieved.

“Thanks. When do you think you’re coming back?” he asked

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“Not before the end of the summer. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Great. Thanks.”

I hung up. The rent for my funky flat was a fraction of what he paid in his fancy high rise with a view of downtown Milwaukee. Once he moved in he’d probably be happy to stay. I headed back up the road, lit a joint, and smiled.

Now, I was unemployed. This state produces a feeling that is extremely enlightening and exciting for two weeks. I didn’t use an alarm clock. I would drink with my friends late into night. Sometimes, I would get lucky and get to lie in bed all afternoon with boys who didn’t work either. (This was Williamsburg, after all.)

But after a while, I started to notice my rapidly depleting funds. Things like “rent” and “bills” and “food” loomed larger in my mind. So, I began the job search. I would wake every day at the tender hour of 2PM, take a shower, and sit myself down at the dining room table with one peach towel wrapped around my body and another wrapped around my head.

I’d smoke cigarettes, make phone calls, and listen to music. I’d try to figure out what kind of job I could live with now. I considered talk show host, advertising copywriter, and circus performer. But apparently you need experience to land those jobs. I pondered the merits of being a rock star over an actress, or an actress over a rock star.

Such thoughts kept me busy for a few days as I was reduced to subsisting on potatoes and broccoli. Sometimes I bought 42-cents worth of thinly sliced turkey and smeared it with mayo. The trick to eating when you’re broke is to not eat for as long as you can after waking. If you get up at 2PM (for example) try to hold off eating until about 6PM. Then, eat again around 11. 

Voila! Two meals a day.

One morning, while sitting at the kitchen table, it occurred to me to call upon that most common dispenser of information–the dictionary. It had answered so many of my questions in the past; why not that of career choice? After trolling “A” to “F” I was not feeling any more inspired about work prospects (though I did finally answer my long-standing question on how to spell “bacchanalia”).

I put the dictionary down and smoked my way thoughtfully through a few more cigarettes. And on my sideboard, I spotted it: the Brooklyn Yellow Pages. An informational tool chock full of businesses requiring employment. My employment! I eagerly set to scouring it. Acupuncturist? Hmmm. I didn’t want to touch people. 

Appraiser? I know nothing of fine jewels…yet! (Wink!) 

Carpet Installation? Sounds a bit boring. Escort? Have to touch people there, too. Keep going. 

Florist? I love flowers! What a pleasant sounding job. I’ll just earmark that page and come back to it. Hypnotist? Sounds cool, too. I could travel to elementary schools and make 3rd graders bark like dogs. Or help people like myself quit smoking; now there’s a noble pursuit. Another earmark.

I was feeling better already.

And then I flipped to “I”: Ice Cream Dealers. Eureka! It was April, I reasoned. The Joe Kool trucks would soon be setting out for the season. There must be an opportunity there for a dependable driver with a clean license and a clean record? Not just someone to dole out ice cream, but a mentor with a ready smile. A friend to the kids. An idol, really. I pictured children running towards the Pied Piper chiming of my bells. Yes. This was it. No doubt.

I picked up the phone and set to work making cold calls (no pun intended). Some places were ice cream dealers who only made shipments to parlors and groceries. I asked for help. Were they aware of any Ice Cream Truck businesses? I got names and numbers. Finally, I reached the proprietor of an ice cream truck garage.

“I want to be an ice cream man!” I announced triumphantly. “Who I do need to talk to?” 
There was a phlegmatic chuckle on the other end of the line, then a reply in a thick Russian accent.

Yes, own truck. Yes, needs driven. You work good?

Sir, I am the very best worker in the world.

You want job?

I do.

OK. We meet. Maybe I like you. Then you paint truck. I show you work. Then it’s good.

Oh yes. It’s very good.

I met my boss-to-be the next day. He was older. Curt and ingenuous. He was wary, but warmed up to me quickly given my easy-going nature and countenance that practically screamed, “You want this ice cream. Trust me.”

OK, lady. I like.

My new boss took me to Home Depot to get supplies. I needed to paint the truck as every ice cream man does at the beginning of the season.

“Your truck will be the prettiest,” I promised him. “I can paint. I’m an ARTIST. I live in WILLIAMSBURG.”

I painted my truck for two days. 
Perfect lines. Red, white and blue–the American Dream trifecta. A Bomb Pop on wheels. I received stickers with pictures of the ice cream bars that I was to sell. These I placed carefully around the service window. So many more choices than when I was little; I gazed upon them with awe and respect.

After a day of waiting for the paint to dry, I was anxious hit the streets. I arrived at the warehouse the next morning and filled out an ice cream order with my boss who helped me stock my truck with frozen confections. I was also given a notebook in which to write down how much ice cream I bought and sold each day. I would receive a 25% commission on what I sold or a 30% commission if I bought the gas myself. I opted for the 30%, figuring I’d get the 411 on affordable petrol in the hood. I would need to meet with my boss once a week at his office in Brighton Beach to give him his profits and show him the notebook.

Next, I learned my turf. Every ice cream driver has a section and a permit for that section only. I learned about Kings Highway. What side of the park I could cruise. Schools to hit up at 2:30PM. Why to avoid Hasidic neighborhoods on the Sabbath. I drank in this new knowledge with a hopeful heart for the first time in so long.

**
My first day on the job. I’d been driving around for a few hours, learning the streets and ringing my bell. No bites yet, but kids were still in school and it was 63 degrees out and sunny. I was patient. At last I saw a walking jackpot: six kids with a basketball on Ave Y. I cruised over and came to a stop. Dangling my torso out the window, I slapped my hands together.

“What’s up shorties! Who wants what?”

Questions flew at me:

“Who are you?”

“Are you our Ice Cream Man?”

“Hey, you’re a girl! Why are you driving a Joe Kool truck?”

“Where’s our other Ice Cream Man?”

“I killed him,” I said. “This is my truck now.”

There was silence for a moment. Then explosions of: “Cool!”; “No you di’nt!”; “Oh, man!”

“Do you live in that truck?” one excited seven-year-old asked.

“Of course!” I tell her. “I got ice cream beer in here. Ice cream soup. Ice cream hot dogs. I got it all.”

They loved me. I could see it in their eyes. This was the new era of the Ice Cream Man. I got them their treats. Asked them their names. Told them mine.

“You’re nice,” one boy said. “The other ice cream man was always yelling at us to hurry up.”

“Yeah, well. That’s why I killed him.”

“Oh man!”

They ate it up equally, the ice cream and my kidding. I wanted to stay and talk to them, but knew there were many more children in the turf who needed ice cream. I had to be fair.

“See ya tomorrow, guys!”

“Yea! See ya tomorrow Ice Cream Lady Lola!”

**
Being an Ice Cream Man had its kickbacks. The biggest, naturally, was free ice cream. Every day, I would bring to work a small cooler filled with my homemade lunch. On the way home it held Bomb Pops, Chipwiches, Strawberry Shortcakes, and Neapolitan sandwiches. There was nothing like coming home, kicking back in front of the TV, and popping the cooler.

Ice Cream Men do not get a day off unless it’s raining. Noon to midnight, seven days a week. It’s a long day, but since you are essentially your own boss, I could come and go as I pleased. That was a nice advantage. I would roll down to work around noon in my 82′ American Eagle hatchback with its cow-print seat covers, blasting Motley Crue and soaking up the city. Now this was the kind of job I could learn to love.

And then there were the kids. Consistency equals regular customers in the ice cream business, and my kids knew where to find me. Packs of them would wait for me. Stoops of screaming kids hurling themselves toward my truck. Jumping, dancing, skipping, yelling. Making up songs about me: “Ice cream lady Lola’s here! Lola’s here with her ice cream beer! No more tears when Lola’s here!”

They’d surround the truck hollering to mothers seated in windowsills to please give me some money. They’d beg me to wait as they ran to the house to procure funds: “I’ll be RIGHT BACK, Lola! Don’t leave!”

I’d cut the engine and hang as long as I could. Sometimes I’d allow one or two kids in the truck to help me and to go for a spin to the next block. They’d sell the ice cream for me and I’d pay them in iced booty. This got so popular that I had to create a schedule: “No, Daniela, you’re next Tuesday. Anthony, you and your brother come tomorrow.”

**
Among the regulars, I definitely had my favorites. On West 3rd, there was Gennaidy-the pint-sized Russian kid who cursed like a sailor-and his best friend, Timothy, a sweetly rotund Chinese boy. On West 1st, there was Nicholas, a quick-talking Romeo in the making. And on the south side of the park was Stan the Man, future prom king. All of them would come running from a block away when they heard my bells ringing.

One Sunday in early June, I brought my friend, Nick, visiting from Oregon, on my route. I had been regaling him with stories of my new career and he was anxious to accompany me.

It was a slow and lazy day. I drove and Nick worked the window. When we rolled up to West 3rd, I was surprised to find the block empty. Gennaidy and Timothy always waited for me. Puzzled, I pulled up, rang my bells, and even called out their names. A minute later, they materialized from Timothy’s backyard.

“Why weren’t you waiting for me?” I admonished with mock upset.

“What’s up sucka?” Gennaidy said. “We was chillin’ with Timothy’s family. They’re all, like, off the boat.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Timothy explained politely: “My parents are having a barbecue. The whole family’s here. Come on back. We’re having crab legs.”

Nick and I looked at each other, eyes wide, and grinned.

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll say ‘Hi.’ You guys watch the truck. And don’t steal anything!”

I had met Timothy’s parents before; they were always in the front yard landscaping things and giving friendly waves to the passers by. As Nick and I made our way to the back yard to find a family party of over 20 relatives, Timothy’s mother greeted us:”Welcome, Timothy’s ice cream friends! Sit and eat!”

Timothy’s parents were the only ones in the group who spoke conversational English, but the rest of the family smiled and waved and made room at the picnic tables. Plates were set before us. Quickly they filled with mountains of grilled crab legs and giant prawns from the South China Sea. Someone opened up a cooler of Heineken and offered it around. Nick accepted lustily. The designated ice cream truck driver, I could only look on and sigh.

As Nick and I basked in our good fortune, the family resumed their party. They talked and laughed, pantomiming for us on occasion. We had no idea what the stories were about, but we always tried to laugh at the punch line. We ate three or four platefuls of sweet crab, rubbing our bellies and enjoying the afternoon sun on our faces. Every 20 minutes or so, Timothy or Gennaidy would come and give us an update on the truck.

After an hour and four plates of food each, it was time to get back on the road. We walked back to the truck where I grabbed two-dozen ice cream bars. These I brought to the backyard. I laid them on the table, put my palms together, and bowed: “Thank you so much! Ice cream for everybody!”

Wallets and bills were out in a flash, but I refused.

“No, I can’t accept any payment. You fed us too well! Please. Take these.”

There was a wave of dissent and shaking heads.

“You shouldn’t refuse them,” Timothy warned. “They won’t give up.”

I had to resort to walking backwards to my truck, hands in front of me: “No, no!” I repeated. “Please. This is for your hospitality!”

I started up the truck and let her run for a minute. As we were pulling away, Timothy and Gennaidy loped up to the window and demanded a ride to the next block. We drove over to West 2nd. As we let them off, Timothy turned back, giggling, and threw two crumpled 20 dollar bills into the window.

“Ha ha! That’s from my parents!” he yelled as they ran off.

**
Unfortunately, days like this were short lived.

Back at the warehouse, the other Ice Cream Men treated me indifferently or with scorn. I was the only American on the job–not to mention the only woman. I was also very popular with the customers. Rumors circulated that kids were crossing King’s Highway to get their ice cream specifically from me. This did not sit well with my fellow vendors.

They began sabotaging my truck.

Every night, we would pull the trucks into the warehouse and plug the cords into the freezer to keep it cold overnight. On a few occasions, in my second month, I would arrive to start my shift and see my cord unplugged from my freezer. I asked Vincent, the warehouse mechanic, what I should do. He helped me rig my cord so that it was locked inside the door of my truck. But that didn’t deter my vandals.

One afternoon, I came into work a few hours later than usual. The warehouse was empty. I stocked my truck, opened the windows, and settled into the driver’s seat. As I started pulling out, I looked ahead to see if I was rolling steady. It was then that I saw a freezer cord dragging along with me, its line almost taut. I threw the truck into park and jumped out, figuring the cord had caught on my bumper. I walked around to the front, dropped to the floor, and surveyed the underside. I was dumbstruck. The plug had been wrapped several times around my rear wheel axle. Immediately, I yelled for Vincent.

“Vincent, look at this! What’s the deal?”

He kneeled to the floor and craned his neck.

“Ooh, man! You been sabotaged again!”

“But why wrap the cord around my axle?”

“Lola. Baby. Those cords have, like, 2000 watts of electricity. If the cord had snapped . . . the entire truck is metal . . . You would’ve gotten zapped, kid.”

“‘Zapped’? As in, electrocuted?”

“Yea, man. They fuckin’ with you now.”

“Vincent,” I cried. “We’re Ice Cream Men. We’re supposed to have honor. This is crazy!”

Vincent shook his head. I looked at my truck and thought for a minute. My decision was quick.

“Shit, Vin. I ain’t gonna die over a couple of Chipwiches. I’m out.”

With dejection I watched as Vincent untangled the cord from around the axle and threw it against the wall. I climbed into my perfect red, white, and blue truck for the last time and pulled forward to park it. I got out, locked up, and handed Vincent the keys.

“Tell Russian Boss Guy what happened,” I said. “Tell him that I was unfairly targeted.”

Vincent nodded.

“And tell the new driver to watch Gennaidy’s language and to buy him a slice of pizza when his mom forgets to give him lunch money. Tell him that I got a new shipment of Chocolate Eclairs for Stan The Man at the park. Oh, and Melissa’s birthday is next Thursday. Make sure she gets a Sailor Moon pop. And . . .”

Vincent just looked at me sadly.

“Tell them I said goodbye.”

As it turned out, everyone wanted to be his friend. More than that, every guy in our dorm wanted to be him- handsome, playful, comfortable in his own skin, and as infectiously friendly as a puppy-and every girl wanted to be with him. While the rest of us observed and sometimes agonized over those social circles, Jonathan did not. He didn’t even seem to notice them. In that way they were a metaphor for other aspects of his life; he didn’t see limitations. If he wanted to do something, he did it. It never occurred to him that he might not be capable of it, whatever it was.

In the wrong hands such confidence might have soured into cockiness. But not with Jonathan. He was as unaware of his confidence as he was of the social groups that coveted his company. We all admired his self-assurance, but we never begrudged it. He was an incoming tide-all the boats in the harbor rose with him…

Dear Jonathan-So much has changed since we saw each other last. These days I ache to be all saltwater and canoes and fish scales and long sunrises across the marshes waiting for the ducks’ first flight of the day. My life wants to be built upon fly rods and darkrooms and typewritten pages of words. In many ways it has been. I’m lucky…

Two years into college, we’d both taken time off, spending the summer of 1991 together roaming the country in a battered VW Golf. Come September, I felt rudderless and temporary without a place to be for the first time in my life. Though we traveled light, I was weighed down by a blind, causeless anger, seeing the world as a series of battles and a tireless queue of adversaries. I thought Jonathan felt the same way. Later, I realized that where I’d been drifting pointlessly, he’d been right where he’d wanted to be - constantly moving forward, learning from everything around him, seeing the world as a limitless expanse of people to meet, opportunities to grasp, trees to climb, rivers to swim.

Still, in Jonathan’s company I learned more about myself than I ever would have being alone. When I remember myself then, I remember being self-conscious, unsure, awkward and unhappy. Jonathan was everything I was not. That same year, we lived with his parents for a short time; I saw how they fostered attitudes and beliefs in him that my own discouraged in me, not maliciously, but because of who they were. Where his planted confidence, mine sowed doubt. His knew you sometimes had to risk something to gain something. Mine prized security over risk, predictability over chance. The ways this affected us showed in our every action. Where he was decisiveness, I was second-guesses. He was a man of action, I was Hamlet. And yet, for all they were obviously responsible for their son’s personality, at times even his parents seemed to marvel at their son.

A year later Jonathan and I lived together again, briefly. We hadn’t spoken for months when he called out of the blue. He’d been backpacking Europe with his girlfriend, and they’d flown into Montreal, a couple hours away. Could I pick them up?

“Oh, and hey,” he said. “Would it be okay if I stayed with you for awhile? I’m broke.” Grateful for more time with him, that summer I watched as one by one my friends instantly and easily became his. He made everything look easy. A decade and a half later, the rest of us still haven’t quite got the hang of it.

Jonathan-My truck is full of coffee cups and wet clothes and hand-tied flies, and around the wheel wells the rust spots are like leprosy. It’s old, but it’s full of me, and my canoe is on the roof, all ash and sea-scratched Kevlar. Fly rods, paddles, waders and lanterns and camp stoves cram the back. I wind my way home through my little town, past the used book store where I’m known by name, past the pub where, too, I’m known by name, snaking through the harbor to watch the storm tip at the boats, up the road past a cemetery full of dead Portuguese dory builders, cod fishermen, spinsters and whalers, and home to write…

College offers a proximity to friends that fades to varying degrees after graduation. For four years you live next door, down the hall, or a couple floors away from each other, and drop by unannounced at all hours of the day and night. You see each other at class, on the quad, or eating at the cafeteria. Someone’s always around to hang out with, and you’re able to see your friends any time you want. That’s a luxury lost to adults.

In those days I spent a lot of time holed up in the bleakness of my dorm room learning to write, a percolator harmonizing with the staccato of my typewriter. Jonathan lived a few doors away. He’d stop by for coffee, or just to chat, and began to call me “Happy Jack,” a name given lovingly, if ironically. It was a name that stuck; when we first went our separate ways, heading to opposite coasts, we kept in touch mostly by mail. All his letters came addressed to Happy Jack’s Snack Shack, care of whatever division he deemed relevant. In one such letter addressed to the Lunch In Exotic Places Division, dated Labor Day, 1994, he wrote from the Black Angus Casino Lounge in Montana.

Dearest Happy Jack. Tom and I just completed a 10-day canoe adventure in the Minnesota Boundary Waters. We ate fish, rice and pasta for 10 days straight seeing only a couple other human beings. 8 days of solid rain, two days beautiful sunshine. The edge of the earth. Just what I needed. Until this, I’d been treading to stay afloat, yet what’s the use in just floating? The well is certainly not dry so it’s time to catch our breath take a dive and swim toward the future. Alive and well, swimming.

He told me he’d gone back to art school to study the thing he most loved, photography. He explained his new living situation, a San Francisco communal housing and studio space full of artists, and in typical fashion, glossed over his own accomplishments to pass three cramped pages describing the talents of his many roommates.

His letter had found me a few months into the world and struggling to define myself as a writer, an adult, a man. I worked a desk job, writing technical manuals, and wrote fiction early in the morning, late at night, or whenever I could carve out a few moments for it. I worried about utility bills and car payments. I worried about health insurance. I worried about proving to my parents that I could make a living.

I thought my struggles were part and parcel after graduation. My own art took a back seat to survival, and once I’d made that choice, it seemed I’d already failed my lifelong dreams. I told myself I’d go back to them. I told myself they’d wait. I wanted desperately to believe it, to believe I had no other choice. Yet Jonathan’s letter proved he’d found a way not just to be an artist, but to live as one, to surround himself not just with art, but with other artists. As always, failure hadn’t even occurred to him. And me? I could think of nothing else.

When you fail at something, you go back and try to figure out what happened, what went wrong, to learn from your mistake. Even now, I lay in the dark studying my failures until I see a pattern begin to form. I know now that each time I’ve failed something, it was because I second-guessed whether I could pull it off. That meant that each time, I failed before I even had a chance to try.

Happy Jack! Earth still spins, school has come and gone and I ain’t got no job! I must eke out my living any way I can. Look for anything and everything to pay them bills. I think I’ll make it to Boston by springtime. Let’s stay in touch-give you a call soon. Take care ‘yo miserable self. Love, Jonathan.

At college in Vermont, Jonathan and I walked through the woods around campus for hours, killing time between classes and meals. We walked every chance we got. One day we were crossing a railroad bridge over the Winooski River, kicking pebbles into the water below. I don’t remember what we were talking about - Jonathan was a great talker, and a better listener -but I remember how the leaves had turned color around us, swamp maples red as wildfire burning past the horizon into Canada and south to the rest of New England.

“Hey,” he said. “Let’s jump.”

“No way. That’s got to be sixty feet down.”

“So what? We can make it.”

“We don’t even know how deep it is.”

“I’m sure it’s deep enough.” And he was sure. But that wasn’t good enough for me, and I told him so.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Don’t jump. But there’s a train coming.” And he was gone.

Behind us, its engines stoked, a Green Mountain Rail Freight obliviously bore down on us, swallowing track in its wake. The bridge rattled as the train neared. Gauging the distance to either end, I realized I wouldn’t make it if I ran.

I jumped.

High overhead, the freight train thundered across the bridge. Jonathan bobbed like an otter beside me, wet hair stuck to his cheeks, his laughter ringing out after the roar of the train faded, after even my lingering fear subsided. I could see the exhilaration in his eyes. It felt like we’d eluded some sure fate that day, just one of many times I’d get that feeling in his company. But there was a different feeling, too, and that was the feeling that somehow I’d failed again - even with a train bearing down, I’d waited until he’d reappeared safely in the water beneath me before I’d leapt.

Jonathan. So much happens in the years we’re apart, and it’s difficult catching up in so short a space. I’ve changed-it’s visible both to the eye and in less tangible ways. I’m sure you have too. I miss the times when we could count on each others’ daily presence. Those walks when we talked about everything. Sometimes I think my life has everything it needs to be happy. And yet, I’m not…. Thinking of you…

Over the years, my life has changed dramatically. I’ve moved cross-country four times, changed careers twice, and chased happiness with varying degrees of effort - and even more varied degrees of success. If I were to sit down with Jonathan now and try to plot the course my life has taken, I’m not sure I’d even know where to begin. I’d know which parts haven’t changed-I’m still fighting the same battles. Self-doubt still plagues me. Confidence still eludes me.

And yet, I’ve found ways to make a living by writing, just as I set out to do all those years ago when he and I sat around Happy Jack’s Snack Shack, sharing coffee, our hopes and dreams possibilities waiting to be enacted. In one way, Jonathan has never stopped being part of my daily life; he’s in much of what I write: the character who exudes easy confidence, or inspires the people around him. The possibilities enacted.

I also work from time to time as a photographer. It’s an art I learned to love when hanging around darkrooms while Jonathan worked. A gifted artist with a natural eye, he made the camera’s lens seem a symbiotic extension of himself in a way it never will me. Like everything else, I have to fight with it. Muscle it into submission. Most of the time I’ll wrestle an image from it that I think is good enough, knowing that Jonathan wouldn’t have settled like that. He would have coaxed out the exact image he wanted. He wouldn’t have stopped until he had.

The thing about photography is that some images capture moments in time exactly how they occurred and others capture them completely out of context. When you look back at the photographs, sometimes it’s hard to tell which they are. It’s like this when I remember Jonathan - have I built him up too much? But then I talk to others who knew him and realize that, if anything, I’ve shortchanged him.

Happy Jack-It’s an adventure down a river, an exploration of all things we encounter-a freedom and not a competition. Time and time again I romanticize the journey’s beginning and end. I wonder if all will be well and productive. The only thing I am certain about is the uncertainty that lies ahead. The river carries us. We are not attempting to carry the river.

When Jonathan visited me in Massachusetts in 1996, I took him striper fishing at the shore on his last day. He loved water in all its forms-in many of my memories he’s surrounded by it and seemed to be elementally linked to it. Though he’d been fishing much of his life, that day he uncharacteristically struggled to catch anything at all. The fish ran thick around us, and I reeled in one after another while he came up empty. As darkness rose like the tide, Jonathan’s frustration grew along with the volume of my taunts. Finally, he beached a single, tiny fish, and quit in disgust. The next day he borrowed a fishing rod from me for his drive back west, promising to hone his skills and embarrass me the next time we fished together.

That was the last time I saw him. We talked a few more times. He wrote a handful of letters, most detailing his upcoming canoe trip down the Mississippi River for a book of photographs. That unfinished trip would be his last. The river took him, as if collecting a debt from that long-ago day in Vermont, or any of the countless others he’d accrued.

Six months before that trip, he wrote me a Christmas letter (to the Trout Bum Division) in which he talked about his projects in the works, his involvement with a nonprofit teaching arts to inner city teens, all the things he hoped to accomplish. Though he was making a living, he said, he wanted to do more than just survive. He wanted to leave the world better than he found it.

Jonathan has been gone now longer than I knew him. For months after his death, I continued to write him letters. Out of habit, I guess. Or a stubborn reluctance to admit he was gone. Or because I had learned so much from him, and had so much yet to learn. He’s still around in many ways-in my writing, and in my photographs, and swimming through my memories like a fish through water.

Anyone who’s seen his photography knows that, given just a little bit of time, he’d have left his mark on the art world. I know how much he wanted that, but even that, I don’t think, is what he meant in his letter. I look back at pictures from those first days of college and wonder if I knew how much my life was changing, and how much of a role Jonathan would have in that change.

For those of us who knew him, who loved him, for those of us who miss him, our worlds got better the moment we met him. Through his example, we go on trying to do for other people what he did for us. It’s one way of ensuring his legacy. We may not do it as well as he did. It may not come as easily to us. And some of us may even believe we aren’t pulling it off. But we keep trying, because that’s what he taught us.

And then, with a flick of the tail, he was gone.

Today, the first story Charlie told me was not from the Dreamtime-where the traditional stories were born to the Aboriginal people. It was not about the lone, pale pelican of the bush who glances out from his paintings. First he gave me a context in which to listen. “At the start of hunting and gathering,” he said in a seasoned storyteller’s voice, pausing in all the right places, “the men and women let the spirits know they’re going hunting,” he smiled, “and ask for help.”

A great big man, Charlie was tattooed with mysteries and wore a brown Aussie Akubra hat crowned by a leather braid. In his hand, he held a wet brush, pausing in the middle of his painting to share the stories with me. But first, he started with his grandmother. Charlie told me how, through the quick thinking of the family, she avoided becoming one of Australia”s Stolen Generation. “The family rubbed her skin with ashes. They darkened her lighter color,” he said. “She was “half-caste” and the government was taking all those children away so they could live in the white world and forget all about the ways of the people.”

Coated in ash and hidden among her family, Charlie’s grandmother slipped past the officials taking children of mixed European and Aboriginal descent called half-caste or mixed race for placement in reconditioning centers. Between 1910 and 1970, over 100,000 children were forcibly removed from their communities in an effort to assimilate them into the dominant culture. “Didn’t get my grandmother though,” Charlie smiled.

Charlie talked about his family and his Cherbourg, Queensland upbringing while I, surrounded by his paintings of the traditional stories, broke a sweat. I was surprised by his warmth and said little, wondering where this part of the journey would take me. I stood listening under the canopy of his market tent, surrounded by the gazes of carpet python, pelican, kangaroo and emu, brought to life again by his hand and witnesses to a town Charlie described as an “Aboriginal dumping ground.” Cherbourg, he said, is where many different native people “were all dumped together and expected to get along, without even speaking the same language.” Many people he knew were devoured by this place, swallowed by the violence and aimlessness of it.

“But I learned from the old people,” Charlie said, “and I became an artist and a storyteller. I come to the markets to connect people with the stories. Everyone loves the stories.”

For seven years, I stalked about this land, wanting to hear the stories from the people themselves and not just read them in books. I asked a few Australians of European descent I met along the way just how I could hear the traditional stories and where I could connect with the Aboriginal people who knew them. The reaction among several people was strangely similar and I felt put in my place: They won’t tell you. They don’ talk to white people.

Reminded I was a stranger wandering these places, I placed caution over desire. I suppose now that I sang out and put my journey into the hands of the spirits. Over time, through listening, attending talks and reading, I learned that Australia’ relationship with its Aboriginal people is red-raw. Other stories needed to come first, stories to bring alive the present astride the past, to make me ready to place my ear to this great red heart. The traditional stories had to be hunted in a sense, and I had to be led by their tracks which shift and disappear in this rust, silken soil. I had to trust them and I understand now that they knew where they were taking me.

One of the first clearings on this journey was in 2000, when the tangled embrace of the gum trees broke open and the great red heart thumped, teaching me the first of its lessons. I met a woman who spoke to a small group at a Brisbane university about her experience as a member of the Stolen Generation. Thirty of us sat in a circle in a tiny chapel, and she was the only person who wasn’ white. She sat with her hands folded on her lap and her glasses hanging from a chain around her neck. I remember the feeling of impending doom, that what she was about to say would rake across our ribs from the inside. It did.

Deliberately, she told her story. She was taken from her family as a toddler and “reprogrammed in the late sixties and seventies.” She spoke of the “lost years” of bouncing between institutions and foster homes and enduring all kinds of abuse, her memories of her family were torn away from her in a fire of forgetting. Through determination and speaking publicly, she sought to reclaim these parts of herself. The response to her story was physical, tears and noses ran. No one breathed a word, but sat instead in the confines of a grief that watermarked the walls.

When she asked for questions, several people said thank you instead. One person, with both hands over her heart, apologized. Another person asked how it helped to speak out and she answered, “I keep telling my story to white people and black people so we don’t forget what we’re capable of-indifference, the bad and the good. There were many blessings along the way. There were many people of all different colors who held out their hand when I needed it. They are just as much a part of this story. I keep telling my story to help me put the pieces together. For all of us and for me personally. By working up the courage to speak, I have been reunited with members of my family.”

I left that chapel with leveling thoughts. I remember feeling dismembered, but now I know that some portions of the sacred hunt are about gathering missing parts back together and seeing things as whole.

In 2004, another clearing opened up and the great red heart thumped again at a book launch for a Queensland Government publication called Connections: A Journey along Central Australian Aboriginal Trading Routes. A collaborative book pieced together by Aboriginal and European Australians writing about the history of their land, the contributions allow readers to journey upon ancient trade routes across the blazing red sands of the outback. I treaded lightly at the launch, shook hands with writers and noticed the tentative yet proud glances about the room. And I met a tribal elder, a fireball of a woman with a tangle of salt and pepper hair gathered into an explosive knot.

“American, right?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “I just flew in this morning. Long day but glad I made the trip. This is just the beginning,” she took a breath and blinked her dry, crackling eyes. “So much work to do. I fly up and down the coast yarning with the white mob, the black mob, this fella, that fella. I’m everyone”s Auntie. My phone rings night and day, people trying to make a bridge of my body. What can I do? They chose me. It’s time.”

At the book launch, I didn’t find the traditional stories I thought I was seeking. Instead, I found ancient, still traceable pathways, linked with breathing bridges-pathways etched in concentric rings around the great red heart.

Along the way there have been other moments as well, disproving what some people told me about imposed silence in Australia, but meeting Charlie today brought this journey to a moment of rest. I was led to a place where I could see further than I had previously, where past, present and future merged and I understood that I’d been changed by what I’d seen along the way. Moments like this on a journey seem rare.

Today, among market tents, I saw Charlie from a distance, painting on a large canvass in black and white. I slid beside him, looking over his shoulder and counting in my head, One, two, three; one, two, three, in time with his brushstroke sets. Tiny white lines were made along a narrow black stripe, shaping a man’s long belly. I was mesmerized as he then pointed tiny white dots |||o|||o||| between the sets.

He squirted white paint from a mustard bottle onto a piece of cardboard and looked up, holding out his brush, “You gonna finish it for me?”

Startled, I laughed, “Oh no.” Hands up, I surrendered.

“This is a hunting trip,” with his first few words, he took me straight into the story behind the painting. “A man and a woman. The woman has a basket to collect fish. The man will hunt goanna.” At the woman’s feet a large perch gasped, while a monitor lizard curled before the man. He told me that the man and the woman prepared their bodies with this pattern, “Before the sacred hunt, the people paint themselves to tell the spirits they are going hunting. They ask for help.” The man and the woman, dotted and banded with white paint, were mid-step, leaping from one world into another.

Charlie stood with his paintbrush, “This painting’s in black and white, but these,” he looked to his other paintings of a pelican, an emu, a platypus, a carpet python wound around her clutch of eggs, “these are in the traditional colors. Red, yellow, black, white.”

Just like the Native American colors, I thought, colors of the native compass points, the spectrum of human colors. Then he told me of his grandmother eluding government officials and his Cherbourg upbringing, he spoke of the elders and storytellers, the artists who taught him so well. He looked back to his paintings, “Even the brush strokes speak. The dots are for my grandmother and her people. The stripes are for my grandfather.”

He picked up his paintings one at a time and told me their stories, the traditional stories of his people, and by then the sweat of my restrained excitement and gratitude was rolling down my back. I was turning into water, my shoes filling, my thoughts running awash with spirals and rings. Charlie was sharing so much with me and I hadn’t even asked.

He held up the long, sullen profile of the lone, white pelican in the bush, “While his brothers by the sea flock in groups of twenty or thirty, this pelican is cursed for tricking the people and trying steal a young girl away from her family.” Listening to how the girl’s family outsmarted the pelican, I thought of Charlie’s grandmother.

“Looking at these paintings,” Charlie said, “is like looking at an x-ray. This line of dots in the kangaroos ears are the nervous system. If you watch a kangaroo, even when he’s lying down, his ears are moving, always listening.” He showed me the emu, long-necked and full-bellied in a swirling world, “This striped shape,” he pointed to a large mass in the emu’s body, “this shows where to find the fat that the old people rub on their tired joints.”

He held up his paintings and told me more stories, as they were told to him by his elders. He said, “The old man who told me the pelican story died a few weeks after. The story would have gone with him. But I know it and I pass it on. Everybody likes these stories,” he smiled. “The white kids and the Aboriginal kids like them, too. So many Aboriginal kids here in the city don’t know the stories. No one told them. But I tell them and they always like them. It reminds them who they are.”

That’s when my hands were guided to the necklace around my neck. He was healing the world through his own sacred hunt.

For some reason that day, I’d worn something special, something that was given to me ten years ago, before I left the US and in that moment, I began to take it off. “I want to give you this,” I unhooked the clasp.

The necklace was made for me by someone named Patrick. Strung on fishing wire, the tiny turquoise and black beads were arranged in what Patrick called, “A real warrior pattern.” Patrick was Pawnee and Blackfoot, and when I knew him, he was homeless. He was 20, maybe younger. It’s hard to gauge a person’s years when he’s dealing with the street.

It was a cold winter when I worked in the art room of a Boston shelter and Patrick would come around to warm up and talk. He didn’t draw often or use much of the free art supplies, but he’d watch and compliment the work of those who did. He wasn’t mean. He was kind, and in a place where meanness and snarls were rife, I noticed it.

The very last time I saw Patrick, he made the necklace, the only thing I ever saw him make. There were always boxes of beads and little meal clasps and spools of wire in the art room and that day, Patrick gathered everything with purpose and chose a spot to work on a battered wooden table. I watched him stockpile the tiny turquoise and black beads by pressing a trembling fingertip against them. He spoke to me as he worked, winding the end of the wire around a clasp and sliding one tiny bead at a time down toward the end. “I’m going to LA,” he said. “Hitching. I’ve got friends there.”

I listened while he talked and I watched how careful he was, since the holes in the beads were the diameter of a pin prick. But Patrick persisted without swearing. Another rare trait among the guests at the shelter, where a woman was often called the c-bomb before nine in the morning.

When he secured the second clasp, he held it up slightly. I figured he was making it for someone, since a lot of people did that. They made gifts, sometimes said thanks and left. Then I thought he made it for himself, since it would have suited him.

“This is a real warrior pattern,” he said quietly so no one else would want it. The beads were formed into bands of black and turquoise and hung snugly. “You’re a warrior in here. You have it. Here.” I was still putting it on with shaking hands when he was gone.

You get so steeled working in a shelter, so used to all sorts of psychosis and violence erupting that when something like this happens, it rattles your core. It’s like someone handing you a piece of his beating heart. Here. You have it. Take this with you on your sacred hunt.

And I have treasured it since. A connection to a period in my life when I was falling in love, preparing to move to Australia, finishing a degree and learning to listen. And it connected me to Patrick and his people. Pawnee. Blackfoot. I would say their names when I was alone and touch the necklace that stayed on my neck for years.

Rattled again to the core today, I sweated, liquefied. My hands shook and my heart pounded so loud I could hardly hear anything else. I only knew that I could not walk away from Charlie without giving him a gift that reflected the essence of the gift he had just given me. “This was made for me a few years ago by someone special,” I told him. “This is a real warrior’s pattern. You are a warrior.”

That’s when Charlie’s expression shifted. Everything about him softened. I continued, “It is Pawnee and Blackfoot. You have it. Here.”

He held the warrior pattern in his great palm and said, “I will treasure it.”

With his word treasure, my eyes filled. I never saw Patrick again. It was a hard thing to release. My heart pounded, the water began to pour. Was it my heart or was it the great red heart thumping the ground instead? Maybe the great red heart sounds just like my own.

Charlie held the necklace and I saw Patrick standing beside him, healing the world, one story, one person, one gift at a time.

As I walked away, I listened as the heart began to slow and I began to understand my journey. I asked to be led and I was led. I asked to be shown and I saw. I asked if I could listen and I heard. And through this journey, I was taught so eloquently that we are all connected. This is where the tracks lead, this is the sacred hunt.

But maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe I’m just trying to make sure she still loves me. Sometimes I fear Lois and I are drifting apart and she’s just sticking around because I treat her so well and have done so much for her. It seems like just yesterday she was loading extra home fries on my plate and shaking that sweet, baby-soft ass until I was cross-eyed. Sure, I’m glad she’s off her feet and living the good life - but sometimes I’d love to go back to 1998, when she walked into my life in that tight little diner uniform, carrying a stack of blueberry pancakes and $30,000 of Discover Card debt.

Don’t get me wrong about turning back the clock…She’s still a knockout. Tonight, I found myself just staring at her as she was watching Lou Dobbs rant about my lack of ethics. She was wearing that silk robe I bought her in Bora Bora and looking scared to death about the case. It’s all she seems to care about right now. She flips from business channel to business channel, screaming “fucking cocksucker” at any commentator who drags her name into this mess. She’s right too…None of it is her fault. And the money she earned from her makeover book is all hers. That’s something she can be proud of.

I started rubbing her shoulders, but she smacked my hands away and called me a “fat, bald, crook” and screamed how she’ll never go back to Jacksonville. I liked it better when she called me her “roly-poly money man” and played naked keep-a-way with my hairpiece - but I still see love in her eyes. I really do. Even when she’s spitting Zinfandel in my face.

Later, we were watching Anderson Cooper together when she paused the show to teleconference me from her bedroom and say that I need to retire the navy blue raincoat fast. She said it makes me look like an 8th avenue porn merchant. Whatever. Gazing up at her image on my ceiling-mounted flat screen got me all emotional. I told her how much I loved her and how much it meant to me that she was sticking by my side. She said “yeah, right” before cutting the feed. It seems like she’s bottling up every emotion but anger right now. I wish I knew a way to help.

I texted her about doing something special this weekend. Maybe fly the helicopter up the Hudson with a pitcher of Margaritas like we used to. She replied that she didn’t want to get chased by a news chopper again. She’s right. Those bastards get so close, I’m afraid we’ll crash in the Catskills. And if there’s anything I’m afraid of, it’s dying in a fireball. Although prison sex with a member of the Aryan nation is certainly climbing the charts right now.

Anyway…with penitentiary life now a possibility, I’ve decided to get in shape. I knocked on Lois’ door and asked her what she thought. She suggested enlisting the help of “anyone who has seen success with the hopelessly bloated.” She’s a funny lady, but I’m afraid the caustic edge her humor has taken is a sign that what she’s most stressed about is a life without me. So I told her we could push for conjugal visits. She let out what sounded like a squeal of sheer delight. I asked her if maybe she’d like to “get conjugal” now. But she just cracked the door a few inches and asked “have you seen my goddamn Marlboros?” I don’t get her sometimes.

Before bed, I popped in the DVD of our 4th anniversary party. What a bash. Lois was mad that I couldn’t get Journey back together, but I still think Aerosmith rocked the island. I just hope they don’t play the video at the trial. That’ll make Lois mad at me all over again. I get so sad when she’s mad at me. But like I’ve said, it’s hard for her right now.

I can say shit.
Shit is good to say.
I can say “tit.”
I can say “bum.”
I can say “You are a bad, bad cat.”
This is fun for me.

I am not the man I can be.
I do not see as far as you do.
Show me a bed, and I run to it.
Show me a job, and I am sad.
I am a bad, bad cat.

Sam is a good mom.
She can do a lot.
She sees that I am not so good -
That I am a bad, bad cat.
This is not fun for me.
Nor for her.

The time is at hand.
Time for me to say shit to you.
A lot of shit, such a lot.
Tit.
Bum.
You are a bad, bad cat.
Oh, that was fun.

If I have to say shit,
Can it be good shit?
Good shit that is not so ABC?
Can I say shit you will not get?
Shit that a bad, bad cat can say?
Not tit, not bum, but …
But …

Can I?
Or am I not the bad, bad cat that I wish I was?

Cosgrove-Cumberbatch is a firm believer in the English language. “At the end of the day, all we have is the spoken word,” she explains. “We may lose our homes, our husbands and our dignity, our children may run far away and refuse to take our telephone calls, but we still hold onto our language.”

Assisted by PM Roget’s devoted wife Nan (who was assigned to write everything in longhand), the tape documents the birth of the vital reference book we know as the thesaurus. The following is a transcript.
PM: We should start, of course, with the letter A.

NAN: Not necessarily, dear.

PM: Why not?

NAN: Let’s be bold and jump ahead to L in honor of our precious little Lilly. We’ll get to A later.

PM: All right then. L for Lilly. L-A-A. Nothing.

NAN: L-A-B. Lab.

PM: Lab is short for laboratory. Not a word unto itself.

NAN: But it’s a word people use.

PM: We’ll come up with synonyms when we get to laboratory.

NAN: Are you sure we shouldn’t have at least one or two suggestions for lab?

PM: Quite sure.

NAN: Suit yourself.

PM: Moving on. L-A-B-A. Nothing.

NAN: L-A-B-O-R. Labor.

PM: Yes, labor. Noun. Activity. Endeavor.

NAN: Good.

PM: Chore. Effort. Industry.

NAN: Industry is not a synonym for labor, sweetheart.

PM: It can be used as a synonym.

NAN: Not to my thinking.

PM: I didn’t ask for your thinking, only for your writing. Labor also happens to be a verb. To toil, strive, travail.

NAN: Work oneself to the bone.

PM: Work oneself to the bone is five words.

NAN: But that’s what real labor is.

PM: Work works. But not work oneself to the bone.

NAN: When was the last time you worked yourself to the bone?

PM: You’re missing the point.

NAN: May we continue please?

PM: We may not. There are more synonyms for labor.

NAN: I’m tired of laboring over of labor.

PM: I just realized something: Label should come before labor.

NAN: Of course, how could we have overlooked label? Label is a…trademark, design.

PM: Also epithet, classification.

NAN: Classification? I think not.

PM: I don’t think not.

NAN: Just because I classify you as stubborn doesn‘t mean I’m assigning a label.

PM: It can be construed as a label. Write it down.

NAN: I’m bored with L. Let’s go to D for our darling little Debbie.

PM: For Debbie. D-A-A. Nothing. D-A-B. Dab. Verb. To smear.

NAN: To touch.

PM: No, no no. I can touch you without dabbing you. Dabbing implies something on your fingertips like a stinging ointment or a poisonous liquid that I might smear on your tongue while you’re asleep.

NAN: Then how about plaster, smudge, pat?

PM: Yes. And flick, peck, spot, stroke.

NAN: What comes after dab?

PM: D-A-C. D-A-E-. D-A-F. Daft. Synonyms for daft please.

NAN: Silly, funny, humorous.

PM: Also demented, cracked, deliberately annoying.

NAN: That’s two words, dear.

PM: Well, some people happen to be deliberately annoying.

NAN: You’re breaking your own rule.

PM: I’m allowed.

NAN: And I’m not? How can you expect me to live by a different set of rules? That’s the mark of a Fascist state.

PM: Let’s jump ahead to W in honor of our frightful little Winifred.

NAN: Why would we do that?

PM: Because the mood struck me.

NAN: Fine, W then.

PM: Werewolf. A predatory mammal that sucks the blood from its prey. You must have scores of synonyms for that.

NAN: No, darling. Waste and want and weakling would precede werewolf, wouldn’t they?

PM: They would. So would wallop. Verb. To bash, belt, pummel.

NAN: Jab?

PM: Jab is good too, along with clobber, strike, slug in the jaw with unrestrained force.

NAN: What are you trying to tell me?

PM: That perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we should include two, three and four-word phrases in addition to singular synonyms.

NAN: I’m glad you finally see the light.

PM: Frankly, I don’t know what took me this long.

NAN: Maybe you spent too much time crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s.

PM: Nothing wrong with paying attention to detail.

NAN: There’s a limit. I can judge a man by his i’s, you know. If you ask me, his i’s are the windows to his soul. Soul. Noun. Spirit. Essence. Disposition.

PM: And what do my i’s tell you about my disposition?

NAN: That you’re a…

At this point, the audiotape goes silent for fifteen seconds. Then there’s the rustling of paper and the deep voice of Dr. Roget.

PM: I will begin with the letter A. A-L-O-N-E. Alone. Adjective. Solo. Single. Unaccompanied. Ecstatic beyond measure.

The recording continues for several hours without the assistance of Nan.

Abigail Cosgrove-Cumberbatch has listened to the entire tape at least two dozen times and hasn’t tired of it. “It’s music to my ears,” she says. “Imagine a Shakespearean scholar coming upon an undiscovered work by the Bard. That’s how I feel.” When asked about the contentious bickering of Dr. and Mrs. Roget, the professorial Cosgrove-Cumberbatch responds, “It’s perfectly natural for marital partners to disagree, especially during the creative process. When the juices are flowing, emotional abuse and physical violence are often part of the process.”

“Humiliation goes with the territory,” Finch-Halifax added.

The tape has been placed in the Sound Archive of the British Library which also houses the 1902 recording of Sarah Bernhardt‘s “Phedre,” the 1953 ceremony in which Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England, and the 1996 hit single “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls.

She looks down, pauses for dramatic effect.

“His six-year-old and my Ned have swimming lessons together. We were watching our kids through the glass wall and he came on to me with some bullshit talk about how he’s noticed me and what beautiful blue eyes I have.”

She glances at her best friend Adam Burrows and feels his disapproval burning her skin as he shakes his head.

She continues: “I know he has a wife - the woman can’t shut up about him whenever we meet - but I didn’t say anything when he invited me to grab some ‘coffee.’” She makes air quotes. “There was no alcohol in my system when I agreed to go to the boiler room and have ‘coffee’,” more air quotes, “with a married man.”

There are about twenty people in the room and they all avoid making eye contact with her. Jane sits in the back row as usual, her leg touching Adam’s. She breathes in the uncomfortable silence:

“My point is that I miss alcohol. I miss how weightless I used to feel, but, most of all, I miss having alcohol as an excuse. I can’t go to this guy’s wife and say: ‘look, I’m sorry, I was so drunk that I ended up having ‘coffee’ with your husband,’ because I wasn’t drunk. How do I make amends for things I do when I’m not under the influence?”

A lot of people raise their hands.

A stocky man with Elvis sideburns is the first to speak: “Hi, my name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic.” He rambles on about how people should take responsibility for their actions, drunk or sober. He remembers step 10, how they are supposed to continue to take personal inventory and admit when they are wrong.

A black woman in a business suit, Rhonda, adds that some people in AA still think like drunks, that they haven’t given themselves completely to God and still cling to the idea that they are in control. People nod.

Ben, a middle-aged alcoholic with a 49ers cap, stands up to say that he applauds Jane’s honesty, that he himself has had some bad ideas in the “seventeen long, long years” he’s been sober. The trick is to try to be a better person, not to make selfish decisions. “We can’t always succeed, but we have to try.” The room is filled with praise and agreement.

“I don’t see why you keep coming to the meetings if you’re not going to take them seriously,” Adam comments later, while they’re having actual coffee near the AA office in downtown Oakland, California.

“I’ve been sober for five years, haven’t I?”

He nods.

“So it must be doing me some good,” she says.

Adam and Jane dated in college. They met at orientation at UC Berkeley and clicked immediately - both didn’t like parties, usually drinking in the privacy of home. They drank their way through college together, buying bottles of cheap tequila and drinking them with straws. After graduation, Jane went off to get an MA in Education, while Adam got a DUI and won a trip to rehab. There he met Jesus, quit alcohol, got married, and had kids. They didn’t keep in touch. Jane ran into him years later, a chance encounter at AA. For the last five years they’ve been “AA buddies,” as she calls them. After meetings, they get together to drink coffee and talk.

“Why don’t you write these stories instead of wasting everybody’s time?” Adam suggests. Three years ago, Jane published a collection of short stories, It’s All Downhill From Here. Literary magazines called it “a refreshing look into the lives of suburban teenagers.” But the good reviews didn’t increase sales.

“Yeah, that would make a great book. The Misadventures of Jane Doe, my AA persona. Thanks, but I’m not quitting my day job.” She teaches high school literature. “And, besides, when you find out your student writes better than you, you tend to get discouraged.”

“You keep talking about this boy, what’s his face?”

“Will,” they both say.

“Maybe you could bring that up next time. You know, your students.”

“My audience expects a certain type of story from me. I can’t disappoint them.”

Adam stirs his drink with a straw, rolls his eyes. “Fabio is, what, the fourth imaginary one-night-stand you’ve had in two months?”

“What can I say? I’m still healing from my last imaginary boyfriend. He hurt me bad, you know?” She forces a sniff. “And since I can’t have a drink, I find comfort in the arms of good-looking strangers.”

“I don’t get it,” he says. “People pour their hearts out and you keep feeding them lies. I really don’t get it.”

Jane leans forward, resting her weight on the table. “You used to.”

The cafe seems airless, the people in the other tables distant. Jane realizes there’s background music, some mellow tune from the fifties. There’s an abstract painting, green and white, on the far wall. Has it been there all these years?

Adam takes a long sip of his drink. “I still think it’s inappropriate.”

“We can’t all be perfect like you. Some of us go home to TV dinners and piles of papers that need grading.”

Adam reaches for her arm, but stops. “I’m not perfect, Jane. I just try to follow the steps of the program and be honest. I trust God will take care of the rest.”

“That’s really precious coming from you. Where does your wife think you are, right now? At least I don’t lie to myself. And I’ve never lied to you. Usually.”

Adam says nothing, his head down. He focuses on his Decaf Nonfat Banana Caramel Frappuccino, drinks it slowly.

“About tomorrow,” he says. “Do you still want to do the same thing for your birthday?”

“Yeah, I just don’t want to be alone. We’re watching Some Like It Hot, right?”

“There’s a lot of booze in it, though,” he says.

“It’s OK, we’ll be together, we’ll help each–”

Adam’s phone interrupts her. Jane knows it’s his wife the moment he turns his back to answer it. Yeah, he’s the poster child of honesty.

Adam turns in Jane’s direction, his eyes squeezed shut. A small smile creeps into her face at the thought of the lies he must be trying to come up with. What is it this time? Is he tied up in traffic, stuck in a meeting, helping an old lady with her groceries?

Jane remembers the stories she told at the meeting today. She doesn’t have a son, and the only man she’s been with ever since she quit drinking was a short college drop-out who smelled like sour milk. But one thing is true: she misses alcohol. Her taste buds crave it. She can practically smell the alcohol, can feel it rolling down her throat, cleaning her insides. When she was drunk, she felt like a passenger in her own life. She just rode in an imaginary roller coaster, her arms up in the air, chilling waves running through her body.

Jane gulps her coffee, which is too hot and burns her throat. She tries to think of why she quit. Hangovers, drunken e-mails, waking up in Los Angeles on a Wednesday afternoon. Drunken phone calls, bad grammar, remembering how she managed to get to LA on a Wednesday afternoon. There were reasons to quit, she tells herself. There were reasons to quit.

She stands up to get pastries and sees Adam scratching his head. His hair is getting thinner at the top and he’s not even thirty. He’s never been an attractive man - no chin - but Jane used to like his wavy blond hair and how it contrasted against hers, always straight and dark brown. She used to think they formed a dramatic couple, her eagle nose complementing his small one, their blues eyes announcing their arrival. They’d have beautiful kids if they got her bone structure, his nose, her full lips, his fast metabolism. They had made plans once.

When Adam hangs up Jane is back in her seat, her legs dangling from the tall stool.

“I got you a Danish,” she says. “What time are you coming over tomorrow?”

“About tomorrow…Looks like I won’t be able to make it. Sorry.”

Jane has nothing to add, so she just stares at him, her face expressionless.

“We can always do it next week,” he says.

“I’m not turning thirty next week.” She presses the bridge of her nose, swallows.

“I said I’m sorry. It’s just that I have responsibilities. Barbara has a play tomorrow and I have to stay with the kids. I mean, she never asks me for anything except this one night off.”

Jane knows he’s repeating what he’s been told. She imagines Adam in a flowery dress and apron - that’s how she pictures his wife-whining these same words in an affected high-pitched voice.

“So, I take it you still haven’t told Barbie about me.” They’ve had this conversation before and it always leads nowhere. Jane hardly ever mentions it anymore, except when she’s angry at him.

“What do you want me to tell Barbara? We have coffee twice a week, that’s all.”

“And yet you keep it a secret. Don’t you find that odd? Why do you keep coming here anyway?”

“It’s just-I just–”

Adam sinks into the stool, his neck buried between his shoulders. He looks so small, not the six-foot tall man that he is.

“You should be careful, though. After all these years of flimsy excuses, she might think you’re having an affair.”

He spins his cup from left to right, then back. “You think you’re so funny.”

“Not really. You, on the other hand, are hilarious. Can you say denial? Step 4, remember? We’re supposed to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. And you come to me with technicalities? You’re worse than Clinton.” Jane’s face is red with anger. “You’re the one who doesn’t take AA seriously, not me.”

“You don’t really mean that,” he speaks in a low voice, looking around at the people at the other tables.

He pats her on the shoulder. She slaps his hand away.
Jane clutches her hands into fists, grinds her teeth so tightly she gets shocks when her fillings touch. “I actually feel sorry for Barbie, cooking you dinner, working part-time at Macy’s, getting all dolled up for you. You’re so full of shit.”

“You’re just upset because tomorrow is your birthday. That’s OK. I forgive you.”

“You forgive me? Are you for real?”

That’s it. She can’t take it anymore. She jumps toward him, grabs his neck, ready to squeeze the life out of him. But once she lays her hands on him, she loses the strength to choke him, his skin warm against her palms.

Jane’s crying now, her vision blurred. She can’t tell if Adam has tears in his eyes, or if he has that condescending look people get when they see an old dog with scabs all over its body. He wraps his arms around her, half to control her, half because she needs him to. She lets go of his neck, hugging his waist instead. Adam pulls her closer. She rests her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeats.

When the cafe’s pimply employees begin to take chairs off the floor, Adam tangles his right hand in her hair, his eyes piercing hers. His mouth gets closer to Jane’s and she tilts her head, waiting to be kissed. Instead, Adam changes the trajectory of his lips, brushing them on her forehead. He steps away. Jane has never felt so cold.

She searches for her purse, trying to find her ground again. “See you next meeting, I guess,” she says. “Maybe Ned can be diagnosed with liver cancer. What’s a story without cancer, right?”

When Adam calls her, Jane’s on the BART train to San Francisco. She knows he’s on his way to Barbie and the kids in Berkeley. They have nothing to say to each other, so they listen to each other’s breathing. They take turns, never at the same time, loud puffs of air, the distance between them becoming wider and wider.

Adam hangs up.

Jane arrives home with a brown paper bag in her hands. She didn’t want to come home to TV dinners and piles of papers that needed grading, so she stopped by McDonald’s. There’s nothing she can do about the papers, but she refuses to eat a TV dinner tonight.

She enters her small studio apartment, kicking clothes off the floor as she walks to the kitchen. Used dishes compete with students’ papers for a spot on the table, there are books and empty soda cans everywhere. Cushions, blankets, clothes and her backpack pile up on her bed. She was going to tidy up, but now that Adam is not coming, she doesn’t see the point.

Jane eats her Quarterpounder with Cheese standing up, leaning against the kitchen counter. She looks at her car keys on the floor. She could drive to Safeway, buy beer. She could get light beer, that has never hurt anyone. She sprints towards the keys, but stops before she reaches them and goes back to the counter. No, she’s not going to Safeway. Maybe she could go and get some ice cream. Ice cream, not booze. No, she tells herself. She’s been down this road and it always leads to alcohol.

She thinks about Adam in Berkeley, watching the kids while Barbie re-heats his dinner. The whole place probably smells like pot roast and baked potatoes. Jane has never been to his house, wouldn’t even know how to get there, but she bets they have a white picket fence. And a lawn which they pay some neighborhood kid to mow. And a swing made of an old tire. They probably even have a tree house.

In her mind, Jane can practically hear the microwave beeping in the Burrows’ residence. Barbie takes the plate to Adam in the living room. She probably sees herself as a modern woman, so she microwaves. Shaking her head, Barbie reminds him that if he’d been on time, he wouldn’t be eating microwaved food. Does Adam think of Jane then? Probably not. Or maybe he does, since she’s the reason for his delay. Maybe he does and feels sorry for her; no husband, no kids, no Jesus, nothing.

Jane goes through her purse, looking for her cell phone. She finds it, holds it and then tosses it back in her bag. Who is she going to call? When things get rough and the craving starts scrambling their thoughts, AA members are advised to call their sponsors, but Jane has never gotten around to actually having one. When she fears she’ll fall off the wagon, she usually calls Adam, but she can’t do that now.

Jane opens her fridge and the white light reveals fifty cans of diet soda. Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke with Lime, Diet 7 Up, Sprite Zero, Diet Sunkist. She picks up a can. Every time she craves alcohol, she has a soda.

Jane needs to go to a different meeting, maybe in Marin County. She needs to get away from Adam, find a sponsor, meet new people.

She shakes her head. She can’t even take herself seriously anymore. Whenever she and Adam fight, Jane decides to keep her distance. Once she even went as far as to go online and look up other AA offices in the Bay Area. But next meeting she found herself in the same familiar building in Oakland, checking the door every five seconds, waiting for Adam to walk in.

The deadline for grading midterm papers is tomorrow and Jane is not even halfway done, but she can’t concentrate. She gets a magazine, maybe some easy read will warm her up, get her in a “reading mood.” But Adam’s face appears on every page. Even TV requires more attention than she has at the moment.

Jane digs her laptop out of her laundry basket. With one big swoop, she throws everything that’s on her bed to the floor. Maybe something on the internet will spark her interest. She lies down, her laptop on her stomach. She should write something. Maybe a story about a married man who pretends to be happy but, when the lights go out, cries in the bathroom, wondering what went wrong.

She checks her e-mails: three new messages. Between newsletters from Border’s and The Writer’s Magazine there is an e-mail entitled: “New story: The Boy With Eleven and a Half Fingers,” from Will Sanchez.

Will Sanchez is seventeen years old. He’s her student.

Dear Miss Davin,

I just finished my new story and wanted your opinion. You keep telling me to describe my characters’ physical appearance, but I might have overdone it this time.
Also, I read Frankenstein. How can you identify with the monster? You should identify with fair Elisabeth, of course. Or maybe even Dr. Frankenstein, since he’s so smart and all.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to your comments on my story. Thank you for taking the time.

See you,
Will

P.S. I watched Some Like It Hot. I never laughed so hard in my life! The thing about old movies is that, once you get used to the weird background music, they’re really good.

Will caught Jane’s attention the moment she first laid eyes on him - he’s the most good-looking person she’s ever met. You can’t ignore his symmetrical face. Yet he’s not very popular at school. Most girls his age can’t see beyond the glasses that hide his hazel eyes and straight nose. Teenagers…

While Jane prints his story, she types:

Hey, Will,

You know you don’t have to thank me for anything. It’s so rare to find a student who actually likes to write!
As for Frankenstein, if you read closely, you’ll see that the similarities between the monster and me are uncanny. At least that’s what I thought when I was in high school and read the book. But enough about me. I’m going to read your story and give you my comments as soon as I can.

See you,
Jane Davin.

P.S. I’m glad you liked Some Like It Hot, it’s probably my favorite movie of all time. I think you are ready for Splendor in the Grass now. But I must warn you, it will break your heart.

Jane grabs another soda and starts to read his story, immediately drawn to it by its first paragraph: “Ask anybody in the Mission District who Diego Delgado is, and they will tell you he is ‘el niño con once y medio dedos.’ The boy with eleven and a half fingers used to be the boy with twelve fingers. He lost half a digit when he was nine.”

She finds a pen in the kitchen sink and writes on the margins: “Great opening! Introduces the character, the setting and tells us a little about his cultural background. Great suspense: how did he lose half a finger?”

She can’t put the story down. As for the papers that need grading, she’ll just tell her boss she needs more time. Deadlines are meant to be broken anyway.

The next day, after school, Jane is unlocking her car. She scratches the paint with the key, not paying attention to what she’s doing. She checks her cell phone again: no new messages or missed calls. Maybe she should call Adam. She starts dialing, but stops. What would she say to him?

She is startled by a rasping voice behind her:

“Happy birthday, Miss Davin!”

Will Sanchez swings a plastic bag against his thigh.

“Hey, Will. You scared the… the heck out of me!”

He shrugs, runs his hand through his dark brown hair. “Here.” He gives her the bag. “For you.”

There is a yellow package inside. She rips the wrapping open and sees a small notebook and a card. “In high school, fitting in is like the American Dream. It seems within every student’s reach, but only a few actually get it. You make high school easier. Will.”

She recognizes that line. It’s from one of her stories, The Lunch Line.

“I didn’t know you’d read my book,” she says.

He leans against her car, smiles without showing teeth. Jane takes mental pictures of his every pose, of the angles his face forms against the white surface of her car.

“I read it three times,” he says. “The Lunch Line is my favorite story. I thought I’d told you that.”

“You didn’t.”

“It’s a great book. That’s why I showed you my stories. I figured you’d get them. A lot of teachers don’t, but you do.”

“Wow, thank you, Will.” She holds her present and the card against her chest. “The funny thing is that I actually needed a new notebook.”

“I know, you told us a couple of weeks ago. I figured it was fitting, you know? Since we both write.”

Will remembers what she said a couple of weeks ago. And he bought her a present.

Jane thinks of Will when they met, almost a year earlier, and how monosyllabic he was, always adjusting his glasses. His e-mails used to be short and to the point. In time, he became more at ease, his e-mails became longer.

She puts the notebook and card in her purse. “Thank you,” she moves to hug him, but stops.

“Cool,” he says and then goes quiet. He sweeps the ground with his left foot, adjusts his glasses. He doesn’t have to say a word, she knows what is bothering him.

“I loved your story, by the way,” she says. His face brightens. “It’s a very powerful piece. You did a great job showing Diego’s feeling of isolation through his physical deformity.” She steps closer. “Of course, there’s still work to be done…”

“Of course.” He repeats, matter-of-factly.

She laughs. “I’m sorry, but the only reason there’s still work to be done is that you write so well. If I didn’t think you have potential, I’d just correct your grammar.”

“Yeah, sure,” he says mockingly.

“I’m serious! I think you should send your stories to competitions and literary magazines. You’re way better than I was at your age.”

He rolls his eyes. “No way. I bet you were a literary genius.”

She laughs, her hand on her stomach. “Are you kidding me? I could show you some of the stuff I wrote when I was seventeen, but then you’d lose all respect for me. When I was a teenager, all I could write were suicide notes.” He is serious. She forgets people hardly ever find humor in suicide notes. “Well, seeing as I’m here, it’s safe to say I did not kill myself.” He smiles a little. “I just liked writing the notes, that’s all. It was therapeutic.” Pause. “Not that you should write suicide notes. No, you shouldn’t even think about suicide. You have so much to live for. Forget I said anything. Please don’t sue me.”

“You’re weird. I like that about you.”

Her face goes red. “Thanks, I guess.”

Silence. Jane realizes she has been standing by her car for twenty minutes. Time has this way of escaping her whenever she talks to Will. She looks around, afraid someone from work might see them. She isn’t parked that close to the school, but you never know. They’re not doing anything, but she doesn’t want anybody to see what they’re not doing.

She should go home, she thinks, and grade papers. But she can’t bring herself to get in the car and away from Will. “My old legs are getting tired. We could go to Starbucks or something, talk about your story if you want to.”

His eyes open widely, a kid getting a new toy. “Really?”
“Yeah. If you want to.”

He smirks, a new idea boiling inside. “I know a place we can go. It’s not Starbucks, though.”

Jane takes a step back: “OK, I guess… What’s wrong with Starbucks?”

Will steps forward: “Nothing. It’s just that I know this other place. It might help you understand my character’s background.”

“Like a field trip,” she adds, warming up to the idea.

“Exactly.”

They look at each other sideways.

“I guess we could try that.”

They both buckle up at the same time and the back of their hands touch. She repositions the rear veiw mirror, opens the window, and starts the car.

Will gives directions.

They end up in a bar called El Perro. At first Jane thinks they’re going to the small restaurant next to it, but Will leads her through the wooden door to the bar. “My uncle owns it,” he says, as if that makes it all okay.

Jane can’t see how this place is going to help her understand Will’s story. There’s no mention of a bar in The Boy With Eleven and a Half Fingers. She walks in anyway.

The place is dark and damp, with neon signs on the walls. As she smells the familiar scent of mold, dust and spilled liquor, Jane wonders if she’s been here before. No, she doesn’t think so. She would remember the stupid smiling cartoon bulldog that greeted her at the door. She would remember the orange jukebox between the counter and the tables.

El Perro isn’t very crowded, which isn’t odd for a Wednesday afternoon. A couple of motorcycle types hang around the counter, half-empty beer bottles in front of them. At a table near the entrance, five executives drink beer, probably straight from work.

Jane rushes ahead of Will and asks for two Cokes before he can order anything else. She reaches for her money, but he is faster and pays for their drinks.

He takes her to a far-end table, hidden by a concrete column. If she stretches her neck a little, she can see the rest of the bar, but people can’t see them. Is that why Will sits here, so that the other customers can’t see him? He wouldn’t pass for twenty-one to save his life.

Her concerns about age are pushed aside when he puts a lock of her hair behind her ear: “Did you really like my story?”

“I did. It’s amazing how fast you’re maturing as a writer. I’m very proud.” She talks fast to even her voice, which becomes slightly trembling when he touches her.

“Thanks. It’s all the feedback you’ve given me.”

Will wipes his glasses in his T-shirt, and his hazel eyes turn greenish yellow as he moves closer to the light. He moistens his lips, runs his hand through his hair, rests his naked arm on the back of her chair. Jane might not learn about Will’s writing in this “field trip,” but she’s certainly learning something about Will. The bar is his natural habitat.

Jane combs her hair with her fingers, moves it from left to right. She’s always had beautiful shiny hair and hopes he notices. “It’s funny that we both write about the same thing, isn’t it?”

Will strokes his hairless chin, head tilted to the left, his strong jaw line and high cheekbones cutting the air. “True. We both write about the odd one out.”

She sips her Coke. “But that’s only because people who fit in are boring.”

Will laughs, his metallic smile blinding her for a second. He wears braces. At first, he’d always bring his hand to his mouth when he laughed, but he doesn’t try to hide his teeth from her anymore.

They talk about his story, about Frankenstein, about old movies. Jane explains that she likes teaching, but the pay sucks. Will tells her his parents moved to the US when they were in their twenties - his mother is from Venezuela, his father is from Spain - and that Spanish was the first language he ever spoke. He tells her he’s going to go to South America after college, or maybe Europe. She says he can do both.

They talk about writing. Will says he thinks a lot about writing, but can’t discuss it with anyone. Most of his friends are older than him - like the bouncer and the bartender of El Perro - but they aren’t into writing. Jane offers to talk to him about the craft any time he wants to.

“Do you mean that?” He asks.

His hand brushes her arm, sending electricity through her bones. Every time Will moves his arms, his veins emerge from underneath his skin, one at a time like waves that soon disappear. He must have just gone through his growth spurt, for he hasn’t gained the weight needed to fill his new frame. He’s so thin she wonders if she’d be able to watch his internal organs working were he not wearing a T-shirt.

Jane realizes she’s staring. She’s not sure about what to do, where to fix her gaze, how to look at him again. Finally she focuses on their empty glasses and stands up. She thinks about buying him beer, but the thought dies before she reaches the counter. She considers buying herself a drink, maybe a shot of Jack, but that would be a bad idea. She orders two more Cokes, regular for him and diet for her.

When she turns around, he’s watching her, his right foot on the leg of the chair, his left hand grabbing the edge of the table. He can’t wait for her to return. She slows down, enjoying the moment, for she doubts anybody will ever look at her like that again. Such respect and admiration. He wants to hear every single word she has to say, wants to tell her everything.

“So, where were we?”

She watches him drink his Coke, follows the liquid as it swims around his mouth and down his throat. His thin lips and square jaw give his face geometric precision.

“Talking about writing,” he answers promptly.

Will’s manuscript lies on the table next to Jane. Spilled Coke has given it a vintage look, but you can still read what’s in it.

“One of my favorite things about fiction is that you can write about your life without writing about your life. You can twist your experiences, turn them into whatever you want.”

His eyes are wide open and she can picture little men in his brain taking notes of everything she says.

He asks. “How so?”

“When I turned twenty-five, I started thinking about my future, that I’d die alone, poor, drunk, and that I couldn’t even be the crazy cat lady because I’m allergic to cats. And that was how I came up with It’s All Downhill From Here.” He forces a laugh. She realizes he hasn’t the slightest idea of what she is talking about. “I know, I know, what does that have to do with an obese teenager who has to get rid of the corpse of her hugely obese mother? It’s about facing your grim future, does that make sense?”

“I think so,” he says. Since he manages to keep eye contact, Jane feels that at least he believes it does.

“You’ll understand it better when you’re older.”

She has committed a cardinal sin when dealing with teenagers. You can never tell them they are too young to understand something, there’s no worse insult. Ever since she can remember, Jane has never thought she was too young for anything and hated when people belittled her.

Will looks down, clearly affected by her words.

It’s time to get the conversation back on track. “What do you think about the role of reality in fiction, Will?”

Jane sees his self-esteem has been restored the moment he adjusts his posture and glasses, inhales deeply and starts: “I think…”

Someone puts money in the jukebox and they are silenced by tunes of the 80s. Maybe Duran Duran, or Depeche Mode, she is not sure. She considers asking Will, but doubts he’ll know.

Will moves his chair closer to her and she follows suit. He is mere inches from her now, batting his long eyelashes, looking like someone out of a dream or a magazine. He says something she doesn’t hear, so she moves even closer: “What?” He smells like soap, like he’s just taken a shower, which she knows for a fact isn’t so - they came straight from school. Their legs are touching now, she feels his bony knee under his jeans. He speaks in her ear: “Nothing.” The word travels through her body down her toes. She is warm all of a sudden as adrenaline floods her blood. She wants to caress his face and find out if he is as hot as she is. She extends her hand, but can’t bring herself to touch him.

Instead, she takes off her jacket, uses a napkin as fan.

Jane closes her eyes, afraid of what she might do if she keeps looking at him. She takes a sip of Coke, swings her head a little, enjoys the music. All I ever wanted / All I ever needed / Is here in my arms.

“I like this song,” she tells him.

Jane’s shoulders follow her head, swinging to the beat.

“Would you like to dance?”

“Here?” she looks around the bar. There isn’t a lot of space to dance.

“Yeah, we should dance.” He shrugs and adjusts his glasses.

“I haven’t had nearly enough diet Coke for that,” she winks.

He chuckles. “I bet you’d feel like dancing if you had a beer or two.”

Is he trying to get her drunk? Nobody has ever tried to get her drunk before.

“I’m sure I would. But I don’t drink,” she says.

“Really? I don’t like beer, either. I mean, I drink it sometimes, but it tastes like cat piss.”

“That’s not my problem. I like beer actually. Too much. That’s why I can’t have any.” She can’t believe she just said that. Is she insane?

“Oh,” is all he comes up with as the implications of her words sink in. “Now we have to dance,” he continues. “You know? So things won’t be awkward.”

He even sounds like her. She is inside his skull.
He takes her hand and is about to lead her to the dance floor - an empty space near the jukebox - when the music ends. They stand there, holding hands, children caught misbehaving. She stares at the contrast between his tanned skin and her pale complexion. Will’s fingers move to the back of her hand and trace the patterns formed by her veins.

He steps forward, his other hand on her chin, forcing her to face him. She does. She runs her fingers up and down his back.

The air becomes heavy, charged, and they have to open their mouths to breathe. She catches a glimpse of his braces. He wears braces.

She pulls back: “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Miss Davin…”

“It’s after school hours, Will. You can call me Jane,” she says before running to the toilet.

Jane has never been so thankful there are no mirrors in a place. The bar’s bathroom smells like cheap detergent, nauseatingly sweet. There are two toilet seats, one next to the other, no booth between them. The toilet paper is pink and rough as she wipes her forehead with it.

Staring at the wall where the mirror was supposed to be, Jane traces the two lines near her mouth. She can’t feel them, but knows they are there, wrinkles in the making, reminders that she is not a teenager any more. She sees herself in fifteen years. She’ll have saggy cheeks. The little bags that appeared under her eyes when she turned twenty-eight will have become “suitcases” of skin and fat, dragging her eyes down with them. Her hair will be blonder, she’ll have highlights to cover her grey strands. It’s all downhill from here, she thinks.

Will she still be going to AA in fifteen years? Will she still have coffee with Adam? She’s not supposed to think about that, “one day at a time” and all, but she can’t help it. She wonders what is worse: a 45-year-old woman, unemployed, with cirrhosis, drinking herself to an early grave; or a 45-year-old woman who comes home sober to TV dinners and piles of papers that need grading.

The pictures of her bleak future fade away and are replaced by the sensation of Will’s fingers on her skin. He has cold hands, not like she imagined. She’s invaded by little balls of happiness that pop inside her heart and stomach, making her whole body shake with anticipation.

Jane splashes cold water on her face. She thinks about escaping through the window - that’s mature - but metal bars stop her. Will’s probably waiting for her, trying to make sense out of what happened. She can sneak through a back door, this place is bound to have one, and run until her legs fall off. How can she face him again? Her student. She thinks about joining the circus, changing her name, moving to Brazil.

She should just go ahead and kiss him, one little kiss, to get it out of her system. Maybe kissing a teenager is one of those things people have to do when they turn thirty, a rite of passage. Then she’ll be able to find a nice stable guy her own age and move on with her life. Just one kiss, just this once.

Who is she trying to fool? This is like one of those arrangements she used to make with herself to justify having a drink, and they never work. Just one shot and then never again. It’s just because I’m depressed; when I’m feeling better, I’ll stop. It’s New Year’s, it doesn’t count. I’ll take one sip and that’s it. It’s never just one drink, one kiss.

Her cell phone rings. It’s Adam. She lets it ring until the voice mail picks it up. After a few moments of silence, the phone starts again. She wants to turn it off, but her fingers refuse to push the button. She can’t push Adam away.

“I told my wife about you,” is the first thing he says. “It looks like I’m coming over later. Do you want me to bring popcorn?”

“You told your wife?” After nagging for so long, Jane had lost hope he would actually do it.

“I thought a lot about what you said yesterday, about the step 4 and being honest, and you were right.”

Is she hearing things? Has he just admitted that she was right? All these years of talking and having coffee, he finally says everything she needs to hear. He picks her. Jane wants to smile, but holds it back. She can’t help thinking there is a catch.

“But I have to be home before one,” he informs her.

“Huh?” She knew it was too good to be true.

“What?”

His question seems so obvious she has a hard time answering it. “You just said you told your wife.”

“I did. But I have to be home by one.”

Jane shakes her head. Maybe things will start to make sense after a good shove, like electric appliances. “But you just told me you told your wife.” Maybe if she says it again and again, Adam will see the contradiction. Jane sees it so clearly, how can he not?

“Yes. She understands there are some things in my life as a recovered alcoholic she’s just not a part of.”

There’s always a catch. Always. “So she was completely fine with you lying to her all this time?”

Pause. She hears him clearing his throat. “Actually, that didn’t come up.”

She sits on the toilet with her slacks still on. “Oh… What about the fact that you’ve been having coffee with your ex-girlfriend for the last five years? Did that come up?”

“No, that wasn’t the focus of our conversation.”

Jane is beginning to understand. “What did come up, then?”

“Why is that important? We can celebrate your birthday tonight, isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Sure, but just out of curiosity, what did you tell Barbie about me?”

“The truth: That I have a friend from AA who is turning thirty today and needs my help.”

“The truth.”

“Yes, that’s the truth.”

“I can see that. You know, Adam? As thrilled as I am that you finally told your wife about me, as much as I appreciate–”

“Don’t be like that,” Adam interrupts, catching up with her sarcasm.

“No, no, no, let me finish. As much as I appreciate your honesty and devotion to the Twelve Steps, I’m on a date right now, and I don’t know when I’m going home.”

“You’re on a date?”

“I know, hard to believe it, right? Especially after all the stories I make up. I wouldn’t believe me either if I were you.”

Jane hangs up. She turns her cell phone off.

The word date echoes in her head, silencing all thoughts she could entertain about Adam and Barbie. She’s on a date. It seems so obvious, but only when the sentence leaves her mouth can she see that that’s what she’s doing. Will is her date.

At AA, they talk about relinquishing power, trusting God will take care of things. Maybe she should relinquish some power, let God do some of the work for a change. So if she goes out there and dances with Will, it’ll just be dancing, no law against that. If that leads to anything else, that’s up to God, she’s not going to pine over it.

Behind the column, Will rests his elbows on the table, his hands holding his head, his eye-glasses next to him. There are two glasses in front of him, one empty, the other half full. Jane can smell the whiskey. For a moment, she’s appalled the place sells alcohol to a teenager, but then she remembers she’s in no position to judge.

She doesn’t sit, but comes near him and pets his hair, ignoring the greasy sensation of hair-gel on her fingers. “I’ll be right back,” she half whispers. She walks towards the jukebox. Will doesn’t follow her. Out of the corner of her eye she sees him downing his drink.

What song to pick, she wonders, staring at the names of artists all lined up alphabetically. She decides to stick with the eighties and is surprised when she sees “Reel Around the Fountain,” by The Smiths. She can’t think of anything more appropriate and puts quarters in the machine.

Morrissey has barely begun to sing when Will appears behind her, looking puzzled.

“I decided to take you up on that offer,” she says.

He hesitates, but eventually puts his arms over her shoulders. Jane has her arms around his waist. She can feel his body humming. Fifteen minutes with you / I wouldn’t say no.

Will’s hands are not cold anymore, they’re warm against the back of her neck, but still she has goosebumps. She trembles and turns her head, catching a glimpse of the bikers at the counter. They’re staring at Will and her. The whole bar is still. The bartender, the bikers, the executives, even the bouncer is watching them dance, glued to edge of their seats, a captive audience in a freak show.

What am I doing, Jane thinks. Before she has time to pull away, Will places his hand in the small of her back and guides her to the area near their table, the column sheltering them from curious eyes. There isn’t a lot of room for dancing there, but, the way they are dancing, they don’t need much room.

Jane feels much better now that she can’t see anybody. She wonders if she should say something, but really, what is there to say? She pulls him closer. He’s smelling her hair, his face buried in it.

Let go, she tells herself. Relinquish control, trust God will take care of the rest. Jane can’t shake the feeling that’s not what the AA people mean when they say that, but if other people can bend the rules to their liking, why not her?

She looks up at Will, glad she needs to actually look up to see his face. She can smell the alcohol in his breath, the scent luring her towards his mouth, inviting her to taste it. So she does. She kisses him. He kisses her back.

Jane searches for traces of whiskey on his tongue and teeth, secretly celebrating every time she finds it.

Will pulls back a little, gasping for air. She spreads butterfly kisses on his face, gives him time to recover. He looks at her. “You’re so beautiful,” he says and kisses her again.

Jane can’t remember the last time anybody told her that and she actually thought they meant it. Maybe it’s because he’s not wearing his glasses, but Will means it. She wants to tell him that he’s the beautiful one, but it will sound too corny.

He deepens the kiss, presses her against the column. Her knees weaken. She’s the one out of breath now, slowly moving her mouth to his shoulder, inhaling loudly. Her limbs seem almost foreign to her, she can’t quite control them, keep them steady.

Will leans against her, combing her hair with his fingers, “I love you, ” he murmurs, so softly it takes Jane a couple of seconds to piece the sounds together and form meaning. By that time, he’s already kissing her again. She doesn’t interrupt him, doesn’t want him to think he did something wrong, but the words fall in her head like an atomic bomb, silencing everything. She doesn’t feel his lips against hers anymore, doesn’t feel his weight against her body.

He loves her. Of course he does. He probably didn’t mean to tell her, the words must have snuck out through some secret passage in his brain. She remembers that kind of love that needs to speak out, to confess its existence. This is the real deal, he actually believes he loves her; she’s sure of it.

Her head feels heavy and she realizes she stopped kissing him. She doesn’t want to cry - she’s supposed to be the adult in the situation - but tears keep coming against her will. What the hell is she doing to this kid who loves her?

“Will,” she says while he brushes her tears away.

“What’s wrong? What did I do? I’m so sorry.”

She buries her face on his shoulder and is sobbing now. “No, you’re wonderful.” She wipes her runny nose with her sleeve.

She has to clean up the mess she made. “I mean, I feel so lucky. I don’t even know where to begin. There’s something seriously wrong with me.”

Will has watery eyes. She caused it. She should kick herself. She searches for the right words, but can only think of the wrong ones. I love you too, that’s why I can’t go through with it. Too abstract and leads to too many questions. We can’t do it, I’m too old for you. Too flimsy an excuse. I have a boyfriend. That can actually work, thinks the writer inside her. It’s plausable for someone to think about cheating on her boyfriend and get cold feet.

“Will,” she begins, but this is real life, not AA, and she can’t bring herself to lie to him. She has an idea: “I’m sorry, I can’t.” Pause. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Will takes a step back, but there is an abyss between them now. “Okay,” he tries to act cool and detached. “I understand.”

They stand still for a while, avoiding eye contact, not sure what the next move is. Jane feels dizzy, as if she has been spinning around for a few hours. She worries she might be sick or fall flat on the ground.

“Let me drive you home,” she says.

Will takes another step back. “No, that’s okay, I live around the corner.”

“Okay.” She can see that he’s trying to salvage his dignity, so she doesn’t insist.

“See you in class, Miss Davin.”

Jane nods. There’s nothing left to say, so Will turns and leaves. Will he understand it when he’s older? She thinks so.

Her knees weak, her body sore, Jane leans on a bar counter for the first time in five years.