This is Your Life

The Sixties

How about it? Pastor Joe asks. He wants you and your wife to run the youth group at Good Shepherd this year. Sipping his coffee, he pins your wife to her chair with his good eye while the other drifts, moving as though he is keeping track of the rest of the congregation milling around the church basement. And that's how you end up spending Saturday afternoons playing guitar and singing folk songs, talking about the war and listening to a bunch of teenagers complain about their parents and school, things you always hated, too.

One of the girls has long blond hair that falls down to where her heart-shaped ass curves out from her body. She is sixteen but looks nineteen. You see her at a bar one night. Shhh, she says, don't tell anyone the truth about me. She bums your cigarettes and persuades you to buy her a couple of beers. An hour later, the two of you are out in your car in the alley smoking a joint, and one thing leads to another.

Her mother approaches you after church one Sunday. Your heart is suddenly struggling, jumping against your chest like the grasshoppers you used to catch in your hands as a boy. But you smile as she explains that her daughter has been even more withdrawn than usual lately and that she's been coming home reeking of smoke and liquor. Would it be possible at the youth group meetings to talk about the dangers of drugs with the kids? She asks it almost shyly, and you see the shadow of her daughter in the way she looks up at you without lifting her head, the way her fingers brush her steel-colored hair back behind one ear.

The girl comes to the youth group meetings a few more times, sporadically, but when she's there it makes you uncomfortable. She's always staring at you, at your hand on your wife's shoulder. When she stops coming altogether, you are secretly relieved. Your wife tries to call her, to find out what went wrong. The other kids say they haven't seen her. You worry for a few months that the girl might tell somebody what happened between you. You think about her at the factory where you work filling molds with plastic foam. Having something to think about makes the shifts go by faster.

The Seventies

A stripper with incredible tits. A waitress who thinks you're the funniest guy ever. The manager's girlfriend. The married woman with the horses. A drug addict you meet at the unemployment office. Your boss's daughter. One of your wife's friends. A college girl. A stranger.

The Eighties

At home after bar-time, you leave a note for your wife: I'll be playing poker all night. See you tomorrow. Love you.

Later, you wonder what gave you away, if, as she read the words you'd written, small details from the past came together in her head like the colored pieces in a kaleidoscope falling into a pattern that actually looked like something--a flower or the shape of a face. Instead of going to work, your wife shows up on your girlfriend's front step. Her banging on the screen door reminds you of your kids when they were young, how nearly every Saturday morning they would start you out of a sound sleep by banging their toys around or yelling at each other or turning the TV up too loud.

At the door, you try to explain to your wife that you were just helping out a friend, that you slept on the couch. As you tell the story, you become convinced that it is true, that if you turned around just now and looked at the couch, there would be a blanket there, a pillow with a dent in it where your head had been. But she won't buy it. In her rage, her lips have thinned until they have nearly disappeared. You can't help staring at the place where her lips used to be. Get your shit from the house, she says. And get out.

The Nineties

Two straight days of crystal meth, whiskey, and poker. The sun has been up for hours when you finally get back to your girlfriend's apartment. The bedroom stinks of farts and sweat and sex. You take off your clothes and lie in the stinking bed for a long time with your eyes closed, your eyeballs jerking around under the lids, thinking about all the things you don't want to think about: how you only have five dollars left from your unemployment check, how that means you'll have to ask your girlfriend for money again, how you owe child support for your son--which your ex-wife says proves you don't care at all, as if money is everything.

Finally you drift off, but only minutes later your girlfriend's daughter comes home from school, turns the TV on, and starts rattling dishes around in the kitchen. Your eyes flip open, your blood surges. Shut up! you yell from the bed, but either she doesn't hear you or she is ignoring you. You fling open the bedroom door and stand there in your underwear. She is at the kitchen sink with her back to you. Shut up! you shout again. I'm trying to sleep in here!

Fuck you, she says without turning around. You don't even pay rent here.

She is thirteen, the undisciplined child of a slut. The surprise on her face when you are suddenly next to her at the sink gives your anger an edge of pleasure. You slap her across the head and push her into the counter when she tries to turn away. When she falls down onto the vinyl tile, you start to kick her--in the ass, in the bare places where her cropped shirt has crawled up and the wavy pattern of ribs presses up against her skin. She screams, the television blares, and then someone is knocking on the door. It's a neighbor, wondering if everything is okay. Though you assure her that everything is okay, she still calls the police.

Your girlfriend presses charges against you, not because she wants to, she says, but because the social worker told her it's the right thing to do if she wants to keep her kid. The judge who issues the restraining order strongly suggests that you get out of town. You call a guy you know in Rochester. Last time you saw him, he said he needed a blacktopper.

The Nineties, Part Two

Your ex-girlfriend calls and asks you to drive down from Rochester and have dinner with her, for old time's sake. Why not? you say. A man named Jack or Jake is living with her now. She asks if you're sure you're not jealous. No, you tell her. After hanging up the phone, you sit for a minute. You don't remember ever having felt something you'd call jealousy. You search your body to see if it knows what the word might mean, and it answers with a deep blankness, a rhythmic silence.

When the two of you meet, it is like old times--without having to go home to an apartment that smells like an ashtray and where the bathroom is always covered with a gray layer of filth. You splurge and go to an expensive restaurant. The steaks there are tender and bloody, and you are on your second bottle of wine by the time you get to the cheesecake.

You're both drunk and laughing when you leave. It must be below zero outside, but the cold air feels good on your face and neck. Tiny snowflakes fall like glitter from the sky, which, as you stand under a streetlight looking up, seems very far away. Before you get into the car, your ex throws her arms around your neck and kisses you. What about Jake? you say. She says, It's Jack, and he's at work.

But on your way back to her apartment, a Buick goes through a stop sign, and you can't keep your Datsun from hitting it broadside at thirty miles an hour. The sound is enormous, a rough chord of brakes and metal bending. The back window on the Buick gives and sends a shower of glass over the hood of your car.

You sit in the steaming silence a moment, your left ankle throbbing, your ex-girlfriend's arm limp across your lap. Then the other driver is yelling, My God, I'm sorry, my brakes, is everyone okay? People come out of the bar on the corner. Your ex-girlfriend is hunched over the stick shift, her face turned toward you. She is snoring softly, and a thin red line runs from her nose, which might have broken when she hit the windshield. She'll be really pissed if it mars her good looks. Gently, you push her back into her seat and lean her head against the window.

You are standing next to the car watching the ambulance crew take her away, when the cop saunters over to take your statement. He smells the alcohol on your breath and says, You'd better get the hell out of here before I'm forced to take you in on a DWI.

You call a cab from the bar on the corner and the bartender there gives you a free draft to drink while you wait. You describe the accident for him--the slow-motion crumpling of the front end of your car, your ex flopping around like a big doll. In no time, the cab is honking outside.

A thin layer of snow has dusted the cars parked up and down the block. The cabbie has his window down and is puffing on a cigarette. It's Richie, a guy you knew a few years ago, when you were bartending at a strip joint on this side of town. He used to bring his wife to the bar. The two of them would have a couple of beers, watch the girls dance for a little while, then go home. The strippers were like foreplay to them. Then Richie's wife had shown up one night without Richie. She was crying and said they'd had a fight. You took her upstairs to the office to try to calm her down, and one thing led to another. She'd ended up straddling you on the swivel office chair, pumping until you thought the big spring under the seat would break. You don't know if she told Richie about it that night to get back at him, or if she'd told him later, out of guilt. Either way, Richie had never talked to you again. You heard that he and his wife started going over to the Yum Yum Tree after that.

When Richie sees you walking toward his cab, he gives you the finger and speeds away, fishtailing down the block. Your ankle hurts, but you decide to walk the ten blocks to the emergency room. Your ex-girlfriend is most likely conscious by now, and without a car to get you back to Rochester, you'll need a place to stay. As you limp along the sidewalk, you wonder at the coincidence of running into old Richie tonight. It reminds you of the TV show you used to watch as a kid, where after a lot of fanfare, the host would bring out the guest's best friend from grade school, his favorite teacher, people he'd almost forgotten but whose lives had touched his in the small ways that add up to something. You wonder who the producers might dig up if you were the guest star. The man who sold you your first joint? Your father, back from the grave, lamenting how you'd never lived up to the hopes he'd had for you? You smile, imagining the long line of women waiting backstage. Some of them you wouldn't mind seeing again.

Heidi Bell