It wasn’t a random idea to stop at Trainor’s Tavern. I’d done my share of drinking in the last decade, and I could keep up with most people. Angie was a little better at endeavors involving alcohol, whether I’d admit it or not. So, yes, her idea. “Drive to Trainor’s. It’s only a block out of the way.” Could she drink me under the table? Probably not. “Don’t park in front,” she said. “Use the lot on the side.”
I backed in between a Dodge Dart and a Ford pickup. Then I took a cigarette pack from my shirt pocket and put one of its inhabitants between my lips. Angie reached over with her Bic lighter before we got out of the car. Cigarettes anchored us in a hazy place, familiar and always available in a pinch, day or night. We shared an extra affinity for menthol, and that connection was as real as any other, a conversation with its own kind of emotional depth and silent language.
We walked under the Pabst sign that lit two concrete steps at the bar’s entryway, and I held the wooden door for her. Two vacant seats waited at the far end of the room next to the glowing jukebox. An easy pathway of muted checkerboard tile led us toward the tall backless stools. She ordered two Iron City beers, one for each of us.
After he set frosty cans on napkin coasters, the bartender put his elbows on the mahogany bar and laughed with Angie, about what I don’t know. Their talk was a secret talk already in progress, like something you return to, and he put his face close to hers. She could probably smell his breath, the roasted peanuts and cigarettes. This particular conversation was gibberish to me, covert.
Angie smiled with her legs crossed and inhaled one menthol cigarette after another from my pack. Her right foot swung in time with the dialogue, the buckle on her sandal glinting and flashing above the brass rail like a knife blade in the sun. I didn’t care what they were saying, but it was easy to discern an absolute rhythm in their banter.
Angie looked happy to be in that nameless dance.
I didn’t want to intrude or listen or participate, anyway, and Jeopardy flickered on the TV, more interesting, more thoughtful. The sound was down, but I could read the answers and guess the questions in my head, imagine Alex Trebek’s voice. Angie never looked away from the bartender unless he was serving another customer—he was the Trainor on the sign, the inheritor of a family business that had been there forever, since the 1930s, I think.
At 9 o’clock I said, “Let’s go.” Without objecting, she stood up so we could retrace our path across reflected jukebox light. I pushed through the wooden door and exited into the night, which was now rainy and cooler. Her sandals clicked and scraped on the sidewalk close behind me, but she didn’t hurry.
The Pabst sign had a fluorescent buzz, and we threw two damp, gloomy shadows beneath it. A traffic light hovered over the intersection of Maple Avenue and 22nd Street. It clicked to green, but the street was empty. Nobody going anywhere. In the parking lot between Trainor’s and the funeral home, I opened Angie’s door so she could slide into the passenger seat to shake off the drizzle.
“Were you flirting with him? Because it looked like you were flirting with him.” I closed the passenger door before she could answer. She didn’t say a word over the whomp-whomp of the wipers. It was two miles to our house. Close to the driveway, I tossed a spent cigarette into the street. Then I followed her through the front door.
I ran track with Trent Trainor in high school. We weren’t exactly friends, but we traveled in that lofty athletic circle that teenagers create before they realize that none of it will matter in five years. Our cohort didn’t create that hierarchy; it lived at West Branch High School long before we arrived. Trent and I existed as a piece of it without asking questions. If West Branch had a false power structure, I was on the correct shelf, popular enough to make people notice when it felt necessary. Nobody with a half a brain would object to that, except the guys on the wrong end of the stick, and they were not my problem or concern.
Coach Piatek relied on us, Trent, me, and the other seniors. “You guys are the leaders. Get out there and show ‘em how it’s done.” Maybe Coach catered to us since he’d lived in the same system for decades, an integral part of a vital, continuous thread. Trent was a passable two-miler who could be depended on to place, though he rarely took first. I ran the 440 and the 880, with the latter being my better race, good enough to win the Tri-County our senior year.
It might be important to say that I can’t relate to that person or his victories anymore. I can easily recall his burning lungs during spring practice and all those endless laps, but I don’t understand how he viewed the world, or why. The high school me is a stranger in black and white pictures, perpetually crossing some finish line in the Red Dragon yearbook, or not smiling in a photograph of boys united by the gravitational force of a team: Coach Piatek’s leaders caught in a passing moment that will be repeated through generations. Shoulders back, chests puffed out, an implied toughness that leaps from the group and the bleachers where they stand, young men spread out across four rows. Who is that kid on the left side of the front row, the one who looks like me? I can hardly approach that question.
Everybody in the yearbook, including Angie in her majorette uniform—all those kids look like strangers. It’s not just that the pictures are black and white. You lose intangible things with adulthood. Maybe the most striking loss is the idea that you know something about life. It didn’t take me more than a year after graduation to see that I didn’t know a thing about myself, about Angie, or about how to exist in this place—or really, anywhere—without feeling invisible and unsure of every decision. The fact that I’m not smiling in those pictures—maybe it’s connected to some inkling I had as a young person, the idea that joy and ease are fleeting. Perhaps I knew that I wouldn’t always have so many reasons to feel confident.
That first fall when I dated Angie, I was a sophomore and probably full of myself. I’d walk her home after Friday night football games, which were major social events. The social aspect of those games—who you sat with, who you talked to, who saw you—was too important not to consider. But I knew what would happen after the game. We’d walk up the hill to Hickory Street, past the white hulk of the Episcopal church and the shaded windows of the police station. Angie would have a red plaid blanket wrapped around her shoulders to fend off the October night, and she’d ramble about the halftime show. I hung on every word and offered easy compliments on the way to her house. “You were great. The last song was really cool.”
We held hands and the street got steeper.
On the porch, I’d unselfconsciously slip my hand under that short majorette skirt to find the heat between her icy legs. Then the inevitable appearance of her father’s face in the window followed by the invasive porch light.
“Get in here, Angie!”
Her father must have known what I was up to, but I didn’t care. Confidence makes you care less about consequences, doesn’t it? The ability to not be self-conscious about things—that’s it, the dichotomy where I don’t live anymore: self-consciousness about acne and haircuts and whether you have the right jeans, or if you had bad breath when you tried to kiss her because the concession ladies mistakenly put onions on the hot dog you ate during the third quarter. But not self-conscious about your will and actions and choices. That’s a different thing all together, isn’t it?
I was in with the right people at West Branch, and they all saw me. Really saw me, at every football game, and cheered me on from the grass beside the track in the spring. They shouted my name in the dim hallways at West Branch High. Fame between the tall brown lockers. You know what it’s like when you’re exactly where you belong, right? I was brave enough to put my hand under Angie’s skirt, right there on her father’s porch. I was supposed to do it, like it was my destiny or something.
*****
I went into Lombardi’s on Thursday afternoon to get spark plugs for the Monte Carlo. It wasn’t at all incongruent that Trent Trainor might be in that same aisle, six feet away from the spark plugs. Do I see every coincidence as some kind of cosmic event? Was his presence part of a larger plan? Was it an accident?
These are questions I can’t answer definitively. I never heard of Carl Jung until he showed up on Jeopardy. I was interested enough to get a book from the West Branch Public Library. Mrs. Sheesley found Jung on a dusty shelf and didn’t hide her surprise at my query. I read about synchronicity. I devoured Jung’s complicated paragraphs, even the parts I didn’t understand. Then I read the book again. It was Sting who read the Jung answer on Jeopardy, an association I can’t shake. It weighs on me.
I’ve been a patient man where Angie is concerned because who am I to dictate what she needs? I will admit that I denied that same courtesy to Trent Trainor. His narrow ratface didn’t put me in a courteous mood. It was not coincidence or happenstance when he walked down the spark plug aisle at Lombardi’s Home & Auto this Thursday. Perhaps it’s my failure to see it as something other than a coincidence, but I won’t apologize for my actions or impatience.
She’s my wife.
And yes, it was me who broke up with Angie during our senior year. You should know that now. That breakup is a necessary element here. My eye wandered, as the eyes of young men will do. “I guess I’m just too young to be tied down, Angie.” If there was greener grass in another pasture, why would I squelch the urge to investigate what lay there? But I didn’t say that part to her, not that day.
It’s true that she began to date Trent Trainor, just a couple of weeks after I broke it off. To hear Angie tell it, he asked her to go to the Mountain Drive-In to see Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood. As a young woman of considerable energy, why wouldn’t she go, especially after having been so downhearted about the recent break up? She didn’t like the movie, but they became an item, a thing that hangs in the air. Trent and Angie rode on gossipy wings across the bright landscape of our senior year like a couple of Hollywood stars. Like Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke. The two-miler and the majorette.
All that chatter made track season a little tense because, well, I didn’t really want Angie anymore, but I didn’t want Trent to have her, either. It’s as simple as that. These things happen. People break up, okay? They survive and move along.
Maybe it’s Angie’s fault that she couldn’t go completely forward with Trent, one eye firmly set on the rearview mirror. She didn’t exactly seduce me at Janice Marino’s party—I was more than willing to enter one of the bedrooms in Janice’s house. A fling with my former girlfriend. No sign of Trent at the party. Angie locked the bedroom door.
That might have been the first time I put two and two together: actions have consequences. It was a matter of weeks before we knew Angie was pregnant. We got married a month after graduation. Our parents weren’t happy about any of it. In a voice that was anything but reassuring, my dad said, “You’ll do the right thing.” I was not mature enough to argue the point, and I really didn’t understand the gray area of wrong versus right. I was not emotionally prepared to visit that neighborhood.
What would have been so wrong about not getting married?
Life is not always a happy affair. To a point, I can accept that. Maybe I don’t object to Angie messing around with Trent in the last few months. Not outwardly, anyway, and who knows how far it’s gone. Maybe I’m ready for some greener grass, just like I was ten years ago, but old emotions die hard. They grab on to you with bony fingers and refuse to let go. I’ll ask you: Is it necessary to say anything to Trent? Were we supposed to end up here in the spark plug aisle? It could take another ten years to find the right words, and I don’t have the energy for that. I’m not entirely sure that I have any fight left in me, not sure that my survival depends on confrontation.
It was April, and West Branch Stadium got hit with a snowstorm—big flakes and low visibility. A squall. I couldn’t see the kids on the other side of the track. Coach Piatek could have been anywhere. No direction from anyone, so I ran. That’s what track kids do. Damp and cold, snow melting on my face and hair. A good day to put in two miles—that’s what I decided. I caught up to Trent on one of the turns and we fell into a rhythm.
We ran together. No sound except for two boys breathing. Snow can do that. It makes the world quieter. It muffles distractions like a wet blanket. He was dating Angie by then, but it wasn’t awkward. Or I didn’t want it to be awkward. I could have moved on or ran at a different pace.
Billy Joel. She likes Billy Joel, I said.
Yeah. I love you just the way you are. She told me that. Trent took a few seconds to gulp at the chilly air. I mean that she likes the song, not that she loves me or anything like that.
We stopped and bent at the waist to breathe, both of us with our hands resting on wet knees and trying to reach acceptable oxygen levels. Sure, I got that, I said. I knew she wasn’t in love with you, or maybe she isn’t just yet. She’s unpredictable, anyway, Trent. I don’t know that I’d trust her, not a hundred percent. I mean, you do what you want to do. That’s on you. If it was me, I wouldn’t trust that girl as far as I can throw her. I speak from experience.
Trent took off for a sprint then, his final lap, I suppose. At a certain point in every race, you have to kick it into high gear. I watched him crash through the thick wall of snowflakes, a two-miler without many wins. After about thirty yards his grey sweats turned blurry, and then they were gone. Trent was invisible to me, and I figured that was probably the best I could ask for.
Quite a vivid slice of life here. A marvelous meditation on the ambiguities and quiet miseries of adult life and how that compares and contrasts with adolescent "certainties". Well done.