Trickle-Down Timeline

Our Time Is Up

Cris Mazza / 133 Our Time Is Up The word, that year, was co-dependant. Barb was in a co-dependency group. Too young for a midlife crisis (that, believe it or not, was from 1965), but was exactly where she should be to begin probing the concerns of adult children (1983). Yuppies, identified in 1984, had already discovered if their families had been dysfunctional (1981), and were ready to become empowered (1986) but first would need co-dependency therapy. They wouldn’t reinvent themselves until 1989 and couldn’t find their inner children until 1990. Barb was only half-listening when the counselor began her opening speech at the first meeting. Besides Barb there were three other women. Somehow Barb had already learned: maryPat was a waitress who used to be something else. Gloria was loud and flamboyant, newly divorced, and Barb didn’t know what she did. Belinda did something in an insurance office and had two pet rabbits and a husband who traveled a lot. The counselor had been seeing at least two of the other women alone, and had recently decided to have group sessions. So when Barb had been calling the numbers listed in the phonebook under counseling, this was the first one who’d said she had an opening in a new group for women she was starting. How was Barb to know the counselor held sessions in a small bedroom converted into an office in her apartment in one of those old neighborhoods near the park where a jet had crashed a few years after they’d moved here, the type of place where everyone was a vegetarian and still wore their graying hair long and parted in the middle and didn’t shave their legs and let their horny toenails show through leather sandals while they were holding group counseling. And it took over an hour to get to San Diego from their condo in Del mar, so she’d had to miss her afternoon aerobics class and sit in Friday afternoon gridlock to get here. who had group therapy on Friday? After she had found the group,but before the first meeting,last Saturday morning, Bobby found her where she was reading on the pool deck. He 134 / TRiCkle-Down Timeline was holding a folded newspaper and said, “i know you like dance movies. There’s a new one, let’s go see it.” She’d looked at him and almost said, “Don’t try so hard. it hurts.” But she went to the movie with him. it was Dirty Dancing. near the beginning ,Bobby leaned over and whispered,“They can’t be serious,a character named Baby?” Afterwards he said the movie had reached new levels of cheesiness. Barb bought the soundtrack, the next day after work. Bought it on lP even though they were trying to switch, but the album had a larger picture of Patrick Swayze than the cassette or CD. Before Bobby came home, she made a cassette and put it in her car, unmarked. Bobby would never notice the album, slipped in between Flashdance and Fame, to the right of wHAm (“Take me out Before You Go-Go”). Tuesday afternoon, she asked the aerobics coach to use her Dirty Dancing tape, even though she knew exercise tapes had to be custom mixed so all the tunes were the proper speed: warm-up,build-up,aerobic peak and maintenance,through warm-down. Dirty Dancing had all different tempos, and they came in movie-plot order. Growing up, learning about sex, falling in love, then profoundly changing someone’s life didn’t necessarily happen in the same progression as heart rate during aerobics class. So she listened to the cassette going to and from work, wednesday and Thursday, and going to work this morning, and on her way to group an hour ago. Barb was on a sofa with compressed cushions, the brown plaid fabric pilled and scratchy. Belinda was beside her. The counselor was in a scratched dining-table chair to Barb’s left. This put the counselor’s bare toes closest to Barb. Gloria sat in another dining chair facing the counselor , and maryPat, on a vinyl avocado green ottoman, faced the sofa. Barb’s husband didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or do drugs. Both sets of their parents were still married, hadn’t ever beat them or their siblings, hadn’t tried to have sex with them, hadn’t neglected them at Christmas or birthdays, came...