Come Under

WE are sitting in a back booth at the Silver Dollar, the four of us: me, Wendy, Charlene, and Doc. It’s Friday, the day-shift at the bakery just got off, and the place is jammed with people in whites cashing their paychecks. Larry, the owner, doesn’t charge them anything, and most stay and have a couple drinks. Doc is holding forth again: “A lot of people can’t give up the past. They have to remain there, no matter how terrible or uncomfortable, because they need the pain of remembering; they need the stimulus.” He lifts his bottle, takes a swig of beer.

Charlene groans. “What a crock of psychobabble. You’re just getting worse as you get older.” Charlene had been one of Doc’s graduate students, lived with him at one time, and now is teaching at the university in Davis. I don’t think Doc was referring to Wendy when he came up with that, but it’s too close. People may know about what happened, but no one at the Dollar ever mentions Wendy’s mother. I used to be able to relax during these kinds of conversations. No one expects me to say anything.

I watch Wendy. She’s probably smarter than both of them put together. Flunked out after a couple of years at a college up in Oregon where she’d won a four-year scholarship. She got a perfect score on her sat, had her pick of places she could go. Overindulgence, self-gratification, too many good times—that’s all she says about the two and a half years up there. And that she has an inch-high f-minus tattooed between her breasts to remind her not to screw up again. I’ve had to pry this information out of her; she doesn’t like talking about herself, but after five months I’ve pieced together a little of her history. Wendy says she doesn’t dwell on the past. In spite of myself, she interests me, but she’s too young—by twenty-one years. I understand that, but she doesn’t.

I see Larry at the bar pointing out our booth to a couple of tourist ladies holding copies of Doc’s book, Closing Time at the Silver Dollar. It must be nine or ten years since that book came out, but people still buy it and still want the author to sign the thing.

I notice the time again and get ready to excuse myself. “I’ll see you guys,” I say, sliding out of the booth. They look at me, surprised. I don’t usually leave the Dollar this early. I don’t mention I have a date. Christine, the project engineer at the construction job I’m working at, has invited me over to her place for a drink. It’s to pay me back for when her battery went dead on her Lexus and I gave her a jump. We got friendly after that—“good mornings” and the rest. A nice change: as the project’s tow-truck driver, I’m so low on the totem pole the watchdogs at the site can piss on my leg. I tried to help the project mechanics out once when there was a breakdown—got the water truck going after everyone else had given up on it (in the army I’d been a heavy-equipment electrical-systems specialist)—but when the shop steward heard about it, I got told not to even look at the contractors’ equipment, much less ever touch it again.

I always look forward to the next relationship, watch carefully to record the twists and turns between the two of us, because usually in the end that’s all I’ll have left, just the memory of how the thing developed. They all end the same way. This new one with Christine could be a fizzle, just a hello and goodbye, or it could be something more permanent. To tell the truth, I’ve had only a couple like that: one that lasted three years, another eighteen months. But it isn...