All Occasions
Tim Feeney

I woke up into a warm American morning at half past seven, CDT. Turned on the television. At the time, my cable system's sole news channel was Fox, so I watched that while fatigue melted away. Weather, some headlines, jocular morning-show banter. It seemed like a beautiful late-summer A.M. At maybe ten to eight CDT I switched off the TV, the chat still lazing back and forth. Showered. I ate a couple of bowls of something branny while I read an old magazine or something, and at about eight-thirty CDT I set out for the walk to work. It's a twenty-minute stroll, and you could call what I was doing strolling—I'd kissed someone for the first time the night before—while traffic flashed by through early light on Main Street, Normal IL. I took the stairs to the office, talked for a few minutes to my office mates (neither of whom had been listening to the radio as they drove to work), made coffee. Turned on my computer to answer a few messages. Then Marty called from Chicago, 9:20 CDT.

After school I went to my friend Bill's house to hang out for a little while before we were both due in to work. When the phone rang we'd been talking emptily about going to see a band at the Aragon that night, though we knew there was no chance that either one of us would be allowed to clock out in time to make the show. Worse, it was plain on our faces that we knew. We knew that talk of going was token optimism, that we were trying to show each other and ourselves that we'd miss no opportunity to be young, to live, to see New York thrash bands when they played huge sarcophagal venues in Chicago; and all the while we knew in the gnawed-on spot at the base of our skulls that we were reluctant to fight what we saw as inevitable, too willing to submit to defeat and the demands of what we thought of as adulthood. We'd go to work and stay until we were told to leave, and then we'd leave, and half an hour away, the show would go on without us. Bill handed the phone to me, saying that it was my sister, Jen. Funny look on his face. We figured out that, given the six-hour difference, we were in a strip club at the time, which afterward seemed tactless and disrespectful, beyond whatever one thinks about the fact that we were in a strip club at the time, which was thrilling and heartbreaking in the way that dealings with pretty women often are. 4,274 miles to the west I sat on an overstuffed couch, talking with one of the dancers, both waiting for the next song to start, she wearing a thong and heels and a couple of tattoos and something that smelled cheap but decent, I feeling cool and jittery. She answered the question "How are you?" with "I'm well"—not "I'm good." She said she'd been in the medic corps in the U.S. army and was now working on an English degree in Iowa. When the next song began she hopped into my lap. I asked what I should do with my hands, and she put them on her shoulders and slowly moved them down to her breasts. I looked at her and saw that we both knew that this was stupid fun, nothing to be taken seriously, and I smiled at her and she smirked back, with what looked like genuine friendliness. It was the best of all worlds, and so my heart ripped itself loose and slithered between my ribs and fell to the floor with a sound like shflup, and afterward I walked back to my friends' table with knees like chilly bunnies. I was young.

I was in my freshman homeroom, I think. Memory's a complete blank on how I heard the news. I did something unusual: I opened a notebook and wrote down how I felt. After I looked out the window, down the hill toward the frozen bleachers and football field and beyond to the white plain where the lake was and the park and the houses around them, and knew grimly, even at thirteen, that I'd never forget where I was at that moment. The particulars are pretty dim. A few minutes later I was in the cafeteria, and when the principal made the announcement over the PA—word hadn't spread much yet—a few people cheered and a few more laughed at the cheers. Teens are casual masters of ruthless comedy. Classes weren't cancelled, and there weren't many TVs on the school grounds, so it wasn't until I got home that I could see the footage on the news. The notebook is long gone; couldn't begin to tell you what happened to it.

She called me that night and asked "Want to keep me company?" This was the week before finals, both of us up to our eyeballs in homework, and after we'd gone to a long chatty lunch that afternoon. I drove to the Wash House, bought her a soda from the machine, and sat on the ancient driers while she folded her laundry, both of us yammering away. I got up and folded her towels, helped her with her sheets. We talked about the class we had together and the paper we had due that week and people we knew and books we'd read; we talked about her clothes, cheerfully regarded her underwear, since it was right there anyway. I helped her carry her baskets out to her car, and we talked about the upcoming summer. We said that we should maybe get together to do something-go to a museum or a show or something. We hugged. She smelled like nothing else ever. We stood warm and alive and happy in the light of the Wash House, together, and the hug went on and on.

It wasn't the thick packet I'd been hoping for, but merely an envelope with what I could tell was a single sheet of paper enclosed. It didn't seem like a good sign. I held onto it until I met Jean for lunch, and as we sat at a table in the diner down the street the envelope sat between us on the table, bier-like, and I was basically being sort of dramatic and stupid, but still, it was a moment when I wanted a moment. Finally Jean rolled her eyes so far back in her head the cords stuck out the front and I went ahead and opened the thing.

In the parking lot. Just before the first second bump, next to the dumpsters. She in the driver's seat, me riding shotgun. Roaring silence. A complete absence of knowledge on my part of how to respond, how to even begin to respond. The engine idles and the radio susurrs and her face is blank, but it's not inattention or daydream; her face is blank the way a canvas is blank, literal tabula rasa, the expressive sum of risk plus soaring hope. The sky is black, it's late, and we're both hungry, and she's dropped an open world into both of our lives. I literally can't speak for a minute, and when I finally do, the words suck the air from my lungs and I can't breathe or speak again for a while longer. She was crying. It had been mostly awful, but then the tears came and it got much, much worse. Having suffered years of lonely horniness and furtive hopes and F5 hormonal twisters, I'd figured that this would be pretty much the be-all-end-all of my entire life. I never thought that I could possibly be so discomfited by someone's physical presence. I realized that it might be a normal reaction. Defense against a foreign body. She cried and I stared at the ceiling or the wall or a corner of the bedspread. Nothing good to say came to mind. What was I doing. What the hell was I doing. This wasn't fun at all. A lot of stuff happens in parking lots, you might've noticed. Drives are finished before the conversation is, so you talk while the engine runs; or people have to leave in separate cars, so discussions that have started elsewhere have to be wrapped up. Parking lots being mostly public arenas, the personal takes on a furtive quality, which adds to the tension if it's a tense talk to begin with. When she asks Is this yes or no, are you cutting me free or what?, your immediate answer is tempered by the number of people walking around you, all of whom seem to be paying no attention but are in reality absolutely dying to know what the frazzled and sweating couple (?) are doing, having what appears to be an intense confrontation in the parking lot between the white Chevy Golf and the maroon '94 Prizm; your answer tempered because you know that she's liable to explode or break down sobbing or start throwing things—you're not sure what the term free radical means, but it sounds appropriate—and the last thing you want is to be the center of that kind of attention. So you look off into the middle distance for a minute, sort of feeling the air around you for not-so-innocent bystanders in the immediate area, and wait until you're relatively alone before you look her in the eye and tell her You're free.