Later, At The Bar

Um, can I skip this book review?

It’s not the book. I loved the book. I just… I’m feeling lazy and full of shrimp cocktail and champagne and really I just want to copy, word for word, one of the stories in this collection and have you all experience what I experienced in reading it.

These stories were good. I mean, GOOD stories. Beautiful stories wherein simple people who live simple lives are given the opportunity to be great, to see life clearly, to win back time and perspective. But, sadly, they don’t. Not once do they reach out in that moment of clarity they are each afforded and take some of it with them, or absorb some of the weight of reality, or make something more of their lives. Each time they go back, quietly and without much fuss, to the every day of their upstate New York lives. They’re sad stories, really. But so beautiful in their sadness, in their inability to be anything more than they exactly are: small, quiet, fairly boring to be honest, and failing to be anything more than what is directly in front of them.

These stories were funny, the characters were funny, and I longed to find myself in a bar with each of them. I would have gone home with most of the men, cried with the women, and lamented every bit of life that had passed us by.

I know it’s probably illegal for me to share all twenty-two pages of “How To Save A Wounded Bird,” but I’d like to. I’d like to write every word of it here in one long block of writing and say, “See? This is why I can’t write about these stories. This right here.”

Oh, forget it. I’ll at least copy the last four pages.

“Let me ask you something,” Elizabeth said. “What made you want to be saved? What made you think you’re so terrible that you need Jesus to save you?”

Trevor said nothing.

“How old are you, eighteen?” she said. She could feel her face getting hot. “What could you have done? Masturbated? Taken money from your parents?” They passed a dead, bloated raccoon lying on its back on the roadside, its little arms and legs splayed out.

“I bet you kissed a boy,” she said.

Trevor flushed.

“I bet you kissed a boy and you want Jesus to save you from yourself.”

“Mrs. Teeter,” Trevor said, “are you mad at me?”

They pulled into the parking lot of the Wildlife Center, and he stopped the car. “It seems as though you’re attacking me personally, and I’m just trying to talk about my paper.”

“You’re all so afraid of sex,” she said. “Sex before marriage is bad, sex with a same-sex person is bad. I’ll tell you what’s really bad. What’s really bad is when you’re married to someone and you just don’t like having sex with him at all. Have you thought about that?”

Trevor was looking at his hands. They were strong hands with graceful fingers, the kind Elizabeth loved on a man. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Not like that.”

“You don’t think,” she said. “None of you do.”

Elizabeth put her head in her hands. She imagined that later Trevor would complain to his mother and possibly the Moral Majority that she had overstepped all her boundaries. She’d lose her job and have no husband and spend the rest of her life sitting in her house trying to control her stupid cat. She’d be attracted to other men and they’d probably all be gay and eventually she’d find a woman who was just like her father who would leave her, too.

“I haven’t kissed a boy,” Trevor said. “My brother is gay, but I don’t like guys that way.”

The bird, which had gotten very quiet, rustled a little in its fake nest.

“Remember how in my last essay I wrote about that place I had to stay?” Trevor said. “There was a guy who was in there because someone said he was a homosexual and we all gave him a really bad time. One day we locked him in a locker and peed all over him and left him there.”

Elizabeth didn’t look up, and for a moment all she could think was, for Christ’s sake, Trevor, why didn’t you write about that?

“Then later that night he slit his own throat with a shaving razor. He was right next to me and I couldn’t think of what to do so I reached over and held his throat together with my hands. I tried to talk to him. I told him that we would all get out of there soon so he should hold on. I don’t know if he noticed because he was pretty far gone. But I held on and all I kept thinking was, Please, dear God, please take this job away from me. Someone else take this job.”

Elizabeth’s head was still down in her hands, and she was afraid if she started to cry she would never stop. She wanted Trevor to kiss her. She wanted his beautiful, sad hands on her neck, in her hair. “Please,” she prayed silently, “let him kiss me.” She knew that if she was going to pray she should be praying for Trevor, or that poor dead boy, or even the baby bird. And she also knew that kissing Trevor would be futile, that it would only disappoint her and confuse him, and both of them would end up sadder than they already were.

She could hear cars whirring by the Wildlife Center, which was in the middle of a strip mall. “Please,” she prayed again. “I need to kiss someone.”

Trevor took the key out of the ignition. “It’s how I make sense of things,” he said. “It may not work for you, but it’s what I know.”

She heard him undo his seat belt. He leaned toward her, close enough that she could smell his young, salty skin. She wanted him to touch her so much her heart actually stopped. But he didn’t. Instead, he very gently took the box with the bird in it from her hands. Then he picked up his blue brick, got out of the car, and when she lifted her head he was walking away from her to the Wildlife Center, bird in one hand and fake rifle in the other.

See? This is why I can’t write about these stories. This right here.