Excerpt: “Where Are They Now?”

This one was a chemist.  Now he’s a salesperson for a company that manufactures isotopes.  I don’t know what this means.  I don’t know what you use isotopes for or how you make them or who buys them, and if I had married this one, which we talked about doing (though we were very young), then I would have had to memorize a stock bit about isotopes so I could describe his job to other people when they asked.  My answer would’ve had this rehearsed quality to it, and he would’ve punished me for my indifference.

We lived in a tiny apartment while he was in graduate school.  I worked in an athletic wear store at the mall.  I had to wear a black and white striped shirt, and a whistle around my neck.  This one taught me how to say spectroscopy and the formula for converting Fahrenheit into Celsius, which I have forgotten now.  Because I didn’t already know these things, this one thought I was stupid.  He taught me the four fields of energy—electromagnetic field, nuclear strong and weak, and I always forget the other one—and how to hold very still during sex.

This one was recently divorced.  His ex-wife had custody of their four children.  He was a welder who made enormous metal sculptures.  I’m ashamed to think of the things I did or would have done or would do for this one.  We lasted for maybe a year, give or take.  He was seeing other women all the time we were together.  This was the arrangement.  These were the rules.  Because we lived in a small town, I saw this one with other women at bars, walking in the park, playing frisbee, drinking coffee, doing the things that we did together when it was my turn to be with him.  At that time I was working at a used bookstore. This one bought a book by Grace Paley.  That’s what got us started, his scarred and callused hands holding Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

This one was, technically, my first.  We went to a concert, then back to my dorm room with its narrow twin bed and too many posters on the walls.  He was not a student at my college but someone from somewhere else that I had met before…