The Genie and the Bottle

I was not much with tools. I'd never had a fascination with building things. My father was a tool and dye maker and had every tool you could imagine and some that you couldn't. He fixed things around the house and worked on his own car and would take the television apart and test the tubes with a meter and then go to the store and buy new ones to make the old black and white work. But when he'd ask me to help him, I was miserable. I would stand in the sun while he changed the brakes on the car. We were supposed to be bonding, I guess, or I was supposed to be learning important life lessons, so he would ask me for a tool and I would inevitably hand him the wrong thing. Eventually, he would tell me to go play. Released from ignominious toil, I would run as far as I could just to be away.

So when I finished tightening the last nut on the new workout bench I bought, I felt an unjustifiable sense of achievement. I stood back and looked at my work. A weight bench. It looked flimsy and cheap. I hoped it wouldn't fall apart. I set the skinny bar on the rack and put some of the little cement weights covered in plastic on each side. It didn't look very heavy. I lay down and lifted it. One, two, three. . . .

Sherri had gotten a job. She was the manager of one of the new Twin Theaters that were just beginning to spring up. I couldn't imagine it. She was nineteen, but she was the manager. She made schedules for the kids selling tickets and popcorn and counted all the money at night putting it into heavy zippered bags and placing them in a thick metal safe. She was a nineteen, as I said, and a Cub Scout Den Mother and the manager of a movie theater. And a full-time student. The girl stayed busy which was OK with me. My life was not greatly changed except for having a girlfriend. There weren't many hours required.

Sometimes, though, we would meet up with some of her friends. One was a pretty brunette, an Italian from a big family that lived in a small house. I never could figure out how they all fit. Whenever we went over there, ten or twenty of them were sitting around the living room watching television and yelling about something. I felt awkward as if I were spying on some dirty family secret, but nobody ever seemed to mind. Her mother would come out and ask us if we would like something to eat, happy to see us in that distressed tone. Happily distressed, I thought, feeling as though putting the two words together made me clever. But I wasn't clever, I knew, for I was never able to hide my yearning for Sherri's friend and all her sisters, older and younger, each one dark with slow, hooded eyes that seemed to reveal the absence of heavy thought or distressing notions. I thought of them as "uncomplicated." In their presence, I was always jumpy, my head snapping this way and that. The estrogen, it seemed, affected my nervous system.

It was Sherri's fault, of course. She had changed me. Before, I had maintained the old romantic notions of love. It had always been something far away, remote, an achingly unattainable goal, a sweet and heavy yearning. Now, however. . . it was attainable. It was corporeal. It attacked my every sense so that sometimes even walking felt impossible. I would be gripped by seizures, arrested by desire. What else was there? It is hard to put the genie back into the bottle. I was already fallen. I had the knowledge. The knowing. Memory is funny, unreliable as it is. Some things are difficult to remember and other things are just impossible to forget. There was no forgetting now. It was Sherri's fault. Yes. Yes. Sherri.