Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

Somehow that was what I needed to hear, evidently, because I did, I told her everything, or at least almost everything, you know how it is, you can never be too careful, about how after high school I majored in education at the U., minored in math and Latin, student-taught up near Medicine Lake, entered my very own menagerie, have been feeding my little ones, whom I don't hate, whom I don't hate and don't especially like, either, baboon-knowledge ever since, how I dated a few guys, slept with fewer, raised my head and realized I was in my late twenties and still had plenty of time left, how I dated a few more, slept with a few fewer, raised my head and realized I was in my late forties and that all the time had run out, quick as a shiver, you're one thing and then you're another, even though you feel like you're not, even though you feel like you're really the same thing from one month to another, only a different size, a different weight, a different outlook with different skin conditions, and yet whose life turns out the way you thought it would? I asked, name me one person, just one —but, despite all that, I said, it feels okay, doesn't it, it feels right, even, sometimes, other times not so much so, only do you remember those crazy films we used to make, those video letters to ourselves, how goddamn creative we were back then, how our Friday afternoons used to blaze by behind the lens? What happened to those kids? I know you can't tell me, but tell me anyway. How strange, isn't it, that I can remember the year we were best buddies more vividly than what I did the day before yesterday, regardless of the fact that I'd be the first to admit I'm romancing the whole deal here, sure, nothing remarkable about that, is there, nostalgia being what it is, being what it isn't, only you have to confess there was a certain density to our high-school years, wasn't there, a certain extension in time and space, you could say, with which last Thursday can't begin to compare, it feels as if we've been half asleep for most of our lives, everything gray and gritty, while back then, before this librarian or that internist, we really were awake, and it was morning, and we had just woken up, and we were lying in our beds, dug into our quilts, and even before we opened our eyes we could tell, we really could, I don't know how, that it was a stunning day outside, the sky unconditionally blue…

It was a stunning day outside. Even before I opened my eyes, I could tell an unconditionally blue sky would greet us. I took it as a sign. A prophecy. Events would go as they needed to go.

I rolled over to wake Iphi and found her already lying on her back under the comforter, right arm cocked behind her head. She wasn't looking up at the ceiling. She was looking up at the unspoiled Sunday morning beyond it.

It's here, she announced to herself. We're here.

We arrived the day before yesterday. Minneapolis to Kennedy, Kennedy to Heathrow. This was what we were told to do. This was what we had been told to do twice before, our flight routes different each time.

My ideas still gauzy with jetlag.

My lower abdomen tingling.

We lay in the B&B across the street from Marylebone Station. Our bed took up so much space we had to shuffle around it sideways to reach the bath. In the next room, a man and a woman jabbered in a language that didn't sound as if it could possibly be a language. We listened because we didn't have a choice.

I snuggled my nose into the skin between Iphi's neck and collarbone and took long deep breaths. I mounted her. She was dry. I got off, rummaged through our suitcase, returned with a tube of KY.

I tried again, but the moment was behind us.

At the bathroom mirror, trimming my beard with scissors. Touching up the black in my hair with the kit I purchased yesterday. Stepping into the shower.

Soaping up, rinsing off.

Soaping up, rinsing off.

Farsi, I think.

Loose black slacks, white knit sweater, a pair of highly polished black shoes. I flipped on the television to the morning shows. A famous young underfed woman who was famous only for being famous and underfed stood before a congested counter watching a fat man in an apron and chef's hat make flamboyant waffles with whip cream, strawberries, banana slices, blueberries, maple syrup, large lozenges of butter.

She wore a silver mini-skirt and frilly white blouse and looked tired and lost.

The shower tunked off. The hairdryer roared. I couldn't hear what the famous underfed woman was saying or wasn't saying. The hairdryer stopped. Iphi appeared and began dressing in her burqa and black slip-on shoes. She was careful to braid and tuck back her long black hair first.

I clicked off the television set, and then we kneeled and prayed silently at the foot of the unmade bed.

Eyes shut.

Listening to the worlds inside us and out.

It was difficult to say whether the people in the next room were fighting or just talking loudly. This is what their language had done to them.

Beyond their commotion: doors opening and closing up and down the hall, footfalls thumping. Engines thrumming on the street three floors below. Horns. Air brakes.

A police siren ululating.

Above us, a plane either gaining or losing altitude.

All this noise.

All this doing.

For what?

Sitting across from each other at the tiny table in the cramped dining room in the basement. The air damp and pungent with bacon fat. It seemed to us our words described things other than the things that seemed important to us, and so we didn't use them.

Iphi studied her eggs. Beans on fried toast. The surreally red wedge of tomato and three fried mushrooms.

I reached over and picked up a newspaper a businessman had left behind on the chair at the next table and tried reading. Nothing from its pages reached me. I folded it again, returned it to the chair, sipped my espresso.

Staring over Iphi's head, I waited for her to finish.

9:37. Flossing and brushing. Spearmint mouthwash. A longer urination followed by a shorter one.

9:51. Iphi standing framed in the bathroom door, eying the ugly gray rug.

Language was never important for us. It isn't what comes out of your mouth that matters. We understood such things from the day we met three years ago at the church retreat in Voyageurs National Park. I was seventeen, Iphi sixteen. We happened to sit together at the campfire one evening during the sing along. Next morning we either deliberately or not sat side-by-side at first prayer.

Her dark brown eyes, long shiny black hair.

The unadorned goodness of her spirit.

You don't need many words.

Who can explain how over lunch we discovered we both lived in Bloomington, both attended Jefferson Senior High, yet had never met each other before?

Who can explain how love happens?

Who can explain why your father, a butcher covered in blood no matter how many showers he took, no matter how hard he scrubbed under his fingernails, didn't show up for dinner one evening, how his bright metallic blue pickup vanished from your life, although you continue to remember every detail of it, how your mother and you found yourselves living in a motel room smelling of pizza and onions on the outskirts of town, how she used to scour toilets and disinfect countertops and mop floors to make ends meet while you used to bump into your father and his scrawny new girlfriend at the supermarket, the gas station, the McDonald's?

How he refused to look at you, refused to meet you eyes, your father, walked past you as if he was walking past a fire hydrant without seeing?