Chester Burke’s list of Things to Do in This Lifetime included skydiving (done), climbing a mountain higher than 10,000 feet (not yet), kissing a beautiful woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower (done, with an older woman from Scotland whom he met day and never saw again), obtaining a graduate degree (done), learning to play the piano (his skill and talent were questionable but he could pound out a reasonable version of Mozart’s variations on Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star), and visiting Machu Pichu (another not yet).

Moving back to Parkman, Ohio, was not on the list.

Until the age of 35, Chester thought he was going to be a monk. He had gone to college in Montreal and studied theology and philosophy, went to New Mexico for a master’s, did the obligatory backpacking trip through Europe, and then spent six years in a monastery in Oregon. He didn’t often tell that last part to people. When it came time to answer the question of how he had spent those years, the monastery was alternately a commune, a hermitage, or an ashram. The ashram was the most palatable story, since it sounded exotic, even if people didn’t know what it was. Sometimes he just fudged a little and said he had been in a monastery but then, when questioned further, would say it had been a Buddhist monastery, which also seemed more acceptable. Inwardly, he couldn’t help but find it amusing that the same people who were so vehemently opposed to any type of organized Western religious tradition would swoon over any Eastern religion they could get their hands on.

Chester came to the monastery via the hippie film version of St. Francis’ life, Brother Sun, Sister Moon. He saw the film in a revival house, then rented it half a dozen times, every time marveling over the twin virtues of humility and simplicity it espoused. He got a lot of mileage out of those ideals in his six years at the monastery, and they ultimately sent him back to Parkman, where, as Chester often reminded himself, you had to be humble because most of the people were so damn simple.

At the monastery, Chester baked bread, which the monks then sold to local health food stores, and made preserves, which they sold through the mail. While the whole idea of living totally off the land and the labor of one’s own back was appealing, in practice it had ultimately led to, at best, persistent cases of the runs and, at worst, near-malnutrition and hair loss. So the monks sold bread and preserves, grew some of their own vegetables, and ran a monastery that constantly struggled with a commitment to simplicity and concessions to practicality. But it wasn’t this tension that led Chester to leave the monastery. It was his longing for the sight of the opposite sex.

Chester Burke had never been a man ruled by his carnal desires. It wasn’t sex that he missed; it was the sight of something—someone—different. He got used to seeing himself reflected in the bodies of his fellow monks. They’d roll up their sleeves when kneading dough or take off their shirts when working in the garden and they all were some variation on his own skinny body. One day, Chester realized that he missed the difference, the variation afforded by the presence of female forms. It was like walking around with one eye shut all the time. He missed the anima, the yin. When he tried to explain this to people, they misinterpreted it in all sorts of ways when really he simply missed the sight of something different, and all the meditation and prayer and kneading in the world couldn’t change that.

Chester’s desire to leave the monastery coincided with the death of his father. Parkman was his father’s hometown, and he had requested to be buried there. So it was that Chester Burke, aged 35, jobless and fatherless, found himself back in Parkman, Ohio, standing in Sheldon’s Funeral Home with his mother, picking out a casket.

“He liked green,” his mother was saying to Mr. Sheldon.

“A green exterior, Mrs. Burke?” Mr. Sheldon asked.

“Interior, of course. A green casket would be tacky. I think he’d like the natural wood, something with a deep grain, but not too flashy of course. Just something simple and practical with a sage green interior.”

As his mother and Mr. Sheldon spoke, Chester realized that she was describing the wood-paneled station wagon his parents bought in 1982. His mother hadn’t shed a tear that he had seen since his father died the morning before. In those 36 hours, what was most surprising was not her lack of tears, but her lack of response. She behaved as though nothing had changed. Standing in the funeral home, surrounded by caskets, she spoke to Mr. Sheldon as if he were a used car dealer. When she actually began to haggle on prices, it dawned on Chester that his mother was in complete denial.

“Uh, Mom?” he said as gently as possible. “Don’t you think Dad would have liked this one?” and walked over to a dark, mahogany-colored casket with a pale ivory lining. This wasn’t the old station wagon—this was his father himself, a big man who favored pale ivory shirts and dark brown suits. Chester had never been particularly found of the combination, but it looked just right for his father’s casket.

“Oh,” his mother said in a half whisper, tears coming to her eyes. “You’re right, that’s him. That’s exactly what he would have chosen for himself.” She stood there a moment, then looked up at her son. “He’s really gone, isn’t he?”

Chester nodded and put his arm around his mother and stayed there with her for a few minutes as she wept for her husband for the first time. At what seemed to be an appropriate moment, he said quietly to Mr. Sheldon, “We’ll take this one. I’ll go over the paperwork and everything with you later, if that’s okay?”

“Of course, Chester. You take care of your mother. Thank you, son.”

Mr. Sheldon proceeded to tell half the town about how Chester had so gently and tactfully gotten his mother to respond to her husband’s death. All through the wake and the funeral and at his aunt’s home afterwards, people Chester didn’t even know kept coming up to him and telling him how proud they were of him and what a sensitive, caring man he had grown up to be. He hadn’t really done anything special, he simply asked the right question to an answer his mother already knew. It was Socrates in a nutshell. But everybody in Parkman thought he was the most insightful guy to come down the pike in 30 years. The Burkes’ old next-door-neighbor asked him if he had a job, and when Chester said “no,” told him about an opening for a guidance counselor over at the high school and how Chester would be perfect for it and that he’d fix it up right then and there. The neighbor talked to someone else, who talked to someone who worked in the principal’s office, and that person called the principal at home, and the principal was so enthusiastic that he came right over to Chester’s aunt’s house himself and offered Chester his condolences and a job.

His mother thought it was a wonderful idea. “It’s a noble profession,” she said. “Almost priestly.” She liked the fact that it was almost priestly because an entirely priestly vocation, like the monastery, precluded the possibility of grandchildren. “Plus,” she constantly reminded him, “you’d be helping people. And you like helping people.” The truth of this statement was arguable, but Chester didn’t press it.

He didn’t mind the job too much. At times he even liked it. In the high school he was surrounded by people, male and female, old and young, and he enjoyed, even reveled, in that variety. It made him feel like a human being. And it was enough for the first couple years of Parkman. He developed a tendency to refer to his current period of life as simply “Parkman,” as though it were an entity unto itself. He had made a small circle of friends, most of them older than he was, married, and somehow involved with the high school or one of the two law offices in town. Parkman itself was a semi-rural township, small population-wise and geographically. And small in its world-view. Chester could never shake the feeling of being an outsider. After four years of going to dinner at this couple’s house or that couple’s house, sometimes just for dinner and conversation, sometimes to be the guinea pig of an acquaintance who wanted to play matchmaker, he was lonely.

The only place he could think of to meet people—real people, not online—was the Longhorn Saloon, which held singles dances every Thursday. He had never been to one, but he had the feeling that it wasn’t the kind of thing most of his acquaintances would be interested in attending. Not only because they were mostly all married, but also because they considered the Longhorn, at best, low-brow, at worst, filthy. It took Chester a few weeks to screw up the courage to go to. He felt funny going alone, as though by doing so he would be a five-foot, eight-and-three-quarter-inch walking billboard for desperation. But January was long and cold, and February was shaping up to be no better. Two days before Valentine’s Day, he went.

The Longhorn was out on state route 422, past the trailer parks where Chester knew some of his students lived and just about as far out as you could go on 422 and still be within the Parkman Township limits. He had been there once for a faculty/staff dinner that the high school threw for Christmas a few years back. He remembered bad lighting and sawdust on the floor and hoped there wouldn’t be line dancing. He felt cliched and foolish and about five times almost turned around and went home. The only thing that got him to walk in the door was the thought that the time had come for him to confront life, to fully embrace and conquer his fears. That and the thought of yet another weekend alone and a future full of empty weekends was enough to get him in the front door.

The Longhorn wasn’t so bad, really. It was, as he remembered, ill-lit. He couldn’t tell if the floor was still liberally sprinkled with sawdust or just dirty. Although the place was crowded, no one looked nearly as grotesque or untouchable as some of his acquaintances had made the clientele out to be. The Longhorn itself was one big room with impossibly small round tables and not enough chairs scattered around the edges. To the right of the front door was a bar that went the length of the room. Along the far wall opposite the front door was a little elevated booth where the DJ sat. There were little red and pink paper hearts and doily cupids taped all over the walls and the DJ booth and behind the bar in honor of Valentine’s Day, a touch that Chester found both tacky and poignant. All in all, it wasn’t nearly as bad as he had been expecting.

He sat at the end of the bar near the door, ordered a beer, and, just to pass the time, decided to count mullets. He only spotted two, which seemed to be a positive sign. Most of the men were dressed in jeans and some, like him, had on khakis. Guy clothes in dark, guy colors. Chester had never thought of himself as a guy, per se, but only as a human being, and as he observed the courtship rituals of the Longhorn, he felt slightly out of place. He liked women. He wasn’t a virgin. He wasn’t even particularly afraid of meeting new people. But Chester Burke didn’t know how to pursue, how to chase. Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” kept rolling through his brain— “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”

“What mad pursuit indeed?” he mumbled.

“Excuse me?” said a woman on his right. She held a ridiculously large glass of white wine in one hand and was rifling through her purse with the other.

“Oh, sorry. Nothing.”

“Here, can you hold my glass for a minute?” she asked. Feeling powerless to refuse, Chester gently took the glass from her hand and watched as she paid for the drink. He noticed that she left the bartender a generous tip. “Thanks,” she said, taking the glass back from him. “Last time I left a wine glass on the bar, somebody knocked it over.”

“You obviously come here often,” Chester said and inwardly cringed because he couldn’t believe how close he had just come to the most cliched pick-up line in the book. This really isn’t me, he thought. Still, she was nice-looking enough. If he overlooked the frosted hair and the too-bright lipstick and just concentrated on her eyes, which had a unique intelligence about them, Chester would actually say she was pretty.

“Often enough to know that you don’t,” she replied.

Chester had been so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he hadn’t realized the woman was responding to what he had said.

“No,” he said, “you’re right. I don’t. I’m not really the singles bar type.”

“Well, don’t think of it as a singles bar, like a salad bar or something. Think of it as a club and this is our weekly meeting.” She looked at him for a moment, waiting for a response. “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s on the agenda for this week?”

She was flirting with him. Chester Burke knew double entendre when he heard it and this woman had absolutely injected that question with several layers of meaning. It made him smile.

She smiled back. “My name’s Didi,” she said, extending a hand.

“Chester Burke.” She had a firm, strong handshake.

“What do you do, Chester?” she asked.

“I’m a uh, a high school guidance counselor.” Chester was fully prepared for Didi to find a way to extricate herself from the conversation when he said this. For crying out loud, Thomas Merton had made being a monk sexier than being a high school guidance counselor. Didi was not visibly impressed to hear what he did for a living, but she didn’t leave, and Chester tried to think of something to say that might make him sound at least a bit more interesting. “It’s not the most glamorous job in the world, but I get the opportunity to help some young people figure out what to do with their lives.”

“And what advice do you give them?” she asked in a voice which seemed resigned to hearing a corny answer.

“I tell them not to make the same mistake with their lives that I did with mine.”

“And that would be…?”

“Becoming a high school guidance counselor.’ She appreciated the light self-deprecation just enough to giggle. “I tell them that’s what happens to them when they do foolish things like majoring in philosophy.”

Didi laughed again, but Chester saw her eyes wander. There were plenty of guys in the Longhorn who were better looking than he was. Not a lot of women were interested in skinny guys, unless the guy happened to be tall and a professional basketball player. No, it didn’t surprise him at all when Didi’s eyes started to wander. He decided to give her a way out.

“I’m keeping you, aren’t I?” he said, then realized that could be taken two ways and half-wished one of them were true. “What I mean to say is, you’re probably meeting some friends or something.”

“Well,” Didi said. “Kind of… but I’ll try to find you later in the night, okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s fine. It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice meeting you too. See you later.” And she left. Chester watched her dance with a couple of tall, pretty well-muscled types and started to feel pitiful. He had long since accepted the fact that he was not most women’s type. It wasn’t so bad when he was younger. He remembered being in junior high and watching a documentary of the Columbia University takeover. All those college guys who looked just as skinny and weak as he was—as he knew he would grow up to be—gave him hope. Hell, they took over an entire university, so they couldn’t be complete wimps. And there were lots of women there too, so it wasn’t as though these skinny revolutionaries couldn’t get dates. He kept a picture of Mario Savio taped in his locker all through high school and that gave him hope. Once, in graduate school, a girl had even said that he had Mick Jagger’s body—the young Mick Jagger—which didn’t seem half bad. At the monastery, it hadn’t really mattered what he looked like. It was only lately, since Parkman, that he had begun to feel slightly inadequate, as though all the education and intelligence in the world couldn’t prevent him from coming off as a nerd.

He spun around on the bar stool and leaned back with his elbows resting on the bar, like a couple of the other guys were doing. It felt good. Masculine. Kind of like he owned the place. He stayed like that for a minute, surveying the room, watching people dance. The same guys kept dancing with the same women and it seemed as though everyone else was just there to fill in the empty spaces on the periphery. Didi was obviously a center-of-attention type of person, while Chester had known all along that he was a periphery person. The height of the bar stool was at an awkward angle to the bar and, unless you were taller than Chester, you couldn’t sit the way he was for very long without severe muscle cramps. It was as though his whole body was protesting against his mind, which kept him firmly planted on his bar stool until closing. He had promised himself that he would give the singles dance a try and decided that he would stay there until the Longhorn closed at 1 am, by which time almost everyone, including Didi, had gone.

Chester swore off the Longhorn for a couple weeks after that. He tried not to feel like too much of a failure since he had given it a fair try. And he tried not to think about Didi. She was the first single woman in his age group he had met in Parkman who sparked his interest. He wasn’t sure why. There was something in her eyes that said she was a whole lot smarter than she was letting on and something about the way she carried herself that exuded confidence and cool—two qualities Chester lacked. But she was obviously not interested, and he put the idea out of his head.

It was spring that changed his mind. On the Monday of the first week of March, after a weekend of nearly constant rain, Chester met with a student after school, went outside, and saw that the sun was finally shining. It gave him hope, and that Thursday he went back to the singles dance. Instead of sitting so close to the front door this time, Chester decided to sit a little farther up the bar, as though by doing so he could sneak a little closer to the heart of the action. His goal for the evening was to dance one time. That was all. It seemed like a reasonable, achievable goal.

He felt like less of a foreigner his second time in the Longhorn, and that was a relief. When he was in college in Montreal, sometimes the weight of being a foreigner, an outsider, was too heavy. Later, after graduation, he spent three months hitching through Europe and had felt the same way. There was always the feeling that he was missing the joke or that he wasn’t understanding everything that was going on around him. And there was always the tendency to want to latch onto the first person who said “hello” because of the constant anxiety that no one else would ever say “hello” to you again. He felt that way in Parkman, too, and that, Chester knew, was why he wanted to speak to Didi again. She was the first person who hadn’t treated him like an alien.

Didi walked in around 9:00. She looked a lot like the first night he met her, in snug jeans with little zippers on the bottom and a tight green sweater. As Chester recalled, the sweater was black the night he met her but the jeans were the same. At various stages in his life, with the exception of the monastery, where he never had to worry about what to wear, Chester had alternately vowed to wear nothing but black or nothing but white shirts and blue jeans, but he had never been brave enough to stop worrying about how eccentric that might appear to the rest of the world. He had read somewhere that Einstein just bought the same suit over and over again so he wouldn’t have to worry about what to wear in the morning. And now here was Didi, proudly snaking around in blue jeans and endless varieties of the same sweater. Chester admired her for that.

“Bartender?” Chester said shyly, lifting his hand slightly. The bartender didn’t notice and he had to ask four times, each time raising his voice until he was practically yelling, before the bartender glanced over at him and nodded. “Beer, please,” he called, awkwardly raising one finger. When the bartender brought the drink over, Chester told him that Didi’s next glass of white wine was on him. When he pointed her out, the bartender seemed to know her as a regular and Chester felt proactive, as though he had a viable plan and, for a little while, Chester Burke was content to sit back and wait.

It was almost ten by the time Didi got around to ordering another drink and by that time, nursing his second beer and drawing doodles on cocktail napkins, Chester had momentarily forgotten the whole thing. She wandered over to his bar stool and stood looking over his shoulder for a moment as he sketched the outline of a woman sitting a few feet away.

“Do you think she’s pretty?” Didi asked.

“Huh? Oh, no, I mean yes… no. She’s got an interesting face. I just like to draw.”

“It’s good.” She obviously enjoyed the fact that he was uncomfortable in her presence. It was a very feminine presence. “I just wanted to thank you for the wine.”

“You’re welcome.” She nodded and took a sip, most likely to be polite. “Didi, right?” he asked, hoping he wouldn’t come off as a stalker if he didn’t seem sure of her name.

“Yeah. Have we met?”

“Oh, well, we spoke in here a couple weeks ago. I’m Chester Burke.”

“Right, the guidance counselor. I remember you now.” Chester was both flattered that she remembered him and mortified that she would remember him only as “the guidance counselor.”  “So?” she asked, “how’s high school? Same way I left it?”

“A steaming cesspool of hormones and angst? Yes.”

She laughed, and Chester thought that he might possibly have found the first person in Parkman who actually understood what angst was.

“So you’re obviously a glutton for punishment if you’re still hanging around there,” she said.

“I’m trying to reduce the pain of future generations.”

“Good luck.” She sat down on the stool next to him and planted her purse on the bar in front of her. It occurred to Chester that he hadn’t spoken freely with a woman like this in years—since before the monastery. It was fun. It wasn’t even that he wanted to sleep with Didi—well, maybe he did— but for now he just was enjoying talking to her. She treated him like just another guy and that was a relief. He was tired of being the outsider and equally tired of being the ex-monk, the counselor, the sensitive one. He just wanted to be a man, without any label or baggage.

“What do you do for a living, Didi?” he asked.

“I work in a doctor’s office.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“No one’s ever asked me that before.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I don’t know. But ear, nose, and throat. Lots of kids with ear aches and little old ladies with sinus infections.”

“How long have you worked in the medical field?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Is that bad?” Chester asked.

“No, it’s just usually the woman who asks the guy questions.”

“It is?”

“It lets him know you’re interested.” She looked directly into his eyes and added: “Most men like to talk about themselves.”

That line he couldn’t read at all. He couldn’t tell if she wanted him to talk about himself or if she enjoyed the fact that he wasn’t talking about himself. It was just too confusing and, for a moment that lasted a little too long, Chester almost wished he was back in the monastery. “I have no idea what I’m doing here,” he said, half to himself and half aloud.

“I can tell,” she replied. “But it’s refreshing.”

This was okay. This was even good. It finally occurred to Chester that she might actually like him. He had no idea what to say next.

“Have you lived in Parkman long?” she asked.

“Four years.”

“That’s long enough. You just don’t get out much.” She said this as a statement, not a question and Chester suddenly felt quite transparent. It wasn’t so much that it was a true statement but the fact that she pegged him so quickly, so easily, that made him feel a little off balance.

“How long have you lived here?” he asked.

“I grew up here.”

As an afterthought, Chester mentioned that he had, in fact, spent a fair portion of his youth in Parkman and they played “Do you know?” for about ten minutes until they realized that their families had moved in completely different circles.

“That’s okay,” Didi said. “Even if somewhere along the line our families had met each other, what would it really mean if say, my aunt’s best friend went to the prom with your uncle 30 years ago? It wouldn’t really mean anything or change anything between us. You’d still just be a stranger on a bar stool.”

“You’re right,” Chester replied, and took a deep breath before adding: “How can I change that?” This question seemed to catch Didi off guard, and she stopped and stared right into his eyes. Aristotle, Chester remembered, said that love is ideally a sort of excess of friendship. So he asked: “How do we become friends?”

“Friends?” She paused. “I don’t know. I don’t have any male friends. All of my friends are women.”

“You seem to know a lot of people here.”

“Don’t you think there’s a difference between a friend and an acquaintance?”

“Yes. I guess I’m just surprised that you think it’s not possible to have a male friend.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t possible. I said I don’t have any male friends.”

That sounded pretty final, but there was something about Didi that wouldn’t let Chester just write off the whole thing. It wasn’t loneliness, or the desperation of an outsider, it was her. He liked her, and if she didn’t want to be friends, then he’d just have to date her, Aristotle be damned. “So,” Chester stammered, “would you like to go out sometime?”

“What happened to being friends?”

“Is that still an option?” he asked.

“It never was.”

“It wasn’t an option for me or it wasn’t an option for you?” Chester was truly confused at this point.

“I’m really not sure anymore,” Didi replied with a surprisingly attractive giggle.

‘Would you like to have dinner on Saturday so we can further discuss whether or not we could ever be friends?” he said quickly, feeling more brazen than he had felt in many years.

“Sure,” she said. And that was that. He had a date for Saturday night. He and Didi sat together and talked most of the evening and he walked her out to her car. It was only after Didi had driven off and he was standing there in a puddle of half-melted snow  that Chester remembered he hadn’t danced.

On the great balance of all things life-altering, the date seemed to far outweigh the dance, but he hated to set goals and then ignore them. Just as he decided to go back in the bar for his one dance, it started raining again, a light drizzle. His shoes were already soaking wet from the puddle, and as he lifted his foot and put it down again, the sound of his shoe hitting the wet, slushy pavement made a pleasant sound and he did it again. The water and the slush and mud splashed all over his pant leg, making interesting little dark patterns, and he lifted and put down his feet again and again, until he was dancing.

Susan Petrone’s short fiction has been published by Glimmer Train, Featherproof Books, Conclave, and Muse. Her novel, A Body at Rest (Drinian Press 2009), won a bronze medal for regional fiction in the Independent Publishers (IPPY) Awards. She blogs about the Cleveland Indians for ESPN’s SweetSpot Network at ItsPronouncedLajaway.com and about other stuff at
susanpetrone.com.