Free One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir by Paul Guest Page A

lap to catch all the spillage. It was no good, but it was the best way we had.
     
    Across from the cramped bathroom I couldn’t enter, on the wall hung a rustic frame, and in that frame was a painting of an old tree, its limbs arthritic and dense with foliage, standing a crooked guard beside a dirt road which rutted off into a dark distance. Carved into the tree’s scarred bark were my parents’ initials: JG & PG. James and Paula. When I was a boy, awake before everyone, I would sometimes stand on the tips of my toes to better consider it. Their names, right there, set into both the wood and the paint, fascinated me. Warm with the breath of a heating grate, I could not be hurried from them.
     
    The town they grew up in is dead now. Dead, though it’s caught between the last gasp and whatever follows after it. Or doesn’t.
    Along its main boulevard, used car lots loiter beneath ragged banners. Adult bookstores wait behind mandated facades, identified by their facelessness. Pawnshop windows dump neon light into the sullen day. Check-cashing services promise not to take your car.
    But on the corner was an ice cream shop, a greasy spoon, the sort of place in which all things were sallow chrome and smelled like grease, grease forever, and onions and beef cooked in common on a grill, right there in front of you, by some kid who, as the story goes, is going to get out of here, somehow, some way, or an old woman with her silveringhair bound up in a net, with her arms like hams and her face not much different and her cough rattling around inside of her like a baby’s toy.
    When I was a boy, I would go with my father to vacuum his car. Loose coins in the blue hoses clattered and I loved that noise. A fastidious hail. Perched on a block while he worked, I waited for him to be done, to take my hand and lead me across the street to the ice cream shop, which seemed ancient to me, a relic from outside everything I knew and was.
    We ordered swirled soft-serve vanilla, injected into sugar cones, and sat atop stools with swiveling seats at the grimy bar. The hiss of grease sang out.
    Outside, in the quiet street, a lone car might trundle past, slowing, almost as if the driver were lost, searching about for crumbling landmarks, a sign which pointed away.
     
    Another image, this time a photo of my parents, senior prom, my father in rented tuxedo with wing-wide lapels, and my mother, seated, her hair longer than I have ever seen it, a dark wash down her back. Fake backdrop behind them, they’re beautiful. Untouched. Burdened by nothing.
     
    When I was seven, I begged for cowboy boots until my mother relented, and then I slept in them and would notstop, though I woke every morning with feet soaked in sweat and my body so hot I felt ill. Too expensive to subject to the playground minefield, the boots stayed behind when I left home, old sneakers on my feet. I loved the boots, and had wanted them after months of comic book back cover advertisements. In them, O. J. Simpson struck an unbothered, post-disco pose, and whatever he said, whatever pablum devised by copywriters, meant nothing to me, except that these boots, all leather heavy, were what I wanted more than anything in that world.
    Never very good at most sports, not baseball, slow enough that I vanished into daydream and caught nothing, and not basketball, which proved physically foreign in a way I could never master, every shot comically errant, I could, however, play soccer. The local recreation league games were held on autumn Saturday mornings, when dew was still on the grass and the sun was low in the sky. I tended to slip into the stiff cleats, having left the laces loose, and when I struck the ball one cleat would sail across the field like an oblong bird, shot mid-flight.
    When my first season ended, and there was no tournament future for us, we were invited to a party at the coach’s house. He lived in a neighborhood that rolled up and down, every lawn and driveway a minor