The following is an excerpt from the short story "My Practice Life" by Garnett Kilberg-Cohen. Kilberg-Cohen will be reading from her latest fiction collection, Cravings—where this short story is printed—at the January Watershed Reading on January 20, 2024.
The summer my niece, Heidi, turned six years old, I developed a daily true-false observation quiz for her.
We saw four dogs on leashes at the park T F
My aunt’s ice cream cone was chocolate T F
I never feel sad T F
She loved the game and always got one hundred percent, never noticing that some questions (Birds sing when they are happy) had no one correct answer. For me, the game provided a means of entrée into her mood, a way to ask questions about topics and emotions she avoided. Heidi’s mother had died of an aggressive form of breast cancer when Heidi was only three. When Heidi was out of school for the summer and I was off as well (I was a teacher), she lived with me while my younger brother (her father) worked. My own husband, Ron, died in a car accident just a few years after we wed, so I knew about hiding emotions.
As Heidi got older, we continued with the quiz, though I had to be more cunning with the trick questions—and more original with observational ones: “We saw three women with alien-like face-lifts today T F.”
We shared a common view of the world. Irreverent. Cynical. Or what Heidi’s psychiatrist called—in her case, not mine—highly defended. I thought the quiz kept her in the moment. Studious, a reader, she liked tests, particularly since I told her they were only practice, not for credit. When she asked to take the real test, I would make up a new one and type it out (the practice tests were verbal) or tell her that she had done so well on the practice test that she had been excused. I always believed we were getting over our traumas together and once she grew up, we would emerge changed, on the other side of sorrow, together.
We spent every holiday break together and half of each summer, usually at my house in Chicago. Her father joined us for most of the time in the early years. Certainly for Christmas. That stopped when Heidi was in high school and he remarried. His new life didn’t have much room for Heidi. I was sorry for her, to lose another parent. But in some ways we were more comfortable, just us females. We enjoyed decorating the tree, and sunning on the Oak Street Beach in the summer. Her father had no patience for that.
I was delighted when following college, Heidi moved to Chicago for graduate school. We spent at least one night a week together. We called the nights our “bonding sessions.” Not that we needed artificial bonding, given we had been irrevocably bonded by circumstance so early in her life. Often we went out to dinner or a movie, but we loved events that seemed less ordinary. We were always scouring the newspapers and posters at the El stations.
Heidi had just started work on her dissertation when we attended the Past Life Regression Workshop. Oh, I know, that sounds a bit nutty or new age, whereas my niece and I are anything but. Most likely we would be categorized as staunch realists who wished the world had not forced us into such roles. We expected nothing from the workshop except a few laughs, perhaps some material (from the leader, the other participants) to poke fun at afterward. But secretly we thought it would be nice if the workshop was able to reveal that we had been Joan of Arc or Lady Godiva in our previous lives. We joked about it. Heidi said that she could see me as Joan of Arc. I had been the most active in defending our school principal when I thought she was being unfairly dismissed, and I fought long and hard against the increase in standardized testing at the middle school where I taught. Though my remarks about sexism in the firing of the principal had been quoted in the Sun Times, my intervention had no impact and was certainly not the result of divine guidance. I told Heidi that if she grew out her wavy shoulder-length hair, she would look lovely on a white horse. She threw her head back to laugh. I loved that mannerism of hers. Though I didn’t share it with Heidi, I secretly thought it would be even nicer if instead of going back to former lives, we could do go back earlier in our current lives for a do-over. Wouldn’t it have been nice if I had told my husband, Ron, not to go into work that day or to watch out for red trucks on his way home? (I’m not sure what Heidi could have done differently except find out that her mother had been misdiagnosed.) Even nicer to go back and find out all the horrendous things that had happened to us were just practice lives, like practice tests, that could be wiped out entirely to make way for more opportunities when we entered our real lives. We were too cynical (or, maybe, it made us too sad) to discuss any of that much.
The workshop cost a mere twenty dollars and took place at a recreation center housed about two blocks from where I live in Lincoln Park. The center usually offered crafts classes or flamenco dancing, that sort of thing. I had never been before and usually threw out the newsprint fliers the place stuffed under my door. My niece saw the workshop advertised online.
“The instructor is certified,” she said when she called me to tell me about it. She couldn’t hide the smile in her tone.
“You sure it didn’t say certifiable?”
“It’s BYOC.”
“Huh?”
“Bring your own candle.”
The class description actually included the candle—not the acronym, my niece invented that, but the candle part was real. Did the flickering candles help one enter the distant past or just make the whole experience feel more transcendental?
The temperature hovered slightly above zero the evening of the workshop. We walked the two icy blocks taking pigeon steps, our arms linked, trying not to slip. Heidi clutched a heavy brown paper lunch bag that held her broad candle. I carried my slightly used tapered dinner candle in my purse. In comparison to her fat candle, mine seemed ridiculously delicate. How would it even stand on its own with no holder? I felt I had already failed the workshop. As a former science teacher before retiring, there was little I disliked more than an unprepared student. I could sympathize with students who had difficulty understanding the concepts, but not with the ones who had not even tried to complete the homework. I had to remind myself that the past life regression workshop was no-credit.
Heidi lived in a less expensive part of the city than I, so she took the bus over to walk with me. I lived in what some would deem a ritzy part of the city. Upon my husband’s death, I received significant proceeds from his life insurance that I invested wisely and didn’t touch until my retirement. Public school teachers in Chicago are allowed to retire after twenty years. I waited an extra five years. I rewarded myself by moving and paying cash for the fancy graystone.
The lobby of the recreation center was not impressive. Cracking plaster walls. Peeling linoleum. Water spots spreading like continents on the ceiling. A group of giggling ten-year-olds in leotards blocked our way to a long folding table with a woman seated in chair behind it.
“Girls, girls, make way,” said the woman. She had bottle-brown hair hanging from an inch of white along the part line. It reminded me that I was past due at the hair salon. I also thought of it as a possible test question for Heidi. I still gave her the true-false tests, though not as frequently. Rather than a means of testing her mood, I hoped for her to throw her head back in a laugh. The woman took our registration slips and told us our class was on the second floor.
“The elevator is broken,” she said, tilting her head in the direction of a long and steep stairway to the left. Ever since we had started navigating the slippery sidewalks, my mood had been shifting between irritated and hopeful. Her words weighted it more in the direction of irritation. I took a deep breath and clung to the railing as we climbed.
Six other participants already sat in folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle in the large rectangular fluorescent-lit room where the workshop was to take place. One entire long wall was mirrored and outfitted with a dance bar. Since I felt slightly out of breath from the stairs, I briefly hoped that I might have been a dancer in a former life and would spring into movement. A slight distance from the semi-circle, in the widest opening, sat the man whom I assumed was the instructor. He was bone-thin and sat cross-legged on the seat of his chair. Piled beside him on a slightly wobbly table (I assume it traveled with him from workshop to workshop) were books, papers, and several objects I couldn’t discern. On the floor in front of his chair sat a hydrant-sized candle. From the look of most of our classmates—most in their late twenties or early thirties, well-dressed, good haircuts—I assumed that they, like us, were cynics, here for a laugh. At this realization, I felt sympathy for the instructor who appeared—with his table of class supplies and the gigantic, already-lit candle—to be serious.
He instructed Heidi and me to get chairs from the stacks at the far end of the room.
As I set up my chair, I surreptitiously studied the instructor’s face. Who taught past-life regression courses at a disintegrating community center? He was about my age, perhaps a few years younger. I could tell from his crystal-blue eyes and aquiline nose that he must have been strikingly handsome before he lost his hair. Not that I find balding men unattractive. It was his particular form of baldness: totally shiny skull—gleaming under the fluorescent lights—except for a dark round peninsula of hair that jutted out over his frontal lobe and a thin ring wrapped around the back of his head from ear to ear. Just a little hair would have drastically changed his appearance.
“Take out your candles please.” He frowned and sighed. “The center was supposed to supply a seminar table for us to put them on but someone forgot and the supply room locks at five, so you will need to put them on the floor in front of you, maybe a foot away.”
I wedged my candle between my purse and my date book. I hoped it wouldn’t topple.
“Does anyone have an extra candle?” asked a woman with a carefully tussled haircut and a series of tiny hoop earrings lining the rim of her right ear like the spine of a spiral notepad.
“I do,” said Heidi, pulling two fat candles from her bag and passing one to the woman. I gave Heidi a look and she twisted her mouth in an impish smile. I realized that—joke or not—she was aiming to be class pet. In a corner of my brain, I began to construct the quiz:
The woman who needed a candle had eight rings on one ear T F
The woman collecting registration slips dyed her hair T F
We took the class more seriously than we planned T F
From Cravings by Garnett Kilberg-Cohen. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
