That Piece of My Heart

In high school he wore a blue jeans jacket frayed and faded to white. His hair was long enough to flirt with his shirt collar, risqué in a small town in the Seventies. The socially acceptable stuck ups called him “hippie” but never to his face. They knew better – Ike (named for President Eisenhower) moved with the careless grace of a big cat and could be just as deadly.

We were both outlanders, strangers from outside the provincial realms of Newton County. That was our common bond, the tie that brought us together and made us friends. Rebels at heart, we were different from the common herd and from one another. Enough strands of common thread existed to pull us into the eye of the needle together.

My first real kiss came from Ike, the one where I realized that I was female and he was male. I was thirteen, so young that I had no idea what I was doing. We were buddies until the day that a single strand of my hair fell into my face and he lifted his hand to brush it aside.

Side by side in math class, our world narrowed into that moment to a small sphere. Something like electricity jumped from his hand to my face and traveled through me as his fingers caressed the curve of my cheek. Without thought, by some ancient instinct I reached out to him and touched him. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet we moved together, heads touching and he put his lips over mine.

I was lost and I was found. The classroom around me faded into fantasy as I let him kiss me, my soul and lips hungry for this rite of passage into womanhood. Like Sleeping Beauty, I felt awakened although Ike was no prince, just a ragged, rough teenager with too many dreams and not enough money to find them.

Mrs. Cornell must have called our names ten times before her voice, scolding, scathing, and sharp filtered into our world. I surfaced to find the class united in laughter at Ike and me. I blushed and he got mad. His angry response earned him a trip to the principal’s office where he was well known. My shame and embarrassment were my penance but the cost was greater.
Ike avoided me for weeks but after the fuss died down, after our peers forgot, our friendship was restored. Over the next four years we smoked many a forbidden cigarette together, passing the smoke back and forth with camaraderie. We never had a formal date, not the kind where he came to the house and picked me up before my parents’ eyes. There were football games, however, where we huddled together against the crisp November cold or field trips where we shared a single bus seat. A few dances in dim rooms draped with colored streamers where we hugged and swayed to the music were the most intimate moments we shared after that kiss.

He met the girl he would marry during our senior year but our paths had already diverged in different directions. I went away to college and he joined Life. In less than ten years, he was divorced, a weekend father to his son. I met him one night at the 7-11 where he worked as a clerk on the night shift, a second job to make ends meet. I, too, worked at two places.
As I paid for my bottle of Pepsi or my tank of gas, we would talk. We were both lonely and our long discussions bridged the years since high school. Our many jobs kept us from considering meeting anywhere else – our time was taken by work, our chats an oasis in the oceans of our drifting lives.

I went by one night and he wasn’t on duty. The following day I learned that he’d barricaded himself in his home with his son over custody issues. It was a desperate act, a cry for attention and he got it from the media, from law enforcement and from his fellow convicts in jail. It took a SWAT team to get him out of his house even though he wasn’t armed and didn’t hurt anyone. He just wanted his boy.

By the time we met again I was married to the high school classmate I’d always known I would wed. It was a warm, unseasonable Christmas season as we gathered along the streets of the town square for a Christmas parade. Arm in arm with my new husband, we saw Ike. He was dressed in leathers from head to toe, stoned and sad.

Three children later, my husband came home to tell me about his new co-worker. It was Ike. He was straight and he had a new lady in his life, this time perhaps the right one. The other guys at the plant couldn’t believe they were friends, my man and my old friend, especially after they joked that they’d kissed the same woman. Me.

One day at Ike’s request I ran the cards for him. Blessed (or cursed) with a few psychic powers I read his fortune. He took the advice the cards dealt and soon after he moved out of our lives again, changing jobs and staying the narrow path.

Last night we went out to dinner, my family and I. As we walked into the restaurant Ike approached, smiling and transformed. He’d been to church, he told us, and gave his heart to God. In confidence, with a shy little smile like the boy that I’d once known often wore, he admitted he planned to start preaching the Gospel soon. Our pleasure was real, valid, but I had to say something more.

As my husband moved our children toward a table, I reached out and put my hand on Ike’s arm. He turned to me and I spoke what was in my heart to him. At my touch he shied like a whipped puppy, then relaxed. His smile warmed my heart; his eyes touched my soul because of what once was between us.
Throughout our meal I felt his eyes on me but he kept it subtle. At his side, his new woman watched him with jealous hunger and when they left, he offered a wave of his hand, no more. I smiled at him and at her.

She has nothing to fear from me. Ike is hers, if she wants him, if she needs him. I don’t. He is a long-ago teenage dream but no longer my reality. My husband is that, always.

We used to listen to Janis Joplin scream her rage, her pain, her heart. Take it, she sang, take another little piece of my heart now, baby. We sang along but we didn’t understand. I doubt Janis did, either, because she didn’t live long enough to gain the seasoning that comes with age, with the long haul of experience.

They all take a little piece of your heart, the ones you let within your sacred circle, in that inner sanctum. Those little pieces make up a cosmic soul, all parts of the whole, and all part of me. Mine are scattered out across the world, some in the keeping of people I’d rather not think about.

Ike has a piece of my heart and he carries it. I’ve always loved her, he told my husband last year and he does. I read it in his eyes when he looked at me. But he loves this woman more and he should.

I hope he minds that little piece of my heart well because love never dies. It strengthens and soars into the sky.

I want to see that boy with his faded jeans jacket, the one that wasn’t made by Levi-Strauss, succeed. I want to hear him preach the Word and I hope he makes it big. I hope he gets the Lincoln Continental, the radio hour, and the TV ministry. I hope he gains it all.

And I hope he never forgets that moment in math class when he found his soul and took that piece of my heart.