I stood there on my potential client’s frayed rubber welcome mat and waited. I was between jobs, auditioning for employment, trying out career roles to see if one fit better than the one before. At age twenty-three, despite diplomas and degrees, I hadn’t learned a lot. I was apprehensive. From my present perspective, half a century later, a thousand choices and changes behind me, that young man seems to me as green as the folded newspaper he held in his hand.

The Valley Green Sheet was a supermarket freebie printed on cheap, pea-green paper. The ad said she wanted help with her resume, a job-hunter’s item I knew something about. I was beginning to regret phoning her, though.

I had grabbed onto the rickety, black iron railing that led up to her second-floor apartment. Now something brown and sticky clung to my fingers. I tried to rub the stuff off on my pants as I waited at her door. I had already discovered the woman lived in a dodgy section of the San Fernando Valley. Should I just turn around and jump back into my sister’s borrowed car? This is kind of creepy. Maybe I got the time wrong. Maybe the doorbell is broken. I pounded twice and was going to finish with a third and final blow when the door opened. She appeared, a short, pear-shaped woman in a purplish muumuu. “You’re Michael,” she said to me. A flake of lipstick stuck to her front tooth. “Any problems finding this place? All these complexes look alike—so come in, come in.”

Her apartment was too warm, and I was hit by a thick odor—something sweet yet unpleasant like rotting orange peels. How long has it been since you stepped outside these walls?  Just open the window, lady. I could still make a run for it. But I needed the money. My word-processing skills were OK, and my Apple IIe and cheap dot matrix printer might help me churn out a couple of bucks.

“So, why don’t we just sit, Michael,” she said. “Let’s just sit.”

Gliding and flopping across her floor in fuzzy pink slippers, she led me to a tiny living room. She pointed to a flower-patterned couch, and then collapsed in it. She looked exhausted. I could see lots of scribbled notes, newspaper clippings, and some typewritten pages strewn across a cheap coffee table. I had trouble wedging my legs between the table and the couch. I was already feeling trapped. An angry squawk from the corner startled me, and I turned to see a parakeet pacing back and forth in a small hanging cage. He was agitated about something.

The woman reached over to an end table and picked up a framed color photograph, which she plopped down in the center of the mess on the coffee table. She obviously wanted me to look. I lifted it to see five smiling young women in bathing suits. A shiny sash draped across each shapely body, and the girl in the center held a big trophy.

“What sort of job are you applying for?” I asked, wondering what the picture in my hand had to do with anything.

She answered, “I was thinking you could use that somewhere in my resume—you know—honors and achievements. That kind of thing.”

“Are you saying—”

“—Yeah, that’s me in the middle—the one holding the winner’s trophy. Look closely―you can even make out my name—Sheila Jones.”

Sheila Jones smiled. Her tired face suddenly looked radiant, and the curious smell and the shroud of neglect receded. Smiling Sheila seemed to make the apartment brighter.

“Wow—yes, that is you!” I couldn’t help expressing surprise. I know I was too loud.

“Yeah—and that’s not the only beauty contest I won, Michael. I’ve got more.” Sheila told me that entering these competitions became a regular thing at one time, that she started in high school. “Sure didn’t hurt in the date department, you know what I mean?” she said.

Sheila Jones gave me another big lipsticky grin, and it was indeed the same smile captured in the gold-framed photo I held. But the rest of Sheila was different. The woman next to me, staring at me, made me nervous. What was this about? I suspected Sheila might have enacted this scene with others: the picture, the punchline, and then the incredulity across somebody’s face. I inhaled her musky perfume as I gazed at the photo. I didn’t know what to do next, though I wanted to ask: What’s the story? What happened to you, Sheila Jones? Why are you left in this shabby, smelly apartment, with only a frantic parakeet and some old photographs? At that time, I had no frame of reference to put bodily aging in perspective.

“It’s breast cancer,” she said. Sheila scooted closer to me on the couch. “Stage IV—even with the chemo and even after they removed them—cut them both away at forty-two—those!” She tapped a chubby white finger on the glass of the frame a couple of times, directly onto her shadowy cleavage. Decades later, memories of the pungent sweetness of Sheila’s apartment would come back to me as I prepared medicines for my wife.

I looked into her eyes. “Hey, I’m sorry,” I said. The inane “Hey” came out first for some reason.

“Look at me now!” she said. “Look at me now!” Shiela pressed her splayed hands against her chest. “Who’s going to hire me now? Who’s going to want me?” she asked, just above a whisper. Sheila drew in a huge breath and awaited an answer.

“Should we get started…take a look at your, uh, your notes?”  My voice sounded feeble and fake to me. I set the picture back on the table and pretended not to notice her anguish. Then she reached over to my hand and pressed it to where one of her breasts used to be.

She said softly: “You can, you know. I mean, be with me--I still feel things. Even right here where your hand is. I still feel things. So, you can, Michael.”

But I stood quickly as if something hot had just spilled on my lap. My leg knocked against the coffee table and tipped over the framed picture of her and the other smiling women, preserved in the photographer’s snapped instant, safeguarded somehow from all that had ever happened to them before and all that would come after.

The look on my wife’s face when she got her breast cancer diagnosis brought back the memory of Sheila’s despairing face. During all the long months I cared for my dying wife, I thought of Sheila almost daily, and cursed myself for being young, cowardly, and inept. Why couldn’t I have suppressed my initial revulsion and awkwardness?

Preparing my wife’s injections, I wiped a spot on her bottom just below the belt line, pinched off a mound of flesh with two fingers and a thumb, then made the jab. Sometimes she would grimace or yelp when the needle hit a pain nerve. Then, feeling sorry and defeated, I would swab away a little blood. Of course, we both knew none of this was about fault or forgiveness.  

Often I imagined myself young again, but able to bring a lifetime’s experience to every awkward encounter. This imagined version of myself could have sympathized with Sheila, would have understood her pain because I knew about pain. I imagined how Sheila and I could have created just the right encounter: no utterance or touch—just a couple of silent souls on a gaudy couch. Simple human solace. Anachronistically, I imagined confiding in Sheila about the loss of my wife.

We both knew that my ministrations would not bring about a cure. It was only about feeling a little better and staying alive. And that’s all Sheila Jones wanted when she scooted next to me on her couch.

Sheila’s parakeet screeched madly at the clamor of my exit. I revisit that scene so often. And feel ashamed. I want to tell Sheila that I am no longer the person I was at twenty-three. It’s my only defense. I sigh when I think about her. Wrong word. More than a sigh―an ache, a pressure in the chest. Hey, I’m sorry.