“Maybe in a minute. Thanks.”
I wonder what they’ll have for dinner, if they’ll invite me to stay. This past Thanksgiving, I couldn’t fly home so I ate with them here. Everything had come from a box or a can and I met her mother and her mother’s husband and her brother and his family and they were all wearing pleated blue jeans and sweatshirts with various designs and decorations and I had loved the whole affair—the blandness and mediocrity of it—and how they’d had no idea it was bland or mediocre. Tombstone pizza, perhaps, or frozen meatballs boiled in Ragú. Bunny bread on a plate, potatoes made from flakes, half of a pound cake in half of a plastic box.
She stops pushing and I touch her hand; the pushing resumes. She tells me she’s doing the best she can, that she does the best she can.
“I know,” I say. “We all do.” I close my eyes and think about this. I could do better, it’s completely within my ability, and Aggie could do better, but we allow ourselves to neglect the most important things as we tell ourselves we’re doing our best. I open my mouth and close it, decide to keep this information to myself. I think I might fall asleep but then I hear thunder in the distance and remember the place I lived before moving to Austin, how those two years were full of storms and I’d stop whatever I was doing to go out to my balcony and watch them. When the parking lot flooded, the cars would pause before the water. Sometimes they reversed and turned around but mostly they just plowed right through.
“My counselor says I have low self-esteem,” I say, perhaps as a way of evening things out.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She seems really sorry, like this is terrible news.
“I think I’m going to stop seeing her—I spend most of my time thinking about her life. And there’s nothing really wrong with my life. My life is perfectly fine.”
Aggie is nearly unresponsive but she keeps pushing and I keep talking about my counselor and her shoe collection and how she doesn’t wear a wedding ring but maybe she takes it off before sessions? On my worst days, the only way I can get through the fifty minutes is by imagining her alone in a dark apartment drinking vodka martinis. And then I start telling her about my boyfriend and how glad I am he doesn’t live here, how he wants me to be someone else even though he liked me fine at the beginning. Loved me, even, just the way I was, and this is how it always goes. I end my soliloquy with, “Men, you can’t live with ’em.”
This stirs something in her. “Aren’t you forgetting the second half?”
“No,” I say. “That’s the end of it.”
“Men,” she says, “you can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”
“I know the saying.”
When the furniture comes, Aggie is sharp, sober. She wraps a towel around her waist and hurries inside. Alexander follows and it’s just Nathan and me. He tries to climb onto my raft and I let him struggle before helping him. He gestures toward the cookies and we paddle over.
“Give me one,” I say, opening my mouth wide. He drops a cookie in. “These were my favorite when I was a kid.”
“You weren’t a kid,” he says, and he laughs and laughs.
I tell him he’s had enough, that he’s going to get diabetes. I don’t know if I could give him a better life but I could wean him off sugared cereal and Chef Boyardee and take him to Whole Foods so he could see where all of the beautiful people go. He paws at my breasts with his pruned fingers. How old is he? I have difficulty with the years between three and six.
I grab his hands and he leans forward and kisses me full on the mouth.
“You can’t French kiss me,” I say. “It’s disgusting. It’s not right!” I wipe my mouth in an exaggerated manner as he squeals and think of the time I saw a dog and a pig playing together on the side of the road, how happy it had made me. Then I think of Gunner and Biscuit, Echo and Willy and Winter, all of the dogs I might have had if I’d played my cards right. Gunner was my favorite—snow white with black rings around his eyes. When I walked him up and down the driveway, he didn’t pull at the leash but stayed right by my side, occasionally looking up at me to wag his tail, no doubt in his mind that all of his troubles were in the past, already forgotten.
LOVE APPLES
He tells you a story about women who put peeled apples under their arms, how they would send these apples off to war with their men and the men would eat them, so what he is requesting is not so much.
He wants you to send him a sweaty T-shirt, or some panties you got excited in.
That night you sleep under a heavy comforter. In the morning you take off your shirt and wrap it up in a piece of tissue paper. It is thin and worn and ocean blue. You picture it draped across his chest.
The post office is empty, the bald guy reading the newspaper.
“Nice and quiet in here,” you say, because even though you are getting a divorce and starting a new life with a man who wants your dirty panties it is no reason to be impolite.
“Twenty people lined up a minute ago,” he says, folding. You hand him the envelope and tell him to send it the cheapest way possible. Then you ask about mail forwarding and he gives you a request form with the stipulation that you are to tell everyone you know. “Don’t count on us,” he says, pointing to himself.
“Through wind and rain.”
He smiles as he wags his finger. You tell him you bet he never heard that one before, as if knowing you are the same as everyone somehow makes it better, and he winks and you gather your things and walk out into the too-bright day.
While your husband is at work, you talk to your boyfriend. You met your boyfriend online, in a chat room for people who are interested in films but no one ever talked about films. They talked about fucking; they talked about their wives and husbands and how badly they had been mistreated so they wouldn’t feel so badly about talking about fucking.
You get to know each other over the phone, over drinks, in the middle of the day. He works from home and you haven’t had a job since the last time you got sick, conjuring up an illness that existed only in your head, which promptly went into remission with your two weeks’ notice.