Sugar ants have crawled into the space beneath my laptop keys. This happened after I ate a Popsicle over my computer. They’ve taken up residence and now they won’t leave. For a week they’ve been my tiny advisers.
I’ll type, “What color blouse,” and wait for an ant to come up. If it crawls out from “R” that means “Red” and if it crawls out from “P” that means “Purple,” and if it is a yes or no question, I’ll wait for the ant to crawl out of either the “Y” or “N” or accept whatever comes closest. (I’ve taken an “A” for “No”; a “Z” has stood for “Yes.”) The questions tend not to be serious, because—even to myself—I prefer not to appear insane. Primarily I’ve been asking: What should we have for dinner? Should I attend this party in Irvine or this one, farther away, in Highland Park? I’ve been asking: Am I a good-enough person, yes or no?
July 4
On the Fourth of July, Uncle John forgets the ice. The fridge is full of food—broccoli and things that are not broccoli—and everyone is too lazy to drive to the store, so our sparkling lemonade stays warm. We watch fireworks from lawn chairs in the backyard. The highlights include a smiley-face firework—the eyes first burst together, then the mouth—and a green-and-gold firework that looks like a palm tree—green on the outside like leaves, gold on the inside like a trunk.
Hungry again later that night, we eat the hot dogs cold and without buns because we’ve run out, and we wipe the grease on Dad’s stained old apron that says boss of the sauce.
Theo and I clink our warm lemonades together, then our cold hot dogs.
“Do you have a picture of her on your phone?” I ask.
“Who?” he says.
“The most severe,” I say.
“Only if you show me yours.”
“Deal.”
Theo goes first. It’s a close-up, taken by Theo; their faces and happiness fill the frame. They were camping, it looks like. Behind them I can make out their sleeping bags, pushed very close together, and only one pillow: one of those long, king-size ones, they were sharing. The photo was taken during a week they spent in Yosemite.
On a night, during that trip, they forgot to throw their food out, and a bear came to their tent.
“We thought this was it, we were going to die,” Theo said. “We made a promise that if we made it out alive, things would change.”
She’d whispered, I give you my word. They had held hands and said they loved each other.
“This happened in the span of, like, a minute,” Theo says.
A moment later the bear looked at them and ambled away, wholly uninterested.
The photo I have is from a vacation Joel and I took to Florida. We rented a car and we drove from Connecticut to Key West. We were squinting in the sunlight. At one of the rest stops he had second thoughts about leaving my iPod exposed so he put a receipt over it, like that would deter thieves.
We were celebrating the job Joel had gotten; in Miami we splurged on an expensive hotel, with walls so white they hurt to look at directly. The hotel had a pillow menu. From the hotel window we could see the small brown people stretched out on the sand like iguanas, and even smaller, the actual iguanas.
Our photos aren’t so different—just some happy couple-ness.
I detect something like pride in Theo’s voice, talking about her. It’s not overt, but it’s there. I notice the pride because, talking about Joel, I can hear the disappointment in my own.
She is very pretty, though, I think later.
Who cares, who cares, who cares, I chase the thought.
July 5
Even though I know it will give me nightmares, lately I can’t stop searching the Internet for “feral goldfish.” They have huge bubbly faces. What happens is people flush their goldfish, presumed dead, down the toilets. They get into the waterways and grow and grow and grow—sometimes to the size of soccer balls, according to these photographs.
“DAD,” I shout. “COME HERE.”
“Is it important?”
“Very!”
And he knows from my voice that I want to show him an enormous fish with a huge bubbly face. I do.
“You’re a monster,” he says, pleasantly. “Let’s see it.”
This one was fished out of a lake north of Detroit. The fisherman is holding the body and his young son, in tears, is holding on to an enormous fin like it’s his mother’s dress. The fish itself has its translucent eyelids hanging down, and it looks to be asleep. I hope it is.
July 9
And now, as of today, I’m thirty-one years old.
As a birthday present to myself I sneak onto campus, into Levin’s office, and glue the caps to all of the prick’s pens. I consider what else I can do that won’t get me arrested. I’ve brought birthday gin with me to campus. It’s in a clear plastic water bottle, an homage to my father. I’m using one of those dwarf bottles, which—under ordinary circumstances—I consider wasteful and absurd. Now I’m throwing bills maniacally into the fountain outside the Life Sciences building. Students going to their summer classes pick up their paces and hold their books closer.
“Ruth,” I hear, about ten dollars later. It’s Theo. He’s walking toward me, holding something that looks like a deck of cards. As he approaches, I see that it’s an ice-cream sandwich.
“That’s a wish you want badly,” he says, noticing all the paper money, afloat. He looks all around us, like he’s looking for the money tree that dropped its leaves. He sits down, finishes the sandwich in a few solemn bites, and stands up to throw the wrapper away. When he sits back down, he sits closer, points to the bottle, and says, “May I?”
I shrug and hand him the bottle. He takes it.
I knew it started being over with Joel when I’d open a bottle of wine and he wouldn’t drink it.
Sharing things is how things get started, and not sharing things is how they end. Theo is looking nicer than usual, I think, but then again, I’m drunk. Thoughts are springing to mind, and I am dropping them all, irresponsibly, like dice.
“So what’s the wish?” he says, finally.
“Won’t come true,” I say.
“We both know you don’t believe that,” he says, observantly and correctly.
And because I am not going to make the same mistake I had when I was a kid, making those thousand wishes with Bonnie, all of them lost now, I decide not to keep it to myself. I have him lean over so I can whisper it. He smells like a delicious dryer sheet.
“What brand of dryer sheet is that?” I ask.
“Snuggle,” he says, inching closer.
“Bullshit,” I say. I inch back.
“Seriously,” he says. “It’s new. It’s supposed to smell like apricots.”
“You do smell like fruit,” I say. I think he takes it as some kind of punch line, because immediately after that he kisses me. Immediately after which, I panic.
“I better go,” I say, and stand up and flee.
“You’re drunk?” Linus says, right away, on the phone. “Already? Without me?”
“Cut it out. Could you come get me?”
When the car pulls up to the curb and I get inside, Linus, without a word, tosses me a soft package, wrapped in HAPPY BIRTHDAY paper. The remainder of the tube of gift wrap is in the backseat.