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Shave your legs in the bathroom sink. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wives are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack—they are tough and hardy and travel in packs—but right now they’re not having any fun. And when you look in the bathroom mirror, you spot them scurrying, up out of reach behind you.
god she's amazing
[...] With the glassed candle by your bed lit and burning away, doze off and on, arranged with excruciating care on top of the covers, the window lamp on in the living room, the door unlocked for him in case he arrives in a passionate flurry, forgetting his key. Six blocks from Fourteenth Street: you are risking your life for him, spread out like a ridiculous cake on the bed, waiting with the door unlocked, thinking you hear him on the stairs, but no. You should have a corsage, you think to yourself. You should have a goddamned orchid pinned to the chest of your long flowing hostess coat, then you would be appropriately absurd. Think: What has happened to me? Why am I lying like this on top of my covers with too much Jontue and mascara and jewelry, pretending casually that this is how I always go to bed, while a pervert with six new steak knives is about to sneak through my unlocked door. Remember: at Blakely Falls High, Willis Holmes would have done anything to be with you. You don’t have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.
[...] At lunch regard your cream of cauliflower soup with a pinched mouth and ask what on earth he and his wife do together. Sound irritated. He shrugs and says, “Dust, eat, bicker about the shower curtain. Why do you ask?”
Say: “Gee, I don’t know. What an outrageous question, huh?”
He gives you a look of sympathy that could bring a dead cat back to life. “You’re upset because I didn’t call you.” He reaches across the table to touch your fingers. Pull your hand away. Say: “Don’t flatter yourself.” Look slightly off to one side. Put your hand over your eyes like you have a headache. Say: “God, I’m sorry.”
Hilda is worried about you and wants to fix you up with a cousin of hers from Brooklyn.
Ask wearily: “What ’s his name?”
She looks at you, frowning. “Mark. He ’s a banker. And what the hell kind of attitude is that?”
lol
Don’t lose your resolve. Fumble for your list. Sputter things out as convincingly as possible.
Say: “I suffer indignities at your hands. And agonies of duh feet. I don’t know why I joke. I hurt.”
“That is why.”
“What?”
“That is why.”
“But you don’t really care.” Wince. It sounds pitiful.
“But I do.”
For some reason this leaves you dumbfounded.
He continues: “You know my situation . . . or maybe you don’t.” Pause. “What can I do, Charlene? Stand on my goddamned head?”
Whisper: “Please. Stand on your goddamned head.”
Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.
At Karma-Kola the days are peg-legged and aimless, collapsing into one another with the comic tedium of old clowns, nowhere fast.
:(
At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.
this was sweet
[...] We ’d both learned—not from each other; we ’ve both been around the block—that the big moments you plan never work, so we decided against the French restaurant two towns over with the forty-dollar prix fixe dinner, and went to the diner on 28. We took a booth, ordered pancakes and sausage and sat waiting for the modest magic by which the everyday becomes precious. Steven flipped page after page of jukebox selections, fingering the little metal tabs at the bottom. The country songs in green. Then he flipped back through in the other direction.
“Nothing,” he said. “Zip. Unless you want to hear fucking Randy Travis.”
By this I understood that I was not to want to hear Randy Travis.
It started in the summer, one morning when Tod and I were alone in the house. He asked if I wanted coffee, then ran his index finger down my bare arm (me in that blue sundress with the yellow flowers, him in blue jeans and a T-shirt I couldn’t imagine how he kept so white) and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we put the horns on Dalton?” The horns. What more did I need to know? And yet. I heard two voices in my head, talking at me as I stood there in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room: my own voice saying This is bad for you and a man’s voice saying Do what I say. I narrowed my eyes, trying to hear which was right, and I could picture myself as Tod saw me, looking intense and tempted. This is a beautiful boy, said another voice, a voice that wished me ill, who knows how to touch you.
Did I simply have bad character, or was I a strong young woman going after what she wanted and willing to pay the price? Though how strong were you really if you couldn’t, finally, get it? One thing I promised myself, I would never again let myself in for this kind of humiliation. When Tod finally dumped me, I did the one bit of bitchy damage I could: I said I’d always known the real romance was between him and Dalton. I hope he still hears me saying that in his head.
Listening to his truck humming and rumbling as he plowed the driveway, I ate the cereal and looked over the pages I’d laid out yesterday, telling myself that one bowl of Count Chocula wasn’t so irresponsible; they probably spray the stuff with vitamins. And only then did it hit me what I’d done last night: got stinking drunk while four months pregnant. Four months: what did that mean in terms of how major a birth defect might be? Wouldn’t it be more major the earlier you did the bad thing? I pictured a bullet, fired at conception: deflect that bullet almost at the target and it would miss by only a little, but deflect it early on and it would veer off wide. Four months. That was less than halfway there. I slid from my chair to my knees and prayed, Dear God, since I did it without thinking, please don’t let it count. Just the kind of prayer God likes to hear. Oh, right, If it be Thy will. I listened down into my body to try to discern any damage, any change from yesterday. Nothing. Oh, God. Well, we just wouldn’t think about this. But what if Steven looked at the bottle? I remembered him saying, I want to make a baby with you. I know you must think I’ve said everything before to somebody else, but this is a first. A first. He actually said that.