The Laws of Average Read online

  —Sexual intercourse: culmination in disease (no distinction)

  —Sexual intercourse: duration

  —Sexual intercourse: triangulation

  —Sexual intercourse: diminishing returns

  —Home furnishings: all, but especially that of master bedroom

  b) In the highly improbable but nonetheless technically possible situation that you have forged a respectful and/or friendly relationship with Ex, here is a short list of approved topics for considered conversation only:

  —Children’s extra curricular activities

  —Comparative current market prices for self-serve 89 octane unleaded gasoline

  —Pro/con analysis: fat free milk or 2%

  c) In the highly improbable but nonetheless technically possible situation that you have forged a respectful and/or friendly relationship with Ex, here is a short list of approved topics for casual conversation only:

  —Recent experienced and/or forecasted weather patterns

  —Status of employment (only if Ex can be considered “technically” so and also you can be considered “gainfully”) (less likely)

  —Status of Ex’s tax, welfare and/or health insurance scams (more likely)

  d) In the highly improbable but nonetheless technically possible situation that you have forged a respectful and/or friendly relationship with Ex, here is a short list of approved topics for both considered and casual conversation:

  —That Goddamn Obama

  Planking

  That one night, he got so drunk that he actually wanted to make up with his wife, so he went into his shop and made her a board. He pulled a nicked and gnarled piece from the kindling bin, a board from a discarded pallet that had carried so very many things in the dark cool of a freon-refrigerated long-haul trailer, a board because he didn’t keep paper in the shop but he did keep pencils, a board, he figured, because paper was just a flatter, fancy-pants form of board anyway.

  So with at least half a dozen shots of Wild Turkey still gobbling in his belly, he scrawled the following prayer in the plank with the big, flat, coarse carpenter’s pencil he kept sharpened with a box knife:

  Lord, I should not be blessed with this miracle you call a women.

  I should not be blessed with this ladie I call my wife.

  I should not be blessed with such an angle you have given me.

  I should not be blessed with someone so close to my own heart.

  But I am and I am very happy.

  P.S.: I AM NOT GAY

  Upon presenting this to his wife (whose name he had scrawled on the back in parentheses, just in case Jesus/ God/Whatever couldn’t—or didn’t want to—remember giving her to him), he was shocked to find out she wasn’t impressed. And thus he was able to slip the noose of her anger and disappointment over whatever she was angry and disappointed over in the first place by blaming her for not being appreciative.

  This was a clever and near fail-proof strategy he used for nearly 20 years on her, until one day it just stopped working. Literally in one day, when she met someone else who preferred to communicate on fancy-pants boards instead of pallet planks, and the next day she left him and the next day he moved out and the next day they were divorced.

  Not too soon after that, he unearthed his great artifact of rhetorical genius and deliberately leaned the sacred plank against her thin stack of garage sale items, to wit the only rational response she could muster was to break into his rental house and nail the thing not even five inches above the headboard of his bed where he slept and fucked someone else whose name had already appeared in at least two other sets of parentheses.

  That, of course, was the moment he felt inspired to practice his own special brand of appreciation, the kind evidenced by the miraculous, crystal-clear recall of birthdays, anniversaries, favorites, first-times, last-times, and all significant times in between that he could never bring to surface before without her assistance or provocation. She later described his mind becoming a steel trap in this phase of things, but she eventually got over that. He, on the other hand, kept whittling at that terrible pencil until all his fingers were bloodied and the lead plumb done run out.

  Know No Better

  I’m sitting here in your back yard, looking at what remains of the shop you tore down, the one I never completed for you, the one I would run and hide in when you were mad at me, where I drew on scraps of wood and misspelled tender words that I knew were coming too little too late but you accepted anyway, carved them into the walls with the flat rectangle of my carpenter’s pencil, deep grooves against the grain of the pine slats I never covered in sheetrock because you never stayed mad at me long enough to warrant it.

  Sitting here at the metal and glass table you purchased at Lowe’s where we used to walk on other days we were arguing about this or that, you a good five full steps ahead of me and never looking over your shoulder at me but catching my eye when you turned the corner. You always turned lots of corners there, it seemed. Because by the time we left the store, you’d usually have spent a couple hundred bucks and almost always ended up matching my steps back out to the truck, you and me walking in parallel over those big yellow eggcratey speed bumps with our cart shuddering like your legs on our early Sunday mornings with the door closed and the kids still hazy in the huge bowls of milk they’d poured themselves with flecks of cereal floating on top.

  Sitting here in the mismatched chair, the one you didn’t purchase at Lowe’s, the one left over from one of your mother’s yard sales, the one with the arch on top that looks like half of a wagon wheel, the one with aqua and fuchsia and flamingo pink plastic webbing in big thick straps, the one I used to sit in before with my shirt off—when I still sat around you with my shirt off—and when I stood up the straps slicked with sweat had left their marks on me, wide fleshy ruts.

  I’m not sitting in the other mismatched chair, the speckled plastic one molded into the shape of a giant hand, some colossus with its four fingers and one thumb all reaching up but holding at different angles to each other. Remember what I told you? It was Mother’s Day. Or your birthday. Or our anniversary. Or something. Don’t Never Say I Never Give You A Hand. I didn’t know what a double negative was when I said that, but I know what one is now. No, I’m not never sitting in that one, and I don’t have to say it no more.

  Because I’m here for dinner and it’s my birthday. You remembered, like you always did. You went to the store and bought everything, like you always did, brought it all home, like you always did, cooked it up, like you always did, lit the candles, like you always did, sang along with the kids, like you always did, held your breath and clutched your own hands as I blew, like you always did. When we got married you said I Do. Present tense. I said it too, but after you. I didn’t know what verb tenses were when I said that, but I know what they are now.

  Barbecued pork ribs. That’s what’s for dinner. Ones that must have been too big to stay on their bones because that’s the way you bought them, no bones in sight. Big boneless rectangles of meat, boiled first on the stove because they never cooked through when they were just on the grill. Grey and pale orbs when you pulled them from the depth of the pot, the water they cooked in chunky and greasy with the parts and pieces that had fallen off. Dead meat made more dead.

  Then they got slapped to the grill, each one paintbrushed in that honey and molasses sauce you make in that glass bowl, the one that looks like an upside down UFO. The sauce is stuck to everything around it, especially your fingers, stuck so good it doesn’t lick off on the second or even third try. Stuck so good you have to scrub it off. The kids get it everywhere, leave trails and globs of it on the staircase handrails, on the bathroom lightswitch, on the toilet seat, on the big mirror above the sink, on the faucet handles, and all over the towels wadded, piled and left on the floor.

  The kids, they stay in there a long time. You don’t say anything and I don’t say anything. Your fingers are still sticky with honey and molasses, grey and pale underneath. It was o
ne of the children—don’t remember which—who called me this afternoon, but I know it was you who invited me, whose idea it was, so I came here. I came here because you still care, and because I want you to still love me. And I want you to say this to me, over and over again. Never stop saying it, like you always did.

  I’m saying this because the last time there was a chance, you told me just to be honest. So I’m going to be totally honest and tell you that I won’t reciprocate any of this. But you know that already. That’s why there had to be a last time in the first place. I’m doing exactly what you told me you want, and some of what you don’t tell me you want, probably way more of what you don’t tell me than what you do tell me. This is me still trying. This is the most I can do, the best I know how. I’m sorry. This is who I am. For years that was enough, for me to be who I am. Now it’s not enough. Now I have to be someone else. I’m being honest here because that’s what you told me you wanted, not because I care about honesty. But you know that already.

  That’s why the last time was the last time. Because being honest wasn’t the only thing you wanted. Your fingers are still sticky. Grey and pale, they still taste sweet. Come here, I want you to save me. Just one more time. You know, for old time’s sake. The children, they’re still upstairs. It’s all right now.

  Come on. It’s my birthday.

  Dear That Lane Bryant Girl

  Years before you, I was a loyal customer of your employer. I always made time to spend my money in their stores. They rewarded me by having managers and clerks call to tell me about the latest sales and affirm that Lane Bryant loved me. They backed up their words by recognizing me when I visited, offering tissue while I tried on clothes, stuffing hand-fuls of those promotional Real Woman Dollars into each bag before sending me cheerfully on my way.

  We were all so happy.

  I first saw you six months ago, wearing a midnight blue hoodie in the Early Fall mailer. They had you buried in the back, crammed between the sweaters and bras. All of the other Lane Bryant Girls had multiple shots with multiple outfits. You, on the other hand, were buried beneath thick folds of velour, your face and hips covered in shadows. I barely noticed you then, like the early stages of an ingrown hair. Before the itch.

  As the weeks wore on, I began seeing less of the others and more of you. Within two months’ time you had crept out of the depths of the mailers and into the bright splash pages of the mid-seasonal catalogs, clad in everything from business suits to lingerie. When I visited, you were hung from the ceilings in large sheets of slick paper and stuck to the windows on even larger chunks of screen-printed vinyl. Without word or warning—let alone a telephone call—you became the company’s curve.

  Before I go any further with this, there are some major things I need to explain.

  Major Thing #1: You Are Not Real

  Lane Bryant’s Real Woman advertisement scheme always seemed harmless enough until you came into the picture. When I visited, I was rewarded for being me, and a big part of these rewards took the form of Real Woman Dollars. Real Woman Dollars were essentially rebate coupons, and functioned as legitimate currency in every one of Lane Bryant’s 700 stores. Spending any given 100 dollars earned 25 Real Woman Dollars; in my case, the ratio of real dollars to Real Woman Dollars was even higher. Store managers lined my pockets with them when I visited, and I got to know them very well. I bought a separate wallet, custom-embossed with the letters R and W so I could identify it by feel from the depths of my purse.

  You’re a young girl, so you probably don’t know a whole lot about the history of things. Real Woman Dollars historically were printed on ivory cardstock with a black scripted font. Their elegance was both in their simplicity and in what they represented: the holder of a Real Woman Dollar was, in all essence and detail, a real woman. Unlike real U.S. dollars, which are printed with patent green ink on a delicate weave of cotton and linen, Real Woman Dollars bore no images of graven men, let alone images of women. Holding a Real Woman Dollar allowed me to define for myself what “real” meant.

  This changed, of course, when you started appearing on them. The decision to strike your image onto each and every Real Woman Dollar was without precedent. As much and as often as I have asked, no manager has ever been able to explain this to me. Being as young as you are, you probably can’t understand the ramifications of this. I’ll return to this point later.

  Major Thing #2: You Are Me, I Am Not You

  I did some research on you. You weren’t always a size 14. Less than two years ago you were a size zero model, struggling with self-imposed anorexia. Your daily diet was a slurred rotation of lettuce leaves, fat-free Pringles, and high fiber cereal. You kept a daily workout routine of swimming, stairclimbing and freeweights. You weighed 98 pounds, ate 900 calories a day, and burned 1200. You wanted something badly enough to starve yourself for it, and just when you thought you had it, you collapsed into an overstuffed Barnes & Noble reading chair in the midst of a 10-hour shopping spree, during which you had ingested only a small bowl of steamed carrots custom-cooked for you at a Panda Express. You said to yourself that if you wanted to live, you had to give up caring about calories. So you did, and you gained 65 pounds, and now you’re a plus-size model for a bigshot agency in New York City. You seem overwhelmed by what you surely perceive as some high irony, namely, that in your choice to eat again, you gained both weight and the success you so desperately craved. You’ve made a lap on the talkshow circuit. Featured in Glamour, Vogue, the whole shebang, all before turning 18. It’s a Lifetime or Oxygen Channel movie-in-the-making, a brave and honest story of whatever we’ll do to ourselves for This, That, or Whatnot.

  Well whoopteefreakingdoo!

  Now don’t get me wrong here. I think it’s great you’re no longer dying, or whatever you want to call it. That you can live your particular lifestyle and not put yourself a through the figurative cheesegrater to do it is something to be commended. Hooray for you. Really.

  I’ve enclosed a picture of myself when I was your age. The similarities are striking, aren’t they? The faint feathering of our hair as it streaks the sides of our shoulders. The mustardy quality of our smile. The bell curves of our waist, smoothing to an S just before they jut out at the hip. The twinning of our pouting stare.

  Fast forward now. Imagine yourself thirty years later: hair dulled, curves straightened into the shapes of illegible letters. How will the Future You regard the Past You? Will the two meet for a weekday lunch and silently judge each other’s choices, in between stabs at tomatoes and spoonfuls of cottage cheese? Will they pick up the check for each other, or will they insist on separate bills? Which one will be the first to grab a toothpick from the metal carousel next to the cashier’s till? Moreover, who will be the first through the door, and the last to say a hasty, parking lot goodbye?

  Major Thing #3: I Am Married to My Husband

  He is a squat, balding man who has recently started talking too much. He says things that are on his mind, and for the most part these are things worth talking about, but it didn’t used to be this way. For years he found ways to circumvent conversation; then, matters worth discussing were What’s For Dinner and When Will You Be Home. He likes to eat carbs and drink big classes of whole milk right before he comes to bed, so the night air above us frequently smells like cheese and peanut butter sandwiches (this has been perfectly consistent, by the way).

  I spend a lot of time away from him, and not necessarily because I want to. We live in a suburb of a city that is a suburb of a larger city. My home, naturally, is nowhere close to where I work, so I am what some call an “extreme commuter.” I leave the house before five in the morning and rarely make it back much before eight in the evening. We have three children and I am the primary earner (this has been pretty consistent, too).

  When our children were younger, my husband mostly stayed at home. He has a college degree in something or other that allows him to teach occasionally, but it’s nothing predictable, permanent, or what someone
could even remotely consider a career. Now that the children are older, he still mostly stays at home, but he isn’t in any way domestic. His daily routine consists of shuffling back and forth between the bathroom, a small office, and the shower, all of which are located on the second story of our numblingly average two-story house. He has a perverse affinity for taking showers, and a measurable distaste for nearly everything downstairs, to wit he bought a grimy garage sale refrigerator and hired a couple of movers to lug the damn thing upstairs to the office.

  It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that my husband never checked the mail on any other occasion than a whim or when he was expecting some trinket he’d “won” on eBay. This is partly what I meant by saying that he’s started talking too much. We have been married for well over twenty years; until very recently, there wasn’t a single second of those twenty years that he’s discussed his personal shopping forays so frankly.

  “Did you know,” he blurted out just last week, “that there are people auctioning off those inflatable love dolls?”

  Please tell me what I should have said to him. Because maybe you know. You are, after all, a Real Woman.

  Well, this real woman was completely tongue-tied. I’m not certain what would inspire someone to auction a used love doll, and I’m even less sure of what array of search terms and hyperlinks would lead somebody to one. What I do know is that I’m married to a man who not only found such an item online, but recounted the excitement of finding it to me with a pubescent grin that I haven’t seen for decades.

  And I know it well, girl, because I used to tell my friends about it, when I still cared about being smiled at and being talked about long after leaving a conversation. It’s the same rumpled, Z-shaped grin he gave me before we started dating back in junior high. It was a signal that he was coming for me, in the way that I was supposed to want to be wanted. It was the first thing I saw before and after. The first thing he saw before and after was you. Meaning me, when you were me.