The Laws of Average Page 13
Hopefully you see where I’m going with this.
For a long time, before and after had different looks. After the children, we didn’t seek out each other’s faces; the room was a tangle of distractions from the television or neighborhood traffic, me thinking about waiting my turn, him guessing at what I was thinking. And we were perfectly fine with that. Really. We raised our children and I worked my job and he officed his mishmash and we looked our different looks. That’s the way it was for a long, long time. And it was fine.
Really.
Fine.
And I should be happy now that the grin is back, right? It should remind me that the core of him is still there, despite what the shell of him looks or smells like. Well I am not happy. Now that the grin is back I am reminded of being me more and more, while feeling like you less and less. And I’m not sure who to blame for any of this. I see you in my mailbox, on my computer screen, in once-sacred places and thoughts I used to visit because I thought they were truly sacred. I’m wearing your clothes, brushing your hair, shaving your legs. I’m becoming un-Real.
I didn’t want to end up finding sticky pictures of myself all over my own house, so I started tacking up pictures of you instead. I put them everywhere I couldn’t reach’: above the sink, on top of the refrigerator, in the bookcases, under the pillows. I put them in these places, thinking I would see them and he would see them, and that would somehow roll back the grin. I started handing them to my husband when they came in the mail, and bcc:ing them to him when they clogged my inbox. I made a pimp and whore of him. He did anything I asked, and he talked dirty to me irregardless of my being there. He loved me completely. Stupid me.
So what I’m asking should be fairly obvious.
I want you to go away.
I want you to slink back to Jackson or Tempe or Crystal Lake or wherever you came from, and I want you to do it as quietly as possible. No cameras or recording devices allowed. Don’t make a spectacle or big deal about it. I’ll do your press release and call all your people. I’ll tell your mom you’re already on your way.
You don’t have to consider the alternatives. I’m already there.
The Show
This is the story that manufactured the other story that became the relationship premised on all of the above, a Jenga tower assembled high and without wide enough base to support itself. Pretty much like everything. This is the selection of promises that were never made good upon, the best intentions not withstanding, the trying times mutating into the tired times, the lie and deceit of love, the selfishness of wanting to stay forever in the dream state and loathing every miserable second of the waking state. He told her a long time ago to practice signing his name, again and again, so she could replicate it perfectly, so their handwriting couldn’t be distinguished. And when she did this, when she had it down cold, that was the point when he took it away and made her promise to never ever do it again, promise to forget him. This, after all, is why it’s called “breaking up.” Because she didn’t, you see. She really really didn’t.
This is the dream she can’t ever make just a dream, and not because he won’t allow it or it’s impossible. This is the part that’s real, and it starts this way: he ties the straps tight on the trailer carrying his motorcycle, the one she still makes payments on because he hasn’t worked for four months straight. His daughter, 2 dogs and aforementioned wife are all tucked into the car in front of him but this is the persistent pattern: drive drive drive, stop; pull pull tie tie; drive drive drive, stop; pull pull tie tie. This morning he made sure his wife wrestled her wedding band over her knuckle, the one she hadn’t worn for the better part of two years, the one which kinda-sorta matched his (both were round), purchased 10 minutes before their courthouse scene scripted out of some horrible cable TV show, the scene where the friend and the other friend take an extended lunch break to stand somewhere and witness something and sign something before they all leave to swill 64-ounce sodas and swallow biggie-sized fries from a drive-thru on the way back to work. Ceremony, of course, isn’t the right word for this, but that’s what it was called when someone garbed in a Carolina blue suit handed him an itemized receipt with very word on it, and his sense of the world was that multi-syllabic words rarely lied.
It is pouring rain, unusual for Utah in August. The high elevation desert floods within minutes, the baked clay tight from the hot summer and totally uninterested in loosing its grip on the landscape. Lake Bonneville used to be one of the world’s largest bodies of water, in an era before humans walked the planet, invented religion, pretended to be gods, and conjured impossible stories to justify their behaviors. Now there is barely a sketch of the lake, its shores mere traces along the horizon of a past no one remembers because they never experienced it, not entirely unlike the one he had before moving here and having her and all of the whatnottery that came along. But like the lake long gone, the past is as well.
His wife is asleep, dreaming. The dream is always this one: spies in glass rooms, smoke and bullets filling the space, the world just a heartbeat away from total annihilation. She has this dream and never shares it. She doesn’t know what any of it means and she’s smart enough not to trust anything her husband might say in response. A recurring dream, it follows and haunts her, like a spurned lover who just can’t accept the finality of things, who somehow always finds a way to play semantics when she says things like It’s Over and I Don’t Love You Anymore and I Don’t Think I Really Ever Did and This Is Really Goodbye.
In the dream there is a company that pays her money to build databases. Virtual vaults of information programmed to sort, stack and sift until patterns form, ciphers blurring into meanings before fuzzing into facts. She has done this long enough and well enough to understand the volatility of the entire universe, how removing a single term—sarcoidosis, say—from a medical database literally loosens the entire economy and knowledge base of the world that teeters on top of it. The thing that’s present but not acknowledged, the complete lack of syntax necessary for a language to arrive and convey itself.
He, of course, works for The Networking Company, the backbone of the entire universe, the gatekeeper of zero and one, and the entire spectrum between the two. He is full-force static-skin. In this dream his reasons for being are entirely financial, and she is here in her sift of bytes simply because of her market value, because of all the things they’ve come to own that aren’t children, and how those things were never worth the price they paid in the first place. No such thing, then, as value appreciation. Value, in the dream, is only ever inflated. As it always is in the non-dream.
This isn’t the thing that keeps her sleeping. Her rest is finite and not all that restful, but it is a deliberate choice and hers to make and the most obvious one given all the pit stops. What keeps her sleeping is the low level of fuel it takes to maintain herself as Just Fine, how here she can’t feel the metal above the webbing between her fingers and her hand, and can displace the muscle memories of his tugs at the tips of her, his palms simultaneously at her temple and back of her head, his thick burn in her throat and stomach.
Another thing keeping her sleeping is the release she feels from instructing her daughter in the delicate performance art of committed relationships, and she deals with this by making the girl sleep as much as she possibly can, sometimes using any means necessary. Methods and/or chemistry. She isn’t proud of this. She knows the damage this is causing. But therapy exists for that sort of deal. There is no cure for alone.
The irony for her is that when we sleep we are at our most isolated and vulnerable, so our brains try to tell us fictions about how this isn’t the case; when our brains succeed, we call that bliss; when they fail, we call that nightmare. States of bliss and nightmare are both just stories, the stuff of fairy tales and horror, stuff that never lasts, and never existed in the first place. The truth of any committed relationship is that it always is struggling to find balance between these stories, rendering its participants little more th
an actors on a stage laden with trap doors, false floors and falling. Ever falling.
Dreams within dreams. This is the thing that keeps her sleeping the most. The thing that keeps us all. The labyrinth and puzzle of them, the awareness that waking isn’t really waking. Or doesn’t have to be. The thick comfort that arrives like a blanket, after the adrenaline shot of having survived the nightmare, of watching it evaporate, of feeling more dead than alive than dead than she probably should. Than we all probably should.
There is much to pity in both of them, but we will always choose a side. We choose hers. Why?
Perhaps it’s because we know her better, which is to say we know more of the things she’s done that she would take back if she could. Perhaps it’s because we don’t know him at all, which is to say he’s made different choices than us, takes on a different set of priorities and responsibilities than us, does whatever it is he does that keeps us from knowing him in the first place. Perhaps it’s because she is beautiful, which is, in most cases, to say nothing in particular, to say nothing stands out. But you. You do what you like. Like you always do. Like anyone ever always does. Dreams within dreams implore, seduce us all to sleep. Not another word now.
Shush.
When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
You can paint every room every color. All at the same time. And you’ll be able to see every color distinct from every other color. You can do this. And you will love what you make of it. But you need to know that no one else will be able to see this but you, not even your dead children. Only you. If this makes any difference in your choice of palate or pattern, perhaps you don’t understand what painting really is.
family WE MAY NOT HAVE IT ALL TOGETHER, BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL
Unsolicited Advice
The only true and permanent and legal form of revenge is to conceive a child with Sig.Other. But only proceed with extreme caution on this after long and emotionally crippling conversations about it that spiral for hour upon hour, night after night, month after month, year after year. If you are still able to engage in sexual activity after this, consider it a Sign From Above that you are blessed and special. Because that is, without any hesitation of doubt, exactly what it is.
Ontology
My children are usually messy eaters, but last night was an exception. They sat properly at the table, waved their forks and spoons through their food in correct, symmetrical patterns, sipped their beverages from their cups without a sound, and dabbed their mouths thoughtfully with their napkins. We were so proud of them when they thanked us for the meal, excused themselves from the table, cleared their plates, glasses and silverware, and retired in single file up the stairs, as if we were Roy Scheider’s angelic little family in Jaws.
That’s the movie based on a novel where a Great White shark bigger than Vermont tries to eat everyone on Martha’s Vineyard over a single Memorial Day weekend. I spent my entire childhood terrified of that shark. When I was 6 years old, my family went on vacation to southern California, which is quite a long way away from Martha’s Vineyard. I grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho, in the most working working class neighborhood imaginable, despite the fact that all the streets were named after famous presidents.
In southern California, there are real Great White sharks, but there are also fake ones. Metallic robotic fake ones. Families on vacation pay real money really on purpose to have them (the fake sharks) terrorize them (the families on vacation). My family was always equally interested in commerce and terrorism. But this doesn’t make them special. Any family on vacation is geared this way. For this particular trip we drove from Twin Falls to Anaheim and did so in my parents’ burgundy Volkswagen bus with a pop-top camper and 8-track player. My parents were the farthest things from hippies: their Volkswagen bus was only an occasional weekend driver; their Volkswagen bus wasn’t originally burgundy but gunmetal gray, and it wasn’t originally shot with a clear coat of metal flake; their Volkswagen bus, on the occasional weekend it was driven, was most often parked on a gypsum-crusted driveway perpendicular to a three-bedroom, air-conditioned cabin complete with full kitchen and microwave oven and curved glass television and linoleum and 20-foot picture windows that stretched all the way up to heaven. My parents were the farthest things from hippies: the rotation of 8-track cassettes was tight and small, and they were all greatest hits compilations: The Bee Gees, Waylon Jennings, Barbra Streisand. My father looked nothing like Waylon or Barry Gibb, but my mother did strike a close enough resemblance to Barbra in both face and figure (Robin Gibb in face only), and especially close enough for a southern Idaho ditchweed town like Twin Falls so as to earn herself a catcall or two.
The drive down was 78 hours of early August swelter. My father’s sole sibling, an older sister, caravanned with us in a royal blue Chevy pickup whose ass end shook with the weight of a much-too-large camper shell. (This, I discovered over and over again in my adolescence, was a physical trait my aunt shared with the vehicle; she never did lose her high-school moniker “Mudflaps,” nor her well-earned reputation which amplified it.) The camper had one of those peeling manufacturer’s stickers on its plexiglas window, the kind depicting a cartoon Indian or a cave man or a turtle or a penguin or a whatever in full-wink mode, its big fat thumb pointed up in the air as permanent affirmation to the camper’s owner-operator that he had made the right purchase.
My older cousin—named after Captain Kirk because (a) he was born the same year Star Trek premiered and (b) his mother had a raging girl hard-on for William Shatner—rode with me and my parents. He, too, was an only child to parents of non-hippies, evidenced by the fact that the family pickup remained static with its stock Delco push-button radio, and even moreso that its big bouncy bench seat was eternally (and deliberately) tucked and swaddled into a horse blanket. For the simple majority of hours we spent not sleeping, Captain and I smashed miniature metal cars against one another in the back-back of the Bus, over and over again, head-on and t-bone and rear-end collisions, for pretends. When we were each only a couple of years older, we would practice these collisions with our own bodies, for reals.
When our caravan pulled onto the enormous lake of sun-warmed asphalt which was the Universal Studios theme park’s parking lot, we had largely trekked the distance to see a fake shark. After spilling out of the Bus, our non-hippie parents paid Captain and I’s entrance, and the entire family cluster made right for Jaws: The Ride, when we rode a fake tour bus around a fake lake. The fake tour bus had a fake stall as it traversed a fake bridge which, of course, bent us down to the lip of the water when there was a fake collapse of the fake bridge to heighten the very real anxiety we felt.
I immediately scrambled to the high side of the bench seat, but my aunt pulled me back with a large jerk of her football-wide forearm. She grinned and gnarled her eyebrow at me. Then she shoved me flush against the opening on the low side of the bench seat, right where the water line met the itchy, flaky fiberglass of the fake tour bus’s window.
My aunt crushed her forearm into my back, splaying my little flab and even littler muscle with her big fat football arm, forming a perfect perpendicular line right up against my spinal column that I could feel all the way up in the tops of my teeth. Captain giggled and pointed from the high end of the tour bus, where he was pinned against the opposing window frame by my aunt’s enormous ass and thus kept clear of the fray at the water’s edge. The fake shark fin broke the skin of the fake lakewater not even 10 feet away from my window, slicing its way not only into my direct line of sight, but quite directly right towards me.
Which, of course, is something entirely different; separating a human being from what they can see and what they are is—as far as I’m concerned and have conducted rudimentary research into—a fundamental distinction that we make all the time and helps us sleep at night, for if we were to fully experience (and I mean this in the most visceral ways: in our bones) everything that we saw, we wouldn’t last too long, and most likely wouldn’t want to.
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br /> Being witness to something is experiential, sure, but only in and of itself. To witness something isn’t to actually experience the thing being witnessed, like how seeing a fake shark fin make a bee-line for you in the real water of a fake lake tricks all your senses and even sizable chunks of your cerebral cortex into triggering your instinctual mechanisms to take flight of the situation; however, the reality of the deal is that you are only witnessing your own fear, feeling it surge against your aunt’s big meaty forearm that certainly feels like it’s all the way up inside you but it isn’t, feeling it dart up through your blood and throat and lips like tiny knives stabbing at the air around you that would whistle and scream—in that eye-popping way that only 6 year old boys can scream—if you, of course, had the full capability and capacity of your lungs at your disposal, which naturally you don’t, because of the truly over-the-line amounts of pressure your aunt is exerting to keep you locked in the magnificently monstrous moment when the fake fin juts suddenly and terribly up with a great shudder of its hydraulicky-robotty parts down from somewhere way underneath the water line, exposing the big shiny nose and eyes and mouth and carrot-length teeth all flapping together in the most ghastly, rickety chomp-chomp-chomp of your worst nightmares up and over and—wait—yes yes yes—past you.
Because you were, after all, merely a witness, and when you hear third and fourth-hand accounts of how eyewitnesses totally fuck up the details of what really happened of the things they’ve really and truly seen, you nod your head accordingly and without uttering a chirp.