“How did that come up at a financial planning meeting?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So what’s his advice?”
“Well, first, we can’t panic…and second…if we were going to eat one of the children, which one would you pick?”
Lisa laughs a little more heartily; her voice always gets lower, throaty, when she thinks something is genuinely funny. It’s very hot. “I suppose the older one,” she says. “That little one looks gamy.” And suddenly I’m filled with warmth and sadness and I am rushed with nostalgia-
This: Right before I went to 7/11 for milk last night, I considered telling her about the letter from the mortgage company. But
when I went upstairs she was asleep. I signed onto her FaceBook page (it had taken me three days to figure out her password) and saw that she’d put up a better picture of herself with her cute new pixie haircut (a picture I took) and I also saw that she’d been carrying on a three-day “chat” with an online buddy named Chuck, which, not coincidentally, is the name of her old high school boyfriend, a guy I was never jealous of before, because, frankly, Chuck sounded like a bit of a chuck, and not like the sensitive, successful guy he turns out to be, at least in the online realm. The subject of this chat seemed to be the flat parallel trajectories of Chuck’s and Lisa’s mildly disappointing lives (“ever wake up and wonder what happened”)-lives that must’ve seemed boundlessly perfect when they were eighteen, sneaking off to his parents’ lake place to squirrel their boundlessly perfect young bodies into positions that I’d give anything to replicate. And it seems clear from their familiarity that this was not the first chat between Lisa and Chuck, not the first time the sad subject of their sad lives has come up. As the FaceBook conversation continued, Lisa and Chuck went back and forth about themselves (“trying to get back in shape” “Y? U look great”) and their jobs (“not the best time to be looking for something” “but U R so talented”) people from high school (“Dana looks like a manatee-ooh, that’s mean” “U could never be mean”) and while it was all vaguely above-board, it also felt…I don’t know, intimate…and then Chuck wrote, “Temted to get all hot and steamy agin” as if the very words made him too worked-up to type straight and she ignored his misspellings and suggested two simple letters, “TM?” and either she was trademarking his stupid sexy-talk or, more likely, suggesting that he should take his nastiness to the text messaging world-
…while I cluelessly watched sports highlights with my buggy old father-
minding me how good Unitas was, every Eagles highlight by remarking what a slow stiff Jurgensen turned out to be-as if quarterbacks were declared extinct in 1968…
…and I saw that I couldn’t tell her about the house, at least not yet, not after coming across the trail of this crushing deception, because God knows I’ve flirted and daydreamed and committed a thousand tiny betrayals-but… this tore me up…my broken little black heart bleeding out through my mouth and my eye sockets and my asshole and…
…I’m dying here. Of emotional Ebola. And I just wish the little bugs would get it over with and gobble me all up, so that I could stop suffering, because I know the world goes on without us; my mother taught me that; it goes on and on, turning us over like broken sod. And hell, maybe it’s nothing, a little late-night nasty smack-smack talk between old lovers-harmless! But
that…
that
…was when I went out for milk and ended up baking my wounded skull.
Of course, this is just the kind of melodramatic, twisted logic I will refuse to accept from my boys when they are teenagers. (You went out and got high with delinquents because you were jealous of your girlfriend? Do you know how stupid that sounds?) But last night I did just that, went to the 7/11 and, sulking over my wife’s flirtation with her old boyfriend and the knowledge that I was losing her house, I fried my nut with the delinquency dream team.
On the phone now with Lisa, I don’t tell her that Richard says the house is almost certain to go to the bank. And I certainly don’t mention her “chat” with Chuck. And I definitely don’t confess my emotionally retarded response. Instead, as I pull into the Costco parking lot, into this temple of buy-bulk-big-box consumerism at the opening bell of a planetary recession, I take a moment to simply pass along to Lisa our pothead financial guy’s more mundane recommendations, the long list of luxuries we can do without in the upcoming belt-tightening: “Richard says we should cancel cable and get rid of the Internet,” I say, with no small amount of conniving joy. “We sure as hell can’t afford these cell phones anymore.”
“I don’t know if I can live without a cell phone,” Lisa says after a moment.
“Well,” I say, and I laugh giddily, “I guess we’re just gonna have to find out.”
CHAPTER 4
I WAS DRIVING AROUND THE packed Costco parking lot
looking for a space and listening to some guy
on NPR talk about America’s growing suburban poor
when I saw this woman with four kids-
little stepladders, two-four-six-eight-
waiting to climb in the car while Mom
loaded a cask of peanut butter and
pallets of swimsuits into the back
of this all-wheel drive vehicle
and the kids were so cute I waved
and that’s when I saw the most amazing thing
as the woman bent over
to pick up a barrel
of grape juice:
her low-rise pants rose low and right there
in the small of her large back
stretched a single strained string,
a thin strap of fabric, yes,
the Devil’s floss, I shit you not
a thong, I swear to God, a thong,
now me, I’m okay with the thong
politically and aesthetically, I’m fine
with it being up there or out there,
or wherever it happens to be.
My only question is:
when did Moms start wearing them?
I remember my mom’s underwear
(Laundry was one of our chores:
we folded those things awkwardly,
like fitted sheets. We snapped them
like tablecloths. Thwap.
