They ate together and she left for work, looking pretty damn cute. Usually she looked like she was going to go do some work in total isolation, he couldn’t think of where, but she didn’t always shower or wear clean-looking clothes. He wondered how the doctors hadn’t said anything about it, but then remembered that most doctors’ assistants wore pajamas.
He felt a little good about last night, but also a little depressed. He moved to his office with his coffee and looked at the internet for a while. He lit a cigarette and opened the project file for Kelly’s store.
He felt a little depressed because she’d said, “You’re the only person I really like.” He repeated this to himself, and with each repeat he got more and more pissed off. Yeah, pissed off. But then sad for being pissed off. Here is what he thought. If someone truly dislikes “everyone” but one person, that means the person they do like they don’t even notice. That person, Randy in this case, is just a blank with no subjective feelings, no interior monologue, no hidden opinion or thought. And that sucked, it was stupid. He was, essentially, her cat.
Her cat who she had sex with and cooked dinner for and watched movies with.
She would have to be nicer.
As soon as he got mad and felt confident about being mad, he imagined what it would be like to say to her that she needed to be nicer. In that conversation there would have to be an “or else.” Or else I will have to break up with you. It was depressing to imagine breaking up with Megan, but she was such a fucking drag. He couldn’t believe this sloppy, ornery person was his girlfriend.
He stamped out his cigarette and stared at the project file. He had that feeling in his stomach he got when he knew he had to break up with someone. That hollow vacuum feeling. There were always two or three good opportunities to break up with someone in the course of a relationship, and he almost never acted on the first impulse, but once it was there it was never fully gone. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. The saying “second chance” came to his mind and he didn’t like how condescending it sounded. But it was, ugh, a second chance, in a way, because he understood that people had their phases. But to stay with someone who insulted his existence—acted like he didn’t have a full selfhood—was not possible. Impossible.
So she would have to snap out of it.
He thought about getting her a job. She could do pretty much anything, he thought. What he did wasn’t that hard, she could do that.
He imagined asking a friend to do her a favor. Then he imagined the friend remembering Megan giving them the stink-eye or something, then he imagined Megan becoming humiliated and infuriated. He dismissed the idea.
She would get out of this phase on her own, he knew it, but he didn’t know what role he’d play in all of it. He might not be what was best for her. If she really did hate all of his friends, he couldn’t imagine her ever being happy with him.
He got that vacuum feeling again, lit another cigarette, and told himself that it was okay to sit on it for a few weeks, then think it over again. Kelly’s website was his priority right now.
4
Adam noticed his mom laughing a lot and thought it was cool. She said she was going to get some cake after work for him to eat for being such a good boy. Elena came over and picked him up. She held his hand as they walked down the stairs and around the block to her car. She held his hand tightly and he kept his hand slack. It was sticky from syrup. He tried to do a dance walk on the sidewalk, but Elena said, “Come on,” so he stopped. He added a few spasmodic kicks before they got to the car, but no more full dance walk. Elena liked to listen to the same radio station as his mother did, and she liked to hum along to the songs, too. But her car was totally empty except for a map and a pot of medicated lip balm. Elena pulled into a parking spot, got out of the car, walked around to Adam’s door, and then led him into the day-care center.
“Hey, Barb,” said Elena. She let go of his hand and he ran off. Elena raised her eyebrows.
“Still no car?” asked Barb.
Elena smiled a sour smile and shook her head. “No, not yet.”
Both women shrugged. Adam took up his occupation of the playhouse in the corner. No one was in there yet. He got there earlier than a lot of the children. He crouched in the middle of the house and made a wild face. He held his hands out in front of his face and said “The jaws of life” and then he hissed. He bounced up and down on his legs saying “I am the jaws and the life.” He gasped, looked quickly to the side, then prostrated himself on the tight blue carpeting. His hands, the jaws of life, went out in front of him and reached for the plastic walls of the house. He imagined himself as a snake and slinked up to the window and observed all that he could see.
“I don’t know, but eventually I’m going to have to ask her to broaden her carpool, you know what I mean? My kids are in high school, I already went
