—The wife, Alice said, like it was a vital video game character we’d forgotten to include in our game of capture the banker.
—What about her? I asked, trying to be neutral, wondering whether she was on the wives’ side or the other side.
—She’s at home, throwing out dead coffee filters from the morning. She’s too exhausted to cook and she doesn’t think for a moment her husband is in a crow pose at some slut’s apartment.
—You’re judging me, I said.
—Of course I’m not. Morality is uninteresting. I’m intrigued by the idiocy of trust. I’ll never trust a man I love. In fact, if I trust him, it will mean I don’t love him enough. And a man should never trust me. Please, go on. I’m rapt. I keep interrupting because I’m rapt as fuck.
—Ten minutes later my heart was still beating hard and my rug was still a quarter up the wall and an email came through from his name. Sweet dreams.
—Fucker! They all should die.
—I was so happy. Because he’d left his Mets cap on my couch and his headphones. I went to bed without a pill and left my shades open and looked out at the moon. I was so happy.
—It’s strange to think that there is some nice boy somewhere who wants to read us Pushkin and play records and not even fuck for a month.
She drank the rest of her beer down and threw her cigarette in the can. She rose and I counted her inches. She must have been five feet eight. Her mother was tall. Mine was not.
—I come in here a few times a week for lunch after class, she said. Will you be here tomorrow? I’d love to hear the rest.
I tried to seem flippant when I said that I was there every day. I watched her get into her car. It was a light green Prius. It felt so good to talk to her. I saw her arm out the window with a cigarette as she pulled onto the boulevard. The purple bougainvillea along the fences was washed blond by the sunlight. Happiness had come easily to her. She was a person who never had to make a haunting choice. Everything was laid out for her. She only fucked men with perceptibly clean dicks.
One of the best things about childhood is the lack of choices. Your parents make choices for you that you must inhabit. Even better is your lack of awareness. You have no conception of all the wrong choices that might have maimed you. Take the road to the left and you won’t get run over by the car that will kill you if you take the road to the right.
The last time I was ignorant to the notion of choice was in the Poconos. It was 1989 and I was nearly eleven. I remember every single day before the day my life ended. I remember all the hot dogs and every sunset. We had a red cedar A-frame on an undeveloped lot. The Saw Creek Estates. The word estate. These ugly little summer and ski homes, linoleum and wall-to-wall oatmeal carpeting.
We never hung around the house anyway. We went to the Fernwood, the local hotel, to meet up with friends of my parents. There was a roller rink attached to the inn. My crisp, electrified memories of roller-skating make me want to kill myself. The sharp cuts on the rink floor. The smells of the pizza and the wood. I was so impressed by the teenage girls who worked there. Their rainbow socks and crimped hair. What they did after the rink closed.
For dinner we’d go to a steakhouse called the Big A. There was a huge iron bull over the door, and THE BIG A in red neon blinked like a beacon. That was where I grew my love for American taverns. Shoestring fries. Men drinking beer from thick mugs. Waitresses with bumpy faces. We never waited for a table yet the place was always packed.
Occasionally we went to a white-tablecloth place called Villa Volpe, which was cavernous like a catering hall. Waiters in bowties and more than five fish entrées on the menu. My parents took me now and then because I liked the idea of fancy things. I think about it all the time. How the fancy place of my youth could seem cheap to me now. Broke as I am.
There was a place right off I-90 that sold pierogies. My mother and I would share an order of six. I thought that we alone in the world knew about them. I didn’t realize they were an ethnic food or that there might be variations. The little rings of scallion on top were thrilling. We ate in the sunlight by the window, sitting on stools and looking out at the passing cars. We dipped the pierogies into a plastic ramekin of sour cream. One time one of the pierogies was still frozen in the middle. I felt betrayed. We wouldn’t have asked the kitchen to heat it up. I guess we tossed it in the garbage.
There was a flea market with funnel cakes, hubcaps, guns, go-carts, Mormons selling soap, candles, men in sleeveless shirts selling generators, patchwork quilts, old dolls with yarn hair, counterfeit Ninja Turtles, tin owls, pelts, hot grills with burgers, and Ziploc bags of homemade potato chips for fifty cents. We
