Fiction By Eli Hopkins

We didn’t know what to think when Grandpa came home last night with a mohawk. Though it’s hardly a mohawk, considering Grandpa’s male-pattern baldness, he obviously believes that it is and behaves accordingly. Under Mom’s advice I pretended not to notice for the first few days, but that only frustrated Grandpa. He’s taken to nurturing it at the breakfast table. Finally Mother found the courage to ask him where he’s been for the last month. He said he doesn’t know, and I believe him.

Tension kept things quiet for a while, until neon patches starting appearing in Grandpa’s mohawk. He claims it’s a natural part of the aging process, but no one believes him. He started moussing his hair at the table, and doing other things to upset the household as well.

I am almost certain that Grandpa is using my towel. The thought troubles me, but it’s an awkward thing to bring up with one’s grandfather, so I’ve taken to hiding my towel in the closet.

Since Grandpa got home there has been a woman that drives by the house at night sometimes. I would say that her visits were secret, but the aggressive yellow of her Pontiac makes it easy to see even in the dim of evening. Last night Grandpa shimmied down the lattice outside his window to go speak to this woman. I saw them parked in her car for nearly an hour. Mother caught him trying to climb back up the lattice when she was turning off the sprinklers and angry words were exchanged. I heard Grandpa tell Mother that he was sick of living in a house of fascists.

Things have been chilly in the house lately. Grandpa has been taking his meals in his room and slamming a lot of doors. He turns his music up loud whenever he hears someone coming down the hall. He bought a chalkboard for the outside of his door and has been leaving sarcastic messages on it. Today I asked Mother, “Mom, what do you think is wrong with Grandpa?”

“Well,” she responded thoughtfully, “I think he is having a hard time adjusting to living in a new town, going to a new school. You know kids can be very cruel.”

“Mom, Grandpa is 72, he doesn’t go to school.”

“Yes he does, I enrolled him this week. I think he needs the structure and the discipline.”

“Can he do that? Go back to school, I mean?”

“I made special arrangements with the new principal. By the way, he is going to be sharing your room with you awhile until he finds his own place.”

What do you mean? Grandpa has his own room.”

“Not your grandfather, Silly, your new principal.”

“You told my principal that he could share my room with me?”

“It was the least I could do after he let Grandpa skip to the eleventh grade.”

“The eleventh grade? But that’s my grade!”

“Well why do you think I wanted him to skip? Now you two can have your classes together and eat lunch together…”

When I came to I was lying on my bed, with Grandpa hovering over me, working his gums on a sandwich.

“Is it cool if I borrow your jacket?” he asked between bites, his jaws palpitating nauseatingly.

“What? What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is that I have a hot date and I want to borrow your blazer.”

Grandpa was already wearing the blazer in question.

“A date? With who, that lady in the Pontiac?”

“I said a hot date, with Lindsay Carlyle.” Grandpa grinned as devilishly as is possible with a mouth full of chicken-salad.

“Lindsay Carlyle? But you know that I’m in love with her, I tell you all the time! Besides, it’s a school night.”

“No shit, I’m gonna sneak out when the old lady goes to bed.”

“I can’t believe that you’re going out with Lindsay Carlyle, Grandpa, she’s sixteen years old!”

“You might as well get used to it, Sonny, she’s with Grandpa now. Oh shit! There she is!” Grandpa crowed as he spotted Lindsay’s car out the window. “If Mom comes in, just cover for me.”

“No fucking way, Grandpa.” But he was already halfway out the window.

I watched him scuttle across the yard towards the street where Lindsay’s car was idling, the fading September daylight painting the back of my blazer with autumnal hues as it climbed in.

“Look, I didn’t want to make a big deal of this, but we’re in love and that’s that,” Lindsay is telling me over the phone. “I mean, I’m sorry, I know I promised to go to homecoming with you, but I just think I’ll have a much better time with Grandpa. Christie is on the homecoming committee and she thinks that Grandpa and I have a real chance at getting crowned.”

“Lindsay, the only crowns in Grandpa’s life are the ones on all of his remaining teeth. The man is seventy-two years old!”

“I know, but high school guys are so immature,” she explains in a tender voice, “Grandpa knows what he wants from life. He wants to travel; he’s even going to start a band. He sang me one of his songs, it’s about two young lovers who wish they were older so they could be together forever, just like Grandpa and me.”

“Christ, Lindsay, that’s a Beach Boys song, and forever could be any day now.”

“Look, will you knock off this whole jealousy thing? It’s a major turnoff. Grandpa doesn’t mind if I talk to other guys, he hardly even seems to notice.”

“That’s because he’s heavily medicated, and for the record I think it’s sick that you call him Grandpa.”

“You just have no sense of romance, you never did. Grandpa knows how to treat a girl like a lady. He’s letting me wear his letterman’s jacket.”

“He got that jacket at the Goodwill when he ran away from home two years ago!”

“Look, I’m sorry, I have to go, I promised Grandpa I would write him a ten page letter.”

“That’s repulsive, Lindsay, I mean it.”

As Lindsay hung up the phone I started to get the impression that I was losing her.

I walked home from school faster than usual today to avoid the sight of Lindsay and Grandpa holding hands. I came into my room to find some mysterious boxes and a horrible miasma of cologne and brushfire.

Suddenly a man materialized from my closet.  I recognized him as the new principal. He was of medium height and slight build, but managed to give the impression of taking up a great deal of physical space. He was tanned to a grotesque, earthen hue, and wore an occultish medallion around his neck. His chest, which was mostly bare owing to the deep cut of his v-neck sweater, was even darker than his hands and face and exhibited a distinct sheen, reflecting light from his medallion.

“So you must be Chris!” he leapt at me. What the man lacked in aesthetic charm, he compensated with forthrightness. “I, as you must undoubtedly be aware, am Principal Mr. Weaselby. It looks like I’m going to be sharing your room with you for a while, so I’d like to lay out some ground rules. First, I go to bed at 7 o’clock sharp, and I don’t like to be disturbed once I’ve disrobed. I prefer to sleep with the door locked on account of my nudity, so if you want to sleep in here you had better be in bed by five of the hour. Secondly, the medication I take for my digestion tends to make me a bit gastronomically turbulent, especially at bedtime, so be prepared for that. Lastly, I read aloud from my own poetry from the hours of seven to nine; and I will not, will not! tolerate any silliness regarding my poetry. No sniggering, smirking, chuckling, upchuckling or moosehollering of any kind. And if we are going to share a room you had better like to listen, because I expect constant positive feedback.” Mr. Weaselby’s voice was strange, all over the place, like a slide-whistle being played by a retard. I had to appreciate his ability to vary his tone by several octaves within a single sentence.

“Well, Sir, it has been a pleasure making your acquaintance, but I have some horses to shoe and re-shoe, so if you don’t mind.” Mr. Weaselby’s face slackened with confusion before the light of recognition illuminated his rheumy eyes, causing me to reconsider the virtues of military service.

“Horses, humph! Humor will get you nowhere but the big house, Son. The sooner you learn that the better. I once knew a fellow, a real cut-up like you. Do you know where he is now?” the tone of his voice was like an asthmatic shepherd bemoaning the death of a sheep.

“No Sir, I can’t say that I do.”

“Hmph, of course you don’t. He’s dead, Son. Stabbed to death in a prison shower. Is that the kind of future you envision for yourself? Because if it is, just keep right on up with the joking and the horse-play.” Weaselby appeared to ruminate on what he had said before looking expectantly at me.

I wasn’t actually sure whether or not there was an implied question in his speech. To play on the safe side I ventured, “Yes Sir.”

“Yes Sir?” he stammered incredulously.

“I mean, yes Sir.”

“Well Boy? To be stabbed in the shower or not to be stabbed in the shower? That, my young friend, is the question you need to be asking yourself.”

“I would prefer no shower stabbing, Sir.”

“Well, good. Now let’s cut the nonsense and get down to business.”

“Business?”

“Didn’t your mother tell you? In exchange for letting me share your room I’m going to be tutoring you privately from now on. Classes let out at 3:15, so I’ll expect you here by 3:30 sharp for your lessons, Monday through Saturday. And Grandpa will be joining us; it seems that he’s been falling behind in class, acting defiantly to the substitute; perpetrating pure, unadulterated chicanery, to tell you straight.” Mr. Weaselby gazed whistfully at the ceiling fan as he spoke. “I’ll teach that boy a thing or two about growing up if it’s the last thing I do.”

“It seems more likely to me that it could be the last thing he ever does.” It slipped out before I stop myself.

Mr. Weaselby looked at me sadly. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Son. I can almost see the knife protruding from your arched back as you soap your legs.”

“Fortunately, Sir, I never soap my legs.”

Weaselby looked like he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“So it’s 3:30 everyday for tutoring, you and Grandpa. Then shortly after dinner it’s the Weaselby double-feature: two straight hours of me reciting from my original compositions, while relaxed at a slight incline; you, of course, will have to sit up straight. I daresay, young man, that you have an exciting month ahead of you. I certainly hope you’ll be able to keep up.”

“Yes Sir.”

I tried to think of happy thoughts, but my future was looking horrible, and I’m seriously accurate when it comes to predicting bad things happening to me.

Within days my unholy prophecy came to fruition: I’m now convinced that Mr. Weaselby is also using my towel. I’m not experienced in these types of situations and don’t really know how to deal with it, other than by pretending it’s not happening and by hiding an extra towel on a nail in the crawlspace.

Grandpa and Lindsey have run away together. Mom found Grandpa’s diary and read that they were planning to go to Egypt or something. The police are looking into it. In the meantime I’ve taken over Grandpa’s room. It’s cramped and smells like Old Spice and sandwiches, but at least nobody’s reading any poetry in there. I originally tried to convince Weaselby to take the room, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He says that the acoustics in my room are far more complimentary to his unique timbre.

They found Grandpa and Lindsay after three days, camping at the airport. Grandpa was trying to take them to an artists’ colony in Cairo, but when he found out it was in Cairo, Georgia Grandpa threw a fit and wouldn’t go anywhere. They wandered around the airport for a few days, living on corndogs and Hot Tamales. Airport Security only figured them out when Grandpa tried to turn himself in for an arson that hadn’t occurred. They were taken into custody without incident, except for when Grandpa tried to bonk two policeman’s heads together. Ultimately the attack was taken as a joke and Grandpa became very popular around the station.

After about a half-hour of questioning they let Grandpa go and charged Lindsey with kidnapping. Mr. Weaselby told me during his last poetry reading that he expected as much from Lindsay on account of the way she had reacted when he offered to read a sonnet he had composed for her.

“It was a shameful display, young man, simply shameful! All of the giggling, the chuckling, and don’t forget the smirking…sweet lord the smirking…” Mr. Weaselby held his face in his hands for a few minutes, trembling slightly. “Let that be a lesson to you, young man,” he stammered, pulling his robe closed tightly over his chest and storming into the bathroom.

Mom grounded Grandpa for a month: no friends, no TV, no videogames, no girls. He lay in bed sobbing for three weeks; I could hear him every night through the wall. Finally he demanded his diary back, stomping into the kitchen at breakfast, his eyes red and full of vinegar.

With Grandpa back I have to pay especially close attention to my towel. Mom caught me using paper-towels and yelled at me, said I was being wasteful. I told her it was easy for her to say, Grandpa and Mr. Weaselby weren’t using her towel. The next day she bought me a new one and I could feel two pairs of geriatric eyes cutting into me as I carried it up the stairs. Old men apparently turn into savages when it comes to a fresh towel.

I guess they’re gonna let Lindsay off with a year of probation. I could smell Grandpa’s aftershave all over the house and he left wearing a new pair of walking shoes, and carrying two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Legally Lindsay isn’t allowed to go within fifty yards of Grandpa but the Judge granted leniency since they’re classmates. Despite my continual and unreserved disgust, not to mention my broken heart, I was almost happy for Grandpa…or at least relieved. Nothing can be worse than having to listen to Grandpa cry on the balcony and watch Say Anything every night.

Mr. Weaselby left a few days ago. He got a studio with Lindsey’s older sister, Amy. Amy’s a thespian and a senior. Weaselby was forced to resign as principal but quickly found work as a prison security guard. He spends many long hours lecturing inmates on the inevitable horrors of joking and horseplay, and reading select passages from his new self-published book of poetry, Walking in My Moccasins.

It was Christmas Eve and everyone had already gone to bed, not because it was late but because it had been dark for hours and everyone had run out of things to say to each other. James sat on the bed in his parents’ guestroom holding a phone in his hand, trying to decide whether it was acceptable to try calling again. He tried to remember how many times he had called already, but couldn’t. Putting the phone down on the table next to the bed he tried to parse the knot in his stomach but nothing would help. He looked around the room. Nothing about it was familiar, though he had stayed here before. It wasn’t his room, and never had been. Somewhere he could hear a clock ticking, forcing into insoluble firmness this intangible moment.

Suddenly James picked up the phone and punched in some numbers. He listened to the ringing and hung up when he heard the machine pick up. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. Looking at his watch he was surprised at how early it was, and disheartened, knowing it would be a long time before he slept. He forced down feelings of jealous rage.

He considered going downstairs to look for something to eat, but the thought of food immediately turned his stomach. A drink would be better, but there was nothing to drink in the house—he had already looked. There was only a bottle of wine in his suitcase that he had brought along as a gift.

He tried to think of a song, or a joke. Anything to dissipate the cloud that he felt growing around him, becoming more and more solid, more like a prison from which even his mind couldn’t escape. It was still early enough to call someone up to meet for a drink, if they could find a place that was open. But as he looked through his phone for numbers of old friends he realized that he didn’t have any, anymore. James felt suddenly grateful he had no numbers to call.

The door to James’ room was nudged open and he quickly pretended to be absorbed in something other than himself, thinking that it might be his mother or father coming to check on him. But it was just Rosie. She was sixteen years old now and moved with obvious difficulty. He wasn’t even sure how she had made it up the stairs. Rosie moved slowly around the room, as if inspecting it, sensing change but apparently ignorant of James’ presence. He picked her up and put her on the bed and she looked up at him with eyes that were clear despite her age and licked his hand. She had still seemed like a puppy the last time he saw her, but she had been attacked by a deer the previous summer and was never the same again. James held the dog on his lap and ruffled her hair, feeling the dent on top of her skull that still made her shiver and whine when he touched it.

James picked up the phone and hit redial and listened to a few rings before hanging up.

Putting Rosie on the bed James stood up and paced around the room a little to get his blood moving. The fire would be mostly out by now and the house was chilly and James felt suddenly cramped and desperate. Going for a walk in the snow felt embarrassingly poetic, but there was nothing else to do. Besides, it had been more than a day since he had been able to smoke. Putting on his shoes and coat, James took the bottle of wine out of his suitcase and slipped it out of its wrapping and into his pocket.

As he crossed the threshold into the hallway James glanced back and saw Rosie sleeping contentedly on the bed.

The faint glow of a fire in the woodstove gave off enough light to see his way to the door, casting glimmering shadows and a warm domestic illusion that was uncomfortable and alien to James. Crossing the chilly quiet of the living room James thought about all the times he had spent as a child wandering through the old house at night looking for home—the feeling of home, or at least its concept. He was no longer sure if it was that he had never found it, or that he had found it and had for some reason rejected it. He carefully opened the front door—his parents were light sleepers—and locked up behind himself out of habit, though no one else ever did.

Outside it was beginning to lightly snow, the unusually bright sky diffusing through the snow like a million tiny lanterns, like a light that had been left on for someone that was on their way home. In the yard stubborn summer bulbs jutted bare stalks up through the soil and the light blanket of snow.

James was already away from the house and up the road when he realized he had no way to open the wine bottle. He considered going back but decided against it. Placing the bottle flat on the road and using a key James tried push the cork into the bottle but slipped and cut his hand. He held the hand up to see how bad it was. Not bad, he thought. After a few more tries he heard the dull pop of the cork falling into the bottle.  He held up the bottle to his lips until he felt calm, feeling the wine course bitterly down his throat and then took a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and managed to light it without putting the bottle down.

He walked west along the road, his steps lit by tall streetlights that blended in among the white blanketed pines. In the distance he could hear the hollow sound of cars crossing a steel bridge, a steady hum that began to reverberate in his ears as he drank more wine. At some point the sound of the bridge faded away and there was silence, but it was an empty, devastating silence. As the snow began to accumulate James could hear the crunch of his steps under his feet and the sound comforted him, gave corporeal realness to his movements. He was not drifting like a ghost.

James walked for a while, drinking and trying to think of nothing. But the road began to oppress him with its linear morbidity; there was only the road behind him and the road in front of him. A path opened to James’ left and he walked down it, abandoning the bright road and the flutter of snowflakes that were illuminated in the wake of the streetlights.

Struggling to negotiate the terrain, James held his hand with the bottle out to his side. Under the canopy of trees there was only the faintest glimmer of light, just enough to guide him toward something for which he had no name. Some kind of freedom, a release of tension, or at least a subduing of the storm inside himself. Eventually the path opened up onto another road, this one without lights but with an open vantage of the sky that seemed now like a chasm. It was the same way when he had flown out of New York a few days ago. She was there to see him off, but when he looked back at the terminal gate it was like he couldn’t see her. Her body was there, as it had always been, but it seemed empty, like the insides had already gone off someplace unreachable to him. It had been that way for months, he realized. But he hadn’t known it at the time. All he knew was that each day she felt a little further away from him, until one day it was like she wasn’t there at all.

As he boarded the plane it felt like he was leaving life itself, and a yawning gulf of loneliness opened up in the sky and swallowed him and everything he had known. And though the plane had soared up into the sky, up into that floating gulf, it might as well have been pushed off a cliff to fall forever. Might still be falling.

James tipped the bottle of wine up and felt the last few drops hit his tongue, already becoming numb from the cold. He wound up and hurled the bottle up into the sky and listened for it to hit the pavement and shatter into a deafening completion. But there was no sound; there was only the silence of the night and the slight creaking of trees, murmuring to each other. He felt a sudden disappointment and went to find the bottle so that he could try again. But he couldn’t find it, so he had to settle for breaking some sticks he found by the road. But the sound of the sticks breaking was not what he wanted; it was less the sound of fulfillment and more the sick resonance of brittle bones being crushed.

James knew he was drunk now, but the freedom he wanted was not there. There was only the tightness in his chest and the empty dark night everywhere. He began retracing his steps back to his parents’ house. They still didn’t know about he and his wife’s separation. He meant to tell them but when the moment came it was too difficult and he made up an excuse for her absence. He knew he had to tell them, but not for a while. Not until he knew what he was going to do now.

His hand had begun to ache and he felt suddenly tired. He fought the urge to sit down in the snow and simply disappear in the blinding whiteness.

As he approached the driveway he noticed that the snow had piled up several inches, covering his steps and painting the world like a false diamond. Feeling for his keys, James sat on an overturned bucket next to the driveway to smoke a last cigarette before going back inside into the stifling silence. A bitter sense of incompleteness overcame James and he stuffed a handful of snow in his face, just to feel the crystalline coarseness, to will himself to a different place. But when he looked up he was still there. Snow fell on his face and in the distance he could hear the sounds of cars on the bridge, coming and going.

James took his phone out of his pocket and with difficulty dialed the number. When the answering machine picked up he expected to hear his own voice telling him he wasn’t home, but the voice wasn’t his, and would never be again. He wasn’t home, and there was no place in the world that was home. As he allowed himself to lie down in the snow he felt a weight had been removed from him, but he immediately missed that weight. There was nothing comforting about the lightness he felt now and he knew that he wouldn’t sleep.

I awoke with the usual affliction; not to say that there was but one, but this one in particular I knew from experience could only be remedied by a physical expression of the affliction’s desire, which is to say I awoke one fall morning feeling favorably disposed to some good-natured pranking. It was early, as per my stalwart regimen of self-abstinence. The sun seeped a honey of autumnal hues through the curtains as I carefully made my way down the stairs for breakfast. I have a unique method of stair negotiation—which I don’t care to get into at the moment—that is slow and tediously executed, but unusually safe.

Falling down—or up—the stairs would be a mistake, and I loathe mistakes.

The clock over the mantel told me it was only 11:20, and I commiserated the cost of my self-abstention. “To-day,” I boldly proclaimed to Titus Andronicus, who was otherwise occupied razing the houseplants, “is a day for something special. None of the usual baby-snatching or cane-greasing will do. Not today!” Titus Andronicus responded by tearing asunder a rare orchid my maid, Gertrude, had been grooming for some competition or another.
“Just so, my boy. Just so!”
I beat myself upon the chest with a solemn, if tender, fist, and continued my journey into the kitchen, leaving Titus Andronicus to recommence whatever it is that Irish wolfhounds do while I’m not around. Through a din of morning sunlight Gertrude fortified me with eggs and bacon, limiting me to five and ten respectively, in accordance with my regimen. Having finished, I belched and rose to see to my toiletry.

You should know that maintaining a gentleman’s dispensation is my primary concept, whether with my cape, my extraordinary moustaches, or my unique personal habits. But I fear I’ve said too much.

Sequestering myself in my bedroom, I disrobed and entered the bath, locking the door behind me. I tested the door for several minutes to assure myself of its integrity; I have learned from a scattering of disastrous situations that the sight of me embroiled in my grooming routine can be extremely upsetting to people, most notably while attending to my testicles, the maintenance of which consumes several hours each day. I’ve been known to orate vociferously, and generally without solicitation, upon the importance of seclusion while attending to my grooming routine, often elaborating on the extensive catalog of exotic tasks I inflict upon my body.
At length, satisfied with my hygiene and dress, I set about the task of fastening my cape and remembering to which side I prefer to part my hair. As I struggled with the cape I began to ruminate on the details of the day’s proposed chicanery. Remembering, sadly, that there were no details to ruminate on, I revisited my speech while maneuvering to the back door, which I prefer to the front for its safety. “No, nothing of the usual sort to-day. Today is a day for something especially hilarious and good-natured,” I thought, or said aloud as I descended the final steps before interfacing with the sidewalk for my daily stroll. Though I have a special method for walking with companions, which I may illuminate for you later, at this time I was walking alone.
Most of the time my neighbors can be found digging in the squalor of their yards—whether foraging for roughage or in pursuit of recreation, is a mystery to me. As I walked past, several of my neighbors paused their savagery to voice inanities such as “Good day, Mr. Furthermore,” or “How do you do, Mr. Furthermore?” all hastily securing both their children and their canes. The habits of my neighbors are wisely informed by previous experience with me and my joyful antics. I managed to make one trip around the block before returning home, happily exhausted.
Upon reentering my abode, I repaired immediately to my study to begin planning the day’s activities in earnest. I was at my desk, hunched over with the dignity of a rabbi, when Gertrude shuffled wearily into the room to announce the presence of a visitor. Gertrude, herself, is no stranger to my methods and suffers demonstratively with ruined nerves. As she entered, I looked up at Gertrude with an amicable grin, which caused her to shift her weight nervously and for her hands to tremble. The truth is, Gertrude once had a large family of her own: a husband, two sons, and a lovely daughter. In her darker moments, Gertrude has credited to my amicable grin the circumstances around each of their untimely departures, a misstep which only the quality of my character allows me to forgive.
The visitor to whom Gertrude had alluded was the Parson Graham, devoted churchman and all around prankster extraordinaire. It was, in fact, the selfsame Parson who was auteur of the great newborn mix-up of ’86, which was never successfully straightened out.

The Parson sometimes liked to joke that he was a prankster first and a man of the cloth second, but that was sufficiently evident to anyone in his acquaintance.

Having announced my visitor, Gertrude shuffled, perhaps even more wearily, out of my study, muttering beleaguered oaths for which I will have to punish her at the appropriate time. If there is one thing I cannot tolerate it is melancholy, especially when given expression, artistic or otherwise. Not a day passes that I don’t give thanks for having never been stricken by the abominable desire to express myself.
The first thing the Parson did upon entering the study of his long time friend and accomplice was to slip on a grease spot which I had placed purposefully before the door, and to gash his elbow on a nail whose presence was similarly motivated. Rising and dusting himself off, Parson Graham applied a handkerchief to his favored appendage, which was already beginning to weep. He then strode quickly towards my desk and thrust out his hand, which I shook warmly.
“Well played, then,” the Parson managed to utter between winces.
“Oh, that was nothing,” I waved my hand irreverently, “I meant it for Gertrude, actually. But the Lord does work in strange and mischievous ways, as you well know.”
“That I do, Sir.”
Parson Graham eased himself painfully into the chair across the desk from mine, but only after thoroughly and painstakingly examining it for a variety of potentially fateful modifications. The chair, as the Parson soon learned, had indeed been modified, and fate struck him a vicious blow as he plummeted backwards, slamming his lacerated elbow on the floor. Tears came to the Parson’s eyes as he struggled to his knees, backing slowly away from my desk.
Having heard the Parson’s shriek from the hallway where she was almost certainly cowering, Gertrude must have fought her maternal instinct and retreated to the pantry where she kept a bottle and wrote her poetry. Not a day goes by that I don’t have to set upon Gertrude for composing poetry in the secrecy of the pantry. Her poetry is miserable, though I’ve never taken the pains to read it.

All poetry is miserable.

After allowing Parson Graham a moment to compose himself at a safe distance from me, I began to relate my ambition for a truly hilarious and good-natured prank.
“It is almost as if God himself has spoken to me.”
“I believe He has, my old friend,” the Parson acquiesced, clutching the torn elbow of his sport-coat, which had begun to harden with blood.
“But still,” I said pensively, “there is the matter of the actual doing of the thing, not to mention the divination of what the thing is, exactly.”
“Yes, yes, there is that.” The Parson allowed.
Parson Graham is one of these gangly, awkward fellows who manages to spring any trap within his vicinity, no matter the intended victim. In fact he often succeeds in stumbling into calamities not designed by man. For the next several minutes he did just this, upsetting bookshelves, piercing himself with a letter opener that was put safely away in a drawer, and generally destroying what was left of his wardrobe.
I was at the point of allowing confusion and apprehension to poison my thoughts when Titus Andronicus burst into the room and saved my peace of mind. Obviously as in the mood for fun as I was, Titus Andronicus began cutting a swath through the study, sparing neither vase nor lamp. I leapt to my feet and clapped with delight, though I soon noticed that my companion did not share my delight. Once the hound had tired of destroying mere objects he began to seek game in a more animated fashion, which inexorably led him to Parson Graham. If the braying weren’t enough for the Parson, there was also the jumping and the clawing to contend with. The ordeal soon began to visibly affect the Parson’s humor. Sensing the decline in my friend’s morale, I hollered at the beast and it let off terrorizing the Parson, for which he was grateful.
I entreated the Parson to bow heads and submerge in meditation with me, which he did slowly and with a measure of indignity.
“Well, there’s always…” he began, but I promptly truncated his line of thought.
“No, no,” I stated flatly, “I’ve bored of child-snatching.”
“What about…”
“Nothing involving babies, I already told you! Don’t mention it again.” I was beginning to lose patience.

It is in moments of frustration such as these that I become afflicted with the burden of my memories: of days spent wallowing by the heady stream of childhood; of love lost, only to hang unreachable in the gauze of the past, which is never so far away as one would like it to be.

In order to combat this mental palsy, I try to conceive of life as a single, fluid motion: uninterrupted symmetry and perfection; and I silently mourn the loss of this perfection, as I mourn the loss of loved ones now absent (as though they weren’t already dead in my heart). Then it is in bed at night, plunged in the entropy of darkness and the rapture of vertigo, that I excoriate myself for such thoughts. Then there are the certain memories that stubbornly refuse to be censured, such as my once formidable desire to sing. Luckily I now have no one for whom I would like to sing, even if I could. There was once a soul who was admittedly desirous of my song, but I was loathe to admit my inability and called off the engagement. Besides, I wisely choose not to believe a word spoken to me, especially on the subject of love. But I mustn’t speak of these things lest I risk alienating people. Forgive me.
The Parson suggested that we take a walk, to clear our heads and perhaps gain some inspiration. I allowed myself to be taken, though I had already had a walk, as it would give me the opportunity to outline for you the theory behind my method for walking with companions, which is as follows:
When walking with a companion, I place myself somewhat behind and to the left of said companion, that being the advantageous position should said companion make any false movements. If said companion should be of the female persuasion, I often extend the distance between her and myself, as women are known to export not only strange and troubling odors, but various of their bodily limbs and digits for the purpose of clinching or being clinched (the extent of this spatial extension reflecting a mathematically proportionate relationship to the specific degree of said woman’s odor and likelihood of limb clinching). The logistics of walking with a female companion while avoiding both her odor and potential romantic assaults are flummoxing to the extreme and tiresome in general, which is why I habitually decline to walk with a female companion unless absolutely unavoidable. It is important to keep in mind that, while walking in such a way with a female, one must be prepared for on-site interrogations such as “Why on earth are you walking all the way back there?”
Should your walking companion be a man, one must maintain appropriate distance that the public does not perceive one as being a homosexual, but not such a great distance that one gives the impression of avoiding a homosexual appearance and therefore being guilty, in fact, of being a homosexual. Walking with a male companion is also very exhausting, and generally unrewarding, which is why I often choose to avoid walking with men as well as women. Also, when walking with a companion of either gender, one will invariably invite the public to make certain assumptions regarding the social affiliation between oneself and one’s companion, which is usually disadvantageous to one’s respectability.
When one weighs the combined threat of damage to one’s reputation, exposure to foul odors and conversation, likelihood of bodily harm (not to mention that most abhorred of all grievances: affection), one will surmise that walking with any companion of any gender under any circumstances is imprudent and inadvisable, and should be attempted only after absolution and with the most fatalistic of attitudes. But, should one find it unavoidably necessary to walk with a companion (of either gender), one should practice caution to the extreme: always maintain a safe distance between oneself and one’s companion, keeping a vigilant observation of one’s surroundings, a constant eye for obstacles, avenues of escape, and native objects sufficiently blunt for cranial violence, should it become necessary; and lastly, by always keeping one’s hands secretly balled into fists within one’s pockets. It is in this manner, and this manner alone, that one may avoid falling victim to the many perils of the companioned walking expedition.
The Parson himself is a proselyte of my walking philosophy, and therefore any occasion on which we walk together inexorably succumbs to chaos, and sometimes violence.

The sight of us walking together, each trying desperately to place ourselves behind and to the left of the other, hands thrust purposefully within our pockets, has often proved a source of ridicule for many members of the public. I shall have to punish them.

Eventually I succeeded in asserting my position behind the Parson, though I must have been walking too closely behind him because he kept stepping on the toes of my shoes and excusing himself, both of us nearly falling over on several occasions, and without the use of our hands to balance us. We hadn’t made it a block before calling the whole thing off.
Depression was again threatening to intervene in my joyfulness, as it is wont to do. I fought the old feeling as best I could, though the only true remedy is to execute a successful—and potentially fatal—prank. Parson Graham must have been experiencing a similar emotion, for we had both stopped and were merely standing on the sidewalk facing each other, eyes locked in mutual suspicion. Within my pocket I had my fingers wrapped around a small but heavy stone that I didn’t tell you about previously in case you, yourself, should try anything foolish. I pride myself on being prepared for virtually any contingency.
There is only one solution I know of when two minds as coldly impenetrable as the Parson’s and mine become locked in such a perambulatory stalemate, and that is that both parties must walk backwards with their eyes closed. Though the only way to be sure that your companion has his or her eyes closed is to keep your own eyes, which are secretly open, trained on those of your companion. Of course, when dealing with a companion such as the Parson, whose wit nearly equals my own, one must assume that they will be doing the same thing. In which case the only thing left to do is squint very convincingly and try to out-bluff your companion.
You can imagine that while engaged in such a vertiginously complex system of checks-and-balances it would have been impossible for either of us to see the old woman shambling behind us with the aid of a cane, clutching a child to her withered breast. Nor would it have been possible for me to avoid shoving the Parson into her once I had discovered her presence, sending the whole mess—minus the infant who I managed to extract—into the thoroughfare. It was only by lucky coincidence that there happened to be an automobile coming along at just that moment which struck both the Parson and the old woman. Sagely weighing the scenario, I decided that the only prudent thing for me to do was to take the child, which wasn’t actually that horrible to look at, back to my house.
When I entered the house, using the front door at the sacrifice of my own safety, I called out to Gertrude to come relieve me of the child. It was to my consternation that she did not appear. Assuming her to be hidden away in the pantry, nursing a bottle and scribbling a few flawed lines, I placed the infant on a very high table so that it would not be tempted to jump and went in pursuit of the truant Gertrude. I was in the vestibule when I noticed the note on a table next to the remains of an orchid. The note was poorly written, and I managed to decipher it only by reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom; read any other way the thing was incomprehensible. The poor woman was obviously mad, of that there could be no further doubt. Her prose was all twisted up into a meaningless arabesque like one of these suicide notes you hear about. Could it be? I re-read the note, trying desperately to extract a drop of meaning from the florid bramble. I held the note up to the child’s face, hoping for a broadening of perspective. From the child’s dumbness I could only deduce that it was practicing an infantile form of Socratic irony on me. I clutched the baby off the table and was standing there with the thing stuck to my arm, wondering what to do with it, when I heard a hollow moan, punctuated with brief sobs and painful sounding hiccups.

Gertrude suddenly emerged from the pantry with a noose around her neck, hanging like a cheap cravat.

Gazing up at me, Gertrude looked impossibly old, as I must have looked to her. Shadows thrown across the walls, the din of Titus Andronicus tearing things up somewhere. Though wretched as Gertrude may be, it would be unfair to omit the fact that she might be considered beautiful to those inclined to such considerations, which I am not.
As is typical with a mother (or former-mother, as the case may be), Gertrude’s eyes were drawn immediately to the child I held in my arms, which I quickly delivered into her own. Tears came to Gertrude’s eyes as she cradled the babe I had just given her, and I magnanimously retreated to my study without waiting for the gratuities of affection that were surely forthcoming. When it comes down to it, I have a heart of silk taffeta and cannot refuse anyone anything when it means his or her happiness. In fact, there was a time when I might have considered making certain declarations to Gertrude, but it’s too late for that now. Matters of the heart are better left to those more qualified than I.
Outside a heavy rain had begun to fall, and from the window of my study I could see down onto the street where the Parson and the old woman were struggling moistly to drag themselves clear of the traffic, which hadn’t time to slow down for them. All in all I had to consider the day a tremendous success. Lowering the blinds to grant the Parson and his new acquaintance their privacy, I leaned back in my chair feeling almost contented, my wretched memory relaxing its claws a bit.
I considered telling Gertrude how I had placed the faulty noose in the pantry as a joke, but I suspected the knowledge that her suicide’s failure was a fait accompli might compel her to try again, and I couldn’t afford to lose her. Not to mention that it would offer her little consolation, and in life, a little consolation is all one can hope for.

When people see Deborah they stop to talk to her, such are the perks, and curses, of being a chili-wife—or chili-widow, as they sometimes refer to themselves in moments of grim jocularity. They are the wives of Schilling’s Chili™ executives. Deborah herself is top widow, the ne plus ultra of chili-wives. It wasn’t always so; she could have been a soup-wife, or even salsa-wife (there was that strange night on the veranda with Don Pancho). But Deborah is a chili-wife, and proud. She is a chili-mother as well, with four partially grown chili-kids.
See Deborah maneuver her new Chrysler Sebring convertible around the familiar curves of the neighborhood, the dull brown greens of August lawns and faded roofs framing the hastily constructed houses with their walls of tracing paper, each one a simulacrum of the previous, or vice-versa. Deborah watches herself giving it maybe more gas than necessary out of the turns, the wheel sliding silkily through her fingers; certain liberties in technique are to be expected, it is a Chrysler after all.

Deborah watches the houses grow and recede on the screen of her windshield, palpitating through the goal posts of her hands and sliding away behind her as if they were moving and she were still.

Soon she realizes that she is no longer looking beyond her hands but right at them where they rest on the steering wheel. Her fingernails don’t quite match the red of the car’s exterior.
Outside the car the air swarms with late summer life, and is fraught with the consequential annoyances: bees, mosquitoes, children not sent to one or another of the many summer-camps designed to accommodate their unique abilities, or lack thereof. Deborah’s two boys are off at lifeguard camp for the summer. Like many women, Deborah knows from experience the special dispensation afforded lifeguards in the way of female relations, and providing that for her boys is just one of the many kindnesses she did for them that they knew nothing about. The boys take after their father, they could use the help.
The girls, 13 and 15, are disposed to refusing absolutely everything, so naturally they were doing nothing but sitting around the house all summer, stalking the hallways like ghosts. At least they seem miserable doing it, Deborah considers with some satisfaction.
The Schillings’ neighbors are mostly older couples who have apparently chosen to spend the little time left to them hosing down their driveways.

Often for hours at a time they stand—or sit, on lawn-chairs with aggressive colors and prints—their preposterous knees sagging like testicles, water flowing down the drives and collecting orgies of swirling debris.

Deborah assumes they’re merely trying to drain a few last resources before ultimately signing off, as if life owes them something they’re determined to recover in the form of wasted city-water. If she were the environmentally concerned type Deborah would be outraged.
It rained last night and is threatening to do so again, so the neighborhood and its driveways are deserted by all but the most dedicated hosers. The sky opens here and there in places, the murky presence of clouds allowing certain blades of light to pierce the branches of transplanted elms whose weary hands extend across the road, breaking the light into fragments, casting bars and jagged penumbra over the damp asphalt and over the hood of Deborah’s car.
Tom the security guard smiles and waves as Deborah speeds past, barely missing the automatic gate, which isn’t quite as attentive as she would like. This is a gated community. Gated meaning a tangible, physical barrier between Deborah’s daughters and the kind of guys she used to date before Walter. The kind of guys she might have married if they hadn’t been incarcerated. The kind of guys who subsequently mailed their bad poetry from prison, where it collected in a certain drawer.
Deborah grips the wheel tightly out of habit as she approaches the shopping district; the public’s din all around her even with the top up. She takes the long route to the store, driving back and forth past the shops before pulling into the parking lot, working to achieve the cheerfully inattentive yet resolutely concerned expression she likes to wear while shopping.
Parking in an obscure corner of the lot, Deborah pushes a button on the car’s console, causing the top to slowly open. She fishes around in her red leather purse until she finds a pack of cigarettes, with a book of matches tucked into the plastic slip. She hadn’t smoked for ten years until recently when for no particular reason she found that she physically could not keep herself from buying a pack. Walter doesn’t know that she has started smoking again. The secret is like a little shroud of comfort she wears around herself that no one but her can see. And it’s not like she’s cheating on him.
She takes a cigarette from the pack and lights a match, not wanting to leave evidence on the car’s built-in lighter. The first match goes out immediately. She throws the dead match on the ground and strikes another one, watching the flame change color several times before it ultimately rests on the yellowish, bluish, reddish color typically associated with flame. The clouds have suddenly gone without Deborah’s noticing, the whole sky opened up like something sure. She inhales deeply, almost too deeply. The smoke feels good in her lungs, solid; it was a goodness you could measure and keep written records of, if you wanted. She smokes the whole cigarette this way, feeling each drag all the way as the sun beats down.
After she’s finished Deborah throws the butt on the ground and pushes another button on the console and the top goes back up, clicking into place. Walking across the parking lot Deborah feels unbearably light, like she might suddenly float up into that lonely blue.

In the air-conditioned insularity of the grocery store Deborah and other women like her stroll up and down aisles, baffled by products only children can understand.

There is a feeling of ease knowing they’re tucked away for the summer, parents going about lives children couldn’t possibly be interested in, unrestrained by the preternatural understanding unique to children. While gazing at the endless selection of peanut butter someone taps Deborah’s shoulder. It is Sally Haines, the wife of one of Walter’s colleagues. She has clearly been to the salon recently, her graying bob reborn as a blond-streaked disaster.
“Wow,” Deborah says, “your hair looks great. Where do you go?” She reaches out and pinches a piece of Sally’s shirt fabric.
Sally says a name to her that Deborah doesn’t hear. The coif is so bad that Deborah nearly doesn’t notice the two recently augmented breasts practically popping out of Sally’s top. Like captives the breasts swell upwards, reaching, in an attitude of escape. It occurs to Deborah that fake breasts are always trying to get away from their owners, like mistreated pets.
Sally fills Deborah in on the Widows’ plan to have cocktails at her house later.
“Fine, I’ll see you ladies then.” Deborah answers, already in motion, feeling an intense desire to get away. She has something in common with Sally’s breasts, she thinks.
A sheepish looking teenager carts Deborah’s purchases out to the car, haphazardly stacking them in the trunk. Struggling with a body he doesn’t understand and distraught by something he is just beginning to, his obvious lack of post-adolescent ardor for her is a source of some consternation. She imagines herself with bigger breasts.
People wave to Deborah through a windshield glittering with crazy life. Fractal glimpses joined through reflection into a hazy kind of coherence. Trees, cars, other people; a world whispering by—stray pets whose insouciance enrages Deborah. Get a Job! she wants to scream at everyone and everything. Am I the only one who’s afraid?
She curses at herself for shopping before going to the carwash: Walter’s ice cream is going to suffer. Though once within the hermetic confines of the wash she is filled with something like solace, these brief moments of meditation. Nothing bad can touch her here. Sometimes Deborah wishes the wash would malfunction, keeping her here forever; an endless cycle of cleansing.
Deborah thinks of her husband: Walter Schilling, CEO of Schilling’s Chili™, a decent man, patient father and bona fide chili vivant, even if not especially dangerous or powerful about the chest and arms. Walter had been there for Deborah, giving her a dream when she had none of her own. That dream was chili, and all that it entailed.
“Mom, you don’t understand the kind of pressure I’m under as a chili-wife,” Deborah is telling her mother as she puts away groceries, realizing that out of everything she bought there still really isn’t anything to eat. Charlotte Darling calls up every other day essentially, Deborah knows, to make sure her daughter hasn’t fucked everything up.
The groceries put away, Deborah paces the house on a cordless phone while talking to her mother, looking into closets and under chairs for no reason; roaming up and down stairs and hallways, visually reclaiming anything she might have forgotten. Unlike most middleclass homes theirs is absent the usual flotilla of family photographs. There is something about pictures that Deborah finds morbid.
“You think you can talk to me about pressure? I lost your father to extension-cords before you were even born!”
Deborah has to cede this point to her mother, for the thousandth time. Harry Darling’s devotion to the extension-cord trade had seamlessly crossed the border from enthusiasm to mania, causing him to have only a sporadic presence in Deborah’s childhood. Towards the end of his life, while writing his soon to be self-published memoirs, A life by Extension, Harry would rarely emerge from his “study”, and when he did was willing to speak only on cord related topics.
“It’s just that he’s been so distant lately. He says it’s nothing, but I know in my heart that it’s the chili. Mom, I think it’s killing him. Maybe it’s killing us.”

At the mention of death Deborah’s mother perks up considerably, but can no longer be trusted to focus on the subject.

Rather than offer wisdom or consolation, as Deborah had hoped, Charlotte summarizes the many travesties taking place in her neighborhood, including some minutia involving the Widow Crabtree and her stepson that Deborah could easily have done without.
After hanging up the phone Deborah has just enough time to perfunctorily clean up the bathroom, that ground zero of peer derision, and change into a pair of lightweight gray slacks and a white cardigan. Looking at herself in the mirror she gets the impression of having a lot of loose ends. She smoothes down her hair and her clothes, but still there is something unkempt that bothers her. She considers changing again but then the doorbell rings.
From the moment they arrive, suddenly all together as if they had car-pooled—which they would never do—Deborah senses something conspiratorial about them. Sally’s new breasts lead them through the house and out to the patio, which the afternoon sun has dried well enough for sitting. After serving the first batch of margaritas Deborah sits with her companions at the patio table, the canvas deck-chair creaking the way it always did after getting wet and dry again. Martine was already criticizing one thing or another, flipping her little boy’s haircut in staccato punctuations of whatever she was saying.
“I told Larry, if you’re going to insist on driving that heap around, at least park it in back so people don’t see it. I mean for God’s sake, the mailman drives in better style. The fucking mailman!””
“You know I always had a thing for mailmen,” Sally is saying, “those little shorts…”
“What about Fed-Ex? They have those darling vests.”
“UPS…”

Deborah looks around her backyard, the grass dying under the pretense of conservation, the ants swarming over everything, the almost complete lack of plants.

She always meant to do more with the yard, get some flowers or an herb-garden at least, but she never seemed to have the time. Why didn’t she have the time? What did she do that precluded her from having the time to plant things? She couldn’t figure it out.
“Pithzza delivery boysth?” Mary suddenly blurts out. Mary is Walter’s younger sister, and though she is not technically a widow, she likes to tag along with Deborah and her friends at their “tea parties”.
“At leastht then you can get a meal out of it.”
“Oh, Mary!” Martine exclaims, nearly choking on margarita in what seems a calculated effort, her short hair never motionless. “You are so funny! Sometimes I wonder what on Earth could have happened to you to make you so funny, you poor thing.”
Deborah rocks slowly in her seat, feeling the creaking of the canvas, listening for certain tones, trying to sustain them. She has already finished a drink and is halfway through her second. She hadn’t planned on getting drunk, but sometimes the news is good, as they say.
“Deborah, what on earth are you doing?” Martine suddenly noticing Deborah’s experiment. “You look like a crazy person, rocking back and forth like that. Should we get you a nightgown and a journal, or would you rather stay here with us?”
Deborah laughs and pulls a cigarette from the pack she has in her cardigan pocket. Martine reaches out for the pack after Deborah and shares the flame of Mary’s lighter.
“Cigarettes are vile,” Martine says, drawing deeply on the smoke and forcing it out in a burst through pursed lips, as if blowing an acrid kiss.
No one seems to notice that Deborah has started smoking again, as if the last ten years were pieces of fabric folded up and sewn down the middle, the two halves joining while the middle is still there but hidden from sight. It’s a pleasant feeling. While she smokes with her right hand, Deborah smashes ants with her left, feeling them crush between her fingertips. Afterwards she smells her fingers, that singular smell of smashed ants, sickly sweet like certain foreign foods.
At 5:30 p.m. she meets her husband at the racquet-club. If volatile in the boardroom, Walter is a menace on the tennis-court, his anger and vulgarity reaching a level of absurdity, considering his beginner status. He lurches across the court, jabbing his racket, his body violently out of control, spewing epithets of a character unknown in his off-court life.

For most club members the sight of Walter Schilling playing tennis is a thing to be feared and despised, but Deborah is continually surprised to find her self charmed by it.

Deborah, who more or less grew up at the country club, plays with practiced ease. Approaching adroitly, passing unreachable lobs over her husband’s shoulder, firing overheads down the lines, all exacerbating Walter’s mirthless rampage.
Though today something is different, her shots are going into the net, serves are going wide and she’s missing overheads altogether. She realizes she is drunk, drunker than she thought she was. Walter doesn’t seem to notice, too distracted by this rare success on the court—which Deborah imagines he is probably thinking of as his ‘relentless onslaught’ or some such aggrandizement. She is getting frustrated, not just wanting to win but mortally afraid of losing. She loses the first set in straight games. Anyone but Walter would realize that something aside from his own will was determining the outcome of the match, but Deborah can tell from the look on his face that behind it someone or something thinks it’s in control.
“Motherfucker!” Deborah cries, putting the final point into the net, the ball striking the tape squarely and popping like a gunshot heard from far away.
“That’s match, Deb.” Walter says sprightly, bounding toward the net.
“Don’t you think I know that!”
Afterwards walking to their separate cars the parking lot is a miasma of rotting leaves that have fallen prematurely. Sickly human, faintly of urine, the smell fills Deborah with the sense of foreboding she feels whenever the seasons show signs of converging. The thought occurred to her: you could just go away. It was possible. I could just disappear—start all over from scratch. As the reality of that idea set in she nearly jumped, so startled she was by her train of thought. Then she started laughing, softly at first but then hysterically. Then she realized that someone was looking at her from the car with which she was parked nose-to-nose, it was Walter. He looked strange and suspicious. He probably thought she was making fun of him; maybe she had let him win just to torment him and now she was having a good laugh about it. Deborah decided she would let him think that, if he wanted. She started the car and backed up, giving her horn a light tap as a signal of something.
Summer dinnertime draws a striking disparity from the usual junta of hungry teenagers, and the peace is nearly stifling. The girls are both lingering in their rooms refusing to eat and Deborah is too tired to do anything about it. Besides, it means she doesn’t have to make anything. Walter, too preoccupied to care, picks through the fridge for leftovers while Deborah eats a salad in the living room. Contrary to the popular opinion that there is nothing on television, Deborah finds nearly everything on those hundreds of channels interesting. She isn’t sure if it’s her or everyone else that’s wrong.

Walter comes into the living room with a beer and a sandwich made up of Deborah can’t tell what. He’s still wearing his sweaty tennis clothes, almost certainly to antagonize her.

The pale blaze of a summer afternoon fades languorously through the windows, splashing the sofa with autumnal hues.
Walter nearly has a fit when he suspects that his wife, while flipping aimlessly through the channels, has skipped over a James Bond movie. Walter, who apparently had never seen a movie until meeting Deborah, missed out on James Bond when he was younger, and now he was more or less obsessed. He forces her to retrace her steps only to discover that the program in question is a made for TV movie about a cold-war era assassin who suddenly finds himself a single father. Walter and Deborah agree that the movie, which is airing incongruously on the Lifetime network, couldn’t possibly appeal to anyone. Over an hour later they realize that they have watched the whole thing, and that they both liked it.
After dinner Deborah tries to entreat her husband by discussing his work. Initiating a dialog on bean-chili, she asks the fatal question: how many beans are too many? It is Deborah’s opinion that four is the optimal number, anything more being excessive and possibly immoral. This opinion makes her something of an iconoclast in what is largely a five-bean community.

Where he once would have become animated, Walter is totally unreachable, but for the demonstrative shudders which overcome his entire body whenever an unqualified mind extemporizes itself on the subject of bean-chili.

After showering and putting on pajamas they read silently in bed while the girls bicker upstairs, the cold scent of vapor-rub wafting prodigiously from Walter’s chest. Walter, who has suffered from an unidentifiable ague all summer, has just shut off his bedside lamp and gone through his arduous routine of settling into the covers when Deborah pokes him on the shoulder.
“Baby?”
“…yea…”
“Baby, are you awake?”
“Deb? Yes, what?”
“Baby, we need to talk.”
Walter reluctantly sits up, loathe to entertain any discussion that begins with those words. “Oh, god. Is one of us having an affair?”
“No Dear, nothing like that. It’s just that, Baby, are you listening? It’s just that, ‘cause I know something is wrong. I just want you to tell me, is it the chili? Is it the Stagg people? Are they bothering you again?”
“Goddamnit!” Walter erupts, his apprehensions finding a home in domestic outrage. “Why does everything have to be about the chili? Did I bring up the chili? Why talk about chili?”
“But the Stagg people…”
“Fuck the Stagg people! Yea, I said it. You know what? Maybe I’m sick to death of chili! Maybe I don’t ever want to see or hear about chili ever again!” Walter himself seems shocked at the ballast of his conviction, and seems to be softly crying.
“But Baby, your whole life has been about chil…”
“Don’t say it! Don’t say the word, I mean it. If you so much as utter that word again, I swear to God, I’m getting up and walking out of here.”
“What about the kids?”
“To hell with the kids!”
“Walter! How could you even say that?”
“Ok, ok. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. But really, Deb, don’t ever say…it…again. In fact, I signed paperwork this afternoon, if you really want to know. I sold our shares, we’re out of the business.”
“You did all this after tennis? Were you even going to tell me?”
“Before tennis, and I did just tell you.”
“Not the Stagg people?”

“Baby, seriously, please don’t mention the Stagg people.”

“Well what are you going to do then? What are we going to do?”
Walter sits up and switches his lamp back on. In the spectral glow of 80 watts Deborah can see the look, as if beamed from the far shores of ecstasy. The look is a dangerous pouring out of the old mortal tonic, an invitation to chaos through abstract thought as a means of domestic and spiritual renewal. It is the look she married, but at the moment it is terrifying.
“Now Baby, just hear me out.” Walter pleads.
Deborah’s mind is quickly succumbing to the entropy of a life uncategorized by manufactured consumables. What was she if not a chili-wife? Just a plain wife? Just a plain mother? What were their dreams if not chili dreams?
“Deb, are you listening?”
“Yea, sure…” Deborah mouths breathlessly.
Walter climbs to his knees and faces his wife, holding her shoulders with firm, chili tempered hands, the mentholated vapors of his chest nearly blinding her. It is the closest thing to an actual embrace either one of them has experienced in recent memory.
“Are you ready? There is just one word, one word, and I want you to hear it with an open mind. Do you want to hear it?”
Deborah nods, her mental state hovering near total apoplexy.
“Plastic.” Walter says it smoothly, the hissing vortex leading from the pliant grounding of the word to the punctuated tic of its finale—pl-aa-ss-tic—massaging Deborah’s mind with its slick durability.
“Plastic?”
“Plastic.” Walter repeats, the even gravity of his voice leaving no further room for confusion.
Deborah is quiet, and Walter is quiet waiting for Deborah to stop being quiet.
“Baby, don’t take this the wrong way, but did you just watch The Graduate for the first time?”
Walter’s face tightens, half masking a guilty expression whose superlative innocence Deborah finds moving, beside herself. Somehow there is a quality in that innocence that is so much more than palliative.
Plastic-wife. Plastic-mom. Plastic-widow? Deborah allows a surging to fill her breast, an impression of movement. As if she, the room, the house, the whole world were gaining momentum, moving away from the darkness and towards something bright and forever. Plastic. It really was such a strong word, resounding of power and permanence.
“Deb?” Walter looks his wife in the eyes, which are twinkling with moisture either from joy or vapor-rub, or possibly both. “What do you think, Deb?”
Deborah allows several moments to pass quietly, merely nodding her head the way people do when they want to give the impression of thought, pretending for some reason that she isn’t consumed with joy.
“Ok, Baby. If that’s what you want then of course I support you. And I’m glad we had this talk, but I do think you should go upstairs and apologize to the girls.”
“Apologize? For what?”
“For what? For saying they should go to hell, of course.”
“I didn’t really say they should go to hell, merely that they could go to hell. Besides, I’ll bet they didn’t even hear me.”
“Wally…”
“Oh, ok.”
Walter plies himself from the bed and walks to the door of their bedroom. Pausing as if having made a decision he turns quickly around and walks back to the bed and takes Deborah by the shoulders, hoisting her somewhat, kissing her deeply, squeezing her breasts, their eyes as he pulls away meeting as if for the first time.
“I love you, Deb.”
“I love you too, Wall.”
As Walter goes upstairs to apologize to the girls, who always hear everything, Deborah lies back and allows one hand to submerge beneath the blankets. Soon her boys will be back and everything will resume its chaotic normalcy, but right now she is young and quiet and in love. This could last forever, she thinks.