Chapter 44
I stab the country fried chicken with my fork and shove a bite into my mouth while I dial Mom.
I can’t chew. The chicken tastes like wood chips.
It slides back out of my mouth and onto the TV tray.
The phone rings. I try for some corn instead and force myself to swallow.
I need to get something in my body besides Gushers.
Those and a half a brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart are all I’ve been able to eat in the two days since he left on spring break.
“Hello? Hon? Can ya hear me?” Mom asks before I have time to say anything, like she’s confused about what exactly a phone is and how it works. Or maybe she’s just confused that I’m calling. I don’t do it often. Not since I was thirteen and I called to tell her our AC was broken.
“Fine, I’ll call the handyman,” she snapped in a haggard, hopeless tone that I knew wasn’t about me.
It was about her crap life and all the pieces of it that wouldn’t stop falling apart.
I understood in that moment how shitty it was to be an adult.
Or a poor one at least. Always underwater with life’s nuisances.
Solving problems you didn’t make with money you don’t have.
I didn’t want to add any more nuisances to her day.
Still don’t. But today I need to. I need someone. I thought about calling Frannie, but she’s in Missouri at her parents’ lake house, jumping off decks and singing campfire songs and eating watermelon and hot dogs fresh off the grill, bubbly and sun-soaked.
“Hon, can you hear me?” Mom asks again.
“Yeah. Hi, Ma.”
“Well is everything okay? Tony’s grabbin’ some popcorn but our movie’s about to start.”
“Everything’s…”
I stop before my voice cracks.
He brought me a bouquet of lilacs as a parting gift before he left for his trip and I said they were beautiful and he said I was beautiful.
We had sex in the back of his car and afterward we looked at the stars and as he brushed my hair absentmindedly with his fingers, I could tell he was somewhere else.
I even asked him, twice, if something was the matter.
And he said no. But I knew something was.
The air doesn’t get thicker for no reason.
“While I’m out of town, can we email instead of text?” he asked. “I’ll be stuck in a shoebox hotel room. Email’s more discreet.”
He read my face and added, “But only if you’re okay with it.” Even though he knew I would be. If I wasn’t okay with it, I wouldn’t have access to him at all. I had to be okay with it.
“That’s fine. Email it is.”
“Wonderful,” he said. “In fact, tell you what. I’ll write you as soon as I land.”
But he landed last night. 8:20 p.m. Almost twenty-four hours ago.
I tracked his flight. And still nothing in my inbox.
My mind’s gone to the worst places. Flashes of him in a high-rise New York City hotel room with crushed velvet curtains, fucking Gwen because that’s what you do when you save up for a trip with your wife.
You put pressure and expectation on it and you get your money’s worth by rekindling the spark that died long ago.
Or at least pretending to rekindle it, the way anyone can when they’re two glasses of wine deep in their best derbies on their way back from a Broadway show, tipsily swiping their hotel room key.
She pulls her unmentionables out of the suitcase and throws them on in the bathroom while he grabs a shot bottle of Grey Goose out of the minibar, worrying that he may have tapped some other shot bottles in his efforts and that he’ll be charged for them but figuring he’ll call the front desk to dispute the charges later.
He chugs the Grey Goose, thinking that right now, she’s more important.
They’re more important. The reason for this whole overpriced fucking trip is more important.
To rekindle the spark. Or pretend to. So he jams his half-soft erection into her and she moans her counterfeit moan until mid-coital, something shifts.
The performance starts to take, and become real, and in each other’s gaze they see reflected all the love they thought they’d lost but realize they’re still fighting for.
I can’t compete with that. What am I gonna do, send him nudes?
It’s so feeble and simultaneously overreaching.
A jpeg of my tits sent over Gmail. So instead I sit here in Alaska, the most libidoless state, the state of moose and bears and frostbite and boring, ugly people, waiting for him to reach out, trying to ignore the twisted, acidic feeling in my gut that tells me he won’t.
I’ve thought about emailing him. I’ve drafted two.
One an angrier, more aggressive hue. The other the more xoxo, no worries if not! type. The bifurcation of every woman. The split personalities.
I’ve refrained from sending them, just barely. I know that that would be a step too far. It would be too much. The way men become paralyzed by any whiff of a woman’s more disturbing emotions. The way they can’t tolerate being needed. Or even, sometimes, wanted.
“Honey, you there?” Mom asks, and I let her voice wash over me, and for a second I feel soothed. Just her voice is enough. It doesn’t matter if she gets me or doesn’t, is present with me or isn’t, our biological connection transcends our fundamental disconnection.
“This damn phone,” she says. “I think we’re breakin’ up, doll, I can’t hear you…”
“No, the phone’s not—I stopped talking.”
“Tony, wouldja get me a Diet Coke? Oh you already paid? Never mind then!” she calls out. “Sorry hon, what was that?”
“Nothing. It’s okay.”
“Well why’d ya call, doll? Is everything alright?” she asks, and then, in the pause, her tone shifts with realization. “What’s goin’ on, sweetheart?”
“Come on, babe! We’ve gotta hurry. Previews started,” Tony shouts half-drunk from somewhere beyond.
“Sweetheart?” Mom asks again.
“Uh, nothing,” I say. “Just wanted to say hi.”
“Oh, well that’s so nice, hon…”
“Babe!” Tony calls again.
“I’m so sorry, my sweet, I’ve gotta run,” she says. “I’ll probably swing by the place in the morning if you’ll be around? We could talk? Catch up?”
“Sure, sounds good.”
“I got you some of those country fried chicken TV dinners. That good brand you like, not the skimpy kind.”
“I saw. I’m eating one right now.”
“Oh, good good.”
“BABE!”
“I’m comin’, Tony!” she shouts. “I gotta run. Love you, honey.”
She hangs up. I chuck my country-fried chicken in the trash. It’s a shame. It was the good brand.