Day Twenty-Six #2
“You have to make a reasonable effort to serve a spouse with divorce papers,” Larry continued. “If you don’t know where to contact them, you have to advertise a month or two in a paper that’s local to their last known address.”
“Really?” Jesse asked, horrified. He couldn’t imagine admitting such a thing to the entire Coachella Valley.
Help, I can’t find my husband! In newsprint?
He didn’t know that many locals, or people who still read a newspaper, but his neighbor, Randall, would certainly see. What if his students did, too?
“There you go,” Luisa said, somewhat triumphantly. “Personally, I’d take out a front-page ad.”
“Or maybe there’s a place to do it online.
Facebook, or something. Either way, he had to request permission from the court to proceed this way.
I remember that. But otherwise, I didn’t press.
We all wanted the focus to be on Charles and his retirement.
” Larry directed his next bit at Jesse. “Charles taught environmental horticulture here for forty-one years.”
Luisa kicked her chair back under the table, and it made a horrible scraping sound. “I’ll let you get back to work.”
Jesse smiled politely and watched until he was sure she had gone, waved his thanks to Larry, mostly to make sure he understood their interaction was through, checked his phone for the time, and returned to writing.
After a few terrible months, Snowball and I negotiated a fragile peace given that we were both a bit scared of each other.
We would snarl at times, but also collapse together when exhausted, a pile of limbs on a couch, too tired to care.
I don’t think Mom regretted her decision, she may even have thought her plan was working; there was something about Snowball, despite his name, that toughened me up.
But it’s not possible to outrun irony, and one day Snowball came home carrying the neighbor kid’s dead guinea pig, a white and tan ball of fluff named Licorice.
Licorice didn’t look a damn thing like his name, but that’s something he and Snowball had in common.
Licorice was filthy like he’d been dragged through the mud, but at least the corpse was intact.
Thank goodness for small miracles. I panicked.
If Snowball was in trouble with anyone, I wanted it to be me; by that point I couldn’t live with the idea of him being taken away.
I yelled and waved my arms and generally carried on until Snowball thought I’d damn near lost my mind.
He dropped Licorice in the driveway and moseyed on to the toys he knew he could chew without me flapping my wings like a sick egret.
Well, I must have been someone even I didn’t recognize, because I remained calm and went into crisis mode.
I picked Licorice up and shampooed his tiny body in the laundry room sink with Woolite.
I knew fur was not wool, but neither were Mom’s delicates and that was all I’d seen her use Woolite for.
And what was more delicate than the corpse of an old guinea pig?
Carefully, I used Mom’s blow-dryer with the diffuser attachment to make Licorice look fluffy and new; when I was done, even I had to admit he looked like he was sleeping.
Then, when I knew the neighbors weren’t home, I snuck into their barn using the window that didn’t latch and returned Licorice to his cage, where he promptly keeled over.
Good enough, I thought, and got the hell out.
Jesse stopped, cracked his knuckles, and took a sip of coffee, which tasted even more like fish as it cooled. Orson was right. This would be his last cup from the school.
It was early evening when I heard the scream, which in itself could wake the dead.
Snowball and I stood side by side, each knowing our part in this horror, but both determined to feign innocence.
As long as we stuck together, no one could break us.
That is, until my mother approached. Snowball took off running, leaving me holding the bag.
“Goddammit, Snowball!” I screamed at the time, for which my mother threatened to wash my mouth out with not Woolite, but actual soap. Snowball hid himself well for two days.
You couldn’t even see the neighbor’s house—there was a strip of city property and a string of power lines between us, but it was clear where the scream came from and what the fuss was about.
The neighbor kid had discovered his dead pet.
Still, it seemed like an unholy amount of screaming over a rodent, and one that was old, at that.
My mother found out later through the neighborhood grapevine that Licorice had actually died a day or two earlier of natural causes (or as natural as you could get for a guinea pig), and the neighbor family had buried him on the edge of their property under the shade of a tree.
Old Snowball had been exploring the property line when his nose told him there was buried treasure nearby.
I never told anyone what really happened, how the neighbor’s pet returned from a dirt grave clean as new and with the gentle fragrance of laundry, inside its locked cage, and Snowball took the secret to his grave.
He wasn’t ever going to share a cell with me if I ever got found out.
But at least he wasn’t going to rat me out, either.
When Jesse finished, he reread his work and smiled.
Not his best writing—it needed a copyedit—but perfectly acceptable for a class assignment, an introductory one at that.
They could all have a laugh at Licorice’s expense.
It wasn’t even in the top five times he felt abandoned (a more recent example had shot to number one with a bullet), and honestly it probably wouldn’t make the top ten.
Comedy, after all, equaled tragedy plus time—something there had not yet been enough of in regard to current events.
But it was funny and that was enough. He wasn’t ready to be an open book with his students, and it would take a lot more than a liter of Mountain Dew for him to spill.
“Who here feels abandoned?” Jesse asked as he entered the absurdly large classroom and set his belongings on the desk; one by one they all raised their hands as he fished his own pages out of his messenger bag.
Good, Jesse thought. It saved him the trouble of explaining why they should.
Non-Trad aside, younger people had better feel abandoned—acknowledgment was the first step toward change.
They’d been abandoned by the promise of everything: a living wage, affordable housing, a sustainable planet, happiness, cable TV, the concept of retirement, the ability to step foot in a classroom without the fear of getting shot, a world without measles, three-camera sitcoms, politicians who weren’t Twitter trolls.
What boomers weren’t taking with them, the rest were fighting over for scraps.
But telling them as much was no way to evoke a laugh, and this was, after all, a class on comedy writing.
“Good. Abandonment should be fun,” Jesse snickered, but Snickers, who today would surely be renamed 3 Musketeers if nicknames weren’t locked on day one, disagreed.
“Okay, well not fun. But part of mining humor is finding it in unexpected places.” He stopped as a faint echo rang in his ear.
“Did this room get bigger?” The size of the classroom was one of those absurd details he would have dwelled on after his first class if Lally’s visit hadn’t derailed his week.
The room was the same, but there was now a militia of chalkboards, enough to create a maze.
Headphones looked around like he was only just noticing that they were but seven in an auditorium that was built for two hundred. “Who wants to share their story first?”
In that moment it was Jesse who was feeling abandoned, as no one, not even Unicorn, volunteered.
“Come on. I know you all did the assignment.” It was usually a few weeks into a semester before excuses started rolling in.
“No one?” He crossed back to the desk to grab his own feeble story, deciding to lead by example.
“We’re not looking for perfection, it’s just the first assignment.
Here. I’ll read you mine. And you can see this is just meant to be an exercise. ”
Jesse wasn’t sure what his students expected from an award-winning author, but after a quiet start they found the story delightfully lowbrow, and it gave them permission to laugh.
It was one of the things he’d always prided himself on—knowing his audience, even if that audience was usually Norman.
It was one of the many reasons he felt so adrift now, not just that he was missing his partner, he was missing that confidence in himself.
And yet he plowed forward, finding his voice, and when he finished he asked the class to discuss the story and what made it funny.
“The absurdity of it,” Snickers blurted. It was always young men who offered their opinions the loudest. But Jesse had to give him props, it definitely had an air of the absurd.
“The surprise ending,” Mountain Dew proffered, firing on all cylinders, clearly having done the Dew. Jesse agreed and wondered if the story he was living might eventually have a similar twist he could mine for inspiration.
“Woolite,” Non-Trad added.
“Yes, nostalgia. Plus, it’s just a funny word.”
Unicorn was the last to offer her thoughts, and when she did she did so without making eye contact with her classmates. “I found it had a surprising tenderness. From the softhearted way the boy treated the guinea pig’s body to the obvious care he had for his neighbor’s feelings.”
“If he really cared,” Backpack interjected, “wouldn’t he have come clean about what really happened?”