of straying, I can’t seem to blame her . I’m terrified that she’ll find out I might be losing her dream house and leave me, but I can’t seem to blame her for that. Maybe it’s because I feel so incapable of doing anything about it right now. Or because I knew the rules going in.
And—as long as I’m assessing my wife’s strengths, a painful thing to do right now—the woman’s not hard to look at. Hell, if I were being honest, I’d have to admit she’s still attractive and smart enough to be on cable news…I mean, she’d need some makeup for primetime, or CNBC during the heavy market hours, but she’s more than cute enough to take an overnight shift or as morning referee between blathering political pundits. In fact, maybe when she’s living with Chuck in the cabin he builds from tree bark and his own nut hair, when she is agin distant, a pair of fur boots against a wall…totally unattainable…I’ll choose her as my mulligan.
“I’m going upstairs,” Lisa says when we finish the dinner dishes. Then she looks back at me. “Everything okay?”
“Everything…is great.”
I help Teddy with his math homework. Listen to Lisa tap away up there on the computer. At bedtime, I read a story to Franklin about a snake that doesn’t want to grow old and shed his green skin. Christ, I despise children’s books. They used to be mysterious and disconcerting, filled with odd Seussian creatures and Wild Things meant to scare the kids to sleep; now they’re aimed at scaring the parents, or worse, fixing us, thinly veiled attempts to get us to shape up, subliminal messages from Oprah’s insidious army of self-help authors trying to get us to be more responsible and loving. I get it, okay? I’m the snake who won’t grow up. I kiss Franklin, pry my arm away from his worried grip and escape downstairs.
“Let’s not watch TV tonight,” I tell Dad.
So we play an insane game of Scrabble instead, but my father only seems to know dirty words or made-up words that sound dirty.
“Cumshok? What is it—some kind of late-life nocturnal emission?”
“It’s a fish.” He pats his pocket for a cigarette, like an amputee looking for a limb.
I slowly reach for the dictionary. His eyes follow my hand, and then rise to meet my eyes. “A fish?” I ask.
“Go ahead. Look it up. It’s a fishing lure.” He stares at my hand on the dictionary.
“A fishing lure? ”
“Yes. It looks like a bell.”
He knows I don’t know shit about fishing lures. Oh what do I care? I’m glad he’s sharp enough to mess with me. Make-believe words are an improvement. Fine. Cumshok. I remove my hand from the dictionary. Write down the eighty-one points and lose to a senile old man by sixty.
We go back to watching TV. He looks over and sees the Scrabble game still on the table. “We should play that sometime,” he says.
Upstairs, the typing has stopped.
Dad sighs. “You know what I really miss?”
I know this loop; there are six main things that my father misses and they come up a lot now, as if, right before he says, You know what I miss, Dad spins a tiny wheel in his head. And I make a game of trying to guess which of the six things he will land on. The six things my father misses are: (1) chipped beef (2) Angie Dickinson (3) Dandy Don singing at the end of Monday Night Football (4) the old pull tabs on beer cans (5) The Rockford Files and (6) Joe Frazier. It is a good sign, the doctors say, anytime Dad references the past, and so I always ask what he misses, even though it’s mildly disappointing that he never seems to miss my mom, or even my three sisters—scattered across the country by the limited employment opportunities of themselves and their husbands—or his job at Sears, or I don’t know, his bowling ball. Instead, it’s always one of these six inane things, and usually it’s chipped beef. I even made chipped beef for him one night, but he ate it without saying a word, while the boys made faces and Lisa
And—as long as I’m assessing my wife’s strengths, a painful thing to do right now—the woman’s not hard to look at. Hell, if I were being honest, I’d have to admit she’s still attractive and smart enough to be on cable news…I mean, she’d need some makeup for primetime, or CNBC during the heavy market hours, but she’s more than cute enough to take an overnight shift or as morning referee between blathering political pundits. In fact, maybe when she’s living with Chuck in the cabin he builds from tree bark and his own nut hair, when she is agin distant, a pair of fur boots against a wall…totally unattainable…I’ll choose her as my mulligan.
“I’m going upstairs,” Lisa says when we finish the dinner dishes. Then she looks back at me. “Everything okay?”
“Everything…is great.”
I help Teddy with his math homework. Listen to Lisa tap away up there on the computer. At bedtime, I read a story to Franklin about a snake that doesn’t want to grow old and shed his green skin. Christ, I despise children’s books. They used to be mysterious and disconcerting, filled with odd Seussian creatures and Wild Things meant to scare the kids to sleep; now they’re aimed at scaring the parents, or worse, fixing us, thinly veiled attempts to get us to shape up, subliminal messages from Oprah’s insidious army of self-help authors trying to get us to be more responsible and loving. I get it, okay? I’m the snake who won’t grow up. I kiss Franklin, pry my arm away from his worried grip and escape downstairs.
“Let’s not watch TV tonight,” I tell Dad.
So we play an insane game of Scrabble instead, but my father only seems to know dirty words or made-up words that sound dirty.
“Cumshok? What is it—some kind of late-life nocturnal emission?”
“It’s a fish.” He pats his pocket for a cigarette, like an amputee looking for a limb.
I slowly reach for the dictionary. His eyes follow my hand, and then rise to meet my eyes. “A fish?” I ask.
“Go ahead. Look it up. It’s a fishing lure.” He stares at my hand on the dictionary.
“A fishing lure? ”
“Yes. It looks like a bell.”
He knows I don’t know shit about fishing lures. Oh what do I care? I’m glad he’s sharp enough to mess with me. Make-believe words are an improvement. Fine. Cumshok. I remove my hand from the dictionary. Write down the eighty-one points and lose to a senile old man by sixty.
We go back to watching TV. He looks over and sees the Scrabble game still on the table. “We should play that sometime,” he says.
Upstairs, the typing has stopped.
Dad sighs. “You know what I really miss?”
I know this loop; there are six main things that my father misses and they come up a lot now, as if, right before he says, You know what I miss, Dad spins a tiny wheel in his head. And I make a game of trying to guess which of the six things he will land on. The six things my father misses are: (1) chipped beef (2) Angie Dickinson (3) Dandy Don singing at the end of Monday Night Football (4) the old pull tabs on beer cans (5) The Rockford Files and (6) Joe Frazier. It is a good sign, the doctors say, anytime Dad references the past, and so I always ask what he misses, even though it’s mildly disappointing that he never seems to miss my mom, or even my three sisters—scattered across the country by the limited employment opportunities of themselves and their husbands—or his job at Sears, or I don’t know, his bowling ball. Instead, it’s always one of these six inane things, and usually it’s chipped beef. I even made chipped beef for him one night, but he ate it without saying a word, while the boys made faces and Lisa
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