2009 Hopes
This is the story I wrote for my writing group. Sometimes, these weird things just pop out of my head. Read it and tell me what you think:
P.S. I stole the title from a Silverchair song. Credit where credit is due.
Radio sings songs of love to Mary Alvarez as she pulls her car into a parking spot at the Pittsburgh Airport. She is happy, she is singing along with Jason Mraz (I won’t worry my life away…!) and she is ready for the excitement the weekend promises. Beside her, silent and thoughtful, sits her husband of 25 years, Jimmy.
“Jimmy, Jimmy?” Mary pats his shoulder. She knows something is wrong with him, but she doesn’t want anything to ruin this weekend. It’s their anniversary! It’s a happy period! “Jimmy, Jimmy! Get out of the car, c’mon! Help me with these bags! We can’t miss our flight!”
Mary gets out of the car and nearly skips to the trunk, from which she pulls a black nylon over the shoulder weekender bag. Jimmy is slowly getting out of the car, slowly stretching, slowly moving to the trunk. He grabs his bag. He won’t look at her.
Mary closes the trunk and hits the lock button on the keychain fob. She begins to walk, Jimmy following slowly behind her. “Jimmy, fa God’s Sakes, what’s the matter with you? You act like you’re sick or somethin’, c’mon. We don’t have all day!”
“Bitch,” Jimmy mutters under his breath. She pretends she didn’t hear him.
Mary is a loud, raucous, selfish woman. She is full of steel and determination and she will let nothing get in her way when she is accomplishing her goals. She is the Vice-President of a large marketing firm and she recruited and stole many of her top competitors’ sales agents in order to acquire their million dollar customer accounts. She is known as a vicious, viperous, poisonous being.
With Mary leading and Jimmy trailing behind, they make it through the check-in of their flight, check their bags, and head to the waiting area. When they are seated, Mary turns to Jimmy, a look of intense anger smoldering under the tangible excitement of her nerves. “Jimmy, Jimmy what is the problem? Huh? You been acting like a wet rag all day, limp, don’t have a clue what’s goin’ on, you know what today is right?”
Jimmy looks up at her, the pain in his eyes stunning her with the weight. “Do you know what today is?”
Mary doesn’t reply and looks instead at a young couple a few seats down from them. The woman is young; she is cooing over a squashed looking bundle in her lap, it is a baby. “Ew” thinks Mary, her nose turned up in disgust. She tightens her scarf around her neck and settles into the seat. They shouldn’t have to wait long, the flight is leaving shortly. She looks at her watch as a thrill passes through her body. She and Jimmy have been waiting on this moon-rocket trip for quite some time; it is very expensive but she is a hard worker. Mary glances at Jimmy as she reaches for her carry-on bag to find some hand-lotion, which she begins to liberally apply to her hands, careful of her wedding ring. Then she stops mid-rub, and stares at Jimmy’s hand.
“Jimmy! Jimmy! You’re not wearing your wedding ring? On this weekend of all weekends not to wear it, you’re not wearing it?”
He merely looks at her. Sighs. Turns his body so his back is to her. “What an asshole you are,” she spits and finishes rubbing the lotion onto her hands. She put the lotion back in the bag, then pulls out an issue of NewCosmopolitan Magazine. As she flips quickly through the pages, eyeing the fashions (ooh, I got to get one of those nice dresses, oh I like this hat!), she hears Jimmy’s deadened voice floating through her reveries. “Don’t you ever think about it with regret?”
“Don’t I ever think about what?”
“What happened, what you did.”
She won’t answer. When she looks at Jimmy, he is gazing into the distance, in the direction of the young coup - “Oh Jimmy, you serious? You’re still thinking about that time?”
“Considering I recently found out the truth about that time, I suppose that’s why I’m thinking about it,” he acerbically fires back.
“Well,” she shrugs, “don’t.”
He snorts. “Oh ok, no I won’t think about it. So easy to do. Just turn the heart off and on.”
She shrugs and resumes flipping through the magazine.
A janitor passes through the main airport walkway, wheeling a cart loaded with cleaning supplies and a large trashcan. Sticking out of the top of the trashcan is a bunch of wilted flowers. Jimmy’s eyes, glazed with anguish, alight on the bunch. He does not merely see wilted flowers; he sees a wilted life, a wilted will, a wilted manhood. Suddenly Jimmy is transformed from a quiet miserable man to a raging miserable beast. He turns furiously upon his wife and lightly pushes her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, you rotting corpse” she snaps.
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“Oh shut up. Are you hungry? Is that why you’re grumpy? I have some peanuts…” she begins rummaging through her carry-on.
“I’m not a damned animal!”
“Yes you are. You’re a damned, ugly, stinking, pig is what you are.”
“Can we get through this conversation maturely, without name-calling?”
She acts as though she hasn’t heard him and continues talking, “you stink to high Heaven like a big fat groveling loser pig. I can’t believe I’m 45 years old and about to celebrate my 25th anniversary and I have to put up with your absolute bullshit. I worked hard, harder than your pathetic ass ever did and we’re gonna have a nice time on this moon rocket trip. Christ!” She spills the bag of peanuts and watches them scatter over the dingy, fading carpet. “I’m too old for this!”
He screams, “well I’m too old to dick around any longer!” and rises to his feet. Everyone in the waiting area turns to look. “You ruined my life, you bitch!”
“People are watching,” she hisses at him, tugging at his hand.
“Don’t you touch me,” he snarls, snatching his hand away. “I don’t want your bloody hands anywhere near me, you murderer, you liar.”
The crowd is murmuring, partly excited, party fearful of the crazy yelling man and his cold, merciless wife. The people nearest them get up and move away. “You’re making the nice people uncomfortable,” Mary says in a condescending and soothing voice. She speaks to Jimmy like she might speak to a child, if she would ever deign to speak to a snot-nosed rug-rat. Children are only there to make a person trip and fall and stop dead in her tracks.
“They ought to move away from you, you witch. You’re evil.”
“What are you making a big deal out of it, for?”
“Because I’m filled with hate, Mary! You took something away from me that wasn’t your right to take!”
“Oh buddy,” she chuckles, “it was all my right. It’s still my right. It’s me…”
“You aren’t worth a damn thing,” he hurls the words like rocks. “You aren’t worth a penny anybody’s ever wasted on you.”
Now a security guard makes his way toward the screaming couple. “Excuse me,” he calls to them. “Excuse me, would you folks mind keepin’ it down?” Jimmy hears him and wants to keep it down, but the volume of this cuckold-worthy action this woman took against him resists the softer tone he tries to put in his voice.
“I want the whole world to know what you did, how you hurt me!” He crosses his arms, glaring defiantly at her. Her brown eyes blaze like heated chocolate pools, her blonde hair is shaking loose of its carefully placed crystal clips. That maniacal look spreading like lava all over her face says to him that she is going to fight fire with fire. She lets loose a deluge upon his unprotected head.
“Fine then! You let them know! You’re a fucked piece of shit anyway. I don’t care who knows that I married a loser who came from a loser family, who’s brother’s a retard, a total drooling retard and I wouldn’t bear your stinking retard, loser baby if you’d paid me a million bucks and so what are you going to do now, it’s 2056 and it happened 15 years ago, you piece of shit!”
He wants to hit her so bad that the idea of it makes such a vivid image and for minute he believes he whipped her a good crack right across the jaw line. He hasn’t hit her though and instead, he raises his voice to match hers.
“I wanted that baby!” he screams, and a dead silent hush falls over the waiting area. “I wanted that baby, you had no right!”
“I had every right! I never wanted a snotty poopy whining crying little turd to take care of. We’re happy, we’ve been happy. All I ever wanted was to take care of myself and I did. Survival of the fittest, sunshine. I kicked its ass.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he moans now, tears forming in his round blue eyes. “Why did you lie to me?”
“Are you fucking stupid or deaf or both? I said my objective was to take care of me and I couldn’t very well take care of me if you weren’t around, now could I? So I did what was best for us. I got rid of the problem and I lied to you. That’s how we made it, honey. That’s how Mary Alvarez made it in the 2000s.”
Mary knows she has won. You have to beat these fuckers to a pulp just to get ‘em to listen to you, but love is pain. Mary learned that lesson and took it to heart, still takes it to heart. She searched for a man who was easy to gain control of, who was a good, charming, kind, upstanding sort of individual. She knew that a man like that would be easy to manipulate and when she met Jimmy, she knew, looking into those baby blue eyes of his that all of her domineering efforts were to come to fruition in his pathetic life.
She spent the entire length of their marriage stripping away every shred of hope or dignity he had. By now, his manhood is shot to hell. Every fine and upstanding trait about him, she has stripped to a raw oozing sore that she never allows to scab over. He will never be able to have a backbone as long as they are together.
Last night, Jimmy was looking for his weekender, while she was out finishing some loose ends at work, in preparation for the very special anniversary trip they are taking today. Shoved way deep into the back of the closet is a box, and inside the box are a few unmarked envelopes, and inside one of the unmarked envelopes is a bill for the abortion of a fetus, date-marked April 15, 2041, 15 years to this day, the weekend of their wedding anniversary.
She settles back into her chair,listening to the moaning sobbing angry man beside her snuffle his way through the shock and surprise. He’ll get over it. Some of the people her age still have old-fashioned morals and values; some people still think that lying, cheating, stealing, and abortions are wrong, but she is ok with that because, as her professor had said in a political science class in college, “you can’t expect everybody to be ahead of the curve. Some of us are leaders and some of us are stragglers.” And Mary Alvarez knows one thing for sure: the stragglers never catch up.
P.S. I stole the title from a Silverchair song. Credit where credit is due.
Radio sings songs of love to Mary Alvarez as she pulls her car into a parking spot at the Pittsburgh Airport. She is happy, she is singing along with Jason Mraz (I won’t worry my life away…!) and she is ready for the excitement the weekend promises. Beside her, silent and thoughtful, sits her husband of 25 years, Jimmy.
“Jimmy, Jimmy?” Mary pats his shoulder. She knows something is wrong with him, but she doesn’t want anything to ruin this weekend. It’s their anniversary! It’s a happy period! “Jimmy, Jimmy! Get out of the car, c’mon! Help me with these bags! We can’t miss our flight!”
Mary gets out of the car and nearly skips to the trunk, from which she pulls a black nylon over the shoulder weekender bag. Jimmy is slowly getting out of the car, slowly stretching, slowly moving to the trunk. He grabs his bag. He won’t look at her.
Mary closes the trunk and hits the lock button on the keychain fob. She begins to walk, Jimmy following slowly behind her. “Jimmy, fa God’s Sakes, what’s the matter with you? You act like you’re sick or somethin’, c’mon. We don’t have all day!”
“Bitch,” Jimmy mutters under his breath. She pretends she didn’t hear him.
Mary is a loud, raucous, selfish woman. She is full of steel and determination and she will let nothing get in her way when she is accomplishing her goals. She is the Vice-President of a large marketing firm and she recruited and stole many of her top competitors’ sales agents in order to acquire their million dollar customer accounts. She is known as a vicious, viperous, poisonous being.
With Mary leading and Jimmy trailing behind, they make it through the check-in of their flight, check their bags, and head to the waiting area. When they are seated, Mary turns to Jimmy, a look of intense anger smoldering under the tangible excitement of her nerves. “Jimmy, Jimmy what is the problem? Huh? You been acting like a wet rag all day, limp, don’t have a clue what’s goin’ on, you know what today is right?”
Jimmy looks up at her, the pain in his eyes stunning her with the weight. “Do you know what today is?”
Mary doesn’t reply and looks instead at a young couple a few seats down from them. The woman is young; she is cooing over a squashed looking bundle in her lap, it is a baby. “Ew” thinks Mary, her nose turned up in disgust. She tightens her scarf around her neck and settles into the seat. They shouldn’t have to wait long, the flight is leaving shortly. She looks at her watch as a thrill passes through her body. She and Jimmy have been waiting on this moon-rocket trip for quite some time; it is very expensive but she is a hard worker. Mary glances at Jimmy as she reaches for her carry-on bag to find some hand-lotion, which she begins to liberally apply to her hands, careful of her wedding ring. Then she stops mid-rub, and stares at Jimmy’s hand.
“Jimmy! Jimmy! You’re not wearing your wedding ring? On this weekend of all weekends not to wear it, you’re not wearing it?”
He merely looks at her. Sighs. Turns his body so his back is to her. “What an asshole you are,” she spits and finishes rubbing the lotion onto her hands. She put the lotion back in the bag, then pulls out an issue of NewCosmopolitan Magazine. As she flips quickly through the pages, eyeing the fashions (ooh, I got to get one of those nice dresses, oh I like this hat!), she hears Jimmy’s deadened voice floating through her reveries. “Don’t you ever think about it with regret?”
“Don’t I ever think about what?”
“What happened, what you did.”
She won’t answer. When she looks at Jimmy, he is gazing into the distance, in the direction of the young coup - “Oh Jimmy, you serious? You’re still thinking about that time?”
“Considering I recently found out the truth about that time, I suppose that’s why I’m thinking about it,” he acerbically fires back.
“Well,” she shrugs, “don’t.”
He snorts. “Oh ok, no I won’t think about it. So easy to do. Just turn the heart off and on.”
She shrugs and resumes flipping through the magazine.
A janitor passes through the main airport walkway, wheeling a cart loaded with cleaning supplies and a large trashcan. Sticking out of the top of the trashcan is a bunch of wilted flowers. Jimmy’s eyes, glazed with anguish, alight on the bunch. He does not merely see wilted flowers; he sees a wilted life, a wilted will, a wilted manhood. Suddenly Jimmy is transformed from a quiet miserable man to a raging miserable beast. He turns furiously upon his wife and lightly pushes her shoulder.
“Don’t touch me, you rotting corpse” she snaps.
“Don’t talk to me like that!”
“Oh shut up. Are you hungry? Is that why you’re grumpy? I have some peanuts…” she begins rummaging through her carry-on.
“I’m not a damned animal!”
“Yes you are. You’re a damned, ugly, stinking, pig is what you are.”
“Can we get through this conversation maturely, without name-calling?”
She acts as though she hasn’t heard him and continues talking, “you stink to high Heaven like a big fat groveling loser pig. I can’t believe I’m 45 years old and about to celebrate my 25th anniversary and I have to put up with your absolute bullshit. I worked hard, harder than your pathetic ass ever did and we’re gonna have a nice time on this moon rocket trip. Christ!” She spills the bag of peanuts and watches them scatter over the dingy, fading carpet. “I’m too old for this!”
He screams, “well I’m too old to dick around any longer!” and rises to his feet. Everyone in the waiting area turns to look. “You ruined my life, you bitch!”
“People are watching,” she hisses at him, tugging at his hand.
“Don’t you touch me,” he snarls, snatching his hand away. “I don’t want your bloody hands anywhere near me, you murderer, you liar.”
The crowd is murmuring, partly excited, party fearful of the crazy yelling man and his cold, merciless wife. The people nearest them get up and move away. “You’re making the nice people uncomfortable,” Mary says in a condescending and soothing voice. She speaks to Jimmy like she might speak to a child, if she would ever deign to speak to a snot-nosed rug-rat. Children are only there to make a person trip and fall and stop dead in her tracks.
“They ought to move away from you, you witch. You’re evil.”
“What are you making a big deal out of it, for?”
“Because I’m filled with hate, Mary! You took something away from me that wasn’t your right to take!”
“Oh buddy,” she chuckles, “it was all my right. It’s still my right. It’s me…”
“You aren’t worth a damn thing,” he hurls the words like rocks. “You aren’t worth a penny anybody’s ever wasted on you.”
Now a security guard makes his way toward the screaming couple. “Excuse me,” he calls to them. “Excuse me, would you folks mind keepin’ it down?” Jimmy hears him and wants to keep it down, but the volume of this cuckold-worthy action this woman took against him resists the softer tone he tries to put in his voice.
“I want the whole world to know what you did, how you hurt me!” He crosses his arms, glaring defiantly at her. Her brown eyes blaze like heated chocolate pools, her blonde hair is shaking loose of its carefully placed crystal clips. That maniacal look spreading like lava all over her face says to him that she is going to fight fire with fire. She lets loose a deluge upon his unprotected head.
“Fine then! You let them know! You’re a fucked piece of shit anyway. I don’t care who knows that I married a loser who came from a loser family, who’s brother’s a retard, a total drooling retard and I wouldn’t bear your stinking retard, loser baby if you’d paid me a million bucks and so what are you going to do now, it’s 2056 and it happened 15 years ago, you piece of shit!”
He wants to hit her so bad that the idea of it makes such a vivid image and for minute he believes he whipped her a good crack right across the jaw line. He hasn’t hit her though and instead, he raises his voice to match hers.
“I wanted that baby!” he screams, and a dead silent hush falls over the waiting area. “I wanted that baby, you had no right!”
“I had every right! I never wanted a snotty poopy whining crying little turd to take care of. We’re happy, we’ve been happy. All I ever wanted was to take care of myself and I did. Survival of the fittest, sunshine. I kicked its ass.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he moans now, tears forming in his round blue eyes. “Why did you lie to me?”
“Are you fucking stupid or deaf or both? I said my objective was to take care of me and I couldn’t very well take care of me if you weren’t around, now could I? So I did what was best for us. I got rid of the problem and I lied to you. That’s how we made it, honey. That’s how Mary Alvarez made it in the 2000s.”
Mary knows she has won. You have to beat these fuckers to a pulp just to get ‘em to listen to you, but love is pain. Mary learned that lesson and took it to heart, still takes it to heart. She searched for a man who was easy to gain control of, who was a good, charming, kind, upstanding sort of individual. She knew that a man like that would be easy to manipulate and when she met Jimmy, she knew, looking into those baby blue eyes of his that all of her domineering efforts were to come to fruition in his pathetic life.
She spent the entire length of their marriage stripping away every shred of hope or dignity he had. By now, his manhood is shot to hell. Every fine and upstanding trait about him, she has stripped to a raw oozing sore that she never allows to scab over. He will never be able to have a backbone as long as they are together.
Last night, Jimmy was looking for his weekender, while she was out finishing some loose ends at work, in preparation for the very special anniversary trip they are taking today. Shoved way deep into the back of the closet is a box, and inside the box are a few unmarked envelopes, and inside one of the unmarked envelopes is a bill for the abortion of a fetus, date-marked April 15, 2041, 15 years to this day, the weekend of their wedding anniversary.
She settles back into her chair,listening to the moaning sobbing angry man beside her snuffle his way through the shock and surprise. He’ll get over it. Some of the people her age still have old-fashioned morals and values; some people still think that lying, cheating, stealing, and abortions are wrong, but she is ok with that because, as her professor had said in a political science class in college, “you can’t expect everybody to be ahead of the curve. Some of us are leaders and some of us are stragglers.” And Mary Alvarez knows one thing for sure: the stragglers never catch up.