Wipe That Smile
Hey, I didn't write about football tonight! And this below is pretty long and not entirely edited, but it's not a shitty mess either.
Sometimes, when I'm lying under the covers but I can't stop smelling the unrelenting stench of grease, even after the shower, I wonder. I wonder about when I giggled at the funeral. Would Alice still be here tonight, nuzzling my shoulder and leaving a tiny trail of little V bite marks down my back? Or would it have dawned on her that all the I love yous and vacations in New Orleans and goofy tandem bicycles didn't change the facts: on Friday Ken and I had drinks and Sunday I visited Pop in Bellview Hills. Some Fridays I prepared the evening's appetizer specials until eight and some Sundays my head hurt and sometimes it started snowing at 3 PM Friday clear until Monday, but I went where I was needed.
So did Alice. She worked downtown for an internet startup called Mystery of Life Inc. It specialized in planning or handling DNA testing appointments. She would inform a clinic a Mr. Edwards or whoever was mired in a paternity suit and then set up a meeting between patient and clinic to make the deposit, swab the parties, and let the science do the rest. This could be something really big, Alan. I mean, who gives a shit about DNA testing, but this could revolutionize the way that legal affairs are conducted in this country. You have a problem in another city, you contact us, by the time the flight lands, Alan, please, one second, by the time the flight lands, you've got your lawyer there and you're ready to go. She seemed to enjoy her work; she was there enough, and when she wasn't in the office, she was on the train to get another provider on board. I began to get used to returning home and staring at the dancing red 1 on the machine. Soon I stopped bothering to play the messages, I just put the water on in the kitchen and reached for the Tupperware in the cupboard.
Maybe I should have told her it was no fun to have your girlfriend become your roommate. I had already had roommates, and you knew what you were getting there. Roommates were big grunting bags of silence occasionally opened to share reviews of the new Tarantino movie or ask to buy another package of Bugles while you were out. Maybe if you were lucky you'd get a long heart to heart, but more often than not the most emotion you'd get was an apology after a fart during movie night. But with Alice, there was a real chance for...something, I don't know, but something that the process of growing up owed us. I wanted a real partner, and so did she. I wanted to be told what a dipshit I was about bathroom towels, I wanted to come home early to make the pan-seared broccoli dish I read about online. Instead I got a woman who came home to find that I wasn't tired, so she must have worked harder. And, in turn, she got me, not the guy she was dating, but me. On Saturdays we made love after SNL, and on Tuesdays we fucked before dinner. At least those nights I didn't come home to a blinking machine. I canceled our paddleboat reservations one day because the weather site said it might rain.
So I just stopped caring. On the official forms we were still lovers and living together, but in the little things department I started checking out. It didn't make sense anymore for me to shave every day if she wasn't going to comment on it and I wasn't going to comment. But then she bought me a Norelco SpeedXL one Thursday, I just saw it and thought of you, as she placed it on the sink as I brushed my teeth. I gave it a go. The blades were good and sharp but they consistently missed perfection just behind the jaw, right under the ear. There was always a little hair, unseen and impossible to trim, but a sharp little pricker when I ran my fingers down my cheek. This little unseen Was Hair, without fail. When I went back to the five packs of Gillette, she didn't say anything. I bought her a gift certificate to a spa on her birthday; it took me about eight minutes out of my normal work route. Nobody's perfect.
Alice's uncle had been sick for about a year. We were watching Hitch (my choice, but for her) at home one night when her mother called. Greg was Alice's father's brother; he had taken a stroke as a result of smoking and being sixty-eight. About a half hour later we were at Sinclair Memorial when the doctors told all us (those) non-essential family members that we (they) might as well go home. Carla and Alice assumed that meant that Greg was resting or sedated and that we couldn't see him, but I wasn't so sure. When I was nine the same thing happened with my grandma, and I didn't hear anything more until two nights later when Mom interrupted my math homework by telling me, "It's time to go." Well, Greg didn't go that night or the next night either, but when he came home in a month, he wasn't really Greg anymore. So it was no surprise when he finally went, just a quiet disappointment.
"You look fine."
"I look terrible."
"It doesn't matter what you look like, it's a funeral, it's just about being there."
"I look ridiculous."
"Jesus Alan, there's no runway at Saint Mark's, just walk, kneel, and sit down. You panic about the littlest things."
"White, I can do. That's my color. You don't work in a restaurant without knowing how to look good in white. Black is the opposite, black--"
"Alan, come on, we--"
"--is stringy, it's tight, it's not trustworthy. There's no positive character--"
"--need to go, we're already almost late as it is, I promised Mom we'd help Auntie Colleen get into the car---"
"--to it. Remember when you wore that black dress to the company party and everyone said you looked like Jennifer Garner? That was Alias Jennifer Garner, not 13 Going On 30. She was a spy."
"--since the gout and the grief swell her ankles, you know they do."
""Are you done?""
She fidgeted a lot in her seat, especially as her cousin started reading about the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Alice wasn't really much for churchgoing unless the place was packed anyway, but years of Catholic education left her in reverential awe and discomfort when it came to The Lord And Savior. I felt the opposite; every week I sat in the small chapel with Pop in the home and listened to the miracle of the birth and the rightness of His Word and all the other majesty and joy that old people need to hear when they start worrying about where they're checking into when they check out. It wasn't exactly that day when Mom left that caused Pop to become born again, but he didn't have to buy a new calendar, either. Pop rejoiced in the everloving glow of Jesus's forgiveness, Alice shifted and twitched when He came to claim one of hers.
I didn't notice this initially, I assumed Alice had made her peace with the great beyond a long time ago. Neither of us necessarily believed the beliefs, but we didn't care enough for conversation with other couples to call ourselves agnostic. But maybe something about Greg in the casket was making her rethink things; maybe she just was really hurt by his loss. Her shoulders sagged a bit while she fixed a piercing stare on the coffin. She was clearly in it, so I didn't look to bother her. I turned to the right and regretted the decision immediately. Colleen was a quivering mess, battling the edge of the pew for dear life and shaking even moreso than normal. Her makeup was beginning to run thanks to the small, hot tears trickling out the corners of her eyes. She was clearly in it, too, mouthing the words to the readings she had picked out two days earlier. Part of her was experiencing this raw, jagged pain right now, right here, in this church, but another part of her was calling off the dogs, releasing the endorphins, putting her far, far away from this awful place.
The part that was there, however, had a bit of a lisp, and instantly I knew this day would not end pleasantly. Ever since I joined Bobby Ellis's gang in first grade and threw pebbles at Stuttering Sammy Weinhold, I had developed a bit of a giggle tic when it came to vocal deformities. A single well-timed misspoken word could put me into a laughing tizzy. Matching me alongside a lisping septuagenarian was a bad idea, like a grown man going through a Discovery Zone. Matching me alongside her when everyone was supposed to be Sad and Serious was worse than throwing asbestos at fire. We reached for our missalettes and turned to Psalm 103, and for one horrific moment, Colleen Janukovic decided that she would sing for her Gregory, belt out an elegy through her grief that would sound down on the heavens. I turned away and reached for Alice's hand to ready myself. I fumbled on her fingers and squeezed, a little too hard to convince her this hand-holding was for her. And then I heard the sound.
The Wawd is kind and mwewciful
The Wawd is kind and mwewciful
It started with a little snigger. I instinctively bit down on my lip with the force of a deranged four year old terrorizing her older brother. Didn't help. Nearly broke the skin. I kept twitching, my upper lip a start-stop tom tom. Alice turned to ask me something, saw me, and closed her mouth. I wish I could say I busted a giant gut-laugh and that set off a huge screaming battle of chaos right there in front of the altar and the organ, but that would be a lie. We had been together for three years and seven months; she knew why my lip was twitching, and I knew what that meant. She turned away and stared straight ahead as her cousin began the second reading.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
We were done in five weeks. I picked up a second job working at a fire-pit barbecue. I was better than this job, had been since I picked up a skillet, but it was what I knew and paid enough to cover the added rent. I couldn't bear to move out; 603 Avalon was my place, was our place, and I was covering the overage until Alice was ready to come back. That was seven months ago. So now I come home and put on the water in the kitchen and stare at the answering machine, waiting for the red light to blink. I think about throwing the old piece of junk away; it's an old machine and the circuits are on their way out. When I press the button, if I press the button, the mechanical voice proudly proclaims I have "One no messages." Sometimes I hear it and catch myself giggling, so I stop and head back into the kitchen to check on the pasta. You get real hungry working in restaurants.
Sometimes, when I'm lying under the covers but I can't stop smelling the unrelenting stench of grease, even after the shower, I wonder. I wonder about when I giggled at the funeral. Would Alice still be here tonight, nuzzling my shoulder and leaving a tiny trail of little V bite marks down my back? Or would it have dawned on her that all the I love yous and vacations in New Orleans and goofy tandem bicycles didn't change the facts: on Friday Ken and I had drinks and Sunday I visited Pop in Bellview Hills. Some Fridays I prepared the evening's appetizer specials until eight and some Sundays my head hurt and sometimes it started snowing at 3 PM Friday clear until Monday, but I went where I was needed.
So did Alice. She worked downtown for an internet startup called Mystery of Life Inc. It specialized in planning or handling DNA testing appointments. She would inform a clinic a Mr. Edwards or whoever was mired in a paternity suit and then set up a meeting between patient and clinic to make the deposit, swab the parties, and let the science do the rest. This could be something really big, Alan. I mean, who gives a shit about DNA testing, but this could revolutionize the way that legal affairs are conducted in this country. You have a problem in another city, you contact us, by the time the flight lands, Alan, please, one second, by the time the flight lands, you've got your lawyer there and you're ready to go. She seemed to enjoy her work; she was there enough, and when she wasn't in the office, she was on the train to get another provider on board. I began to get used to returning home and staring at the dancing red 1 on the machine. Soon I stopped bothering to play the messages, I just put the water on in the kitchen and reached for the Tupperware in the cupboard.
Maybe I should have told her it was no fun to have your girlfriend become your roommate. I had already had roommates, and you knew what you were getting there. Roommates were big grunting bags of silence occasionally opened to share reviews of the new Tarantino movie or ask to buy another package of Bugles while you were out. Maybe if you were lucky you'd get a long heart to heart, but more often than not the most emotion you'd get was an apology after a fart during movie night. But with Alice, there was a real chance for...something, I don't know, but something that the process of growing up owed us. I wanted a real partner, and so did she. I wanted to be told what a dipshit I was about bathroom towels, I wanted to come home early to make the pan-seared broccoli dish I read about online. Instead I got a woman who came home to find that I wasn't tired, so she must have worked harder. And, in turn, she got me, not the guy she was dating, but me. On Saturdays we made love after SNL, and on Tuesdays we fucked before dinner. At least those nights I didn't come home to a blinking machine. I canceled our paddleboat reservations one day because the weather site said it might rain.
So I just stopped caring. On the official forms we were still lovers and living together, but in the little things department I started checking out. It didn't make sense anymore for me to shave every day if she wasn't going to comment on it and I wasn't going to comment. But then she bought me a Norelco SpeedXL one Thursday, I just saw it and thought of you, as she placed it on the sink as I brushed my teeth. I gave it a go. The blades were good and sharp but they consistently missed perfection just behind the jaw, right under the ear. There was always a little hair, unseen and impossible to trim, but a sharp little pricker when I ran my fingers down my cheek. This little unseen Was Hair, without fail. When I went back to the five packs of Gillette, she didn't say anything. I bought her a gift certificate to a spa on her birthday; it took me about eight minutes out of my normal work route. Nobody's perfect.
Alice's uncle had been sick for about a year. We were watching Hitch (my choice, but for her) at home one night when her mother called. Greg was Alice's father's brother; he had taken a stroke as a result of smoking and being sixty-eight. About a half hour later we were at Sinclair Memorial when the doctors told all us (those) non-essential family members that we (they) might as well go home. Carla and Alice assumed that meant that Greg was resting or sedated and that we couldn't see him, but I wasn't so sure. When I was nine the same thing happened with my grandma, and I didn't hear anything more until two nights later when Mom interrupted my math homework by telling me, "It's time to go." Well, Greg didn't go that night or the next night either, but when he came home in a month, he wasn't really Greg anymore. So it was no surprise when he finally went, just a quiet disappointment.
"You look fine."
"I look terrible."
"It doesn't matter what you look like, it's a funeral, it's just about being there."
"I look ridiculous."
"Jesus Alan, there's no runway at Saint Mark's, just walk, kneel, and sit down. You panic about the littlest things."
"White, I can do. That's my color. You don't work in a restaurant without knowing how to look good in white. Black is the opposite, black--"
"Alan, come on, we--"
"--is stringy, it's tight, it's not trustworthy. There's no positive character--"
"--need to go, we're already almost late as it is, I promised Mom we'd help Auntie Colleen get into the car---"
"--to it. Remember when you wore that black dress to the company party and everyone said you looked like Jennifer Garner? That was Alias Jennifer Garner, not 13 Going On 30. She was a spy."
"--since the gout and the grief swell her ankles, you know they do."
""Are you done?""
She fidgeted a lot in her seat, especially as her cousin started reading about the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Alice wasn't really much for churchgoing unless the place was packed anyway, but years of Catholic education left her in reverential awe and discomfort when it came to The Lord And Savior. I felt the opposite; every week I sat in the small chapel with Pop in the home and listened to the miracle of the birth and the rightness of His Word and all the other majesty and joy that old people need to hear when they start worrying about where they're checking into when they check out. It wasn't exactly that day when Mom left that caused Pop to become born again, but he didn't have to buy a new calendar, either. Pop rejoiced in the everloving glow of Jesus's forgiveness, Alice shifted and twitched when He came to claim one of hers.
I didn't notice this initially, I assumed Alice had made her peace with the great beyond a long time ago. Neither of us necessarily believed the beliefs, but we didn't care enough for conversation with other couples to call ourselves agnostic. But maybe something about Greg in the casket was making her rethink things; maybe she just was really hurt by his loss. Her shoulders sagged a bit while she fixed a piercing stare on the coffin. She was clearly in it, so I didn't look to bother her. I turned to the right and regretted the decision immediately. Colleen was a quivering mess, battling the edge of the pew for dear life and shaking even moreso than normal. Her makeup was beginning to run thanks to the small, hot tears trickling out the corners of her eyes. She was clearly in it, too, mouthing the words to the readings she had picked out two days earlier. Part of her was experiencing this raw, jagged pain right now, right here, in this church, but another part of her was calling off the dogs, releasing the endorphins, putting her far, far away from this awful place.
The part that was there, however, had a bit of a lisp, and instantly I knew this day would not end pleasantly. Ever since I joined Bobby Ellis's gang in first grade and threw pebbles at Stuttering Sammy Weinhold, I had developed a bit of a giggle tic when it came to vocal deformities. A single well-timed misspoken word could put me into a laughing tizzy. Matching me alongside a lisping septuagenarian was a bad idea, like a grown man going through a Discovery Zone. Matching me alongside her when everyone was supposed to be Sad and Serious was worse than throwing asbestos at fire. We reached for our missalettes and turned to Psalm 103, and for one horrific moment, Colleen Janukovic decided that she would sing for her Gregory, belt out an elegy through her grief that would sound down on the heavens. I turned away and reached for Alice's hand to ready myself. I fumbled on her fingers and squeezed, a little too hard to convince her this hand-holding was for her. And then I heard the sound.
The Wawd is kind and mwewciful
The Wawd is kind and mwewciful
It started with a little snigger. I instinctively bit down on my lip with the force of a deranged four year old terrorizing her older brother. Didn't help. Nearly broke the skin. I kept twitching, my upper lip a start-stop tom tom. Alice turned to ask me something, saw me, and closed her mouth. I wish I could say I busted a giant gut-laugh and that set off a huge screaming battle of chaos right there in front of the altar and the organ, but that would be a lie. We had been together for three years and seven months; she knew why my lip was twitching, and I knew what that meant. She turned away and stared straight ahead as her cousin began the second reading.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
We were done in five weeks. I picked up a second job working at a fire-pit barbecue. I was better than this job, had been since I picked up a skillet, but it was what I knew and paid enough to cover the added rent. I couldn't bear to move out; 603 Avalon was my place, was our place, and I was covering the overage until Alice was ready to come back. That was seven months ago. So now I come home and put on the water in the kitchen and stare at the answering machine, waiting for the red light to blink. I think about throwing the old piece of junk away; it's an old machine and the circuits are on their way out. When I press the button, if I press the button, the mechanical voice proudly proclaims I have "One no messages." Sometimes I hear it and catch myself giggling, so I stop and head back into the kitchen to check on the pasta. You get real hungry working in restaurants.