Some thoughts

Fiction (Cont form way earlier)


The dog has stopped barking or someone has put it down. I have the whole day ahead of me stretching out like some ancient valley in the eyes of an explorer. I watch dust motes settle on the television from the light in the window. I don’t know how Einstein invented things but perhaps it was on days like this. The carpet appears to be beige. The sink is best cleaned with Windex. I can’t remember the last time I had an original thought.

In bed, I read a magazine that has twenty five ways to look good at forty. It promises the secrets of twenty five good-looking women in their forties. Honestly, I don’t even bristle at stuff like that anymore, about the industrialization of beauty or anything, I just read the articles and say to myself, “I am only thirty-two. I have eight more years until I need to start getting back in shape.” Number twenty three: smile more often.

The upstairs neighbors, a couple straight from Bangalore, are having what sounds like the Olympic medal round of intercourse, so I turn on the ceiling fan and try to forget what they look like with middling success. Sometimes, people complain that the women in the magazines make them feel inadequate. But I realize, when I look down at my small chest, that it is not the magazine that has been a disappointment, it is my small breasts that make me feel inadequate and there is no sense on blaming it on anyone else. You’d think I would be used to them by now, partners in crime, but I’m still constantly surprised by their insubstantiality. When I was in my teens I used to give them pep talks, promise them more attention if they’d just chip in a little. Maybe that’s why I was so happy for those four weeks last June? We were finally in concert together, my breasts and I.

I catch a pigeon staring at me through the open window, and I wonder if anyone else has been watching me give a pep talk to my breasts thinking that I had lost my marbles, which is just the sort of way a crazy person might describe going crazy. I’ll probably end up like my Aunt Marie, a real battleaxe. I don’t have any aunts, but that is the sort of thing that people say. And sometimes not having them is harder than you might imagine. “Peep show is over,” I say to the pigeon, who is shitting in the gutters, before I close the blinds.

When I call Jason and he asks why I’m taking the day off, I tell him that it’s for reasons undisclosed, but I can’t resist so I tell him about the dog and the siren. And he insists that my neighbor’s don’t even have a dog, until I hang up on him. My cereal box says that the product contains fourteen whole grains, but the cereal seems much too small for all that. I think that they’re topping out at nine at best.

I sit in the sweltering living room and turn on the television. I want to watch something where all the women hate each other, and also have very long fingernails. My secretary, Janice, has long green fingernails that she taps on the desk in the early afternoon. And for the longest time I thought that I liked, Janice, but I’ve recently been forced to admit that I might hate her. The tapping of her nails reminds me of my father’s hammer, pounding away on a crib in the garage of my childhood and all the fireflies rising from the grass like tiny lanterns lit to guide the unborn into the sky.

As it turns out, nothing is on, so I watch someone, who is not Bob Barker ask people the price of shampoo. A lady, college aged and pretty, guesses $5.95, and I nearly the punch the face of not Bob Barker on the screen from the sheer idiocy of her guess.

Before the soaps start I have a staring contest with the pigeons on the roof. If we ever had a child, I told Jason, I’d make sure that it learned how to fly. Babies are capable of all sorts of things that adults aren’t. They can swim right of the womb and out to the ocean. They can learn to speak Cantonese even if they are from some rural valley in Nebraska. And I bet that if we gave them enough encouragement and maybe some role models that they could learn to fly too. “Why does the sky have to be the limit?”

“That’s insane,” he said at the time. But I wasn’t listening because that’s just the sort of discouragement you want to avoid.