The Laws of Average (4 page)

She celebrated by raising both her legs into the air mere inches from their pictures but far enough away from his rusty hips not to knock over the big metal frames into the landing strip of their revenge; spotlights burning down from the ceiling to form elongated coins of white on his back and her forehead; the carpet dirty and well beyond need of a good scrubbing and shampooing job; the room filling with the smell of clammy latex: on and off and on and off again; the taste and sting of the pre-packaged lube numbing her tongue and throat just enough to let his perfectly-timed explosion slide down like a snotty sniffle after being out too long in the rain.

An hour prior to that dropped them off with backpacks and color-coordinated overnight bags. She was always scooting him out right around their bedtime, having breathed the same air-freshened air with him in her car for the better part of three hours while she worked him into a frothy mess. Her bold moves to coax him away from trolling eHarmony and Zoosk and Ashley-Madison on his laptop for an afternoon of coffee somehow worked, the big teeth of him half-framed in his profile picture by the computer's pinhole camera, his thick rectangular lenses perched on his numbingly average nose, thick waves of orangish nicotine-stained hair filtering his lips and nostrils in a wide mustache which spilled around his mouth and pooled under his chin, the same way her father's did when he was also in the naval reserve, the same way her soon-to-be-ex-husband's did when he let his grooming habits go slacker than slack, and this, of course, was something her soon-to-be-ex-husband let happen beginning in the 5
^th
year of their marriage, something she finally stopped complaining about in the 9
^th
or 10
^th
year, and something she gave up entirely before the whole thing toppled without so much of a breath's resistance.

The hour prior to that she was in the movie theater with them, nodding in and out of sleep as the high definition projector blasted millions upon millions of color combinations above their heads, the walls dripping with sound synched to scenes from the pretend places that had flooded their entire fields of view.

Two hours prior to that she purchased the largest-sized popcorn along with the largest-sized box of Milk Duds along with the largest-sized Coca-Cola along with the largest-sized Sprite along with another of the largest-sized Coca-Colas along with another of the largest-sized Coca-Colas.

One hour after that she cupped her hand over the screen of her cell phone, trying to dampen its bright haze amidst the one 2-second stretch of total dark and quiet in the entire 136-minute affair, checking her bank balance in direct response to the nightmare she'd just woke up from, the one where she snapped a plastic card out of her purse to pay for this or that and said card was violently ripped from her hand with a heavy sigh and even heavier scowl, the one that had started somewhere in the depths of something truly blissful—a memory of the sky blue cloud of cotton candy her daddy always bought her at the September fair, maybe—but inevitably turned to thunder and wind and nastiness. You know, like bliss always does.

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She shucked the corn, spilling its silk into a brown paper sack balancing itself on the floor at her feet. The other woman followed her lead.

“He won't even discuss it with me,” she said. The other woman bent her cheeks into a frown but said nothing. “He probably even wrote it into the will, I'll bet.”

The other woman held the positions and muscles of her face. “So…you can't
ever again
, really?” she finally said.

“Nope.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

“Jesus.”

“Not him, either. Not a single touch.” She chuckled and the other woman followed her lead.

“But that's just…mean,” she finally said.

She smiled. She didn't know what else to do.

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Little Orson was told from the time he could remember being told things that he was a genius. His mother repeated this nearly every day and because his father didn't correct her, he said it nearly every day as well, only in slight nods and looks that weren't as stern as they should have been. When he was nine, Little Orson slowed from hearing these things and when he was 10 it stopped completely. That's when he ran away with his sister and worked the streets for money. The rest, as they say, is history.

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The child threads the tiny screws into their tunnels one at a time, pinching them with a thumb and index finger, held fast by the fingernails, drops just one more no more, swivels for the tiny screwdriver and fastens the hinge by turning and turning slowly, careful not to strip the metal or flange the plastic, careful not to bend the arms too far back, careful not to crack or smear or scratch or dent or bend or damage in any perceivable way, no matter the cost. The child learns what it means to be an adult. The consumer, having already learned what it means, patiently waits in his cage of birch and stainless steel.

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The professional athlete, the person who gets paid to play, took the game ball home and wrote on it in big loops with a permanent marker. The professional athlete, the person who gets paid to play a team sport, sealed the game ball away in a special room with hundreds of other game balls written on in a similar fashion with a similar instrument. The other professional athlete, the person who no longer gets paid and no longer plays a team sport, unlocked the room one game ball at a time and auctioned each off to the highest bidder. That professional athlete—
that
one—had never felt such joy.

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He'd had a few before he got home that night. She was watching television but not really watching, her laptop balanced on her legs, fingers clicking and swiping, its molded plastic form hinged open in front of her and glowing. He made a move on her and she responded. He made another move and she responded to that one as well. She closed the device with a thin snap and stood up. She smiled and walked in front of him and he followed her and this is how it all ended. Except the next move was hers, the both of them naked, her hand there, and he did not respond. She made another move with another hand on another there and he did not respond. When she stood and reached for her clothes he finally responded, but not that way. The other way.

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It was purely electronic. They agreed to never meet in person, conducting their romance totally in bits and bytes, framing their world one email, one text message, one status update, one profile pic, one like at a time, an intricate weave of emotions they would never express inside the same physical space. Their world became The World and everything else atrophied. A beautiful mess.

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The father orders the granite one, the one with custom laser etching, and chooses a picture of her holding a teddy bear she was handed to hold by the minimum wage photographer at Sears. She never loved the bear and the father never loved her. Not really, anyway.

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She lassoes him around the waist, on purpose, so her arms are out of the way.

“Really.”

No reply. Wide stare.

“I want you to.”

He thinks his thoughts while she watches him think. She doesn't quite get it.

“Don't make me beg you.”

No reply. Wider stare.

His eyes roam the rumpus room, scurrying along the felt of the billiard table and making invisible tracks in the light white dust atop the TV. He moves his hand to the top curve of her. The cup of silk.

She's always owned such pretty things.

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This is your swimming pool you wanted him to fill for you; your hand-terraced steps dug out with a wooden-handled trowel and minimal cursing; your bricked driveway with the special red grout he had to drive 236 miles round-trip to get; your concrete water fountain shaped like an angel or fairy or dragon or what the fuck ever; your bleach party in the camp trailer to catch Just One Mouse; your That Way; your Like This; your Please…Don't; your surprise and your shame and your regret.

The smell of charcoal briquets stains him now. Sniff from the stopsign here and smell it from all the way down the block, taste it against the teeth.

Kneel.

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First!

You wouldn't bee-leeve this shit she does!

Twice, even!

Oh yeah well that was before I didn't know.

No really. It's not like that.

Okay so it's a little like that.

No hard feelings right?

I mean, right?

We're good?

So…anyway…Twice!

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When that girl at the family practice hung up on him, he knew what needed to happen. And when the police pulled onto the asphalt in that bright heat, their patrol cars aflame with light and sound, all of them also knew.

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Dear Back In The Day,

I have a list of complaints. In no particular order:

1.   You are a cocktease.

2.   I don't remember you the way you remember me.

3.   X doesn't cost Y anymore. It's exponentially more expensive. Damn you for not telling me the price.

4.   You are about one inch away from being a complete fiction.

5.   All things eventually get damaged, all things ultimately get broken. Stop pretending otherwise. It's pathetic.

6.   I hope you are writing one of these yourself. I can't wait to read it and then ignore you the way you're ignoring me.

7.   There is a love I have for you but I will not allow you to have it. You simply want it too much.

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Dear Wherever You Are,

I only have praise for you. Don't you dare try to resist me.

1.   There is simply not time like the present. Cliches are cliches are cliches. And they are that way for very good reasons. Grow up and accept that.

2.   I only have memory. That's all there is. Nothing more than you can touch now.

3.   The cost of everything is everything. And so is nothing. There is no difference between everything and nothing. Please try and understand.

4.   Bliss isn't ignorance. Don't change the subject now. You are so so close to getting this right, you don't even know.

5.   You need to laugh some more. And cry some more. And Some More some more. Even more, even.

6.   I have written all that needs to be written. Except one last thing.

7.   You could never stop me. Not that you wanted to. Not that you tried.

Hold up a second. The phone and doorbell are ringing.

At the door is a bill collector from Waste Management. I am silently sliding my open window closed and drawing the blinds.

The letters “WASTE” are blinking on the wall-mounted caller ID box, the “W” hovering over a phone number with a (713) area code.

Surely these simultaneous events couldn't be coincidental. As he cups his hands around his eyes and peers through the thin strip of glass running parallel to my front door, the bill collector—let's go ahead and call him Bill, since he's the most serious kind of creditor, the kind who comes to your door
without
a nametag or business card, who parks a completely non-descript 4-door sedan with out-of-state license plates in your driveway—can surely see the lime green flash from the caller ID box, just as surely as he can see me looking back at him from my comfy vantage point back on the living room sofa, laptop obediently purring, balancing on the caps of my knees as I type this very word and then the next and then the next, the slats of the blinds fanning themselves slowly behind my head.

I am waving at him.

I used to think Bill came here to collect the past due amount I currently owe on my garbage removal, which I haven't paid in decades. Which has to be tens of thousands of dollars now. Or should be. Much like the weekly service his company provides, Bill faithfully appears at my door on the 5
^th
of every month, rings the bell, cups his hands against the glass, and quickly returns to his car. He does all this in the matter of 25 seconds; he never appears angry or threatening in any way. I attempted to pay him in the earliest days of this, but he politely refused.

“Oh, I don't handle payments,” he explained then, his eyes brighter, cheeks higher, hair thicker then than now. “I am merely checking that you are still in domicile here. And so you are. Have a nice day, sir.”

Apparently, in our country, I can get away with not paying the garbage bill for years on end, but if I'm only a day late with my car payment, a thin woman chaperoned by a tow truck always appears in my driveway by the end of the next business day. This has never made any sense to me, nor does the woman ever come to the door.

Waste Management is a publicly-traded company based in Houston, TX. In April of 2006, they announced 1
^st
quarter revenues of 3.2 billion dollars, marking a 6% increase over the previous year. I'm guessing Waste Management doesn't need my money, but obviously they are in the making money business. Have you ever heard of anything so strange?

Maybe they're just happy I'm doing my fair share to create higher disposal volumes during this never-ending string of warmer springs and drier summers. Maybe the voicemail they are leaving me right now is a generous thank-you from the home office, maybe offering a gratis block of shares. Maybe it's a call from CEO Dave Steiner, inviting me down for a weekend of golf and a fat sirloin steak the size of my head. Or maybe I'm the statistical anomaly Waste Management tallies into its obscene profit margins.