The Laws of Average (5 page)

If so, what do I do next?

See, things are just slightly below average. I am sorting my loose change into scattered piles of silver and copper before divvying them amongst a strange assortment of coffee mugs, mayonnaise jars and potato salad crates. Listen closely and you'll hear the scrape of pennies, nickels and dimes against textured melamine, the occasional splash of errant, defiant coins as they refuse to go quietly into that good container and bounce against the vinyl floor.

This sorting process is something I'm doing more and more, and coming up with less and less each time I do it. I'm also finding fewer and fewer quarters. I used to think my personal shortage of quarters had some connection to the U.S. Mint's 50 State Quarters Program, that a small subculture of junior numismatists were hoarding all the new quarters and taping them into their die-cut cardboard maps.

When I visited my son's school one afternoon, though, I noticed pockmarks on such a map that was obviously the classroom map. Meaning it belongs to the class. As a whole. The entire class.

The teacher told me all of the quarters from the Eastern Time Zone states disappeared within the past two weeks; at that rate of evaporation, he predicted by the end of the school year, only the Dakotas would be left.

The more I think about this, the more discouraged I get. I don't want to believe the nation's children to be so greedy as to steal quarters from a classroom map anymore than I want to believe the nation's largest garbage removal company to be so generous as to give its services away for free. My sensibilities are too firmly stuck in that infinite loop between Rousseau and Locke for me to believe something like this about children, and too corroded by National Public Radio to believe something like this about a major North American corporation.

The only road out is to begin discussing my role on this planet as an adult, isn't it? I don't play golf but its operative metaphor—the mulligan—is mightily useful here, and most definitely the product of a child's mind: try; fail; try again; fail again; try yet again. Make the mistake; correct accordingly; move forward. It would be lovely if adults could grant each other the same kindnesses and do-overs they used to afford one another as children, and to do so without wearing garish, goofy clothing while brandishing long, thin weapons of brushed titanium. So many interests. So many penalties. Far too many grudges.

The man stood naked in his own kitchen, drinking his own milk from his own stubby glass originally purchased for drinking his own scotch. Exactly 37 minutes prior to this scene, the woman sat in her own naugahyde recliner in the adjacent room and declared that the man should accompany her upstairs. This almost always meant he was to sit in their own bed, fully clothed, and navigate the DVR which drip-fed their small television perched atop her own dresser; the woman called this ritual Running The Remote, and it entailed the man carefully trimming the woman's daytime soap operas for commercial interruptions while she listened and made her attempts to sleep. The man pretended to loathe these duties but had come over the decade to rely on this nightly routine to anesthetize the woman.

In summertimes the man and the woman shipped their children to another timezone, where an older man and an older woman lived on 10 acres of high desert scrubland. Here the children assembled model rockets and launched them into the clouds. They delighted at the puffs of white when their rockets reached apex, popped their hollow plastic nosecones off with a gentle plop 500 feet overhead, the coardboard tubes always spinning beneath the twirl of a plastic parachute held taught by thin strings and newspaper-grade rubber bands, floating and drifting and dodging the rows of Russian olive trees and quaken aspen trees neatly marking the older man and older woman's property. The children had surveyed most of the northwest quadrant with one of the older man's four-wheeled, gasoline-powered motorbikes when an errant rocket blew its nosecone so forcefully that the rubberbands emancipated themselves from the cardboard tube body, and two pieces descended back to earth instead of just one. Although never directly instructed as such, the children implicitly understood that they were not to return to the older man's and older woman's house without both pieces in their possession, no matter how long it might take them to scour them out of the flush of thistle and puncture weeks carpeting the NW quad. of the older man and older woman's property. They had, after all, all summer to complete the task.

Back in the other time zone, the woman laboriously climbed the stairs of the house she owned with the man. Where it was clear the kitchen was the man's domain, it was not clear whose province the stairs were. Individual rooms were quickly claimed, but the paths of egress/ingress—hallways, staircases, doorways, thresholds, etc—were never clearly marked. So far as the upstairs/downstairs staircase was concerned, the man easily doubled the amount of daily trips taken up/down as the woman; however, the woman easily tripled the amount of time spent actually ascending/ descending the stairs as did the man. Because the man and the woman never articulated which was more important—trip frequency vs elapsed time—this particular part of the house was effectively a demilitarized zone, travelled but not controlled, an area of mutually-assured protection.

The woman suffered from sharp pains located in her lower back, caused by extended hours sitting in a pneumatic chair arched just enough to aggravate the bottom-most vertebrae buried beneath of her wide, thick skin. The woman owned a business which connected hospice nurses to hospice patients, and thus had complete control over the purchase and replacement of the office furniture. This was a point the man routinely brought up when the woman complained about the pain, and because he brought it up so frequently, she refused to replace or even adjust the chair. The woman, above all, prided herself on being a person of principle, and the principle clearly exercising itself as she lumbered up and down the stairs was that she would rather suffer chronic pain than have the man tell her what to do. The man found this principle trite and predictable. The man's own mother had raised her own son to defer when an argument ground down into second gear and showed no signs of immediate resolution. The woman's own mother had raised her own daughter to shift all the way down into first gear in similar situations, and to keep the option always visible that throwing it all into reverse could happen at literally any moment. The woman's own mother perfected these techniques on five different men; the older woman her own skills on the older man for over fifty years.

The children had just become pattern-recognizant enough to see how the man and the older man were son and father, how the man and the older woman were son and mother. The older man loved them as much as an older man can probably be expected to love his own son's own children, but the older man had already spent an entire lifetime locked inside his work-life balance-rhythm, one measured so much in overt morning coffee and secret afternoon cigarettes that the older man found himself frequently short of patience when dealing with his own son's own children and their trite and predictable problems in varying degrees of needing solved. The older man saw every human action connected not to tissues of cause-effect, but problem-solution; human beings communicate, he was taught, because they cannot acquire something they desire, and construct fancy ways to attempt acquiring that something through the simple expression of their desire for it. Thus, silence to the older man was a homeostatic zen, in which humans were content with what they already possessed, and with whom they possessed it. So when the children returned to the older man and older woman from the NW quad. of their property with two separate pieces of a model rocket which had been joined as one not even an hour prior, the older man's reaction consisted entirely of grumpily snatching the nosecone and cardboard tube out of the children's own hands without saying a single word.

The older man did not believe in anything commonly called body language, and this is something that made him an easy mark for the older woman so very very long ago. The older man purchased a pachinko machine for the older woman as an engagement present but she never played it, not even once, because she considered it a sexed-up slot machine, and this is something it most certainly was. Small steel pebbles with strange hieroglyphs carved into them bounced around a maze of pegs; the only difference the older woman could see between this design and others she had seen in international airports was the latter used actual money, and the former seduced its player into believing the steel balls had no value whatsoever. The older man was not sure what the older woman thought about gambling at the time and place of his purchase, and it would be hard to say that he was actually thinking about the older woman at all, because it was in a split-second utterance at the customs desk that he even gave the purchase an official narrative.

The man as a child flipped the outside lever on the thick, spring-loaded launcher resting inside the tall sheet of glass, over and over and over and over without ever loading a single steel ball into its chamber. The older man kept the steel balls sealed in a coffee can somewhere else in the house, somewhere the man as a child would not discover until much later, in a moment when steel and glass was the furthest thing from his mind, and the older woman had successfully reversed the older man into getting rid of the garish thing once and for all. The painted decoration on its pegboard featured an arrangement of small, symmetrical cylinders shaped like lipstick tubes, radiating out of a plump explosion of violet, tangerine and scarlet, at least a hundred tiny rockets taking flight from a common center but each ascending into its own orbit, paying no attention to the gravity which exerted its heavy will upon everything else not painted or nailed to the pegboard's surface. The man as a child marveled at the orange plastic basket at the exact epicenter of the spectral bomb. How it opened up towards the sky with its tulip mouth, flattening its sides after a miracle steel had passed through a lucky strike of the flipper below the 12-volt battery powering a flashbulb fireworks show behind the sheet of glass to the simultaneous peals of a real brass hammer striking a real brass bell. Then the rush of hieroglyphed spheres showered his little hands in the payout tray, wave upon wave upon wave of them, like an ice cream headache right before the pain takes grip at the back of the throat. The man as a child never failed to be amazed at how the lucky fortune of a single pebble was instantly celebrated by the whole quarry, and how the finessed flick of his sticky thumb had made it all real.

The woman, at the top of the staircase, beckoned again for the man to join her. She closed her own bathroom door inside their own bedroom as she always did, making sure to push with just enough force that the man would hear it plop against the doorframe. The woman devised this part a long time ago, back when she could (but didn't) take the stairs two at a time and could (but didn't) offer herself to the man twice in an evening. Before enacting the door ritual, she spent too many moments waiting for the man to climb the stairs and join her in their own bedroom. Moments without a clear signal of some sort that she was in fact already in their own bedroom. Wasted in her waiting for the sound of his fingers gripping the handrail on the staircase. The groan of the iron brackets inside the drywall that echoed and amplified in the ascending tunnel of air. Sighs when he at last let go of whatever insignificant tasks that were preoccupying him in the bowels of the house. To join her at last upstairs. The man was the one to always shut the door connecting their own bedroom to the hallway, as reassurance to the woman that he was present in her presence. Although she was still behind the door of her own bathroom, she enjoyed knowing that she wasn't alone in the larger nested doll they called their own bedroom, and furthermore that her companionship did not require the man's physical appearance in her line of sight. The man and woman had once enjoyed sharing a bathroom and all the shared privacies of such a space (the speckle-spatter of another's toothpaste on the gargantuan rectangle of mirrored glass that somehow floated above their double sinks; the errant pubic hair of the other's body (flattened and dried against the ceramic tile of the shower's high backsplash; the clumsy stacking of half-dispensed rolls of toilet paper atop the porcelain lid to the fixture's engorged and sweaty water tank), but they gradually tired of watching each other perform the banalities of civilized hygiene that were required of them to even consider living in their own neighborhood.

The man timed his bedroom entrance to the narrow sliver of time before/after the woman's closing her own bathroom door a second time, so as to be already in their own bed, overhead lights off, outer bedroom door closed, staircase light off, television on, DVR remote laying still in the trough of his outstretched hand, armed and thumb on the control like a missile commander waiting for the launch code.

The woman appeared. The man rose. The children sat. The doors locked.

All fast-forwarded through the night, rewound and readied for the inevitable day.

Turn the television to a static channel, the volume all the way down. Whomever turns up the volume will be next to die. Whomever turns off the television will get a telemarketing call within the subsequent 24 hours, with the surprisingly-soft voice on the other end asking specifically asking to talk to you and only you. Whichever of these acts inspires the most crying and regret is something you totally get to decide.

The Internet seems like a useful tool on the surface, but it is completely your enemy. It is an objective repository for shards of the truth, and lends itself far too well to deductive logic—in most cases, leaps in pattern recognition are necessary to make anything there useful, and be mindful of your own tendency towards jumping to conclusions. If you use online banking services and/or pay any of your utility bills electronically, you must immediately and forever stop. Scribbling out paper checks for arbitrary sums and mailing them anonymously with no return address so they can be randomly sorted and opened and processed by silent machines once they reach their destinations is a tried, tested and true method of keeping your relationship nice and sedate. It worked for your grandparents, after all, and everyone knows how doe-eyed happy they were all those years.