The Laws of Average (16 page)

Well whoopteefreakingdoo!

Now don't get me wrong here. I think it's great you're no longer dying, or whatever you want to call it. That you can live your particular lifestyle and not put yourself a through the figurative cheesegrater to do it is something to be commended. Hooray for you. Really.

I've enclosed a picture of myself when I was your age. The similarities are striking, aren't they? The faint feathering of our hair as it streaks the sides of our shoulders. The mustardy quality of our smile. The bell curves of our waist, smoothing to an S just before they jut out at the hip. The twinning of our pouting stare.

Fast forward now. Imagine yourself thirty years later: hair dulled, curves straightened into the shapes of illegible letters. How will the Future You regard the Past You? Will the two meet for a weekday lunch and silently judge each other's choices, in between stabs at tomatoes and spoonfuls of cottage cheese? Will they pick up the check for each other, or will they insist on separate bills? Which one will be the first to grab a toothpick from the metal carousel next to the cashier's till? Moreover, who will be the first through the door, and the last to say a hasty, parking lot goodbye?

Major Thing #3: I Am Married to My Husband

He is a squat, balding man who has recently started talking too much. He says things that are on his mind, and for the most part these are things worth talking about, but it didn't used to be this way. For years he found ways to circumvent conversation; then, matters worth discussing were What's For Dinner and When Will You Be Home. He likes to eat carbs and drink big classes of whole milk right before he comes to bed, so the night air above us frequently smells like cheese and peanut butter sandwiches (this has been perfectly consistent, by the way).

I spend a lot of time away from him, and not necessarily because I want to. We live in a suburb of a city that is a suburb of a larger city. My home, naturally, is nowhere close to where I work, so I am what some call an “extreme commuter.” I leave the house before five in the morning and rarely make it back much before eight in the evening. We have three children and I am the primary earner (this has been pretty consistent, too).

When our children were younger, my husband mostly stayed at home. He has a college degree in something or other that allows him to teach occasionally, but it's nothing predictable, permanent, or what someone could even remotely consider a career. Now that the children are older, he still mostly stays at home, but he isn't in any way domestic. His daily routine consists of shuffling back and forth between the bathroom, a small office, and the shower, all of which are located on the second story of our numblingly average two-story house. He has a perverse affinity for taking showers, and a measurable distaste for nearly everything downstairs, to wit he bought a grimy garage sale refrigerator and hired a couple of movers to lug the damn thing upstairs to the office.

It really shouldn't come as a surprise that my husband never checked the mail on any other occasion than a whim or when he was expecting some trinket he'd “won” on eBay. This is partly what I meant by saying that he's started talking too much. We have been married for well over twenty years; until very recently, there wasn't a single second of those twenty years that he's discussed his personal shopping forays so frankly.

“Did you know,” he blurted out just last week, “that there are people auctioning off those inflatable love dolls?”

Please tell me what I should have said to him. Because maybe you know. You are, after all, a Real Woman.

Well, this real woman was completely tongue-tied. I'm not certain what would inspire someone to auction a used love doll, and I'm even less sure of what array of search terms and hyperlinks would lead somebody to one. What I do know is that I'm married to a man who not only found such an item online, but recounted the excitement of finding it to me with a pubescent grin that I haven't seen for decades.

And I know it well, girl, because I used to tell my friends about it, when I still cared about being smiled at and being talked about long after leaving a conversation. It's the same rumpled, Z-shaped grin he gave me before we started dating back in junior high. It was a signal that he was coming for me, in the way that I was supposed to want to be wanted. It was the first thing I saw before and after. The first thing he saw before and after was you. Meaning me, when you were me.

Hopefully you see where I'm going with this.

For a long time, before and after had different looks. After the children, we didn't seek out each other's faces; the room was a tangle of distractions from the television or neighborhood traffic, me thinking about waiting my turn, him guessing at what I was thinking. And we were perfectly fine with that. Really. We raised our children and I worked my job and he officed his mishmash and we looked our different looks. That's the way it was for a long, long time. And it was fine.

Really.

Fine.

And I should be happy now that the grin is back, right? It should remind me that the core of him is still there, despite what the shell of him looks or smells like. Well I am not happy. Now that the grin is back I am reminded of being me more and more, while feeling like you less and less. And I'm not sure who to blame for any of this. I see you in my mailbox, on my computer screen, in once-sacred places and thoughts I used to visit because I thought they were truly sacred. I'm wearing your clothes, brushing your hair, shaving your legs. I'm becoming un-Real.

I didn't want to end up finding sticky pictures of myself all over my own house, so I started tacking up pictures of you instead. I put them everywhere I couldn't reach': above the sink, on top of the refrigerator, in the bookcases, under the pillows. I put them in these places, thinking I would see them and he would see them, and that would somehow roll back the grin. I started handing them to my husband when they came in the mail, and bcc:ing them to him when they clogged my inbox. I made a pimp and whore of him. He did anything I asked, and he talked dirty to me irregardless of my being there. He loved me completely. Stupid me.

So what I'm asking should be fairly obvious.

I want you to go away.

I want you to slink back to Jackson or Tempe or Crystal Lake or wherever you came from, and I want you to do it as quietly as possible. No cameras or recording devices allowed. Don't make a spectacle or big deal about it. I'll do your press release and call all your people. I'll tell your mom you're already on your way.

You don't have to consider the alternatives. I'm already there.

This is the story that manufactured the other story that became the relationship premised on all of the above, a Jenga tower assembled high and without wide enough base to support itself. Pretty much like everything. This is the selection of promises that were never made good upon, the best intentions not withstanding, the trying times mutating into the tired times, the lie and deceit of love, the selfishness of wanting to stay forever in the dream state and loathing every miserable second of the waking state. He told her a long time ago to practice signing his name, again and again, so she could replicate it perfectly, so their handwriting couldn't be distinguished. And when she did this, when she had it down cold, that was the point when he took it away and made her promise to never ever do it again, promise to forget him. This, after all, is why it's called “breaking up.” Because she didn't, you see. She really really didn't.

This is the dream she can't ever make just a dream, and not because he won't allow it or it's impossible. This is the part that's real, and it starts this way: he ties the straps tight on the trailer carrying his motorcycle, the one she still makes payments on because he hasn't worked for four months straight. His daughter, 2 dogs and aforementioned wife are all tucked into the car in front of him but this is the persistent pattern: drive drive drive, stop; pull pull tie tie; drive drive drive, stop; pull pull tie tie. This morning he made sure his wife wrestled her wedding band over her knuckle, the one she hadn't worn for the better part of two years, the one which kinda-sorta matched his (both were
round
), purchased 10 minutes before their courthouse scene scripted out of some horrible cable TV show, the scene where the friend and the other friend take an extended lunch break to stand somewhere and witness something and sign something before they all leave to swill 64-ounce sodas and swallow biggie-sized fries from a drive-thru on the way back to work.
Ceremony
, of course, isn't the right word for this, but that's what it was called when someone garbed in a Carolina blue suit handed him an itemized receipt with very word on it, and his sense of the world was that multi-syllabic words rarely lied.

It is pouring rain, unusual for Utah in August. The high elevation desert floods within minutes, the baked clay tight from the hot summer and totally uninterested in loosing its grip on the landscape. Lake Bonneville used to be one of the world's largest bodies of water, in an era before humans walked the planet, invented religion, pretended to be gods, and conjured impossible stories to justify their behaviors. Now there is barely a sketch of the lake, its shores mere traces along the horizon of a past no one remembers because they never experienced it, not entirely unlike the one he had before moving here and having her and all of the whatnottery that came along. But like the lake long gone, the past is as well.

His wife is asleep, dreaming. The dream is always this one: spies in glass rooms, smoke and bullets filling the space, the world just a heartbeat away from total annihilation. She has this dream and never shares it. She doesn't know what any of it means and she's smart enough not to trust anything her husband might say in response. A recurring dream, it follows and haunts her, like a spurned lover who just can't accept the finality of things, who somehow always finds a way to play semantics when she says things like It's Over and I Don't Love You Anymore and I Don't Think I Really Ever Did and This Is Really Goodbye.

In the dream there is a company that pays her money to build databases. Virtual vaults of information programmed to sort, stack and sift until patterns form, ciphers blurring into meanings before fuzzing into facts. She has done this long enough and well enough to understand the volatility of the entire universe, how removing a single term—sarcoidosis, say—from a medical database literally loosens the entire economy and knowledge base of the world that teeters on top of it. The thing that's present but not acknowledged, the complete lack of syntax necessary for a language to arrive and convey itself.

He, of course, works for The Networking Company, the backbone of the entire universe, the gatekeeper of zero and one, and the entire spectrum between the two. He is full-force static-skin. In this dream his reasons for being are entirely financial, and she is here in her sift of bytes simply because of her market value, because of all the things they've come to own that aren't children, and how those things were never worth the price they paid in the first place. No such thing, then, as value appreciation. Value, in the dream, is only ever inflated. As it always is in the non-dream.

This isn't the thing that keeps her sleeping. Her rest is finite and not all that restful, but it is a deliberate choice and hers to make and the most obvious one given all the pit stops. What keeps her sleeping is the low level of fuel it takes to maintain herself as Just Fine, how here she can't feel the metal above the webbing between her fingers and her hand, and can displace the muscle memories of his tugs at the tips of her, his palms simultaneously at her temple and back of her head, his thick burn in her throat and stomach.

Another thing keeping her sleeping is the release she feels from instructing her daughter in the delicate performance art of committed relationships, and she deals with this by making the girl sleep as much as she possibly can, sometimes using any means necessary. Methods and/or chemistry. She isn't proud of this. She knows the damage this is causing. But therapy exists for that sort of deal. There is no cure for alone.

The irony for her is that when we sleep we are at our most isolated and vulnerable, so our brains try to tell us fictions about how this isn't the case; when our brains succeed, we call that bliss; when they fail, we call that nightmare. States of bliss and nightmare are both just stories, the stuff of fairy tales and horror, stuff that never lasts, and never existed in the first place. The truth of any committed relationship is that it always is struggling to find balance between these stories, rendering its participants little more than actors on a stage laden with trap doors, false floors and falling. Ever falling.

Dreams within dreams. This is the thing that keeps her sleeping the most. The thing that keeps us all. The labyrinth and puzzle of them, the awareness that waking isn't really waking. Or doesn't have to be. The thick comfort that arrives like a blanket, after the adrenaline shot of having survived the nightmare, of watching it evaporate, of feeling more dead than alive than dead than she probably should. Than we all probably should.

There is much to pity in both of them, but we will always choose a side. We choose hers. Why?

Perhaps it's because we know her better, which is to say we know more of the things she's done that she would take back if she could. Perhaps it's because we don't know him at all, which is to say he's made different choices than us, takes on a different set of priorities and responsibilities than us, does whatever it is he does that keeps us from knowing him in the first place. Perhaps it's because she is beautiful, which is, in most cases, to say nothing in particular, to say nothing stands out. But you. You do what you like. Like you always do. Like anyone ever always does. Dreams within dreams implore, seduce us all to sleep. Not another word now.

Shush.