Always Happy Hour: Stories(37)

This stirs something in her. “Aren’t you forgetting the second half?”

“No,” I say. “That’s the end of it.”

“Men,” she says, “you can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.”

“I know the saying.”

When the furniture comes, Aggie is sharp, sober. She wraps a towel around her waist and hurries inside. Alexander follows and it’s just Nathan and me. He tries to climb onto my raft and I let him struggle before helping him. He gestures toward the cookies and we paddle over.

“Give me one,” I say, opening my mouth wide. He drops a cookie in. “These were my favorite when I was a kid.”

“You weren’t a kid,” he says, and he laughs and laughs.

I tell him he’s had enough, that he’s going to get diabetes. I don’t know if I could give him a better life but I could wean him off sugared cereal and Chef Boyardee and take him to Whole Foods so he could see where all of the beautiful people go. He paws at my breasts with his pruned fingers. How old is he? I have difficulty with the years between three and six.

I grab his hands and he leans forward and kisses me full on the mouth.

“You can’t French kiss me,” I say. “It’s disgusting. It’s not right!” I wipe my mouth in an exaggerated manner as he squeals and think of the time I saw a dog and a pig playing together on the side of the road, how happy it had made me. Then I think of Gunner and Biscuit, Echo and Willy and Winter, all of the dogs I might have had if I’d played my cards right. Gunner was my favorite—snow white with black rings around his eyes. When I walked him up and down the driveway, he didn’t pull at the leash but stayed right by my side, occasionally looking up at me to wag his tail, no doubt in his mind that all of his troubles were in the past, already forgotten.





LOVE APPLES

He tells you a story about women who put peeled apples under their arms, how they would send these apples off to war with their men and the men would eat them, so what he is requesting is not so much.

He wants you to send him a sweaty T-shirt, or some panties you got excited in.

That night you sleep under a heavy comforter. In the morning you take off your shirt and wrap it up in a piece of tissue paper. It is thin and worn and ocean blue. You picture it draped across his chest.

The post office is empty, the bald guy reading the newspaper.

“Nice and quiet in here,” you say, because even though you are getting a divorce and starting a new life with a man who wants your dirty panties it is no reason to be impolite.

“Twenty people lined up a minute ago,” he says, folding. You hand him the envelope and tell him to send it the cheapest way possible. Then you ask about mail forwarding and he gives you a request form with the stipulation that you are to tell everyone you know. “Don’t count on us,” he says, pointing to himself.

“Through wind and rain.”

He smiles as he wags his finger. You tell him you bet he never heard that one before, as if knowing you are the same as everyone somehow makes it better, and he winks and you gather your things and walk out into the too-bright day.


While your husband is at work, you talk to your boyfriend. You met your boyfriend online, in a chat room for people who are interested in films but no one ever talked about films. They talked about fucking; they talked about their wives and husbands and how badly they had been mistreated so they wouldn’t feel so badly about talking about fucking.

You get to know each other over the phone, over drinks, in the middle of the day. He works from home and you haven’t had a job since the last time you got sick, conjuring up an illness that existed only in your head, which promptly went into remission with your two weeks’ notice.

“Are you online?” he asks. Of course you’re online, so he sends you a photo of penises in a lineup: small, small-average, average, large-average, large. His is large-average. He wants to give you an idea. You tell him you’re reading a novel that takes place inside a woman’s head, during the span of a blow job.

At five o’clock, you stand at the door with the phone pressed to your ear and watch out the peephole. The peephole is your height, installed by your husband so you wouldn’t have to answer the door for anyone you didn’t want to answer the door for, and now the only people who come to the door are people you’re certain you don’t want to talk to. Your social life is limited to the old lady across the street. When your car is in the driveway, you’re home, so she calls and you go over to her house and drink a flat Coke and try to come up with a reason to leave, or you watch Sunday services with her in the back room and she points out people in the congregation, tells you the things they have done and the things that have been done to them and you say how terrible it all is.

Your boyfriend is saying he has waited an eternity.

Now he is saying he will take you to Korea, Japan, India, Iceland. The world is so big and you have seen so little of it. All of the people you used to know are strangers but if you saw one of them on the opposite side of it then maybe you could say hello. “I’m hungry,” you say. “Eat an apple,” he says, but you don’t feel like eating an apple. When the two of you are together you won’t want to eat pizza anymore. You won’t want to eat sandwich cookies. Where is your husband? He said he’d take you to The Hungry Heifer, where the waitresses wear T-shirts with cows on the back of them, because you asked, because he is a nice guy even though you are leaving and he will probably die without you. Whose back will he scratch? Who will watch Cops with him? You don’t think about these things, and you don’t think about how quiet the house will be, how he will lie in bed and listen to your absence.