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October 2000

One bite at a time, I was being nourished by something mysterious. I was eating rain. I was eating sunlight. I was eating a piece of bread and actually tasting it.

Losing Weight

Filing for divorce, buying a skirt that ended above the knees, getting a stomach-stapling operation

Disguises

A black wig, four long red marks spaced like fingers, a black polyester shirt with white polka dots

Past Imperfect

My first impulse was to correct her English: it might be better to say, “I have fallen in love with Lawrence.” We had been over the difference between the past perfect and the past imperfect tens of times, and she still didn’t get it. In the past perfect, the action was over and done with. But imperfect action had a continuing and vital connection to the present, which I knew was the case here: she had fallen in love with him and continued to be in love with him, at that very moment.

Ten Things

He had a special way of doing everything. He developed a method of eating watermelon with a knife, cutting slices so thin the seeds would slither out, and setting aside the juiciest fillet from the middle to eat last. There was an order in which to read the newspaper (sports, business, style, metro, front page). The two of you never left a football or a baseball game until the last second had ticked off the clock, regardless of a lopsided score or a ten-below windchill or being late to meet someone for dinner. He always carried a pen in his pocket and kept long lists of things to do and places to see on little yellow sticky notes inside his wallet.

Punch Line

The last time my father takes a bath, my mother has to help him lower himself into the water. The melanoma that infests his body has made him gigantic. He is so bloated he looks like a woman nine months pregnant.

Little Zooey

Little Zooey died today. Pam and I were in the backyard playing with the dogs when we heard a knock at the front door. Pam went around the side of the house to see who it was and came back a few minutes later with Zooey cradled in her arms. There was no blood, but the cat’s head hung slack, her tongue sticking out of her mouth. It was plain that she was dead. Pam was crying freely, and I felt a quick surge of grief myself.

Green

Katrina had been talking about the garden for years, as long as he’d known her. Some women dream of white weddings, or sandy beaches, or new diamond rings; she dreamed of spinach and lettuce, garlic and tomatoes, and tall native grass in the spring. Each day, the man looks out the window above their bed and sees that there is more to be done, that her garden is green but not green enough.

Sunbeams

As I grew to adolescence, I imagined, from closely observing the boredom and vexations of matrimony, that the act my parents committed and the one I so longed to commit must be two different things.

Shirley Abbott

The Marriage Bed

A rouge wave, a hand-bound journal, a Catholic priest