She always cleaned on Mondays, but never like this. The dust blew out in nebulas as things shifted in the closet. The furniture polish bit at her eyes, justifying the tears that cut gullies down her dirt-smeared cheeks. Her hands fluttered in the afternoon light. Once they were so strong, the wedding ring cutting angles on her straight fingers. Now they looked like weak things in need of rehabilitation.
She cleaned to blur her mind away from everything, but she found today that the distraction of smoothing wood picture frames and ironing dresses only gave her mind the permission it needed to dwell in the very places she was trying to escape.
Always it was the wedding that came first and last, Harvey in his jacket that pulled smooth over his muscular shoulders so that his shirt was as taught as his body. She saw the moment when he tried to pour champagne down her throat but missed, the pink fluid creating a pool on the chest of her wedding dress. He had apologized endlessly, even gotten down on his knees the way he had when he slid the angular ring on her strong finger, but of course she hadn’t cared, and now the most important thing about her wedding seemed to be that washed-out pink blush that still lingered on her dress.
The light caught on her weakened joints, the veins raised against the flesh. It seemed absurd that they were the same hands that he held that night. Time had divided things somehow, so that in all of the continuity some indiscernible fracture had occurred, and now there was no convincing connection but the gaunt memories billowed out by the sting of ammonia on tile.
She had felt so safe that wedding night. She had never expected it. She had anticipated claustrophobia, panic, the walls closing in with a dizzying tilt, but the moonlight on his bare back had actualized her, defined her again as something strong and new.
Now, her own back was a bit crooked from the shallow advent of years, and her skin, once silvered in the night, was mottled from the bombardment of ultraviolet light.
If she wiped the pictures three times, she thought, she could erase their contents, wipe the memories from her mind.
Every Monday he had brought Chinese food takeout. The greasy, white boxes and the crumbled fortune cookies in plastic wrappers became the symbolism of her happiness. They were closest when they spooned out the sweet and sour chicken. No matter the trials of the week in those early years, every Monday was a baptism that ameliorated all of the small fissures between them that every week were in need of healing.
The 409 dripped thickly down the glass, the solvent helpless against the buildup of grime.
She could not pinpoint exactly a first Monday on which there was no Chinese food, and the week’s pains were left to accumulate for the next week’s Monday, though such a day must have happened. She was aware of a gradual shift from fortune cookies predicting fantastic futures to fortune cookies dispensing advice, and finally to fortune cookies commanding her actions.
She tried to forget, but as she wiped at the hopelessly tarnished glass, she was transported again to that night when all of the symptoms she had repressed became unbearable in the silence and sterility between them.
It was odd, finding out she wasn’t the one the way they had always believed there was nothing else but each other. How could there be spaces he needed someone else to fill? How could someone else share his fortune, his future, his bed?
She had, until that night, naively believed that love never died, and she thought it would sustain her. But then the mortality of romance overwhelmed her, and she lay on the bed they had consummated together and sobbed until her nose bled onto the white sheets, and she left the blood to dry and decay.
She didn’t know where he was now as she cleaned what she planned on taking. She felt their separation deep inside of her below the place the pink champagne had spilt on her white dress so long ago. There were so many years between them, so many losses, so many hopes that dried up now as the sun descended.
The door was not audible enough to shake her from her washing of the pictures with her tears, tears which dissolved the dirt after the 409 failed. When she finally became aware of his presence, he was standing in front of her with pink champagne and Chinese food in greasy, white boxes. They said nothing as she cracked open a fortune cookie with trembling, aging fingers (“don’t lose faith in tomorrow”), and he tried to kiss her lips but missed. He looked so small, finally, in this end.
She would still leave in the morning with her pictures and her shame, but for now, it was Monday, and there were so many cracks to fill.
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2 comments:
Guess this is another thing your "cool brain" can do...literally change you into another person w. different experiences than yourself; you can lose your "self". Maybe this ability of the brain (imagination) helped saved early mankind from it's miserable experiences.
that's probably very true. sadly or not i cannot say.
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