by Maria Semple
In fact, that dinner at Dojo, it wasn’t Rasta Bob singing “I wanna love you, every day and every night” that inspired Joe to declare the three words that sealed our fate; it was the following discussion of the New Testament:
Joe: It’s doggerel, aggrandizing a moody egomaniac written by men who believed heaven was a hundred feet above their heads. Literally. So when Christ ascended, He didn’t go higher than a seven-story building.
Me: Who cares?
Joe: The hours I wasted listening to that contradictory claptrap! The things I could have done with that time! I could have learned another language. Or leathercraft.
Me: I was brought up Catholic too, you know. When I was seven, they were teaching us about the loaves and the fishes. I raised my hand and said, “That couldn’t really happen.” Sister Bridget, not happy, responded, “Faith requires the mind of a child.” I said, “But I am a child.” She replied, “A younger child.” I thought, What a load of malarkey, and never looked back.
Joe: So you just turned atheist? Wasn’t it a struggle?
Me: “Let’s not and say we did” is my attitude.
Joe: I love you.
Me [I knew it was a blurt that didn’t count. But still, you gotta jump on these things.]: I love you too, Joe.
I’d officially fallen in love the week before, in the Adirondacks, and was just waiting for him to say it first. Violet Parry, the creator of Looper Wash, had rented a lake house and invited the animators and their significant others for a bonding weekend. (I’d only just met Joe, so new work friends + new guy = doubly scary.) It was July 4th. Rumor had it if we hiked to the ridge we could watch the fireworks from the town on the other side. Only after evening fell and we were getting ready to go did we discover that none of the cabin’s dozen flashlights worked. We groused and resigned ourselves to a boozy night on the porch. Joe didn’t come outside. I found him alone at the kitchen counter. He’d disassembled the flashlights and laid them out like surgical instruments. He’d swapped bulbs, scrubbed off crusted battery ooze, and was folding tinfoil into small squares. So peacefully absorbed, so competent, so dear. (That was the moment.) I’m not kidding, within thirty minutes Joe had ten of those flashlights working. As we headed up the forest path, Violet pointed to Joe and mouthed, Keep him.
Had I lost him? Might there be someone else?
Yo-Yo’s eyes were closed and his face was raised to the sun. Come to think of it, he was pretty useless. Thanks a lot, Joe. You left me for another woman and turned me against my dog. If Jerry Garcia were alive, he could sing a song about it.
The fisherman helped the tattooed chef load the squid into an ice chest. I caught them looking at me. Had they been talking about me? I gave them a nod. They carried on with their business.
I revisited my Gratitude List. Oh, another one! Joe reads in bed long after I go to sleep. No amount of passive-aggressive tossing and turning on my part, nor looking at the clock, nor dramatically putting a pillow over my head will make him turn off the light. When he finally does, he’ll sometimes rest his book on me. And these aren’t slim volumes of poetry. They’re Winston Churchill biographies, and Winston Churchill lived a very full life.
The van door slammed shut. The fisherman was gone. The chef came around the side. Our eyes caught. I held his gaze. He held mine. It’s not that I wanted to get anything going with this guy, but it was too weird…
And then he was walking toward me with an intrigued half smile.
I don’t put my hair in a clip for one day and this happens? A hot chef, knowing he’s got a squid in the back of his van, boldly crosses a parking lot to start up a conversation with a middle-aged woman?
This brave new world could not have come at a better time.
“I have to ask,” he said.
“I have to answer.”
“What kind of dog is this?”
I was as desirable as a hedge. That’s what happens when you lose your sex drive. I can put on Belgian dresses, wear my hair down, and flirt garishly, but when it came to real currency, sexual currency, I had none.
This morning when Joe said of Yo-Yo, “I know what he’s getting out of us, I just don’t know what we’re getting out of him,” he wasn’t only talking about the dog.
I offered the chef the leash.
“He’s a mutt,” I said. “Want him?”
“Wow,” he said. “No, but thanks. He sure is cute!”
With that, my Gentleman Caller disappeared into the ether.
It’s not like I don’t come with my own grab bag of flaws. Although Joe is far too superior to catalog his grievances toward me, they might include:
1. Once I ate a bagel on the toilet.
2. I use too much floss.
3. I floss in bed.
4. I take the dog into the shower with me to wash him.
5. I take my first bite of popcorn at the movies by touching my tongue to the top of the popcorn and eating what sticks. But Joe always says he doesn’t want popcorn because it’s too salty, so it’s mine and can’t I eat it the way I want?
6. I toss Milk Duds into the popcorn.
7. Actually, I bite the Milk Duds into four pieces and spit them back into the popcorn so they’re smaller, giving me a better popcorn-to-Milk-Dud ratio. Yes, they’re covered in saliva, but it’s my saliva. Though I can see how, to someone reaching into the popcorn he said he wasn’t going to eat, it could be an issue.
Joe wouldn’t say this because he’s a gentleman, but I will: I’m looking worse by the day. I’m all jowly. My back is dry. I have a bush the size of a dinner plate. My core strength is nonexistent. Menopause means your metabolism skids to a stop and you lose 30 percent of your muscle mass. In other words, the self-discipline to watch my weight, which I never had to begin with, I now need more of. Really, I’m hanging by a thread. Sure, Joe had spent breakfast with his face down on the table but at least he was still in the same room with me.
Yo-Yo, bored with the hot sun, let out a snorty yawn.
Come on, Gratitude List, work your magic! I haven’t nursed you all these years for nothing! The whole idea was when Joe finally hit the eject button, I’d feel free too. Kind of like that first shower after getting my hair chopped off, or those first steps in a new pair of cushiony running shoes, or seeing the world through new, stronger prescription lenses…
Could this be happening? Could the elixir I’d been squirreling away for decades have lost its fizz?
Was it me? Was it Joe? Was it the passage of time? Was I too tired to care? Earlier this year, I’d told a mother at school I’d been married fifteen years. She asked, “What’s the secret to a long marriage?” I thought for a second, then answered, “Staying married.”
Was it happiness I’d found in my long marriage? Or capitulation? Or is that all happiness is, capitulation?
The story of our marriage was in frames all over our apartment: Joe and I riding to the Emmys in the back of a limo. Me surprising Joe during a medical conference in Chicago and having someone take our picture in front of Cy Twombly’s peonies. (Moments later, Joe asked me to marry him in front of the Bean with a ring he’d grabbed at the museum gift shop.) Our wedding in Violet Parry’s backyard in Martha’s Vineyard. Giving birth to Timby at home on Thanksgiving Day, the TV on in the background, the cast of Sunday in the Park with George performing during the Macy’s parade. Sunday, by the blue, purple, yellow, red water. Joe opening the Wallace Surgery Center. Timby’s first day of kindergarten.
But standing there in the weak October sun, a different story of our marriage presented itself. It was as if all those years, Joe and I had been followed by a photographer snapping pictures of us unawares…
Joe and me reading quietly in bed, Timby playing Legos at our feet.
Me looking out the window, seeing Joe and Timby below, walking home from the Science Center.
Me standing on the Galer Street lawn in the drizzle, early for pickup.
Yo-Yo snoring in the living room, so loud none of us could sleep.<
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The three of us sitting on the curb outside Portage Bay waiting for them to call our name for brunch.
That was happiness. Not the framed greatest hits, but the moments between. At the time, I hadn’t pegged them as being particularly happy. But now, looking back at those phantom snapshots, I’m struck by my calm, my ease, the evident comfort with my life.
I’m happy in retrospect.
Oh, Joe, take me back and I promise I’ll make love to you twice a week and never eat a bagel on the toilet again. I’ll appreciate the quiet moments and—
Hey! Could it be? Alonzo! Walking on a pedestrian overpass spanning Elliott Avenue.
I watched him go down the stairs and head into the Costco parking lot.
This was perfect. I needed to apologize for calling him “my poet.”
Alonzo had changed into jeans and a red polo shirt, but he was unmistakable from afar with his sturdy frame and regal carriage.
“Let’s go!” I said to Yo-Yo, who jumped so vigorously out of his sleep I feared we both might tear muscles.
Cars were few on the edge of the Costco parking lot. Yo-Yo’s friskiness toggled to despair as I tied him to an empty shopping-cart rack and sliced the air with my index finger. “You. Stay.”
Alonzo’s mop top bobbed over the parked cars in the distance and stopped at a rack filled with pony packs of marigolds. Alonzo took in the unremarkable sight and threw his head back with a jolly laugh. Poets. I needed to be more like them.
Alonzo spotted something on the ground—I couldn’t see what—and leaned over to pick it up. He then disappeared into the shadowy maw of Costco.
This was my Costco, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t lost Timby in here more than once, so I’d perfected the art of finding moving targets. My secret? To canvass the place like I was drawing that house with the X through it without lifting my pencil.
I entered and jogged along the left wall, checking the aisles to my right. When I reached the top left corner, I crossed through wine and hung a left, which landed me in toilet paper. Still no Alonzo.
Last time I was here was a year ago. After an hour spent filling my cart so high it handled like a bumper car and required an arm across the top so everything wouldn’t slide off, I made my way to the checkout line. A wave of misanthropy swept over me. Why did that lady need a whole drum of Red Vines? What would someone even do with a hundred combs? Did that fatso really need a laminator all to herself? Couldn’t she just go to Kinko’s? Or that guy, what was he doing with six gallon jugs of generic scotch? And why must they all wear shorts?
Thank God I wasn’t one of them! Me with my case of highly rated New Zealand sauvignon blanc, my pound of fresh pineapple spears, my salt-and-pepper pistachios, my twelve-pack of dental floss. My items painted a clear picture of my sophistication… my superior taste… my sparkling intelligence…
I abandoned my cart in the checkout line and walked out empty-handed. I felt bad for the person who had to return my stuff to the proper shelves. I felt worse when I realized it was probably cheaper for Costco to just throw it all away.
I crossed through produce. Impossibly cheap! Good color! Firm to the touch! What’s the catch? Too many seeds. As good as it all looks on the outside, take it home and it’s filled with a freakish number of seeds. English cucumbers: dense with flat leathery seeds. Lemons: you dull your knife on all the seeds. Cherry tomatoes: jammed with tiny, slimy seeds. Not that I’d ever buy chicken at Costco, but if I did, I could imagine slicing it open and seeds pouring out.
A mob of Seahawks fans blocked the way to the bakery. Racks of cupcakes were being rolled out, a dozen to a shrink-wrapped sheet, each frosted blue with a green 12. Across the aisle, a bigger mob swarming cupcakes decorated with Pope hats, also with the number 12. The only thing you need to know about Seattle? Nobody was offended.
I arrived at the gauntlet of food-sample people. They stuck to their script without deviation and avoided eye contact, America’s version of the Buckingham Palace guards. If the Buckingham Palace guards had terrible posture and filled you with existential dread.
“Jack cheese,” said a woman. “In four zesty flavors. Stock up for the holidays.”
“Breaded steak fish,” a voice droned. “Fresh from Alaska and a perfect option for a healthy nutritious dinner. Try it tonight. Breaded steak fish…”
My attention snagged on the slight Southern accent. My head jerked back. My body turned.
There he was, in a blue apron and shower cap, manning a little counter. My poet, with a marigold in the buttonhole of his polo shirt.
“Fresh from Alaska and a perfect option for a healthy nutritious dinner. Try it tonight.”
I was jolted by the mash-up of high and low: the red plastic tray, damp and smelling of industrial dishwasher—his encyclopedic knowledge of the lives of the poets—the toaster-oven door stained brown with grease—
“Eleanor?”
“Alonzo!” I opened my arms for a hug.
He looked down: he couldn’t step off his mat.
“What’s this?” I said, picking up a little sample cup.
“Breaded steak fish.”
“I’ve heard it’s fresh from Alaska and perfect for a nutritious dinner.”
“A perfect option for a healthy nutritious dinner,” Alonzo corrected.
The whole exchange had an easy grace.
“Don’t mind if I do.” I dropped the morsel of fish on my tongue. Not my favorite.
Alonzo handed me a napkin and pointed to a trash can across the aisle. When I turned back, a man was standing at Alonzo’s station, kicking the tires, so to speak, of free food.
“What’s steak fish?” he asked.
“Tilapia,” Alonzo answered.
“Tilapia?” the man said with suspicion.
“It’s a sustainable, farm-grown replacement for pollack.”
“Never heard of that either.”
“It has the texture of steak,” Alonzo offered.
The man took a bite. “This?”
“I think it tastes fabulous!” I said. “I’ll take five cartons.”
The wary customer shook his head as I grabbed my stack.
“See you next week?” I said to Alonzo.
“Same Bat Time.”
“Oh,” I said. “What’s our next poem?”
“‘At the Fishhouses,’ by Elizabeth Bishop.”
“But of course,” I said.
Sometimes victory knocks on your window even though you never sent out an invitation. This is what today was supposed to be about! I had been present. I had been kind. I had radiated happiness. True, I’d completely forgotten to apologize to Alonzo. But I did turn what might have been an awkward situation into a respect-filled exchange bobbing with wit and sophistication. Chalk one up for me, leaving the world a better place than I’d found it.
But first, what to do with this goddamned steak fish? I made sure nobody was looking, nestled all five boxes in a bin of loose T-shirts, and got the hell out.
I stepped outside and got smacked by the sun. Yikes, I’d been gone forty-five minutes. Spencer hadn’t called, which I considered a minor miracle. This middle-aged body would have to do the last thing anyone wanted to see: run back to the sculpture park.
“Wait!” It was Alonzo charging out, tugging at his blue apron as if being attacked by bees.
“Alonzo?”
He finally freed himself from the apron and whipped it to the ground. He crouched for a moment, hands on quads. This was no athlete either.
“I can’t do it. The degradation, the dehumanization, the perversion of the English language.” He pulled out a pack of American Spirits, tapped out a cigarette, and lit it with a mini Bic.
To my enormous credit, I didn’t spend the next five minutes haranguing him for being a filthy, self-destructive smoker.
“It was that look on your face,” he said after the first drag.
“My face was beatific and serene… wasn’t it?”
“That made it worse.
Seeing how hard you were working just to look me in the eye.”
“I swear,” I said. “I can’t win for losing.”
“I’m not sure that’s what that means.” Cigarette in his mouth, Alonzo picked up his apron, balled it up, and dropkicked it into a nearby dumpster.
“Oh, Alonzo,” I said.
A motorized zzzt approached, followed by a slurring, high-pitched voice. “You don’t want to do that.”
It was a guy in a wheelchair with a tall safety flag. He wore a Costco name tag. JIMMY. His ear was frozen to his shoulder and his good arm worked a joystick.
“That’s a twenty-five-dollar deposit on that apron,” Jimmy said, scooting into Alonzo’s personal space.
Alonzo kept smoking and listened with an air of amused detachment.
“I seen a lot of people flip out and quit,” Jimmy continued. “Usually they throw their apron in the bin over there. Don’t return it, and they deduct it from your last paycheck.”
“Thank you,” Alonzo said. “But I honestly don’t give a rat’s ass.”
“Hey,” I said. “You’re a poet. Talk like one.”
“They empty that trash at twelve, three, and six,” Jimmy said. “I seen a lot of folks have second thoughts, come back but it’s gone.”
“I stand on my little mat flogging my fish story. Fresh from Alaska! On the box there’s an icy, roaring stream jumping with sassy fish. Really, it’s antibiotic-pumped tilapia farmed in Vietnam that maybe makes a stopover in Alaska. But hey, the price is right! Americans. You can see it in their walk. If they find something cheap, it puts a disgusting little bounce in their step.”
“Okay!” I said.
“And yet, it genuinely pains me when people like you spit out my samples.”
“I didn’t spit it out!”
“I saw you,” he said. “Yesterday was worse. Yesterday they gave me ostrich jerky.”
“That was you?” Jimmy said, his chair leaping back with a zzzt.
“I didn’t kill the ostriches. I didn’t hang them up to dry and hack them into strips! I just handed it out. I’m a poet!”
