All Back Full

by Robert Lopez

  It would be the same if she had diabetes, which she doesn’t have.

  Someday, though, she might develop diabetes.

  She hasn’t exercised at all since the marriage started.

  Asthma was recognized in Ancient Egypt and was treated by drinking an incense mixture known as kyphi. Hippocrates officially named it as a respiratory problem circa 450 BCE, with the Greek word for “panting” forming the basis of our modern name. During the 1930s to 1950s, asthma was known as one of the “holy seven” psychosomatic illnesses. Its cause was considered psychological, with treatment often based on psychoanalysis and other talking cures. These psychoanalysts interpreted the asthmatic wheeze as the suppressed cry of the child for its mother, and considered the treatment of depression to be especially important for individuals with asthma.

  Which isn’t to say the woman suffers from depression, or has suffered from depression.

  But it’s likely she’s had bouts of depression all her adult life.

  This memory of summer, of the city empty, of everyone somewhere else, others milling about and congregating in barrooms, and this love of someone, is not at all accurate. It’s an amalgam of various memories from different times and places.

  The man doesn’t even believe what it is he’s saying about loving this friend.

  When he was a boy there was a mailman named Ben. Everyone called this mailman Ben. His father called him Ben, as did all the neighbors. No one ever called him Benjamin.

  Ben was a mailman to the boy. They had no connection beyond that.

  Perhaps there was a brief exchange on the weather or baseball.

  The boy could be seen playing baseball across the street from his house, where Ben would deliver mail. The boy would either play with the neighborhood boys or his father.

  His father played baseball with him from the time he could stand up on his own. His father was a gifted athlete and thought the same would hold true for his son.

  The same did hold true for his son. The boy was also a gifted athlete, though he was never physically strong. He could never do a push up or pull up, but he could hit and throw and run and jump and do extraordinary things on the fields and courts all over the county.

  There were hopes of turning pro one day, or at least a scholarship.

  His father cautioned against this sort of hope.

  He cited any number of statistics and relayed anecdotes, cited precedents.

  His father advised the son to fix the hitch in his swing, for instance.

  He said one can’t catch up to a major league fastball with a pronounced hitch.

  The woman says, And your own father? What was he?

  The man says, He was in and out.

  The woman says, I’m sure he was.

  The man says, He was busy working. He wasn’t around much.

  The woman says, Missing in action.

  The man says, He was a good father.

  The woman says, Loved by one and all.

  The man says, What are we talking about?

  The woman says, Maybe you should call and ask him. Your father.

  He is probably home now, wandering the halls reciting….What does he recite again?

  The man says, Aristophanes.

  The woman says, I thought it was Euripides.

  The man says, What’s the difference?

  The woman says, Vive le difference.

  The man says, Why should I call him?

  The woman looks at the man. It seems as if she wants to say something. There is a particular look on her face.

  She is squinting ever so slightly. This squint is hardly perceptible.

  The man recognizes this squint, but no one else would.

  It’s as if she is thinking about what she wants to say, like she is organizing her thoughts, assembling the appropriate syntax and diction.

  The man waits for her to say something.

  It goes on like this for a while.

  She thinks better of it, decides it will keep.

  It’s unclear what’s on her mind.

  Outside the slugs are still on the driveway, leaving an easy-to-follow trail behind them, still on their way elsewhere, still slugging it out.

  The neighbors with the dog are no longer out there. They have concluded their walk, which they take every Sunday without fail, rain or shine. They do this for an hour, sometimes even longer.

  The man sees them from inside his own kitchen. If he is outside on the driveway pouring salt on slugs, he will wave. If one or the other says hello he will say hello back. He might even say, How are you today or Good to see you.

  He has never engaged either of these neighbors in any kind of conversation.

  There’s no way of knowing what the neighbors with the dog are doing now that they have returned home. Perhaps they’re not even home. Perhaps they are out and about in the world at large doing what people do on Sunday mornings. They could be shopping or going for a drive in the country.

  They could be Sunday drivers, which is a term the man doesn’t hear anymore.

  He remembers his father saying this many times. Goddamned Sunday drivers was how he always put it.

  The man’s father does recite poetry from time to time, but never classical playwrights like Aristophanes or Euripides.

  The man and woman have lived in this house for years now. It is the only home they’ve ever lived in together.

  The house is a Cape Cod cottage, which is a style of house originating in New England in the seventeenth century. It is traditionally characterized by a low, broad frame building, generally a story and a half high, with a steep, pitched roof with end gables, a large central chimney, and little ornamentation.

  Traditional Cape Cod houses are simple, symmetrically designed with a central front door surrounded by two multi-paned windows on each side. Homes were designed to withstand the stormy, stark weather of the Massachusetts coast.

  This is the house they live in.

  Looking for this house proved difficult and quite a process. It took six months altogether, but it seemed like years. They could never agree on certain particulars—city or suburban living, apartment or house, neighborhoods, amenities.

  There was awkwardness, confusion, frustration.

  They’d made an offer on another house before finding the Cape Cod, one that was out of their price range.

  This house was not a Cape Cod, but rather a Colonial.

  These buildings typically included steep roofs, small casement windows due to a scarcity of glass in the Colonies, rich ornamentation, and a massive central chimney. To maximize natural light in northern climes, early houses faced southeast, regardless of a building’s alignment to the road. Conversely, in southern colonies, houses faced northwest to minimize the sun’s heat.

  Essentially the Colonial was bigger. Also, there were multiple levels, small staircases that included only a few steps in either direction. There were also built-in bookshelves.

  This is what they remember of the Colonial.

  They were desperate and tired of looking and tried to justify this potential expenditure in various ways. One was that it seemed a good investment and that, if worse went down to worst, they would get their money back. Still, they didn’t like the idea of overextending themselves.

  But they were also tired of looking.

  Their offer was considerably lower than the asking price. There was at the same time another offer on the table, though they didn’t know for what amount.

  They assumed the other offer was higher than theirs.

  They were advised by the realtor to write a letter to the owners explaining why they loved the house and how they would be the best possible new owners for it. They were told to detail their personal histories, highlighting where they’d come from and what they hoped to achieve in the future and what they loved about the house, which seemed as if it were built for them, as if it were a dream house.

  All of this seemed futile at the time, as it does in retrospect.

&
nbsp; Of course, the other offer was accepted and they had to keep looking.

  They looked every weekend. They kept in close touch with the realtor, who told them not to be discouraged. She relayed statistics, anecdotes, cited precedents.

  Finally they found and decided on the Cape Cod.

  How they decided was the woman said I like it and the man said Finally.

  That other house, the one they’d made the low-ball offer on and had written a letter to the owners highlighting their histories and hopes, was actually a Ranch.

  For some reason they both remember it as a Colonial.

  The man sometimes refers to his own house, the Cape Cod, as the domicile.

  He’ll be out with his friend at a bar or restaurant or in the park and he’ll say, Let’s go back to the domicile.

  The friend is coming over later and might stay for dinner.

  This is likely to be a problem.

  The domicile is not located on the Massachusetts coast, but it is often in the path of hurricanes and otherwise stark, stormy weather.

  The domicile is green inside, different shades of green.

  Eleven of Aristophanes’ thirty plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are used to define the genre. Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.

  His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes’ play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent execution of Socrates, although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher.

  In his time, Euripides was associated with Socrates as a leader of a decadent intellectualism, both of them being frequently lampooned by comic poets such as Aristophanes. Whereas Socrates was eventually put on trial and executed as a corrupting influence, Euripides chose a voluntary exile in old age, dying in Macedonia.

  Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but according to the Suda, it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete. There are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays.

  More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined.

  However, Aeschylus and Sophocles aren’t currently under discussion, nor are they likely to come up later.

  The Suda or Souda is a massive tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas. It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with thirty thousand entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers.

  The man and woman painted the interior of the house themselves. The man was responsible for the dining room and kitchen, while the woman took care of the living room and den.

  It’s more accurate to say the man and woman painted the downstairs of the house themselves. After accomplishing this, they decided to hire professionals to paint the rest of the interior, including the stairwell and the two bedrooms upstairs.

  The man did a shoddy job of painting the dining room and kitchen, in particular along the molding. He wasn’t adept at taping, nor did he take the time to use a smaller brush for the more delicate work.

  There are blotches of green paint along the ceilings in both rooms. Some are larger than others, though most go unnoticed.

  The woman noticed these blotches straight away. She considered pointing out the man’s mistakes. She considered showing exactly what he did wrong and how he could correct it, how he could do better next time.

  Ultimately, she decided to say nothing. She decided to keep it to herself. She figured the man did his best.

  Eventually she did say something about the blotches. This was maybe a week or two later, at the dinner table.

  The dinner table is the same as the breakfast table.

  It is the kitchen table, the one they are currently sitting at, the one that has coffee mugs and pastries sitting atop it, along with the newspaper.

  They were eating takeout Chinese food. It has been their practice to eat takeout Chinese food once a week.

  They order from one of two places. This decision is made together and they discuss it beforehand. One person will not unilaterally decide from which Chinese takeout place they should order on a particular night.

  The difference between the two Chinese takeout restaurants is marginal. One has better dumplings, the other better fried rice.

  Although, this is entirely subjective. There is another couple in the neighborhood that believes the opposite regarding the dumplings and fried rice.

  The rest of the respective menus is almost indistinguishable.

  The man asked the woman to pass the lo mein.

  She said, Even a child could do better, as she passed the lo mein to her husband.

  The man wasn’t sure what she was referring to and didn’t ask, but it turns out it was the paint job.

  He says, At any rate. Every day I would wait for the mail and occupy myself with minutia.

  She says, This is our national occupation. Minutia.

  He says, There’s no point arguing.

  This is something the man says out loud from time to time, but he doesn’t believe it. He enjoys arguing, as it presents an opportunity to learn something. This is what he tells himself, what he tells his wife.

  But it’s also an opportunity for him to demonstrate a certain learned proficiency in any number of disciplines and subjects.

  The man enjoys learning but forgets most of what he learns.

  The man will spend hours on the Internet looking up information on any number of subjects. He is most interested in historical figures and weather and sports and aberrant sexual behaviors.

  He can spend hours looking up encyclopedia entries, getting lost in all the information, this factoid concerning geology sparking curiosity in that factoid about space-time and so forth.

  Thus, he can never retain what he’s read, what he’s tried to learn.

  Still, this is one of his favorite pastimes, this futile pursuit of the arcane and trivial.

  He cannot bring himself to reference the source of this information in conversation, as he finds the name too ridiculous to mention, a cross between a cartoon-character and a fatal disease.

  The woman knows this full well and allows the man to indulge in these conversations more often than not.

  Of course, the man cannot recall what minutia occupied him during the time he is discussing; such is the nature of minutia.

  The woman almost comments on the nature of minutia and how this is everything we do in the world, everything there is. She catches herself, and is pleased to have done so.

  After the professional painters painted the rest of the house, the man and woman adopted a dog from the local shelter.

  It wasn’t immediately after the painters finished painting.

  There was an interval.

  It wasn’t as if the painters had just pulled out of the driveway, had just packed up all of the tarps, stood back and admired their work, called the owners over to discuss the billing options and said their goodbyes, and the man and woman rushed off to the shelter to adopt a dog.

  It wasn’t as if the paint had yet to dry.

  But sometime after the painters finished painting, the man and woman adopted a dog from the local shelter.

  It is safe to assume nothing of note happened during this interval.

  The man and woman did sleep in a hotel for a week, though, waiting for the paint to dry.

  At the same time, they were waiting for the floor to finish drying, too.

  At the same time they had the place painted, they had the floors refinished.

  The woman said, This house is toxic and we can’t stay h
ere.

  She didn’t cite her asthma or any respiratory difficulties as the reason for leaving, but it was clearly the reason.

  The woman had always wanted a dog of her own, as she was denied one growing up due to her mother’s allergies.

  It’s not clear if her mother ever had an actual physical allergy to dogs.

  They drove to the shelter on a Saturday. They had settled into their new house and it was no longer toxic. Perhaps there was a slight hint of wax or turpentine or paint thinner or finish. The man’s eyes did burn for a while, but he kept this to himself.

  The weather was perfect and not at all stormy or stark. Perfect conditions for picking out a dog and taking that dog for a walk, which was the plan.

  They moved up and down the room that housed all of the dogs. The dogs were behind cages, locked up. They looked like prisoners.

  The woman said, Doesn’t this break your heart.

  The man said, I know.

  The man’s heart wasn’t broken or in the process of breaking during this time.

  These dogs had been abandoned or abused by their previous owners. These were rescued dogs. As such, most of these dogs looked skittish and of poor disposition.

  The man said, I’m not sure about this.

  The woman said, What aren’t you sure of?

  The man said, These dogs look skittish. They look of poor disposition.

  The woman said, They’ve been abused.

  The man said, I can tell.

  The woman said, Well, I’m sure of this. This is something I’m sure of. These dogs need loving homes and I’m sure that we’re adopting a dog today.

  They settled on a small but athletic-looking mutt, a female. She had light eyes and seemed to be the most docile of the group.

  They named her Georgia for no particular reason.

  Actually, there was a reason they named her Georgia, but they both have forgotten.

  In this context, Georgia doesn’t refer to the U.S. state, nor does it refer to the country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. It comes from a series of children’s books the man has never read, which is but one in a long list of books the man has never read.

  The country Georgia is located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe. It is bounded to the west by the Black Sea, to the north by Russia, to the south by Turkey and Armenia, and to the southeast by Azerbaijan. The capital and largest city is Tbilisi.