It was my brother’s hatchback. I swore years ago I’d had it with oil changes and insurance, gas and tuneups. All part of the things I’d wanted the opposite of. Nothing like it was. Everything different. That’s how you move on.

     I related that to Doctor Finn, the shrink I saw when I first came home, and in his smarmy, agreeable manner he had disagreed, and told me it was some kind of reactionary defense mechanism, that I was regressing. Some kind of retreat to the womb based on the emotional trauma I was experiencing. He had a bunch of highfalutin words for it, stuff I’d heard in the Psych course I’d taken at Ball State but didn‘t pay much attention to. I figured without the slick-haired Ph-and-D goober-speak that what he was getting at was that I was being cowardly. Weak.

     More sessions with him would help me through it, he said, would help me make peace and start to want a three car-electric dishwasher-TV-in-every-room kind of life again. That if I just listened to him and spilled my guts and had a frizzy-haired backflesh-tugging weepfest, I’d start to crave the tennis dates and golf trips, fancy restaurants and dinner theaters, lakefront summer homes, private schools, and vacations to Waikiki. I’d want that goddamned poodle with the goddamned diamond collar. Not that I’d ever wanted those things to begin with, but I guess that was what Peter and I had been shooting for without really thinking about it. 

     I saw the mick head doctor four times, answered vaguely when he asked me questions about how I felt about my looks, my brains, men, sex, my father‘s death, and after I’d shelled out two hundred dollars to essentially feel like I was the most screwed-up person in the whole world, I decided that if I was bound and determined to be a divorced woman’s cliché then a chocolate bender and extensive time with Karen Carpenter would serve as more functional therapy. If I started feeling really down, I’d read Anne of Green Gables or paint a pretty picture.

     If you had told me then that I’d be on the road back to Ohio at some point in my life again, I’d have socked you in the nose, but there I was. Fifty-eight and fat.  On I-70 to Akron, stuffed into my brother Lowell’s hatchback, trying to pretend that when my ex-husband saw me we’d both think that not a day had gone by, that this trip wasn’t nineteen years too late.

 

     The car was small. I mean, it’s a hatchback, so that‘s not particularly a startling revelation. It would take a very accomplished, very slick salesman indeed to present the car as spacious, but it always seemed to me that it was smaller on purpose.  As though the manufacturer had decided he hated all big-boned people, and wanted to champion a car, literally, for the little people. My brother Lowell is bigger than I am and I don’t know how he puttered around in it for as long as he did. But he’s always been big on gas mileage, and on getting the most bangs for your buck and he went for the longest time refusing to replace it. He’s just like Papa in that way, which drives me up the wall. 

     So yes, I was getting wonderful production out of what Lowell had dubbed, in the worst faux Irish accent in the history of faux Irish accents, “the wee car,” saving money hand over fist while driving across states. The tradeoff was that it made me feel like Camryn Manheim after falling ass first into a schooner full of double cheeseburgers. 

     Now look, I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m a tad larger than other women. Much of it is genetic, runs in the family, and it is also important to note that I am on the downside of my fifties. I have yet to see anyone my age who isn’t putting on the pounds somewhere. But when I say I’m comfortable with my weight, what I mean is, I’m comfortable with it as long as attention is not being drawn to it. This is why I don’t wear bathing suits or dresses. I’m the old lady who sits in the shade at the swimming pool, wearing capacious slacks and a baggy shirt with her face pressed in a book. I won’t look closely at myself in the mirror if I’m still in my under things (there’s nothing more acutely depressing than being in bra and undershorts, and looking at folds of fleshy stuff drooping over the sides of yourself like dried pancake batter spilled over the edges of a mixing bowl), and I don’t do strenuous activities in front of people. Being large means I’m rather large everywhere, and when something fatty and large starts moving quickly, it is bound to jiggle some, and by some I mean a lot. So something like chasing after my nephews through my brother’s cornfields–an overrated experience to begin with–is out of the question. Auntie is just fine over here thank you very much. You go run with your brother. Have fun. Go get ’em. 

     Like I said, I don’t like drawing unnecessary attention to it. Which is why the hatchback was ruining everything. By the time I had crossed the state line into Ohio I had  gotten so nervous that I had to pull over and take a walk. I should add I was wearing a light red blouse that looks very good on me I think (at my age and size, “very good” is where I top out unfortunately), it just had this one drawback, that being if I start to sweat, it trumpeted the evidence in the form of dark, pool-y patches underneath my arms. So, being nervous and high-strung and cramped and all, I spent a good ten minutes between Lima and Findlay, holding my arms up like an idiot, hoping the wind would pick up and the shirt would dry out. I should have been horrified at the amount of cars passing by full of passengers pointing at the fat old woman drying out her armpits, but I wasn’t in the position to be flipping out over every little thing that happened along the way. All that mattered to me was getting to Peter, and I thought if I could just hold it together until I saw him, I’d be all right. Damn the journey so long as I could fake it at the destination.

     After I managed to dry out the shirt decently, I got back in and drove for a few miles before stopping at a sandwich shop in Marion.

     That’s right.

     I was feeling really fat and I went in to get something to eat anyway. How the two go hand in hand is something Doctor Finn could explain better than I could.

     I sat in a small booth by the window, stuffed my face with a turkey sandwich while the man next to me, bald and bearded, sniffled over his coffee. He was wearing a plaid shirt and ash-colored boots. His eyes were red and I noticed he had an endearing patch of dried snot on his sleeve (endearing to me because of my aforementioned sweaty armpits). He was clutching in a hairy, quivering hand a crinkled photo of a perky little blonde.

     Between the sniffling, the snot and the photo, something told me I had found something of a kindred spirit, someone who was perhaps taking the same kind of trip I was. I wanted to help him out, say something encouraging or comforting but as it turns out I wasn’t really able to think of anything in the way of encouragement or comfort, so when he turned around and gruffly asked me what in the hell I thought I was looking at, I shrugged before leaving the ungrateful bastard to his own devices and said this:

     “You want to forget her, you should get rid of that goddamned photo.”  Then I waxed philosophic, surprised myself: “To purge the soul is to purge the eyes.”

     To purge the soul is to purge the eyes. I know, it sounds slightly Buddhist and I remember getting it from some movie or TV show I think but it’s still true.

     And believe me, I know whereof I speak.     

 

***

 

     The decision to leave my husband wasn’t hard. Didn’t keep me up nights (well, one night perhaps). I made it at the kitchen table, with bourbon and ice and not a hint of gray on my head. I had been waiting for Peter to come home, so we could work it out, but he was too ashamed to show his face. After that morning I didn’t give him another chance. I instead made my mind up right then and there, alone, with Makers Mark burning my throat and metallic-sour, hard water ice cubes numbing my tongue. To top it off I sang songs. A medley. I won’t tell you what. Why? Corny. You pick. Three breakup songs from the 70s. Go for it.  String them together. However, I will tell you what I chirped at the end:

     Meep-meep.   

     Those were the days I was able to keep my weight down, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead saying words like “highfalutin” and “undershorts.” I had stamped out most of that small town Indiana talk in college. Instead I swore. Asshole, shithead, panties, fuck. I was a completely different person. My god I was thin.

     And Peter had money.

     After we married, I quit my job--secretary at the law firm he was partner at--and embraced the spoiled rich housewife role with relish. I made Peter buy me a minivan, outdoor patio furniture, and Persian rugs. I drank dirty martinis every day and I wore scarves and light sweaters. I took out subscriptions to Harper’s and The New Yorker. I played tennis with my next door neighbor Jayne, and had tea with all her little friends and somehow they all became my little friends. I became part of the clique, the club. Rich Bitch Nation. They loved me and thought I was so funny. I lied and told them I was from Connecticut.

   I hired a gardener, a lawnmower boy, a maid, and had my groceries delivered four times a month.  I even had an interior decorator and helped her design the chic post modernistic bullshit living room that we ended up with and thought was so goddamned wonderful.

     A word about this decorator lady: I hate her.

     She had rainbows on her business card for starters. She wore high heels and pantyhose, and if memory serves she looked goddamned good in them too. She liked to flex her calves as she walked, and she had a habit of licking her lips all the time, like they were made out of strawberry syrup.  I could imagine her practicing it in front of a mirror, thinking it amorous, seductive, but in truth it made her more snakelike than sexy.

     She was a laughingstock. A joke. I mean it and it’s not just because of what happened either. I had honestly thought at the time that none but the dumbest dick would ever fall for someone like her. Jayne and I used to crack up the second she came strutting inside the door, flipping that tongue out and gushing over the blinds. She was to be pitied, we all agreed. Even Peter had said so at first.

     We even managed a game of it once.

     I predicted she would marry an accountant with a hairpiece who collected old Civil War memorabilia. Jayne said she would come out as a lesbian, host her own interior design show on public television and campaign on the side for the rights of furry animals. I returned with her becoming a mountaineer who would refuse to climb in any shoes but her heels and has her army of Sherpa guides carry a complete furniture set for camp sites. Jayne trumped that with her being the mistress of a traveling salesman who would spend his quality time with her acting out the big bowl game when he was a lineman on his college football team. I finished with her converting to Mormonism and becoming the second wife to a rancher in Utah (redecorating the homestead in a decidedly deco fashion, causing quite a rift with the other, more old-fashioned wife, Petunia, bringing out this shout, from me, as Petunia: “IT‘S SUPPOSED TO BE QUAINT!”). Jayne ended with her developing cancer of the tongue when it was discovered that the main ingredient in that red lipstick of hers was saccharin.

     It wasn’t until we’d run out of ideas and stared at each other like idiots, half-giggling while the moment passed, that I realized Peter hadn’t joined in our game at all. His smile had been pasted on his face and  he had excused himself from the table and had gone to clean the garage.

     Amazing, considering how prominently that decorator lady has figured in my life, that I can barely remember her face now. If I saw her on a street corner, I doubt I’d know who she was unless she went into her one of her signature ticks. It started bothering me after the sandwich shop, and I pulled over after Mansfield to take another stroll (arms up again, goddamned shirt) around the hatchback to think about her. Get a clear image of some sort. Face, hair, nose, legs, something. You would think this is someone whose face would be flash-burned onto my mind‘s eye, like the silhouettes of victims on the rubble after a bombing, but all I could drum up was a bunch of words. Hearsay from a younger version of myself that I’d retired years ago like so many other forms, banished into the recesses of memory, only allowed out from its dark, smoky corner to tell secondhand, what I couldn’t seem to remember anymore.

     Words.

     Auburn hair. Killer calves. Bright laugh. Short skirt.

     Thin.

     Nina.

     Bitch.

     But those goddamned lips. I can still see those. Red like menstrual blood. Red like the dress Cindy the Goddamned Prom Queen had worn to the dance my last year of high school.

     Red like that neon sign on Folsted Street.

     It took me a while to screw up the nerve to get back in the tiny car again. Thinking about a thin, beautiful, eternally young woman while you yourself are struggling with a bit of I-just-stuffed-my-face-with-turkey-and-mayonnaise-and-it-wasn‘t-reduced-fat guilt doesn‘t exactly get you pepped up to squash your belly in between the seat and the steering wheel again. It didn’t help either that once I got my nerve up to get back into the car, it seemed to have trouble getting up to sixty miles an hour again, as though it just couldn’t take my weight anymore, or that perhaps it was refusing to as it was pissed at me for stopping in the first place, scolding me in a passive aggressive way (a Doctor Finn term) for being such a kook. 

     But then I’ve always done these kinds of abrupt, strange things. Drive. Get mad about something.  Stop. Get out. Stomp around. Wring my hands and point my fingers this way and that. Wake up the next morning. Get mad again. Build a birdhouse.  I mutter to myself as I do these angry little tasks. I let my mind froth over. Every now and then I have these imaginary shouting matches with whomever I’m too pissed at to talk to in person. Then, just as quickly as I got pissed off,  I just as quickly stop. I get back in the car and drive away. I leave the birdhouse half-finished. I chuck it in the dumpster. And I usually quit without anything fixed inside of me. You want an explanation I’ll give you Doctor Finn’s number. He knows every goddamned thing there is to know about people and why they do things.

       The only time my little fits ever really solved something was when I was on Folsted.  I sat there on that corner all night. Sat right under a broken street light, right in front of a porno book store, importantly called: “First Amendment Books.” At the time, I had really thought this plan was ironclad, foolproof. I sat there waiting hopefully for the sex pervert, the serial rapist, to come, take me, hurt me, so I could hurt Peter. I waited all goddamned night in the dark, with a blinking red, pointy boobs sign in the background. I even thought at one point to ask some lurking vagrant to punch me in the eye and then be done with it, but no one showed. The street was empty from the moment I plopped down until the moment I struggled up. I simply sat there, freezing my ass off all night thinking  there’s never a sex offender around when you need one.  

    A little after dawn I walked back home. By noon, after Peter pulled a no-show to our kitchen table confessional, I packed what was left of my clothes, and was on a bus back to Muncie, back to my brother Lowell and my father’s house, an official expatriate of Rich Bitch Nation.

     Meep-meep!

 

***

 

       I should mention that before I left the sandwich shop I did manage to squeeze out a bit of Snot Sleeve’s story. His big thing was that he didn’t understand why. The perky blonde in the photo had never shown any inclination toward leaving him for someone else, and he couldn’t understand how this someone else, inferior in all ways to himself, could have taken everything away from him. I commiserated with Snot Sleeve, channeled Oprah in my sympathetic looks and explained that it’s not too difficult to understand why at all. In my case for instance the interior decorator lady had those lips and those calves. Peter was a man of flesh and blood as they say, only human. I left for the weekend for my ten-year reunion. Peter didn’t come with me. Nina was coming over with a Picasso print we‘d picked out together to put over the mantle. Because reunions are ridiculous, I came home early. I wanted Peter to take me out to dinner and dancing or something. I ran up the stairs, thinking he was napping, or lying in bed, reading a book, and there they were:

     Naked Nina.

     Peter’s peter.

     But she’s a moron, I had whined to myself later, incredulous. 

     One of my brother’s idiot friends from high school probably said it best: “it’s difficult for any chick to sound all that smart with a mouth full of...”

     Basically, I said to Snot Sleeve, people are assholes. And why isn‘t important. Monkey nature, sin nature, Darwin, Christ, Lucifer, doesn’t matter the explanation. People are assholes. Then I recapitulated. Get rid of the goddamn photo. Purge the eyes. Then go get loaded.

   

***

 

     For me, the first things to go were the clothes. I dropped all the blouses and sweaters and dresses I‘d bought with Pete’s money, boxes of them, to Goodwills and ARCs. I took all the jewelry and trinkets he had given me for birthdays and anniversaries and just-because, and sold them in pawn shops, at jewelers, my wedding ring merely tossed into the middle of the pile, a princess unceremoniously dumped into a mass grave. I chucked the wedding and vacation photos into the dumpster. The hundred dollar sunglasses he spotted and thought I’d look sexy in: out of the window and onto the highway. The porcelain figurines--little pigs, little wolf--his first gift to me: bashed with a hammer in the basement. I did it all quietly, without making a fuss. I didn’t rave. I didn‘t explode, bawling and hurling things against the wall, screaming and clawing at my face. I was cold. Professional. An assassin. I systematically and calculatingly removed all traces of the life we had built together until the only thing left to get rid of was me.

     Peter was too ashamed and too busy helping his clients safely navigate the oh-so murky waters of tax season to really pay attention to what I was doing. He set up camp at work. He left long messages on the answering machine. He sent purple hyacinths. When he was home, briefly, to shower, shave, change clothes, he didn’t notice that my closet was nearly empty and that the tabletops and counters were missing their adornments. Showed no sign that he knew or cared that all the framed photos were gone. He never found out that I spent an entire night in front of the blinking tits sign trying to get assaulted, and it took him well into the next day before he realized I had left him altogether, and had left nothing of myself behind.

     After I moved back in with my brother and his wife, I took the money I had finagled from the liquidation of my marriage and purposefully blew it. Blew it on lobster dinners, marble cheesecake. Lost it at the blackjack tables on the river boats. Threw it away on pampered weekends at bed and breakfasts. Spas. Mud baths. Milk baths. Saunas. Jacuzzis. Nothing tangible, nothing to take home, nothing to put on the patio or hang in the closet. I let it all slip through my fingers, go straight to my thighs, spoiled myself rotten--no keepsakes--until the memory of everything I was became so broken up and dispersed over so many places that it gave me a buffer of forgetfulness. Until the blade in my stomach was shattered.  No reminders. Until I could push the rest of it out with my spine.  

     I never resumed contact with Rich Bitch Nation either. Not even with Jayne, who wrote once a month for almost a year until she got the hint. What the hell are you doing in Indiana?

     No reminders.

    

 

***

          

     At sunset I reached the road I had scrawled on the back of a pizza flyer the night before, the road gleaned from the upper-lefts of all the Christmas and birthday cards he had sent me over the years.

     As I got closer I started to laugh, a snicker tic like I hadn’t had since I was little, when Lowell and I would trade faces over the dinner table, or Papa would do his Tin Man impersonation from the Wizard of Oz. 

     Peter’s house was at the end of the block, and I parked next to the mailbox, with tears streaming down my face. My laughs were now a series of hoots and snorts, and I never hoot and I never snort.

     It was all just so goddamned funny. I looked down at the flyer and suddenly wished like hell I had a pizza. I’d put on a ball cap and walk up with one of those pineapple and ham abominations Peter absolutely adored and that would be our peace pipe. I’d show up as his pizza delivery girl and everything would be wonderful again. The years would just fall away.  

    I sat there laughing while pictures of my father walking mechanically paraded in front of me, of my brother and me following him around (Lowell was Cowardly Lion, I changed what I was with every step, never able to make up my mind: winged monkey, munchkin, scarecrow). I got out of the car and stepped onto the pavement and felt like I was seven again. I looked around mischievously, wickedly, and yelled out:

     Meep-meep!

 

***

 

    He called me that when I was knee-high, and made sure it stuck.

    Little Meep.

    It started when I was on the couch, watching cartoons, waiting for Papa to come in from the corn fields because of the lightning. Terrified, I was hugging myself and concentrating on the television with all my might. The Road Runner was doing its thing, pecking at bird feed before bursting off screen in a cloud of dust, while the coyote was doing what it does best, which was essentially kick its own ass. But then there was a clap of thunder and I didn’t give a damn about the cartoon, wanting instead to burst into tears and shriek, but because I thought that would encourage the storm to continue or because I thought if I did Papa would never come, I squelched it.  But something had to happen, something had to get out as I was about to burst so I changed it, transformed it, into a cough, then a forced laugh. I repeated what the Road Runner spat out and laughed again to seal it: Meep-meep!

     Somehow, Papa heard me. A day later, he was pressing me to do it again in front of Lowell. I obliged (though out of spite this time) and suddenly there was a reason for everything I did, and would do. A way to define me. I would not get to be the enigma every woman is destined to be, an unfathomable mystery that is every woman’s right. I instead became a cartoon, explainable in four minutes or less, easily dismissed. 

     After that, when Papa would hold his arms out to me at the door and I’d run away, he’d just grin. That’s my little Road Runner. That’s my little Meep.  When I’d throw a tantrum for virtually no reason at all (another God-given womanly right), yell and scream and stomp from the room, meep-meep would trail behind, cling to the bottoms of my feet like wet toilet paper. When I disappeared from family gatherings, holidays, to yell at the sky, to get away from the simpering and the cheek-tugging and the why don‘t you go play with your cousin crap: meep-meep! When I ran track in high school to escape from the glares and the backstabbing from the other girls, the teasing and the taunting from the boys, my bleeding uterus and my growing breasts: meep-meep! When I never dated anyone in school longer than a week and when I wouldn‘t put out: meep-meep! When I spent my sophomore year at Ball State drunk every weekend and slept with four different boys in six months but wouldn‘t return their phone calls: meep-meep!

     When I broke up with Peter six different times before he finally wore me down:    meep-meep!

     “She learned it from the boob tube,” Papa said, over cans of PBR, when Peter came to him out of exasperation, a week before we were to be married and I had told him I wasn’t sure how I felt about him anymore. 

     “From those goddamned soap dramas, from going to the movies. She thinks she’s so complicated.”

     They had thought I was upstairs, asleep.

     “And she‘s not. Some kind of messed up wiring if you ask me. Always running away from people. Always wanting to be alone. It’s not normal.”

     I had been in the next room, on the couch, in the dark, listening, waiting for Peter to defend me. 

     “You’re a good boy, Petes. You’d do better with someone else. My little Meep is all screwed up, and I for the life of me can’t figure out why.  She’d be stupid to let someone like you go, she’d be stupid to run away from you, but it’s just the way she’s always been.”

    “Just like her mama.”

    I heard a sniff and a tear-filled sigh from Peter. He was crying, the goof. So Papa kept going, rolling now. 

    “I don’t know Petes, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think she’s capable of being with anyone for good. She’ll always be looking for a way out. For a back door. When my little Meep finally stays with someone it’ll be because she‘s been broken, that she doesn‘t have anything left, that something’s died inside of her. That’s she’s all used up.”

 

     I told that story to Doctor Finn, related it in a neutral tone. Matter-of-fact. My voice didn’t shake at all. I didn’t force a smile or try to laugh it off or defend Papa or curse him. I stayed factual, even, still. It’s not every day you get to recount to someone the fact that your father thought you‘d finally settle down once life beat the ever-living shit out of you, that he believed it would even be for the best. I thought I did all right. Handled it well. Kept my cool. After all, Papa had been old and crotchety. Nearing the end. Full of disappointment over being broken himself.

     And he would be wrong.

     Life wouldn’t get the best of me. I would work behind the perfume counter at an Elder Beerman in a small town mall for the next twenty years and choose not to remarry. I would live with my brother and his wife and help their children grow. Call me crazy but that isn’t exactly the recipe for an American tragedy, The Meeps of Wrath.

 

***

 

    I crossed the street, holding the pizza flyer for some kind of bizarre emotional support, like a rescued victim from a well who had made friends with a log while she’d been trapped. When I reached the gravel of Peter’s front driveway, my stomach dropped and went cold. I couldn’t laugh anymore; it felt like I had stepped into the sea.

     His house looked much like mine, as though it had been caught up in one of those storms I had feared as a girl and had been dropped here. An off-white color all around. Paint peeling.  The driveway empty except for a shady oak in the center. The porch bare too save for a rocking chair near the window.  

    I wondered if he had already seen me, peeking through the curtains or watching from the door. I had a wicked impulse to lift my hands up with twin middle fingers extended, like the wounded but still cocky gunslinger, pistols drawn, ready for his last stand at the old saloon. That’s right asshole, the bitch is back. Ha. But I immediately realized, with growing alarm, that lifting my arms up right now would probably not be a wise choice as my shirt underneath the arms again was once more soaked through, and though I couldn’t be certain, it wasn’t exactly the greatest of stretches to think that now, the third time through this, that the shirt, and my armpits for that matter, had started to stink.

     Wonderful. Exactly the way I had imagined it. Couldn’t have dreamed it any better.

 

***

     The last time I saw Doctor Finn he asked me if I had married Peter to prove Papa wrong, and he asked me once more what I had been thinking when Papa had died, a month before I caught Peter penetrating a spread-eagled Nina on the bed Papa had given us as a wedding present. He asked me why I hadn’t stayed in the hospital room with Lowell.  I told him I couldn’t stand waiting on the doctor or nurse to show up with the drug that supposedly would give my father a window of consciousness where he could at least mumble something at us before succumbing. But the goddamned nurse was taking too goddamned long for my tastes and after waiting and watching Lowell hold Papa’s hand, crying and whispering in his ear (“he can’t hear you Lowell, Jesus1⁄4”) it dawned on me that this miracle medicine that would take Papa out of the coma didn’t really exist, and that the doctor and the nurses were all hoping he would be dead before they returned with the news that they had to call to another hospital for the drug, and that it would be a little longer still, or that Papa’s condition was too far gone for it to be of any use. 

     It was an insult to both of us. Lowell didn’t seem to mind, but then, he never seemed to mind such things. I, on the other hand, saw no reason to stick around. Papa was finished. I knew it. He wasn’t going to snap out of it, say something wonderful to me and my brother, and then be whisked away on a flowery chariot to heaven. He was going to drool, breathe shallowly, and then, just stop.

     “So it wasn’t worth staying for?” Doctor Finn asked.   

 

***

     I reached the front porch. The rocking chair looked comforting, grandfatherly, like a Norman Rockwell painting. It was pretty much dark by this point, and I saw through the window one light on in the house.  

     I ascended the porch steps quickly but quietly, stealing to the front as though ready to pull a prank. I leaned into the door, pressed my ear against it, listening for the sound of the television, the sound of someone puttering back and forth, a clearing of the throat, anything.

     Hearing nothing, I rapped on the door like an angry neighbor. More silence. Then, all the little things I hadn’t done, like, make sure ahead of time that he would be home, flooded my brain in a rush of slap-happy ridicule. Ignoring this, I instantly concluded that a grievous crime had been done against me, and that I was the victim of some sort of cruel joke. My brain quickly spit up a list of suspects, and by suspects, I mean one:

     My brother, Lowell. He’d kept talking to Peter over the phone through the years, even though the calls were anything but frequent. He was probably the reason Peter had finally stopped calling.

     “You know Pete, she is getting kind of chubby these days, and she isn’t near as much fun to be around. In fact, she just sits all day in the hammock and reads silly women books or just stares out into the sky. And boy can she eat.”

     He’d probably tipped Peter off to what I was doing. Told Peter to get out of the house for the day. Let her see what it’s like to be cruelly rebuffed. Vengeance surged and I wondered how they would feel their payback had gone if Peter came back to his house burnt to the ground and Lowell found his beloved, gas-conscious hatchback in a ravine.

     I went to the window and peered inside. The light was coming from the kitchen, and I could see that the living room, though still shrouded in darkness, was a simple one. Couch, love seat, television. Could have been anybody’s living room. In fact, it occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I had gotten the wrong house and there was the proverbial terrified housewife with the proverbial double-barreled shotgun, cowering in the corner, taking aim on me, the proverbial crank, leering through her window.

     Then I saw it. The Picasso print. Hung over the TV like a trophy, a reminder of a glorious conquest. I turned away.

     Not enough years had passed by for this.

     There was no question now. I was going to burn this goddamned house to the ground. Or, if that wasn’t feasible, I was going to drive the hatchback full speed through the front door. I was going to find a cat somewhere and make it piss on his couch. I was at least going to write ASSHOLE in red lipstick over the Picasso.

     The sense of injustice, of an extra added knife-turn of cruelty colored my anger, drew an extra circle around my own personal hell. What would he think if I had screwed some other guy and then when he showed up twenty years later I still had the condom stapled to the mantle?

    I kicked that Norman Rockwell chair and it, along with its tranquil aura of Midwest Americana, went flying across the porch. Feeling rather powerful, and ready to kick just about anything else, I turned to the door, intending to smash it in, and braced myself, before realizing that I had no idea how to smash a door in.

     To save me from the embarrassment now hot on my face a small voice that seemed a lot like Doctor Finn‘s, chimed politely within my head:  

     “And why not? Why shouldn’t he have the painting still? Weren’t you the one who picked it out?”  

     Sigh.

     I righted the chair and checked it. It was cracked around the base, but other than that it was okay, I gingerly sat, barely placing my ass on the seat, ready, at the first splintering sound, to stand up quickly, not wanting to add to my list of wrongs sitting in Peter’s chair and crushing it. 

     Hi Pete, sorry I missed you, just wanted to say hello. By the way, I’m old and fat now and I smashed your chair when I sat in it. But to be fair, I think it’s mostly because I just kicked it across the porch. This was because I was mad about the Picasso. But then I thought maybe I shouldn’t be upset about that. Also, I’m really not that fat. Lots of people say I look great for my age. So anyway, call me sometime. Ta, Your Ex-Wife.

     But the chair held, and because it did, I was determined to wait. Wait for Peter as night fell and with it blew in chilly breezes announcing the coming of rain. A monsoon probably, a typhoon definitely. No matter, I’d wait. If he was at the store, I would wait until he got back. If he was in Africa, I’d set up camp and subsist on beans and gentle woodland creatures (or maybe order a pizza or two) until he returned. I would wait, on this porch, for as long as it took. If termites came out of the woodwork to attack me, I would hold them off with water from the hose. If the hungry wild boar approached me, I’d tell him to shoo, shake my fists and make loud noises. If the long-delayed sex offender jumped out of the bushes, I’d say, no thank you, tardy.

      But. I. Wasn’t. Going. Anywhere.

     And I laughed again, the crazed, disbelieving laugh consistent with the kind a shoe fetishist would exhibit after incredibly waking up one morning in a world created exclusively by Jimmy Choo. I still couldn’t figure out why I was here, couldn’t figure what I had been doing the last twenty years.     

     I thought of hospital rooms, and Folsted. Of empty streets and blinking red boobs. Of Doctor Finn‘s stuffy-headed opinions and Papa’s voice and how similar they sounded to me. Of Snot Sleeve and his perky blonde. Of Lowell, Peter, and that interior decorator bitch with her ruby-red whore lips. Of a pack of goddamned diamond-collared attack poodles.

     Meep-meep!

     And I thought: they’re wrong. I’ve proved it over and over again. I’m always the one sitting in the dark, sitting through a storm, sitting on a street corner, sitting in the hospital room, sitting on a porch, waiting. Waiting to be defended, waiting to be comforted, waiting to be hurt, waiting to be loved, waiting to be forgiven. I’m always waiting, always have been waiting, and always will be waiting.

     Waiting for someone who’s not coming.