Adam rolled his eyes.
“Come here,” said Jillian. She scooped him up. “Who do you like more, Mommy or Miss Elena?”
“Mommy,” he said. He gave her a kiss, then squirmed out of her lap and said, “Crispy!”
MEGAN COULD SIT NOW. All her scab did was itch. She sat on the couch and said, “Jillian was totally high all day.”
“How could you tell?” asked Randy.
“She was eating cookies and laughing with her mouth full and talking to herself.”
“Hahaha.”
“Being around her makes me feel closer to death.”
“Ha.”
“It’s like, oh-kay, this is the future. Guess I better get used to the idea of slowly going crazy and having a baby and going to some kind of freaky church in the suburbs.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Easy for you to say, ‘oh come on.’ You have a real job and friends and shit.”
“Uuuughh,” said Randy.
“What? I’m in a dead-end job, this is what it means to be in a dead-end job. I face death.”
“You can always get another job.”
“Not when I am become death.”
“Think positive,” said Randy.
In bed that night, Randy put his arms around Megan and said, “Hey, I love you.”
“What? I love you, too.”
“No, I mean, I really, really love you. You make me happy.”
“I know,” said Megan. She felt nervous.
“Ok. I just want you to know that I love you and I’m not trying to make you feel bad, but I also, you know, want to have a nice job and active friends and I want to have a girlfriend who is happy at least seventy percent of the time.” He hugged her.
“I’m sorry. I get like this sometimes. I’ll be better. And you’re the only person I really like at all,” she said. “So of course I love you.” She laughed and it was terrible. “I just feel messed up and diseased right now. But it’s just a mental thing, I’ll be better, I promise.”
“I love you, ok?”
“I know, I love you too. I’m sorry.”
God I suck, god I suck so much I suck so much, what the fuck, why the fuck do I suck this much? Why me? Hahaha, why meeeee? thought Megan, feeling the simultaneous sting of remorse and indignation. Oh shit, I’m such an asshole either way.
The next morning when the alarm went off, Megan turned around and squeezed Randy and said, “I love you.”
“Oh, good morning,” said Randy.
She got up and made the coffee and took a shower while Randy stayed in bed and flicked his boner like a doorstopper. She made him a bagel and poured him some coffee and then said, “I made you a freezer bagel. Do you want it in bed?”
They ate together and she left for work, looking pretty damn cute. Usually she looked like she was going to go do some work in total isolation, he couldn’t think of where, but she didn’t always shower or wear clean-looking clothes. He wondered how the doctors hadn’t said anything about it, but then remembered that most doctors’ assistants wore pajamas.
He felt a little good about last night, but also a little depressed. He moved to his office with his coffee and looked at the internet for a while. He lit a cigarette and opened the project file for Kelly’s store.
He felt a little depressed because she’d said “you’re the only person I really like.” He repeated this to himself, and with each repeat he got more and more pissed off. Yeah, pissed off. But then sad for being pissed off. Here is what he thought: if someone truly dislikes “everyone” but one person, that means the person they do like they don’t even notice. That person, Randy in this case, is just a blank with no subjective feelings, no interior monologue, no hidden opinion or thought. And that sucked, it was stupid. He was, essentially, her cat.
Her cat who she had sex with and cooked dinner for and watched movies with.
She would have to be nicer.
As soon as he got mad and felt confident about being mad, he imagined what it would be like to say to her that she needed to be nicer. In that conversation there would have to be an “or else.” Or else I will have to break up with you. It was depressing to imagine breaking up with Megan, but she was such a fucking drag. He couldn’t believe this sloppy, ornery person was his girlfriend.
He stamped out his cigarette and stared at the project file. He had that feeling in his stomach he got when he knew he had to break up with someone. That hollow vacuum feeling. There were always two or three good opportunities to break up with someone in the course of a relationship, and he almost never acted on the first impulse, but once it was there it was never fully gone. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. The saying “second chance” came to his mind and he didn’t like how condescending it sounded. But it was, ugh, a second chance, in a way, because he understood that people had their phases. But to stay with someone who insulted his existence—acted like he didn’t have a full selfhood—was not possible. Impossible.
So, she would have to snap out of it.
He thought about getting her a job. She could do pretty much anything, he thought. What he did wasn’t that hard, she could do that.
He imagined asking a friend to do her a favor. Then he imagined the friend remembering Megan giving them the stink-eye or something, then he imagined Megan becoming humiliated and infuriated. He dismissed the idea.
She would get out of this phase on her own, he knew it, but he didn’t know what role he’d play in all of it. He might not be what was best for her. If she really did hate all of his friends, he couldn’t imagine her ever being happy with him.
He got that vacuum feeling again, lit another cigarette, and told himself that it was ok to sit on it for a few weeks, then think it over again. Kelly’s website was his priority right now.
FOUR
Adam noticed his mom laughing a lot and thought it was cool. She said she was going to get some cake after work for him to eat for being such a good boy. Elena came over and picked him up. She held his hand as they walked down the stairs and around the block to her car. She held his hand tightly and he kept his hand slack. It was sticky from syrup. He tried to do a dance walk on the sidewalk, but Elena said, “Come on,” so he stopped. He added a few spasmodic kicks before they got to the car, but no more full dance walk. Elena liked to listen to the same radio station as his mother did, and she liked to hum along to the songs, too. But her car was totally empty except for a map and a pot of medicated lip balm. Elena pulled into a parking spot, got out of the car, walked around to Adam’s door and then led him into the day care center.
“Hey, Barb,” said Elena. She let go of his hand and he ran off. Elena raised her eyebrows.
“Still no car?” asked Barb.
Elena smiled a sour smile and shook her head. “No, not yet.”
Both women shrugged. Adam took up his occupation of the pastel plastic house in the corner. No one was in there yet. He got there earlier than a lot of the children. He crouched in the middle of the house and made a wild face. He held his hands out in front of his face and said, “The jaws of life,” and then he hissed. He bounced up and down on his legs saying, “I am the jaws and the life.” He gasped, looked quickly to the side, then prostrated himself on the tight blue carpeting. His hands, the jaws of life, went out in front of him and reached for the plastic walls of the house. He imagined himself as a snake and slinked up to the window and observed all that he could see.
“I don’t know, but eventually I’m going to have to ask her to broaden her carpool, you know what I mean? My kids are in high school, I already went through the day care thing. I’m not trying to do it again with somebody else’s baby,” said Elena.