The garage door creaks open, and Ned, who probably shouldn’t be driving, eases his car in. The headlights slice through the cluttered garage, revealing a teetering stack of Amazon boxes piled on a wobbly sofa table against the wall. The headlights also illuminate the garage walls, plastered with our old posters of punk bands we bought at concerts and festivals back in the day. There’s even an old, faded “No Future” banner barely visible from behind two rolled up soiled carpets that were supposed to go out to the dump three years ago.
Ned pulls a bit too close to the sofa table, tapping it lightly with his bumper. He does this kind of thing a lot. Fences, those cement poles in parking lots, other cars; Ned is always hitting something whether he has had a few or not. His front bumper is dented and scratched to hell, but no one is the wiser because I came up with the ingenious idea to hide it all by covering it with a car bra.
His little tap causes the Amazon tower to sway. I cringe, waiting to see if the table is going to collapse. Most likely due to the twenty washers and screws I left out, the table’s got a mean pinball machine-like tilt that sends anything placed on it toppling over. So, here it sits in the garage, cast from the living room, strategically holding up boxes we are too lazy to break down. Luckily, Ned’s collision light and the Amazon boxes do not tumble down. However, this little earthquake is strong enough to send a brown field mouse scurrying out from one box. We both see him but say nothing.
I hate mice.
Ned turns off the car, the music stops, he pops the trunk and gets out. He grabs the leftover manicotti from the restaurant, slams the trunk lid, and heads for the door to our mudroom. He pauses by his driver’s side window. I can only see his waist, hidden under his black leather coat, and the manicotti wrapped in a white plastic takeout bag resting in his left hand. His wedding finger looks extra-long, white, and skinny since he lost his ring a month ago. Every time I see his naked finger I get so mad I want to puke. I am reminded of his reluctance to retrace his steps from the gym to find the ring. That unwillingness to try to find what may not really be lost irks me more than when the Meijer clerk rings up the bacon twice and neither of us catches it. And that is pretty damn irksome.
“You coming?” he asks, his ringless hand punctuating the question before his headless body continues into the house without an answer.
I exhale. I don’t feel like moving. Maybe it is because of all the food. We just returned from celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at Pergola’s Mangia Mangia Italian Ristorante. The all-you-can-eat manicotti and breadsticks paired with bottomless salad and two pitchers of Peroni entertained us during our semi-silent meal, but little else. We kept drinking and eating, hoping to feel celebratory, but we just didn’t.
Even though we didn’t say it, it was clear that going to a chain restaurant with commercials and its own theme song (“Easy Like Manicotti” set to the tune of Lionel Richie’s “Easy Like Sunday Morning”) was a big mistake. Sitting there, surrounded by babies and senior citizens, we felt out of place. This wasn’t our scene, not at all. But after twenty-five years of marriage, we felt obligated to do something special, something different than our beloved dive bars. Besides, we had a twenty-five-dollar gift card that I won at a raffle. So, instead of a live band, there were screaming kids and instead of posters of punk bands and graffiti art there were prints of the Vatican and the Pope. There was also a horrific Tony Bennett double CD stuck on shuffle which would occasionally get interrupted by the “Easy Like Manicotti” commercial.
Disgusted by our aesthetic, we decided to do what old-school punks disguised as mild-mannered suburbanites do; we were going to eat and drink our way into oblivion. We decided that we were going to do more than get our money’s worth at Pergola’s Mangia Mangia Italian Ristorante; we were going to make them wish they never heard of us.
We ate as if we hadn’t seen food in days, ravenous and relentless.
We ate as though we were criminals on death row, hours away from execution.
We ate like wolves, finally making a kill after a long, cold winter.
We added more butter to the oily breadsticks and then used them to sop up the remaining tomato sauce on our empty plates. We did this angrily, like we were putting cigarettes out in a dirty ashtray. Between that we passed the bottomless salad bowl back and forth. We gave up using tongs and just shook the wilted lettuce and thin tomato slices onto our plates. Oversized, soggy croutons tumbled onto our plates, some of them missed and rolled onto the floor. We drenched everything with the House Ranch. When we weren’t passing the salad bowl back and forth, we passed the pitcher of beer.
We ate and drank for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary as well as our fiftieth. The nail in the coffin was when I ordered two gigantic slices of tiramisu paired with two double chocolate espresso martinis. The drinks arrived, not in martini glasses, but in chalices with straws and marshmallows on a stick. We toasted each other and then miserably tried to drink them without choking on the quart of Hershey’s syrup and pound of chocolate sprinkles that was mixed in. Apparently, their bartender was an eleven-year-old girl.
As we sat and waited for the check to arrive, Ned started singing “that’s why I’m easy…”and I noticed that the lights were doing that twinkly thing they do when I am really, really buzzed.
“This was a bad idea,” I said
“Pretty bad,” Ned agreed and then burped, clutching his chest in pain.
The truth is, the two of us are at our best when we’re doing nothing, or more precisely, not doing the things we should be doing. This includes not breaking down Amazon boxes, not using all the screws and washers on a mail order sofa table and not celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary at a chain restaurant. Doing nothing is what we excel at. Yet, for some reason we went against our natural state and ended up with a boring, uninspired, all-American, geriatric Italian dinner and, to make matters even worse, we were mad at ourselves for doing it.
Now I sit alone in Ned’s old car, not wanting to get out. All I want is to go to sleep. I sit a little longer, staring at the mudroom door he left slightly ajar. The light inside is bright and clinical, bouncing off the white walls. Suddenly, I see that damn mouse run along the bottom of the door and dash inside. Like the cartoon character who gets so angry that her head transforms into a factory whistle, steam pouring out, I am overcome with pure, unadulterated rage.
I get out of the car and attempt to slam the door in anger, but there is barely enough room to stand. The long Amazon box that housed the sofa table is propped against a utility ladder which is holding up a broken patio umbrella which is supporting a screenless screen door, all about two inches from my side of Ned’s car. I walk around the car and am about to make my grand entrance inside when I realize I don’t have my purse. Panicked, not sure if it is in the car or back at the restaurant, I reenter Ned’s car, but on his side. I strain to get over the gear shift in my big winter coat, hear something rip, and then begin feeling around the floor for the purse. It is dark, the floor is damp from the March sleet, and all of my blood is now in my head. Moving my hand around the floor I run across something hard and round. Grabbing it, I realize it is dumbass’s wedding ring. I stick that in my back pocket for later. I then find my purse, which I must have kicked under the seat, dislodge myself from the gear shift, get out, and then finally get to slam one door good and hard before storming inside and then slamming that one.
Inside, I find Ned leaning against the kitchen counter, still wearing his leather coat, but his pants are unbuckled, eating peanut butter straight from the jar with a fork. To beat the Tony Bennett out of his system, he has Motorhead’s “Eat the Rich” blaring from the stereo.
“Better save that peanut butter for the mouse trap we’ll need to set since you let a mouse in,” I brush past him, screaming.
Ned refuses to look at me, or he doesn’t hear me as he is concentrating hard on his jar of Jiffy.
I slam my purse down on the old kitchen table, scratched from years of slamming my purse down; “How the hell are you still hungry? I’m going to be fat for two weeks because of what I ate tonight and you can just eat and eat and eat!”
Escalating, my blood pulsating in my temples, I begin sniffing the air. “Is that trash I smell? How can trash smell this putrid when it is only thirty degrees out?” I run over to the trash can and open the lid. “How is this possible? I just took the trash out yesterday! How can something rot so fast?” I try pulling the trash bag out, but it is stuck. I tug at it, ripping the useless red tie strings out. About to commit murder, I throw the red ties, one in each hand, down on the ground and then unzip my big, ugly J.C. Penney coat, struggling to get out of the sleeves because my new sweater is too big and bulky for the coat, but I have no special coat to wear when I wear bulky sweaters. Free of the coat, I throw it on the floor and then, because I am on fire, I pull my big ugly pink clearance rack anniversary dinner sweater off, nearly taking my Black Flag tee shirt and black bra with it. I ball that up and throw that on top of the coat.
Ned, who may or may not be watching any of this, steps away from the peanut butter jar, leaving everything, including the fork, on the counter. He then rips into the leftover manicotti and begins eating that with a fresh fork, ignoring me as I continue to fight to get the trash bag out.
“You’re going to be so hungover tomorrow,” he finally speaks as he opens up the cupboard, spinning the Lazy Susan around several times before stopping on the red pepper flakes.
I stop tugging at the trash for a moment and hold my throat in horror. I can imagine the vomiting I will be doing. He is right. His comment is one hundred percent true. I have a low tolerance for alcohol and with my meds I probably shouldn’t be drinking at all. “But…I…” before I can complete my thought Ned launches into a coughing fit, most likely due to a stray red pepper flake.
Now frantic as I feel my hangover clock ticking, I try to dislodge the trash bag with great urgency. Much to my joy, it finally budges. I then yank it as hard as I can and fall backward, slamming right against the refrigerator. The portable television we have positioned on top of the fridge wobbles back and forth. I tilt my head and look up. Ned stops coughing and looks up. For a moment in time Ned and I are again one, frozen in space together, waiting to see if the T.V. is going to fall on my face.
It doesn’t. Free to live another day with my own teeth, I return to battling the garbage while Ned returns to stuffing his face, again. Empty cans of tuna, beer bottles, and a burned-out light bulb clanked against the linoleum floor as I finally release the stubborn bag. Before I tie the knot, I toss in my stupid pink sweater. I then head outside through the patio door, slamming it shut behind me.
On our back porch, I take deep breaths, allowing the March air to cool my flushed cheeks and steady my uneasy gait. The snowsleet has stopped and everything shines, coated with slush. I turn my face up towards the moon. She is full tonight, pretty and distant, far from all of us. Up there, she sways, twinkling at me like an over-ripened tomato ready to burst. At that moment, I would have given anything to see her explode, to stand there and let her lunar seeds saturate me, softly spraying me, getting stuck in my hair. I wanted to hear moon seeds hit the metal porch roof like hail, see them bounce off the shed and I didn’t want to have to rush in the house to get Ned. I didn’t want to share. I wanted something that was mine, just mine, for the sake of being mine. I wanted my own planetary shower of moon bits and stellar chunks to come raining down on me, just me. I wanted my world, and only my world, to glow; a fertile celestial garden freshly sown with millions of intergalactic seeds ready to bloom into God knows what.
But this doesn’t happen. There are no moon explosions, no cosmic showers. If I am lucky and wait long enough, there may be a shooting star, but even that is slim. I tuck my hands into my back pockets, and my right hand touches Ned’s wedding ring. At that moment, I realize that I have more choices than I give myself credit for. With this ring, I have the power to start a war or celebrate victory. Instead, I will do neither. I will sneak into the bedroom and place the ring under one of his black socks on the dresser. Then, I will go to the kitchen and drink a lot of water, maybe even from the Brita if one of us actually filled it, and then head back to the bedroom to fall into a deep sleep.
Tomorrow I will wake to the same world I momentarily left. It will be Sunday and maybe, just maybe, it will be easy. The sun’s golden rays will gently filter through the sheer curtains, casting a warm glow over the room. I’ll stretch leisurely, savoring the softness of the sheets and the calm that comes with knowing there’s nowhere I need to be. That is when I will realize that the house is filled with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee, mingling with the scent of homemade pancakes sizzling on the griddle. I’ll then pad lightly into the kitchen in cozy socks, greeted by a spotless countertop and a vase of fresh daisies, their petals reaching toward me as if asking to be kissed. Ned will be there too, humming a familiar tune, a smile playing on his lips as he flips the pancakes with practiced ease, his wedding ring sparkling.
We’ll sit together at the kitchen table, its surface gleaming and uncluttered. We’ll sip our coffee slowly, enjoying the peaceful silence, broken only by the soft sounds of the world waking up outside—the chirping of birds and the distant hum of a lawnmower. Just then we will hear a little squeak, and it is the mouse, standing at the back door, waiting to be let out. Ned will get up and slide the door open and then look back at me and we will laugh.
Angie Curneal Palsak loves exploring the human experience through her stories. She recently ended a 25-year writing hiatus after celebrating a milestone birthday in Venice, California. Angie works at the University of Notre Dame and lives in South Bend, Indiana. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and a BA in English from Indiana University. When she’s not working or writing, Angie and her husband love to travel, learning more about themselves along the way.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 