a modern family

There is a girl, let’s say she’s 17, a good age, not too young but not too old, old enough to drive but young enough to not yet realize the freedom in that, to not yet have the urge to drive that old Pontiac halfway across the country – that need to escape that comes with bills, and responsibility, and the everyday entrapment of adult life. So she’s 17 and her eyes are still bright with hope though she feels dulled by her surroundings and bored in her small town. She looks at boys with half-lidded eyes and her arms are dusted with hair that grows lighter in the summertime. She likes to eat everything bagels with cream cheese and they don’t make her fat. Of that, her mother has to admit she is jealous.

Her mother loves bagels and cream cheese – poppyseed, though – but she won’t eat them because she says they go straight to her hips and anyway don’t you know dairy is bad for you, and the cows? All that rGBH. In truth, though she is dying for a bagel, she won’t give in because she has seen the way her husband looks at those 20-somethings in that sorority house down the street, and she doesn’t like the dreamy look in his eye. She believes all men have chronically wandering eyes but believes also that if she just tried a little harder she could maybe tame it a little. So she bought a treadmill and began to eat more arugula and now she finds that she is thinner but more vapid; she can not think of a single thing to talk about, a single topic to discuss, other than food and the lack of it and the wanting of it and the not-having-seconds of it that has become her daily obsession.

Ironically the husband has not noticed her weight loss because the routine of their relationship has not changed and so he remains on autopilot, his erection rises at the appropriate time and falls shortly after, he rolls over for the remote, he watches Cops, his wife falls asleep, and when he is awakened in the morning by his alarm she has already showered and has begun preparing breakfast (cottage cheese and pineapple for her, 2 eggs over easy for him, and challah French toast on Sundays). He has forgotten the feeling of his arms around her waist and his mouth on her neck, settling for a restrained intimacy that is not forced – indeed, at 55, he still enjoys sex – but not quite present. He does think of the 20-somethings down the street but only in the way that a man visiting the Louvre might regard its works of art: they are beautiful, rare things equipped with radar security. You can’t get too close. His own work of art is looser and messier, with dirt under her fingernails from the garden and hair that curls in the humidity. But he prefers her. He doesn’t wish for anyone else in particular but more for an abstract idea of someone else, a fictional person who is half-current-wife, half-sorority-girl, but who also can change her own oil – he always did like those vo-tech girls – and hike mountains, something his wife has always abhorred. But he knows these are idle dreams. Every morning he trims his mustache in the mirror, stares into his own eyes and inhales deeply for 5 seconds, then exhales. He thinks, not too bad, Schaffer. Not too damn bad at all.