I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (5 page)
Read I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow Online
Authors: Jonathan Goldstein
“He had such a fabulous time with you today,” she says a little suspiciously. “He can't stop talking about it.”
I ask her if he enjoyed the meal we had, and she tells me not to feed my father garbage. Beer keeps him up all night, and he has to watch his cholesterol.
“When's the last time you had yours checked?” she asks.
I really can't recall. My mother is always reminding me how her brother had a heart attack when he was around my age.
After I put down the phone, I stop to imagine, as I find myself doing lately, several times a day, what my heart attack would look like. It would be an undignified, pulling-down-the-drapes, cheeks-bulging-with-veal sort of thing. It would be the kind of heart attack that friends would laughingly imitate in the kitchen during my shiva, my mother shushing them from the other room.
bed
(43 weeks)
SUNDAY.
I'm lying in bed watching old episodes of
Deadwood
on my laptop. The laptop is resting on my chest in what I like to call “the deathbed style.” By watching the movie in this manner, I have come to see how it is not about the size of the screen in one's “home entertainment unit,” but about how close you can get the screen to your face. Pressed against your nose, fourteen inches is just like IMAX, but the problem inherent to this method is that it is only good for one. Also, it is stupid-looking. Really stupid-looking.
The characters on
Deadwood
are constantly drinking whisky or taking dope. If I lived in Deadwood, I'd be in a continual state of anxiety, always trembling, terrified I was about to be shot in the ass or worse. I wouldn't even look at people, for fear of inciting their wrath. I'd slither around on the ground between people's legs, apologizing and
avoiding eye contact.
Thank God I don't live in Deadwood
, I think while pouring Skittles into my mouth.
THURSDAY.
I'm over for dinner at Marie-Claude's and while she's cooking, I make conversation with Katie.
“Ever notice how the word âbed' looks like a bed?” I ask.
“Not âpillow,' though,” she says.
“And what's up with pimentos?” I ask, picking up an olive from the plate on the coffee table. “What are they anyway?”
“They're red,” she says, keeping up her end of the conversation. “Where do you think pimento trees grow?”
“Inside olive trees.”
“Stop filling my daughter's head with garbage,” Marie-Claude says, walking into the living room and putting down a tray of cheese and crackers. “And do me a favour and shave your beard already. It's unsanitary.”
I'd lately begun growing it back. Running my hand across my cheek in a way I hope looks thoughtful, I say, “People tell me it makes me look intellectual. And more youthful.”
“It makes you look like a hostage,” Marie-Claude says, leaving the room.
“Mama's only joking,” I say to Katie. Katie takes off her shoes and asks if she can rub her bare feet in my beard.
Marie-Claude re-enters the room to find her daughter doing the moonwalk on my cheek.
“Katie,” Marie-Claude says, “go wash your feet.”
FRIDAY.
At work, I confide to David, a fellow radio producer, that I've lately been feeling an overwhelming urge to lie down on the sidewalk on my walk to work.
“I'm overcome by this feeling that I can't go on,” I say. David tells me to be careful not to get arrested for vagrancy.
“On days when I feel especially frustrated,” he says, “I always make sure to give myself a nice close shave before leaving the house. That way, if I start yelling in the street, people will be less inclined to see me as a garden-variety street lunatic, and more like a man wheeling and dealing into his Bluetooth.”
I decide that shave again I must. Sometimes it's worth making the effort of personal hygiene, if only to afford yourself the freedom of antisocial pleasures.
The Great Gazoo
(42 weeks)
SUNDAY.
I stare at myself in the mirror, shaving cream covering my face.
Mid-shave is a good look for me. A face full of lather really brings out my eyes. I wish this could be some kind of styleâsomething to leave the house in.
I imagine myself at Tony and Natalie's wedding, toasting the bride and groom in a three-piece suitâa face brushed white, erasing all blemishes. I could always become a clown, but when I'd take a cream pie across the face, instead of making the audience laugh, I'd make them gasp at my sudden, horrifying beauty.
THURSDAY.
I'm meeting Tony for coffee. When I sit down, I find him drinking from a coffee cup the size of a fire hydrant.
“The other day I watched a Steve McQueen movie from the seventies,” I say. “Do you have any idea how small coffees were back then? The way things are evolving, in a couple more generations, we'll be ordering coffees using mattress sizes. âOne queen-sized soy latte to go.'”
“I've always hoped that one day in the future I could walk into a coffee shop and have the counterman ask, âWith or without Sea-Monkeys?' It would be like bubble tea, but with bubbles that do tricks.”
After a silent stretch spent staring out the window at the falling rain,Tony asks, “If you could eat only one or the other for the rest of your life, which would you choose: Baby Aspirins or Flintstone Vitamins?”
“Based solely on taste or curative properties?”
“Just taste,” he says.
“Flintstones,” I say. “The Great Gazoo in particular. Did you know he was exiled to Earth for inventing a machine that could destroy the universe with the push of a button? When I was a kid, I used to think about that a lot.”
“When I was a kid,” says Tony, “I thought about brontosaurus ribs a lot.”
FRIDAY.
Still thinking about the food of my youth, I'm struck by the realization that I no longer have friends who make Jell-O shooters. I don't even have friends of friends who make Jell-O shooters. Let me be clear: I never actually liked Jell-O shooters, but I guess I just assumed they'd always be around. And now their memory has become more potent than what they were.Which was disgusting.
Even so tiny a loss has the power to still feel like a loss.
Forty slowly descends like a mid-November frost.
LOSS OF MEMORY
There was once a man who felt his losses more acutely than others. Lost watches. Umbrellas. A money clip. He just couldn't let go. The passage of time didn't help, either. He still dreamt of childhood toys he hadn't seen in years.
And of course there was the loss of women, some of whom he still woke up aching for. He'd study their remnants alone at nightâslips of paper bearing old phone numbers. Photographs. A mitten. In bed he would stare at the ceiling, trying to seize on the exact feeling of a particular woman's head on his chest. Its weight, the smell of her hair.
And yet oddly, the majority of these recollections were almost perfectly wrong. His memory turned redheads into brunettes, French women into Spaniards. Awful women into saints.
One day while waiting for his bath to fillâhe
lived in a building with ancient plumbing and it often took hoursâthe man went out to buy a magazine to read while bathing, and on the street he ran into one of those ex-girlfriends of his. She was staring into the window of a candy store, and when he approached her there was not a shred of recognition in her eyes. He told her his name, repeated it, pointed at his face, and still, it was like staring into an abyss. He worried this might be some game she was playing. A hurtful game.
As he turned to leave, the woman touched his shoulder and explained that, about two months earlier, she'd been in an accident and had lost many of her memories. Some she kept. Small ones. The colour of old blankets. A mole on a kindergarten teacher's face. But most of the big ones had been wiped out.
“You might have been a big one,” she said and smiled.
It was in seeing the woman smile that the man immediately realized this was not his ex-girlfriend at all. His ex-girlfriend did not have a gap between her front teeth. His ex-girlfriend in fact looked nothing like this woman.
“If you're not too busy,” the woman continued, “I'd love to hear about us. The things we did. What I was like back then. What we were like together.”
She suggested a nearby café, and the man, not sure what to do, began to stammer and hesitate.
“Please,” she said. “I've been so lonely without my memories.”
And so with nothing else to do besides wait for his bath to fill, the man acquiesced.
To lose a fountain pen is one thing
, he thought.
But to lose one's entire self!
It was clear this woman needed him.
Seated at a table in the rear of the café, he searched for where to start.
“Well,” he said, “we went out for hamburgers quite a bit. Milkshakes, too, and you always insisted on paying. It was your thing. Our thing.”
“I don't eat many hamburgers these days,” the woman said with amusement. “I'm mostly vegetarian.”
“And we always sat on the same side of the booth,” he said.
The woman listened to him recount her past, taking it all in, sometimes with closed eyes as though soaking up sunshine and other times shaking her head with disbelief. Occasionally, she would throw her head back and laugh.
“When you drank soda,” he said, “you held the can backwards, like a cute little monkey.”
She tried it out with her mug and felt the coffee dribble down her chin.
“I still do that sometimes,” she said uncertainly.
“You had this way of rubbing my head furiously when I'd bang it,” he said. “I banged it often.”
Some of the things he tried to remind her of sounded familiar, and made her feel like she was entering a warm, carpeted room; but other times, the things he spoke of seemed so alien that they made her feel like she was hopping out of a cake onto a cold, dark stage.
“One time,” he said, “we were trying to get out of the rain and we mistakenly ran into an S and M bar. There was a TV in the back and we watched an old episode of
Frasier
.”
He was painting a portrait made from the bits of memory he'd stored from all the women he'd ever loved. Brandy's fondness for American sitcoms. Nancy's joie de vivre. Kathy's impenetrable melancholy. Meaghan's enthusiasm for the smell of toast. Or was it socks from the dryer?
“You liked raisins and you liked chocolate,” he said. “But you did not like chocolate-covered raisins. You enjoyed it when I sat on the lid of the toilet and talked to you while you showered.”
The more he painted, the more he experienced the sensation of falling in love. With something. Or someone. Possibly her. It seemed the woman was feeling something, too.
She was in fact feeling something indeed. For as the man spoke, as he leaned towards her, closer and closer, the smell of his coffee breath was slowly turning her stomach. And with the smell crept spiders of memory. His morning breath. The way he would speak so close to her that she'd have to wipe spittle from her glasses.
“So much is coming back to me,” she began.
Yes
, the woman thought.
I'm certain this must be why we broke up. Those noises he makes while drinking. The way he doesn't let me get in a word edgewise.
“You'd made me promise,” he said, “that if you were ever kidnapped or locked away somewhere, that I would never give up, never rest until you were free.”
The man leaned forward and looked at her with great intensity, and as his bathroom flooded with bathwater and his downstairs neighbour pounded on his apartment door with increasing fury, he knew he was succeeding in making her remember.
The Tears You Cry in Dreams
(41 weeks)
SUNDAY.
After helping my parents clean their garage, I decide to sleep over. It was a long night spent convincing my father how certain things were better off being thrown out, like a box of microfiches, considering he doesn't even own a microfiche projector.
“Once the internet fizzles, they could come back,” he said. “Look at vinyl.”
In the middle of the night, I'm awakened by a dream in which my lap is on fire. Some back story:
When I was a child our family used to eat at a restaurant called Pumpernick's, a kosher-style tiki bar-restaurant where the husbands made sport of driving their wives as close to the front door as possible. This often involved getting right up on the curb, almost killing anyone foolish enough to lolly-gag after a meal.
When dining there, my sister and I usually shared a hamburger, but my dream was to one day have the flaming Pu-Pu platter, a dish of chicken, onion rings, wontons, and God-knows-what, all brought to the table ablaze.The diner had to blow it out like a plate full of birthday candles, or a stray Molotov cocktail. To a ten-year-old, a Pu-Pu platter turned dining into an act of heroism.
In the dream, even though it closed down years ago, I am back at Pumpernick's. It is late at night and when I walk in, the cashier tells me they're closed.
