The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (25 page)

From what Ralph had told me, Melissa and her sister didn’t get on too well. She was younger and not prettier than Melissa, but pretty in a way, this according to Ralph, that made everyone act like she was prettier than Melissa, which was a serious blow to Melissa’s ego and had been eating at her for some long time now. Then a year ago she moved up to Wisconsin and found work in television broadcasting for a local news station, which wasn’t why there was bad blood between them, but the move and her success had only seemed to make the bad blood worse.

“How would that screw her over if she likes unicorns?” I asked.

She laughed and said, “This? This thing is not a unicorn. I mean, fuck, maybe it is, with that horn, and it looks kind of like a horse, I guess, and it does something, anyway,” she said. “It’s done something to Ralph, at least,” she said. She turned and looked at me over her sunglasses again. “To you, too.” She sighed. “But my sister, if I convinced my sister that this was what a unicorn really was, she’d hate it.” She took one last drag off her cigarette and then stubbed it out and then pulled out another one and lit it, and then she said, “God, she’d hate it. Course, she wouldn’t believe it. Nothing I could say or do would make her believe it, so I guess it wouldn’t matter.”

“Sheila doesn’t believe it,” I said. “Or maybe she does. I don’t know.” Then I said, “What about you? Do you believe it?”

“It’s because of that thing, you know,” she said, ignoring my question, waving her cigarette at the unicorn. “The job.” She slapped at her leg again. “He didn’t even tell me he got a job,” she said. “I wake up and it’s still dark out and I hear him rustling around the room, and I find the light and turn it on, and there he is, his hair smoothed back, and his face shaved clean, and he’s wearing pants and a shirt and a tie.” Then she said, “I don’t even know where it is he’s working.”

I didn’t know what to say to any of this, or that I should say anything, so I kept my mouth shut and let her speak her mind as long as she wanted, so long as she didn’t decide it was too hot outside or that she was tired of sitting out there with the unicorn, because I had this feeling that if she left, she’d make me leave, too.

“And you know,” she said, “two days ago I would’ve given anything to get him out of this chair and into the house, to help me with the kids, to do any goddamn thing that wasn’t to do with this unicorn. And now this. I know what he wants to do,” she said. “Build a fence, maybe buy the lot next to us, make it into a pasture or some shit.” She slapped her leg again, and I started to get the feeling that when she did that she was, in her mind anyway, slapping the unicorn, or maybe she was slapping Ralph. “Six years, I’ve been with this man for six years, and I never told him he had to get a job, I never pushed him, though I sure as hell wouldn’t have minded. Six years, I’ve done without and I’ve held on, because I figure, give him space, let him find his own way, and then, boy, things will turn around. He’s a man of special talents, I thought, and he can’t be locked into a job that doesn’t let him use those talents, that doesn’t appreciate them.” Then she said, “Ha. Ha, ha, joke’s on me.” She looked at me and smiled and said, “Less than a week with this thing and he’s already found a job to take care of it.”

She looked, then, back at that creature standing in her side yard, and she stared at it with a trying-to-move-it-with-her-mind kind of intensity, and this went on for an uncomfortably long time, and I wondered if she was trying to move it with her mind, or wish it out of existence, or look into its heart to see if she could figure out what it was about this animal that had inspired in her layabout husband the sudden urge to clean up and work and provide. Then she shook her head at it, giving up on whatever she was trying to do. It pawed its hooves against the ground and shook its mane and dipped its horn. Then she took a long drag off her cigarette and, coughing as she exhaled, she said to me, “Don’t you worry, though. One of these days, while Ralph’s at work, I aim to make a pair of pants out of that animal.” She winked and took another drag, a shorter one. “Maybe a jacket, too.” Then she was quiet, smoking her cigarette, and it was right about then, I think, that I got the notion that I should steal this creature from them.

My mom called then and told me I had to come pick up Victor or have Sheila come get him because she had to get to a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t seem too generous about the situation, but really she’d already called a few times, and since I’d blithely ignored these calls, she had every right to her indignation. There was a moment, just after I hung up the phone, when I considered calling Sheila and feeding her some story, asking her to swing by and pick up Victor, but I didn’t, only because Melissa was sitting right there, listening intently to what I said, and the idea of letting her overhear me lie so easily to my wife made me feel guilty and at the same time thrilled in a way that made me uncomfortable.

Reluctantly, I left.

By the time I got to my mom’s again, she was carrying Victor out to her car, and when she saw me, she looked ready to start hollering at me, but she just handed me, without word or fanfare, my son, and then she gave me a cursory peck on my cheek before loading herself into her car and driving off without so much as an offer to give us a ride.

When I got home, the car was in the driveway, and I braced myself for a hellish fight. I figured she would tear into me about lying to my mother and about leaving Victor with her to begin with and then about forgetting about him, and that this would lead to some shouting, some storming around, some random household objects thrown about, most of them aimed at my head, my chest, and as I stood there on the front sidewalk, I wondered what made us fight like some 1970s sitcom couple, and then I wondered if it was worth going inside at all, if maybe Victor and me, we could keep walking, and maybe I could take him to a bar and set him up with some pretzels and let him look at one of those Trivial Pursuit video games and then take in a couple of beers myself, though I couldn’t imagine further than finishing that second beer, couldn’t imagine what would happen after that. I shrugged my shoulders, bent down and pulled Victor out of his stroller, was struck briefly by the image of me walking into the house with Victor held up in front of me like a shield, and then I walked inside with him clinging to my side.

She was there looking exasperated and wild and disheveled and, honestly, pretty sexy, though I’m sure that last part wasn’t intentional, was more to do with the weird, unsettling pleasure I took from working myself into trouble with her. I felt my body tense, waiting for that first wave, but all she did was take Victor from me and take him into our bedroom and then close the door behind her. At first, I figured I’d performed some sort of voodoo, or maybe Victor had, but then I thought about Sheila in our bedroom, in the dark, holding that boy tightly, and I pictured everything that normally would’ve come out of her, and how instead it was building up inside of her, and I started to imagine what might come next. This upset me enough that I had little choice but to sneak off into the kitchen, where I grabbed a six-pack of beer and an unopened bag of chips, which I took with me into the backyard and proceeded to finish, the chips crushed one fistful after another into my mouth.

Five beers and an empty bag of chips later, I felt sick and sweaty and overcome with guilt, which I blamed on the chips.

Back inside, the house was still and quiet and the bedroom door was still closed. I considered risking opening the door, but thought better of it. This was uncharted territory for me, and something about the way this had played out, something about our situation, or my own distractions, made this new development feel dire and irrevocable and exhausting. I sensed something large on the horizon, large and charging toward us, and this feeling that I should flee urged me out of the house and into the car and kept me driving until long after night had settled over Houston, and then farther still, until the engine stopped dead as I was pulling off the highway, leaving me only enough momentum to coast to a stop on the shoulder.

When we were kids in high school, Ralph and I bonded over the fact that we thought we were outcasts, even if we weren’t, and that we lived a reckless life, when in fact we were safely ensconced in our families’ suburban homes. We snuck out of the house not to drink or smoke or fuck, but to drive around back roads and listen to music and to pretend to race other cars in the lanes next to us whose drivers were oblivious to whatever games we were playing, which made it easy for us to win every time off the starting line. We would visit cemeteries, and we would tromp through creeks and what passed for woods. We perceived life and our movement through it as if we were still eleven or twelve and not sixteen or seventeen, but we reveled in this as if we had made a conscious decision to do this and hadn’t been somehow left behind.

One time we found ourselves moving slowly across an unexpected clearing, a patch of dirt and flattened grass and weeds we’d not come across before, which turned out to be a private landing strip. We found this out when a small airplane—a Cessna, maybe, or a Super Cub, neither of us knew, though we speculated for hours on it afterward—began its descent nearly on top of us, or so it seemed at the time, when in truth the plane was probably half a mile away and no real danger to us, and we ran screaming and hollering across that flat expanse as fast as we could and holding hands, as if this would protect us from being inevitably caught up in the plane’s propeller. When we cleared the landing strip, we fell and laughed and told each other how awesome we were, and afterward, for a week or two weeks, we retold that story, embellishing it to ridiculous and impractical heights.

We did things back then, is the point I’m trying to make. Not huge things, not important things, not life-changers, nothing so serious as that, but still. We had an impression of ourselves, of who we were, right or wrong, and we acted out our lives accordingly, and as I sat in my car I wondered when we had come to some reckoning of ourselves, some reappraisal of our personal narrative, when we had stopped thinking of ourselves as guys who did exciting, adventurous, childish things, and then through the basic laws of cause and effect stopped doing those things, or, rather, when I stopped doing those things, when I stopped believing in that story we told about ourselves, because, miserable or not, married to Melissa or not, Ralph was still doing things. Things, for the most part, I wouldn’t do. Things I had no interest in doing, but things, nonetheless, and he had eked out a life for himself that, though just a shadow of the lives we had imagined for ourselves, was at least closer to those lives than anything I had made for myself, and that had now brought him to a Chinaman with a unicorn to sell for cheap.

Without thinking or looking, I threw my car door open and pulled myself out of the driver’s seat, only to be honked at as another exiting car swerved around me. Then I slammed the car door, and then I opened it and slammed it again. Then I walked down the exit ramp and across the access road, and then I looked around to see where I was, which was less than an hour’s walk from Ralph’s house.