We never stood a chance, and in those days chances always stood us up, so we resorted to the merely gruntled functions of couplehood, which in the end amounted to little more than a loose accumulation of crumbs and greasy fingertips wiped on the laps of our jeans, the occasional flushing of the toilet, and a crushing staleness to the air, since the windows had been painted shut many years before.
I began calling in sick more frequently. Words arrived winded and wheezy at the ear, barely able to scrape their way down to the tympanum, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes they seemed just too exhausted to bother, or simply unwilling to make the effort. On those occasions they would just float about in the air, and you could see them there among the dust motes when the sunlight skulked around the curtains at just the right angle. They were unreliable; even then that much was clear. Yet I could hardly keep myself from them, and there were nights when I would sit up at the kitchen table, repeating those my ear had clutched at during the day, sometimes whole phrases, even.
We grew accustomed to vouching for our bodies, for the vacancies they took up and over. I would go so far as to say that we were in love, even if just barely. We would have liked to undertake a reckoning of sorts, but accountancy was not our strong point, and there seemed little choice but to come to terms with the voluminous leaven of ourselves. That was the problem with bodies, we agreed—the gas and the grease and the grime that curdled everything they came in contact with, the doughy undoneness of their compositions and complexions. There were two accusatory depressions in the bed, one for each of us, as if their barrenness were the mattress’s way of telling us to give up the ship, and perhaps the ghost as well.
When she was drinking, she would sit in the house all day with the curtains drawn and watch the same VHS cassette of Zig Ziglar repeatedly, dutifully rewinding it when it reached the end, just to start all over again with a new bottle of Boone’s Farm or vodka with cranberry juice, depending on her mood. Sometimes her brother would come over, and they’d watch the video in silence together for hours, though he didn’t drink. The cassette wore out eventually, and she sent away for another one. She put cash in the envelope instead of a money order. The new cassette never arrived, but she found another copy at the Twin Valu that had recently opened over by Chapel Hill. When she wasn’t drinking she would record episodes of Smithsonian World on the VHS machine and hold down a job from some temp agency or other, usually data entry or transcription of recordings of various customer service calls or marketing research telephone surveys and such, since her typing was fast and accurate. That was the only useful thing Central-Hower had given her, she always said, and she was grateful to Mrs. Vercuski for that. She was always planning to get a permanent position somewhere, but ended up spinning her wheels, rarely working at any one place longer than a couple of months. She eventually registered for college, thinking that she might get a degree in business, but that dwindled down to nothing even before the end of her second semester. If she never came into her own, then at the very least she never came into anyone else’s either.
One time we were watching an episode of Smithsonian World about Islam and I mentioned what a beautiful thing I thought it would be to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, dressed all in white, kissing the black rock and throwing stones at the devil and running around the Kaaba. She laughed so hard the Boone’s Farm shot out through her nose, and nearly choked herself saying what kind of Muslim would I be, drinking Milwaukee’s Best and eating bacon cheeseburgers. She said that if I threw stones at the devil, he’d probably just throw them back at me.
As for french fries, Wendy’s was her preference, while I was partial to McDonald’s, so we’d always walk up to the top of Cotter Avenue and eat at the Burger King there, since neither of us liked their fries. That was back when we lived on Hazel. Once we were sitting at a booth in the dining area off to the side, back where it wraps around towards the restrooms, where the staff could only see us if they came out from behind the counter to change the trash bags or wipe down the tables. I don’t remember what we had ordered, but we always got the french fries. A southern accent clipped our silence, leaping out from a beggarly, bearded old man whose eyes flashed with a provisional shine that seemed willed into place.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Excuse me, sir. I’ll tell you right now I ain’t here to beg no money or nothing else from you,” he said. “I ain’t no bum. My name’s Gordy the Strolling Player and I was born down in Blackshear, Georgia, but I’ve been traveling and playing this here guitar for the better part of twenty years now, and I’d like to perform a service for you, if you don’t mind. What do you say I play a song for you, and you give me two dollars in exchange? I got a bit of money already, but this is how I make my living, and I’d like to get something to eat, and maybe a little something to drink later.”
“You know, I like that attitude,” she said. "That’s the real American way, not begging, not asking others for charity, but offering an exchange, a business deal. You know, there’s a saying that it’s your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude. Do you know who said that?”
“Zig Ziglar, ma’am.”
“That’s right. Zig Ziglar. How did you know that?”
“I saw him speak once down in North Carolina. That was a long time ago, before I became a Strolling Player, but I’ll be damned if I don’t remember that very quote, ma’am.”
“He’s a great man. He changed my life, you know.”
“Amen to that.”
“Alright, then, go ahead and play a song for us.”
It wasn’t really a chord the four rusted strings sent into the soundbox and back out again as Gordy strummed the guitar, but an agglomeration of unrelated sounds of no discernible pitch, accompanied by the buzzing of the strings against the fretboard and the rattling of the empty tuning posts where the missing strings ought to have been attached. The strumming continued for several minutes, his blackened fingers scratching out new combinations of what ought to have been a chord progression of some sort, and when the song proper got underway, Gordy just repeated the phrase ‘it came out of the sky’ over and over with a box-grater voice that refused to stay in tune with itself, not to mention with whatever it was his fingers were doing to that poor old guitar. The manager came out and interrupted Gordy before he got too far into his performance. She asked if he was disturbing us. We said no, but she told him that if he wasn’t planning to order anything then he was kindly asked to leave the premises and in any case he wasn’t allowed to be harassing their customers like that.
“I apologize if I’m a bit out of tune tonight, but I’m in a schizophrenial petris ’cause I ain’t got my blue scarf,” he said once the manager had returned to her post.
“That was lovely,” she said as she pulled out a five-dollar bill and placed it in his hand.
“Thank you, ma’am, you’re a God-send. Thank you, sir. That’s more than I needed. God bless you both.”
“Don’t you think five dollars was a bit much?” I asked after Gordy had gone to place his order.
“No, I don’t, actually.”
“Well, it was.”
“You see, that’s the difference between us. You’ve got no heart.”
“And you’ve got no head.”
“Oh, I’ve got head and heart enough for the both of us. Someone’s got to, and it ain’t you. You know, Zig Ziglar says that the only way to truly improve your life is by helping others.”
The next few nights I sat up at the kitchen table repeating the phrase schizophrenial petris to myself. I held my horses over the bones of the phrase, and came out the other end without much to show for it. The letters felt clogged and gummy on the tongue, but I chalked that up to my own clumsy gumminess, and made a note to stop in the public library to look it up next time I was downtown.
The story was always the same. That’s what it boiled down to. Well, the words were the same at least, but the meaning was always different. I’d call my boss and say that I couldn’t come in because I had diarrhea. At first he was concerned, if displeased, but after the third time in a month, his tone grew skeptical. Once it had become a regular occurrence, he’d get all worked up, telling me there was no one to cover my shift and that the customers depended on us for all their tobacco needs. My coworkers didn’t talk to me any more than was absolutely necessary.
“They’re going to fire you one of these days,” she would say whenever I hung up the phone.
“I know,” I’d say, and I did. In the end I’m not sure if they fired me or if I quit, because I called off with the usual excuse one day and just never felt like going back, so I didn’t. After a few other speculative flings at gainfulness, I ended up on unemployment and, eventually, disability.
We fumbled about with each other for a few years, but things blew over before we could settle into anything like conjugality. She always had something to get off her chest and onto mine, and I obliged her but had nothing really to give in return. That seemed to suit her at first, but one day she came home and told me that the whole thing just wasn’t tenable. She wasn’t wrong. Some months before, we had dragged ourselves out to Put-in-Bay for a few days, and, standing on the passenger deck of the ferry, I looked out over the greasy waters of Lake Erie and felt it claw up from my gut, though I didn’t have the heart to go through with it. We’d long since moved on from the old-fashioned TV dinners, the kind with foil lids on thin aluminum trays that you heated up in the oven, and were well into the era of the paper-trayed low-fat microwaveable meal, when she packed her things and left.
There was an exquisite disarray to the way she dispensed with the relics of the ‘our’ part of our life. She abandoned most of her clothes, and left her video and audio cassettes and CDs behind, even the Zig Ziglar. She took the Def Leppard ashtray we had bought at a rummage sale and all her Def Leppard t-shirts, all her make-up and other beauty products, the wool socks my aunt had knitted and given to me one Christmas, and all the pasta and frozen burritos we had in the place. She had worked herself up into the kind of wife no one really wanted to be, she least of all, and decided it was time to be a little less the sort of woman that she had found herself fashioned into, and a little more an inhabitant of the future she had been plotting together with Zig Ziglar.
After she left, I’d spend afternoons and sometimes evenings up at Zobby’s place, and when I was drunk I’d repeat to anyone willing to listen that I wasn’t the kind of man who was mindful of the needs of women, or needful of the minds of women. I was proud of myself for that one. It had a nice ring to it, and it seemed clever at the time. In a way I suppose that was enough for me back then, but the guys at the bar never really seemed to get it. Same thing with the toast that I had learned from a book of quotations I found at the Goodwill and repeated whenever I had an audience and fresh glasses in our hands—To hell! May we have as much fun there as we had getting there! It never got the reaction I was hoping for.
I sank into a tiny brown box of a rental unit over on Nieman Street. I’d taken to drinking at home and watching that Zig Ziglar VHS cassette with curtains drawn and lights out. Zig says that the foundation of success is a positive self-image. Zig says that you must be before you can do, and you must do before you can have. Zig says that first you need to take inventory, then you need to dress up, and that will help you to go up. Zig says that you have to walk before you can run. Zig says that you can have everything you want in life if you help others get what they want. Zig says that we all need to join the smile and compliment club, that if you just smile at people and compliment them on some specific positive behavior, then they will feel better and you yourself will feel even better than they do.
Eventually, I was able to flub out a few deflated smiles and compliments when the occasion arose, but no one was having it. I’d apologize and somehow we’d all feel worse. It was John Wayne who said that he wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. I thought for a while that something at least might get out ahead of the unease. You have to be before you can do, right? But what if one simply isn’t and doesn’t?
Truth is, from the very germ of it we’d barely been conjectural, perhaps not even. I never did find out what a schizophrenial petris is, either, and if I did, then I don’t remember anymore.
