You: pronoun; a person in general. Or a specific ‘you,’ as in me. I could have driven a truck through my own mouth.
“I can think of a truck that should be driven through a cavernous opening — preferably, one that leads to a cliff. It’s not exactly a truck; there’s an acronym that escapes me.” Aaron frowned at his wife. “Superfluous Ugly Vanity? Simple Unadulterated Vacuity? Wait, don’t tell me….” He drummed his fingertips against his brow. “Self-aggrandizing Urban Vandalism?”
Emma raised her teacup to her lips. “That would be ‘Sports Utility Vehicle.’”
Sports. Utility. She can’t manage a thirty-minute aerobics class, much less traverse ravines or haul firewood.
Aaron’s and Emma’s staid, fuel-efficient, fifteen-year-old Toyota was on its last legs, or wheels. Emma needed a new car. Hints had been dangled and dropped; stories had been shared. It began to make sense to Aaron. Dreadful, treacherous sense.
Emma told stories, of how their across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor Lyndsey Dayne defended her husband’s acquisition of the monstrosity that choked their driveway: “Finally, a car powerful enough to haul our trailer!”
Aaron reminded Emma that the Daynes used their trailer but once a year, for an overnighter to the coast.
Emma told stories, of how it could be a prudent decision to purchase such a vehicle: “Remember the January snowstorm? The Crossans could get out for milk and other perishables because their car has 4 x 4, all-wheel, multi-terrain response.”
Aaron was certain that, if asked to do so, Emma could not describe the vehicular features she so solemnly specified.
Emma told stories: If she and Aaron had a “stronger” car they’d be ready for a similar storm.
Aaron checked the state weather bureau: The next “similar storm” would likely be three years from now and drop a half inch of snow at most.
The inevitable does not stare you in the face, but it does skulk in your kitchen. You will come home one evening and behold in your driveway a motorized behemoth, with its own zip code instead of a mere license plate.
“You didn’t know.” Emma removed a paring knife and a small acrylic cutting board from the utility drawer.
Syllables of deception, slithering down my beloved’s tongue. Would I recognize them?
“It’s bothering you, Aaron, I can tell. You really didn’t know how I voted?” Emma inverted their daughter’s lunch bag. A cloud of cracker crumbs descended into the sink. “Remember all those conversations, even before the election, about the state of the world and things we take for granted? I never hid how concerned I was about how things have changed.”
“Things have changed.” Aaron pushed his coffee cup toward the center of the table. “No argument there. We’re living in a Brave New World.”
The arched brow, the squinty mouth. She recognizes the reference but can’t place it.
“What kind of sandwich did Vicki have yesterday?” There was no pause in Emma’s school lunch preparation mutterings. “PBJ, tuna, or cheese ’n mayo?”
“You gave no indication you were seriously….” Aaron massaged the notch behind his mandible, under his left earlobe. “I assumed you were doing what people do—playing devil’s advocate, considering the other side. Emphasis on considering.”
“I’m not saying it was an easy decision. Though once I made it, it was.”
“You’re not saying it was, but it was? Emma, that makes no sense.”
The front end of Aaron’s Honda Civic sported what appeared to be faint claw marks, where he had scraped off two of the bumper stickers that were no longer applicable. The candidates he’d supported were no longer running; there was no need to continue to declare his backing. Against all civic good will and rational hope, “Regime Change Begins at Home,” “The Emperor Has No Clothes” and “Fire the Liars” remained affixed to his car’s rear bumper.
She slides onto the passenger’s seat. We pick up a pizza, go out for Thai. She rides in my car without complaint or comment. There are no bumper stickers on her car.
“Vicki showed me a new way to do her apple. Her teacher demonstrated it in class. You cut it across the middle and when you pull it apart, the seeds form a star. Vicki? Hey, Vicki?”
Aaron’s wife called out to their daughter in a voice that would never be heard upstairs, asking what kind of sandwich Vicki wanted in her lunch.
You ask for her choice, but you’ve already reached for the peanut butter.
“Vicki? Victoria Rose?!” Emma wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “If you want a ride with Dad you need to be down here in fifteen minutes.”
+ + +
Aaron’s college roommate had deemed Emma’s features ‘patrician.’ Emma’s skin was porcelain-fragile, her tall forehead still mostly unlined. Her nose was long and lean, with a prominent bridge curved like a raptor’s beak—a shape universally praised as aquiline. Aaron watched his wife slice the apple into thin shards. Why had he never noticed the true contours of her face? In the ordinary yet illuminating morning light there dawned recognition, and Aaron saw the profile of selfishness, arrogance, even cruelty.
The previous evening during dinner preparations Emma had refused Aaron’s offer to dice the shallots. She loathed chopping shallots; the fumes made her eyes teary. Last night, her eyes stayed dry. Aaron had tried to entertain her by sharing a bit of Internet humor a friend had forwarded to him, about a satirical website offering a matchmaking service between Canadians and disaffected American liberals. Between shallot peels, out popped Emma’s offhanded confession—the admission that turned Aaron into a drive-a-truck-through-it, jaw-dropper.
“You don’t change horses in the middle of a stream.”
At first, Aaron had thought she was joking. But, no. No horses would be changed, not for Emma. It was only last night, and already her simple declaration had been absorbed into the emotional detritus of his family history. Had there been previous clichés for rationale, other clues he hadn’t noticed? Aaron scoured his memory: When she’d declined his offer of culinary support had she also, on the sly, proclaimed that too many cooks spoil the broth?
+ + +
Emma hummed softly while she finished making her daughter’s sandwich. She counted out six saltine crackers and layered them in a small food storage container. She pushed her hair back, away from her forehead. The stray strands of hair on her shoulders seemed ruddier than usual. Perhaps it was the white sweater.
No one ever calls Emma’s hair red, not even Emma. It’s auburn. It used to be auburn.
Emma had always snickered at women who highlighted their hair with what she called “mid-life red” or “menopause flame.” But Aaron could not deny the distinct, shiny, carroty tinge.
She is a mole. A B-2 consort; the stealth spouse.
“Did you do something to your hair?”
“‘Something.’” Emma snorted. “Two weeks ago, Mr. Johnny-on-the-spot.” She removed a soft drink from the refrigerator and added the can to the lunch bag.
“What are you doing? Since when does she have a soda for lunch?”
“It’s just a treat. A ‘stick with it’ incentive. Vicki’s been stressed out, haven’t you noticed? There’s play tryouts today. Remember last year, when she couldn’t decide whether to audition with the older kids? She panicked and ran out of the gym, in front of all the fifth graders.”
“And you certainly don’t want her changing horses in the middle of a stream.”
“What?”
Put a can of pop in my daughter’s lunch, like every other American butterball in training. Abet her to consume sixteen tablespoons of sugar before noon; urge her to do her patriotic duty and develop brand name recognition, product loyalty, and Type II diabetes by age eleven.
“‘Change horses in the middle of a stream.’ That’s what you said last night, to justify why people, why other people, might vote for…” Aaron couldn’t bring himself to utter the name.
There is a re-education camp, right here. In my own home. She’ll infect us all.
“So, we’re back to that?” Emma exhaled noisily and zipped up the lunch bag. “It’s not the most original reason but it got Lincoln reelected, and history says that was a good thing. Lincoln wasn’t popular at first, you know, not until the Civil War. People realized that they should see things through, that it wasn’t wise to change horses in the middle of a stream, so to speak. They’re the ones who said it—the people back then. People who actually rode horses.”
Equestrian metaphors do not become her. She’d be the last person to change horses, which would imply she’d be up on one of the beasts in the first place. Emma is afraid of horses.
“But if it’s your horse that stops in the middle of the stream and defecates in it, polluting the water downstream, then you’re morally obliged to…”
“You’re losing me,” Emma sighed.
Aaron had known about Emma’s parents’ politics before he married her. A potent if momentary image came to mind, from a National Geographic documentary: an orphaned Sandhill Crane, thrashing its wings, mimicking its human caretaker’s ungainly imitation of the species’ courtship dance.
Imprinting. There’s no escaping it. Still, it may not be too late for Vicki.
“You read about stuff like that, Aaron. Out of the blue, in-laws stop speaking to each other, neighbors give neighbors the cold shoulder, friends snub one another at the grocery store…”
Google public education in Canada, Australia, New Zealand…the pitifully small list of progressive, English-speaking countries. Check their respective extradition treaties.
Emma wiped her hands on the tattered, stained dishcloth that Aaron had thrown out last week, the one she had retrieved from the garbage can. “That people would allow a thing like politics to come between them is kinda scary, isn’t it?”
Kinda: a substandard, technically nonexistent contraction.
“Kind of scary; yes. It certainly it is.”
“It’s amazing.” Emma hugged the lunch bag to her chest. “Amazing, more than scary, to feel that strongly about something and have other people apparently not know about it, and then be so surprised.”
Emma approached the kitchen table. Aaron flinched when her cool, dry breath brushed the side of his cheek. She took her teacup to the sink.
An anemic excuse for a kiss. Feeble, yet worthy of a Hitchcock storyboard. One small peck, and then another.
“Yes,” Aaron said dully, “you could call it amazing.”
Aaron’s attention turned to the window facing the north side of the back yard. There was a rancid debris pile aside the rhododendron. Last summer Emma had begun to save the household food waste instead of running it down the garbage disposal. She’d purchased a small, stainless steel bin, placed it on the counter by the sink, and announced that henceforth all leftover fruit and vegetable matter would go into the container, and not down the disposal or into the garbage. When the can was full she’d take it outside and dump it by the rhododendron. She’d promised to transplant the alleged compost pile to the south side of the yard.
When you forget to turn the compost pile it doesn’t transform into fertilizer, it simply rots.
Aaron thumbed through his wallet. Behind his credit cards was a bulge of frayed, once-white business cards. He’d sorted through them only last month, discarding the stockbroker’s and insurance agent’s cards, and the one from the handyman who’d resurfaced the front porch. He was certain he’d kept the cards from the travel agent and the family law specialist who’d drawn up their will.
How does it go? You never know someone ’til you meet them in court.
There was the sound of a protracted, cheerless exhalation. Emma was staring at him, her eyebrows elevated and her lips drawn tight. Aaron realized that he must have produced the sigh.
“You were mumbling something. What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Aaron put his hand over his jacket breast pocket and patted the wallet’s reassuring bulge. “I was just thinking about an old saying.”
