Violet’s only rule when she started dating again was No Vegetarians. Matt’s food had been so disgusting, all dry loaves and barfy stews. Whenever she would criticize a slimy mushroom and tofu soup, she got the Intolerant Persecutor speech. He sighed and glowered whenever she cooked herself food in their kitchen. His greasy hair had hung over one eye as he shot daggers from the other. She lost a lot of weight, because eating her food was awkward and eating his was impossible. 

So, then, no  more vegetarians.

Over the next six years, she ruled out doctors (too tired), lawyers (too exhausting), students (too sheltered), and dog owners (too controlling). She ruled out women and married men. Smokers were out. Car fanatics were out. Anyone with a fish tank was out.

She always had her reasons.

Bacon picture: jacobms on flickr

“Happy retirement, Joe.”

“Yeah, congrats, man. Good work.”

“Who’s Joe? Is that why all this champagne is in the break room?”

There was an obligatory round of strained chuckles at Mel’s joke. Joe grinned. Awkward office moments could only cheer him up, now.

“Thanks,” he said. “You guys are great.”

“What are you going to do with all that free time? Don’t tell me we’ll find you here coding for free out of boredom.”

“Mel, I am seventy-two years old. Fuck if I have time to be bored.”

“Okay, everybody! Who wants cake?”

It didn’t take long to pack: a framed picture of Judith and the kids, taken before Harry and Wendy went off to college. His good pen. A copy of The Tempest he’d been reading on the bus. That was it. 

Judith was waiting for him. He hung his hat on the hall tree and took her in his arms for a kiss. Her hair was like a night sky streaked with lightning.

“How was your day?” she asked. Her tone was wry.

“Savor asking that question, honey, because you never will again.”

“Oh, and why not?” But she knew the answer.

“Because I’ll be spending all the rest of them with you.”

That was a good night. There were a few months of good nights and good days. The kids came for a week at Christmas, and Wendy brought her husband and their little boy.

“I know about Santa Claus,” Matt had whispered, excited and conspiratorial, clutching a red sugar cookie on his grandfather’s lap. He was three. Joe felt proud of his grandson’s cynical intelligence. Harry cooked a turkey. On New Year’s, the six of them toasted with champagne at midnight. The young people all went to bed at one, yawning theatrically, conscious of the bedtimes of their more elderly hosts. But Joe and Judith were not tired, and they held hands and talked alone together until the birds sang.

On a sunny day in February, she surprised him with a cake in the park. They ate some and fed some to geese. It was chocolate, with dark purple frosting. Judith had a crumb in her salt-and-pepper hair, and Joe brushed it away with a steady hand.

In May, Harry graduated. He announced he was going to Yale for law school.

Joe and Judith went on a cruise in June. They saw whales and grumbled happily between themselves about the losers who go on cruises. They derided shuffleboard. They made enemies of everyone and were themselves a team of two. They had oysters and raspberries in bed.

In between these adventures, they were together most of the time, enjoying their marriage. He waited for the depression everyone warned him about, but it didn’t come. The only problem was that he couldn’t sleep. But really, you hit seventy a solid drinker, you eat steak and shellfish and drink black coffee, and what do you expect? He still played frisbee.

So. A typical day. They wake early, or Judith does, since Joe is already awake. She makes black coffee while he showers and shaves his white whiskers; she is reading a mystery through coffee steam when he plods in on bare feet. He starts the toast and slices fruit while his short hair drips onto the shoulders of his robe. Maybe he fries bacon, sipping from a mug of supermarket arabica while he waits to turn the meat. He delivers two plates to the table. She marks her place and moves the vase of peonies aside, the better to see his face. They talk about grammar, about the chemistry of baking cake, about cats they have known.

He washes the dishes while she takes her shower.

He works on a piece of software, or he goes birding, or he reads about stars. She sews or works on scanning her analog photographs. Sometimes they call on friends. Once they went to a matinee, a Shakespeare comedy. An hour into the play she stood up. He assumed she was going to use the toilet. After five minutes, he started to miss her. Maybe there was a rule about re-entering; maybe you had to wait until intermission. He paid more attention to what was happening onstage, so he could tell her later.

Intermission came and went. He bought a plastic cup of merlot and drank it while pacing quickly, wondering where she could be. He had no cellular reception. His heart beat quickly as the curtain ascended. Just then she returned to her seat and squeezed his hand. He was filled with relief and forgot, after dinner, to ask her why she had left the auditorium. She had always been deft about steering conversations. As he twirled pasta on his fork she brought up their daughter’s second pregnancy (which would turn out to be a false alarm).

The next day, they went hiking and took in spectacular views. They saw a heron and a sunning snake and red fungus. They stopped at a bench for water and nuts and raisins. The sunlight was warm.

“Excuse me,” she said, and he dozed off while she was in the bushes. When he woke up, she was back, and she looked young, her eyes alive and her wrinkles smooth. As they went downhill, he thought that the sun had moved during his nap, and that she must have wandered off for a long time. But he was concentrating on where to put his feet as they plodded downhill, and he was thinking about the carnival they went to to in their thirties. So his head was full of half-remembered goldfish in plastic bags, and trainyards viewed from metal carts at the top of rusty scaffolding, and he didn’t think to ask.

Every day she was gone for a little bit longer than the day before. As he lay awake at night, he worried: drug habit, he thought; liaisons; a secret double life. But he chided himself for being clingy and obsessive. This was the retirement talking: he was looking for something to obsess over, looking for a project.

Still, it got worse. She would miss lunch, entire courses at dinner parties. She ran off while they were in the grocery store, and Joe had to wait by the automatic doors with melting ice cream and warming meats in the paper bags around his feet. She returned after two hours, smiling almost apologetically and putting a hand on his shoulder. That night, he would try for hours to remember which direction she had approached from: inside the store, or the parking lot.

He started roaming the house when she disappeared, peeking in cabinets and behind the radiator, all kinds of ludicrously small spaces, not knowing what else to do. He started calling her friends to ask if they’d seen her. He wrung his hands. He thought about their New Year’s, sitting on the couch, holding hands and talking. That had made him perfectly happy.

One morning, she wasn’t there when he woke up. He showered and did not drink coffee. He poured cereal but could not eat it; he pushed the bowl aside and wept briefly. Then he read a grocery circular, which was outdated. It advertised artichokes, which were not even in season. He waited for her to return.

She appeared at her seat at the table, next to the vase of drying flowers. She hadn’t walked into the room and sat down. He was sure of that. He thought she looked slightly less-there than usual, thought he could see the cross joints of the window behind her, through her.

She flickered in and out maybe three times. She looked impossibly young and dark-haired and pretty. He had so many questions. They were all in her eyes. She saw them all. But she could only shrug and smile sadly. What can I do? the shrug said. I don’t understand either, it said. But here, I will share this strangeness with you.

Then, for the first time, he watched her simply disappear.

image: theogeo on flickr

I threw a piece of pizza to the wall. The sauce made a picture of a cathedral.

Whenever I have to go more than two or three days without robbing a bank, I can’t take it. I have to at least go to the corner store and steal a grape soda or something.

Usually, when I’m doing a really good job of bank robbing, I black out. I wake up in my living room surrounded by sequential bills. Maybe I actually rob casinos. I can’t be sure, I guess. I think it’s banks.

Mal was incapable of caring what Petra thought. Actually, that’s not quite true. Generally if Petra thought something, the opposite was true. This was almost as useful as having a smart, accurate, experienced companion along.

“Maybe someone will come rescue us,” Petra said. But Mal knew they couldn’t depend on anyone but themselves.

“Why are you building a lean-to, Mal?” said Petra. “We can sleep under the stars.”

“I’m sure this rain will pass,” said Petra.

“If I could have one book here,” Petra would say, and then she would name an awful novel.

 Her favorite thing to say was that everything would be fine in the end.

The beginning. The middle. The end.

Jorry loved his little brother, but they had nothing in common. Jorry loved to scale tall buildings, and Friedrich only like to spelunk. Jorry ran a hot-air-balloon tour company; Friedrich was an archaelogist.

They put all the flowers in boxes, for later, so none of their floweriness would be wasted when they went away. Then, ready to go, they grabbed suitcases and walked out the door.

He wrote a note about carrots and turned orange. He asked a question about beets and turned purple. He tried not to say anything about pancakes and potatoes and Jell-O and cupcakes, because he thought they were unattractive. He tried to frame statements about bananas and zucchini and cucumbers, but that didn’t work out as he had fervently hoped. So, rather desperately, he talked about action figures and movie stars and athletes.

It all turned him into a merry-go-round.

Looking around the park, it could be worse. He’s not a trash can or a toilet or a park bench (which might as well be a trash can) or a sandbox (which might as well be a trash can and a toilet).

He’s just a merry-go-round.

image: Mr.Thomas on flickr

We found it buried behind the narthex. A dirty, leather-bound book with green, costume-jewelry rhinestones on the cover. We took turns reading it and then put it back.

Only Jimmy didn’t touch it; the rest of us all read at least a page. Now Jimmy is a diplomat, and he travels all over the world to make conversation and eat expensive food. I wonder if he ever thinks about what he missed. I wonder this too much, in fact; it’s an odd recurring thought, like a hiccup. I have similar thoughts about the chunky sound of the soda machine in my high school cafeteria when it would spit out a can of Surge. Also about pogo sticking on the roof of the little house my grandparents sold when I was three. Every now and then, like the pogo stick, there’s the book of fairy tales, grime caked on its cover, one rhododendron leaf stuck to the spine.

Chances are Jimmy doesn’t think about the book at all. Just limos and planes and silverware and endless strings of the names of husbands and wives.

image: The Artifex on flickr