1974
Southern California
Summer
One
1.
So much of everything isn't the way I'd do it at all. I wouldn't do myself the way I've been done. Nope, the way I'm turning out is not the way I planned, definitely. I'm turning out to be a limp middle class day-after-day type of guy ... I go to work, I come home from work, oh it's a very exciting life. Drive down a calm residential street, look at a neat house, any house and that's me. I live in a snug, middle class house, an expensive hunk of cement. Inside there are carpets, calendars, automatic devices that hum and make life go. The toilets are clean, the lawn's trim. It's the type of house wherein people try to live happily ever after.
I've been living happily ever after for eight years now, and if I'm forced to keep doing it much longer, I'm going to start killing people, myself included.
I've ended up with a wife who could use a bit of killing. I often wonder how I'd do her over again if I had the chance. Physically, she's still all sleek and desirable, I suppose ... having the kid we got put nary a rumple on her flesh ... but it's her mind that's gone ... well, gone puffy. At twenty-six, she's definitely turned into a puffy, fussy mother-type, really concerned about her family's well-being, and not much else. She's extremely demanding and meticulous about trivial, household matters. She's brisk, energetic, bright-eyed and damn it all to hell and back, bushy-tailed: in a supermarket there's absolutely no one who can beat her when it comes to choosing what's balanced and nourishing for her family. She actually likes to read the helpful instructions on food cartons that tell her how to build strong bodies dozens of strong ways, then she goes and inflicts all these healthy new recipes at me. She's become a busy housewife with daily cares right before my eyes. I see the next decades coming rapidly at me wherein I become bald, beer-bellied, easy-going, fussy, puffy....
The main difference between us right now is that she loves thoroughly what she has, while I cannot bring myself to believe that what I have is all I have.
Okay, go on, do it, say it, I can hear it already, call me names. “Just another displeased hubby grouching about his little place in life." "Another sniveling, surfacy guy busy attempting to have deep pangs.” But. I stare at my life and wonder if it's as small as it seems to be getting ... and try to think if there're ways to make it bigger.
When we go to the beach, which is usually loaded border to border with common happy families, I feel a bit better. A bit. I can put on my sunglasses and contemplate the common world around me. I usually sit a little distance away from my common happy family, because I don't want other people to think I'm a typical common hubby-daddy. I like to give myself the illusion of being an individual, so when common happy people look my way they'll think: why look at that unhappy, lonesome, common individual.
So I lie a tiny individual distance away, nestled warmly in the sand, my chin propped by my hands, gazing listlessly at my prone woman, my glistening suntanning wife, Lawnair Dinks Cupping. Lawnair Cupping. Dinks is her maiden name she decided to throw back into her former self a while ago because she believes it to be a valuable part of the overall structure of her delicate female identity. I think she ran across this wisdom while reading one of her food cartons: 1) Always include fresh vegetables with every meal; 2) Keep your maiden name with every meal; 3) Brush your teeth after every meal. So she brushes her mouth with vegetables while reading the back of some carton, repeating to herself, "I'm Lawnair Dinks Cupping, that's who I am. I'm Lawnair Dinks Cupping, that's who I am." And I think she really believes it.
But in truth, her identity, her Dinksness, is negligible; she's too much in love with the common life to be an individual. She's comforted by the fact that other housewives read food cartons as she does, that they have kids and nice homes, watch the same TV programs and movies, and go to the same beach to be happily common together. I think her seeing other people being like her assures her that she must be doing something right. Like most everyone else, she probably enjoys anonymity, it must give her a sense of identity.
