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Marriage
December 2000
We fell asleep the usual way, Norma curled against me, the cats between us at the foot of the bed. At three in the morning, she woke up, violently sick from something she’d eaten, and spent the next two hours throwing up. I knelt beside her in the bathroom, my arm around her shoulder. There are many positions for love.
December 2000November 2000
In the moonlight, I study the face of the woman I’ve loved for eighteen years. I’m thankful the moonlight traveled such a vast distance tonight, just so I could see her sleeping.
November 2000Any Comments Or Questions?
Girlie slid out like a hot buttered noodle on that Indian-summer night in October — her father’s birthday, in fact.
November 2000October 2000
One bite at a time, I was being nourished by something mysterious. I was eating rain. I was eating sunlight. I was eating a piece of bread and actually tasting it.
October 2000Losing Weight
Filing for divorce, buying a skirt that ended above the knees, getting a stomach-stapling operation
October 2000Disguises
A black wig, four long red marks spaced like fingers, a black polyester shirt with white polka dots
September 2000Past Imperfect
My first impulse was to correct her English: it might be better to say, “I have fallen in love with Lawrence.” We had been over the difference between the past perfect and the past imperfect tens of times, and she still didn’t get it. In the past perfect, the action was over and done with. But imperfect action had a continuing and vital connection to the present, which I knew was the case here: she had fallen in love with him and continued to be in love with him, at that very moment.
August 2000Ten Things
He had a special way of doing everything. He developed a method of eating watermelon with a knife, cutting slices so thin the seeds would slither out, and setting aside the juiciest fillet from the middle to eat last. There was an order in which to read the newspaper (sports, business, style, metro, front page). The two of you never left a football or a baseball game until the last second had ticked off the clock, regardless of a lopsided score or a ten-below windchill or being late to meet someone for dinner. He always carried a pen in his pocket and kept long lists of things to do and places to see on little yellow sticky notes inside his wallet.
August 2000Punch Line
The last time my father takes a bath, my mother has to help him lower himself into the water. The melanoma that infests his body has made him gigantic. He is so bloated he looks like a woman nine months pregnant.
July 2000Little Zooey
Little Zooey died today. Pam and I were in the backyard playing with the dogs when we heard a knock at the front door. Pam went around the side of the house to see who it was and came back a few minutes later with Zooey cradled in her arms. There was no blood, but the cat’s head hung slack, her tongue sticking out of her mouth. It was plain that she was dead. Pam was crying freely, and I felt a quick surge of grief myself.
May 2000
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