Two Natures

by Jendi Reiter

In her plain black down jacket and sweatpants, with her hair tied back in a ponytail, she was glamorous without even trying. To be that beautiful must be like having only hundred-dollar bills in your wallet.

One thing I could say for this apartment, everything was in easy reach. I could have cooked breakfast while sitting on the toilet.

How terribly serious that would have been, all of a sudden, how much like buying the ring and booking the chapel. Like the readers of Woman’s Day, I wanted to have it all: “Five Delicious Cake Recipes!” and “Thin Thighs in Thirty Days.”

Family is a movie you know so well that the syndicated images flickering across the TV screen are unnecessary to the dialogue in your head.

Some would call opera a queen’s cliché, but if this were true of Richard, it was only in the way that two dozen long-stemmed roses and a diamond ring are cliché. In other words, sign me up.

I kept waiting for a soft-voiced hunk with wavy hair and a huge baguette to run me down at the crosswalk, apologize with a candlelit dinner, and spend the night making fondue for two. If only my life were an Audrey Hepburn movie. My closest encounter was with a pushcart of sardines.

Not that my fantasy reel was all kisses and candlelight, either; I’d jerked off to the galley slaves scene in “Ben-Hur”, though I didn’t feel good afterward.

Vegas in July was a Martian red-dust furnace kept at bay by extravagant systems that sucked air and water out of the landscape to feed the Mirage’s tropical foliage. Slot machines everywhere, starting with the airport. I half expected the toilet tank to come up three cherries when I flushed the handle.

One thing no one tells you about grief is how boring it is. Running from your feelings is at least an activity.