Mighty Mango #11

“Mom! Will you tell Ellie to get her stupid friends out of here?”

That was the first thing I heard when I got home: Lisa and Ellie fighting again. When they were born, the idea of having twins seemed vaguely romantic, or science-fictiony, or something. It turns out that having twin daughters is like having twin boils on your ass. It sucks, and there’s two.

“Ellie! It’s seven o’clock. Tell your friends to go home so that Lisa can—oh, Breyer. Hi! I didn’t even hear you come in.”

My wife, Helen. Helen and I went to business school together. Here’s an advice for all the young turks out there: don’t marry anyone you meet in business school. Okay? It seems like a good idea: power couple, make lots of money, Bill-and-Hillary thing, right? Actually, most of the time, you end up marrying yourself, and it turns out that I’m not a very pleasant person.

“Hi Helen.”

And that was it. That was the only thing we said to each other for an hour. And you know what? I don’t even mind. I don’t think she minds, either. My life is not a tale of wistful longing, of lost romance, of wanting. I don’t want anything. I don’t want romance. I just want to keep up the appearances of my marriage and work, because dammit, I like my job. I love it.

So I retired to the bedroom. Getting home at 7pm was sort of a treat, because it meant I could watch “Jeopardy!” (I love Jeopardy!) as it was airing, rather than on the TiVo. So I curled up my feet on the bed, and reached for the remote—

Damnit. God damnit. Where is my fucking TiVo remote?! Probably buried under a pile of… what the fuck is this? Liberté: A first-year French Textbook. Wonderful.

Lately, Ellie's French books have been all over the damn place. I assume they’re Ellie’s books, anyway. They’re… about high school age, I’ve got to imagine. Kids take language classes in high school, yeah? And obviously my daughters aren’t going to take Spanish or something. I guess they could be Lisa’s. She’s… bookish. She has books. I’ve seen her read a book before.

It really pisses me off that they’ve been in here. They’re not supposed to be in my bedroom. I keep private things in here! Well, I don’t, actually. All of my private things are in my office. But I could. I could keep really goddamn private shit in here. I could have naked pictures of their mother in here, spread-eagle.

Thinking that thought weirded me out a little bit.

I’d tell Helen about the books. But the last time I found Liberté lying around and complained to Helen, so she’d talk to the girls, she just looked embarrassed and changed the subject. Helpful, Helen. Meanwhile goddamn Liberté is sitting on the coffee table next to some… tea cups, I guess. Some kind of cup. People drink tea from white cups, yeah? I think my Mom used to do that. Have friends over, drink tea. Whatever.

“Ellie! Lisa! Get in here!”

No one was going to leave a goddamn French book in my room. Not while Breyer Brest Levinson was the king of his household!

They skulked in. “What, Dad?”

“Who left this book in here?”

Silence.

“I know one of you did. Whose is this?”

“I take Finnish in school,” said Lisa.

“You do? That’s cool,” said Ellie.

“Shut up. I like it!” Lisa was, I think, overreacting. But it was hard to—

“I’m serious! I want to take Finnish.”

“You can’t,” said Ellie, sardonically. “It overlaps with cheerleading practice.”

“Oh.”

Why is this drama bomb going off in my bedroom?

“I don’t care who wants to take Finnish,” I said. “Who is actually taking French?”

Silence.

“Whatever. Get out.” Boils on your butt. Having twin girls is exactly like having boils on your butt. Boils that lie about their French books.

Sigh.


Tomorrow was Sunday. Which meant, inevitably, that sometime tonight Helen was going to ask me to go. Which meant, inevitably, that I was going to say yes. I’ve tried getting out of this a lot of ways. Staying late at work doesn’t work because she leaves a note in the foyer before I go to bed. Falling asleep early doesn’t work because she wakes me up to ask.

I’m not against God, per se. I just don’t… feel like going to church. Is that shallow? Well, whatever. I don’t. I want to sleep in. On the rare Sundays that I don’t have to go into work at all, I like to sleep in, wake up, eat some toast, watch my recorded copy of Meet the Press, and relax. Hearing about how I’m supposed to love blah blah and whatever is fine, but I just don’t… get it.

But I can’t say no. If I tell her no it will become an issue. A fight. Some goddamned thing, that we’ll have to talk over and truthfully, I’ve measured this stuff, the talking and fighting takes more time than church. Which is pretty unfair. She gets to make me go to church by fighting with me for longer than church would take.

Knock on the door. “Breyer?”

The fact that we knock on our own bedroom door should really tell you something.

“Yeah. Come in.” I quickly turned up the TV volume so I could appear to be paying really close attention.

“Are you coming to church tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Pause. Helen’s standing there with the door open, I’m pretending to listen to Rear Admiral Dipshit on television miss a basic Kafka question. And there’s this weird moment where I feel like I should say something, but truthfully, I don’t want to talk to her that much. What am I supposed to ask? Hey, Helen. How was raising the girls today? Oh, yeah? Blah blah blah and whatever? Great, great.

“Well, thanks, Breyer.” And she walks away.

And I fall asleep like that. About half an hour after Law and Order. Helen got in bed beside me sometime during the night, because when we wake up, she’s there.

I sit through church. On the way there, Ellie compliments Lisa’s shoes, which she manages to take offense to. Ellie’s wearing these sort of strappy sandal things which, honestly, look goddamn uncomfortable to me, but that’s how all of Ellie’s shoes look. I think 16 is too young to be wearing even a short heel, but all of that’s Helen’s department.

But Lisa is just wearing flat-footed slippers that look like ballerina shoes to me. Comfortable. Drab. Boring. But comfortable. I think there’s probably a subtext here, but damned if I have ten minutes to sit down and puzzle it out.

Don’t think I’m a monster. I’m not. I do care about my girls. I just don’t know them. And I don’t think they want me to know them. It hasn’t always been this way—me sitting in church, hoping the Colts win their game this afternoon. I used to work shorter hours, come home earlier. I did love Helen. We got married, after all. I didn’t have to do that.

But who knows? You drift apart in a marriage. I tried to commiserate with “the guys,” but none of them really understood. Helen was… I don’t know. I lost her, somehow, somewhere along the way. I don’t remember a point. Did I do something? I don’t know. But I lost her. And then the girls were born, and they were hers. Twin girls. I was never a part of any of the decisions.

Worked later. More money. More satisfying, to work. Get to contribute to something. Do I miss the old images I’d have, of fantasies of old age, hopes for a hammock together and a glass of lemonade on a summer afternoon? Yeah. Shit, yeah, I miss all that stuff. But things aren’t so bad. My girls are growing up smart. Smarter than me. Lisa’s smarter, anyway.

We arrived at the Episcopal Church about ten minutes before services started. The crowd was still milling around a bit.

“Breyer? I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” said Helen. “This is Marie-Élise Rousseau.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Breyer.” We shook hands, and I sat down. The minister came in, and services started.

“Today’s reading is from the Book of Ruth.”