Maisie Fails to Anticipate the Ordinary
As her body began to break down, first one joint at a time—knees, hips, shoulders, then the discs in her spine, then the chambers in her heart, Maisie grumbled that the human body had been designed badly, and what had God been thinking when he chose planned obsolescence over something more durable? Death, he’d probably been thinking of death, she thought, that is if there was a God, and as she hobbled from bed to the kitchen for breakfast, it seemed that death might become more welcome the more infirm she became. They were so ordinary, her infirmities, and in fact much worse afflictions like cancer and diabetes and heart attacks were ordinary too. Who could have anticipated it? Anyone, really, but somehow the side effects of aging came as a surprise to Maisie, because she’d secretly believed herself exempt. Maisie sipped her morning coffee, slowly, so she didn’t develop heartburn, just one cup, so her heart didn’t begin to race. She opened the newspaper, avoiding the obituaries, checking her horoscope instead, ready to immerse herself in fake predictions and someone else’s news. National news wasn’t good. World news wasn’t either. “We’re all going to hell in a handbasket” was what her mother used to say and Maisie used to laugh at her. She’d been gone now for, how long had it been, more than ten years. Her mother had died young, if seventy-something was young, which maybe it wasn’t, wheezing and coughing and burning up with fever during a severe bout of influenza. So ordinary, the flu. According to Maisie’s horoscope, it was going to be a five-star day, if you believed in that stuff, and she should pay particular attention to physical fitness and her health. Or she’d die, probably, and that was going to happen anyway.
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I Still Don’t Care About Hegel
I don’t think about my teenage years often, but when I do, I’m still not sure how this experience fits into the larger picture or what it means.
My family was living in Providence, so I must have been around fifteen. We moved to Phoenix for my dad’s job when I was sixteen. A whole new high school. A whole new set of problems. In Providence I was the nerdy girl who walked a lot, restless, on edge. Ready to jump out of my skin really. I didn’t know much, but I knew I couldn’t wait to get older. I wanted to be thirty, glamorous, living in Paris or Rome, arguing with intellectuals in sidewalk cafes. By thirty I would have had a string of lovers but I’d be independent, doing something artistic, I wasn’t sure what. Instead, I was this gawky, flat-chested teenager with braces who was always raising her hand to answer teachers’ questions in class (why did you do that, I’d ask myself, too late). Who read too much (according to my mother). Who walked and walked because what else was there to do?
There were a couple of colleges in Providence, so there were college students wandering around town, a lot of them male, a lot of them nerdy too but I thought being in college made you cool no matter what. And this boy sat down on a bench next to me in Brown Street Park and asked me what I thought of the book I had with me. I not only read too much when I was fifteen, I often carried around books that I wasn’t actually reading but thought might be impressive. That day it was an introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology, a skinny paperback that I kept putting down after the first two paragraphs. As far as I was concerned, it was impenetrable.
It’s okay, I guess, I told him, something like that. Maybe I asked him what he thought of Hegel. It would have been a good way to deflect the question, get a conversation going, but part of being nerdy was being tongue-tied with boys, so maybe I didn’t say more. He didn’t care about Hegel anyway. He didn’t care that I was fifteen. I mean, I didn’t tell him, but it must have been obvious. Or maybe not, since he wasn’t all that perceptive. Whatever we talked about, it led to him asking whether I wanted to go back to his dorm room to see the books from the Philosophy 205 class he was taking and of course I said yes, because I was fifteen and dumb and dying for something, anything to happen. He might turn out to be a young Sartre to my Beauvoir.
His room was a double but there was no sign of his roommate. Neither bed was made and the sheets smelled stale, sort of rank. I used to have fights with my mother about making my bed and cleaning up my room and looking at his, I could sort of see her point. It was depressing, the open cardboard box with leftover pizza, the clothes and dirty socks on the floor, the sour smell. He pulled up the blanket so we could sit on the bed and to be honest, I don’t remember exactly what happened. I mean I don’t think I was traumatized or anything, but I’d never been with a boy and didn’t know much about what he was trying to do. Who knows, maybe he’d never been with a girl either.
He took off his glasses and started breathing heavily, he was pushing against me and fumbling with my clothes and pinching one of my breasts, I know he unhooked my bra and unzipped my jeans. I don’t think he got them off. I think he came. I know I didn’t. Is this my #MeToo story? I’m not sure myself. (I guess #MeToo has everyone reviewing their past for new meanings.) I don’t think we went all the way. I didn’t say no to whatever it is we did. I didn’t enjoy it either. He fell asleep and I hooked my bra, zipped up my jeans, and rushed out, trembling. I was shaken up, I can remember that much. A boy looked at me curiously when I ran down the hall. I can still see his face.
What would Hegel have said? Really, I don’t have a clue. I took philosophy in college but I never did read Hegel, maybe an excerpt in a textbook, just enough to know he was the thesis-antithesis-synthesis guy who believed that love was a union of opposites, which this definitely wasn’t. The phenomenology guy, and now my take is getting hazier (I didn’t major in philosophy after all, which I found less interesting than I expected), but I guess I’d need to know how nerd guy experienced the same event in order to put together a meaning. Or is it possible it was just a meaningless encounter where nothing bad happened, but nothing good either? It could have been much worse.
I stopped wandering around town because I was afraid I’d run into him again and then we moved anyway. I left the book behind in his room and sometimes I wonder whether he read it and what he got out of it. Hegel had an illegitimate son with his landlady and two more sons after he married another woman, twenty years younger than him. (I care more about people’s lives than their philosophies.) Is nerd guy married by now? Does he have kids? Maybe he’s become a philosophy professor. Or an insurance salesman. If he remembers me, how does he describe our encounter to himself?
Somewhere Hegel said, “The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.” Necessary to achieving true understanding, he means. Maybe even the embarrassing moments, the awkward ones, the ones you leave out of your life story. Maybe those too.
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All Told
I’m all ears, she said. I’m all nose, he said, and it was true. She loved his big nose and gloomy disposition. He loved the way she listened and her optimistic nature. Two years after they married, they had a daughter who was all heart. He worried about their daughter’s future. Would her heart be broken? She was sure their daughter would find someone who treasured her heart. They were relieved when she married a practical young man who was all business. When their daughter and son-in-law produced three granddaughters, they planted a fruit tree after each birth. For many years they had more apples, peaches, and plums than they knew what to do with. Then birds and moths and fruit flies invaded the orchard. Their grandchildren became teenagers, bratty and rebellious. And when their son-in-law had an affair with a woman at the office who was all over him, their daughter realized she was over him too. She confided in her mother, who was sympathetic and all ears. Never let a man lead you by the nose, her father said, and her mother nodded. Their warm-hearted daughter divorced and started her own business, which prospered, annoying her know-it-all but less successful ex-husband, who was still all business. Their three granddaughters grew up and went their own ways. One married a man and divorced and then married a woman and had a child whom she home-schooled. They called her a jack-of-all-trades because she dabbled in different part-time careers. One discovered she had a talent for numbers and became an accountant. One took a long time finding herself. When their middle-aged daughter was diagnosed with heart disease, her father feared the worst. Her mother hoped for the best, and so far everything looks fine. They are getting old, making more frequent visits to doctors themselves. When their child and grandchildren and great grandchild visit they are all smiles. They beam across the kitchen table at each other, delighted by the smells of good cooking, the clatter of plates and silverware, the lively chatter and laughter. She still loves her husband’s big nose and mild melancholy. He still loves his wife’s cheerful serenity and ability to listen. All told, their family has grown from two to three to four to five to six to seven (plus in-laws and ex-laws) and they are well content.
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Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is (available from Black Lawrence Press) and a hybrid essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball (forthcoming from Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press). A previous contributor to New World Writing, she has published flash in The Pinch, Aquifer, Wigleaf, Ghost Parachute, and numerous anthologies. She is creative nonfiction flash editor at the online literary journal CRAFT. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com.