101 Words

Nothing much happened in class today except when the girl from Pakistan walked in, just beating the tardy bell. She’s been here for three months but for the first time she had no head-cover. No hijab. We all stared, even the teacher, breathless and silent. She bypassed her second row desk to sit next to the tall boy from Peru who always sits by himself against the back wall. She took the chair tucked in the far corner between the file cabinets and the teacher’s desk. She took the chair and she took his hand. Oh, yes, his name is Jesus.

In those days we all drank too much, too heedlessly, as though there could be no consequences. In that awkward space of being no longer young yet not quite middle-aged, we all lived with the nagging fear that what little we had accomplished to that point might in fact be it, forever, for the rest of our lives. And so we drank, and laughed too hard, and made careless, undemanding love to each other’s wives and husbands. And for a time, at least, we pretended we were wiser than we were and assumed a happiness we would never truly know again.

Marcus sat on his bed, contemplating his situation. Amina, his older girlfriend had just informed him that she was pregnant, and she had every intention of keeping the baby. His mind raced. She had told him that she was on the pill. How could this have happened?! He queried himself, vigorously running his hands through his thick blonde hair. He had no idea how he would support a child. He had been unemployed for almost two years and his bank account was dusty; his savings were nearly depleted. He dreaded the thought of telling his religious parents. They would be disappointed.

“Damn!!”

Sam stared at the Sudoku puzzle. This was his third failed attempt to solve this puzzle. The difficulty level was only ‘Intermediate’.

Four years ago he had routinely completed almost all the Sudoku puzzles with difficulty of ‘Evil’. Over the next three years, the number of puzzles solved become less and less until he had been forced to abandon ‘Evil” puzzles and downgrade to ‘Hard’.

This year he had been forced to switch to ‘Intermediate’ puzzles, which were now becoming more and more difficult to complete.

Thus did Sam measure his descent into dementia. God, how he hated that word.

“Men communicate at their convenience,” Madeline’s mom told her, and mom knew about men. She married seven of them.

Madeline married once, and her Steve was a joker. He’d bypass meaningful conversation and move straight to a punch line. Always.

Ten years later the jokes stopped.

“I want you to be present when I talk to you,” she told him Christmas Eve. Predictably, Steve ran upstairs and rushed back down with a bow tied around his head.

He laughed and laughed.

So she put him under the tree.

And she laughed and laughed.

She also giggled when they dug him up.

An associate professor, she had the credentials to teach German. She was well-educated and had worked hard day and night to earn her spot on the prestigious faculty. She gave up opportunities, chances for happiness, potential flings of passion — all for this aspiration.

But she couldn’t get through to the students.

The bags beneath her eyes were heavy as she spoke with the department chair, her boss. The students’ complaints had grown increasingly vitriolic. “Budgeting restraints” kept her without tenure. It was the fourth year in a row.

That night, she cried alone, the tree’s ornaments reflecting her face tenfold.

“That’s how a family should be,” he stated with authority as he watched “Leave it to Beaver” on his flat screen. “June Cleaver is hot.”

So I bought a hot dress, mid-century modern they call it. And one of those cone-cup bras. He liked them sticking out. Hosiery with a seam in the back and black heels. He started wearing a cardigan sweater to dinner and smoking a pipe. He said we needed to have children, a couple of boys.

For his birthday I bought him “Twilight Zone,” the complete DVD set, and went shopping. When I returned, he was gone.