Ignoring the loud crash coming from inside the house, I yell, “Get over here!” I had just about lost my patience with him. I had been yelling that sentence to him repeatedly, scaffolding my volume with each successive utterance. By this point, I’ve hit the apex of loud. I can’t get louder. But it’s not doing any good. He’s not getting over here. I’m three inches away from the discovery of a lifetime, yet he’s stationed in a corner, aimlessly picking bark off a tree. “Will. You. Hold. On?” With each syllable, he scrapes a piece of bark. “I found it, though, and I don’t know if it’ll fly away.” The bug seemed to be jittering nervously. It was so delicate; its presence so transient. It had withstood my shouting for about 17 seconds. Another twelve and it’ll be gone. Andy ripped a large piece of bark from the tree and came over. “It’s tiny.” “But beautiful.” “We have to capture it. Do you have a jar?” “No! We aren’t capturing it. That would take away the beauty. That would damage the magnificence.” “No it wouldn’t.” Andy was trying to coerce the ladybug onto his piece of bark. “If you capture it, the beauty will remain. It’ll look the same no matter where you put it. You could put it on a pile of dead bodies, and it would still be a beautiful ladybug.” “But how beautiful can it feel? There’s a radiance in things when they know they’re free; when they’re in nature.” Andy tries to grab the insect with his thumb and forefinger. The bug flies away, upwards, towards the sky. Andy swats at it with his piece of bark. “What are you doing??” I’m shouting again. Louder than before. I’m appalled. I can’t bear to watch this. Whap! As the bug’s corpse drops to the earth, I notice Andy, with gritted teeth, proud in his accomplishment. I begin to cry.
I pull into the parking lot and notice my husband’s car in the driveway. He shouldn’t be there. Not that it isn’t his home or he isn’t welcome here. It’s just that he works every Saturday. Noon to Midnight. It’s his long day. I can hear his mantra, tattooed into my mind: “These are the sacrifices I have to make in order to appeal to corporate. I must climb the ladder if I am to provide for us.” Then my mind falls inevitably into my counterpoint. “60 hour work-weeks, commuting to Dallas bi-weekly, and still bringing barely enough money home to scrape by. What’s the good in providing for a family that you don’t even know?” Of course, this is all just internal dialogue as my tires thud over the curb and into the driveway. But we have this conversation routinely. That is, when he’s not at work. I walk through the door, bags of Kix Cereal and Jiff Peanut Butter—I’m a choosy mom. I choose Jiff—and Roger is sitting on the couch, slouched slightly over, staring at his feet, his tie falling limp into his lap. He looks up, but slowly. He appears confused, or brooding, or plaintive. His expression is contagious. I immediately adopt a more somber mood. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” There’s a long pause, during which his head drops like a guillotine. He takes a deep breath, as if he’s about to dive into water, then explodes: “I suppose that depends on who you ask.” His tone shifts to sarcastically malcontent. “If you were to ask, say, a greedy corporation who equates workers with machines, where penny pinching productivity is more important than worker morale, or, say, human survival, then, I would wager their answer to be, ‘No. I should not be at work.’ However, if you were to ask any decent person who recognizes the importance of things like basic needs, then yes. I should be at fucking work, shouldn’t I? But I’m not. I’m not at work because I’ve. Been. Fired.” With each syllable, he jolts his head like a cartoon. I drop the groceries. They crash to the ground like a hydrogen bomb. Cans and jars shatter. Tile cracks. I don’t even look down. Everything becomes silent. From the backyard, I hear a small voice yell, “Get over here!” and am immediately reminded that we’re a family with two kids who now have cracked tile, broken groceries, a jobless father… I begin to cry.
The road so frustrating. Cars just swerve, trying to find a faster route within the empty space cushions I’ve created out of safety. Don’t these cars know there’s this space cushion for a reason? I don’t want you in my way, turn signal or not. The radio is playing a song way too happy for my mood. I switch the dial to AM, knowing subconsciously that I can find some angry right-winger yelling about Democrats. If my sentiments won’t be matched, at least my anger will. I’m replaying the incident in my mind, can’t help doing so. I don’t want to replay it. I want it to go away. I want it to have never happened. Mr. Sherman calls me in, tells me to sit. My heart dropped—I never sit. Am never told to sit. Then: “We have to let you go.” I don’t want to be let go. I want to be held on to. I want be secure at a job where I know my hard work and integrity are indispensable. I thought I had that. I thought— I turn the fuming conservative way up. —Now I don’t know what the fuck to think. Everything is crumbling around me, the cars keep cutting me off, I’m just far enough away from green-turned-yellow lights to slow down. And worst of all— “We’re making cutbacks. You, of all people, know how these things work. Eliminating your plane tickets to Dallas alone will help us financially.” I sat there in that annoying, vinyl chair, barely hearing what he was saying, thinking about how to explain this to Sheryl. She won’t know why I’m home. —She’ll say, “I told you so.” She did. She knew I was spending too much time on work and not enough with her and the kids. I was. She’s right. Blessing in disguise? Blessing in a fucking ugly disguise? The sign up the road says I have to merge. I don’t want to merge. I like where I am. I turn on my blinker. When I arrive in the garage, my wife’s car is gone. Hair appointment? Grocery shopping? Saucy Saturday tryst? I start to wonder if pain and loss are exponential. Who knows what’s been happening to my family since I started slaving for that company. Upon entering the house, I see my children, running through the house like jarred fireflies. My children. I throw my weight onto the couch. Here’s my juxtaposition: I just lost my job. And I’ve just seen my kids on a Saturday afternoon for the first time. It’s like being confined to a life in prison, only to find your cell mate is Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday. You’re not sure whether you’re despondent or elated. My kids run out the door, oblivious to their world having been dramatically altered roughly forty-five minutes ago. They, instead, appeared to be discussing the history of a particularly enigmatic ladybug residing among the bushes of our backyard. I watch them from the couch, through the back window. So peaceful. So at ease. So child-like. These were images I’d been missing for so long. I didn’t even know about these things. Tears begin to swell in my eyes. I’m not sure if this is due to having lost my job or realizing I barely know my family or just the beauty I associate with the picture of my daughter rustling through leaves, searching, archeologist-like, for the commonest, most insignificant insect and my son, not ten feet away, trying futilely to climb a tree, only to give up and begin to peel away its bark, possibly as a punishment for being unclimbable. I hear the sound of tires thudding over a curb while the garage door opens and I instinctively put my hand to my eyes, wiping the water with the bottom of my palm.
I swear I didn’t mean to make her cry. I didn’t want the bug to escape. She’d been trying to find it going on three or four weeks now. I couldn’t bare to just let it walk away. I was unaware of the dreams I was batting at with that jagged piece of bark. She ran inside and I just stood there, staring at the bug’s carcass, wondering what went wrong. I walked back over to the tree and tried to place the bark back on the trunk where I found it, but it just fell to the ground. Sometimes things can’t go back to the way they were. I walked inside. My mother was kneeling on the ground, with red eyes, wiping up groceries. My father got up from the couch, picked up a broken piece of tile, inspected it, then let out either a sigh or a small bit of laughter. His eyes, I noticed, were red, too. I didn’t say anything to either of them. Instead, I wandered upstairs, into the hallway in front of my Emily’s room. I knocked on her door. “Go away.” “I just wanted to say—” “Go away!” I tried again, only this time I spoke faster. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry” “Then say it.” “I’m sorry.” Just then, the door swung open, she looked up at me, her eyes red. “Then why’d you do it?” I really had no explanation. It was an impulse. It felt like the right thing to do. I tried to make up an excuse as I rambled on. “Well, you’d been chasing that bug for weeks, trying to find it, trying to investigate it. And then you found it, and I noticed a sense of joy within you. Like your quest had ended. Like you could finally retire with peace of mind. To have the ladybug just fly away…it seemed anti-climactic.” “Anti-climactic? It was a beautiful ending. I find the ladybug, then it goes off on its own and I go off on my own, both changed in some unnamable way by the encounter. But with what you did, you gave the change a name. You gave it substance. You gave it tragedy.” It was then that I realized my powers as a person. I was able to affect people’s lives by my actions. It was empowering and humbling and amazing and devastating all at the same time. I can’t explain what that did to my insides. I felt like a catamaran was sinking within me. Water poured over my eyes. I walked back down the stairs where my father and mother stood in the kitchen, embraced. I thought of how much taller my father was than my mother and if I would ever be that tall. I’ve always wanted to be tall like him. |