More Chalk

We looked at the same glossy deck of paint chips with your hand curved around my hip, and you nestled into my neck. The blue, I can see now, wasn’t the same colour for each of us.

You took me out for lunch, a move in celebration, seating me with a flourish but hadn’t mastered tucking the chair back in. I squeaked, hitting the floor. I saw the waiter wince and the stockbroker at the next table snorted under his breath. You ordered for me, mispronouncing foie gras. I scoffed, said, “You can’t be serious, no one likes foie gras.” When it came, I told you it was goose liver, I was impressed you forced it down.

Inside that modern house, you tried to put it in my mind to be a good wife, pouting a bit. You said a good wife would colour-drench a room with your shade of blue while holding a paintbrush in her mouth, and if she were one, she’d cook dinner with her feet, complimenting you on just existing, her arms busy stroking you.

I found I jumped through hoops. I made myself smaller, living in limbo, lower and lower. I should never have unpacked or started a life when I saw how stingy you were with the shelf in the medicine cabinet, how you measured my half of the closet with exactness.

I saw it in the lid you levered off with the flathead screwdriver borrowed from my car, arguing about that shade of blue again—duck egg, you said. Then you educated me on the migratory patterns of birds. I quipped back that humans are the only animals where it is reversed, and we peacock for men for a chance to be chosen. I watched you fumble with the bit, bending the paint can lip. I struggled not to take it out of your hand and do it myself, knowing that blue was not an egg at all.

You said my cooking was sublime, but I did see you spit it in the garbage can when I wasn’t looking. Next week there was a handwritten recipe box of crisp, oddly brand new cards. You told me your mother wanted to make sure her boy ate well. 

Is this my life? Where is the independent woman? Where are my lady balls? Jesus, they’re in your back pocket. I’ve been reduced to Sunday pot-roasts and unsalted gravy. Sodium, your mother clucks. My boy, his blood pressure. Even the potatoes upset your stomach.

I wish I had turned around and rewound, backward stepping. I wish I was back in my car that day, too rushed to stop for coffee. That I had not been intrigued by the Baudelaire you were reading. I wonder now, why I ever thought your mouth was so pretty.

Now, you say let’s learn to rock climb. I’m fairly certain I’m one more dumb suggestion from breaking. “God, no,” I replied. The rope would become unmoored, and I’d be swinging, dangling like an idiot. Oh, the indignity. I’d be reaching, but my fingertips would only ever brush yours, keel-hauled on the barnacles underside the clipper, blood dripping hanging in defeat. You’d be the captain perfecting the rigging and bowlines; I’d be the cabin boy that falls out of the crow’s nest and couldn’t patch a sail.

I already know you’d be a pro, bounding up the side like a goddamn mountain goat, saying, “Honey, more chalk! More chalk!” watching me struggle, I will want to take that chalk bag and blow a cloud into your eyes. You told me it was a carabiiiiiiner; I said I thought it was a carabeeeener. But it was always that way, wasn’t it? I honestly don’t even know why we are together. 

We aren’t even two tomatoes—we are, at this point, a potato and a tomato. I am a warped pool cue choking on a chalked-up tip that still can’t shoot straight. I’m the scratch on the opening break, and I’ve been tucked and rolled into that triangle. You have slapped me onto the slate.

My hand doesn’t even slot into yours anymore. I’ve been finding it too sweaty, even those hairy knuckles are silently judging. You have begun to smell like the sour grapes you accuse me of chewing. If anything I’m Lucille Ball, a virtuoso of mashing grapes, turning water into wine, like Jesus. When you snore at night, I think about the efficacy of a pillow. 

Next weekend, you want to go to an indoor climbing wall. And I think, for fuck’s sake—I married a marathoner, who won’t even eat the Thanksgiving turkey. Instead of getting fat, on pumpkin pie, I’ll be freezing cold, clapping at the finish-line gate.