Socks

It was the month of my wedding; I thought the napkins were in the box. These napkins were a particular point of contention for me. I was dead set against them. As dead set as you can be against something that is actually going to happen. My stepmother insisted on printing them with a photograph of my fiancé and I, trying on hats. She’d designed a monogram to be positioned underneath this: the first letters of our names, connected by an illustrated version of a bubbling champagne glass. A complicated substitute for an ampersand, if you ask me.
We’d invited 50 people to the wedding, but she’d ordered 300 napkins. She told me we could use them again on our wedding anniversary, wouldn’t that be fun? So when my father came up the stairs from the garage into the kitchen with a big bucket of fried chicken on top of a larger, brown box, I thought that the oft-discussed napkins had finally arrived. My plan was to open them, to act enthusiastically, and then to hide them in the attic. Because everyone in my family had been coasting along in high spirits, attacking the wedding to-do list with tremendous good cheer, I felt sure that if these napkins went missing on The Best Day of My Life, my stepmother would turn to me and bravely say, “They’re only napkins!” and that this act of benevolence would do more for our relationship than the fact that she’d wanted to make me customized cocktail napkins in the first place.
But my father acted very shy and surreptitious, and made as if to hide the box away from us, which made it even more obvious that its contents were for me. So I leapt up from the table and lunged for the bottom box, knowing full well that my father’s instincts for survival would cause him to grab the bucket of fried chicken posed on top of it less it tumble to the floor, and this is exactly what happened. My stepmother beamed as I stole away behind the kitchen table with my booty, safely out of reach.
Using my sharpest fingernail, I dug underneath the packing tape and peeled it back with a tug. Across the room, my father held his breath. Gleefully, I pulled apart the cardboard flaps to reveal four dozen pairs of tiny white athletic socks, their reinforced pink tips touching like the snouts of sleeping piglets.
“Dad?” I said, looking across the kitchen to where he stood hugging the greasy bucket against his sweater.
“I got them on EBay!” he exclaimed.
I lifted out a single specimen to try and understand whose feet, exactly, the small white socks were for.

From an exercise for a Gotham Writer's Workshop

I could see how the cutlets could be sauteed with curried spinach, onions and cream, and how this would taste, if not delicious, certainly rewarding on top of a bed of rice. I could taste the future perfect of those chicken cutlets. I could smell the garlic frying.

But right now, those chicken cutlets were lying underneath a choke of plastic, like pale and fattened slugs. Where were the nerves, the rubbery tendons where was the puckered flap of cream-white outer skin?

The other meat choices were no more enticing. Every cut before me looked like the embodiment of nothing; the exact color and texture and glistening sheen I would attribute to this word. What do you feel like doing? Nothing. What did you learn at school today? Nothing. What do you feel like eating? Nothing. This.

From "Night Watch"

The next morning, Antonia padded downstairs into the kitchen and surveyed the kitchen counter (somewhat accusatory, so empty, so clean) and the blinking coffee machine, already dribbling out its necessary black fuel. Something made Antonia pause, as she listened to its gurgling, its faint, reptilian hiss. Her memory jolted, Antonia walked back upstairs to the second floor landing and leaned her ear against the door of the guest bathroom that Grey favored for his grooming. She knocked hard enough for him to hear her over the busy whir of his electric toothbrush.
“Can you eat anything?” She hollered.
He appeared at the door, a flaccid burst of foam around his mouth.
“Hmmm?”
“Can you eat anything, darling, or do you have to go on empty?”
“Ghmghm, ghmmm,” he mumbled, shooing her away.
She went back downstairs and poured coffee into a travel mug. This was for her, Grey didn’t like to drink anything in transit. She fixed him an English Muffin with almond paste in case, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and sat down at the table to wait. He was putting on a show for her, but she knew he hadn’t slept the night before because she hadn’t slept, either. Both of them had simply been too proud to say something in the dark.

When they pulled up in front of the hospital (why were they like this, and always in brick? Factory-like, with noxious fumes tumbling up into the sky from a forgotten wing), Grey undid his seatbelt and stilled her hand on the gear shaft, with his.
“I don’t want you to come in with me,” he said.
“Don’t be silly,” she answered, undoing her own belt.
“No,” he said. “I mean it. Just drop me off and go back home, like I’m a schoolboy. I’ll be good as new tonight.”
She bit her lip and looked out the window. They both knew this wasn’t true.
“You’ll need me.”
“I’ll have them call you when I’m ready to go.”
“Like takeout.”
“Be brave.” He said this to her. He was always saying things like this, to her.

From "Night Watch"

Tomorrow would be the first trip to the hospital they would share together as a couple. Neither of them had wanted a child, and Antonia took any physical complaints she had to gentler merchants: acupuncturists, massage therapists, energy healers.

From "Night Watch"

He had a funny way of speaking, always calling attention to mundane, perplexing words. Split pea. Split pea, he had said to her one time. Table. Cloth. He was batty, and brilliant. But it was true that he smelled.

From "Night Watch"

In their bathroom (still painted pink. How many times had they thought about a change?) Antonia wet a washcloth with tonic and pressed it to her cheeks.
He’d been a bear of a man, until…Antonia moved the washcloth down to her neck. She tried to picture herself saying this to a girlfriend over a glass of wine. She wasn’t sure which girlfriend, exactly, someone she didn’t see often. He’d been a bear of a man until this. And it happened to be true. Not a broken bone in his body, a cholesterol level just average enough to be taken for granted, a vibrant libido, two squash games a week.

From "Val Smells"

The Winklevosses has a life-size chess game in the west corner of the lawn that no one ever played with. Two children were playing with it now, however, pushing their pudgy faces behind and then to the right of the wooden figures, screwing their mouths into frightening shapes for each other.
Antonia pushed her body against the wooden railing. “Checkmate,” She said out loud, to no one. She thought about drinking more. She considered getting tossed. It would certainly make it easier to sit through the coming dinner and the dreadful obligation of a formal desert.
Desert was for children. Or it was for feeling like a child, at the very least. Desert was something that should be eaten in a field, that should be spilled, melted on to fingers, licked off of hands. It should be messy and irreverent, not quartered, cut and presented onto matching porcelain plates. This wasn’t going to last, none of it. Grey would remain friends with Robert forever, men were like that. Comfortable with comfort. But Antonia imagined that she would see this house two, perhaps three more times. And then? And then nothing. Dixon would go on smelling worse and worse and no one would ever tell him.