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Friday, November 09, 2007

The Last Straw

“You have an overblown sense of your own importance,” she said to him finally, breaking down and, as it were, tugging on him.  At him.  “Let’s go.”

He looked up at her, shrugged, and went back to his, so to speak, newspaper.  It had been a tree.  Maybe it still was.  She couldn’t see the point, that was for sure. 

She waited.  She was considerate, if nothing else. The utter lack of respect, though, the complacency—for which, she knew, she was partially responsible—irked her.  It had been a long day.  Considering that time was passing faster in general, and that life was virtually flying by, here, now and then gone, in what very well might be her twilight years, she marvelled at how long a single day could be. 

They finally got home.  Nothing was going on.  The house was as they’d left it.

From her point of view, it was kind of a relief.  The failure of anything to be going on in the house was always kind of soothing.  It was rare.  It meant she could Work.  So to speak.  He, though, was manifestly disappointed that there was nothing going on at home.  He was younger than she was.  He probably felt immortal.  Ready to party.  Naturally, she felt guilty about his boredom and disappointment, but, this time, did nothing—just to see what he would do.  Well.  Just to get something done of her own, for once. 

He paced around and then had something to eat.  She ignored him, typing something.  But in the back of her mind, in her heart of hearts, she worried.  Well, you couldn’t call it “worry”.  She thought. 

She thought about him.  “Awwww,” she thought.  Sympathetically. 

“Again!” she thought.  Again.  “I care, I care, I care.  Gawd help me, I care.  I spend all my time thinking about others, and they probably don’t care about me at all.”  She was only typing; she was envisioning herself banging her own head repeatedly against something.  She was frustrated because what she was typing was not what she had intended to type; she had never intended to type this.  She had had something else in mind, something else entirely, when they’d left.  It was just that, on the way home, he’d looked at her like that.  He’d shrugged, as only he could. He hadn’t taken her seriously at all.

When she looked up from her so-called Work, he was gone.  Gone, bored, full of disapprobation, to bed. 

“Fine, then,” she thought.  It was fine.  But she still felt bad that he had been disappointed.  That she could have made it better, and hadn’t. 

Earlier,  she had appreciated and respected his talent, his abilities that transcended her own.  She didn’t even really expect anything back from him—this entire thing had, overall, been her doing.  He was younger than she.  He was naive.  What did she expect?  She’d cultivated this relationship precisely in order to get what she was getting.  Kind of.  Why then, this nagging thing. What, what was nagging at her, preventing her from Working, so to speak?

He came back downstairs and, wordlessly, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. 
His point?  This was the last straw.  Whatever it had been, whatever she had been going to write, was done, gone, over.  It wasn’t going to happen, and she couldn’t even remember what it was going to be.  She couldn’t even blame the goddam poodle.  He was just a goddam poodle.