No Matter What Position You’re In
From her couch, she is looking at me upside down as she sketches,
her pink, bare feet are flapping in the air like two salmon fighting upstream.
She wants to discuss what to do about her short-tempered boyfriend, the ox-like
defensive end of the high school football team.
I'm sitting on her bedroom floor in what I painfully realize is a good imitation of
her aging Golden Retriever who is wheezing and shedding copious amounts of
hair.
"Hey boy, what does a bad feeling smell like?"
Not more than half an hour ago, I was a miserable assistant manager
at a miserable movie theater.
Not more than half an hour ago, a glass counter full of unhealthy treats
was all that had separated her half-open mouth from me.
Over that counter, she had asked (and I'm not kidding) if I wanted to see her
sketches.
Her house, conveniently empty of Mommy and Daddy,
is actually a halfway house for stray pets who are trying to please her.
Strewn everywhere are sketches in colored pencil of hamsters nuzzling with
turtles,
cats playfully pawing frogs and other animals forced to imitate snuggling for her.
I tell her that any art college would be lucky to take a talent like her
the minute she finishes high school.
As you may have guessed, many years huddle together, like a string of
linebackers,
between her age and mine.
I'm looking at her mouth, wondering how really big
a high school defensive end could be.
Is that my belly growling or is that the dog?
Her cat is on the love seat, its neck crunched up into the armrest.
Amazingly enough, the contorted cat is sleeping.
I guess it's possible to do anything, no matter what position you're in.
"He doesn't look at me the way you do." She is talking about her boyfriend again,
A clump of hair from the dog gets stuck in my throat and as I cough, I get a
perverse vision of my bathtub drain, clogged with the remains of my thinning
hairline.
"I think about you a lot," she says as the cat on the couch knots up even tighter.
The dog, believe it or not, is panting at the same rate I am (or is it the other way
around?)
If I had a tail, it would swing back and forth like the tail fin of some fleeing fish
that had already swallowed the bait.
