WHY I QUIT READING

I’d read something about a professor applying for a job elsewhere, though she didn’t really want the position. She liked where she was—this was in either Mississippi or Maine, I forget. It was one of the M states. It might’ve been Missouri or Massachusetts. I don’t think it was Montana. It might’ve been Maryland or Michigan. There are a lot of states that start with M, as it ends up. Minnesota. Anyway, she had a job teaching, if I’m not mistaken, sociology. She might’ve been one of the better-known sociologists in America. I didn’t read the article closely, but I know that where she taught they only paid her about poverty-level, even though she’d published two books—one about alcoholism rates among ex-circus performers in Florida, the other about manic-depression among ex-carnival workers in northern Alabama—and gotten something like a 100% positive rating from her student evaluations. I think her name was Teresa. Everyone liked the woman, Teresa, including administrators, which, according to this particular article, seemed to be rare. Again, I forget where she taught—probably not Mississippi, seeing as the poverty level in the South still works out better than poverty levels elsewhere, what with the low price of gas and tamales.

So Teresa went on the job market and got an offer paying twice her salary at the M state. Twice! And whatever college offered her the job was in a place that didn’t cost twice as much as where she lived. Let’s say she taught in Michigan, and she got a job offer teaching for twice as much money in Washington, or Wyoming. Not West Virginia, but I’m pretty sure it was a W state. There aren’t as many W states as M states. Wisconsin’s another. I’d have to go back and look it up, but I think Teresa had a choice to leave a college in Michigan or Montana or Maine or Maryland, and move to a college in Washington or Wisconsin. They offered her the job, and she returned to the chairperson of her department, who went to the dean, who went to another dean, who went to a provost, who maybe went to the president. As it ended up, about two hours after she came back with the news, out of nowhere, she got an email going, “We will match the salary you were offered, plus a dollar,” or something like that. It went, “We have been meaning to offer you a raise.”

It’s like the college just sat around hoping Teresa wouldn’t go out looking. Knowing that if she did, they had the resources to keep her there as a magnet who attracted sociology-interested incoming first-year students with an obsession in trapeze artists, minders of a tilt-a-whirl or Spook House, people hooked on anti-depressants and nooses.

This was in a magazine called True Employment Tales I found in the backseat of a guy’s Ford Taurus. He’d left the car in our parking lot and promised to get it towed. That never happened.

Reading might not be the healthiest thing for me to do in my free time. I’m better off talking to plants in the garden, or driving around the countryside looking for stray dogs to pick up, take to the vet, get chip-checked, then bringing home to hang out and teach them how to shake hands.

I don’t know if, technically, I have a problem. In the past, I’ve also read articles about people who developed issues later in life because their daddies died early on, or their mothers held zero maternal instincts, or they got hit by a car or cyclist in the middle of an intersection. All three happened to me, if it matters: My father died when I was six, my mother never tucked me into bed or read a story nighttime, and when I was fourteen, crossing Highway 25 in order to retrieve someone’s hubcap, I got clipped by one of those Tour de France wannabes because no one traveled with me, there to grasp my bicep. And I might’ve been drunk, you know. I think that incident’s what turned me toward a later life managing an AutoZone.

Anyway, I said to my wife, Carolyn, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Marolyn said she’d have no problem with giving me what I want.” This took place at supper, one day after I read the article about professor and sociologist Teresa and her little scheme to get paid on par with male colleagues and beginning welders. “Marolyn said she’d be more than happy to do some things you won’t do.”

Understand that Marolyn and Carolyn were twins. We all lived in the same town. My wife worked as a social worker, her sister as a high school counselor. The twins looked alike, though my wife wore a ponytail and limited makeup. Her twin liked to wear eye shadow that, from what I gathered, women normally wore when going out for a long night in a place like New York City or Memphis. She’d bouffanted her hair and dyed it magenta. She might’ve been the first person in our town to purchase and wear fake fingernails, and she’d painted little stars and crescent moons on each of them. My wife’s twin opted for a gold tooth at some point instead of a regular canine crown. She drove a VW bus. She listened to sorrowful dirges only, it seemed, whereas my wife liked to dance around the living room alone while playing either the Go-Go’s, Jefferson Airplane, Sinead O’Connor, or Randy Newman. My sister-in-law believed firmly that the end of American civilization began with the invention of metal lunch boxes emblazoned with cartoon characters, superheroes, and sitcom characters—that a caste system similar to the one in India would eventually point back to fourth-graders looking down on children bringing in their PB&J sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, toted in a paper sack. Marolyn believed firmly that sounds occurred in our lives, then returned haphazardly—I never understood exactly what she meant, but I think it involved Einstein, and a time/space continuum. She thought she might be able to blow an air horn in her den, and then, no telling how many years later, that sound might return at full velocity, out of nowhere, for no reason. My sister-in-law’d had a Manx that jumped off countertops, desks, tables, and beds, blump, causing a thud. The cat died. Marolyn swore that, once a day, she heard that same sound, though a remnant, or ghost, of Nubby never appeared.

Other than all those things, and a few more, my wife Carolyn and her twin Marolyn were pretty much the same. We usually got together on Wednesday nights to drink two bottles of wine and watch TV. The sisters reminisced about their relatives. Me, I thought about what I had to do the next day at work, dealing with shoplifters.

“Go for it,” my wife said. She put a forkful of pork chop alfredo into her mouth that I’d made for supper. She said, “Okay.”

Listen, all of this had to do with my reading that article and thinking I could get twice as much if I faked a better offer. And believe me when I say that I wasn’t looking for some kind of menage-a-trois. This had nothing to do with sex. I wasn’t thinking about blowjobs, or any of those pictures in the Kama Sutra. “Some things you won’t do” didn’t point toward doggie-style, hand jobs, watching porno, 69, role-playing, or anything else.

It had to do with PDA. It had to do with public display of affection. I wanted to be able to hold hands with my wife in public—not only crossing the street, but walking down the sidewalk in town, or sitting in our favorite pizza joint. Goddamn. Carolyn shied from me whenever I touched her where another human being might see. That’s all I cared about. I didn’t care about shoving my tongue down her throat in public, or walking up behind her and jokingly pumping at her butt. I wanted to hold her hand, and I thought that—like the professor—I could call her bluff.

“I’ll call her right up now and tell her about it,” Carolyn said.

She picked up her cell phone. I tried to stop her, but I had a mouthful of pork chop.

She said, “Marolyn? You were right.”

And then she hung up. I swear to God I think those twins planned, or pre-planned, or surmised this situation right about the time of my wedding to Carolyn, with Marolyn as maid of honor. They understood something. That’s how twins are, I’d read, in another article I should’ve shied from.

Carolyn packed up and left one morning while I was at work. I came home to find her twin sister seated on the front porch, waiting for me. It didn’t take a month before I got another job and transferred to Savannah, in Georgia, the only G state in America. Almost every afternoon my first wife’s twin and I go sit down at one of the famous moss-strewn oak tree squares, and I try to feed pigeons and squirrels one-handed. Sometimes we hear merchant ships blowing their horns off in the distance, entering the mouth of the river, on their way to dock. Marolyn always says it might be echoes from horns blown long ago, and squeezes my palm.

I’ve been thinking about writing all this down and sending it to one of those True Marriage Tales magazines.