Couple Sucks Same Candy

Culturally, for Ron and me, Shoppers Drug Mart is all there is. So when the cashier called me Lovey while handing over my bag of toilet paper and shampoo I felt happy, fulfilled. I was still feeling that way when an older man holding an apple pie behind me in the checkout line at Safeway tapped me on the shoulder. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at a headline in the National Enquirer – “Jen Pregnant and Alone.”

“Aren’t you glad you’re not famous?”

I thought about this on our drive home and decided, yes, I’m glad we’re not famous. Because imagine a man on a motorcycle taking a picture of Ron and me sharing the hard candy Ron found in his jacket pocket. It must have been there for years. A lime one wrapped in clear plastic. We didn’t think twice. I sucked the first half and Ron finished it off. But after that I saw the headline – “Couple Sucks Same Candy” and knew the world would find us disgusting. So full marks for anonymity.

At home we continued our afternoon by pulling apart the jigsaw puzzle from Christmas. Only the sky, the head of a fish, and a few trees were finished and it was just about March. The puzzle had become a burden. You could spend hours and hours and only find one matching piece so that pretty soon night would be falling with supper nowhere in sight. It was a revelation when I told myself that some things in life could go unfinished and Ron agreed. Actually, pretty much everything can go unfinished, we decided, and especially the jigsaw puzzle, which we had come to hate.

There was a bowl on the side table filled with the pieces of a large bear that would never inhabit its shape. They went into the jigsaw box, along with the broken sky, the head of a fish that would have been in the bear’s paw, and the several small trees.

“I wouldn’t mind taking my life apart and returning it to an attractive box,” I said – mindlessly, I suppose, because of not having to finish the puzzle – and Ron said, “Think again.” “Oh right,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that.”

So I thought instead how happy I am with our home and all the machinations thereof. And with my goldfish, Hilda, who gives me no trouble, and with my little commercials for the family, who frequently do: our girls with their toenail palace, and our son, Boyd, who still wants to be an astronaut, and my brother, Doug, who’s never paid me back for totalling my car in 1979, a sweet little Volkswagen. And I thought about Nature. How every once in a while there’ll be a day with sun. And a few clouds. Ones the way I always want them to be. Clouds like shampoo foam.