Rubber, Metal, Glass, Plastic

FICTION CORNER (written while I worked at my digital marketing job in 2014)

“We should be together,” he says, six months to the day they met. “We should always be together.”

Marina considered this statement, at the time, to be farcical, the sort of thing that half-deaf septuagenarians say to anybody born in the twentieth century. When he spoke these words to her – his knotted knuckles clutching her white wrists -- Marina was sure that she had whispered some sort of affirmation, her eyes welling up with tears. She had probably extended her left hand while covering her lips, coy, with her right. Most likely, she had smiled, grinning like the winner of the goddamn grand prize.

She had nice teeth. Her mouth was a display of faultless geometry -- perfect squares rimmed by blushing gums, no hint of plaque or flash of forgotten dental work, no trace of film or funk on her pointed red tongue. She had the kind of teeth that indicated generations of good breeding, as if there were plush plantations, polo ponies, crisp stacks of bills reflected in the pearlescent bones.

Clyde’s mouth was outfitted with teeth that bent left when they were supposed to go right and a constant stench of half-ripe bananas. His nose had seen one too many bar fights, and his chin sinkholed into his neck. Clyde’s eyes were green, a color a topographer would use on a map to illustrate foliage in the area, but they were hidden beneath cloudy cataracts and lids swollen by sodium.

Clyde Litkos had shades of former beauty, but at 78, he was shriveled, puckered, swollen and soft in the joints, the belly; even his chest sagged. Tufts of curly white hair sprung from every orifice, coarse like the brush tail of a doe.

Marina was hairless. Waxes, sugar stripping, and laser treatments that felt like a thousand rubber bands snapping her inner thighs banished any errant fuzz, aside from the strands of gold that fell root to tip past her shoulders. She was a natural blonde, but after the accident, her hair had paled – a delight to Clyde, who had a penchant for Marilyns.

Ma told Marina that ancient Roman women used to douse their hair in horse urine and sit in the sun with wicker bonnets to lighten their locks. Ma would laugh and laugh about the ridiculous things people did for beauty, but Marina didn’t think it sounded so bad. No scalpels, no snipping, no silicone – Marina would take pony piss on her head any day over what the carnage her fiancé built his life on.

Tit jobs, nose jobs, arm suction, tummy tucks. Who was everyone trying to look like? Marina would wonder. Who was everyone trying to be? They looked like aliens. The nine weeks that she lay in the cosmetic wing, awaiting her new face, she would watch the women in the lobby through the close-circuit channel on the TV.

They always looked the same to her – muscled calves flexed beneath cropped yoga pants, neon tennis shoes, their mouths twisted into a scowl as they typed on their smart phones with one thumb. They always seemed obligated to be there, as if this was the world’s best looking DMV. They never acknowledged each other, instead casting their eyes skyward as if they needed a greater approval before proceeding.

Clyde showed Marina dozens of before and after photos, so she knew what their eyes looked like: glued to the floor, their lips quaking and their hands flying to cover themselves in their sports bras. Their bellies were puckered and dimpled, their breasts uneven and drooped, their faces were lined like walnut shells – some would say that time had been "unkind." Why did time have to be kind? Marina thought.

What did we expect?

Afterwards – “after” – they were happy, pink cheeked, their eyes gleaming in the fluorescence. As they watched their new breasts push out the front of their camisoles, I have hope for happiness now. I have everything I need, they thought. She thought.

“Pretty girls shouldn’t frown so much – you’ll end up lookin' like a canned prune,” Ma used to say, her thin lips wrapped around a Virginia Slim. “You’re our lottery ticket, take care of yourself.” Ma was convinced that they were royals once, but some relative buried long before Marina was born had squandered their assets.

Some of the pecuniary misfortune was pointed towards her hapless grandfather, a man whose pockets were always full of candy but whose gambling on arena football left the family “up shit creek without a paddle,” her mother said. Marina’s father typically went unmentioned, his last name swept into the same ashy pile as Marina’s real first name, but the sounds of those chicken-fried idioms stuck in her head like they had just come from Ma’s melted pout.

Ma was, of course, the one who suggested the tiny hobby for her baby girl, just somethin’ to get some extra pocket money, just for kicks. Ma who drove her to the county fair, jerking along a road that was forever unfinished; Ma who slapped pink powder on Marina’s face until she coughed; Ma who burned her daughter with a hair curler in her haste but slapped Marina’s thigh if she screeched. Ma whose wish to have her pretty little girl onstage set her on the path that unfurled and coalesced into a lifestyle that Marina quietly identified with.

She was on the way to her first audition for a film called “Cowboy Butts Drive Me Nuts,” an independent film, when the driver of a dusty SUV decided to check his texts in Marina’s lane. It was clichéd to black out, she knew, but really all she remembered was this -- crunching, punching, and the wringing feeling of being betrayed by a machine.

The man in the SUV would later claim that he lost control of the wheel, a statement that tickled Marina – why, do you think, you would ever be able to capably wrangle 5000 pounds of metal and glass? These steel and aluminum cages that glide on the asphalt like swans on a lake, swiveling and swerving -- what power do we have over them? Cars these days are installed with human voices, as if everyone is trying to connect to these metal beasts now – just another thing we can’t handle.

What did we expect?

That’s when she met Clyde. He said that he was in charge of her restoration, as if she were a piece of art – she pictured him dusting her off with a stiff brush, them both sweating in a desert beneath floppy khaki hats. In his office, all stainless steel counters and syringes, his white coat offsetting his ruddy cheeks, she’d found him utterly charming. She liked the way he would scoot his chair towards her and make harmless jokes, the way he wasn’t afraid to look at her like Ma had been – “after.”

She had to hand it to him -- he did a good job. He really must have loved to her, to make her look so beautiful. Nine weeks of needles and swelling, grafts, new bones, metal sutures in her head and she came out looking better than she ever had. Not so much “restored” as reinvented. She looked perfect, like the kind of girl who people look at it and wonder if they've ever had any sort of trouble. Like a teacher's pet. Like an angel.

Like an alien.

“We have to keep appearances up,” Clyde would always say. “I wanna show you off!”

There were always cameras around him. He has his picture on billboards and in the back of local magazines whose pages were long and glossy. Once he removed her last bandage, the camera lens hunted her. The cameras, with their big glass eyes, liked her ski slope nose, her perfect teeth, her unicorn-sheen hair. Clyde always gripped her waist, a wooden smile pasted on his face, sheepishly soaking up the credit for his work.

Marina felt herself cracking. Her bathroom mirror betrayed her, illuminating shady circles, creases and lines encircling her mouth and eyes. The lunette brows began to dip down, revealing an anxious forehead; her hair continued to blanch, a cascade of snow now obscuring the scars on her chest. She didn’t want more scars, her dreams at night charged with shining scalpels, flesh tore opens, machines out of control. She hid beneath glasses or scarves. She slathered on creams and turned off the light before Clyde entered the room. He didn’t like cracks; he wanted things to be calm, smooth, the unbroken surface of a lake at dawn.

“After,” she would lie on the couch, bruise black for days, swollen.

Now he comes in the kitchen, a box of donuts in hand and his belly pulling the cream linen of his shirt forward, globular eyes stuck in their sockets, not even seeing her. He waves at Marina as if they are former associates, as if bad business had gone down between them.

Every time the two are near each other, they aren’t -- like cars in opposing lanes, choreographed in avoidance. The smell of sugar from the donuts reminds her of the wedding cake that was currently chilling in storage in south Toronto.

Clyde wanted to be closer to the cold. A second home would be lovely to have, he said, and wouldn’t it be nice to get married there, to christen it? Marina had agreed, had said “yes!” to sending every bit of wedding paraphernalia to a storage locker Clyde had already rented out. For “insurance purposes.”

Out of sight, out of mind. Marina was not yet privy to the real reason for the hidden matrimonial riff raff, but she was happy that she didn’t have look at that musky travesty that his deteriorating mother wanted her to wear.

The dress is something Marina’s own mother would have loved to see. Sleeves that cloud out, obscuring the flower girls' faces. A bell skirt that she could fit a small person under, with tiny white roses embroidered on top of it. A veil, to conceal the spot where he was too heavy handed with the collagen.

He coughs from his chair in the living room. “So, two weeks out, huh? Excited?” She doesn’t even have to look to know he’s flipping through his new iPad while speaking to her, his attention directed towards a fresh game of Sudoku.

“Two whole weeks,” Marina says, sorting through the heap of returned RSVP’s on the counter. The “yes” count was beginning to trail behind its negative cousin. She swept the taller pile into the trashcan next to her feet. "Would you do me a favor?"

"Anything for you," he says, still poking at virtual numbers on a screen.

"Would you try on your tux? I drove to the storage place to get it, and we need to make sure it fits you."

Marina brandishes the garment bag, unzipping it. He drops his sweatpants right in the living room, not bothering to remove his White Sox t-shirt before donning the crisp pleated shirt.

"Looking good," she says. His cumberband is snug, and she slides a carnation through a buttonhole. He wrinkles his nose but then smiles, touches her arm in a pantomime of adoration.

“Soup tonight?”

The storage unit had been frigid when Marina visited the weekend prior. The champagne glasses, crystalline and weightless, were frosty in their crates. She had poured herself a glass of icy bubbles as she withdrew the ring from the pocket of her floating wedding dress. She couldn't bear to leave the square cut diamond in this cold 8 x 10, much as Clyde begged her to wait until their wedding day. It sits on her finger, confident and heavy, as if it's going to crush her bones and revel in the shards. It sparkles, flirting with the fading light from the window as she pulls a can of cream of mushroom from the pantry.

He grunts his affirmation and resumes his position on the couch as she grinds the lid open. She plops the cylindrical contents into a pot over the stove, watching as the tepid liquid coalesces out into a Band-Aid colored pool. Chowder, just like he liked it, with plenty of butter and so much cream that it obfuscated any rendering of the soft vegetables she slopped in the bowl. His wife’s famous recipe.

Marina has never met Deidre Litkos, but she knows that she has rosacea, and lives on 2299 W Oak Park Lane in a beautiful brick cottage for two.

Marina knows that Deidre is lumpy in all the places that Marina is straight. Her eggy thighs mash together beneath a caftan that Marina is fairly certain she saw being sold as a couch throw at a garage sale once.

Marina knows that Deidre is a teacher -- for young kids probably because she is gone for long hours of the day -- but she always winds down the night watching reality TV on loud, so loud that Marina can hear it from the window.

Marina knows that when Clyde and Deidre make love it’s like two stuffed animals in a spin cycle, all stunted arms reaching, plushy bellies smacking together.

Marina also knows that Deidre’s middle name is Gertrude, because when Clyde went to ramp up his life insurance policy two weeks ago, it was her antiquated name he left in the benefactor line.

Marina had thought to check before the wedding, you know. “For insurance purposes.”

As she pours the warm soup into a big orange bowl, Clyde looks at her above the ridge of his tablet. “Marina,” he says. “Won’t you let me just get that niggling bit above on your upper arm? Nobody likes a pudgy bride.”

On his shiny iPad, he conjurs up a picture of a celebrity, one of those girls who does nothing and has everything. Her face was Martian, eyes wideset and not a pore showing underneath the glare of a thousand camera flashes.

“Do you see this?” and he drew a circle with his stylus, like a redfaced coach highlighting a play, or a teacher explaining the pythagoream theorem. “She’d be perfect without it.”

His chapped mouth forms a line before he looks at her. “Please let me fix yours.”

What did we expect?

He winks at her, handing her the orange bowl, its sides licked clean.

She turns the faucet on, watching the cold water hit the dirty saucepan, steam stinging her eyes. She begins to rub a dingy sponge around the rim of the big orange bowl, but stops first to wriggle her ring off her finger. She’s slipping on the ivory gloves when she hears the thud behind her.

Clyde’s mouth is slowly leaking white foam, and a guttural moan – like the sound of the sink draining – is coming from his throat. Marina rushes over, drops to her knees, cradling his head in her lap. Grabbing the iPad from his hands, she makes sure that his face is catching the light.

Marina draws red circles with her finger around his puckered purple face.