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writegirl@altavista.com
Spontaneous Combustion
It’s been a brittle winter. Winter solstice has arrived and no snow yet. It has been just too cold. Yes, that’s right…TOO cold to snow…just in the teens. Fierce winds blow the cold right through your parka and suck your breath right out of your mouth. The river is freezing over fast. The ice fishermen watch such things very carefully, 2”, 8 more to go until they can place the shacks out and drive across the sealed water.
I’d like to find a fisher fellow this winter. We would drive across the ice as it crackled in sharp strep-throaty sounds down deep, creaaaak! snap! I would be afraid every moment.
At the shack he would fire up a smelly little kerosene heater and cut a hole into the ice. We’d sit there with our tip-ups hoping to catch a fish, and we would talk. I would have Peppermint Schnapps in hot chocolate and he would have, well, he would have whatever he wants.
If he liked me especially well he would have brought a snow shovel to clean off a patch of the ice for skating. That way I could tie on my skates and be off so he could have some cavetime in the shack, alone.
He would have packed his hockey skates too for when his pals came out for a game.
I think I would be a very happy girl with a fisher fellow this winter. But right now I am getting ready for a party, my best friend Kellie’s 25th birthday party. It’s going to be a sleepover so we can all relax and have fun all night long and not worry about DUI’s. I bought her bold black and white zebra print seat covers and a matching steering wheel cover and the new Game Boy Advance with a Rayman. The handheld game will give her something to focus on when she is stuck in commuter traffic crawls. She spends most of her week at the office or in the car.
Her tattooed, cool cat, almost a rock star, boyfriend Jonathon is catering the party with Jewel trays…cold cuts, shrimp, antipasto, deviled eggs…and lots of wine, brandy, coke, snow and puff.
I am in my little toasty warm kitchen making platters of crab cakes and odd little meatballs in a peculiar, yet tasty sauce. I once had something like it at a gallery opening and one collector told me the secret ingredient was grape jelly so I snatched a recipe off the Internet. Everyone else is bringing food too. I’m listening to early Beatles, “I wanna hold your hand/ I wanna hold your hand/ ooooooooooo/…primal, goofy innocence. I’m feeling good. Life rocks.
“I’m late. I’m late…for a very important date. No time to say hello, good-bye. I’m late. I’m late. I’m late!”
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Okay I wasn’t late. I was second to arrive. Everyone else is late. Haha on them. I hate being late. It means I mis-scheduled my time. I am good on time, usually.
Two hours in, the party is going really well, she opened her presents; the lingerie from hell that her friend Chelsea gave her is outrageously wonderful. Kell’s boyfriend was practically drooling!
Ten minutes later the birthday girl and her boyfriend start to squabble about who will sleep where…the futon in the den, the guest room, the couch. Seven people and their sleeping quarter assignments soon spiral out into a volcanic eruption. Not loud, just seething, and all of us are sitting around watching it.
It makes me sick. I don’t want to be in the audience. I don’t want to be part of it. Soon birthday girl leaves and goes into the kitchen. The atmosphere in the whole house has changed to a fragile eggshell. No one speaks.
Fuck it.
Everyone is stunned, frozen, uncomfortable. They can barely move. Conversations begin slowly.
I decide that I am not doing it. I won’t participate. I’ve done it too often…pretended I didn’t hear it. Public fighting is for shit. Once a couple has crossed into not caring who is around when they start this then 1. this was only a minute reflection of what goes on behind closed doors, and 2. the relationship is dead. Time to move on. Forget Oprah’s Band-aids, you have stepped over the threshold of hate.
I stood up, grabbed my coat and bag out of the guest closet, walked over to a guy I have had my eye on and wrote my cell number in his palm. “Call me, if you like.” I thanked the hosts.
”Are you mad?” boyfriend asked.
”Mad? No. Just don’t need this.”
Birthday girl joined him. “I really love the presents. Thank you. Call me tomorrow?”
”Of course. I love you two.” I hugged them both squeezing them together, hopefully making curative glue.
”Hey wait.” said the man with my number on his palm. “Can I warm up your car for you?”
”Yes. Thank you.” I said as I threw him my keys. “White Buick. By any chance do you fish?”