(Part One)

 

Of course! Why had it taken him so long to see what now was so clear.

“I’m sorry if it hurt.”

The laughter would surprise even her. It’s loudness. It’s forcefulness. It’s immediacy. A sudden, rapid chugga-chugga burst of a chortle-filled magazine from her diaphragm. No. She wouldn’t do that. Would she? Couldn’t do that. Could she? She loved him, least of all for his anatomy. It was his quick wit and easy smile that had surely won her over. At least that’s what she told him, that she wanted to grow old with him, no matter what. He had no valid ideas about size. He had no way to truly know whether or not he was this size or that. He suspected he was, at very least, average-sized.

Average. There’s another word for the list. It’s such an average word, really. Was anyone ever unbridled in their averageness? It pained him to even contemplate.

He never took measurements. That seemed egotistical in a very, truly perverse way. The mere process of measuring would either turn out good or bad, but what was the threshold from one to the other? And also, where do you start and where do you end? Even forgoing length, how does one estimate girth? A quick Google search would suffice. In Incognito Window mode, no doubt. But then, he would know. And was knowing worse than not-knowing?

He also neglected glimpsing comparisons at the gym. He considered himself a very enlightened soul not prone to the trappings of homophobia, but the act of stealing glances at other men’s ‘equipment’ did make him quiver a bit.

No matter what? Had she actually said “no matter what?”

What exactly did “no matter what” mean? Perhaps it was his lack of pedigree. Duke was as far away an educational empire as one could get at Wayne State in the slowly-eroding modern hell of Detroit, Michigan. Wayne State. Wayne. State. A state university named for a guy named Wayne. A name slightly less interesting than Dewayne. A shallow depression crept in as he re-absorbed his own lackluster educational journey. At the State School named after Wayne, he was a C student.

An AVERAGE student. Damn it.

Maybe ‘no matter what’ had more to do with their future than his past. No matter what the world may bring, it is you, Mr. Wayne Average-Sized Average Student that I seek to shelter with until I succumb to death’s sweet release.

Yes. That’s how he would take it. That Hannah chose him over innumerable other suitors despite his lack of anything remarkable in either his ancestry or ambition. Scratch innumerable. He dared not turn Hannah into an imaginary slut. There were maybe one, two other guys serious enough to contend for the title of Mr. Future Hannah’s Husband.

Suitors? Really? He was once a suitor. As a sophomore in a high school production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The suitors … were the losers. They lost the eponymous brides to the amazing, dynamic, hale and hearty, clearly better-than-Wayne-State-material brotherhood. Through song and dance, and some lumberjackesque competition, they swept the brides off their feet and into their robust, testosterone-toned arms. The suitors, went back to their sullen suiting. Defeated. Dejected. Alone. It was less a stage performance and more a disappearing act.

No matter what.

No matter the mindless genericism of modern suburban existence, or no matter what nuclear holocausts, illegal immigrant invasions or zombie apocalypses to come, Hannah would be his, at the very least. Eternally betrothed until the bitter end. ‘Til death and dismemberment do us part.

He did, however, periodically succumb to sudden impulses of vast inadequacy. She had hitched her wagon to his dimming star. He was, now at 36.61 years of age, a white dwarf of humanity. His molten helium core cooling, his outer layers (and waist size) slowly expanding. One who had never done “the thing” that was destined to lead to his alternate life’s more interesting obituary. Sadly, he never had an inclination of what “the thing” was. He never excelled at sports, nor at art. In more primitive societies in which children are branded with destiny long before they reach puberty, his name would have been He Who Middle Manages.

However, she was on, after the MBA, to assuredly bigger and better things. New people. New, maybe longer hours. New everything.

The potential newness frightened him. She would wear new clothes. New shoes. New perfumes? She would meet new men. New non-Wayne State men. Who drove new cars and wore new watches. And said new things. Used new words. New charm. New energy. New potential. New stars. New protostars and main sequence stars, shining brightly in her night sky. Her new night sky with longer hours poring over new financial disclosure forms for new case studies and new presentations with new computers and new conference rooms in a new building with new coffee makers and new desks and new filing systems and new elevators and new parking lots and new whatevers.

All this made him decide newness was evil. All this was a conspiracy of newness against him.

He was no longer new.

He was familiar. Ugh. Another weird word, especially when used in this context. I am familiar with him. He is very familiar to me. The root of this stupid word? Family. He was slowly morphing into just family. Like a benign uncle. People get used to the familiar. The lack of excitement in these words — familiar, used to — was palpable.

At least he hadn’t become furniture. Not yet.

This struggle was becoming a mental marathon dance with no judges to come along and tap you when you stopped for a moment or two. He wondered: would he spend this and all future anniversaries of this near-mythical, semi-regrettable event engaged in endless mental and emotional navel-gazing?

He had decided that approaching the subject with her was reaching Tolkien-like proportions. An overly-strung-out-and-slowly-attenuating-finger-quoted-epic. A bloated sojourn, thick with torpor and rife with non-importance. A slog. He also realized he lacked the machina-like convenience of giant eagles to whisk him onward to Solution Mountain. It remained to be seen if this tale, spun largely in the Middle Earth of his nervousness, would have eleven or more endings. Would Peter Jackson oblige? And who would play him? Who in Hollywood was even average enough?

Jesus, Tim, get a hold of yourself, you’re making this incredibly onerous and arduous and laborious and well, serious.

Too serious.

A light bulb dawned above his head as he opened the door to his 2015 Camry. A literal dome-light light bulb. Accompanied with a distant but persistent DING DING DING. He looked around and sighed at the intense averageness of the car. That word again. So horrible, but so APT. He faintly remembered that the interior color he chose from the slightly-rolled up Toyota Camry glossy brochure jammed into his Dockers back pocket was the generically generic VERY BEIGE. Good Christmas. Dockers? The Camry of pants. Or were Camrys the Dockers of cars? Maybe it’s all a colorless commercial continuum. A long, winding road of blandness. A near-endless desert tableau sans rock formations, cow skulls and Joshua trees or anything that could gain one’s attention for more than thirteen seconds. A hollow landscape littered with Panera Breads, Olive Gardens, Chili’s, Jos. A Banks’s’s’s’s, and Gaps. A mall. A mall of life. A serious non-place.

Too serious.

A more figurative lantern above sputtered to life and gave birth to an idea. He fished through the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his phone. He made a call.

And there it was.

Flesh-colored buttercream frosting. A delicate but playfully-scripted “Happy Analversary” in teal icing spread across smooth, slightly arched buttocks. An even more playful winking emoticon sign-off. Beneath the sugar-spun skin lay a fine marbling of moist chocolate and vanilla.

A cake.

An ass cake.

A joke.

It was funny.

Of course it was funny. It was downright hilarious when you think about it, which he did sincerely too much. A man harboring a deeply repressed admiration for a one-off flight of inebriated fancy. A man afraid to challenge his other half (his better half as we’ve already determined.)

A man afraid to make fun of himself.

He beheld the ass cake with curious awe as his Camry lurched and unlurched and lurched again in throes of everyday commuter traffic.

A funny smile crossed his face, and he turned back to the road before him.

WHAM!

Suddenly shattered glass. Crunched and buckled metal. His head jerked violently forward, narrowly missing the steering wheel. His knuckles scraped the dashboard.

What the hell?

He turned his eyes to the rearview mirror filled with steam and the rearranged black bumper of a much-larger SUV. He struggled with his seatbelt and finally wrestled himself free.

The Cake! Shit. The Cake.

He slid a dizzied sideways glance to the empty passenger seat. A cakeless seat.

The obliterated remains of flour and sugar and eggs and butter derriere painted the footwell beyond. Gone. The joke, ruined. The way in, destroyed. His brise-glace, démantelé — like the homely and unsatisfactory on suite (sic) in the demolition days sequence of one of the aforementioned home-improvement shows. His puerile peace offering was now nothing more than a messy memory.

He rubbed his neck. It was sore. Of course it was. He threw open the door. It rang a unworldly, metallic howl. He eased out into the sweaty Carolina air and hobbled to his feet.

A frantic, sobbing woman scurried to him, presumably the driver of the big black behemoth half-lodged in the trunk of his tepid transport. She crunched over fragments of tail light, her hands quivering like two oscillating fans. He fixed his gaze on her—a blurry, sobby shambles. She was nothing but whine and slobber. His eyes adjusted slowly, taking her in. All of her. All one hundred and seventy-seven pounds of her.

Holy shit.

Elaine Pomeroy. He had been rear-ended by the socially-advanced financially-superior unfortunately-paunchy not-really-ever-pregnant star witness Elaine Pomeroy. Butt fucked, automotively speaking, in a spectacular display of pseudo irony. An average man with an ass cake stranded on a literal Hershey Highway with his neighbor—not his peer. For a moment he thought his next call shouldn’t be to the boys in blue, or his beloved Hannah, but to a certain Canadian well-versed in pseudo irony.

The only problem?

He didn’t have Alanis Morissette’s number.

Pomeroy jabbered at him in a semi-unintelligible warbling.

“ImsosorryohmygodIcantbelieveitIthoughtohmygodohjesusareyouokayohmygoodnessIknowyouIthinkyouaredownthestreetI’msosorry”

He straightened his stance, winced, and refocused his eyes on Elaine’s semi-meaty legs tightly swaddled in black spandexy curve-hugging fabric.

One thought pushed out everything else. Everything that had tortured his psyche for so long. All of the masturbatory mental gymnastics of the past three years seemed to vanish from his temporal lobe.

“Are those Lululemon?”