Queen for a Day

Not only that, I got fired. I mean, who gets fired from teaching preschool? Besides level one sex offenders and drunkards over sixty with too many earrings and at least one visible tattoo?

Welcome to your friendly neighborhood downward karmic spiral.

I blame the Saturn Return. Which, according to my calculations, occurred about three years ago. We're talking Astrology here. I mean, I could go all Biblical on you and invoke Job, the poor thing, but there isn't a religious bone in my entire fucking body. And that includes my liver. The poor thing.

Come to think of it, maybe that has something to do with it. Getting fired, I mean. The aforementioned preschool is annexed to a church, for crissakes, and it's there that I've been lurking lo these past too many years, a fly in the ointment, a crack in the plaster, a nihilist in the narthex. That's gotta be it. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the meth lab in my basement.

I held onto this improbable job for one reason only: the kids. Who knew?!? I mean, I'll miss the little shits. In my ever darkening existence, they remained LED lightbulbs. It's obvious a couple of the little alumni are headed for your friendly neighborhood Supermax, but for the most part, they continued to light my pipe.

Make no mistake, I accomplished my mission. In amongst the bathroom mishaps and bonked heads and surrealist fashion faux pas and general mayhemic absurdity of it all, rest assured I managed to leave most of them with the one lasting life lesson any self-respecting pagan leftie educator could hope to impart to her wee adherents: DON'T STEP ON BUGS.

So I feel bad for the little lab experiments, I really do. They'll miss me when I suddenly vaporize from their bug-hugging little lives. But mostly I feel bad for my husband, the poor thing. He's been suffering me for almost half his life now, and there I'll be, underfoot more than ever, plantar fasciitis manifested in the flesh.

As a matter of fact, in March we celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary. Or, as my husband likes to put it,

"I've been happily married for two-and-a-half years, all told."

So there we were, between blizzards, the dog's diarrhea on the back burner, the kid on the run again. We threw caution to the wind and went all out. That is, he went out and picked up roses and Chinese. I took out my cellphone and dialed the liquor store. Let the party begin!

But no sooner did we uncork the champagne than the diarrhea hit the fan. I shrank to skin and bones, repaired to my bed of nails, wallowed for days in a feverish netherland of hypoglycemia and hallucination the likes of which I haven't seen since the seventies, started speaking in tongues:

"P fft glk bmtd xgg zbbmm rtplqwc xgg blc msd!!"

Translation: I can hardly wait to get out of this fucking bed so I can fucking weigh myself!!

As dead ancestors and poets begged for an audience in my fevered brain and my life unscrolled across the dampened screen of my fevered eyelids, I heard voices:

"H3N2."

And no, those weren't Bingo calls from the basement of Our Lady of Perpetual Delusion. That was the doc, from the other side of the exam room, her voice muffled due to the face mask.

Translation: Influenza.

It lingered for weeks. And I with it. But, unlike the roses, I didn't die. Though you could've fooled me.

Then just as I was starting to rise from my bed again, like bread or Jesus (it was Easter, for crissakes), the kid came back. So did the dog's diarrhea and a couple more blizzards. Then I got fired. Then the kid took off. Again. Meanwhile, there's Saturn, lurking outside the bathroom window like your worst migraine manifested in the flesh. Think Michelle Bachmann.

Remember "Queen for a Day"? It's like I'm one of those contestants, only the day never ends. It just goes on and on, like marriage or influenza, just one thing after another after another. And the audience never votes and no one gets the washer and dryer and the contestants just keep wringing their hankies and sobbing, until eventually the stage becomes your friendly neighborhood pool of tears with Alice in the middle doing the deadman's float, only it's Alice Cooper not Wonderland Alice, and he's surrounded by would-be-queens frantically treading water and imploring tearily:

"I'm the worst case!! I'm the worst case!!"

Which is, I suspect, pretty much my husband's lament whenever he gets together with the guys to drink scotch and commiserate about marriage.

It's all a fucking crapshoot. I mean, if it isn't fucking Saturn, then it's Job or Jesus or the Stepford Boss or Michelle Fucking Bachmann, take your pick. Meanwhile, somebody has to clean up the diarrhea, three guesses who. At least I've been happily married for two-and-a-half years. All told. That's gotta be something.

Punchline

Now that you're gone, I can begin. To look for you.
Now you could be anywhere — bus stop, bakery,
bookstore. Is that you at the corner of Superior and 10th?
disappearing into Starbucks? in a VW out on 53?

You in a Volkswagen? You in a bookstore? If you were here,
we would laugh and laugh. Once at Target, accidentally,
I saw you, reading lipstick labels instead of Latin,
basket over your arm, face hidden behind a cape of hair.

Why did I turn? I knew what your eyes would see
if they saw me. But I'll always remember the sound
of the door, always it was you, returning, or leaving.
Ghost in the machine. And here is the thing I must say:

I was starting to hope. For leaving. And now that you've
left, I can stop. Hoping. The door can do what a door does,
my heart will be still. There is no ghost. Now I can
leave the porchlight on, and up in my bed, picture it

grinning into the darkness, for hours, like a clown.
At last, a punchline.