Tumbling

She lived an ordinary life and she was furious. Dreaming about blue jellyfish had become her escape while she was doing laundry or picking up discarded pieces of clothing from the mud room floor. Their liquid, lilting, translucent bodies gave her sublime impulses that transported her away from her world of thankless children and unsatisfied wives. Husbands didn’t figure in the mix. They were accessories that were put on for public viewing at school functions and backyard barbecues, and then put away again until needed. They lived in separate worlds under the same roof with nothing between them but Jericho walls of plaster.

Her wedding day was a lie of what her future was to become. There were no perfect white dresses with perfect flower arrangements complimenting every worried over confection and hors d'oeuvres. There were no toasts or dances, and she was not the center of attention or the princess on the homecoming float or anything else but ordinary. Romance had died in dreams and was only reborn in paperback novels, afternoon soaps, phonograph recordings of Sinatra, and commercial jingles for dishwashing liquid.

When her husband wasn’t drop dead drunk he worked at a brick mill moving one stack of papers to another while dreaming about nothing in particular. In the past he’d dreamed about journeying to undiscovered countries and sticking his flagpole in them to mark them as his own. But they’d all been discovered now, so he was left with nothing but his tired eyes staring at him each day while he shaved off another layer of his life.

They didn’t look at each other and hadn’t for years. So he had no idea the hellhound he unconsciously called “honey” hated him. And she had no idea the screaming baseball beer spiller on steroids who had ceased to mow the lawn euphemistically for more than five minutes before rolling over exhausted and spent, wanted to kill her every time he kissed her goodbye.

It was a happy life.

She dressed like everyone else with her string of noose pearls and happy homemaker apron. Her smile was painted on and removed with cold cream each night. Her family would sweep past her after a long day alone spent making their home perfect and ignore her. She made perfect meals and kept a perfect house where specks of dust, wrinkled curtains or unfluffed pillows were as extinct as passion. She smoked cigarettes while reading about sales at Bon-Ton between bottles of pills that calmed her nerves.

Every Thursday she had obligatory lunches with obligatory friends. She hated them and their conversations that began and ended with nothing. She blew smoke rings between bitterness, cocktails and clams casino. They all wore boa constricting underwear that either forced them out or in as they crossed their legs while trying to look carefree. She smiled masking truth unaware of the words she’d pushed all the way back to oblivion.

Her son Billy collected geodes and her daughter Susie collected hair ribbons that she tied to the dying dreams her mother, all mothers demanded their daughters to eat without question. Daughter, wife, mother and on, and on, and on, until eternity where they would all be reunited to ponder their significance in the worlds they’d created. Her son would bear the weight of walking in his father’s shoes even if they were an uncomfortable fit. These too had been passed down from one generation to the next. The only sin was to do what others did not expect of them or for them. They wore their lives like costumes over who they wanted to be. They dreamed in stereotype: he a rock and rollin’ man and she, one of “those kinds of girls” who dates a duck-bill wearing dude and swishes her hips to forbidden instruments. True dreams would come and go later like washed away residue from scraped off plates in a sink.

Sometimes a vein would pulsate in her temple while she was stuck in traffic or waiting in a checkout line. She would ignore it like she did everything else that wasn’t preordained, until the pain would force her to sit on the wobbly kitchen chair her husband had promised to fix. Then she would rise with all the dignity of the movie stars she read about in the latest issue of a movie magazine driving karma away with a cold, icy stare.

Her husband kept a cask of gasoline in the garage. She went out there one night and doused herself before sitting on their perfectly mowed lawn and setting herself on fire. The hoses of her husband and the fire department didn’t come fast enough to save her. So she died perfectly as planned. Only the sounds sirens and barking dogs were out of place as they broke the spell of her screaming. Her light shone brightly in the darkness highlighting the faces of throngs of neighbors who would undoubtedly discuss this for weeks.