I go home. Home is appliances; the refrigerator, which you check on the half-hour, whether hungry or not: it is more like inventory. It is more like
Charlie Brown and the football, and yields the same cans of
mixed vegetables and souple and the same
Hamburger Helper Rice Oriental no one has touched for years.
Home is television. And television is a high school flame, made radioactive; TV is every high school humiliation, every crush revisited in fabulous technicolor, if a bit faded.
Home is shelves of high school yearbooks. It is the voices of your fighting parents, which your try to drown out. It is a tense reunion with my sister, edges softened with vodka and OJ.
It's The Big Fucking Chill. It's Footloose in stereo. The Dukes of Hazzard drinking game, the Saved By the Bell board game, the giant Beverly Hills, 90210 jigsaw puzzle. It is crimping irons and bright red lipstick, when it's not enormous curling irons and frosted lipstick. It is hours and hours of Family Ties and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. It is, perhaps above all, Behind the Music in an infinite loop. And the E! True Hollywood Story. And Biography. It is the pallid, sweaty face acquired amid a Welcome Back, Kotter marathon - the same strung-out look Wayne and Garth got at the onset of the Gulf War.
It is romantic comedies, with interchangeable heroines, leading men, and wacky best friends. It is a conspiracy against my heart. It is every brilliant woman in America dumped on, or won over too easily by an undeserving man. It's a Celine Dion soundtrack. It's a Peter Cetera soundtrack. It is easy to laugh at all of this until Peter Gabriel gets his finger in the pie.
It is comfort food and an empty notebook, in which I waxed and waxed. (Wax on, and off, as the wise man says.)
I did not determine which one of us was wrong. On the one hand, she was justified: You can't respect somebody who kisses your ass, I write in quotation marks. As the wise man says, it just doesn't work. There is the other hand to consider: every sorry face, every Lane Myer, every variation on Brian Krackow wheeling his bicycle down the street. Every Very Special Episode, every peanut butter solution, every refrain of "It's All Right to Cry." You remember that one: the Schoolhouse Rock-esque singer, assures you that "it might make you feel better."
Alarmingly, it doesn't. The sun never breaks through the clouds; the waves of relief never do set in. The good cry is elusive. The good meal is elusive. Some itself is elusive, an endless channel surf, an endless roller coaster of guilt and pity and senseless self-pity.
And I could not leave. Not for hours, not for days, instead sitting zombie-like on an overstuffed sofa, in the moon-blue light of the television screen, making myself sick, making myself stupid in an effort to forget her name.