My kitchen stinks.
I don’t know what it is. My nose isn’t sensitive enough to lead me to the source of the stench. It reeks the worst when I open the refrigerator. An inspection of the refrigerator, however, leads me to nothing. And if something inside the refrigerator stank, would the smell escape to plague the rest of the kitchen?
I am at a loss.
Are there people one can hire to sniff out the source of such rank odor? Surely not. It couldn’t be a very lucrative profession. How often would one need such a service? Once? Twice in a lifetime?
I sit at the dining room table with my morning cereal, leafing through yesterday’s bills and watching the squirrel search my front yard for grub. I paid for that yard, but he’s the one who enjoys it.
My American Express bill is insane: $4,767.72 of new charges. We decided to use American Express instead of our credit cards to help us pay off the balance each month and avoid new debt. Instead, I will have to transfer this balance to a credit card because I don’t have the cash to pay it.
I remember my prozac. I need to take it today.
It doesn’t seem to help.
Monday was a bad day. I debated whether my wife and daughter would be better off with me in my current condition, or with the million dollars that Northwestern Mutual Life would pay them if I were to meet an untimely demise.
Of course I came to the right conclusion. But the fact that I thought about it at all is the disturbing point.
I also considered just driving off into the sunset, never to return.
Or maybe to return, sheepish and weak, decades from now, a ghost from the past, hollowed out and wretched and bitterly, bitterly hated by the two girls I love.
And briefly, ever so briefly, I imagined Erin’s severed and lifeless head in my refrigerator, beside the milk and the orange juice. Would I shut her eyes? Yes, yes of course. It would be too ghastly with them open, staring at me.
But that was Monday. I’m better today.
The drug was meant to kill my depression, wash it from my brain with a bath of serotonin.
It has succeeded in part. I am no longer lethargic or melancholy.
But I do get anxious. Like on Monday. My mind flits from thought to panic-stricken thought like a . . . what? Fuck. I don’t know. Like something moving fast and frantically with no rhyme or reason. Like something gone all to Hell overnight.
I’m stretched a bit thin.
I shamble back to the kitchen in my plaid green robe, my cock dangling out. I open the refrigerator, smell the sour something, replace the milk and close the door.
I hear movement.
The baby is awake. Erin is bringing her out to greet the day.
I better get in the shower.
I kiss my daughter as I go past, and say hello several times in a silly, high pitched voice. She smiles with her whole face and waves her arms around like she’s swimming, doing some fast dog paddle. She lets out a squeal, and then I am away, in the back, in the shower, face under the twin jets of water, shaking the shaving cream as the fogless mirror frames my image.
My facial hair is for shit. I can’t grow a beard. I could honestly skip a day shaving. I’ve done it before.
But I shave. I do so for my daughter, with her sensitive skin that would be punished by my stubble.
I do so for my wife, who enjoys kissing my clean face so much more than its evil, unshaven twin.
But mostly I do so because I am a man, struggling to survive and succeed in a world of men, and as such, certain things are expected of me, of all men. Is it so much to expect me to shave? To dress? To have a firm handshake? To take clients to lunch? To participate in the firm golf tournament? To attend the cocktail hours, the galas, the charity auctions and benefit cook-offs?
To get up in the morning?
To keep your shit together?
To not run, screaming down the hall and out of the office forever?
Shit! I cut myself. I watch the blood well up below my lip. I rinse it clean and then watch it reappear, again and again.
I step out of the shower to face my Wednesday.