Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Married

by Heather McElhatton

  Happy guests are seated in rows of white Chiavari chairs beside the runway. Bright lights and specially choreographed music accompany a team of Miami models wearing chic fashions—and several million dollars’ worth of Cartier jewels.

  Oohs and aaahs ensue.

  Afterward the auction takes place back in the tent, where the highest bidders take home such tantalizing prizes as dinner for two with Bobby McFerrin, a vacation rental home at Sundance, and a year’s fur storage at McPhee’s Furs. All in all the event is a success, except that the day afterward Addi discovers two used condoms in her guest room and vomit in the Ming vase upstairs.

  Ellie’s son catches the measles, so I offer to host her holiday book club. I pick Virginia Woolf’s essay on Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the House.” The poem is about the ideal Victorian wife, who was immensely charming and completely unselfish. She excelled in the domestic arts and sacrificed her own desires daily. She was eternally devoted and endlessly submissive. She lived to serve her family and thought nothing of herself. Self-sacrificing, pious, and chaste, she was also kind, loving, and powerless. She spoke softly. She never lost her temper and remained charming in even the most unsettling situations. She never needed help. She was always smiling and beautifully dressed and smelled lovely. I thought we’d talk about modern feminism and unrealistic ideals, but instead of discussing any of that, I hear a shriek from the kitchen.

  Addi has discovered the Ice Empress. The ladies make me give them a full demonstration of the geisha’s repertoire and Addi starts giggling, then snorts wine up her nose. She speaks Japanese, and apparently our little ice princess has been cursing at us and calling us names.

  Her daily greeting, “Naniga hoshiino?” means “What the fuck do you want?”

  Her cute little sign-off, “Kutabare!” basically means “Go fuck yourself.”

  All of our names are nasty. “Inpo Pho” means “Pho the impotent weakling.”

  “Brad Baka Ka,” the term she used for Brad, means “Brad the stupid asshole.”

  Christopher’s name, “Chin-Chin,” means, quite simply, “Dick.”

  “Shine, Star Fan!” means “Die, Star Fan!”

  My favorite name of course is my own. Elegant yet simple. “Jen Aho-Onna” means “Jen the dumb bitch.” Only Trevor’s name is nice. “Akiko” apparently means “Bright child.”

  Perfect.

  In the kitchen, Addi laughs so hard, I think her sides are going to split open. She says it’s probably a special program that runs just for Americans.

  I smack Pho. “I told you to tell her we were Canadians, didn’t I?”

  He shrugs.

  “I told you nothing good ever happens to Americans! You’ll see!”

  He rolls his eyes and leaves. Enraged, I smack the refrigerator screen and angrily confront the Ice Empress. “Naniga hoshiino?” she says. “Moshi-moshi, Jen Aho-Onna!”

  “Don’t you moshi-moshi me, you dumb bitch. I know what my name means.” I tell her I have a new name for her. “Dead!” I shout, and dive down to the floor, where I yank the industrial electrical cord like hell, grunting, “Ehn . . . ehn . . . ehn . . .” while everyone’s screaming at me to stop, the refrigerator will fall over, I’m going to get crushed . . . until I rip the cord out of the socket and the refrigerator powers down. The screen goes blank. I sit there panting on the floor, holding the limp cord. “Pho!” I shout. “This is your chance!”

  Pho pops his head out of the study cubby. “What now?” he says.

  “You’re a cyber-ninja, right? Well, this thing’s just a cold computer. So reprogram it.”

  He frowns at me. “What?”

  “Reprogram it! Rip off the doors, yank out the wires, cut the mother-effing motherboard in half. Just make her obey me.”

  “I can’t . . .”

  “I’ll pay you. A lot.”

  “But I don’t know how to—”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “I will pay you ten thousand dollars to make this Goddamned bitch behave . . .” I sit there on the floor, panting, still holding the limp cord. “So?” I wheeze. “Do we have a deal? Come on, Pho, this is probably exactly how Bill Gates got his start.”

  “Okay.” He shrugs. “Deal.”

  I look at everyone in my kitchen and say, “Well . . . ’tis the season to be giving!”

  I decide to pick a charity cause of my own, which is animals. At first I wanted to do something specifically for Ace. Since a snobby elitist dog show like Westminster would never let “damaged goods” like Ace into their precious special competition, I thought the world could use another dog show: the Handi-Capable Dog Paralympics. A special dog show for “special dogs” who want to compete in dog shows too. There could be physical competitions, like a three-legged dog race and a wheelchair obstacle course with a special textured lane for the blind. We could have a mentally challenged division for the inbreds, with a stick fetch-off for the stick obsessed, a tail-chasing competition for the neurotic twirlers, and a blue ribbon for the best incessant barker. Alas, I cannot find enough like-minded souls who share my vision, so the Handi-Capable Dog Paralympics will have to wait.

  Luckily I have another idea. I set up a special fund called the Ace Award at the local emergency animal hospital. It’s for pet owners who can’t afford emergency care for their pets. I get the idea when Ace eats a bottle of aspirin and I have to take him to the animal emergency room. There’s only one in the city. It’s open twenty-four hours a day and it costs a fortune. The emergency room vet gives Ace a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide and he throws up. The bill is three hundred dollars.

  “But a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide costs ten cents,” I argue at the front desk.

  “Well, the room it was administered in cost ten thousand dollars to renovate,” says the stalwart bulwark of a woman at the front desk, a vet tech named Greta. She’s huge. Her face looks like an angry beach ball. I pay my bill, muttering, and as I’m packing up Ace to go home, a sobbing couple comes in with their bulldog, Scout, who was run over by a Lexus SUV. He’ll need extensive surgery right away. I overhear Greta tell them the procedure will cost three thousand dollars and they’ll need payment up front before they can operate.

  “But we don’t have that much money!” the woman cries. “Can’t you operate anyway?”

  Greta says she’s sorry, but it’s policy. The woman sobs louder and the guy offers to pay in installments, says he’ll call friends and family, that they’ll raise the money right away, but Greta just calmly shakes her head and says she’s sorry. It’s policy. I’m shocked. I start arguing with her again. “You mean to tell me you’re just going to let that bulldog die in here?”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Greta says snippily. “It’s none of your business anyway.”

  Anger boils up inside me and I reach for my wallet. “It’s my business now,” I tell her, and I slap down Brad’s gold card and pay for Scout’s entire surgery, thinking that’ll wipe the smug look off her big face. The couple is so shocked they don’t know what to say. A week later I get a handmade card in the mail from their six-year-old son.

  Dear Nice Lady,

  Thank you for saving Scout. He is our dog.

  You saved his life. He is my friend.

  I Love you,

  Daniel (age 6)

  That’s when I decide to help as many animals as I can. Imagine bringing in your dog and not being able to save it because you don’t have enough cash or room on a credit card. It’s inhumane. People love their pets as much as they love their human children, sometimes more. Imagine bringing your child to the emergency room and the nurse telling you they can’t sew his arm back on until the bill is paid. Disgusting.

  I call Greta and set up the Ace Award, a fund for pet owners who can’t afford emergency treatment for their animals. In the very first month the fund saves six dogs, fourteen cats, and a mallard, which was attacked by one of the fourteen cats. Believe it or not, the mallard was cl
early the winner. The animal hospital texts me whenever there’s a need, and I okay it. I’ve said yes to every request so far except the snake, because people who own snakes are weird, and the hamster with internal bleeding, because I suspected it was being used for nefarious purposes.

  I throw my first fund-raiser at the country club and Greta gives a PowerPoint presentation featuring some of the wounded animals they’ve saved at the hospital. She’s a superstar, choosing to show my genteel audience only cutely wounded animals: kittens with bandaged paws, bunnies with bandaged ears, a puppy with a cast on one leg, and a turtle with one tiny eye sewn shut and a small bandage on his head—he looks like a little pirate turtle saying, “Arrrrghhh!” I even got Scout, the bulldog who inspired the Ace Award in the first place, to make an appearance. The couple who owned him agreed to bring him, along with six-year-old Daniel, who slayed every heart in the audience when he climbed up on a chair in order to reach the microphone and then said, “Pweeze, everybody, pweeze help dee animals. Dey need you!”

  Not a dry eye in the house.

  We raise sixteen thousand dollars that night, which Addi says is the best haul for a new charity that she’s ever heard of. Soon I’ve raised so much money I have to hire a tax accountant and Brad complains about the cost. He complains about money all the time now; I have no idea why. He’s the front-runner to become the president, but he says that doesn’t put any money in the bank right now.

  I ask the Kellers if they’d like to help and Ed’s all for it but then he says, “My cousin Ada used to work at the animal shelter. She’s one special person, that Ada!” and Mother Keller looks furious. She glances over at me sternly, twisting her ornate diamond rings around her fingers, and says if I’m so interested in volunteering, why don’t I start showing up at the church youth group subcommittee meetings? “You’re a committee head,” she says, “but I’ve never seen you at a meeting once.”

  The girls and I attend a charity event at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, a fund-raiser for their permanent collection, which mostly features dead artists from other centuries. The theme of the event is a funeral wake, a festive dirge; patrons wear black veils and sip evergreen absinthe as sad cellos play throughout the galleries. Everyone who pledges a thousand dollars or more gets a small headstone carved right there for them, in their honor. The girls think it’s a hoot. Addi buys us all headstones and tells us to pick our epitaphs.

  Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

  ADDI RATHBONE

  Left everything in a children’s trust.

  Here lie the remains of

  ELLIE RATHBONE

  I might be GONE—but I’ll be watching!

  R.I.P.

  JENNIFER KELLER

  She thought life would be more . . .

  something.

  I can’t finish.

  Something makes me too sad. The cello music presses uncomfortably in my head, reminding me of the calypso music from my honeymoon, and suddenly everything seems doomed, decaying, made of dirty water and bitterness and blue ruin. I feel like I’m a bumblebee trapped inside a cello. Maybe it’s the absinthe. Maybe it’s the diet pills or the prescription painkillers I always seem to be popping. I don’t know. I don’t care anymore.

  I leave early and go home, only to discover I’m brutally, inexplicably, unforgivably out of any pills that could aid or assist me here in my time of melancholy need. No Vicodin, no Ativan, no freaking aspirin? How can this be? Even Bi’ch and company are sound asleep. There’s no begging for exotic cures or medicinal herbs. I settle for unhappily soaking in a hot tub. Unhappy, I am. It’s true, but I love my porcelain sanctuary, and there amidst the fragrant splendor of blooming gardenia oil and pink rose petals I sink my brittle frame into the warm eggshell-shaped embrace of my astronomically expensive bathtub, steeping myself in warm pearly-white water. Drawing a thick cowl of bubbles up around my collarbone, I think they seem so happy. Shiny green, oystery blue, pearly pink little bubbles, and so social, as though they’ve come from great distances to be together there at that moment.

  I close my eyes.

  Perhaps this bath, a mere moment in time for me, is also a grand event. An opulent, effervescent All-Bubble Ball, a magnificent occasion, demanding that each small transparent guest wear their finest, most glimmering-shimmering frippery. I sit up and study them. The bubbles dance together. I get lost watching them crowd each other in graceful interconnected and randomly clumping orbits, merrily joining one another in jolly groups or pairing off in romantic seclusion. My favorites are the wee singles, the lone bubbles that drift off on their own and seem even happier once away, as if escape allowed them to look back and see the mesmerizing beauty floating serenely behind them in peaked clouds on a silky white sea.

  It must be the absinthe. I must remember to get some absinthe.

  I study the lone singles, and they seem to become intoxicated by some invisible, vibrating, percolating velocity as they go along their travels, most usually near their death. They seem to know the dance is almost over. Sailing about, they become bigger and brighter every moment with a sharp iridescent green; they hurry, tacking hard across the harbor, gathering up all the most beautiful sights. Then, as though they cannot withstand their own sheer happiness, or perhaps the orchestral frequency of their brothers, they pause, quivering with incandescence and washed with pearly faces, all luminous, shiny, and bright. Then they . . .

  Pop!

  A tiny shout. A cry of joy and the bubbles burst apart at their iridescent seams. Not a shout of warning or weakness or worry . . . not that. They give a shout of unstoppable, incandescent glee. Then they’re gone. This is the way bubbles die. I watch legion after legion of them die, until the milky bathwater is all but spent. No bubbles remain.

  When the water becomes less warm, I draw myself up and wrap a large terry-cloth towel around my pale body. I step out of the tub gingerly, onto the cool porcelain floor, and climb into bed. There I write deep thoughts in my journal, using neat handwriting, until I fall asleep with all the lights on. My journal is still open, the pen rolling off the page, staining the white sheet a darkly blooming permanent blue, as my last thought hovers, abandoned on the page. It’s this. There can be nothing happier or better on earth than to be a little bubble, a bubble that lives an entire life in just one day. Especially if that very short day is actually a long, magnificent dance.

  Brad comes home with an apple-green Lamborghini, to celebrate his rising star at Keller’s, a Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera, to be exact. I shake my head. “How much did that thing cost?” I ask him.

  “Isn’t it insane!” he shouts at me over the roaring engine.

  “Yes, Brad, it is. Especially since it’s winter . . . in Minnesota.”

  “It’s sick! She goes two hundred and sixty miles an hour!”

  I cross my arms. “I see. And is there an autobahn somewhere nearby that I’m not aware of? Indoors, perhaps? Or with heated roads?”

  At Brad’s insistence I climb into the ridiculous green car, my head bumping the ceiling. You could slide this car under a school bus if you weren’t careful. Brad puts the beast in gear and guns the engine, which roars so loudly I cover my ears. We take off, my stomach lurching, and with each turn I think I might vomit inside his new car. The whole ten-minute drive he’s laughing like a maniac while I scream, “Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!” We veer around the lake so fast, we actually hit a bird in flight. Not one on the road, one that’s actually flying through the air. A crow smacks right off the windshield and Brad curses it, the vehicle screeching to a halt. “My God!” he says. “Did it crack the windshield?”

  Soon after we get back home, a car honks outside. “That’s the Brock!” Brad shouts. “He’s gonna shit his pants when he sees the new Lambo! Wanna go for another test ride with us?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ve killed enough birds in flight for one day.”

  For New Year’s Eve Brad flies to Tokyo and Addi takes me and Ellie to some artist’s party in th
e warehouse district, where guests pour back champagne and gnaw on lobster claws. The semifamous artist throwing the event takes plaster casts of willing participants’ genitalia behind a tasteful Japanese silk screen. Addi is first in line to sit on a bucket and have her hoo-hah planted in a tub of cold wet plaster. Then we all line up, drunk on the extraordinarily strong mojitos. After he’s done, the artist’s assistants set out plaster pussies and penises on a long table under flickering candles and guests guess which organ belongs to whom. One thing is certain: There are some really weird-looking vaginas walking around in the world, with orchid-like stamens and ham-steak-size labia.

  “Wow, Jen,” Addi says. “You have the cutest one of all.” She’s joking. My vagina looks like a smashed bat stuck on the grille of a car. Of course, Ellie’s isn’t pretty either. Her vulva looks like a meat-eating orchid. Addi’s looks like Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  13

  Yokemate

  In January the weather gets weird-ugly. It warms up and thaws, warms up and thaws, creating a week of weird warm sloshy slush, followed by a frigid week of brutal black ice.

  Everyone on earth has the flu, including me. Two weeks of fever, headaches, body aches, and painfully coughing up butter weasels. By the tenth day I hold my arms aloft and say out loud, “Death, I welcome thee.”

  Even when I get better, something is off. The world around me looks the same but feels different. Like the wrong music is playing. The club feels stuffy, the cocktail parties get boring. I’ve heard every conversation before, eaten every appetizer already. Brad is always away on business trips these days. I go to almost every social event without him, and I notice lots of wives of wealthy men do. I spend more and more time with the girls at the club lunching and talking. Addi regales us with horror stories from the unhappy housewives field. Souring marriages, acrimonious separations, and sticky divorces fester in every corner of the club. We talk about the trouble with marriage, everyone gladly joining in.