The Big Door Prize

by M. O. Walsh

  It wasn’t until the night before his fortieth birthday, after all, that Douglas had finally confessed. He began by telling Cherilyn the large and emotional truth, which was that he felt he’d hit a wall in life. He believed it was time to make ­big-­picture changes. Since somber conversations like this were rare in their home, Cherilyn understood he was serious and sat beside him on the sofa. She let Douglas carry on in his ­self-­deprecating and humiliated way without interruption. It had nothing to do with their marriage, he assured her, and he meant it. Yet here he was nearly bald and sporting a ­comb-­over. Here he was soft in his belly. He had recurring and inexplicable pains in his feet if he wore certain shoes. He had no serious hobbies, he realized, no remarkable trophies on their bookshelf, and had made no permanent mark on the world. Each of these depressing observations, as if he had just read them in the papers, appeared to Douglas as undeniable facts. Even his job as a teacher, he told her, the one he now understood he’d likely have forever, was not as fulfilling as it had once been. He’d nurtured no prodigies, rescued nary an at-­risk youth off the Deerfield streets, and could barely remember ever even giving a D.

  It was, by all means, a crisis.

  Then, after he had talked himself out and the two of them put on their nightclothes and crawled into bed, Douglas told Cherilyn the practical truth: that shaving off his mustache to become a hotshot trombonist was all that could save him now. It was what he had always wanted to be, he told her, ever since he’d seen a man playing trombone on the corner of Bourbon and Royal Streets on an ­eighth-­grade field trip to New Orleans and felt, for the first time in his life, a love of music. It was perhaps still the reason he felt so drawn to music, the sound of it live and on vinyl, the jazz and funk masters, even the symphony, as he inevitably imagined himself one day playing those brassy notes when he heard them. And so how was he now forty years old? How had he never kept that promise to himself? To give it a try, at least? To pursue it? How had all those years gone by? With everything else in his life so admittedly happy and secure, Douglas told her, this was his only regret in the world and he could no longer deny it. Life was too short. Time was too precious. Desire was too big. It all made sense to him. He snuggled next to her in the quiet dark after he said this, wondering if she was awake, then wondering if he himself was asleep, until Cherilyn spoke, and asked him to kiss her with his mustache one last time. After that, she whispered, if he really thought it would help him blow a trombone, she would shave off the push broom herself.

  And so he did this for her. And so she did that for him.

  This was their marriage.

  What Douglas did not know, however, was that tonight, as he sat at the dinner table polishing his new horn, his ­clean-­shaven upper lip looked so foreign to Cherilyn that she fancied it to be made of wax. The lingering splotches of razor burn, along with the rigors of his first trombone lesson, had crested his top lip like an infection and made Cherilyn imagine her husband, for the first time in her life, a stranger. But these were not her only imaginings.

  As is often the case when one person is honest, other hearts wish to be honest as well. So, ever since Douglas confessed, Cherilyn had begun some introspection of her own. What kind of life was she living? she wondered. What sort of dreams had she put on hold as she piddled about at different jobs, as she ran her errands, as they ­small-­talked their way through the Sunday crossword? And were the undone things in one’s life even dreams, when you thought about it? Could something even be a destiny if you don’t know it exists until your life is half over? What was her true calling? Making birdhouses out of Popsicle sticks? Crocheting Christmas stockings? What great places had she stamped on her passport? An entire life in Deerfield? Is that what she was meant for? Why not something bigger? Something grand? Wasn’t she about to turn forty as well?

  Yes, she knew, she was.

  Rather than talking to Douglas about any of this, though, Cherilyn quietly turned away from him as he put together his horn. She wiped her hands on a towel and stared out of the kitchen window above the sink. Douglas kept up his jazzy whistle and, when he got to the solo, pretended to play his trombone right there at the table. He jerked the slide in and out and raised his eyebrows with each high note.

  He then stood up from the table and posed for Cherilyn with the horn, as he had done several times since he bought it. He straightened his back, held the trombone at the ready position, and gave her a wink. This was something that had previously made Cherilyn smile, although not tonight. “How do I look?” he asked her and puffed out his cheeks on the mouthpiece.

  “Ready to play the king’s court, I suppose,” she said.

  “Picture it, Cher,” Douglas said. “Lights down. Radio City. There you are in the front row, VIP. What do you want me to play for you? You name it and you’ve got it.”

  “You know I’m no good at this,” Cherilyn said. “Play something with a lot of trombone in it, I guess. ‘Seventy-­six Trombones.’”

  “A march?” Douglas said. “On a night like this? Not a chance. For my wife, the prettiest girl in Manhattan, I would play something romantic. Something soothing.” He adjusted his shoulders and readied himself. Then he lifted his chin above the silver mouthpiece and whistled a low and vibrating tune.

  “That’s nice,” Cherilyn said. “Something exotic.”

  Cherilyn moved to the stove and looked down at the boiling water. Pasta shells surfaced and dove like dolphins. Steam surrounded her face. And who could say how many worlds both invented themselves and disappeared in her mind as she let the vapor plume around her head? It was impossible, even for her, to keep count. So, she drained off the water, added milk, butter, and powdered cheese, and served dinner.

  Douglas dropped a paper towel onto his lap, picked up his fork, and began to gently scrape the gray fat off the side of his hamburger patty. He shook the ketchup bottle, still thinking of his wife’s mysterious mood, and said, “I sure do love your burgers.”

  “I was wondering,” Cherilyn said. “Have you seen that new machine at the grocery?”

  “I don’t know,” Douglas said. “You mean the one that reads your future?”

  “That’s not what it does,” she said, and poked at the ice in her water.

  Douglas knew about this machine. It was apparently a recent addition to Johnson’s Grocery that sat near the big green box for people cashing in their change, but he’d not seen it himself. Yet he’d heard enough ridiculous anecdotes the past couple of weeks from people who’d played the game to make up his mind that it was not likely a fruitful pursuit. He was a history teacher, after all, and these are a hard lot to impress.

  “It reads your DNA,” Cherilyn said, “and then it tells you your potential, like what you could have been if everything would have worked out just right. What you are capable of doing, of being. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “I think that’s the one my students are playing,” Douglas said. “Charlie Tate gave me some slip of paper the other day that said he’d grow up to be a nuclear physicist. Told me he didn’t need my class anymore, just to go ahead and give him the A. Isn’t that funny? Not just the idea that a nuclear physicist doesn’t need history classes, which is itself a horrific notion, of course, but the idea of Charlie Tate in charge of anything. His parents would say the same. I mean, I’ve seen that boy eat an eraser. But anyway, yeah, I remember it now.”

  “You think that could work?” Cherilyn asked. “You think there is a way to know your potential like that?”

  Douglas dipped a piece of his hamburger patty into the ketchup and chewed it. “Doubtful,” he said. “Just by pure definition, your potential isn’t written in stone, I don’t think. Then there’s the idea of nature versus nurture, as you know. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, et cetera. The debate’s been around for centuries.”

  “They can do all sorts of things with DNA these days,” Cherilyn said. “And you
know Megan Daly started up that new ­sno-­ball stand because her DNAMIX reading said Entrepreneur. She got the readout and just went for it the next day. Had it up in a week. That place already has a line around the block.”

  “Good for her,” Douglas said, and he meant it.

  “Do you think it’s silly for people to do that, though? To wonder about that stuff?”

  Douglas saw that his wife was eyeing him intensely, leaning in toward the table, the bow of her white blouse dangling above her plate. “I guess people get into all sorts of things,” Douglas said. “But I wouldn’t put too much stock in a video game.”

  “It’s not a game,” she said. “Why do you always have to put things down?”

  Here was another small thing to make Douglas worry. He did not feel like he was putting anything down and yet she did. It was an odd experience for them to be sitting together yet feeling apart, and so Douglas set down his utensils and looked across the table at her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know I was doing that.”

  Cherilyn placed her head in her hands. Her fork jutted out between her thumb and forefinger with each tine stuck through an individual pasta shell, something Douglas hadn’t noticed her doing while he ate. He looked down at her plate. The noodles had been shifted around the edges and pressed to the exact height of the skillet burger, which remained untouched. “Maybe you aren’t putting me down,” Cherilyn said. “You just don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sorry. I know. I’m just tired.”

  Douglas longed to say something perfect, to perhaps utter some sweet turn of phrase that might recalibrate the evening entirely, but could come up with nothing. So, instead, he instilled each bite he took with a noise meant to suggest that this particular piece of her meal was even more pleasurable than the last. And when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to eat her portion, Douglas reached across the table and switched plates. He forked off an edge of her patty and used it to scrape up some hardening cheese. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “this meal hit the spot. I don’t know what else a guy could ask for.”

  Cherilyn took his empty plate from the table and walked to the kitchen. “It needed tzatziki,” she said. “Is that how you say it? ­Tat-­zeeky?”

  Douglas nodded, although he wasn’t quite sure, and began to whistle the theme to Peter and the Wolf.

  Later that evening, Douglas sat on the couch watching a baseball game. Cherilyn had come out of the kitchen and gone into the spare bedroom, which they used as an office, without speaking. After an hour passed, Douglas walked down the hall to find her sitting at the desk and reading a large book, with her left hand inside her blouse. When Douglas pushed the door open, he saw her tugging gently at her nipple.

  “Cher?” he said.

  Cherilyn took her hand out of her shirt and looked up at him. “What?” she said. “I had an itch.”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Your computer takes forever to start,” she said. “I grabbed a book.”

  “You want to come watch the ball game?” he asked her. “The good guys are up in the fifth.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t keep the players straight anymore. It’s like all of their names blend together.”

  “Just come sit with me then. Bring your book if you want. I’ve been missing you in there.”

  The book Cherilyn was reading was called Lines of Succession: A World History. It was a textbook Douglas used to teach to his ­ninth-­graders before the change of curriculum. Cherilyn kept her place in the book with a pencil and followed her husband to the couch. She sat ­cross-­legged on the cushions and placed a pillow over her thighs. She took one glance at the television. Estenitando Escarbiones was at the plate and only hitting .230.

  “See what I mean?” she said, when the announcer called out his name.

  “It’s a big world out there,” Douglas said, and began to whistle an old bullfighting song called “El Carne.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Cherilyn said and reopened the book.

  Douglas watched her flip through the pages, scanning over pictures of dukes and duchesses, kings and queens. “What are you reading?” he asked, even though he knew. She pointed to a paragraph on the page.

  “Did you know that twenty of the world’s fifty richest men are oil sheiks?” she asked.

  “I did know that,” Douglas said. “Or, at least, at one point that was true.”

  “Look at this one,” she said, and turned the book around for him to see. “I can’t pronounce his name, either.” The man in the picture was in full ceremonial dress, standing next to a camel cloaked in a red ­jewel-­covered blanket. “He’s a prince, it looks like. He’s got a big mustache like you used to have,” she said. “Where do you think he’s from?”

  “Saudi Arabia, probably,” Douglas said. “They have princes.”

  Cherilyn got off the couch and walked over to the wall where Douglas had hung a map, long ago. She ran her fingers over the glass frame until she found Saudi Arabia and tapped it with her nails. “Here it is,” she said. “I found it.”

  Cherilyn returned to the couch but didn’t speak. Instead, she read the large book until her husband fell asleep. Later that night, she turned off the television and woke him up. She then led him to the bedroom and, once they were under the covers, began to touch him in the ­well-­rehearsed way that, Douglas knew, meant she wanted to make love. After fifteen years of marriage, this was an increasingly unexpected request, and so Douglas, sleepy as he was, was happy to oblige. He recalled the most recent times they had been together, maybe three occasions in the few months since Christmas, the last a tipsy night after a school fundraiser, an impromptu session on the living room couch, of all places, and orchestrated this new scene in the way he’d so often done the past twenty years that they’d shared themselves with each other. He then collapsed, grateful and pleased, on top of her.

  Life, at this moment, was not so bad.

  What troubled Douglas, though, and what was truly unprecedented in the life they’d long lived together, was this:

  After he finished, Cherilyn asked him to do it again.

  “But maybe,” she whispered. “A little bit harder this time.”

  2

  Jacob

  He had his father’s face. Maybe there was some value to that.

  And the face he used to share: his twin brother’s. Jacob could never forget.

  But what else did people think about him, as a person? Sixteen years old? Skinny? Invisible? That he was the other Richieu boy, the lesser twin, as he had always been? What had he done to stand out? Win a spelling bee? Play Pokémon? Rock out his PSATs? Bake a soufflé? Suck at basketball? That is quite the résumé. So, Jacob wondered, what could he do to better himself? To move forward? Was that even a thing that he wanted? And where was all the ­anger he was supposed to feel about his brother’s death, all that rage he’d initially felt? And how again do you rationalize a numerator? Do you multiply both the numerator and denominator by √ax + b + 2? And is today Thursday? Is it tacos or chicken nuggets for lunch? And how serious was she about him? About anything? Could he ask her? Could he be honest? Could he tell her he wanted out? What were the options before him? And how could he, the person in charge of his own thoughts, not know even the simplest things about himself?

  Jacob had little time to consider these questions as, behind him, two other boys tromped in through the men’s room door. He checked them out through the reflection in the bathroom mirror, registered neither fear nor simple pleasure at their appearance, and went back to staring at his own face. The boys were Randall Wilky and Brett Boone, both of whom Jacob knew in the obvious way that everyone knew one another at Deerfield Catholic, but these boys were truly ­non-­integers, neither positive nor negative, in the math of Jacob’s life. They were freshmen, as Jacob was a junior, and were so engrossed in
their own conversation that they didn’t even notice him.

  “She doesn’t actually blow on it, you idiot,” Randall said. “It’s just a phrase. Jesus, man.”

  “My point,” Brett said, “was even if that’s all she did, I would prefer she do it from a great distance.”

  Them, too? Jacob wondered. Even them?

  He picked at a scab on his chin and washed his hands. He ripped a long stretch of brown paper towels from the dispenser and held it against his skin until the small dot of blood disappeared. He then turned to leave as the boys brushed past him and sidled up at the urinals.

  “What’s up, J?” Randall said. “Hey, you’re a smart guy. Can you tell this dumbass what a blowjob is?”

  “It’s an idiom,” Jacob said. “Not a phrase. Getting a blowjob is an idiom.”

  “All I’m saying is that I believe Brett would be an idiom not to accept Jenny’s offer.”

  “That,” Jacob said, “would be a maxim.”

  “And that,” Brett said, “is a pretty good website.”

  The boys laughed and bumped their fists over the urinals as Jacob put the straps of his pack around his shoulders. He paused at the bathroom door before leaving. He paid no attention to the ­familiar graffiti sprawled across it but looked only at the ­top-­left corner, which was still, thankfully, blank. He then left the bathroom and walked into the bustling hallway, alive with the clamor of slammed lockers and squeaking sneakers, as the two hundred and ­twenty-­four students of Deerfield Catholic hustled to first ­period.

  Jacob entered a classroom and walked down the second aisle to his seat in the back row, where he had been assigned by alphabet some months ago. Through the loudspeaker on the wall, the voice of Father Peter Flynn crackled, “All the time,” to which the two hundred ­twenty-­four students of Deerfield Catholic replied, “God is great.” To which Father Pete replied, “God is great,” to which the students replied, “All the time.”