Dorothy, On a Tuesday

[Open Diary lives!  Hooray!]

Dorothy gazed silently at the yellow birch shivering outside of her window.  In a few weeks, its ovate leaves would be in bags at the curb.  The neighbors’ kid, an eleven year-old boy, did the raking for two dollars a bag.  A good windy night, and then that tree would strike a pose like a naked ballerina, unashamed of her nudity and unaware of her grace.  Dorothy had noticed last autumn that the bags seemed less and less full each year as the young man tied them off, but she never mentioned it.  Quite a little con-artist, but age makes deceitful little shits of us all.  She would just smile and write a check. 

The alarm blared insistently back to life.  She’d already hit the snooze four times, and it was set early enough that she could get away with five times.  It emanated from her cellular phone, an outdated piece of Scandinavian technology she’d purchased during George W.’s first administration.  She still didn’t understand T9, but it didn’t really matter, because she has no one to text.  Sometimes, though, she thought of things she would say, and she saved them to her drafts folder.  She named them "Best Friend," "Lover," and "Husband."  "Dead Father" and "Dead Mother."  "Five Years Ago" and "Five Years From Now."  "The Child That Never Was, and Now Will Never Be."  She painstakingly crawled out of bed, keeping sure not to mussy up the bedsheets.  Oh, how she would love to mussy up those bedsheets in the proper way.

Dorothy was lonely.  Dorothy had been lonely for so long, now, that she rarely ever even noticed it.  It simply followed her about like a spiteful spirit, slipping iron weights in her shoes and lead ingots in her eyes.  It only caught her attention after the giddiness of a movie’s happy ending, or the last note of a tragic song.  Though when it caught her, she really caught it.  Sometimes–but not all the time–she cried, hating each and every tear.  On the sole of her right foot, she’d gotten tattooed "It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah."  She couldn’t remember who wrote that song, only that it had been a Canadian.  She knew that she liked Jeff Buckley’s version better.  It was a silent, unseen reminder, about which only she knew.  When she laid unclothed on her mattress, she could read it in the vanity mirror beneath the Degas print.  Her faithless ex-husband had loved that song; Dorothy had never felt lonelier than she had with him.

The teapot shrieked, the bacon sizzled, the sausage hissed.  Dorothy had given up on eating healthy when her mother, a triathlete, died of a heart attack at forty-eight.  Somehow, though, the years and the saturated fats had been kind.  Her breasts had only begun to sag, and it had only been some few months since Dorothy had noticed the crow’s feet scratching at the corners of her eyes.  Michael at the office had a crush on her, a sickly-sweet little adolescent thing.  Dorothy couldn’t recollect the last crush she’d had, but she did remember the feeling.  It was like a cockroach studying the bottom of a descending boot, thinking that eleven was just its size.  It was a fly staring down at the shadow of a rolled-up newspaper, dumbly asking itself, ‘What does it mean?"  You’ll find out.  It’s amazing the type of power over ourselves that we helplessly bestow upon someone else.  Dorothy had had sex three times since the finalization of her divorce.  After all three times, she’d had nightmares for a week, and all about her honeymoon cruise striking an iceburg like a match, and going down in flames to the bottom of the sea.

The DVR had diligently saved the Daily Show from the night prior, and she, in something of a ritual, clicked it on as she sat at the kitchen table to eat.  Most of the kitchen table hid furtively beneath a cavalcade of old electricity bills and spreadsheets from work, but there was a tiny space at the head that she kept tidy.  She wrapped a link of sausage in a strip of bacon as the distinctive theme song burst to life on the television.

Dorothy hated politics.  She liked to hate it–it was fun.  And she couldn’t help but notice the rationality of political discourse trending downward.  When she had taken a course in political philosophy in college, she’d taken up the cause of enlightened despotism.  A whole flock of philosophers had espoused it, even if none of their names could ever come to mind.  She like to drop that phrase in casual conversations at the office: "Oh, Democrats and Republicans are all well and good, but I’m all for an enlightened despot."  It didn’t really make any sense, and it could never work, but Dorothy knew that that was true of everything.

The parlor coffee table offered two alternatives of reading fare for the Metro ride into the city.  The new Twilight book, the spine already dilapidated from rough use, or "The Prince," by Machiavelli.  Dorothy always tried to read classics–her bookshelves were full of them–and then gave up on them about twenty pages in.  She loved the Twilight series, if guiltily.  I’m not saying they’re good literature, she’d tell herself.  They’re simply entertaining."  And she’d dive into the same book for the fourth time.  She regretfully slipped "The Prince" into her purse; after all, the Metro would be full of people, and she couldn’t very well take "Twilight."  As she indifferently skimmed through its pages on her transit in, her wandering eye caught its toe upon something peculiar: "One who deceives will always find those willing to be deceived."  She knew, quite suddenly, that she no longer wished to be either.  The subway train struck like a match and burned down to the bottom of the sea.