Plastic Shutters

Ken

“You made the wrong choice.” He knew he would too, and by giving him the opportunity to make the wrong choice something irretrievable was put on display for the principal, who was observing him for the third time this semester. The boy refused to be embraced by his laid back teaching style.

“Fuck this.” The boy muttered. It was just audible, and everyone knew it. With Principal Stanley looking from the back, Ken couldn’t choose to ignore it.

He tried to maintain his composure, but he could feel the earth opening beneath his feet.

He blurted out, “Go to the office!”

“Is that because the principal’s here?” Disdain oozed from the boy’s mouth.

The bastard, he thought. He didn’t dare.

“That’s enough.” Ken tried to staunch the flow, but he knew the kid wasn’t ready to leave. now Principal Stanley was turned sideways in his desk like he was getting set to intervene.

“Go to the office right now!” Ken spat the words at the kid.

“Quit being a dick, Ken.” This last, a rotted vestige of Ken’s early attempt to have a student centered classroom. The rest of the class sat in rapt attention.

Principal Stanley finally got up.

“Come with me, Alec.” The principal said it so calmly. As Stanley made his way to the door, Alec got up and followed him.

The kids counted off by sevens and worked on their discussion questions. Ken focused everything he had left on finding a reasonably priced record player on Craigslist.

That spring Principal Stanley placed Ken on unrequested leave. He had intended to implement a new classroom management plan and retype and revise those worksheets next year, but now he wouldn’t have the chance.

Last night he waited in bed for his wife to finish reading, but when she turned her lamp off she stayed there--facing the wall. He didn’t think he asked for much, just something to get him through the night. There was a time, he often thought, when he could guide her into an orgasm like landing an F-16 onto the bucking deck of an aircraft carrier, but now he didn’t know what she wanted and had given up trying to read her mind.

It’s a hellish circle once he’d got caught in it and impossible to reach the exit or even recognize the need for change. Ken felt like he was being pulled into a vortex that had gathered speed and was beginning to shake violently. He always had a weakness for the attention of a woman and lately he’d been making eyes at the girl behind the counter at the smoothie store. 

Lila Kujawski. He had her little sister in class. They had the same jawline. Lila was probably twenty with fierce eyes chipped in blue, hair the color of crime scene tape and a body that shifted beneath her clothes every time she reached for the cups.

As a work in progress, she electrified him.

“Lila.” He loved saying it out loud. Two slippery syllables in a row. An electric shock snapped across his forehead now whenever he uttered her name. 

Platonic though--strictly platonic. But when she pushed that steel hoop through her lip in a circle with her tongue and clicked it on her teeth. God. The sound made was like ice on glass. She was the tonic. He couldn’t stop. Just what I need, he thought--a girl; no, a woman, who understands me without all the baggage of time.

Before long, he knew Monday, Wednesday and Saturday were Lila’s regularly scheduled days.

He understood their appointment in the woods could have implications for getting his teaching job back. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted that job back, but he thought he might get himself back.  

It was already late in the afternoon, so he called Shelly and left a message, turned the T.V. to the cartoon channel and walked out the door.

Across the street, his neighbor Diane came out of the house. He waved to her. She was obese and dwarfish and he couldn’t help but wonder if she ever felt as he did right now. Maybe she simply chose to ignore it and repress the basic human survival instincts that force an individual off their dead ass just before they begin the somnambulistic slide to indifference.

“Don’t you have any shame?” he mumbled to himself as he watched her climb into her SUV.

The wind bit into his back now and he cursed the decision to wear his rough hewn great coat rather than the down parka.

Baby steps, he thought.

I have set a goal. 

I have recognized a need for change. 

He thought by saying it that it would become true.

I need to find the answers to assuage my wretched soul.

There’s the tone he’d been looking for. 

Wretched soul.

What he really wanted to find out here was some Wiccan goddess and beg forgiveness while she looked on like a baby-blue clad Virgin Mary with a snake wrapped around her feet. She could endow him with certain inalienable rights and an everlasting peace that would protect him until his last silent sleeping breath in an air conditioned bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac in Phoenix.

Diane

The door of the SUV closed with the hermetic shump of the hatch on a spaceship. Her husband’s promotion to Chief Quality Control Officer was the best thing that ever happened to her marriage. With a French manicured nail, she carefully pushed seek, searching for some music to which she could affix her mood. Exhilarated, she watched that enormous coat billowing behind him like an Italian count, as he walked up the hill. Her ass felt warmed and cupped in the leather hands of the heated seat beneath her. She imagined they were his hands.

Slow. Tempered, steady, open-handed waves with no motion in the wrist or fingers was all she allowed herself so far. Slow. She’d seen him look at her--from the corner of her eye--five minutes before. The intensity in those eyes as he nodded to her and the wild abandon of his hair falling from a widow’s peak excited her. Her thighs grew warm and she experimented with the smooth edge of her cell phone as she pushed it between her legs.

She would watch his yard from her kitchen window and see the two little boys play in the sandbox for hours. The little one would begin to cry and he was always right there with something to pacify him.

The tenderness of that man--not like his wife. She was never home. But when she was, the sharp scowl that furrowed her cheeks punctuated the hardness of her personality. She’d seen them from behind her window. The mouthed expletives and distant body language steadily chipped away at the marital sham that could have only been maintained for the sake of the kids. He would do that--for his boys.

She liked how that sounded. “The boys,” she said aloud to herself. She imagined approaching him --make the first move. Men are turned on by a confident woman.

In the rear view mirror she saw his wife driving up the street.

Here comes that bitch now.

Shelly

You’re thirty-four years old, have breasts with stretch marks and you’re working Oil of Olay into the crow’s feet at the corners of your eyes as if you were trying to rub life back into a heart. This futile action brings tears to your eyes that you blink away in front of the bathroom mirror every other night. There is no such thing as making love and what your husband does to you doesn’t rise to the level of getting laid. It is just what you have decided you have to do so you can get through an extra chapter of Nora Roberts. You firmly believe that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You pray to God that’s all he wants. Maybe he’ll ask you a question. Maybe it will be something about your day. 

Each night, standing in front of the kitchen sink, beneath the fluorescent light, the refrigerator hums in the darkness at your back--while through the window to your front, the night reveals nothing. Under the warm, gray water you finger the spoons and forks and knives. There is a butcher knife in there, and you feel for the blade’s edge. Sooner or later you’ll run your pruned finger over its sharpness.

You’re two blocks away now. The urgency of your husband’s message forced you to cancel your afternoon appointments. He said he had to go. I have to go. Go where? What about the boys?

From here it could be anyone’s house--even a home. White plastic shutters screwed to the surface--props. Entombed in the old slate siding, you can see the Asbestos fibers under the microscope in your head. You can feel them embedding themselves in the soft alveoli of your lungs and their poison seeps into you. Closer. The garage doors are open. The opener is long broken--wheels off the track. The garage doors are always open. This isn’t what you envisioned when you were seventeen. When you were seventeen.

Your six year old is sitting on the lazy boy in front of the TV--transfixed by a man in a mask fashioned from human flesh hacking at a body. The machete, rhythmic and mesmerizing, sounds like it is striking a block of wood. You don’t say anything except “let’s go baby,” as you push the power button.

Shit. Hanging on every molecule--inhaled into your nose. Your two year old is in the playpen squeezing his own shit through his fingers like Play-Doh. A scream builds in your skull, but it is a full minute before it works its way out of your mouth. Frightened, snot strings and crusty fingers--both children snap inside too. It’s communal. You load a bag with clothes, diapers, baby wipes and animal crackers. Your parent’s house is two hours away.

Diane

Taking a pull off her Diet Coke and releasing pressure from the brake, she carefully pulled the SUV out of the driveway.

Tomorrow would be Friday and it was always the same.

“Where do you wanna eat?”

It was always his question when he got home from work. Just once she wanted to stay in. She’d actually feigned a headache so they could stay in once.

Her husband was large--big and tall store large, with an enormous trunk from which hung a generous amount of meat and potatoes without making him look fat. He was just a big man.

“I don’t care, but let’s go somewhere with good salads.”

She continued to massage her insecurities with this focus on salads--salads loaded with hard boiled eggs drenched in sweet dressing and sprinkled with bacon bits and sunflower seeds.

Dan always ordered the prime rib with mushrooms and fried onions sitting in a pool of bloody au jus. After he was promoted, he moved from queen cut to king.

When she would recall what she’d seen on the morning news shows she’d put her hands over his wrist and physically restrain him from eating another bite.

“What else’d you do?” He’d ask and continue to cut into his meat. 

After supper they’d drive back home in silence, choose a movie from Netflix, usually an action film with vaguely familiar looking actors.

Her French manicure was a virginal white half moon bordering precisely the end of her nails and there was a matching set encased in her tiny Reebok running shoes. She thought of them with a twinge of dissatisfaction derived from unavoidable defeat. Her neighbor always brought it out.

Knobby cysts had formed amid the dark and labyrinthine warmth of her reproductive organs--forever reducing her to a spectator of the children of others. This public blessing was a secret source of despair--permanent as a page torn from a book. I don’t have time for kids she’d pretended to believe-- she’d even said it out loud to others, including her husband, who seemed indifferent to the loss. Sometimes the sight of a child in a cart at the grocery store pulled at her chest while she made tight smiles to their mothers, and she ached. The envy and longing burned and pulled her insides into a tender hollow only she knew about.

She pulled into the Gas-n-Go and went inside.

“Do you release ‘em back after you catch ‘em?”

“No, you can’t release pond raised trout; they’re too fragile. Gotta eat ‘em” A mangy teenager with an American flag plastered across his T-shirt carried on with a man in a blue suit and tie at the counter as he scratched the soft silver film off the top of his five dollar lottery ticket.

“Well--lookit that, I won my five dollars back.”

She stared out the window behind the cashier’s head as her neighbor’s car went by. Out the side window a little boy in the back seat stared straight at her, and she felt the hollow behind her ribs.

Shelly

In the rearview mirror your six year old is looking out the side window and the baby’s face is pressed up against the headrest of his car seat. He is fast asleep. The street leading from your house is narrower than you remember. The tidy three bedroom rambler next door has a double attached garage, utility shed and a chain link fence in the back for their golden retriever. It’s beige with white trim--the house number in black wrought iron running at an angle alongside the garage. Every Friday night they leave for a date and the husband opens the car door for his wife, she delicately steps in and he closes the door behind her. They were doing something right. She was doing something right.

Diane, you think her name is, or maybe Debbie. Her kind eyes looked through you daily, pleading you to take action. You too can have what I have. The clean lines of the vinyl siding and white trim around the windows make your lungs feel soft and smooth on the inside. Your throat widens and air rushes in and out as it should.

Leaving town, the Hansen Motor Company billboard fills your rear view mirror. You lean forward and peer up into a twilight sky and see a star--the first star of the night. His tan leather satchel sits on the floor of the passenger side and a grocery list is fastened by a rubber band to the handle. The road ahead is obscured by your tears and you try to blink them away.

You know you’re going to turn around soon. The guilt, weighing less than the anger, surfaces and the anger again sinks to the bottom briefly unsettling the inexplicable love you have for your husband.