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Survival of the Fittest


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The idea

“‘What’s she doing now?’ I asked knowing full well.” —Raymond Carver

David Spiering

    It was a clear night and the wind was strong and up high hissing and making shrill sounds in the treetops.
    For years now I’ve been a writer/house wife. I married to get a steady paycheck, so that I didn’t have to worry about paper, postage and envelopes. In the old days, I worried about typewriter ribbons and now I worry about black ink jet cartridges and laptop computers. I buy used PC equipment because it does what I want and it’s cheap. I like the word “cheap” because it [poetically] doesn’t take up too much breath-space on my tongue and between my cheeks.
    My husband’s name’s Mike and he works construction. He drinks rotgut beer, eats greasy fast-food and he likes it when I make scalloped potatoes and ham and hamburgers and lard-rich brown sugar BBQ baked beans. Sometimes I get nervous fits concerning the fact I’m living a double life and I want to believe he’ll leave me alone if I have dinner ready and keep the fridge stocked with bad beer. My worst fear zeros on he’ll come home and tell me it’s over and I’ll have to find a job as a waitress in a diner, somewhere, and I’ll have to subject myself to the general public’s petty whims.
    We’ve been married for 20-years. We’ve lived in the same neighborhood for 15-years. There’s a small backroom in our house I work in. I have a desk where my laptop and printer are located; I have a large tv table I set up when I do submissions or when I want to write with a pen and a legal pad. Portable bookshelves line my room’s walls holding my books and I store my contributor’s copies and chapbooks in stackable plastic file boxes.
    After I fed my husband his supper he watched sports on tv. Usually, he’d drink between 15 and 25 cans of cheap beer before bed. We had cable tv and the only time he changed the station from sports based programming was when sever weather passed overhead. At night, after supper, I slipped into my room to do some writing. I kept the window shade up so that I could watch the night approach. I liked the various stages and shades of twilight. In fact, I wrote a poem about it—I called it “evening light”—and I got it published by a well-known Midwestern literary magazine. My husband never said anything to me—I heard from other housewives what they went through trying to live their lives in the midst of the predatory male ego, needing know they can command their wives attention at any and every moment. Having fits and tantrums just like they were spoiled brat 5-year-old boys because the beans were too soupy or they wanted beef, and not pork; and, as a wife, you’re supposed to look at them (be so tuned-in to them) that on the night before you should be able to tell those things. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to put up with that. I guess I’d have to find a job to support myself. I use our weekly grocery money to lay-in supplies and to buy postage, paper, and ink. I shop at used bookshops and I occasionally get some money for my writing, but mostly I’m paid in copies.
    We’ve always had these peculiar neighbors. He smokes all the time and he has nothing better to do than turn the lights down or off and watch me while I’m writing. He has a housemate, I think, that’s a woman but I’m not sure. I don’t want to look too closely because I don’t want to be like them. They’re over there reveling in—what they think is total security—but they leave the tv on and I see from my eye corner their head shadows in the tv’s glow. I never see them when I’m at the grocery store, when I’m fish-nosing downtown used bookshops. I’d like to tell my husband and he’ll go puke on their front porch and stagger back home. I look at this way, it’s more important for me to watch the twilight fade-down, than to snap those curtains shut.
    When I was girl we had nosy neighbors. When they wanted to spy on us they’d walk their dog. Their dog didn’t walk nice and he snarled, and clawed at the pavement, chewed at the leash as they drug him. They stared at us head-on without even a smile or a friendly wave. My family laughed about it. Sometimes, it made my mother mad. But my father said, “we don’t have anything to hide, let ‘em look all they want.”
    Out of my eye corner over there at the neighbors I see the heads bobbing in the tv glow at the windowsill level, but it’s so petty and silly, I’ll just rejoice in my twilight and heed no concern as to the rest.



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