Choices Josie Sloyan
When they met they fell in love and decided to get married and all of a sudden they were in California. The successive events were short and definitive as knife wounds. His father was dying and needed someone to stay with him in his home outside Fresno. He flew out first. His father died. She followed in a car out of whose windows stuck lamps and drying racks and antique chairs snitched from her ma’s house. The backseat was lined with Styrofoam mannequin heads that held her wigs. Each wig demarcated an event. That day she wore a red wig because during her threeday drive late summer had snapped dramatically into fall. Her real hair was flyaway brown and cut in an unfeminine bob. When she pulled up the front yard was covered in leaves and it was a real house with a real live front yard and patio and fireplace and garage. Just like that: bills, gas, his dead dad’s Jeep. The dream had weight and a shape. At night he lay his head alongside her stomach as though they were expecting and listened to what he pictured as a little train chug and gurgle through her stomach, unknotting, detangling, until she got impatient and twisted away and started making digestion jokes in the dark. 40
She threw herself into domesticity. Their house filled with animals. They had three cats named after presidents and two dogs, a bluetick retriever mutt and a sloe-eyed Lab. She had her eye on a bulldog puppy. She showed a picture to her fiancée. That dog’s really ugly, honey, he said doubtfully. Baby, she said. She was wearing a blond wig when they bought the dog. The dog snapped at the wig’s complex braids. Little shit, she said cheerfully. They named this dog Divine. She was in a John Waters phase. She began to realize she most loved the smallest fragments of her life, beats so short there was no space to project unhappiness or anxiety on them, moments that could be cut and shown in any respectable detergent ad or family sitcom. Sun cutting through the blinds. Her fiancée on the patio yawning clouds into the frozen morning. A perfect sangria. A birthday cake haloed with candles. The world of perfect moments could be reached through food. She bought cookbooks and baking pans and a whipped-cream shaker that could be flavored with lavender or persimmon or rose essence. She bought a stand-alone mixer. She put off the actuality of the cake in order to deepen the idea of the cake, the dream of the cake. Each recipe took days.