Life Story
A man lives with a woman he loves enough to live with, but not enough to marry and not enough for kids. He knows he could love others enough to marry, enough for kids, but he's not the kind of man to find those women when he's with this woman.
Sometimes “love” doesn't fit what he feels. It's too pocket-sized. Or maybe too monumental.
Sometimes “enough” fits. He says to himself, “I don't enough her enough.”
“I won't enough her enough.”
The woman loves the man enough to live with, enough to marry, enough for kids, but loves him too much to make him into what he won't be. She knows she could find others who love her enough to marry, enough for kids. So what.
Sometimes “love” is too blunt. “Timing” is more textured. “He doesn't timing me yet.”
“He won't ever timing me.”
The man is skinny with a robust beard and when he walks he keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead. The woman is full-bodied with a bouncy gait and when she's alone she sings opera songs. They're not traditional in the way their parents are but they're Midwestern enough to want marriage and kids, they can't help it, it's in the lives they imagine.
He stays, and stays, and stays. She knows.
They love living with each other. They get a dog, they play cards, they cook and bake and slap each others' butts. They share friends, some who marry, some who move away. They both have OK jobs that get better.
They continue loving living with each other except for when they think or talk about marrying and having kids. When they talk about it there is only the restating of statements. They enter their thirties, a tiny banquet hall with no tables or chairs or carpeting.
Years stack up before the both of them, a tower, one they'll pass.
The woman thinks, Maybe I won't timing him ever, and when she sings she feels like biting her wrists, or hugging their dog, or resolving to one day tell herself that she will not feel good when he stays forever.
The man thinks, Maybe I don't fit enough, and when he touches his beard concludes, continuously, that it doesn't seem possible that such a thing could be pushing out of his face.
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Author's Note
Appears in Kenyon Review Online.
Other stories by Joseph Scapellato
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"I don't enough her enough." Clever stuff. *
This gets into the core of so many relationships these days. When we thought that being together was because we wanted to be instead of having to be. But it all comes back to the same reason we used to "go steady." Skillful and thought-provoking.
A really interesting piece. Yes, skillful and thought-provoking.
Very well written and honest. *
Big like.
Joseph, I enjoyed the rhythm of this piece very much. It has the sense of catechisms, of a list of mantras--very soothing. There's also the dark undercurrent, the sharp teeth of anomie poking through now and then, the sense of having a destination and getting on a bus and forgetting to get off, to choose a stopping place. And the quietly awful feeling at the end that life takes shape whether you shape yourself or not; that brilliant tag sentence with the astonishing beard "pushing out of his face." Bravo. *
We are always more (and sometimes less) than the ideas we have of ourselves. Love the structure of the piece.
Thanks so much for reading, and for taking the time to write such kind comments!
I like this story all the way or if not the story how it's told. There's a sense that it's love (not meaning sex) with a condom, with barriers to its full becoming, to its safety in roommateship and caution. *