Saturday's Storyteller: Option One
by Belinda Roddie
Option One is, when you open the door, stepping into a single story house with three bedrooms and two baths, and a backyard that appears to stretch to infinity, if infinity were constructed from fallen tree branches and broken bridges. There is debris everywhere, rubble that you are not expected to clean up or rebuild. You are allowed to settle in this home and see if you can handle the mortgage and the upkeep.
Option One includes a spouse that is soft on the eyes but tough on the stomach. She will be nothing but candid as you navigate your new married life together. You both will have fallen hard and fast in the beginning: "whirlwind" is not even the strongest word you would use to describe it, though it is difficult to find something in your vocabulary that feels more appropriate. Six months into dating, and you two will have married on a warm September evening on a beach in Southern California, where the smog will be less dense and more gray than brown above your heads, which will make for spectacular natural lighting for the wedding photographer. Now that you are living together, there are habits to get used to, and an unadulterated honesty that your wife now exposes, as if she were a reptile revealing her raw underbelly to you for the first time.
There are no children in this house if you choose Option One. Your spouse will be rendered infertile after you have completed the second year of your marriage. You will consider adopting, but you will relent after your job becomes more demanding and requires more hours at the office. All those months preparing for a promotion will pay off, but the extra money will seem frivolous compared to the free time you will have sacrificed. No more happy hours with the coworkers on Thursdays. No more day trips to the national park on Friday afternoons. You will order a stand-up desk so you can keep your leg muscles from atrophying, and you will force yourself to go to the gym twice a week. But your biceps will always be frail.
You will get used to the color white. That is the color of your house, and that is the color of your wife's porcelain skin. She will ask that you both build a white picket fence in the front yard to keep in the white cat that you will take home with you in lieu of a baby. The walls of your cubicle will also be white. A pristine white, strangely, rather than off-white, or a white smudged by dust or cobwebs or age; the custodians working in your office will be very diligent in that regard. Everything will appear sterile, save for the endless colors of natural shrapnel in your limitless backyard. You will notice that despite your very pearly world, the broken bricks and shattered glass and crumbled concrete and tumbled tree trunks near the back of your house will boast rainbows on their skins. But again, you are not expected to sweep up any of it.
You will never hire anyone to do that job for you. Your spouse and you will not go into the backyard very often. There will be no patio furniture, no swing set or potted plants. You will not tend to a personal garden. You will adjust to Mother Earth and Modern Man's collaborative art piece just outside the window of your study. You will never know where those incomplete bridges were supposed to go, as their crooked beams jut out from behind scorched hills, and golden tufts burst like coarse hair from valleys that open their mouths but display no teeth or tongue. You will occasionally wonder how far your backyard really goes, and why your wife has never insisted on building a fence behind the house rather than only in front of it. But you will never explore that infinity. You will never have the energy to.
By now, you may be wondering what Options Two and Three are. But those two doors are locked, and we have lost the keys. Option One is, as a result, the only option that we offer here. But there is no need to shake hands on it.
Because if all else fails, the best you can do now is turn and walk off the game show set. And you may enter your own infinity outside.
Just don't take it personally if the studio audience boos.
No prompt was provided for this week's Storyteller.
Option One is, when you open the door, stepping into a single story house with three bedrooms and two baths, and a backyard that appears to stretch to infinity, if infinity were constructed from fallen tree branches and broken bridges. There is debris everywhere, rubble that you are not expected to clean up or rebuild. You are allowed to settle in this home and see if you can handle the mortgage and the upkeep.
Option One includes a spouse that is soft on the eyes but tough on the stomach. She will be nothing but candid as you navigate your new married life together. You both will have fallen hard and fast in the beginning: "whirlwind" is not even the strongest word you would use to describe it, though it is difficult to find something in your vocabulary that feels more appropriate. Six months into dating, and you two will have married on a warm September evening on a beach in Southern California, where the smog will be less dense and more gray than brown above your heads, which will make for spectacular natural lighting for the wedding photographer. Now that you are living together, there are habits to get used to, and an unadulterated honesty that your wife now exposes, as if she were a reptile revealing her raw underbelly to you for the first time.
There are no children in this house if you choose Option One. Your spouse will be rendered infertile after you have completed the second year of your marriage. You will consider adopting, but you will relent after your job becomes more demanding and requires more hours at the office. All those months preparing for a promotion will pay off, but the extra money will seem frivolous compared to the free time you will have sacrificed. No more happy hours with the coworkers on Thursdays. No more day trips to the national park on Friday afternoons. You will order a stand-up desk so you can keep your leg muscles from atrophying, and you will force yourself to go to the gym twice a week. But your biceps will always be frail.
You will get used to the color white. That is the color of your house, and that is the color of your wife's porcelain skin. She will ask that you both build a white picket fence in the front yard to keep in the white cat that you will take home with you in lieu of a baby. The walls of your cubicle will also be white. A pristine white, strangely, rather than off-white, or a white smudged by dust or cobwebs or age; the custodians working in your office will be very diligent in that regard. Everything will appear sterile, save for the endless colors of natural shrapnel in your limitless backyard. You will notice that despite your very pearly world, the broken bricks and shattered glass and crumbled concrete and tumbled tree trunks near the back of your house will boast rainbows on their skins. But again, you are not expected to sweep up any of it.
You will never hire anyone to do that job for you. Your spouse and you will not go into the backyard very often. There will be no patio furniture, no swing set or potted plants. You will not tend to a personal garden. You will adjust to Mother Earth and Modern Man's collaborative art piece just outside the window of your study. You will never know where those incomplete bridges were supposed to go, as their crooked beams jut out from behind scorched hills, and golden tufts burst like coarse hair from valleys that open their mouths but display no teeth or tongue. You will occasionally wonder how far your backyard really goes, and why your wife has never insisted on building a fence behind the house rather than only in front of it. But you will never explore that infinity. You will never have the energy to.
By now, you may be wondering what Options Two and Three are. But those two doors are locked, and we have lost the keys. Option One is, as a result, the only option that we offer here. But there is no need to shake hands on it.
Because if all else fails, the best you can do now is turn and walk off the game show set. And you may enter your own infinity outside.
Just don't take it personally if the studio audience boos.
No prompt was provided for this week's Storyteller.
Comments
Post a Comment