Saturday, June 12, 2010

Interlude - Jerry

“Yes, dear,” Jerry said for the sixth time before leaving the house that morning. He said it so often it had become rote. His wife Sheila was reminding him of things she wanted him to get done before he came back home that night. Long past were the days when she would be up to fix him a decent egg for breakfast, or even a good cup of coffee.
Now it was her orders for food, a late night snack, some cleaning that had to be picked up or something for one of her (no, “our”) daughters.
He felt like a pack mule…a load thrown on his back and ordered to carry it.
He picked up his faded windbreaker off the hook next to the front door of their three-bedroom duplex and slipped it on. It was supposed to be in the 40s this morning and Jerry hated the cold. He told himself if he were rich, he’d move to one of the warmer states, not the one where old people go to die, but maybe Arkansas or Arizona.
But he wasn’t rich, and unless one of the lottery tickets his wife bought hit it big, he never would be. Jerry was just the manager of the local “big box” store’s delicatessen. Sure the title sounded good and the position got him a couple trips a year to deli conferences, but there was really no money in it.
The three-bedroom duplex he lived in was a testament to how well he was doing in life. He and Sheila started renting it nearly seven years ago, thinking they could buy it a few years later, rent out the other half to make most of the house payment, and his income and hers would allow them to live the better life.
Things didn’t work out quite like the two had planned.
Sheila, his “fluffy little sweetheart” of 10 years, injured her back while working on the line at the air conditioner manufacturing plant where she’d been for seven years. She was off work for months, visited doctors and chiropractors by the score and eventually settled with the company to go on permanent disability at 50% of the rate of pay she had been making when injured and $20,000 cash.
With Sheila’s pay cut in half, and no possibility of her getting another job, the extra income dried up quickly. The two girls from Sheila’s first marriage, Sandi and Jolene, went through a lot of money and the $20,000 went right into a college fund for the both of them.
Sandi was 19 and attending the community college while living at home, even though she spent most of her time being dated by any good-looking guy with a cool car and money to flash.
Jolene was a stand-out on the high school’s soccer team and track and field squad, as well as being one of the smartest kids in the class, most popular, most attractive and most often heard about when gossip was being spread.
Jerry knew the girls must have inherited their looks and brains from their dad, who he'd never met because Sheila was no looker. Since she had gone on disability, she had even fluffed out more, gaining another 30 or 40 pounds and one chin at least.
There were times when Jerry thought it would serve her right if he just packed up and moved out, leaving her to wallow in her own self-pity and sorrow.
But he couldn’t. He’d lived the single life before and he hated it. He needed to have a wife, even if she were over bearing and over-weight. Part of him even loved her and enjoyed the way it felt when the two of them were alone in their room, snuggled up to each other. Her strong hands caressing the tight muscles in his neck, the weight of her heavy body covering his slender frame and the way she moved him the way she wanted him to move in their love-making.
She controlled him and he was too weak to change.
“And don’t forget to that Jolene needs a case of bottled water for tomorrow’s track meet,” was her last instruction to him as he zipped up his jacket.
“Yes, dear,” he said back to her. “I’m going now. Love you!”
He waited to hear her respond, but all he heard was Sheila’s talking on the phone with Sandi and she’d already forgotten about him.
He climbed into his 1992 Park Avenue, it years showing as well as the rust on the quarter panels and around the edges of the doors. He sometimes had to slam the driver’s door two or three times before it would stay closed, but the engine started every time.
So what if the air conditioning didn’t work, or the power windows for two of the four windows didn’t work, or the radio was just a radio with no cassette or CD player? The car was paid for and the insurance on it wasn’t so bad.
Sheila had sold her vehicle, the stylish-challenged Astro van after she found it hurt her back to drive, so gave it up and had Jerry drive her everywhere she needed to go. There was no need for Jerry to support two vehicles when the van would sit for months without being driven and neither of the girls would be caught dead driving the POS.
His commute to work was Jerry’s favorite part of the day. It was just 14.9 miles, 22 minutes on a good day, 25 minutes on a bad day, including the stop he always made. He’d stop at the Amoco station for a 20-ounce coffee, a packet of sugar stirred in and as much cream as he could pour without overfilling the cup.
At the counter, he’d get a pack of Marlboro Lights, because he knew Sheila would want them when he got home and a Snickers bar which would be his breakfast in the last five minutes of his morning commute.
But what made the drive the most important was it was “his’ time. It was the half hour of the day Sheila was not nagging him, his work was not demanding him, where bills were not needing to be paid, house work requiring to be completed or any other of a hundred details in his life begging for his attention.The drive after work would have his head filled with problems from the day, employees who didn't show up for work, or worse, would show up and not work but hang around the deli looking busy but getting nothing done.
No, the morning drive was all Jerry's and no one could change that. Many times Sheila had told him he should find someone to commute with, but Jerry would always never find anyone to share the ride. He needed his time alone and to hell with what sheila wanted on this issue.
In his car, radio playing from the oldies station, Jerry could relax and be himself and day dream of the life he should have.
Sometimes he would think of his first wife, the lovely Kady who he’d married when the two of them were finished with their first year at the same community college his step-daughter attended now. They were going to do something with their lives until midway through their second year, Jerry’s dad died of a stroke and he had to quit school to help his mom run the family catering business until it too collapsed and folded.
That kind of setback was too much for Kady and she left Jerry for a man who could give her more in life than an ailing mother-in-law, an openly gay brother-in-law and a man with no future plans in his back pocket.
Not unkind, Kady came out and told him the truth. She didn’t love him any more and she was moving away. Jerry liked to believe she really did love him at one time in their life and believed she didn’t cheat on him, but he would never know and he really didn’t care. Surely he loved her on some level, but he never really thought he and Kady were right for each other. His mom and dad did and that’s what motivated him to ask her to marry him, but with dad gone and Kady feeling the need to move on, the hurt wasn’t as bad as people supposed it might have been.
Last he heard of her she was married to a successful business man and the two of them had moved somewhere swanky on the east coast. He was happy she had found what she needed because she was a good friend when he needed one and had made his life easier for a time.
Sometimes Jerry would think about Marcus, his younger brother with all the creativity and imagination the family genes could provide him. Marcus had come out of the closet to his mom a little more than a year after dad had died. It wasn’t as difficult for him as he’d thought it would be as their mom loved each of them with all her heart and was not judgmental like dad had been.
He lived with his partner 30 miles away, in a much bigger city than this one, where it was less unacceptable to be gay and there were more people who lived the same life style who Marcus and Stevie could socialize with. The two ran a very successful advertising business and when Jerry got the chance to visit his brother, he’d see some new award hanging on their gallery wall, or pictures of local and a few minor national celebrities hanging in Marcus’s office. He was proud of his younger brother, even if he couldn’t understand the lifestyle.
Jerry would sometimes let the miles pass him with almost empty thoughts. There’d be a flash of some long ago memory of simpler times or he might remember the time he walked in on Sandi in the bathroom, her lithe, well-carved body barely covered with a towel. Her long, tanned legs stretched out and nearly perfect from a fresh shave and being conditioned with some type of conditioning oil. He would recall her scream of surprise when Jerry walked in and the loud protest of “Don’t you knock?” as she tried to grasp a bathrobe for dignity only to have the towel fall to the floor leaving her completed naked for over two whole seconds. His retort of “Can’t you remember to lock the door?” and the mess that had become of the mishap became a lesson in hierarchy in the home.
After that incident, a new lock was put on the bathroom upstairs, the only one near to the three bedrooms, and Jerry was relegated to using the one downstairs by consensus of the three women living in the house. He hated having to take his clothes downstairs every morning to shower and shave, even if no one else in the house was awake.
Jerry, who only in the deepest recesses of his mind would he ever admit, thought  the incident was way overblown because if the women living in the home knew what secret he kept so well hidden, they'd have not made such an issue of Jerry seeing his step-daughter in such a state of undress.
Sheila had been awaken today by Sandi's call, from where ever she was staying last night, and not by the alarm clock that woke Jerry every morning at 7:30 a.m. He wished Sandi would not call so early because it was always easier for Jerry to get out of the house without Sheila ordering him around and dictating instructions. It also tended to make Jerry grumpier starting the day with Sheila reminding him of all the things he had to do, just as she'd done the previous night, when he got home from work.
This morning, however, it was a most pleasant drive for Jerry. It was Friday and tomorrow morning, instead of going to a track meet for his step-daughter, having to help his wife into the car with her cane, driving to the school, helping his wife out of the car then walking the 500 or so yards to the stands where handicapped people were allowed to sit and watch, walking at a pace slower than sap dripping down a pine tree because of Sheila, and then sitting on the hard seat for three hours of painful boredom and pretended interest, Jerry would be driving to Toledo for a Deli convention for three days.
Jerry would have three full days and two nights away from his family, to do with as he pleased. There would be no one there he knew well enough to be chums with, who would ask him to the bar or a night at a movie. Jerry would be on his own without supervision of anyone.
It was a convention of Deli managers and Deli owners and Deli this and Deli that. All the new food preparation ideas would be trotted out and vendors would be hawking their ideas and utensils not unlike the open desert markets from 2,000 years ago.
And Jerry would attend the convention, sit in on a few forums, speak with vendors, allow himself to be made to feel important and sit in on several demonstrations. He’d do all this because the store manager would ask many questions when Jerry got back to work on the following Tuesday about the convention and how the store could improve its delicatessen department. Jerry would speak knowledgably about some of what he saw, recommend some ideas brought up by others and make it seem to the manager that the trip was well worth the price the store paid to send Jerry. This would insure that another convention would be in his future six or eight months down the road.
But the convention was just another convention. What Jerry really wanted when going to the conventions was not in the convention hall.

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