Once upon a time, we were ancient. We were Vikings, set out to explore a new land. He was Gunther and I was Torvald and we had a love unrealized by other Vikings, but we had to keep it a secret, because we were at sea in a very small boat and tempers flared at the drop of a hat. You know, one of those helmets with horns coming out of them? Yeah, those. Don’t drop one, it puts a hole in the boat and people get mad. But it was a fine life. We’d steam up the sauna with our own heat and then retire between skins and feed each other gravvlox and lefse from our fingertips. And then one day, Gunther got into a fight with the minstrel and even though Gunther was favored with 3 to 1 odds, due to his size and sexy flaring nostrils, the minstrel somehow skewered him with a pickle fork and went on to be called Ewald The Fighting Minstrel, while I was left alone to put loganberry flowers on Gunther’s pyre and swear that we would be together in Valhalla. And then I knocked Ewald on the head with a big rock and ran off into the fjords and froze to death.
Once we were living on the plains in a sod house and he wore broadcloth shirts that I sewed with big long loops of thread and I wore a petticoat made from a flour sack. He slaughtered a pig and we had to think up ways to use every single bit and he blew up the bladder and tied a knot in it and then we played volleyball on the plains, me tripping on my skirts and him with his shirt off, suspenders rubbing his nipples raw, until the cow broke loose of her tethers and we had to chase after her. Through a nest of rattlesnakes.
Once we were trees in California, giant redwoods. His leaves would flutter around my roots and I would creak and bat my limbs at him. We stood through centuries, always eighty yards apart, never able to intermingle our limbs. I would blush each year that I lost my leaves and he would growl in a way that only trees can growl. And then we were gone. Stupid root rot.
Once I was Judy Garland and he was Clark Gable and it was 1939 and I was working on a little picture called the Wizard of Oz and he was one set over, doing that big Civil War picture, and we’d meet on the back lots and exchange torrid glances at each other until Jimmy Stewart would yell at us and say ‘Hey now! We’re trying to shoot a Western here! You all best just move along! Well’ well’Clark? Clark, is that you? Hey now!’ And we’d run and giggle and then he’d ask me to kiss him and I would and his mustache would smell like cigars and I would tell him about the midgets looking up my skirt and making jokes about how ruby slippers reflect up and then he’d tell me that he was thinking about breaking up with his girlfriend Joan because she seemed like she had a temper. But then he misunderstood my thing with Mickey Rooney and was hurt and we kept on making movies and babies with other people until Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles ruined everything. I saw him again once in Vegas. I was doing a show at the Aladdin but by then he was an alcoholic and I was pretty much just stringing from one pill to the next but we both looked at each other and smiled and if there was a God in heaven, Mickey Rooney had one of his heart attacks right then.
Once we lived in the Paleolithic Era. I was a tribal leader and I clubbed him over the head because the way his ass looked in a deerskin made me grunt and jump up and down and I couldn’t think until I got some of that. He was a woman and didn’t like getting clubbed in the head and didn’t talk to me until after he was nursing our infant and had another on the way. He set up a complicated water delivery system so that we didn’t have to go out of the cave. I couldn’t understand it but it was beautiful. Truly beautiful. And then I got crushed by a wooly mammoth.
Once he was a double secret agent and I worked for the Kremlin and wore dark glasses and it was the fifties and I had a dark mole that hair grew out of because there were no Tweezermans in all of Mother Russia, but it was a sexy mole nonetheless. He liked it. Or at least one of his double secret agent personas did. And then I found out that he was a double secret agent and I was supposed to kill him and the broad shoulders of the KGB were coming but I couldn’t. I couldn’t! I sobbed and fell into his arms and then we ran, hand in hand, and caught a train that snaked through the winter landscape until we reached Poland and then laughed in a bar with American college students and drank vodka until we got alcohol poisoning and died.
Once we were children at a Montessori. He was a paste eater and I had just had an accident and was walking around wearing a pair of borrowed sweatpants. He asked me if I wanted to build a fort with him and the big cardboard bricks, and I said ok. So we did. Later I watched in fascination as he used the leftie scissors. Then I pinched him and he called me a wiener and we never talked again and I grew up and he grew up somewhere else and he started a company that made parts of industrial machines and I got married to an accountant and volunteered at a library and learned the Dewey Decimal system.
Once he was a Gap sweater, size L, a cream-colored wool blend, and I was a Gap scarf, tight-knit all wool, red with green stripes and with a luxurious grey fringe. I was set down on the table where he was hanging out with the other sweaters. They were chatting about Star Wars. I politely listened, feeling awkward and out of place with my fringe. I tried to have good posture, but it was hard, being stuffed down between the sale sign and a stack of turtlenecks. Then a temporary seasonal worker named Aidan walked by and plucked me off the table and put me with the other scarves, who just kept talking about the most recent Gap holiday commercial and wondering how Missy E really did lose all that weight. Two weeks later, the sweaters all were clearanced. I couldn’t bear to watch anymore, so I started keeping track of shoppers instead, counting how many had designer purses, how many had kids with runny noses, how many used bad grammar. And then one day, I felt like I was being stared at and then I was in the hands of a woman named Esther who was buying me as a Christmas present for her grandson Charlie. And then I sighed and was put in between tissue paper and into a bag with handles and then we were moving through the mall and into the cold and then into the trunk of a car and then quiet and dark. And then that’s when I heard him again, talking about Winston Churchill to some Old Navy performance fleece, something I would never do because Gap accessories do NOT associate with that Old Navy tripe. But you just had to admire his attempt, even though the Tec vests could only talk about the most recent episode of Everyone Loves Raymond. And then we were in a box together and we realized, yep, this was it. We went with each other. We were a coordinated outfit.
