Second Thoughts

by Stanley W. Rogouski

<<<<Of course, she thought, had he come from a nice, upper middle-class family like hers, had his teeth been perfect, had he gone to an Ivy-League university, he would not have been dating a chunky, slatternly ex pothead like herself, but a giggly little ingenue like her sister. That he would deny it and that, just possibly, she would believe his denial did not make it any better. It wasn't so much that his parents were white trash down in Lubbock, Texas that bothered her, but the way he tried to hide it, the way that he had intellectual pretensions way beyond what he was capable of fulfilling. Some of it was almost endearing. They way he would listen to National Public Radio and try to make witty small talk about the guests on New York and Company was almost cute. The political groups that he belonged to, Men Against Rape, Men for Choice, well how could she possibly be against that? No, she could. It was all of the speeches that really made her angry, the half hour monologues about the evils of high-school football in Texas that bothered her so much, all of that whining about how tough it was for guys like himself, guys who weren't athletic, to grow up in such an oppressively patriarchal culture. Jesus Christ, she thought, he was 31 years old. Couldn't he just get over it? Then there was the way he was always trying to hide his southern accent. How clueless could you get? Didn't he notice that she kept a black, velvet portrait of Elvis in her bedroom. She liked southern accents. Southern accents turned her on. Half the fights she picked with him were to get him to drop that creepy NPR way of speaking, and sound as if he were about to go to a Klan rally. She didn't want some gutless little creep with a bland accent, neutered and spayed, with all of the correct political opinions on everything. She wanted him to be himself, and, if he was afraid to be himself, then what was he hiding? But all of that was trivial compared to the way he refused to get his life going, the way he was wasting himself because of that insane desire to be a writer when he so obviously didn't have the talent. Not that he was stupid, far from it. To put yourself through college working in a slaughterhouse just outside of a God forsaken hole of a place like Lubbock, Texas, to go to class all day, come home, take a quick nap, then spend the rest of the evening in a bloody, plastic apron hacking out the entrails of cows, that was more than just not stupid. It was downright heroic, especially with his parents, who gave him no help at all, especially with that mother. Christ, she used to have a rule that she would never date a man who didn't get along with his mother because it was a sure fire sign of how he got along with women in general, but that went out the window in five seconds. There was something evil about that woman, something mentally disturbed, something almost retarded. That was the kind of woman who turns her sons into rapists and serial killers, and not the kind of men who put themselves though college with a 3.7 while doing manual labor to earn a living. It was downright tragic, therefore, that he was so wrong about what he was suited for in life. It was keeping him at the emotional level of a 20 year old, drifting from menial job to menial job, and making it impossible for him to settle down in one place, or connect with women, including her. She felt like a bitch for trying to deny him what he really wanted to do in life, but she didn't care. She was not going to deny how she really felt. She'd feel it anyway, so why not just get it out in the open. It was for his own good anyway. As far as writing went, whatever "it" was, it was more than obvious that he didn't have "it." It wasn't that she minded his interest in literature, books, and culture. If only he'd realize that it was never going to be anything more than a hobby. After all, her father wrote page after page of bad poetry about the glories of the Maine coast and his great, great grandfather, who died on the bridge at Antietam. He wept sentimentally over all of those betrayed lads in A.E. Houseman's poetry, but that was on the weekends, and it was really only an excuse to unlock the whine celler before dinnertime. On the weekdays, he had a career, made enough money to support his family, had a place in the world. So if he wanted to write, fine. It was a good hobby, as long as he didn't use it as an excuse to contradict her friends. But, she sighed, it wasn't a career, not for him anyway.>>>>