Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [43]
And then what if this gossip cycle swelled so much that a few days later, at the checkout counter at the grocery store, you found yourself staring at an endless parade of articles about Bobby with titles like “Inside Bobby’s Secret World” and “What Bobby Does to Lure Young Girls”?
Let’s say that you’re a person who doesn’t buy the magazines at the grocery checkout line because you honestly don’t care who Jennifer Aniston is dating. But still you couldn’t help but wonder, “What does he do to lure them? Sticky wads of bills attached to invisible wire?” So what if you let your curiosity get the best of you and you decided to pick up one of these magazines and have a look even though it was against your better judgment? And after slogging your way past all those pictures of Jennifer Aniston—in swimwear! in leotards! Oh no! She’s crying! Is she going to be okay?—you found an enormous half-page picture of you with Bobby from twenty-five years ago? And your jaw dropped open because this picture of you, from the early eighties, was right underneath the capitalized word “LURE”? And what if, in that instant, you felt like you had pushed open the door of an occupied public restroom to discover that you were also the person sitting on the toilet in the stall?
“Oh my God!” you heard yourself thinking, or … wait, did you just say that out loud? You are suddenly talking more like Jennifer Aniston than you’ve come to expect. “Are they saying I lured someone? Or are they saying I was lured?” And what if now you actually wondered, “Was I lured?” Maybe you were! Think back! Think! Are you involved somehow?
Is it possible that there is another version of you running around somewhere twenty-five years ago over whom you have lost all control?
And then what if you decided to sneak a peek at a different magazine to learn a little more about Jennifer Aniston and also to make sure you aren’t in there, too? You’re pretty sure the first one was just an aberration. But what if you discover, to your horror, that there is another gigantic twenty-five-year-old picture of you with Bobby in this magazine, only this time the article is about how Bobby is leading “a secret double life”? What does this have to do with you? Does that mean you are leading one, too? Have you inadvertently entered one of those other eight dimensions they always speak of in string theory? Could you have possibly tripped on a tear in the fabric of time, where you are now leading a parallel existence that is somehow connected to a secret world of luring?
And what if while this was all going on you also started coming in contact with all kinds of information about Bobby and his assorted extracurricular activities from the years that you two were together … information that so totally re-informed and reorganized the way you viewed the landscape of your own past that you wondered if your original theory about the impossibility of combining love and work could have been a mistake? What if the problem wasn’t really combining love and work? What if it was combining love and Bobby?
What if now, in your dotage, it finally occurred to you that all the messages you’d been receiving from the world at large about the best way to be a female in a relationship, which to you has meant placing love on a pedestal that rises above all else, is just a terrible, terrible piece of advice?
That would be a really weird experience to look back on, would it not?
My Advice to the Fidgety Young People
EVERY JUNE, AS I READ OR WATCH EXCERPTS OF THE PITHY, heartfelt speeches delivered by people of note to graduating seniors all across the country, I have to admit: I get a little jealous. So every year I secretly compose the imaginary commencement speech that I would deliver if anyone ever asked. I make it full of timeless wisdom and gallows humor and lace it with enough blunt profanity to hold the attention of and perhaps even inspire the most fidgety audience of young people.
I guess it was a chance to fulfill that fantasy