Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [118]
“Don’t think of it like that. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you. This is just the way these things sometimes work. I have a theory. A woman has two choices only of men: the ones who stopped maturing around the age of ten or eleven and the ones who stopped maturing when they were nineteen or twenty. The ten- and eleven-year-olds aren’t as cool in the traditional sense of the word, so maybe that’s what you’re talking about when you say you weren’t cool enough. These are the geeky guys. The ones that play video games and listen to weird indie bands and watch The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They read comic books and walk around in sweatpants and become musicians and teachers and computer programmers. You know who I mean, right? These are the guys who think that The Matrix is the best movie ever made and spend a year learning to speak Klingon.”
Milo cringed, remembering the afternoon that he and Andy spent speaking English in object-verb-subject order, the grammatical structure of the Klingon language.
Twinkie want you?
Ping pong play us.
Klingon like I!
“The nineteen- and twenty-year-olds,” Emma continued, “are the ones who become the lawyers and bankers of the world. They wear the thousand-dollar suits, drink the microbrews, and go to the gym at lunch. They drive sports cars and take power naps and play golf on the weekends and marry the prom queen. You know the type. And based on the car we’re in now, I’m guessing you’re not it. Am I right?”
“I don’t think everything is as simple as you make it seem,” Milo said, deciding to take a stand against Emma’s brash absolution. “It’s pretty narrow-minded to think that every guy in the world would fit neatly into one of your categories. How would you feel if I did the same for women?”
“Oh, I have categories for women too, and I can tell you all about them later on, but for now, just tell me. Do you fit into the ten- and eleven-year-old category?”
“Well, I don’t speak Klingon and I’m not a musician or a teacher, if that’s what you mean.”
“Milo, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m not saying that those ten- and eleven-year-old men have anything wrong with them. As painful as it is for me to admit, considering the men I seem to always choose, I believe that the ten- and eleven-year-olds make better husbands. They tend to be loyal, they’re better with children, and they’re just easier to get along with. The nineteen- and twenty-year-olds have bigger houses and better retirement plans, but most of them, unless they’re ultra-religious, never finish sowing their wild oats, and they’re more complicated in general to deal with. Gimme a geek any day. But not every woman is as smart as I am. Some care about the house and the car and the well-dressed man. Some want a nanny and a vacation home on the beach and the admiring friends. Maybe your wife is one of them and finally realized it.”
Again, Milo said nothing. Part of him wanted to reject Emma’s ever-condensing, ever-delineating notions of marriage and men, but there was truth in what she said, even if she wasn’t entirely correct.
More important, he was suddenly in need of a sealed jar of Smuckers. Milo didn’t know how many of these jars were needed to satisfy the current demand, but if he didn’t get to one soon, he worried that this might be just the tip of the iceberg.
chapter 28
“Okay. Your turn. Tell me what it was like to run away.”
The two were sitting in a booth at a McDonald’s off Interstate 95, just over the Virginia line. Milo had ordered a double cheeseburger, fries, and a vanilla shake, and Emma was attempting to swallow a mouthful