Elephants in Our Bedroom by Michael Czyzniejewski

Author:Michael Czyzniejewski [Czyzniejewski, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (single author), Short stories; American
ISBN: 9781936873340
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2009-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

I know why Debbie's doing this, playing this Victor game with me, which is why I have to play along. A few weeks ago, when Debbie was supposed to be at the gym, she came home, her ankle turned, and found me, in our bedroom, with Laura Neumann, the woman who delivers our bottled water. I wasn't naked, Laura wasn't naked, and we weren't even touching. But Laura was sitting on our bed. To any woman who breaks her two-year routine only to find a woman sitting on her husband's bed, her husband just a few feet away and looking startled, this would seem like infidelity. But like I said, Laura's clothes were on, my clothes were on, and Laura's clipboard was in her hands. It was easy for me to tell Debbie that Laura was in our bedroom because she wanted to see if an extra dispenser would fit under a cabinet in our bathroom, that she sat down because she runs up and down people's front walks with five-gallon bottles on her shoulders all day. She was tired, had to run some numbers, and I told her to take a load off. I appeared startled to Debbie because Laura's work clothes were sweaty and Debbie had just done the bedding—I was thinking about the sheets, not some crazy affair with the Culligan lady. As soon as Laura left, Debbie told me she wasn't mad about the sheets, filling me in on what she thought was really going on. I told her she was imagining things. Yes, I'd made comments about Laura before, her tan (probably a farmer's), her thick thighs and lean calves, how it looked like her breasts overtaxed the buttons on her shirt. So I could totally see where Debbie was coming from, and later on, we laughed about it together, made jokes.

Victor's appearance is just the joke taken a step further, the punch line to the online personal she filled out and left on the screen of our laptop. We joke with each other like that: She calls me "Doughboy" sometimes, I dig on her cooking, especially anything from the casserole family. It's how we get along, how any married couple gets along.

And I have to admit, a wooden ventriloquist's dummy is a lot better than Carl the mailman in a thong when I come home early from work. Victor is made of wood, not to mention a snob, maybe even gay, the way he drinks water at dinner and doesn't follow sports. I'll take a wooden gay dummy any day over Carl and his shorty-short blue pants with the black stripe running down the side. As long as Debbie does, too, we won't have a problem.

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