He chuckled, setting his red flesh in motion. Her father was short and ruddy and his complexion was so fraught with broken capillaries that in a certain light his cheeks seemed sculpted from venison. He had a convincing air of physical exhaustion about him at all times, though slightly less so now that he used a scooter due to a botched knee replacement. Pre-scooter, complete strangers often approached him to offer him bottles of water. You look thirsty! they’d say.
He was also covered with bright white body hair, which gave a wrongful impression of cuddliness. It reminded Hazel of a type of cactus named “old man cactus,” a metaphor gifted from nature. The plant had an inviting, shaggy white coat of fuzz, but the hairs were radial spines concealing a painful layer of central needles below the surface. “I told you she was a firecracker.”
It took a moment to realize that her father was talking to Diane, not to her. She sighed. Mostly out of disappointment that she wasn’t in a better position to be judgmental. Showing up at her father’s home and putting him at risk was indecent. She had no idea what Byron would do when she failed to return that night.
Hazel stared at the gaudy clip-on earrings her father had applied to Diane’s earlobes. What was that line Byron quoted when he allowed himself to have a tiny amount of alcohol and his dialogue began to sound lifted from a community-theater rendition of Plato? Man’s greatest desire is simply to bring things to life? “Christ, Dad,” Hazel said, which surprised her. “Jesus” and its synonyms weren’t her usual exclamatory go-to’s. But if this wasn’t a time for a quasi-swear invoking the religious vocabulary of resurrection, when? “Okay. Fine. Thank you both for having me. How’s that?”
“You haven’t gotten old yet, Hazel,” her father said. “You have to find happiness wherever you can get it.”
“So should I call her Diane or Di or Mom?”
“Hazel! She’s not trying to be your mother. Play nice already. Will you have a drink with us? I feel like celebrating.”
Before she could answer, he’d reversed and begun accelerating toward the kitchen. The Rascal’s top speed was just fast enough to make Diane’s long red hair flow back in the breeze.
“I feel like celebrating too,” Hazel called out, “in the sense that I’d like to completely withdraw from the realities of life.” She wasn’t sure if her father could hear her or not, over the sounds of the Rascal and the hum of the open refrigerator door; she supposed it didn’t matter. “I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, so it wouldn’t be a relapse . . . is there a name for the first time that a person gets really high on a lot of things, dangerously and possibly fatally high, in one’s early thirties? I certainly feel like doing that, though I won’t, because I’m afraid of an accident—not dying so much as managing to live but severely damaging my brain. Imagine the Frankensteinian attachments and implants Byron would attempt with me smiling and drooling the whole time. That’s probably his greatest fantasy—me as part computer, part vagina, part breasts. I’ve got to speed up this divorce paperwork! Just kidding. It’s pointless for me to file anything; there’s no way I could possibly protect myself from Byron in a court of law. Wow, do I wish there were. If I somehow managed to half-kill myself, it would be a real purgatory to have Byron helming my power-of-attorney wheel.”
“We can’t hear you!” her father called out from the kitchen. “One second!” As the headlamp of the Rascal grew brighter, easing toward the living room through the dark tunnel of the hallway, Hazel thought she spied her father give Diane’s earlobe a playful bite.
The basket of the scooter held a six-pack of domestic beer and a box of Ritz crackers. Hazel walked over and opened a can, opened another can for her father. “Is Diane a drinker, Dad?”
He gave her a wink with a glistening eye; he seemed to be on the brink of happy tears. “I drink for the both of us.”
“Cheers, Pops.” Hazel lifted her can and her father did the same. Somehow they formed an awareness that neither was stopping; they both chugged to the bottom and didn’t lower their cans until both were empty. He opened another, accelerated just enough to reach it over to Hazel.
“Cheers is right. I’m particularly giddy. It’s like a wedding day, but we skipped the boring part and got right to consummation.”
Hazel felt what she hoped was a belch rising. “Can I have another beer?”
“I’m serious, Hazel. I know how this must look, but I’m three years away from the average male life expectancy. What was that TV show where contestants had sixty seconds to run around a grocery store and shove as much crap into the cart as possible? That’s where I’m at, lifewise: if I don’t grab it off the shelves right now, I’ll never get to. There’s no more procrastinating. Here, let me show you something.”
And that’s when the bathrobe was lifted. With a quick flip of the wrist, her father relieved Diane of all modesty.
“Oh. Her breasts are huge.” Hazel realized she was whispering this with a tone of grievous acceptance, the way she’d report one friend’s cancer to another.
“The station wagon was practical,” her father acknowledged. “But I won’t be missing it.”
“How are they sloping upward like that?” Hazel asked. The doll’s breasts hung as though Diane were upside down doing a handstand. Her nipples literally pointed toward the ceiling.
“I could hypothesize, Hazel, but I’d have to get a little spiritual on you.”
An ambulance went by, its loud wailing pausing the conversation. It seemed to make her father recall a previously forgotten point. “That’s another thing,” he added. “Do you remember Reginald and his wife, Sherry?”
Yes, Hazel confirmed, she was not imagining it; there was an overall conical shape to Diane’s breasts that was aesthetically energizing—she wondered if she could admit this while still continuing to loathe sex overall to spite Byron. When the trouble had first started, she’d thought it might be enough to just begin despising sex with him, but she soon saw that was just not going to cut it. Hazel knew that it would seem, to one who might be an amateur at marital rancor, that her masturbating while thinking about someone else would be a victory for her—pleasure, orgasm, the thrill of a mental affair—and a loss for Byron. Not so. She’d tried this for a while, and realized that she was becoming more in touch with her sexuality than ever: she was constantly thinking about sex, longing for sex; her body was turning into a Mardi Gras float except instead of throwing out beads it was tossing heavy vapors of pheromones to anyone close enough to smell, which often included Byron. He was delighted. It didn’t even matter that they weren’t having sex, because she was oozing it; Hazel had a glow and everyone who saw her, she was quite sure, attributed it to Byron fucking her with sovereign competence. That’s when she realized: If one wanted to make a house inhospitable, closing off the vents to one room would not be enough. The power must be cut completely. So she shut everything down. And frankly, now, Hazel was a little disturbed by how the first thing in years to stir those embers was a hyperbolic set of plastic tits.