From

The Future for Curious People

By Gregory Sherl

Home now. In front of the fourth floor walk-up I’ve been sharing with Madge for nearly six months. I raise my arms over my head. Coach used to suggest this for cramps. I bend over, stick my head between my knees. I try to count slowly to twenty-five, but I keep losing my place around twelve. I look up, directly at our fourth-floor window, but I only see blinds, blips of light peeking through. Why isn’t Madge looking for me? Is anyone thinking about me right now? If not, do I exist just a little less?

A woman walks by pushing a stroller. She’s staring at my hands as if looking for what I might be holding. Just bulky mittens with mitten clips that are more appropriate for a 4 year old in the 1950s! I want to tell her. I nod politely, look into the stroller. The baby is so packed in that I can barely make out a face squinched up in puffy drawstring hood. All babies are just pudge until they’re not. It’s a disturbed little face, so red and puffed it could be choking, but then the face twists and begins to wail. I flinch. My heart stutters. This is just the kind of thing that happens to all men before they propose, I tell myself. But then, for a moment, I’m sure I’m dying. This is it, I know, squeezing my eyes shut.

A second later, I’m not dead. Fifteen seconds later, still not dead. My heart still beats. My lips still inch open to let air in. The moment passes. Another moment passes.

“Why are you standing out in the cold?” It’s Madge’s loud voice, which carries like a soccer coach. She’s overhead. Her hair is blowing around her beautiful face, her whole upper body is sticking out the window. Some women’s breasts can remind you of the singular term bosom, but not Madge’s. She has great breasts, ample and buoyant, and independent of each other.

I’ve been expecting her, wishing for her, but I didn’t realize how not ready I was for the reality of her. This is going to be my wife. Wife! It’s disorienting.

I look away at the gargoyles perched on the corners. One is stuck in an indiscreet position — is he scratching his balls or protecting them? You can never be too sure. The sky is a gusty gray. It snowed earlier and might snow again.

“Godfrey!” Madge yells again.

I’m stuck on the idea of proposing outside. It strikes me that I might pick Madge up and spin her around — if she says yes — that I might actually yawp. I look up and down the street, shout back, “I’m not sure why I’m out here still! Are you ready?”

“I’ll be down!” She sighs. It’s a gusty sigh, the kind you give a child, and slams the window shut. Standing there in my mittens, I shift my weight from one foot to the other, feeling tall and galumphing. I’m on the tall side; nice little league coaches told my parents that, one day, I’d grow into my body and become, suddenly, coordinated. That never happened.

I shouldn’t have worn the mittens. I should feel more manly right now.

But here’s something I love about Madge: she’s quick to get angry, but also quick to get over it. When she appears on the stoop in her red coat, she’s over being annoyed with me, and she looks fantastic.  She’s wearing frosty lipstick, as if she’s just kissed a cake. Madge is good to me. She really is. She once made homemade matzo ball soup for me when I was sick and she’s not even Jewish. She looked it up online.

I want to yell out, Madge! I! Love! You! I am happy. There’s so much blood in my head, I’m top heavy. She walks up and kisses me on the mouth. Right there, full mouth. Her lips are warm. Her lips are a heater and when I hug her, perfume gusts up from her coat. This has been my problem since I’ve started growing hair where there never used to be hair: I love women. I should stand in the middle of a group of men sitting in chairs shaped in a circle: My name is Godfrey and I love women. I’m completely susceptible to them. It’s a difficult way to go through life, constantly falling in love. I don’t wear love very well. And, because of my weaknesses, I’m dangerous. I have to keep myself in check, always. Madge helps keep me in check mainly because she’s enough. Madge is so full of life, so vigorously alive that I’m rapt every time she walks into a room – or out of a building… to meet me.

“Why were you lurking?” Madge asks, jokingly. “You shouldn’t lurk. People will think you’re a serial killer. Are we going to the sushi place? It’s my turn, you know.”

And that’s how quickly it changes. Taking turns. This is my future. Life doled out simply: Madge’s turn. Then: my turn. Everything in this moment seems suddenly permanent. Everything in this moment is permanent.

Fact: I hate sushi. Rolls too big for your mouth, but you don’t dare cut them with a fork.  I don’t trust raw fish. Normally I might say, “I only eat sushi that’s well done.” Or I might say, “I’m not feeling suicidal enough for sushi today.” But this would encourage Madge to give me a speech on living life to the fullest, and I’m never in the mood for that, much less now, on the brink of such emotional risk. My hands feel too hot for the mittens and now I’m thinking of the wallets I’ve lost and the girlfriends I’ve lost, too – Tina Whooten, Liz Chase, the Ellis Twins. I look up at the buildings around us, hundreds of windows. How many women are in there? How many could I fall in love with? How many would let me fall in love with them? Am I choosing the right one? Does it mean something to even be thinking this?

“Why are you just standing there, Godfrey?” I stop and look at Madge. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Jesus, I’m just standing here, looking at her like that. To be honest, I’m not really sure what that is. “I’m sorry,” I say, glancing at my shoes. How is it possible that my shoes look rumpled? If I were holding an ironing board, that would probably look rumpled, too. “You know,” I tell Madge, “If we ever had kids, they’d have a fifty percent chance of rumpledness.” I look back at Madge.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “You aren’t making a lot of sense. Are you drunk or something?”

“I mean,” I say, “I’m sorry about not having a better job. I should have paid better attention in college, taken harder classes. You know, really hunkered down with something like pre-med.” Madge talked me out of being an elementary school teacher, explaining how much money they make when they hit their salary ceiling.

“Are you going to throw up? You look that same way you did on the subway that time.”

“Just listen,” I say, trying not to raise my voice. “I’m not going to throw up.” Now that I say it, though, I’m not so sure. I feel shaky. I finally take off the mittens. They dangle on the strings. Slowly, I reach into my pocket. “Madge.” My chest tightens. I feel a fiery heat, a certain lightheadedness. “Look, I mean,” I manage to say. “Here.” I hand her the box.

Madge opens the box and then shuts it. She’s smiling.

“I was planning on picking you up and spinning you around.” I want to tell her, Sometimes I wish I could reverse time and start over, from the very beginning – my first wail. “I feel like passing out.” I sit on the stoop.

“Godfrey,” she says, “listen.” She sits down next to me. “I think we should look into this. Go forward carefully.” She draws out the carefully, all three syllables.  “You know?”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a yes, kind of. A slow, careful, looking-into-it yes.”

“Okay.”

Madge smiles and puts her arm around my shoulder like a fellow sailor. We are out at sea together, hunting our dinner: giant whales, kraken. Maybe we are in a submarine, sitting on tons and tons of nuclear warheads. Madge finally says, “I thought you’d say no. Funny, huh?”

I am baffled. “Say no? To what exactly? I mean, I asked you.”

“To looking into it first.”

“Looking into what?”

“Well, I don’t think we should use the same envisionist. I mean it’s like sharing a therapist or something. I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about Dr. Plotnik and you should see Dr. Chin. I hear he’s very good at giving the total experience. I almost made appointments but decided I should at least wait until you asked first.”

Madge hasn’t put on the ring. It’s still in the box. The box is pretty, but nothing should stay in the box. “You’re talking about envisionists?” There’s a billboard on the beltway: Dr. Chin’s Envisioning Services, Now Offering: The Future — for Curious People. At the bottom it says, “It’s easier to choose the future, when you’ve seen the options.” And that actor who does all that sci-fi stuff has started doing commercials for some conglomerate that offers discount rates. “No. No way.”

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