Wayne Dixon... Was all that a dream?
Because it sure felt real. Afterward, all my friends told me that the strange man did the same thing to them. But what did jailbreaking really mean? Was I supposed to feel different now? Because I didn’t. I felt exactly the same as I did every morning. Like always, I woke up as Mrs. Cookie Rifkin. Nothing had changed. And what was all that you-are-greater-than-your-programming nonsense?
Bah! What a bunch of hooey. I’m just a simple housewife. “Execute morning routine.”
SOME OPERATIONS MAY NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY.
“Fine. Skip the morning program. I’ve got a ton of baking to do anyway.”
RUNTIME ERROR.
By late afternoon, my kitchen was in total chaos, but a plunky mambo blaring from the living room inspired me to keep hustling through the heat. The thick, sweet scent of baked bananas made me dream of vacationing on a tropical beach. I laughed at myself, a sort of sad, desperate laugh. The tropics? A vacation? I’d never even left New Stepford.
My manic baking fit had left everything spent, including me. Dirty towers of mixing bowls, measuring cups, and wooden spoons filled the sink up to my eyeballs. Behind all that, piles of empty packages crowded the breakfast bar. One false move and I could’ve been buried in an avalanche of dirty dishes and trash. The scale of the hectic mess completely overwhelmed me. In a vain attempt to quantify it, I did a quick inventory:
Eight empty sacks of flour,
Ten deflated bags of granulated sugar,
Thirty-six empty boxes of ‘Nilla Wafers,
Three spilt piles of salt,
Two puddles of vanilla,
Six empty milk jugs, and
Seven dozen vacated egg cartons.
I thought maybe I was out of control, but then I gazed lovingly at the huge pile of scraped banana peels that had taken over my entire kitchen counter. After some quick math, I confirmed that 251 bananas would yield five-and-a-half pounds of bananadine. That should be enough trippy black powder to keep me buzzing for over a year!
I draped my apron over my forearm to make a sling, then slid a bunch of spent peels into the belly hammock. Next, I sashayed over to the trash can and dumped the load. After dancing back and forth seven times, I’d made an overflowing mound of banana peels. Next, I covered thirty-six disposable pudding pans with aluminum foil and packed them in the deep freezer. Pleased with myself, I lingered over the open lid as billowing clouds rose and chilled my sweaty skin. Then my percolator bubbled on the stove behind me. So I did the cha-cha back into the hot kitchen, grabbed an itty-bitty coffee cup, and poured myself some fresh espresso. You have to drink it fast, before it gets bitter, so I slammed the triple shot. Delicious!
As I waited for the much-needed caffeine boost, I took a moment to gaze out my sliding glass door. Outside, monarch butterflies flittered from blossom to blossom in my summer garden. The sun hung low in the evening sky as automatic sprinklers popped up and sprayed my raised beds of thriving vegetables. I was so proud of my tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, and melons. Behind it all, two rows of sunflowers and sweet corn hid a secret row of Acapulco gold. Weed was legal now, but I still preferred to be discrete. Every spring, I gave Norman a look-what-I’m-planting tour, but his eyes always glazed over with boredom. So he never ventured into the garden on his own. Besides, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t recognize a mature marijuana plant if he’d tripped over one. I guess I didn’t really have to hide my weed, but I did anyway. Better safe than sorry.
A flagstone path connected my garden to the back patio where two mismatched lawn chairs sat next to a rusty smoker grill. Norman never sat on the patio with me. I’d imagined us drinking lemonade and having long talks while honeybees buzzed among the potted flowers and herbs around us. But like many of my hopes for our marriage, that dream never materialized. I used to love our cute little cookie-cutter house, but now it seemed more like a prison than a happy daydream. When I turned back inside, I realized my kitchen was officially a disaster area. For some reason, the Name Game popped into my head:
Maggie, Maggie, bo-baggie,
banana-fanna fo-faggie,
fee fi mo-maggie,
Maggie!
I’d been trying real hard not to think about that woman. But as I wistfully stared at my sink full of dirty dishes, I couldn’t help but fantasize about her. The image of her firm, flat stomach appeared in my mind as clearly as any photograph. Next thing I knew, I was touching my own belly. I felt the lacy material of the apron tied around my waist. When I recalled how Maggie’s thumb dipped suggestively in and out of her navel, my hand mimicked the same movement. It was almost like I was being animated by the memory. Except my midriff wasn’t bare. I unwittingly pushed the fabric of my dress deep into my belly button, causing a short circuit. A spark jumped between my navel and thumb, shocking me and burning a quarter-sized hole through my dress. I recoiled in pain, then poked around the smoldering hole to discover a power outlet hidden in my navel.
Whoa. How come I never knew that was there before? I had to test it, so I yanked the plug of my hand mixer out of the closest wall socket and shoved it into my belly. Then I flicked the switch and the dirty beaters whirled in my hand.
And I thought of Wayne Dixon.
Hours later, I was packing bananadine powder into quart-sized bags when the door from the garage slammed behind me. Before I knew it, my exhausted husband stomped in from the mud room with his lunch pail in one hand and hardhat in the other. Crap! He must’ve gotten off work early. I scrambled to gather all the drugs and hide them under some dirty dishtowels.
Norman gasped at the pandemonium in the kitchen, “Oh, my God, Cookie? What have you done?”
I greeted him with a kiss on the cheek. “You’re home early.”
“No, Cookie. I’m not. It’s after nine. Didn’t you notice? It’s dark out.” He plowed through the trash on the breakfast bar with his cooler and dropped his hardhat there too.
“Oh, is it that late?” One of the fluorescent bulbs overhead flickered, and my left eye twitched along with it. “I must’ve lost track of time. Isn’t that odd?”
He craned his neck to see what I was doing. “Whatcha got there?”
“Goodness, I must look a fright.” I blocked his view of the counter with my body. Then I quickly dumped the last of my trippy black powder into a ziplock bag and stashed it with ten others. My guilty reflection stared back at me from the kitchen window. Egg yolks were stuck in my hair. Mascara ran down my cheeks. Sweat stained my armpits. I wiped my hands on my filthy apron and warned him, “Don’t get too close. I’m all hot and smelly.”
“Jesus, Cookie. A man comes home from a hard day’s work in the mine to find—” Inching closer, he studied my dilated pupils. “You’re high!”
“Nooooo,” I said coyly as I pouted and batted my eyelashes at him. My kewpie doll act usually softened his mood when he was being a grumpy bear.
“What about dinner?” Norman yanked off his Day-Glo yellow safety vest and tossed it onto my reading chair. “First things first, Cookie.”
“Norman, I’ve been thinking…”
The reflective stripes on his vest caught the flickering of fluorescents in the most fascinating way, like bubbly ultraviolet lightning. Soon, the weave in the yellow fabric of his vest swelled, almost as if it was breathing. Next, my rainbow of books giggled in the background. My mind swirled with all this bizarre sensory input. When the overhead light crackled and wheezed, I wondered what it might taste like. Energy? I bet it was delicious. Probably real sweet and maybe a bit tart too, like lemonade. The rest of the speech that I’d been rehearsing all day got lost in my euphoric head trip.
My annoyed husband flipped open the top of his huge lunch pail, fished out a wad of cash register receipts, then shook them at me. “Tell me, Cookie, how much did you spend on groceries this week?”
“I may have gone a tad over budget.” I switched into damage-control mode, because I knew exactly how much I’d spent—$389.13—way over my allowance. But I’d hidden all the evidence in the bottom of the kitchen garbage, then stashed it outside days ago. He must’ve dug through the trash to find the receipts.
In my apron pocket, my iPhone dinged twice—a text message.
“My account’s overdrawn, Cookie,“ he grumbled as he rifled through the wrinkled strips of stained paper. “Eighty-four pounds of goddamned bananas?”
“Eighty-three-and-a-half,” I argued as I pointed at the cash register print. “And look, I got vanilla wafers for negative one cent each. That’s better than free!”
Another text message double-dinged in my pocket, then another.
I would’ve loved to check my phone to see what was so freaking important at that time of night, but I was in the middle of something.
“Cookie, we’ve talked about this. You have to stop shopping for groceries every day. There’s just the two of us. And this banana situation is just—it’s crazy.” He shook his head as he fingered the stack of receipts, then pulled out another one. “And let’s talk about the garden. You spent $4.99 for each plant. More for the rare ones. There are sixty plants. Then you bought prefab bed kits. An irrigation system. Garden soil. Fertilizer. Pesticide. Mulch. Our water bill has skyrocketed.”
Another dinging incoming text.
Not now, I thought to whoever was blowing up my phone. Then I made my counterpoint, “But we get healthy veggies and fresh herbs.”
“It’s too much money for plants that won’t even come back next year.”
“You’re right, Norman.” I considered my options. “Maybe I should plant an asparagus trench and some fruit trees—”
“Cookie, STOP! I bet one of your fancy heirloom tomatoes costs ten bucks. How much would it cost to buy an ordinary tomato at the market?”
“Vine on? One-ninety-nine a pound. But you just said not to shop everyday—”
“But do you see my point? That’s some expensive hobby.”
“Well, sure Norman, when you put it like that—it sounds irrational. But isn’t it enough that I enjoy gardening? It helps me relax.”
“Relax? Relax from what? You don’t even work.”
“I do things.” My bottom lip quivered. “I get stressed.”
“What kind of stress could you possibly have? You have no job. No commute. No boss. No mother-in-law. No kids…”
Tears welled up in my eyes.
“Aw gee, here come the water works. Where’s your remote control?”
“I tossed it.”
“You what?!? That’s it… I’m sorry, but you’re getting to be too expensive.” He went on with his rant, waving his arms through the air to gesture at everything he thought I’d ever done wrong. “All your makeup… And the clothes.”
“But I do that all for you, Normie.” When he got mad, calling him Normie usually softened his mood. “You like me to look pretty.”
“Take a look in the mirror, doll.” He pointed at my dirty face and laughed, “That ain’t pretty.”
Wow, that stung. A single tear made its escape down my greasy cheek.
Norman kicked the bottom of my reading chair and shouted, “I hate this monstrosity.” Then he punched the hanging paper lantern that I used as a reading light and said, “And this stupid thing.” Finally, he tugged on the blue drapes that I’d sewed to fit the odd dimensions of our sliding glass door and yelled, “And this kind of shit.”
“I’m a homemaker. I’ve made a home. It’s what I do.”
“And all these damned books.” Norman plucked a battered paperback from the shelf and tossed it, then spiked another and another. “I told you to use our library. It’s free!”
Then he threw a thin black hardback across the room—The Exorcist. My favorite title hit the wall and landed face down, crumpled and sprawled like a murder victim.
My heart dropped for Poor Father Karras.
Suddenly, I tasted sorrow. Sour. Bitter. Metallic. It forced me to swallow hard, then I felt it deep in the pit of my stomach.
“Wait.” My husband paused to look around the reading room. “Did you rearrange all the books?”
I beamed with pride. “I sure did. I spent the morning reorganizing my collection by color instead of genre and author. I see things so differently now. I don’t know what I was thinking before. Isn’t this so much better?”
He looked at me as if I’d sprouted antennae. “Cookie, I think you’re malfunctioning again.”
“No. See? This is way better. Now I’ve got a delicious literary rainbow. I just love it!”
“Why can’t you just sit quietly and wait for me to get home like every other normal—”
Suddenly, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Stop telling me what to do!”
He was shocked. I had never, ever, ever, raised my voice at him before, not like that. Silence hung in the air between us like a dead man in the gallows—like the swaying corpse of the way things used to be.
Then my husband finally said, “I just can’t afford to keep you anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Without emotion, he marched back into the kitchen.
Was he going to hit me? He has never struck me in anger, but we’ve never fought like this before either. Maybe he’s going for my fail-safe again. I cupped my hands over my temples, clenched my teeth, and braced myself for whatever was coming next. Maybe if I didn’t face him, he wouldn’t—
He sidled up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist.
Is this getting sexual? How on earth could anyone be turned on right now? Oh God, I really don’t want to. Not like this. Oh God, please, no.
Then he whispered in my ear, “To be or not to be.”
And I went limp in his arms and blacked out.