A Surprising Measure of Subliminal Sadness

By Sue Powers

From the death of a beloved cat that leads to the breakdown of a relationship to a girl's struggle with the thrill of shoplifting, A Surprising Measure of Subliminal Sadness ranges the gamut of domestic restlessness. This is a book about unbreakable habits and the habits which break us. Powers conjures a domestic landscape which begins in an

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648261848

Book preview

A Surprising Measure

of

Subliminal Sadness

Sue Powers

atmosphere press

Copyright © 2020 Sue Powers

Published by Atmosphere Press

Cover design by Nick Courtright

No part of this book may be reproduced

except in brief quotations and in reviews

without permission from the publisher.

A Surprising Measure of Subliminal Sadness

2020, Sue Powers

atmospherepress.com

TABLE of CONTENTS

Part One

13 Rules        3

Eleven Jewish Korean Vets       7

When Something Happens      22

The Darling Smiths       30

The News      46

Part Two

Ennui      53

Shopping      54

Brother       55

What She Knew      56

Three Brothers      57

Part Three

T’aime Moi       63

We’re Not Them       68

Part Four

Born Again      91

You and PJ and Molly and Zack      107

Into the Heat       111

Tiny Red Dot       118

Last Call      124

Here’s How      132

Part One

13 Rules

Don’t smoke for the first hour of the day. Not in the house, and never with your first cup of coffee. These are absolutely hard and fast rules to live by. During the first hour, you could easily drink five cups of coffee and smoke three or four cigarettes before your eyelids open and your husband is already whispering into the phone. Think about something else, say skin and clothes that smell like lilacs, a shower with herbal shampoo. Afterwards, do not go outside for your first smoke of the day, or check the clock and see you’ve only managed to expend thirty minutes. Spend the next thirty minutes eating breakfast and not listening to your husband’s conversations on the phone. Remember, ten cigarettes a day is your goal and you do not wish to smoke five of them before nine a.m. This may be difficult as you are used to smoking two packs a day, but think of the money you will save and of not irritating your husband, the new ex-smoker who, though whispering into the ear of someone not you, suddenly claims he’s allergic to your smoke.

Count your cigarettes throughout the day, and take a sleeping pill before bedtime. This will help you sleep and also curb your craving for a fix of nicotine when you awaken in the middle of the night and discover your husband has left the bed for the too-short-for-his-legs couch. Decide this means he prefers this discomfort to lying next to you. Decide later if you are overreacting.

Remind yourself daily that your goal is ten cigarettes a day, or twenty should your husband get drunk and start flirting with your friends. First consider all you and he have been through together, and toss back a beer. Consider all the beers he’s tossed back over the years and consider the years you always believed he was faithful to you.

Resist the urge to go through his jeans pockets, coat pockets, car. Resist all manner of snooping, even those times you have access to his wallet and the intriguing trail of calls you find in his cell phone. Never call any of the unknown numbers you find in his cell phone, nor should you write them down and check them later at switchboard.com.

Never, ever, read his email before you read your own.

Remember, if you choose to live with a cheating man you do so knowing this is certainly better than living without him. In your addiction-laden mind, living without him would be like giving up all your cigarettes instead of living inside a few rules of limitation.

Get a hobby or join a Partners without Borders support group. It will take your mind off your troubles and perhaps create better ones.  At your support group, for instance, you might meet a twenty-something woman with startling green eyes and slicked back hair, whose thickly lashed eyes bore into you as she asks for your number.

Resolve to forget about the young woman with startling green eyes who invites you to sit on the back of her Harley and drive you to the lake to watch the sunset. Go to the library and look up books on sexual behavior that don’t necessarily explain what you need to know about your boyish woman-on-a-Harley attraction. Just set your resolve on not driving to the beach with this woman or any other woman; for that matter, set your resolve on not leaving your husband, unless of course your husband leaves you first.

When the boyish bike babe takes you for a ride along the lake, just pretend she’s another friend. If she makes you laugh until your sides ache and your heart beats wildly inside your chest as you sit on her bike and clutch her around the waist, remember: friend.

Resist the temptation to kiss your new friend Billie on her very kissable lips. Think of your husband’s kissable lips and resist imagining what Billie’s lovely lips would feel like on your skin. Brush aside your thoughts, everyone has a fantasy life, yours is just more highly evolved. In particular, ignore that fact that she has told you how much she wants you. Ignore all of her attempts at seduction; especially ignore the pulsing sensation between your legs when you just speak to her on the phone.

Now is the perfect time to remember how it feels to be in your husband’s arms when he wants you. Remember this is why you are outside smoking in the sleeting rain, and not on the couch under a cozy blanket fantasizing about your friend and what you might wish to do with her should your clothes accidentally come off under a blanket on the sand.

Your ease with smoking outdoors could come in handy down the road. Particularly when the acrid odor of booze and smoke lingers on your husband’s clothes as he removes them, indicating for certain he hasn’t been with you. At this point, you have permission to go outside for a smoke in the middle of the night and consider ripping up your list of rules to live by and making new ones.

Under the new rules, when your husband comes into the room where you are speaking quietly into the phone to your new friend, don’t hang up. She might be telling you she thinks about you all the time. She might be telling you, or is about to tell you, that she thinks she loves you. Say that you can’t speak freely now. Say this in code, and as the possible hot conversation grows cold, light up a cigarette right there in the room and remain calm, for while a great self-righteous noise emanates from your husband, who is waving at the smoke and pretending to gasp for air, you might readily agree to any rule if he would please just shut the fuck up.

Eleven Jewish Korean Vets

You come from a family of addicts, her mother warns her. Amy’s been slipping away to the alley behind their Chicago apartment for many more purposes than her mother knows. But her mother has just washed Amy’s favorite jacket, and behold! (oy!) found a soggy remnant of a cigarette stub in the pocket.

Amy the adult will hate cigarette smoking, although she will not be averse to inhaling a little weed now and again. As an eight-year-old, however, her main concern is simply for the safety of her secret stash of Camels hidden under a pile of abandoned Barbie dolls in her closet, cigarettes stolen from E. J. Korvettes, a mere three block walk from most points of her limited universe.

Despite the confines of her narrow existence, Amy manages to do as she wishes, the secretness of it all a thing she loves. She is an impetuous, strong-minded child who steals candy, cigarettes, pen knives, small toys – whatever she can easily slip inside her pockets and later stash in the several hiding places she’s discovered around their apartment and in the alley. She also loves to toss basketballs in the alley with some very adult butch women, a thing she will always love to do.

Now watching her mother’s face gradually go from bright red to pink, she understands her mother’s anger is already fading. Her mother is an intelligent woman with the long, slender fingers of a musician and a razor-sharp tongue, though her anger tends to flicker out nearly as fast as it flares; a woman who is as easily distracted by a bug on the wall as a cool fall breeze, or a memory that floats behind her eyes and lands squarely on the forefront of her mind.

Amy calls her parents Mitzi and Morris. Jewel, her sister, she calls Butt Face or sometimes just Butt.

At thirteen, Jewel weighs more than her mother Mitzi. More than her father Morris. She was named Jewel after Morris’s mother, a fact she will never forgive. In the dark shadows of their bedroom, Jewel has confided to Amy she would give up anything, anything at all except maybe food, to have a name like Susan or Linda, or even Babs.

Their father Morris’ addictions are Peppermint Schnapps, baseball and sleeping on the couch in daylight hours. He works nights driving a cab and these are the only hours on the couch he has. Amy ignores him, ignores everything that doesn’t concern her, which of course is everyone and everything – perhaps the ‘things’ most of all. All the heavy furniture, doilies, old grey and white family pictures, silver candle sticks, hand dipped Shabbat candles, buffet overflowing with Passover dishes, silver platters, stupid ceramic figurines – far too many to count – things which seem to Amy to be overtaking the house, crowding her out.

She will grow from a skinny, eight-year-old tomboy into a small framed, femme woman, which to a twenty-something Amy will mean she fusses with her hair and cares what she wears. Later, her femme identity will acquire more nuances – a certain fluid walk, talk, at times