Comfortably Numb (Intro)

She walked slowly and softly around the sturdy oak table in the formal
dining room. The claw-foot pedestal legs seemed particularly vicious
this time of the month. A delicate lace tablecloth was barely visible
beneath a pile of bills slit open at their sides with the precision of a
butcher and situated on the table in a constellation that made sense only
to her, as the Pythagorean theorem or the law of relativity does to some,
as a recipe for pineapple upside-down cake does to others. Something
can be made of it, but only by certain people.

A letter opener her brother-in-law brought back from Korea lay next
to the freshest bill. The long red tassel had faded over the past forty
years, but not the hand-painted picture of a little man who stood in his
boat never losing his balance, still hoping for a lucky fishing day.

She took a deep breath, left the dining room, rummaged through the
desk in the kitchen. The lamp above the desk had lost its fluted cover
and a single bulb burned brightly, exposing a few cobwebs that hung
loosely to and from the phone like a flimsy hammock. She opened the
drawer and pulled out a pen she already knew didn’t work. The ink had
dried up years ago: thirty-nine to be exact, if she counted backward
from today, past her divorce, through the years. Back when there was a
roast beef cooking in that oven that hadn’t worked in five years. When
her children were outside running in a sky turning pink. Snotty nosed
and red cheeked, they’d burst in with her husband returning from work
with a similar charcoal-black pen with “U.S. Government” stamped on
the side sticking out of his front shirt pocket. If she closed her eyes,
she could still smell the Avon aftershave on it. But she simply turned it
over in her hand, the same way she turned over the past, never looking
at it directly but out of her peripheral vision. She placed it back in
the desk drawer along with nubby crayons, rubber bands, paperclips,
a watch that hadn’t worked in at least two years, a key chain from the
Golden Gate Casino, and a small plastic pink high-heel shoe from her
daughter’s Barbie doll. She’d sold the doll along with Barbie’s brunette
cousin, Francie, the red-headed Stacey, and Barbie’s beach house for
ninety-nine dollars to an obese woman whose number she had found in
the Thrifty Nickel.