Birthday Cookie: A Short Story by Lisa Vega
Edit by: Catie Menke. Photo by Tara Winstead from Pexels.
Short Story by: Lisa Vega
Editor: Jeni Fjelstad
Creative Direction: Catie Menke
I endure the sour-sweet mayonnaise smell as long as I can. It feels like a funeral, standing in the drab parking lot before sunrise, arms folded, paying my respects to a trashed pallet sign that was commissioned ironically to begin with. Doug and I had hung it upside-down in the entryway like an inverted crucifix, to serve as a warning to visitors: here be neighbors with no respect for suburbia. Run while you can. Now every muscle in my body is screaming for me to run. Away from this dumpster, toward the mountains, the sunset. Right into traffic.
I all but gave him the house; he laughed at me when I told him I'd only wanted the sign. “You said I was the sentimental one." We were sitting shattered on the carpet surrounded by things, mementos of what we were losing. “That’s because you hold onto shit like this.” I held up a bulging folio of old college assignments. Somewhere within were the sonnets we’d written to each other during our shared poetry workshop, along with our twin stories from Travel Writing 240, when we’d crashed on the floor of a friend’s apartment in Sedona, too poor at the time to venture out of state. We still held hands, giving a gentle squeeze each time one of us felt it was all too much. That was four months ago. This morning I tried burning the sign with a drugstore lighter. That was a mistake. Now it looks like the type of cheap novelty décor you notice and appreciate but never, ever buy, and that somehow makes everything feel worse.
I take a trembling breath in and let it out as a single sob. My marriage, unlike this sign, can’t be remade into something with new meaning. I repeat the words in my head. I say them aloud in eulogy.
“I’m starting to feel like he and I are on different planes of existence,” I explained to Dr. Garza, who had a habit of humming ambiguously in affirmation. “We’re just occupying the same space.”
“Mm,” she offered ungenerously. I avoided eye contact with her, instead staring at a framed picture of an angel on the side table. Dr. Garza’s office was an old sepia photograph that smelled of wood polish and dust. We’d been having the same conversation, I noticed, week over week. Different packaging but the same underneath. “I’ve worked with a lot of couples,” Dr. Garza started, “and what I often find is that one of the partners has no idea that the other has a particular need that they aren’t communicating.” I nodded, wondering if I could have found this same insight for free on a relationship blog. The advice I’d been receiving of late was varying. For instance, my mom told me that this was just what happens to married couples. Put enough years in and the romance dies. I asked myself if romance was all that necessary, if I could do without it. To live a life free from our expectations of each other — to be happy as we once were — sounded like a dream.
“The next time he tries to escape into one of his hobbies,” Garza chimed into my rumination, “I want you to try asking him to spend some time with you.”
I left that day, as I normally did, feeling light and exhausted, having cried out my worries. It would only take the twenty-minute drive home for the knot to build back up in my chest. Shouldering open the front door, I called out, "Homie, I'm home," but Doug had his headphones on, hunched over a stack of ungraded papers, and by then, I was tired of my feelings.
Past a certain age, bingeing a show alone with a glass of wine becomes a respectable way to spend your birthday. I choose a romcom from my feed that I’ve been ignoring. The couple in the pilot episode meet at their therapist’s office. They are miraculously both in their twenties, well-dressed and devastatingly attractive. After an awkward waiting room courtship, we find out he is rooting through deep emotional trauma; she is there for “routine maintenance.” It’s called Chemicals, and I end up hating it in all the ways I hate seeing my own face in a mirror.
"You wouldn't happen to be interested in some continued group therapy over dinner Saturday, would you?" The man asks the woman, with very little of the charm he is going for. She responds in kind, "I've read that food does help to increase your dopamine levels," and I wonder if the entire season will be like this. I end up leaving it on in the background while I build a dating profile, tuning in when I need help with prompts such as “my ideal first date.” During episode two, the two are perusing the shelves of a second-hand bookstore, flipping through the yellowed pages of old westerns while having a strangely competitive discussion on their various neuroses. The scene transports me back to the old record store Doug and I had frequented early on, that carried old books and smelled like cigarette smoke and was never short on odd treasures to comment on. Toward the end of our marriage, we rarely left the house. When we did, all we wanted was to be back home.
I am suddenly and profoundly bitter at the dating app and the show with its contrived characters and plot, so I curl up into the couch cushions and breathe through my anguish.
Today I turned 37. I’ve been with one guy my entire life, and I don’t know the first fucking thing about dating.
It started as a means of self-comfort. Doug had dove headfirst into one of his podcasts the minute he came home from work. I was pretending to read while my mind spun elaborate justifications for his distancing. "I'm really stressed," he had said in the past. "My patterns help me relax." He was self-sufficient, a creature of habit, and here I was carving out a space for myself where I didn't belong. We passed the night in a silence that seemed only to bother me, and the thought simply slid into my awareness and out again, like a scrolling marquee. We'd be better as friends. I shook it away, the first time.
I did end up taking Dr. Garza's advice. I asked Doug for his time, and we went on a date. The comic book shop where we had first officially met; I thought it the perfect setting for a resurrection or a wake up call. The location had moved since I was last there, during college. Doug was huffing his displeasure by the time I'd found the building and a spot to park. It was a warm day, and I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my arm, adjusting my purse on my shoulder. We discovered, upon entering the shop, that the original owner was no longer there. "He retired a few years back," the girl at the counter said, popping her bubblegum. "Let me know if you need anything." Doug and I quickly separated as I eagerly thumbed through the bins of plastic-wrapped issues, arranged in alphabetical order. When I noticed him standing awkwardly near a shelf of board games and dice, I closed the distance. "See anything you like?" I took both his hands. He grinned down at me. "Of course."
After that I dragged him about, pointing at figurines and video game titles, scanning his face for cues. "Remember these?" I offered, picking up pieces of nostalgia to wave in front of his face in desperation. He gave me little reassuring pats which provided no comfort. He was bored, and we both knew it. He was enduring for my sake.
As we shuffled back to the car, my passing thought became a question, "Don't you think we'd make better friends?"
Doug's face fell. "What?" he asked. My ears rang.
"Like instead of spouses," I clarified. "Don't you think we'd be better off as just friends?"
He gave a long pause, then responded enigmatically: "Do you?" I was starting to feel like an ass, or perhaps it was that he was purposely making me feel like an ass.
"Maybe," I challenged. We stared each other down over the roof of my car, as if we were both wary of making sudden movements, before he finally looked away with a "huh."
"I think we should get a divorce," I said one morning, and that was that. The word had a permanence to it that I'd braced for, and yet the sound of it still made me flinch. We were both in the kitchen. Doug had been in the fridge but turned to face me. I was leaning with both hands on the counter for stability. His eyes brimmed with betrayal and disbelief, and I knew that mine looked much the same.
"Yes," I said, and at the moment I wasn't even certain I meant it, but it was too late. The word hung on the air, almost visible. It shrieked its own name. It promised to poison all we had left.
There was no going back to a time when it hadn't been there.
I'd ordered a pack of four to deliver to my apartment, but they all smooshed together during travel, so I stabbed a candle into the least damaged one and placed it onto a saucer, which brings me to now. I am aware of how pathetic I must look sitting at the head of an empty table before an imperfect cookie, about to blow out the lonely little candle in its center. But it's my gift to myself — for all I've given up, survived and overcome — and I feel like I need it.
I make a wish to be okay, take a deep breath in, and…
...I put out the candle in a dainty little puff. I want it to feel like closure, but instead I feel about the same. Raw and aching, suspended in time. That's how these things go, I guess, as much as I had longed for something tidy and attractive to close out my evening. I check my phone for well wishes; among them is a message from Doug:
Happy Birthday, kid. Hope you're doing all right.
And it hurts to see, but maybe one day it won't.
At eighteen, when I should have been giving my presentation in 1800s American Lit, I was instead laying low at a comic book shop down the road from the university.
“Don’t you have class?” The owner, who had seen quite a lot of me in the past weeks, cocked an eyebrow. I buried my nose deeper into Milk Man, Issue 3: Mad Cow.
“Yeah, but not a lot going on today.” I was barely afloat with a C- and wondering how I’d pull off flying below Professor Bennet’s radar for the rest of the semester. Already he had singled me out with a “don’t be shy” during group discussion, and I often found myself dodging his gaze from the seat closest to the door.
"Creative Writing, with Professor Hawley?" I looked up to find a familiar face atop stooped shoulders. The boy, Doug Davis, was indeed from my Creative Writing class, easily recognizable for his large framed glasses, bushy eyebrows and a single lock of curly brown hair that hung down over the center of his forehead like Clark Kent.
That, and he’d used the word "resplendent" in one of his short story assignments, which I considered at the time a power move. He stood bashful with his hands in his pockets, and I felt a sudden irresistible urge to set him at ease. "Hey," was the best I could do.
“Doug,” he said, extending a hand. “What’re you reading?”
I took his hand and found it clammy. “It’s just this new series I’ve been interested in. You like comics?”
“Not really.” He shifted from one foot to another. “I’m taking this one class... just picking up some required reading.”
“Oh cool, anything I might know?”
We talked at length about books we liked, and while there wasn’t much there in common, I enjoyed the way his voice pitched higher when he got excited.
“Hey, would you like to grab ice cream, like right now?” he asked. I was taken aback by his boldness. He was standing close, so much so that I could notice the slight freckles along the bridge of his nose and a faded scar above one eyebrow, and I wanted to know how he got it and more.
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