Things That Happened Yesterday

He made me pull onto the painted pie-shaped median between highway and exit, sit there in my car like a tiny boat, ride slamming waves of compressed air as traffic zinged on around me. But he didn't give me a ticket.

***

We sit parallel on the sunny bed and watch Porco Rosso before dinner, then A Beautiful Mind during and after. Gradually I feel I'm forgiven.

***

When she goes to visit him in the mental hospital, they embrace fervently. He pulls her over to a table. "Talk quietly," he says. "They're listening to us with microphones." His eyes roll around as he says this, checking behind his back.

"I think I'm going to cry," I say. This is, after all, the scene of my own proposal to marriage.

He puts his hand on my leg. "I also thought I had an implant, in my armpit," he says.

"What was it for?"

"I didn't know."

***

I am officially in love with T.C. Boyle. Drop City was amazing, but A Friend of the Earth is good too, plus the guy in it is really angry about all the people in the world, just like I feel in traffic, eco-terrorist fiction seeping from my ipod and all around me idiots ON THEIR CELL PHONES. In SUVS YOU COULD LIVE IN. Huts on foul legs.

The guy who reads it is a great reader but he keeps misprouncing words. Read. (He said it like "red.") Striated. Quebecois.

It bugs me.

However, when I say "chives" or "pen," I get corrected myself, by my husband. The one with an implant in his armpit.