|
She kept it hidden for a while and then sprang it on a night we
started to have sex but didn't finish. She pushed my thigh off her
thigh, cleared her throat and said, "Ted, I want you to know, I like
the dolphins."
 I nodded and went to the bathroom. I knew she wasn't talking
about dolphins in general and she'd never mentioned football as an
interest, but we'd only been together for a year -- people forget things.
The next morning I found a Miami Dolphins pennant on the
refrigerator and at night Chrissy came to bed in a Dolphins jersey
stretching well past her ass.
I sat in the dark for a long time. "Are the Dolphins going to be
good for us?" I asked.
In the next week I awoke three times to her watching games from
the 1984 AFC Championship season. Her hair in pigtails, her pom-poms
orange and blue. "Jesus Christ," I shrieked, "We have to go to work in
two hours."
She twisted a pom-pom in my face. "You are fair weather, so so
so so fair weather."
At work I staggered around the office, staring at other,
normal-seeming women. I spoke to Leslie about good dentists in the
area. I joked with Madeline about file folders. "Problems on the home
front Ted?" my supervisor said.
"Chrissy really likes the Dolphins."
At home I was made to be a dummy that Chrissy would practice
clipping penalties on. Salivating, she said, "It hardly gets called,
but when it does, it's totally amazing." She now went to her reception
job in full regalia, missing only the shoulder pads. In a few days she
was fired and immediately urged a move to Miami. I snapped my fingers
in front of her nose. "I like Cleveland and you told me you liked it
too."
I told friends, I told family. I told our neighbors, I told
everybody. They would not reply. It was like I hadn't spoken. I went
to the police and they laughed. The Dolphins weren't even in the same
division as the Browns, what the fuck did they care.
I looked around the city I lived in, wondering about the world
and specifically my sexual needs. We hadn't done it since 'the night
of the Dolphins,' as I now referred to it.
On a Sunday when Chrissy had the four big Dolphin fans in the
Cleveland area over to watch the game, I went to a bar with no TV's, a
red interior and a reputation for bringing people together. I found a
woman who wrote werewolf novels. She'd lived in Scotland and had
straight black hair, three inch fingernails. She knew I was married,
she knew my kind of problems. I went after her hands but that must
have been rude because she swatted at me with her new werewolf
manuscript. "I don't think this is going to work," she said.
"But you know me," I cried. "You know the issues. The person
that becomes another creature. You write about it all the time."
"I write from the viewpoint of the werewolf," and she wiggled
out of the booth and stood up. She was six-foot-seven. I could
understand her now -- a really tall woman wants a really tall man, that
which I was never. I twirled my thumbs and moaned and she smashed my
face. "And don't tell a woman that she knows you." Then she whacked me
again, "And that's for all the werewolves."
|
