The Problem of Human Consumption
Steve Almond
 

Then she sees that the object is the ring, her mother’s ring, and she is furious at herself for being so careless and a little frightened of what her father might do, and a little frightened, also, of what her father might not do, that he may be too cautious at this point to express what she would consider an appropriate rage. Because she did not, after all, receive this ring from her mother. She stole the ring from her father, from a shoebox tucked away on a high shelf in the closet in his study, where it was stashed, along with the results of a blood test and a yellowed marriage license and a ribbon which she imagines her mother wore on her wedding day, though she has never been able to find it in the photos.

Jess is considering all this when her father looks up.

Remember: the light is low. It is difficult to read precise expressions. These two are, more than anything, familiar shapes in the dark.

Paul feels dizzy with shame. He has been caught in his daughter’s room, playing with his wife’s ring, a ring which now belongs to Jess. The transfer of this object between the two women is, in his mind, an ancient secret he had no business discovering. He wishes he had slipped away a few minutes earlier, as he intended.

Jess doesn’t say anything. She is capable of excruciating silences. She doesn’t quite know how she should react, though she does have a vague sense that her father should take the lead here, he is the adult and the rightful owner of the ring and the person whose actions have initiated the moment.

But her father is standing there, frozen. The ring is quivering. Jess waits for him to speak. She still hasn’t figured out exactly how the ring is able to float there between his fingers. She wants to switch on the light, solve the mystery, confess to her secret theft, get everything out into the open. And then again, she wants to back away quietly and run to where her friends are waiting in a car by the curb. Her father might never say anything. He might suppose he had dreamed the entire thing. She would not put that past him.

Paul looks at his daughter, looks her flush in the face, that soft pink swirl of youth, and suddenly he is hungry again, famished. He wants to prepare himself another sandwich, heavy on the ham, and settle into his sleeping chair. But his legs won’t move and he remembers, rather too suddenly, that he used to feel this same way after making love to his wife, a queer, short-lived paralysis which overtook him as he lay in a pool of his own heat.

Jess sees her father begin to smile and she takes this as a bad sign. He looks a bit touched, and this worries her and this worry causes her to take a step into the room. Not a whole step, just an experimental little half-step, as if testing the temperature of a bath.

“Dad?” she says. “Are you alright?”

He nods, or tries to nod. She can’t tell.

“Is something the matter?” Jess steps closer. “What’s going on?”

Paul is shaking a little. He is looking at his daughter and smelling the sandalwood and remembering a trip they took years ago to the beach, to San Gregorio, south of Half Moon Bay, remembering the sandy hollow where they built a fire to roast hotdogs and marshmallows. He is thinking of his wife, who was not ill yet, not diagnosed, though she was tired more than usual, and despite this, the cooling breeze off the water and the rhythm of surf made them both amorous. Jess was there, too, in a little white bikini which she quickly shed. She ran about naked, chasing the gulls all the way down to the shore, until Paul was forced to go after her. He picked her up and swung her so that her toes swept across the water and she shrieked. The sun beat down on both of them. Later, her mother combed out her hair until she grew drowsy enough for a nap. Paul ate the last of the hot dogs and his wife lay beside him and set her hand on his chest and they whispered to one another, Should we? Do you think? though they already were (beneath their blanket) engaged in the soft panic of love. It was a weekday afternoon. There was no one else around. Their daughter slept beside them. Her hair, still blond, fell across her small brown shoulders.

Jess is still calling his name and she has, by now, stepped close, close enough to smell the meat on his breath, the tang of mustard, and she, too, is thinking about that trip to the beach, though she isn’t quite certain where she was, only that it was some place outdoors that smelled of fire and burned meat and that she woke to find her father on top of her mother, moving against her with a wet desperation, as if to devour her, while her mother smiled delicately in profile. Then her father looked over and saw her watching and seemed to want to say something to her, to yell or apologize, she couldn’t tell which, and she shut her eyes and turned the other way and soon after her mother got skinnier and skinnier and they locked her in the study. This is when all the aunts began to arrive and to give Jess gifts, one every morning. They told her she was beautiful again and again.

Jess would have no idea, at this point in her life, that she has associated this memory with her mother’s death, that, in some hidden cavern of her heart, she regards her father as having killed her mother, or, more precisely, that she regards she and her father as having collaborated in the murder of her mother.

She knows only that she has arrived home to find her father in her room, that he is shaking, his eyes clouded over, and because she loves her father she moves to embrace him, not a full hug, just a brushing of their two bodies in the dark. Her hair is shining like some wild flag and he is staring down at the ring, breathing heavily.

Paul is so hungry now he could eat a pig, a cow, an entire farm of useless beasts. All the fields of crops in all the countries of the world would not fill his belly. He can smell the smoke of the fire and the meat and he is lying with his wife on the warm sand and he is holding on to his only given daughter and he is starving to death.

It is important to remember that this is only a single moment, this tentative caress, nothing they will speak of again, an interlude.

It is important to remember that their crimes are not really crimes. They are simple human failings, distortions of memory, the cruel math of fractured hopes. The only true crime here is one of omission. The woman they both loved has been omitted from their lives. She is a beautiful ghost, a floating ring.

In less than a second, a horn will sound from below. Jess will fall back, swing herself away from her father and toward the rest of her life, her friends waiting in a car by the curb, the night to come, the boy who has told her she is beautiful, who will, in a few hours, in the basement of another home, slip his hand inside her pants and whisper again that she is beautiful.

As for the ring, it will be replaced, first by Paul, on the dresser, under the scrunchies, then by Jess, in the box on the shelf in her father’s closet.

Paul will return to the kitchen and make himself a sandwich, but the meat will taste rotten and this taste will haunt his tongue, even after he rinses with mouthwash, and he will drink warm milk instead and take a sleeping pill, and then a second, until he can feel the convincing blur of his dreams. In the days to follow, he will swear off meat, a gradual transition, so as not to detect the notice of his daughter.

But this, of course, is what lies ahead for them, as they race away from the hot center of themselves. Decent lives. Reasonable consumption.

For now, they are still together. Her arms are around him, one hand on his shoulder, the other touching the padding of his waist. He is staring at the ring. Hunger is surging inside him as he sways with her, once, through the dimness of the room. What are they doing here, exactly? Who can say about such things? They are weeping. They are dancing. They are prisoners of this moment and wonderfully, terribly alive.

Steve Almond is the New York Times bestselling author of Candyfreak. If you liked this story, you'd also like My Life in Heavy Metal.