A Good Set of Knockers Will Give Giant Leaps of Faith a Soft Landing

My friend Dan’s nervous ex-wife, Helen Who Hates Me, asked me for a ride to the airport. If you look up desperate in the dictionary, you will see this example of the proper use of the word: Helen was so desperate for a ride to the airport, she called a friend of her ex-husband whom she hates. It depends on the dictionary. I bet Helen has that very edition and needed to look up the spelling of desperate for an article she was writing, and like a horoscope, or a quote on the tag of a tea bag, that uncannily fits the situation at hand, she solves the transportation to the airport dilemma. The solution was found in, of all places, the dictionary. On the exact page to which she turned, no less. Providence.

Speaking of providence, after much online trolling, Helen scores a man who lives in Nebraska in a one-bedroom flat who will marry her, just after she drops off her belongings with family. Her belongings include her beloved 12-year old daughter and her loyal dog, her car and cats. She will leave all of the furniture with the last guy she met online. Since they belong to him. Helen will arrive in Nebraska by plane with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and the oversized computer in a brown paper grocery bag. Carry-on.

We know how well brown paper bags hold up just from the cart to the trunk. Can they hold up through airport security after they reduce the computer to a pile of parts to find a bomb? Helen hasn’t thought about this. Her mind is unable to imagine that someone would touch her computer with a screwdriver. It’s her computer! Maybe they’d take it out of the bag to verify that it is indeed a computer. She is worried only about the bag ripping if they don’t remove or slide it back in with proper care. They would tape it if they tore it. Security.

Helen is sure that they’ll just take her word for it, take into account her breasts and her innocent/anxious/about-to-jump-off-a-cliff-for-a-guy-she-met-online expression. (Which doesn’t look anything like the expression of a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his legs.) Maybe at the most, they’d plug it in and turn it on. But they would never disassemble it the way she has just disassembled her life. She has a plane to catch! And already she’s running behind! Airport security would take all of that into consideration and let Helen, an American, white, middle-aged woman with a ticket to Nebraska for love, glide through. Not!

I arrive to pick up Helen Who Hates Me at her ex-father-in-law’s house eight minutes after our agreed upon time, just because I know Helen hates me and I want to mess with her. I’m awful like that. And I know it. I can see in her lips that she is very anxious. The untrained eye wouldn’t detect her unease, they’d go right to her breasts, but I zoom in on her rigid smile first. Breasts second. The aperture of her lips doesn’t open any wider than if she were sipping a milkshake through a straw. It is an attempt to keep everything tightly in place, including her teeth, lest they fly out of her mouth in fight or in flight.

The only thing not tied down by sheer will or tensed muscles are Helen’s remarkable breasts. A low-cut shirt in December with snow on the ground just doesn’t say “practical” to me. It says: “I hope he’s happy to see me!”

I don’t climb out of the car to help her get her things in because I am, quite frankly, mesmerized by her jiggly breasts. They are two hyperactive children, both bobbing and talking at the same time about different subjects, yet still comprehending what the other is saying. They speak in unison and don’t shut up until Helen finally settles herself in the passenger seat and secures her seatbelt. Even then they are still yapping away in my peripheral vision. The road is bumpy from the snow and potholes and her breasts cannot contain their excitement about the big trip and the role they get to play in it!

I’m sorry if I’m going on and on too much about Helen’s breasts but they are the best part of the ride. Everything else is a whiter shade of her pale, yet remarkable, breasts.

I try to suppress my enjoyment over hearing Helen lament the fact that her luggage is 25 lbs. over the limit.

“Did you pack more than three ounces of liquids?” I ask, thinking of things that can easily be replaced in Nebraska, say, from her online boyfriend’s bathroom.

“No. Just clothes and a comforter.”

“Oh. Maybe pitch the comforter,” I offer.

“I don’t know. It’s my comforter, you know?”

I imagine her standing in front of Delta’s counter, pulling out Stevie Nicks look-alike blouses, that all look alike, and deciding which ones she can let go. Like Sophie’s choice. If Sophie had twenty identical children.

When Helen is nervous she goes into actress mode. She frames this naive leap into the unknown as something that she has considered all the considerations considerably. She has rehearsed how it will all succeed countless times and could stick the landing, blindfolded, gagged, and her hands tied behind her back, which is how, I’m afraid, I picture her in the paper and on the news in a week’s time.

However, Helen seems undaunted and her charms work me. That is, right up until she gets to: “He doesn’t have any money. So we’re going to be poor. But that’s all right. I’ll make money on the internet.” Stop the music!

There’s the tell. Right there. No girl thinks dropping off the last 12 years of her life with family and rushing into a marriage with a guy she has never met is worth a one-way ticket. No matter how thoroughly you twist the Rubik’s Cube of these details, the colors can never match up on all sides. But on the side facing Helen, they are all green.

Her bags are packed, her breasts are primped, a one-way ticket in hand, there is no changing her mind. And I’m not so sure I want to try. I feel strangely selfish, on behalf of my friend Dan, that I get to send her off into such a precarious situation.

Helen’s eyes are locked onto the airport control tower on the horizon as she paints a cheery Ann Murray picture of how her new life will be.

And even though we ain’t got money

I’m so in love with you, honey

Everything’ll bring a chain of lo-o-o-o-ve

And in the mornin’ when I rise

Bring a tear of joy to my eyes

And tell me everything’s gonna be all right

“I always say marriage is a last resort,” I tell her, giving her the opportunity for an epiphany, or at least to tell me, “Turn this car around right now! Amy, you’re right!” But she doesn’t.

She says, “Not me. I like the buddy system.”

“You can still have the buddy system and be happily unmarried.”

“No. I’m 52. At my age, you need a partner. Try raising a kid on your own. It isn’t easy.”

She is sticking to the talking points: He’s a nice guy…they plan to move to New Mexico in a couple years. The talking point that we rambled on about freely? The weather in the Southwest in summer. Even though the destination on the ticket in her hand is Nebraska…in December…where the normal high temperature consistently hovers around freezing, approximately 80 degrees colder than New Mexico in the summer.

I realize I’m caught up in her fantasy of enchanting saguaro cacti in New Mexico and comfortable temperatures at the higher elevations, rather than the disfiguring frigid Nebraska winters without a comforter. So I interject, “Well, it’s not like you’re leaving your daughter with a father she has never met and an evil step-mother. Sarah (Dan’s girlfriend) is awesome and Dan is a great dad. Plus, she has stayed with them before, so it’s not like she’s going to live with distant relatives she can’t relate to in a town she’s never seen.”

“True.” Helen says, realizing that she forgot to rehearse her lines for why any part of letting the man about whom she once said nothing but negative comments is now capable of raising their daughter, and for why it’s not weird, but rather adventurous for everyone. This is a huge shift for Helen. If she had never met this guy online would she be able to bend her thoughts into a positive perspective of Dan?

Helen is a study in believing what you want to believe as it meets your needy needs. This would be a “happily ever after” story, now that Dan has custody of their daughter. But the other shoe hasn’t dropped and it always does. Although the neediness of Helen’s needs is steadfast, the needs themselves jiggle all over the place, like breasts in a push-up bra. And once she gets that computer put back together she could find a new guy back East.

You've enjoyed reading this post. What's next?

Subscribe to the RSS feed or Email Updates.
Help us promote this article by bookmarking it to your favorite social network via an icon below:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•