General Knowledge
By Radhika Kapoor
I knew, of course, when I married you (or should I say, when you married me), that maybe you wouldn’t water the creepers that my boss gave us as a wedding present, white-spotted bougainvillea slinking up the balcony wall even as its roots dried, shriveling like frayed shoelaces; that you wouldn’t, maybe ever, run your pinkie toe up my leg, pulling my joggers up, up, up, your eyes still closed as I curved away from you, senseless, not knowing what I was giving up; knew you would, every time we got the cashier named Rob at Trader Joe’s, drop — theatrically, it might seem to others, but to me it seemed natural, expected, cellular — the Yemeni zhoug they sold, so spicy your eyes burned, but not with tears; that your shoulders would tense, softly, and then with a pulsating conviction, whenever mine bumped into them as we brushed against each other at the kitchen island, me careful not to put my arms around yours without first announcing, staccato, their arrival; I knew that our doctor, whose son’s name is also Rob, makes sure never to bring his family up when we pop through to get our urine checked, or our platelets counted, our thyroid-stimulating hormone levels calibrated, because the one time he laughed about his twins’ graduation ceremony at school, you cried so hard they had to squeeze your arm tight enough to leave a purpling dimple; I knew all of these things, I did, and yet I thought: you might grin when I made a bad pun about the Alsatian who ate too much — all of your friends smiled, so did your mother, which should have made me feel better but didn’t; that you might turn toward me, eyes bright, that day I drove to your office with challah and with too much fruit jam, and say something that wasn’t “Sorry, today’s deposition day”; that you might sob (softly, I conceded) when I got on my bike last morning and the lady from the apartment down the corridor opened her car door lightning-quick and I tumbled down, glasses crushing, toothed fragments sailplaning into the bridge of my nose; you made me a toastie, edges sawed off clean, although I never said I didn’t like the edges, but you never sobbed.
THE END