Joan Zimmermann, originally from New York, now calls Virginia home. Since 1994, she has excelled as a writer and editor, specializing in technology and biomedicine. Since 2001, Joan has served as an independent consultant for NASA. Her academic background is diverse, with a B.A. in English Literature and Pre-Medical Studies, as well as an M.S. in Biology. When not engrossed in her work, Joan can be found perusing her extensive and somewhat chaotic bookshelves. She cherishes moments with her grandchildren and enjoys the company of her spirited senior Shiba Inu. A lifelong passion for fiction and poetry fuels her creative endeavours.

Twelve Theories

By Joan Zimmermann

As usual, the car door would not close on the first try. I had eased my way into the passenger seat, mindful not to mar the plastic door handle with too forceful a grip, carefully placing my feet on the immaculate, tightly napped floor mat. The next part, the critical element, always made me nervous. I pulled the door to, and the incomplete click announced another failure. From the corner of my eye I saw my husband roll his eyes, shake his head disappointedly, and then I heard him expel his breath in a sharp yet restrained woof of exasperation.

I said, with no hope of vindication, yet I had to try anyway, to uphold my drowning ego in a waterlogged life vest: “The door is a problem, as you know,” I said for what may or not have been the twentieth time.

“All you have to do,” he began, pitching his voice as if speaking to a brain-injured companion, “is pull the door closed carefully,” enunciating this last word and drawing out each syllable with showily modulated frustration. I felt my sense of inadequacy rise; as inadequate as the faulty door, the door we both agreed must be checked by the car dealer at the 10,000-mile check-up.

He readily admitted its problematic nature, the door even he, the anointed expert at shutting doors, could not shut properly on every try. However, he believed he shut the door properly more frequently than I did, and he etched this superior characteristic into his deceptively full lower lip, which at present was contracted into a linear grimace of righteousness. Reese had been known in his younger days for his precision, but I had never expected this gradual transformation into an ossified caricature of obsession. The ordered rows of underwear, the shiny steel cookware suspended, largely unused, above the kitchen island. His labeled cubbyholes in the tool shed. His request for sex every single Saturday morning, as regular as an atomic clock. The change was astonishing to me, once a sleepy-eyed undergraduate suddenly married and then just as suddenly pregnant, and then shut in a steel latticework of Reese’s perfect expectations. I was a Miocene fly captured not in amber but in a diamond.

There was nothing I could do that he could not improve upon. When I scrubbed a pot after dinner, he would hold it up to the recessed light bulbs in the dropped ceiling, plunge the dried surface back into the dishwater and vigorously scrub the minute spots I had missed. He would move my cooking pot from the large burner to the small burner if he judged that the pot was not the right size for the diameter of the burner. If I attempted to retract his action, he would stand his ground and insist that the situation be put to rights in a painfully borne, always one-sided diatribe. He would stand and jab his finger at my face or chop his hands in the air, slicing invisible onions, until my tears ran or until I gave in. It was not very long before my tears dried entirely and I was always giving in.

He fancied himself an expert’s expert and would tolerate no assertion to the contrary. He could outlast anyone in an argument. Whether his assertions were valid or whether they were endless repetitions of the same invalid assertion, a Möbius strip of meaningless elocution, his victim would almost always crumple under the impossible hail of words cracking loudly on the eardrums, and concede. Reese understood his victim’s withdrawals to be victories, which served to continually inflate his considerable hubris. Indeed, over some years’ duration he had acquired such a massive quantity of publicly demonstrated confidence that I now told a standard private joke to my friends: the Anna Freud Institute of Psychotherapy in lower Manhattan had tapped him as an organ donor of sorts. Upon his death, approximately 270,000 suffering souls would be healed of their psychic welts, infused with the serological remains of his radiant self-love. (Perhaps it was because he is a narcissist, a personality disorder now immortalized in medical texts. That was Theory One).

I closed the door again; this time it held, a satisfying click that spared me from further castigation. However, the drive had only begun. Reese stepped on the clutch and eased the car into reverse. The gear would not engage, and he stomped the brake and jiggled the stick shift, complaining about the poor design of the mechanism. Not only was the gearbox mis-manufactured, but the entire driving universe was a bright spiral arm of insane enemies in aluminum casings, hurling themselves at his car with evil intent. And pity the poor soul who drove two miles per hour slower than Reese himself.

“I have a life, people,” he would mutter, “do you think you could learn how to drive so I could go live it?” And then he would pull up sidewise, slow down to pointedly glare at the dangerous imbecile lately impeding his progress, and invariably pass to the right of the offender.

Reese’s family was close-knit, mum, and abhorring any hint of irregularity. It is entirely possible that their forebears invented denial, and for generations the Weckmans had been refining its usage. Denial, combined with their flat and forced pleasantries, became their moat, an impossible barrier to breach. For the two decades of our marriage I observed them as they smiled and made nice while Reese raged and ruined holidays with his tantrums. They concentrated on his good points (extremely careful) and minimized his bad points (a tendency to freak out over nothing). No I will not open a gift on Christmas Eve. That is not the way we did it when we were growing up! Why should we change? And we would all watch, in silent amazement, as a grown man stomped out of the tastefully decorated, Americana-draped living room, leaving behind him the sour and nearly visible stink of his disapproval. Old Scratch himself would have shuddered and taken notes. His mother was assiduously well-informed and a pro at “changing the subject,” and on that night among many, she changed it to interesting revelations about the Cuban missile crisis. (Perhaps it was because he is so smart that he is always convinced he is right. That was Theory Two, closely espoused by Reese and his mother.)

I was glad the kids were not in the car. My role over the years had become insuperably that of buffer zone, the reasonable voice, the only adult in their immediate range who would not explode into irritation at any minor provocation: the scrape of a chair, a raised, exuberant voice, or the knock of an arm against Reese’s body as a kid sped past.

Almost as obsessively as Reese, I once noted to a therapist, I played my role to the hilt, yeah yeah, martyrdom, rescuer syndrome, all that psychobabbular crap that just about anyone’s grandmother could recite thanks to the ubiquity of Twelve-Step Programs and the unerring guidance of a psychiatric God at support group gatherings. God had never managed to step in to help me, however, so I eventually took it upon myself to take His place. (Perhaps it was because I am a co-dependent who cannot stand up for myself. That was Theory Three, adhered to by my therapist.)

They had been stalwart little soldiers in Reese’s charge of the right brigade, but even barely out of diapers the children could easily gauge when Reese had stepped over the wavering Maginot line of insanity. Straighten your shoulders. No, not like that, like this. Don’t make so much noise when you cut your meat. Hold that bow a little more to the left. No, that’s too far, like this. Like this!! They all knew how to get invisible in a hurry, like sand crabs scuttling back to their holes in a shifting sandstorm. They more than anyone knew that it could be the day before the Apocalypse, with the Four Horsemen clopping in reverberating doomslaughter through the downtown district, slicing heads off the damned, and Reese would be in the middle of the street directing Famine and Pestilence: Hey that’s not the way to use a scythe. You have to ease into the motion. See? Like this…

(Perhaps it was because I am an atheist. That was Theory Four, according to my mother, who saw me shoeless at the gates of Hell).

Birthday parties could be agonizing. There was something about the singular focus on the child at birthday parties that annoyed Reese mightily. When Reese was annoyed, his anger permeated skin and bone, and any sentient being in his vicinity could feel it. On our son Trevor’s fifteenth birthday I had decided to take him and his friends to a hamburger palace with a video arcade, per his request. It was not Reese’s preference, however, and he let us all know it. Reese drove us to the restaurant in complete silence, jaw working and forehead vein pulsing, and soon we comported ourselves as if being transported to the death chamber at San Quentin. (Perhaps it was because his parents had not given him adequate attention. That was Theory Five.)

When we had arrived and taken our seats, I tried to put on a bright face and start a conversation with the gathered boys, all rather geeky in nature, sweetly intelligent and awkward, wearing their growing maturity the way ostriches might wear morning coats. Mason, the tallest of Trevor’s friends, was so thin that if he had taken a deep breath his khakis would have fallen and pooled around his ankles. Richard, freckleheaded, stocky and ordinarily loquacious, was at this time warily quiet. The place itself was loud, accelerated, and sticky, a perfect backdrop for the hormonal sine wave of adolescence. The arcade rang with a confused symphony of electronic notes, and swam with the odor of hamburgers and the 21 sticks of bubble gum noisily processing in Trevor’s mouth. These sensations delivered to me an odd sort of peace, a glimpse at normal life, or paradise. But I could see Reese’s face darkening out of the corner of my eye and I tried to ignore him, hoping hard that he would not create a scene. He searched the menu and I could see that he found it wanting. A young, sloppy waiter zipped over to our table and hovered over us with practiced insouciance. Reese regarded him with the air of a connoisseur at Sardi’s and asked, “Do you have any bock beer?”

Game over.

“Well, what sort of beer do you have?”

“Uh we have Budweiser. On tap.”

Reese shook his head.

“Can’t you tolerate it for Trevor’s sake,” I asked him in a low voice, leaning into his shoulder semi-affectionately. He pulled away from me as if I were a warm can of Schlitz.

“I told you we shouldn’t have come here,” Reese said to Trevor.

Trevor manfully squared his shoulders, but they slumped downward quickly once the ire appeared in Reese’s expression. Like murder, Trevor would often say.

We all trooped out, poor Trevor’s gum wadded into a motionless lump in his left cheek, his friends looking spooked and bewildered. Another Crazy Dad story.

Why are you afraid to leave? asks the therapist each week. I give all my standard answers. Reese will not discuss divorce; when I mention it he merely smirks his supercilious smirk and tells me that I am insane. And it’s too expensive to obtain a contested divorce; the kids’ tuition fund would be dried up in two legal billing periods. And he does keep an immaculate house, mows the lawn better than the neighbors’ expensive lawn services, pays the bills, so on and so on. Jesus Christ I know exactly why I am afraid to leave. I am just afraid, sore afraid, panic-stricken to the point of incontinence and really all I am trying to do is take care of my kids and protect them from their crazy father and the fallout and the uncertainty… at that point of course I usually need Kleenex.

(Perhaps it was because I have no reliable family to speak of and that my parents were as crazy as Reese. That was Theory Six.)

(Perhaps it was because I had never known security and was scared senseless to be alone with three children. That was Theory Seven and pretty airtight.)

(Perhaps it was because I am a spineless echinoderm and do not deserve happiness. That was Theory Eight but it was upheld with little empirical evidence).

(Perhaps it was because Reese is an asshole. That was Theory Nine.)

There fell the infamous night of the snowmen. It was just before Christmas and just after the failed birthday party. Part of my annual Christmas ritual was the purchase of a new tchotchke, and this year I had bought a votive candleholder beringed by three sturdy resin snowmen, chubby arms attached to one another as in a paper doll chain. Their bodies were covered with a translucent glitter, and each snowman had a perfectly chiseled, delicate carrot nose. But not too delicate, not with six-year-old Vanessa in the house, a hurricane of a girl. For dinner, I put the snowmen votive in the middle of the table and allowed ten-year-old Elizabeth to light the match to set it aglow. Elizabeth had a thing about matches just then. Reese came to the table as I was distributing roast meat and peas and carrots, and mashed potatoes. Elizabeth carefully moved her peas and carrots far from the mashed potatoes while Trevor did the opposite, mounding them into a crater atop a potato volcano. Vanessa began inhaling her food like a rescued castaway as soon as the plate touched the table. Reese was therefore in somewhat of a trilemma; I watched his eyes flick from child to child as he desperately tried to figure out whom to criticize first.

“Trevor,” he began, with an edge in his voice.

He usually went for the oldest one first, a primogeniture of torment.

I interrupted him with what I thought was a brilliant diversion. “Did you see our new candleholder? Vanessa picked it out.”

Vanessa’s maple-brown eyes beamed at me and then at Reese.

Reese appraised it carefully. “Why, it’s bee-yootiful, Vanessa!” He could ham it up a bit for his youngest if he was in a good mood. “And look at those little carrot noses.”

He paused. Vanessa looked at me, then back at Reese, and she saw it coming before I did. She stopped eating.

Reese frowned and tapped the little noses with his ring finger. “Don’t you think it’s too delicate for the dinner table? Someone might knock off one of the noses,” he said.

“Oh of course not,” I said, “it’s a polymer resin and pretty unbreak…”

“Well, I don’t know, Sarah, it might. Let’s put it up on the…”

“No!” shrieked Vanessa suddenly, and she started to cry.

“Cripes, Reese,” I said, sharply, “do you have to do this every…”

“Oh don’t be such a troublemaker, Sarah,” he interrupted me again as he reached for the votive. I blocked his hand. All three kids swiveled their wide eyes at me. Reese stared at me in disbelief.

“What are you doing, Sarah?” he asked in a voice quiet with acid.

“I am giving the snowmen a reprieve,” I said, and tried and failed to smile sincerely. I wanted to hit him as hard as I possibly could with the three deadly little noses of the candleholder. He reached for it again.

“Leave it alone, Reese,” I said.

Trevor got up from the table.

“Sit down, you’re not finished!” said Reese, very loudly. Vanessa stopped crying and watched Reese. Trevor sat down.

“Elizabeth, blow out the candle,” said Reese with dangerously exaggerated care.

“Reese, you cannot possibly be serious. This is a candleholder, a gewgaw, not a priceless piece of crystal.” I waited until he looked toward me again, and I held his gaze. I resisted the urge to flinch from the ugly frown, the marble-like fixity, the stuck tectonic plate, the inhuman inability to trade sensory operations, to communicate, to befriend, to yield. Reese said to me with pure hatred, slicing and mindless, “You’re a big hero, aren’t you?”

For a moment, I felt the saddest and deepest sense of pity. But the snowmen stayed in their circle on the table, stalwart in the light.

(Perhaps it was because I am a big hero. That was Theory Ten.)

Not long afterward, I found Reese in the bathroom, washing his hands methodically, rubbing one hand in a circular motion over the other, once, twice, three times. He rinsed and repeated. His hands were bleeding; little pink swirls of water were flowing clockwise down the drain. I asked him what had happened to his hands and he said absently that the soap he had been using was too strong. The Crabtree and Evelyn goat’s milk soap bar in its porcelain cradle appeared pretty innocuous to me. When I made this observation aloud, he impatiently replied that I did not wash my hands as frequently as he did, as I was not as careful as he was.

(Perhaps it was because Reese’s intended gamete was bombarded by cosmic rays in his mother’s womb and the tumbler rolled not ATG, adenine/thymine/guanine, but OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, during recombination. That was Theory Eleven.)

Our children are thus far blessedly free from the tics and storms of Reese’s personality, though I blanched once when Vanessa confessed to me that there was a brief period when she felt compelled to count her steps on the sidewalk, and there always had to be two steps to a square. Normal for her age, the pediatrician assured me. The line was as thin as the lines separating the concrete squares under my daughter’s feet.

When Reese works late hours, the children and I usually have a powwow in the family room. It gives us all a chance to relax and clamber down from the everyday powder keg of Living With Reese. I decided to rent The Odd Couple on one of those blissful nights. Vanessa had grown to enjoy old movies as much as her siblings, and for me the mere thought of Walter Matthau, droopy underlip and darkened baggage beneath his eyes, was a pure physical pleasure. I also wanted to enjoy the reassuring animalistic and chaotic presence of my children, draped over couch arms, slumped against ottomans, collapsed on my lap. Vanessa’s freshly shampooed head, a tropical mélange of baby shampoo and newish human being, was butted into my armpit; she still possessed a wicked hangover from her nursing days and sought out the chemicals that shouted “Mom” from my apocrine glands. Trevor sat like a C-clamp directly in front of Elizabeth, who whined occasionally that he made a better door than a window. They both refused to move. My contribution consisted of a mechanical and half-hearted “Pipe down, I love this part,” phraseology that I contributed about 10 times an hour. We giggled and sighed and ate popcorn and the kids traded confidences with one another, most of which I pretended to not hear unless there was some alarming content. And yes it was bliss.

The semi-climactic scene appeared wherein Jack Lemmon, with orbits bulging, gestures frantically at Walter Matthau with a ladle, lambasting him with scorn and hysterical impatience, sputtering “it’s a ladle you moron…” All three kids straightened up simultaneously. Trevor turned his head announce to me, “Oh my God, it’s Dad!” I watched his eyebrows disappear beneath his overlong dirty blond bangs. His mouth hung open.

“Yeah!” said Elizabeth, slowly, slowly comprehending.

Vanessa looked up at me for corroboration. I said nothing, but my shoulders began to shake, and within seconds the four of us were guffawing uncontrollably, slapping the sofa cushions, pounding the floor, and wiping tears from our eyes. Each time one of us would recover, another would snort and ignite another paroxysm of mirth.

Reese and I are in the car. Soon I will have to open and then close the door. The light is red and Reese is unhappy. He whistles a dissonant phrase, then commences to hum even less tunefully, clucks his tongue twice and soon wonders aloud when the light will change. He whistles, hums, double-clucks his tongue, and wonders at all red lights and to my knowledge has done so for exactly 22 years.

(Perhaps it was because I took the crazy gamble everyone takes upon being born: living, trudging forward, elbowing aside every thorn that scratched me. That was Theory Twelve.)

Perhaps it was the soap.