1.
Maybe it was his middle-aged pliability, Mike thought, that made him such a target. He could not say no anymore, could not resist, could not muster a fight, even to save himself. He’d somehow, somewhere along the way, lost his independence and the personal agency that came with it. He knew these things were required for survival over the long slog, but he could no longer locate them in his arsenal. Whatever assertiveness he’d once had—and he’d had plenty as a young engineer—was simply gone, evaporated, leached out of his body by twenty years of hard freeway commuting to a windowless office, back and forth from his cookie-cutter house in a meritless development. He was, he sometimes thought, now the modern Babbitt incarnate, living by proxy in a state of suspended animation. So when Ursula woke him up with yet another sunrise harangue he stared up at her in an emotional fugue. He didn’t even wonder what the problem might be. The actual problem was irrelevant because she was hovering over him, growling at the world like a lioness defending her kill on the African savannah. He rubbed his eyes and blinked. She’d done something to her hair too, which framed her manic intensity with suggestions of lunacy.
But he got up anyway, like some lumbering and stupid thing, and followed her down the stairs, down a cold hallway filled with pictures of her mother and their one dismal son—now at UCLA making outraged Tik Tok videos about various earthly injustices—and into the guest bedroom filled with her dusty collection of “antiques”.
Mike hated the antiques. They were always one step away from being deployed somewhere wrong in the house. He stood in the doorway watching her sniff the four corners of the room.
She was like this now. Mornings were a flurry of administrative announcements and five paragraph orders and clattering dishes and slamming doors until the menopausal storm that was Ursula finally blew out the door and backed out of the driveway scraping—always—the undercarriage of her Tesla on the curb.
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