Shelly Stewart Cato
ANTI-ODE TO A MARRIAGE: “Why Antimatter Matters”
I was listening to a TED Talk on the plane to San Diego, flying over snowy, Colorado postcard ridges and thinking the ridges looked like mackerel clouds—meaning the earth looked like the sky, and the sky looked like the sky. TED said that for every particle of matter, there exists a particle of antimatter. For every particle of iridium, a particle of anti-iridium. For every electron, an anti-electron. And for the Milky Way, even an anti Milky Way!
And I deduced that for every person a person happens to be married to—for every pink-eyed, stumbling fat ass that rolls over the bed’s horizon and thwacks the snooze button three times—for every slack-jawed, twaddling, grizzled-face bunko of molecules that stumbles into the bathroom, drapes its dick
(I wonder: Is drape too magnanimous a word here?) over the basin’s rim so it can pee and not miss, checks its teeth for a fleck of last night’s massaged kale (and finds two)—for every flash-fried, freeze-dried, molecular birth of a person, there must be an anti-person.
This would, of course, be me or if I’m the person, then my husband is the anti-person. So, if he is the one whose anti matter is still lying in bed, then I’m the one at the mirror, showered and coffee’d and deriding his flaccid body when I slough a glance at the slump-hump of anti-partner lying in bed. If that’s the case, then he could not be my anti-person. No, no, not the soul and reflection of me—he is more like that one red potato escaped from its Polypropylene bag and rolled to the back of the pantry, thinking it has been spared the roasting oven, the All-Clad pot. (Even as a potato, my husband is thinking he has superior genetics.) He withers there, bodily fluids leaking, and I, still a person and not yet a potato and normally a good housekeeper (If my husband were listening to this, he would say, When did this become fiction???)—I simply allow this to happen.
There! On the white laminate, sticky syrup puddles until the potato wears its skin like sackcloth, until the yellow-maggot green-smush smell—not at first—no, no, at first, the kids all aquiver that it might be another dead owl in the attic; at first, the composite family nose recoiling as the smell weighs in silently like overnight snowfall. But there you have it, the weeping, rotten, once-a-potato—now anti-potato. I retrieve it with my yellow Playtex glove and, to avoid the smell, swivel my neck around raptor-esque, and to distance myself, preen my scapulae like a roosting turkey hawk on a cold, cold night, and then walk that potato out to the curb; and, of course, drop my potato—or rather, he sieves through the hole in my glove from Jacko’s third-grade volcano project.
Hell, if it isn’t snowing even harder now.
But, wait, I’m saved!
Isn’t that the snowplow over by Dollar General? Leave that mush on the sidewalk for the plow to sloosh down the neck of the sewer pipe. Because, no worries, my potato-husband will never cease to exist. Because his molecules have not altered, have only shifted from muscle to fat, bright-eyed to bulge eyed, cream to butter bean. Potato, anti-potato, partner, anti partner—it hardly matters. He’s still here beside me—snoring on his king-size anti-snore pillow.
What I’m trying to tell you is I lost him. His molecules mutated beyond recognition. This is not an ode or an anti-ode. It’s an elegy. I wasn’t saved. He wasn’t. We weren’t.