I frightened my girlfriend this morning. She was terrified, her face contorted and pulled back in terror. I should have known it would happen. I had scratched on the bathroom door. I was being cute, I thought. But I hadn’t counted on looking like death incarnate. My own face looked like a zombie. Is everybody like this? Do other people get morning dead-face and lurk about their own apartments?
Most days, I’m the eager beaver. I am also, on occasion, both bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But, after a bad night’s sleep, I look just awful, and my face is the last part to gain animation. It’s as though I’m tiptoeing around in my own brain, and I don’t want to disturb me, so I leave that light off, the one that makes my face look human.
So this morning I ambled out of bed to have a pee. Ambled is too lively sounding though. I pushed my left shoulder up, moaned once, and the wrest of the limbs had to follow. The key is to lead with one part of your body, something small. Nevermind, the other bits dragging behind it; they’ll keep up in their own way. This is how I reached the bathroom door.
My lady was in the bathroom already. I heard her flush and waited politely, listing to one side as my body steadied itself for continued standing. The phrase, “My turn!” done in a childish, playful voice, seemed an appropriate thing to call out. (Even in the morning, with my face turned off, I do this, I drill the little things I’m going to say next.) Then I thought I’d scratch at the door just before saying it, only, as I scratched, it seemed more like a cat scratch. How funny, I thought, as the joke started to take a new form. She’ll think I’m one of the cats. I pictured jolly ol’ me and how delighted she would be, and felt warm and cozy from drilling the line, “My turn!” over and again in my head. I was awfully playful this morning!
Except for one thing. I had forgotten about my face. If only I had actually said the goddam line, given her some notice I was behind the door.
When she opened the door, I had been listing there, silently, in the dark, all my weight on the right leg. I cannot account for the look of my face, but it must have been the face of the living dead.
She opened the door, and instantly wrenched back, inhaling terror. You know that look of dread, of anguish that a woman gets when you’re breaking up? It’s the saddest, most pained face ever. A man’s fidelity, his taking out of the garbage, his rubbing of the feet, his coming home early to help decorate or move something…all of it, all of his being a good man, is to avoid the pain of seeing that face. For a flash, I saw that face on my girlfriend as I confronted her with my own, morning, dead-face. It was hideous. I was hideous.
It was the sort of fright that took sitting against ledges on her part, and the holding up of a single hand, gesturing me to keep my distance for a moment longer. My comfort was not yet welcomed, not yet trusted (the small, animal part of her brain still expecting to be gored.)
But it was all enough to wake me. Like ice cracking I felt my eyebrows raise, I was alive! at least my face, anyhow. I kept the eyebrows up, hoping she’d see. Look honey, happy-face, not your own mortality.
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