This is who we are now

Jan wasn't sure what to do.  The man she loved had run off with the man he loved.  

Well.  

She had had suspicions but it was 1976 and Fresno, California was not San Francisco, California.  In San Francisco, you marched and shouted about your private preferences in the middle of the street.  In Fresno, you kept those sort of things to yourself and just quietly ruined other people's lives with your declaration of self-importance, thought Jan.  Your stupid, "I gotta be me" rap.  Jeff had packed up his stuff in small boxes, got tenure at the university, maintained a shocking amount of "their" friends (HA! thought Jan HA! HA! goddamn HA!), and suddenly started calling himself Jefferson.  

Jan found this particularly insulting.  They had been a wonder couple.   Jan and Jeff.  Jeff 'n Jan.  One syllable each.  Both starting with that cute little hook: the letter J.  Symmetry.  Sweetness.  Togetherness.  Forever.

Now he was Jefferson as in "Jefferson and Jackson."  How presidential, thought Jan as she dug through other people's trash or treasures at the flea market.  How fucking royal and s

elf-centered and pretentious.  Who was Jackson?  He was Jack Neidermeyer, that's who.  Librarian at the college, former racquetball opponent, and apparently the true fucking love of her husband's fucking life.  

But Jan always made nice because nice is what housewives were.  Not that she had ever gotten her house.  "Divorced apartment woman" didn't really have the same allure.  Oh, but she was nice, nice, nice.  She would invite them over to see her new found flea market art.  The Las Palmas drive-in had closed for good and the marquee letters were for sale.  She sifted through them carefully, paid the gristly old guy with the coin belt for them, and carefully placed them in the back of her car.  

"Look," she would say.  "Look, Jeff-er-son.  Look at what left-to-rot-in-her-own-fat Jan put on the wall of our old den."  Den.  It was going to be the baby's room.  When she was pregnant, right after high school, Jeff brought her flowers and said, "Anything for you."  A week before college they drove to Tahoe and married in The Chapel of a Thousand Aquariums.  Fishbowls, really, but to be surrounded by all that glass and water.  It was magic.  In her mind it was a cathedral, it was Atlantis.  When she wasn't pregnant after all, she looked at her ring and thought about the goldfish swimming around that glass chapel.  Cute little hook.  

Jan giggled to herself as she nailed the letters to the wall: YOU ROTTEN PRICK, it read.  

"Jefferson, you don't really believe I ever cared, do you?"  No, she would keep it simple.  Less like a soap opera and more like a movie with Meryl Streep.  "Look Jeff.  Jack," she rehea

rsed.  "This is who we are now."