She loves me, she loves me knot
There’s A PRICE
you pay for living in a slender L.A. suburb, where ultra-skinny women can be distinguished from the lampposts only because of their hundred-dollar haircuts and the cellphones glued to their ears as they drive. Who are these women talking to as they chariot their children to school at 7:30 in the morning? Their brokers? Their therapists? The former lovers they left behind for a Sub-Zero and a four-bedroom ranch?
“You have no idea what it’s like to run a house,” my wife explains, rushing to their defense.
“It must take incredible skill,” I say.
“You have no idea,” she says.
You want desperate housewives? I’ll show you desperate housewives. Drive by the park at 5:30 a.m., where they’re gathered for one of those boot camp fitness classes everyone swears by. They lie in the wet grass, performing leg lifts in hopes that their hipbones will soon reappear and their husbands won’t run off with their nannies. Such is life in the slender suburbs.
“We’re multitasking,” my wife explains when I grumble about all the cellphones.
Nobody understands multitasking more than I do. I can read two sports sections at the same time. Gifted with two throats, I can drink beer and sing college fight songs simultaneously. While fishing, I can light a good cigar. You don’t have to tell me about multitasking.
But mostly, I prefer to operate in the moment, completing one fine task at a time. Which is how I hurt my leg.
IT IS NOT JUST ANY LEG either. It is the leg I clutch with when I drive, the one I lead with when I dance. If I had to give up a leg, it would not be this one.
The injury happened while jogging last week, when a knot -- perhaps, even a kink -- developed in my lower calf. It’s the sensation you might feel if a bobcat latched onto the back of your leg, mistaking it for a Double Whopper. Fortunately, I live in a place of tremendous sympathy.
“No way,” my wife says when I ask her to rub my wound.
“But there’s a knot or something,” I say.
“In your calf?” she asks.
“That’s right.”
“Moo,” she says.
It’s been an odd week, marriage wise. Jennifer Tilly apparently has wed Chucky, the zipper-skinned horror movie goof. He looked good in the photos, never more content. I’ve always been a big advocate for marriage, especially for the troubled and uncertain. In this case, I think Tilly will be good for Chuck -- if that chipmunk voice of hers doesn’t drive him over the edge. Then look out.
Meanwhile, my own marriage, normally a model for others, has been rocked by emotional detachment, almost abandonment. I ask my wife to rub a knotted muscle; she declines on moral and legal grounds. According to her, it was a scam similar to this that led to our four children. I, of course, remember the circumstances as being far more romantic.
“But I’m ref-ing a soccer game in the morning,” I explain as my left leg throbs.
“Oh, in that case ... no,” she says.
I warn her that a knotted calf muscle is nothing to take lightly. Left untreated, it can develop into a kink, which could work its way up past my pancreas and deep into my brain. All of a sudden I’d begin behaving strangely, and making career choices like Jude Law.
“I love Jude Law,” my wife says.
“He’s seriously overexposed,” I tell her.
“Thank God,” she gasps.
SUCH AN INJURY couldn’t come at a worse time. In about a week, I’ll pour the baby into a stroller and push him across 5 kilometers of hard suburban roadway for the annual Turkey Day Charity Run. The whole town will be there.
Traditionally, we race up the boulevard, past the YMCA and the Taco Bell, where I stop for a breakfast burrito and a large coffee, before circling back to the park as dozens of spectators cheer. It’s a big event in our little community. Ronald McDonald is usually there, if that gives you any clue. Like a lot of redheads, he flirts shamelessly and remembers no one’s name.
“You have no idea,” I tell my wife, “what it’s like finishing a race like that with a belly full of coffee.”
“It must take incredible skill,” she says.
She has no idea.
Good luck, Chucky. I hear the first 25 years are the toughest.
Chris Erskine can be reached at [email protected].
