pragalagma

I married her for money. I don’t know why she acts the ways she does now. All in all, I think it’s an improvement. Black socks, red feet underneath. She’s taken to putting her feet in a bucket of red dye in the morning. I’m afraid to ask her why. It does make her more attractive, so why complain? Best keep my mouth shut. I’m determined, however, to ask her about the buttons. I don’t know who she thinks she is, a goat? Buttons are not food. Show me on the chart what food group buttons belong to. It’s the same one that contains paperclips and teabags. She puts icing on everything, but not yet on the buttons. I have asked her about the icing. She says it just makes stuff taste better. And by stuff, she doesn’t exactly mean food, as I understand it. She means life itself somehow. The Taste of Life. “Does that make me sound odd?”, she asked me in one of her uncharacteristically self-conscious moments. “No,” I told her, “just a little quirky.” But this was before she started eating the buttons. Or dyeing her feet in the morning (but I’m not complaining about that! – Dye on!). There’s quite a lot of things I didn’t know about her. For one thing, she’s attracted to men inside machines. Men are all fine and good she says, but stick them in some sort of mechanical contraption – the more gears and pistons the better – the more she swoons. Something about the combination of warm organic flesh with cold ordered technology working around it, encompassing it. Or something like that. I don’t know. She likes men on bicycles, but that’s just a little thrill. She told me she fantasized about me being inside the inner workings of a giant old-style clock. She also has a thing for robot men – androids. She told me once she wished I was a robot. I think I was a little offended at the time. Another weird thing is – when she dyes her feet she sings a little ditty. It’s from America, so I don’t know much about it. Some sort of patriotic anthem. I’m positive she’s changing some of the words – hopefully because she doesn’t know them. Her parents are these rich American TV producers. I’ve never watched American TV in my life. But they got rich off of it so it can’t be all that bad. I’ve always liked equestrian sports, and she tells me that they have a lot of that on American TV. That’s actually something I didn’t know about her for a long time: she’s American. Well, her parents are anyway. She was born here, she says, but why then sing that ditty? Especially when dyeing your feet? I’m fairly sure it’s not an American custom. I once, I’m ashamed to admit, went to one of the bawdy-houses in a Virginian township on my visit there during my late schooling (long story) and not one of the as-advertised American bawdy-girl’s bare feet was dyed red. It’s one of those things you notice. Especially at this particular establishment, which I believe was called the “Foot Club”. I should point out that I did not enjoy the Americans’ attempt at housed bawdiness (not that I’ve ever witnessed another country’s attempt, but I can just imagine they’d be better – something about subtlety, I don’t know). They made you stand in line forever and you had to open all these doors when you got in. The doors were nice. I mean they had all these fancy ornate designs all over them, but I didn’t feel like touching them. It was almost like I was in a haunted house and something behind the doors was going to leap out and scare me. I’m sorry, I don’t like haunted houses. I mean the fake supposedly-scary-and-entertaining ones. Now that I think about it, combining a bawdy-house with one of them haunted houses sounds like a good idea. Anyway, I didn’t want to open those doors. And I think my disinclination to do so was the direct fault of the owners of the establishment and maybe in an indirect way, the fault of the American culture itself. They should have figured out a way of making me want to open those doors. I don’t know, scary noises or something. The proximity of deadly fires, or the possibility of free candy bags. I don’t know. It should be in the constitution or in one of those patriotic songs my wife sings while dyeing her feet. My wife likes America. I think it’s cause she associates it with her parents. Makes sense. But she also associates the smell of rotten sea logs with her parents.