The Dysfunctional Family

The twenty-year old was reading a book of proportions, so magnanimous was its meaning that he could not understand what was being said, the elusive meaning, but he read it, most words going over his head, but to everyone around him he seemed to be understanding what he was reading, judging by the odd chuckle and eyebrow raise that emerged from his reading corner, quite like a hermit’s cave, whilst he imagined his summer that just past and his unfortunate return to university and the lectures that he also did not understand what was being said, those words too going over his head, he picked up words and made his own sentences, some of them rude indeed, but he could not quite catch their meaning, as the words were of a highly elusive nature, but he felt powerful reading this book, as it was thicker than his hand and was beginning to make his knees hurt, he was sure there was going to be an indent on them for weeks, from the sharp corners and edges, he really tried to understand he could, but as his mind was more preoccupied with his hedonistic summer he was quite unable to grasp what on earth he was reading, try as though he might, he glanced up briefly and saw a girl looking at him with something akin to respect in her eyes, and he thought ‘well, yes, this book commands respect and it commands understanding but only if this girl understood my plight and help me catch this elusive meaning’ the words still being quite out of his reach, being of the elusive nature.

The wife was a good woman, courteous to her husband at all times, the cooking done everyday, and the dusting was carried out every Sunday, like a cuckoo sticking its head out of the clock, keeping it prisoner and she kept herself demure and the house neat and her hair was kept wrapped in a handkerchief, and her nails were whittled down to a soft oval, occasionally she painted a cream colour to match the kitchen tiles or when it was one of the other girls’ parties there was a splash of a lurid colour that looked out of place on the pale hands that served so much of the lazy husband’s life. She was currently seated on a stool on the north-west corner of the marble kitchen island sipping a cup of lukewarm tea that she had poured a little bit too much milk and had not properly stirred all of the sugar into the tea and so the sugar had conglomerated into sodden pyramids of Giza that were slowly solidifying as the tea’s warmth translocated into the caring housewife’s hands. At the moment, she was contemplating what to cook for dinner, for their extra guest really was a quite a picky eater, only last week he had refused a perfectly alright chicken thigh on the basis of the skin being a little too pink but too crispy in the corners for his liking, but it was quite alright for him to eat three-quarters of her coffee and walnut cake that had taken her about three hours to bake and heaven knows how long to ice with the pretty sugar pink flowers that were sickly after the taste of the second one, but he was really a nice person, overall, she mused, despite the fact that they rarely saw him out of his room, he was usually curled up in a corner pretending to be reading a thick, great, important classical book, that he clearly thought made him look educated or what she thought he assumed to be scholary. He had done some nice work on the garden, trimming back the hedges that seemed to be causing a civil war, leaving the hydrangeas as casualties and the weeds the prison guards for the poor unsuspecting little birds that swooped in for a bit of rest.

The lazy husband was hard at work in his high-tech spanking rich and modern firm, watching the stock markets fluctuate and watch his clients money grow or fall away respectively. Every day brought a new surprise for him, suddenly Apple was falling about 3% for some unknown reason or the stocks he had turned his nose up at last week were suddenly the highest earning investments, it kept the people on their toes, dancing a dangerous tango with some form of lame devil, only people’s livelihoods hanging in the balance, only last week the lazy husband had a client become homeless overnight due to the fact he had not listened to any advice that had been given to him by the financial adivsors upteen times. The lazy husband was a consistent high achiever and he was very much aware that because his wife did not quite understand or indeed bother to even begin to understand the work that he did and it seemed to her that he just stared at a computer screen and occassionally jumped up or down in excitement or reached for the whisky bottle to pour himself a drink with one hand whilst the other supported his head which had become so heavy so suddenly that he could no longer hold it up with no assistance, that his wife just classified him as lazy. However, she was quite happy to spend home the money he had earned, on things just for her such as makeup or getting her nails done, that he was supposed to appreciate and enjoy but he saw no improvement in her at all because he cared more about what was the inside and no amount of makeup was going to make up for the rotten core his wife had, but somewhere in that rotten core was a little nugget of goodness that peeped its head out shyly occasionally and reminded him why he had married her, but that was on occasion. More of than not he spent his free time contemplating what his life would be like if her was ever single again and he simply could not quite work it out, he thought at times that he had freedom and could do whatever he wanted and sleep with whoever he wanted but was that really what he wanted to do anymore, sleep around with flimsy girls whose names he forgot about a month after, and so he could never quite think of what he would do if he became single and so he never looked into getting a divorce. For what would his life be like without that lovely hag he called his wife?

The three members of the household each existed in their own orbit that sometimes managed to cross the path of another member of the household but on that brief moment something so profound occurred, there was an interaction. There was the occasional dinner but the student was so absorbed in his egotistical world and the lazy husband had an obsession with money and earning it whilst the wife really only cared about looking nice and spending her entirely lazy husband’s money.