The Cusp

The Cusp

    Meg lifted an eyebrow at the bottle of Pinot Noir standing innocently in her kitchen cabinet. She’d been saving it for a special occasion. When was that gonna happen? Ever? Tonight was New Year’s Eve and she was alone. Tonight would have to do. She stood on tiptoe and pulled it out.

    Just the weight of the bottle in her hand soothed her. Its cool, polished curve, its narrow, phallic neck. The perfect diameter to wrap her hand around, just enough weight to satisfy, to offer pardon. The urgent twist of the corkscrew into the cork, the satisfying pop. The naked, bulbous glass, impossibly thin, its vulnerable flower-like stem, its transparent bowl a smooth promise in her palm. Then the music: the lyrical, gurgling, ruby-colored stream as the glass filled higher and higher, the liquid notes ascending. The lift of the glass to the nose, the press of her lips to its cusp, its vicious perfume, the sucking in, the ripple across the tongue and down the throat, the rising release.

    Meg stepped barefoot across the veined marble kitchen tiles, then collapsed onto her cream-colored, top-grain leather, eight-way hand-tied, five-thousand-dollar designer couch. She knew every detail of every inch of this house, having made a mutually exhaustive decision with Jim about everything from recessed versus pendant lighting to brass or bronze drawer pulls. Now, they realized it had been a gluttonous exercise in distraction from a marriage that had lost its substance. They’d compensated by going into debt on Sub-Zero appliances, hand-rubbed hardwoods, and a ten-thousand-dollar bocce ball court they were bored with after using twice. With the divorce, their dream house was irrelevant, but the debt was unrelenting.

    When she or Jim referred to the divorce, they used the word amicable. But a rip tide seethed beneath the surface. The home she still lived in was designed by him, for God’s sake: too big, all glass and stainless steel. It felt like a showroom, not a home. An extravagant cage. With Jim gone, she was no longer part of the momentum of we, but a solitary she, like a bird crashing into a sheet of glass, hovering in the air, disoriented, unsure of where to land.

     Now Meg padded around every day in 2,400 square feet like a rat in a maze, her feet chilled on the tile, the constant echo against the high ceilings unnerving. She wanted to be cradled. The wine helped. She finished a bottle every night. Sometimes two. She knew it was wrong, but she’d followed the rules all her life and the rules had betrayed her. Weren’t things supposed to go your way if you followed the rules? Wasn’t that the agreement you made with life? 

    And then there was Kit, her beautiful daughter, who’d taken to dressing in overalls. Who’d come home last week with a rattlesnake tattoo slithering up her neck. Who’d shaved her head the next day. Who couldn’t utter a word to her without an edge of sarcasm. Meg clung to a picture of Kit and herself having a close relationship as time went by, when they would be just two women and not two adversaries.

    And her mother’s death weighed on her. Mom had been declining for years; it should have been no surprise when she passed. Still, the finality of her mother’s death shocked her— the arrangements for cremation so sudden and hard to stomach, barbaric. The box of ash and bone that sat on a shelf in the den saddened her and slightly repelled her. Even worse, she felt a guilty sense of relief.

     Meg missed her mother’s lucid years, when they would gossip on Saturday mornings in Mom’s antiquated kitchen, eating homemade almond cookies and sipping potent, black coffee from an old, hiccupping percolator. Meg repeatedly offered to replace the old appliances, but Mom insisted the 1965 improvements she’d made still suited her, that the pink fridge would last forever. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it!” she’d protested. Mom always had an infectious optimism. “Life is your friend, not your enemy, my girl,” she used to tell her. Meg’s eyes teared up hearing those words in her mind. She wanted to believe them. Now Meg was next in line. The next to go. The next to be fondly remembered.

    Meg took a long sip of the Pinot. More of a swig, really. She tried to taste the earthy currant and iron essence the label promised. The precious bottle had cost almost two hundred dollars; an extravagance she’d regretted the moment the cash register had rung up its tinkling victory. She’d been wine-tasting with a client she’d wanted to impress, but the free tastings weren’t really free.  She’d felt compelled to make a purchase at the time.

     So many times when the urge came to pour a drink, she tried to stop herself, using every contrivance of her willpower. But the desire for oblivion always won. It was a guilty pleasure, and that was the problem; she had so few pleasures. The alcohol rush allowed her the delusion that everything was okay. If she finished this bottle she could pretend everything was okay.

    Except she’s always hated pretending.

    Meg looked at the wine glass cradled in her hands, her lipstick prints smearing the rim like the kisses of a desperate lover. A lifetime of regret was contained in the moment between lifting the glass and swallowing. The awareness appalled her like a slap in the face.

    Suddenly she detested the bloated feel of the glass in her hand, its polished lie, the sour, inky liquid. Before her impaired senses could catch up, she watched the glass soar in slow motion into the air, the wine slosh upward in seeming alarm, then the doomed vessel arced downward, bursting in a hideous explosion onto the cold, marble tile.

    Meg stood and walked upstairs to bed, leaving the wine to drip down the white leather couch like a spray of fresh blood. Like a wound in the side. Like salvation.