Part I: I Think, Therefore I Cannot Swallow
Chapter 1: Sweet Sticky Serendipity | Page 3
"Not always. Francie's office had their holiday party there. Come on, we can have the altar by the polar bear. He's on Prozac; he needs some festivities," I semi-joked. "And afterward we could take a horse-drawn carriage to the Plaza?"
"Yes, sweetie, I can see the sea lions barking their mating call to the violins as you walk down the aisle," he said with a smirk, before going on about thinking outside of New York: Tad had his at a seaside resort near home in Hyannis, but Stephen's not his brother, hence we'd be having ours nowhere remotely near the Cape; we could do an elegant Caribbean island or, how about a beautiful European town like Brüges or Krakow, or maybe somewhere warm - the Venezuelan Riviera... I wondered what I was thinking suggesting the Park.
Stephen's been nearly everywhere the planet over. Family vacations consisted of world travel and deep sea dives. He'd been to the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall all before his tenth birthday. And they went on dives all over the world: the South Pacific, French Polynesia, even the Great Barrier Reef. That worldliness shone through to me every time I gazed into his eyes, which seemed to have taken on the color of the sea itself. Not that I knew which sea -- I didn't exactly share his background. My childhood travels consisted of a couple short trips from Arizona all the way to L.A. to visit my dad, and pasttimes a few pre-divorce ballet classes then free local girls' softball. Yes, I should leave the wedding venue to Stephen, I was thinking, when he interrupted.
"Honey?" he said, sounding strangely far away. I looked up at him. "You're going to be wearing that in a minute," he said pointing down to the sticky melted mess that had become my sundae. I scooped up as much soupy, marshmallow-covered ice cream as would fit on my oversized spoon and topped it onto a chunk of brownie. Just as the first bite neared the back of my mouth for swallowing, I peered into Stephen's knowing eyes. I began to feel this lump in the base of my throat. The chewed food was so close to my esophagus that my swallowing reflex pushed it on down, where it met the lump and merged into a larger ball, about the size of a fist, that I couldn't move up or down. Stephen continued jabbering blithely about -- I think -- sun, water, Cunard...
With the food stuck in this ball, I started to panic. I tried to calm down, breathe through my nose. But either the ball or the panic exacerbated the blockage and I couldn't get any air through. "Or we could be really venturesome..." Good, I thought, the horror in my eyes wasn't apparent to Stephen. I knew this was sheer lunacy and all I had to do was talk myself out of it. I knew there was really nothing there - I knew that because I'd felt this ball before, three times to be exact. I'd willed it away then; I was sure I could do the same now. I simply needed to force myself to be calm. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, I repeated in my head while Stephen talked. But it didn't seem to be working.
Stephen's mouth was busy, but in my panic I couldn't hear what was coming out. If I focused on what he was saying, I might be able to take my mind off the ball and he'd disappear -- I'd come to think of my little ball in the male gender, for some reason. So try I did. I picked up on something about removing something from something else - could have been wedding from family, honeymoon from country, or multi-state trademark violation lawsuits from state to federal court - he'd been working like a loon on those damn briefs. But listening required looking into his eyes, his omniscient, über-sophisticated ocean blues: his most intense physical feature, and the one that originally most drew me to him. Not only did they emanate wisdom and savoir-vivre born of good-breeding, they were just so arresting, focused, trenchant, and above all penetrating. Very penetrating. When they stopped and fixed on me, sometimes I got all tingly, sometimes a bit queasy, usually a combination of the two. And they were capable of the most amazing peripheral vision; always catching a subtle expression on my face or the way I'd be slouching, even when they didn't seem to be concentrated at all in my direction. Anyway, looking at him looking at me, expecting me to listen and converse like a normal, sane -- if not refined and educated -- adult and not a nutter afflicted by some panic-driven problem emanating from a loony, screwed-up rustic childhood experience, just made me all the more aware of the ball.
The second Stephen's eyes shifted from me to the waitress to motion her for more coffee, I opened my mouth widely and gasped in as much air as I could, so as to force the ball down with air. It didn't work; the air still couldn't get around him. I tried coughing him down, but still nothing. I was starting to feel lightheaded.
© Swallow is the copyrighted material of Tonya Plank.