The Beer-Eating Woman and her Unlucky Husband
Once, we knew a woman who ate beer.
Her husband stocked their freezer with cans of Coors Light (complete with a first-in, first-out system to prevent bursting), which she would then de-lid, one by one, to slurp and crunch. We invited her to happy hour at our houses on some Fridays because our kids went to school together, but the beer-eating woman usually just stayed home and called us.
This was years ago, when we still had landlines with caller IDs, and being a few drinks in ourselves, we’d talk about her instead of answering. Had the beer-eating woman grown smaller since we’d last seen her, subsisting as she seemed to on light beer and cigarettes? We would have liked to be smaller ourselves but preferred snacks to smoking and vanilla vodka with our Coke.
On school nights, the beer-eating woman slurped and crunched and smoked on the back deck while her husband kept their kids inside. Their backyard angled or butted up against four others, and if we had been her husband, we too might have imagined the whole neighborhood listening while she chomped and guzzled and inhaled; listening as he rolled two full recycling bins to the curb every week.
At some point, he decided to do something about it.
Everyone guessed something, but few knew what something was. Of those who knew, no one said anything. It was a decorum you don’t see much of in the suburbs, and of course, it didn’t last.
When the beer-eating woman found out, she took turns calling us every night at 8:00, yelling and slurping and crunching into the phone—"Was it you? Was it you?”—which drove her unlucky husband (this is when we started calling him this) to their basement, where he wrote songs and drank what would turn out to be too much wine.
After he puffed up like a yellow raft (which in a different kind of story might have saved him), we found samples of his music on Amazon: “Mia gave her life like an orchard/Mia drained the life from me.”
We wondered about the unlucky husband. How he had gone from here to there to (we presume but may never or not for a long time know) nowhere.
We felt bad for the beer-eating woman. We were relieved when she moved away.
But Mia? We obsessed over Mia. Was she successive, concurrent, sequential? Walkable, local, transmittable? We talked about her incessantly (this is how we buffered ourselves, with adjectives and adverbs) but finally decided that she was no one like anyone we knew.
No one, after all, had written a song about us.
Lorri Mcdole
Lorri McDole’s writing has appeared in The Writer, Defenestration, The Offing, Cleaver, Sweet, Prime Number Magazine, Eclectica, and The Brevity Blog, among other places. Her writing has been selected for several anthologies, including Flash Nonfiction Funny and Into Sanity. Her essay “Storms of the Circus World,” which was a finalist for the Talking Writing Prize for Personal Essay, was nominated for a Best of the Net award.