The Ring

Mindy Newell


She sits on the couch and stares into nothingness while her fingers turn and twist and push and pull and play with her wedding ring until her knuckle is red and aching and the heat from the friction burns her skin; all the while he is throwing handfuls of M & M’s into his mouth and laughing at Kramer using a blowtorch to break into Jerry's apartment on Seinfeld.

"I love America," he says during the commercial.

"And that’s why you married me.”

"Of course. That, and the green card." He gives her a kiss.

He smells of sweat and deodorant, tastes of tinned sardines and baked beans. His hands are flecked with indigo ink and acrylic paint. Strong hands. Good hands. Artist's hands that have known how to paint the canvas of her body to reveal the lightness of her being and the deep dark depths of her passion from the very second she met him.

And now he is gone.

“GOD DAMN HIM!”

She yanks the ring off her finger. It flies out of her hand, and she does not see where it lands. She goes down on her knees, searching under the couch, the coffee table, behind the entertainment unit. Her search spreads out, into the kitchen, the bathroom, the hall, the bedroom. Every light in the house is on. She uses a flashlight.

The ring is gone. She cannot find it. It's as if it never existed.

She starts to panic. Maybe it did never exist. Maybe he never existed. Maybe she imagined it all, the last two years of an international love affair made up of e-mails and telephone calls and flights back and forth across the Atlantic, the proposal on bended knee in front of the whole family, her acceptance, the wedding gown, his kilt, the roses, the breaking of the glass, the marriage, maybe it was all a dream. The hallucination of an aging, lonely woman of fading beauty with only pictures on the wall to remind her that here there was once a vibrant, laughing girl with sunshine dreams of her future.

She takes a Xanax. And sits in front of the TV, watching, but not really, the rerun of Seinfeld, the one where Kramer tries to break into Jerry's apartment with a blowtorch.