Screen Name

I presented her with the gift, a slim box about twelve inches long and four inches wide. It was wrapped in the only thing I could find in Chinatown — a garish red and yellow paper sprinkled with a pattern of  tiny dark green branches that were probably supposed to be mistletoe but which looked like little pieces of burnt spinach. Perhaps, with a better grade of printer’s ink, the paper would have been burgundy and gold, but for two dollars you get what you get. She held the package tight to her chest. 

“But you said we weren’t going to do this!” 

“Nah! It’s nothing. Go on. Open it.”

“But I didn’t get you anything,” she whined. She looked at me, pleadingly, as if to ask for permission, permission I had obviously already granted but which, somehow,  just wasn’t quite good enough. I hated this about her, too. 

“Opennn iiiit,” I urged.

She sat down quickly on the edge of the sofa and then slowly, methodically, with a single fingernail, began to pick at the corner of a piece of tape on one end of the package. She sat there and she picked. Pick. Pick. Pick. She brought the package up close to her eyes, examined the piece of tape, and then she continued to slowly, methodically, pick. Pick. Pick. Pick. 

“You can tear the paper, you know.”

She looked up at me. Pick. Pick. Pick. Then back at the package. Pick. Pick. Pick.

“I have lots more,” I said, emitting a corrosive laugh at the end that in another, proper universe would never be recognized as a laugh at all, but for what it really was — an involuntary expression of pure hate and rage. 

“I just like things neat,” she said, implying that no one else in the world did but her. Pick. Pick. Pick. 

Watching her, everything inside me tightened. Her awful phrase, “I just like things neat,” replayed over and over in my head as she picked at the goddamn fucking tiny corner of a piece of fucking tape that was holding some shitty two dollar Chinatown wrapping paper around the goddamn fucking two dollar counterfeit extension cord she was about to get as a goddamn fucking gift. 

“An extension cord,” she announced flatly. 

“It’s for the tree,” I said. “Now you can plug the lights in.”