John Wilmes
In my thirty-first year, what I looked forward to more than anything were my walks. My wife did not know about them. On these walks, I would get McDonald’s—often a shameful amount, double-digit McNuggets and multiple sandwiches. I would take laps around the neighborhood and, while walking, eat it all secretly. The dexterity, the downright athleticism required to do this with my robust pace was considerable. And here we have to add in that I would perversely construct my laps so to pass by our house during them, adding extra levels of hiding complication to the routine. My ingenuity was pushed to impressive heights by the goals and restrictions of my secret McDonald’s exercise; my left forearm grew much stronger over months of doing this, it being so often a tensed narrow table I put all my food on and kept balanced amidst high walking speeds. I was also required to skillfully hold a coat over this mobile dining structure, as cover, when I passed by our home.
Many people looked at me strangely as I did this, but I am certain my wife never saw me in the act. And not just because I would use the sidewalk on the other side of the street, or because our front windows simply did not favor the prospect of my wife’s visibility of my behavior, which was emotionally adjacent to cheating. I was sure that she didn’t see me because of a more elemental truth: I could read my wife, but she couldn’t read me. This was something we both knew, we had even acknowledged it explicitly. It was especially obvious when we played games together that involved any subterfuge. There had been a phase a few years prior, in which we did this quite a lot. As we played board games that invited their contestants into psychological manipulation, there was a mirthfulness, often sexual in nature, in the dynamic of Christine’s feckless attempts to clothe her intentions and my ensuing, absolute ease at deconstructing these efforts. It sent both of us into hysterics, this little charade, hysterics which would escalate toward the bedroom.
How I came to translate this sanctioned, romantically generative sneakiness into something more sinister over time is not completely clear to me, nor is the why of it, but I suspect it had something to do with the rising possibility of Christine and I having a child. I did not want to have a child, but was unable to express the extent of this feeling, or even really a portion of it, largely because the prerogative to reproduce felt like someone else’s; not mine and not even hers, it was the idea of our parents maybe, but probably it was more nebulous than that. It was someone who was certainly more powerful than us, but not identifiable, who somehow held long string above us like we were puppets.
The closest I would get to articulating how I felt on this matter was when I would go into a riff, with Christine, about how I am not a puppet, which she assumed to be a joking reference to one of the president’s unfortunately hilarious soundbites. In reaction to this assumption, I would not alter my riff to distinguish it from such a thing, nor make any attempt to clarify the place it was coming from. Instead I would lean into an impression of the president; I suspect that, during those years, the unusually conspicuous president was a convenient—though very bad—organizing structure for many types of conversation, thought, and feeling. My McDonald’s habit felt, to me, in keeping with the regrettable comic palette of these years, as well, which was probably also a chief reason I went on with it.
I would elevate the funniness of the act for myself by cycling through all of the establishment’s various dipping sauces, explaining these condiment patterns internally like I were an overwrought pop-culture critic, envisioning each sauce as a distinct era within my career as an artist. My barbecue phase, my transcendent sweet and sour days. Funnier yet was the slow realization that on some level I considered my smartwatch, dutifully logging calories burned on these walks as I intook many more, as some kind of righteous counterpoint to this gross action. Robot Watch Versus McDonald’s, went the show in my head, scored by the Wagnerian overtures of TV football.
The McDonald’s ritual never did collide with my hiding of it. All those ingested experimental meats were ultimately not, as I once whispered to myself on a walk, “Chekhov’s McNuggets.” Instead I stopped doing it, probably because of the long road trip Christine and I went on, hiking and visiting diners we’d learned about from our favorite website. This was an outstanding trip, the best of our marriage, my smartwatch statistics even agreed with this claim. More important to the trip’s success, though, was how we did finally discuss the prospect of having a child together. Christine and I did not do this with much sincerity, though, instead poking our way to the subject with a series of sarcastically imagined fears regarding the basically total vulnerability of a baby. On one hike, I loudly wondered atop a large incline just how many ways a one-year-old might manage to die in our predicament. I said I was glad to be in my thirties, instead—I am not all that smart, I clarified, but I am so much smarter than a baby, who could probably not survive this kind of topography, this lack of amenities, and for us this is instead a fun and enriching place to be, not a place that challenges our existence.
Christine ignored my musing in the moment, but in the car on the way back to our rented cabin she continued in this fashion. She said that she, too, was glad not to be a baby, because if she were a baby she would not be able to operate a car as she currently was. How would she get her hands all the way up to the wheel, or even understand what it was for, she wondered. As the joke evolved over the afternoon and evening, we began to extrapolate this imaginary baby into increasingly dystopic scenarios, and it was clear that we were using the hypotheticals not just as a means to chuckle, but as a way to share our worries about raising a child in a world that we didn’t like the direction of, not even a little. Poor baby, Christine would say, every time something terrible happened in the news again. How is the baby going to get through this latest wildfire, she asked. The poor baby doesn’t own mid-continental property, and its coastal home will be blown or burned or washed away, she said. That baby is really going to talk a big financial bath during the tsunami medleys of tomorrow.
The morning after the birth of our long-running baby scenario rhetoric, Christine was in a slumber too comfortable to break, while I woke up joltingly and irreversibly—sometimes I thought this difference in our sleep patterns was related to how I could emotionally evade my wife, pretty much unscathed, but I wasn’t sure. Relief coursed through me this morning; ecstasy as well, aplomb, and other qualities I so rarely have opportunity to take note of. I believed, in that moment, with the clarity of an epiphanic voice-over in a bad television show, that my previous inability to confront the baby question and reach this level of understanding was why I had been keeping up my McDonald’s habit—it was the barge upon which I floated my unpackable inner things, across a body of water too large to see the other side of.
With Christine indefinitely asleep in our remote vacation cabin, though, I cannot lie and say that my instinct was anything but to go and guiltily eat another ballast of McDonald’s, just one more. So uncommon was the chance to capitalize upon breakfast hours, which I had been thinking about a lot. So I got dressed and drove to the nearest drive-through, and ordered three biscuit sandwiches with hashbrowns and pancakes that can’t legally be called that. This, I told myself, would be—and it really was—my last hoorah. So I made it count: after I got the stuff, I raced down the country road back to the cabin, a lush, harp-driven soundscape—my favorite harp soundscape, I believe—blasting from the car speakers as I risked life to cram the biscuit sandwiches and synthetic pancakes into my mouth too quickly for their flavors to distinguish themselves.
This wasn’t a good idea, despite feeling like one, and it led me off the road, narrowly between two trees that would have destroyed my vehicle at the speed it was moving. As I stomped to the brakes to marginally avoid a third tree, syrup splashed upon my face. The car hit the third tree as it slowed, but not badly enough to damage or even ding it—such was the forgiving kismet of my fake pancake crash. But it did hit the tree, and so I stayed there in the driver’s seat, the car parked with its nose right up against wood. One of the pancakes had flown to the radio, and stayed stuck to it, but half of another laid still in its open styrofoam packaging. As I looked at it I knew that everything I thought had been larkingly, yet also seriously communicated between Christine and I, regarding having a child or not, may not have been communicated at all. I thought that if I gifted her this flat synthetic piece of food, all that was left of my impressively consumptive McDonald’s streak, that maybe it could begin to show her more clearly.
