Control

Georgina had had it, totally had it with Jerry. To say she was at her wits' end didn't begin to describe her irritation. All around the house were projects he'd begun in a fit of energy and enthusiasm and then abandoned, half finished, leaving tools and supplies and whatnot right where he'd put them down. For example, there was the hole in the kitchen under the telephone, which he'd cut 10 years ago in a fit of modernization that she'd never quite understood the need for. A box with wires sprouting from it dangled below the rectangular hole, instead of having been housed neatly within it and then plastered over so that all the wires and connectors were hidden. For 10 years she'd looked at that ridiculous hole with the ugly aluminum box dangling there. And for 10 years she'd hoped that all the guests who visited their home would blame the mess on Jerry, not she herself. She told Jerry she'd forego all future birthday gifts if he'd just finish that one project. To no measurable effect. 

Finishing was a big thing with Georgina. She hated leaving projects midway through, the materials and byproducts and preliminary sketches and wasted bits all strewn about the dining-room table or her sewing room or wherever she happened to be working. Jerry didn't seem to even see what she called messes. Indeed, they didn't appear to share a definition of the word. Tools and parts and wires and screws lying on the coffee table or kitchen counter or wherever were evidently invisible to him. And so she had learned to live with it. 

She was walking the dog one sunny day in July, stewing about the undone things at home, thinking that maybe she would try to get a job so that she could leave the house every day and go to a neat office, where she wouldn't have to be surrounded by those unfinished projects. In her right hand was the dog's leash and a blue plastic bag of poop she'd just finished picking up. The dog strained at the leash, threatening to pull her shoulder from its socket. Why hadn't she ever taken him to a second training class, she wondered. He was a terrible dog, out of control and random, sometimes stopping and refusing to go another step, sometimes wandering into the neighbor's yard to do his business, sometimes running ahead of her, like he was doing now, so that she could hardly keep up. She knew that she was supposed to be in control, not the dog. It was another reminder of how little in her life she did control.