|
The gift box was small and square, and my face flushed as my boyfriend handed it to me. How perfect, that he would get me a ring for my twenty-seventh birthday; how excited he looked, handing it to me first thing that morning, as I propped myself up on my elbow in bed. He wasn't down on one knee, I noticed, but that was all right. I still planned to say yes.
I unwrapped the present eagerly, the sharp corners of the plastic packaging indenting my fingertips, my heart shriveling under my ribs. It wasn't a ring. It was something that looked like a small, white plastic egg.
Welcome to your Tamagotchi!, the packaging said. Your new virtual pet!
"Isn't it cool?" asked Tim, grinning. "Here, lemme see it."
He reached out and swiped the toy from me, turning it over in his hands, studying the directions written in both English and Japanese. "Isn't it cool?" he asked again. "Don't you love it?" He handed it back to me, triumphant. "Here, turn it on. I want to see how it works."
I looked at the toy, mostly to avoid looking at his face, which I knew still bore his trademark grin: an anxious, teeth-clenched pseudo-smile that was always more rapacious than happy. We'd been together for a year, spending every day together as co-workers at a dot com startup, and four or five nights a week as lovers; I knew his expressions the way I knew my computer passwords — automatically, intrinsically. How well did he know mine?
I struggled to smile. "Wow," I said. "Neat."
|
It wasn't a ring. It was something that looked like a small, white plastic egg.
|
I studied the plastic egg, with its inch-square screen, which, when activated, would display a shifting series of grey squares that would represent my virtual pet, pictured on the box as a hamster-ish creature with plaintive, neonatal eyes. There were three buttons under the screen: one to feed the pet, one to play with it, and one to clean its waste. There was no off button. According to the directions, once I turned it on, I would have to tend to my pet religiously, feeding, amusing, and/or cleaning it whenever it chirped to announce its need. The more I cared for my pet, the longer it would live.
"Turn it on, turn it on," Tim urged.
"I think I want to wait." I wasn't ready to be a mother, especially if I wasn't going to be a wife. I put the egg aside, to Tim's great dismay. "But it looks great. Thanks."
Three days later, we broke up. We'd muddled through the rest of my birthday, the rest of the day gone strangely sour; then he blew me off — no call, no nothing — over the weekend that followed it. At work that Monday, I left a note in his in-box. It said, I think this is over.
That night, I took my Tamagotchi out of its package and turned it on. It beeped its cheery welcome song; the shifting grey squares arranged themselves on the screen into the form of a cute mammalian blob. The blob had floppy ears, hopeful eyes, a round belly, and a tail that splayed out to the right of its feet, which danced with joy and appreciation. I knew it was just a bunch of code and pixels, but I couldn't help but feel tenderly towards it.
This was always my downfall — I couldn't help but feel tender. I'd rolled my eyes at Tim when we first met, thought he was just another fratty, wiseass programmer, with his backwards ballcap and his obfuscatory jargon, but then he'd started to woo me, hard, showing up at the door to my office with his hat in his hand to ask my opinion on the such-and-such project, sending a dozen roses to my desk. He was needy, almost maniacally so, his leg bouncing under the table at meetings until someone praised his work, at which point it bounced even harder, but I was attracted by his need; it was like the gravitational pull of an exceptionally dense planet. And I was in love with my new job — my fancy-pants, pie-in-the-sky job, where people rode skateboards through the hallways and smoked pot on the roof and spoke entirely in buzzwords. Sleeping with Tim was as close as I could come to sleeping with my job. Thus, I became tender.
| RELATED ARTICLES |
|
Rough Patch by Nicole Ankowski
This contraceptive device sickened thousands of women. I was one of them. |
|
|
Bad Panties by Alice Bradley
I wore them on a date. It wasn't pretty. |
|
|
Bad Sex with Gwendolyn Knapp
An itch you can't scratch. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Whodunnit? by Ryan Britt
With her, I was a mysterious stranger — even to myself. |
|
|
|
