The Professor’s Wife (Flash Fiction Part 1)

Flash Fiction #170

I meet Alotus from time to time in stores, financial seminars, children’s events etc. I wouldn’t call her my particular friend since she is the kind of person who has a perfect life, who concentrates on her perfect family, who has no need for outside friendship, who tends to talk about “facts” of life or what life should be rather than what life is.

Anyway, our acquaintanceship goes on for years uneventfully. Whenever we see each other, we would stop to talk and to exchange pleasantries.

“What a perfect son you have. The little boy is so smart.” I would say in response to a story she has just described, like her son pretending to be a big boy, or her son saying something more illogically delightful than those Instagram videos posted by other people.

Alotus is a lucky girl among Asian immigrants and she does have a perfect life, which is acknowledged by everybody in our circle. She has married well. Her husband Daneu is a math wizard by birth and a math professor by trade in a very reputable university in New Jersey. He is not only smart, but also very cute with a good height. His boyish face makes him twenty years younger than his age. Most women don’t have her luck of gaining the affection of a highly skilled scientist, who is marked out–often from an early age– as the best provider and husband an immigrant woman can find. Alotus married up while most women have to settle with somebody, if not for survival, at least for avoidance of social censure.

And Alotus’ luck doesn’t stop there. Daneu has no bad habits or fastidiousness to upset her. Not infrequently a math professor of Asian descent will develop an obsession for gambling. He would imagine that he can use his math skills to outsmart casinos. Along the way, he gets addicted with gambling and loses money just as easily as those hapless people who are too ignorant to know the existence of statistics or probability. Daneu dislikes gambling. The only time he went to Atlantic City, he felt sick since the lights and noise of the casinos unsettled him so much that he thought he was out of his mind.

Daneu is also very good tempered, and not very fussy about food he eats. Some husbands would insist on traditional meals each day and special traditional meals on weekend, which are very time consuming to make and very easy to make mistakes during the long cooking process. And women talk with each other about those incidents, during which they put a little more salt than they should or missed an ingredient or timed a step one minute too long. Most cooking mistakes are irreversible and a picky husband may have a sour mood for not eating a satisfactory meal. The problem is there are so few places to buy quality traditional Asian food in America. If the husbands don’t get it at home or at friends’ dinner gatherings, they won’t be able to have it at all. And Daneu is not like that. He is not a picky eater. He is not one of those husbands who require satisfactory meals. If he doesn’t like his dinner, he will just go to HMart to get some rice donuts, which is his favorite.

Daneu doesn’t even require a spotless home as tidy as a soldier’s barrack. He doesn’t even ask his wife to doll up for him. I only heard about this from other women since Alotus has never invited me to her home and I’ve never met Daneu in my life. I am not in Alotus’ intimate circle. There’s a rumor that Daneu is a saint since he has no human foibles. Wait, he does have one weakness: he is not good at house chores or fixing the toilet kind of thing. However his mother lives with them and his mother helps with a lot of the chores.

Then, one day I meet Alotus at a picnic. As usual, she is not accompanied by her husband, who is at home working on some math problems for one of his papers. Alotus brings her mother-in-law and her two kids with her.

Whenever we have a picnic in Roosevelt Park, I like to walk around the park. I am not interested in the food very much. And Alotus, who has never taken a walk with me before, insists on walking with me.

(To Be Continued Here)

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