Another excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress. For the first excerpt, please click here.
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At a dark wooden table in downtown Garnetville’s trendiest bar, Bouquets, whose drinks all had floral names and steep prices:
“I broke up with Brody yesterday,” Cassie says.
“You did?” Olivia says.
“Uh-huh. We got along well enough, but sometimes—sometimes, if you don’t watch out, you can fall down the well and drown.”
Cassie sips her rhododendron (2 ounces [60 milliliters] dry vermouth, 1 ounce [30 milliliters] red herbal liqueur, 3 dashes absinthe, garnish with an orange twist—US $28.00 total but pretty dang great).
“Also,” she continues, “I think he kept trying to push me down that well.” She adopts a slightly gravelly voice: “ ‘Yes, look a li’l bit deeper, Cass, you’ll see our future together, where you prostrate yourself before me twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, just for the heck of it—ah, yes, the heck-related reason, the best reason for prostrating.’ ”
Olivia laughs while reaching for her delphinium (1½ ounces [45 milliliters] white wine, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] lime juice, ½ ounce [15 milliliters] orange liqueur, ¼ ounce [7½ milliliters] blueberry syrup, garnish with skewered blueberries—also US $28.00 total, also dang great, the dangest, in fact).
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During Brody and Cassie’s first date, in which they stroll around the Garnetville University campus, Cassie tells him (as she does with every guy during the first date, to make a capital-Q Quirky first impression and thus maintain her brand) about her “bio-dad,” Dr. Reed Flanagan, white, cisgender, unmarried, a media and cultural studies professor at that school, who, in 1985 at age forty-six, not long after Cassie’s birth, had a brief romance with one of his graduate assistants, Sydney Bartholomew, a white, cisgender, unmarried woman half his age, the first time he’d ever “boinked a student during his sixteen years there.” A few weeks after the relationship “had cratered,” she paid a surprise visit to his campus office, where she told him “he might as well hear” from her and “not from the ol’ grapevine” that, first, “he’d knocked her up”; and second, “she planned to have an abortion, a legal abortion, back when every state still permitted women to have reproductive rights, excuse the editorializing.” As it turned out, he supported her decision. He supported it so much, he insisted on paying for the procedure. No, he “vehemently insisted.” He actually used that adverb. How could she refuse? “Perhaps she would have used the V-word if he hadn’t offered to pay.” Anyhow, he “forked out three hundred bucks, a bargain back then.” Then he resigned before he could face disciplinary proceedings for his “inappropriate relationship.” He spent the last nineteen years of his educational career teaching media and cultural studies at the only place that would hire him: “a much smaller and more intellectually undemanding school,” Trebain College, in Trebain, Iowa. He still resides in “that minuscule town,” from which he sends Cassie “epic e-mails extolling the Midwest” and suggesting she move there. No thanks—she’d rather continue living near Pittsburgh, “essentially one big Superfund site,” than “suffer through the most stultifying boredom ever conceived of by demonic geniuses who speak with a twang, eeeee-yup.” Anyway, as it turns out, before leaving for Iowa, he “knocked up another woman,” Cassie’s mother’s sister, “during that rarest of occurrences, a one-night stand.” The result: Cassie’s “nephew-slash-half-brother Zane,” who receives the same e-mails from their father, “cat memes included,” as she does.
Pause.
“Do you like oatmeal?” Brody asks.
Pause.
“Cooked oatmeal?” Cassie replies.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes, I like cooked oatmeal, but only with brown sugar.”
“I like oatmeal, too, but in my case, only with fruit cocktail, the type in heavy syrup with artificially-colored cherries. It makes the oatmeal taste like—Santa’s helpers.”
“You into cannibalism?”
“Candy cane-iballism. Sorry.”
“Why apologize?”
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By her mid-teenage years, Olivia decides to devote her life to literature (the more classic the literature, the better), as a way to rebel against her parents. Her father, Grant Purcell (a white cisgender man who received a master’s of business administration [1978] from the Alden Business School, and who serves as the CEO [chief executive officer] of Shining Beacon, one of Pennsylvania’s largest insurance companies), reads only two types of books: ghostwritten memoirs (in hardback) from white, presumably cisgender, male American tycoons, about the tycoons’ inexorable rise to fame and how anyone can succeed just like them; and action-adventure novels (in paperback) about white, presumably cisgender, male American police officers, private detectives, secret agents, and mercenaries who battle—and always triumph over, usually lethally—Eastern-Bloc Communists, Middle-Eastern terrorists, Central-American narcoterrorists, African-American gang members, treasonous bleeding-heart white liberal American politicians, and other violent, savage, grotesque, human-adjacent foes. By comparison, her mother, Ruth Purcell (a white cisgender woman who received a bachelor of science in entrepreneurship [1983] from Lockridge University, and who runs her own business, New Performance Consulting, Incorporated), never reads any books, at least in her daughter’s presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean Mrs. Purcell never reads any books at all, just that, on a typical evening at the family’s near-mansion, while Grant sits alone in his charcoal recliner in the den (the room he calls his “sanctum sanctorum”), savoring every page of, say, My First Billion Dollars (Give or Take a Nickel), or Ghost Squad: Takedown in Tehran, Ruth sits on the teal couch in the living room (the room she calls “the living room”), watching, almost always with a rudimentary smile, a rented VHS tape of a popular mainstream hit movie of any genre, showtime always starting exactly at eight. Sometimes she watches an entire franchise from the beginning, one entry a night; on July 28, 2003, the eighteen-year-old Olivia joins her mother for the first time in doing just that, watching Extreme Weather (1994); followed the next night by Extreme Weather 2 (1996); then Extreme Weather 3 (1999); then the final one in the series, the straight-to-video Extreme Weather: Tsunami (2001), all on rented DVDs (the Purcells had replaced their VHS player with a DVD player by this point), and all of these movies featuring white, cisgender male protagonists and their much younger, white, cisgender female love interests fleeing from cheesy-looking, computer-generated dangers that include rainstorms, snowstorms, sandstorms, hailstorms, and genetically-modified wolves with foot-long fangs.
Olivia had never seen any Extreme Weather movie, due to her aversion to lowest common denominator entertainment product; however, wanting for some unfathomable reason to experience more than a few milliseconds of quality mother-daughter time before leaving for college in a few weeks, Olivia, for four nights running, slowly walks to the couch (sometimes shuffling her feet as noisily as possible upon the hardwood floor, to warn every inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere of her approach); sits down next to Ruth at 7:59:58; and watches her press the remote control’s PLAY button. The two Purcells stare straight ahead at the screen for the movie’s duration (including the entire closing credits), neither mother nor daughter saying anything. Afterwards, Olivia mutters “G’night,” Ruth says “Good night,” and Olivia walks (or noisily shuffles) off to bed.
But during the fourth night, after the final Extreme Weather had ended and Ruth had pressed the remote’s OPEN/CLOSE button to eject the disc:
“God, Mom, how could you stand watching that sexist garbage?”
“Sexist garbage?”
“Amber [the white, cisgender female love interest] whines like a little kid for the entire movie. She can’t do anything. She needs a man to save her. She never gets stronger or more independent. And when she runs from that humongous wave, of course she has to say”—Olivia adopts a squeaky voice—“ ‘Ohhh noooo, I broke a nail! Sob sob sob!’ ”
“In other words, you prefer feminist propaganda.”
“If you mean movies that don’t dehumanize women, then, yes, I prefer feminist propaganda.”
Ruth pauses.
“Can’t you just enjoy a movie for once?” she asks.
“I dunno. Anything can happen, I guess. Good night, Mom.”
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 