Carl and Gerlinde (Instalment # 51)
“No – please not! You can have anything you want, but not marriage… “ Carl heard his Gerlinde moan when, for the n-th time, he again lay on his knees and looked up at her with true dogs’ eyes asking for her slim hand.
Standing straight but as pale as a corpse, and wearing a hideous pink-coloured dress made of Lace of Brussels, Gerlinde just murmured: “No, please not! You can have anything you want from me, but not marriage! Anything you want, but not marriage … !”, while at the same time nervously fingering the margarite chaplet she wore on her head with pointy fingers. But Carl just stared at her through glassy eyes and tried to fit yet another golden ring on her right ring finger, although they were all far too big and consequently kept falling from her perspiring hand all the time. When, finally, he almost managed to do it and her right hand was quasi equipped with a beautifully sparkling, golden finger, she gave a beast-like howl, shot up and ran through Carl and towards the front door…
Carl woke up soaking wet with perspiration!
His inside was smattered; it took him half an hour to calm down at least a little bit.
Gerlinde, who had just run through him like a North-Korean rocket, lay next to him snoring comfortably. Occasionally the sound that squeezed itself through her throat sounded more like a bark! Following their mutual agreement, he would poke her right upper arm in such a situation until she moved to lie on her side and the sound from her lips would dwindle down to a spring-like purring …
Unfortunately, this “wedding nightmare” was a dream Carl suffered from more and more often recently!
To be precise, he had been having it since June, 30, 2017, which was the day the German parliament, after Angela Merkel’s quick “change of marriages”, had decreed with a considerable majority that the right to marry is now to be established for persons of the same sex. Yes – ever since then, this nightmare kept returning in periodically changing intervals!
Nor was it helpful to discuss matters with Gerlinde – or with Hannelore and Kurt! On the contrary – the “nightmare frequency” even increased after such discussions, because Carl saw himself more and more being moved into a “depressing offside position”. After all, it was now a fact that everybody could marry – except if you were relatives – and thus rise to the superior category of “spouses”. A status which included all the significant characteristics, such as your realty property, garden, car, child, dog – and, naturally, also your spouse, whom, when talking with others or at business dinners, you could simply introduce as “my wife”!
If you belonged to this category, you knew that you had made it: you had actually arrived in real life and had fulfilled one of the most important norms of our society! No matter how long this norm lasted?
Couples like he, Carl, and his reluctant Gerlinde, were actually often looked down on with a mixture of pity, rejection and secret envy in this “normative society”. In fact, sometimes – as he saw it: far too often -, they were even considered to be in a state of “Not – Yet”! Which meant that, regardless of their advanced years, they still had not yet found the partner for life and that, due to this lack of commitment, their life was just in a phase of limbo: these couples had not yet arrived in real, actual life.
This was especially true for Carl with his “courtesan”, as some of their friends frequently called Gerlinde to his face whenever their alcohol level had reached the mark at which truth not only lay on the tip of their tongue, but also found its way beyond their slimy lips.
But then, what exactly was the position of his Gerlinde?
Was she his girl-friend? Or his life partner? Or his cleaning lady or lust object? Or what? …
For his Gerlinde, however, all those questions were something she could not have cared less about! For her, Carl’s bickering was neither understandable nor reasonable. In her opinion, all the problems he had with this non-existent and socially accepted term for couples that suggested they were one unit were just due to his being uptight! And his age! To be sure, both were naturally rather strongly related, as she herself often pointed out with a forgiving smile.
And whenever she had no arguments left, she was quick to cite some US study or other where it was scientifically proved that men, as soon as they tied the knot, unfailingly and inevitably started putting on weight – and not in small amounts, either!. And that was something she wanted to avoid at all costs, because a married obesity was something she definitely had no need of. Compared to that scenario, the almost slim Carl, in the “Not- Yet” state, was a lot better!
Although, as far as this was concerned, Carl was totally of another opinion than Gerlinde and still lamenting his unexplainable and singular non-married status, he had to admit that Gerlinde’s bizarre “obesity prejudice” soon started making his nightmares even more horrible: because now, whenever he urged her to marry him – she actually suddenly replied: “Yes, I will”!
At the very moment when he feels how this smiling “Yes” starts warming his soul, he is overcome by an irrepressible flatulence that blows him up like a hot balloon and makes him rounder and rounder – until there is a big bang and he bursts with a loud plop. And then he feels how his embarrassment about being finally liberated is even stronger than his anger about Gerlinde’s outburst of hilarity …
KH
(Translated by EG)
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