Empty Glasses
By: Sara Grace Stasi
Tags: Its Complicated, Realtionships, Love, Fiction, Short Story

Empty Glasses

photo by Grace

He watched, helpless, as the door closed behind her. Sitting in the stillness left by her departure, he heard the second hand clicking around the face of the cuckoo clock. His grandmother’s clock mounted over the fireplace.

She gave it to him weeks before she died, knowing he had always admired it. His grandparents had brought back the nature-themed Black Forest clock from their honeymoon in Germany. It was nearly one hundred years old, and the design was dominated by intricate twin carvings of evergreen trees that formed a canopy over the face of the clock. On the base, grizzly bears were locked in an eternal rivalry, each one snarling a challenge to his opponent, bearing his teeth in a show of dominance and power. On the half hour, the cuckoo sounded and a spotted woodpecker leaned out and clacked its beak with authority. On the hour, the clock also played Edelweiss.

The clock was a showpiece in his apartment, a common-ground conversation starter that he used as a Hail Mary in many an awkward social engagement. His third and final date with Jennifer came to mind. The night had started off all right, with her picking a cocktail randomly from his bartender training handbook and them mixing it together in the kitchen. She sliced limes while he macerated mint leaves with a mortar and pestle. Later, sitting side-by-side on the replica Eames sofa, their chemistry faltered. Despite the alcohol, he couldn’t seem to loosen his tongue, and racing thoughts of how to start a conversation stiffened his mind.

“You know, that clock is almost one hundred years old. It belonged to my grandparents. They were married fifty-five years!” He rattled off these statistics too loudly, his voice sounding huge in the otherwise silent apartment. He should have put on some music. Miles Davis or Moby or something.

“Oh, really? That’s a long time,” she replied her eyes widening. He wasn’t sure if she was impressed by the age of the clock or concerned about the premature injection of marriage into the conversation. He could literally palm-slap himself in the head for bringing up his grandparents. Wasn’t there anything else he could think of to talk about? The rest of the date was a polite conversation about trends in food truck dining and the reboot of “X-Files” on TV.

The cuckoo over the fireplace struck nine-thirty AM. A little carved and painted woodpecker leaned out of the trap door above the clock face and opened and closed it’s beak while the bellows of the clock produced a “cuckoo-cuckoo” sound. One reason he loved the clock is that it was so reliable. As long as he wound it every eight days, it kept impeccable time and never failed to please and delight him with its hourly show. Each time he felt the deeper connection to his childhood and his grandparents. Their golden marriage was the impossible model to which he held his own relationships. Under the cuckoo’s watchful eye, each potential partner fell short of his grandmother’s standard. He had idolized her all his life and still held that ruler up as a measure of what a marriage should be.

But he would never get to fifty years if he couldn’t get past the first date. Why were women always walking out of his life? Jennifer was just one in a long string of failures. Sally and Marina both worked at the Coffee Castle, and Eleanor was an executive manager at Lowe’s. Then there was Tanisha and Lacey. Diverse, lovely women, all driven out of his life by some force he could not identify.

He knew it wasn’t his appearance. He was conventionally quite good looking and had been told so repeatedly throughout his life. Most women his age compared him to Christopher Reeve in the first Superman. He had a cleft chin and his thick dark hair had a cowlick in front that made a ringlet curl on his forehead. He liked hiking and gardening. He was a vegetarian. He voted for Bernie (in the primary, of course). He worked full-time as a bartender at one of the hottest nightclubs in town, the Hawkeye Huey, and had invented a signature drink called the Red Velvet Express that got a five-star review in Bartender Weekly. It also made good use of grenadine, which was cheap but easy to mark up, making it a fine choice for the club’s bottom line as well.

On the wall, the cuckoo struck ten AM and faint strains of German folk music filled the room, comforting him like a lullaby. The clock’s hands urged him forward, reminded him that there was always another turn of the dial, another day, another chance to be the man he wanted to be. He stood and gathered the empty glasses from his most recent failed date, taking them to the kitchen to wash, rinse, and repeat.