Adequate

“I thought frogs were our thing,” he said to himself in his head, and felt kind of hurt. She saw the look on his face and knew it; but could she help it if she had walked a golf course with another guy at night, listening to frogs sing from artificial ponds? They sat dumb, mouths silently always-open, feeling forever inadequate from comparisons with real ponds that were dug out of the earth by old night forces instead of smallish Caterpillar trucks. They wish they weren’t the smallish models, but rather the huge steeds of the construction garage, because then women wouldn’t pass them and call them “cute,” a thing a machine is never supposed to be. She got scolded by this other boyfriend once, Frog Guy Number One, for flattering his truck as “cute” because it was sort of diminutive for a truck, and she thought it would be okay because she meant it well but he was always never-getting her so she left him and found Frog Guy Number Two. This boyfriend will never quite get over being bothered by the fact that his are not the first arms she has listened to frogs in, and this is what he thinks about as they settle into the grass at the edge of a noiselessly wailing, artificial pond.