Goines On: Table thought

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Goines could tell that Mrs. Goines was thinking of something unpleasant during dinner. Between bites and chewing, her lips would twitch and quiver as though she were mouthing thoughts, but not mouthing them sufficiently for Goines to read. Both of the Goineses usually, and normally, occupied themselves during meals by thinking of this or that, occasionally breaking in to the other’s thoughts with an announcement of what they had just been thinking. “Do you remember when Nat told Gabriel in that restaurant that she could get Legionnaires’ Disease from eating the food?”

    There was probably as much private thinking about the TV shows they watched together as about anything else. Nat was Ally’s sister whose husband Vince has died, and Gabriel was Ally’s long-time friend who had recently been sleeping with Nat and whom Ally had rejected years ago in favor of Vince, who was the father of their two children, Romeo and Gigi, as well as of at least one daughter, Ophelia, by Vince’s girlfriend Tanya, whose house Gigi now frequents in order to conduct a friendship, a sisterhood, with Ophelia, who has known about Gigi all along and attends the same school as Gigi and Nat’s son Max, who has become Ophelia’s boyfriend.
    But Mrs. Goines hadn’t been thinking about a TV series this time. “Trump said he isn’t a globalist,” she announced.
    Goines knew immediately what she was referring to, as he usually did – as they both did, their respective private thoughts being so familiar to each other – for he had also heard the snippet on the radio from the POTUS’s address before the United Nations General Assembly while driving home from Costco that afternoon. The POTUS had told the Assembly that he was a patriot, not a globalist, although someone else seemed to have written the words, because the POTUS sounded stoned enunciating them, without feeling, slowly, like a child learning vocabulary. Of course, everyone knew that it wasn’t that – even if the POTUS was a child and overused his tiny lexicon – it was simply that the POTUS was reading from a prompter, and he made no apparent effort to do this so that what he was reading sounded natural and his own.
    The exact words on the prompter had been: “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”
    “Ha,” continued Mrs. Goines, “not a globalist, except when it comes to pressuring foreign leaders to help him get dirt on his political opponents.” Goines nodded his head in agreement. He had been following the news of the whistleblower’s complaint about the POTUS’s telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which the POTUS tried to pressure Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden. And everyone knew that as a candidate for the office of the POTUS, the candidate had asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for help in obtaining Hillary Clinton’s emails, which Putin obligingly did.
    But Mrs. Goines hadn’t finished sharing her thought: “…and a globalist when it comes to enriching himself with foreign visitors staying in his hotels.” Mrs. Goines’ lips were now trembling ominously, and Goines thought it better to try to change the subject. “Do you think Ally and Gabriel will ever get together?”

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