Husband and Wife Read online

  Because we lived on a winding country road with no sidewalk, no shoulder, and pickup trucks swerving around cyclists at sixty miles an hour, since the kids had come along we’d taken our walks on the driveway. It was a long driveway, as I’ve said, and steep, so pushing a stroller back up the final stretch to our house was good exercise, even if going up and down five or six times lacked a certain excitement. Mostly Nathan and I were working too hard to talk, fighting to keep the strollers from running away with us on the way down, fighting to push them up the hill on the way back. Not talking was fine by me.

  By the fourth lap I was lagging behind Nathan. I was too tired for this, and I didn’t want to do it, and I suddenly resented Nathan for making me do it, even if his motivations were good. Kate Ryan. Kate Ryan. And Nathan had failed, week after week, to fix the mailbox, which wobbled on its post at the end of the drive, and which he’d insisted I not fix myself, because if I did what he perceived to be his job I’d make him feel bad. I resented that, too. I resented the hell out of the back of his head. Over the crunch of wheels on gravel Mattie was calling my name. Or, anyway, she was calling me Mom. Is that the right word for that appellation? Is Mom my name? I stopped walking and leaned over the top of the stroller to hear her better. Caught in the grip of wheeled momentum, Nathan and Binx kept trundling down.

  “What is it, sweetie?” I asked. I was braced for her to say she wanted to get out and walk, for argument.

  “Mom,” she said, her tone inquisitive, “why did you decide not to be married anymore after your wedding a few days ago?”

  A flash of panic, shivery and hot. What did she know and how did she know it? “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you decide not to be married anymore?” she repeated.

  “We didn’t decide that,” I said.

  “No,” she said, frustrated by my stupidity, “why did you decide not to be married when I wasn’t born anymore?”

  “Oh,” I said. Relief chased the panic away. “We got married before you were born. Is that what you mean?”

  “No! I mean after your wedding a few days ago!”

  “That wasn’t our wedding, sweetheart. That was Alex and Adam’s wedding.”

  She looked puzzled. “Alex and Adam’s wedding?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh.” She put her fingers in her mouth, got the twist going in her hair. I resumed the walk, the matter resolved, but no. Her misunderstanding about the wedding failed to explain away the original question. I stopped walking. I came around to look her in the face.

  “Why did you think we decided not to be married anymore?”

  She didn’t answer. Children her age are by nature cryptic, unable to explain the assumptions and associations they make, falling back, in the face of questions too frustrating to answer, on silence and refusal. She looked at me with her fingers in her mouth, her eyes heavy-lidded and dull. “Answer me, please,” I said. Twirl, twirl, twirl. “Mattie, please answer me, or we’re going back inside.”

  With a wet pop the fingers came out of her mouth. “Daddy,” she said, and then opened her mouth to insert the fingers again.

  “What do you mean, Daddy?”

  She said, around her fingers, “Daddy said you decided not to be married anymore.”

  “When did he say that?”

  “Yesterday,” she said. This answer told me nothing. To her yesterday was not the day before this one but anytime in the indeterminate past. And really, why not? What did it matter that Nathan had told me what he’d done five days ago, and that he’d done it more than a year ago? He might as well have done it, be doing it, right this minute, fucking Kate Ryan, short story writer, right here across the gravel drive. Nathan and I had been together ten years. We’d met ten years ago. We’d married four years ago. We’d had our first child three years ago. When was it that, sick with a fever, I lay on the couch beside him through wavering hours as he read to me from books I’d loved in childhood, The Dark Is Rising, A Wrinkle in Time, and then when his eyes got tired he recited all the poems and scraps of poems his memory retained: “Whan that Aprile with his shoures soote” “Note the stump, a peachtree. We had to cut it down” “I want to say that forgiveness keeps on dividing” “For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of paradise”? I didn’t know. Yesterday.

  “Are you sure, Mattie? Are you sure he said that?”

  “Yes,” she said, with the polite, precise pronunciation she’d learned somewhere. From her teacher? Not from us, habitual users of the sloppy, casual yeah, unless we were angry, and then it was yes, yes, yes, squeezed out through the teeth. Yes.

  Nathan and Binx were at the bottom of the hill, behind the Dodsons’ place. Nathan stood with one hand on the stroller, looking back at us. “Come on,” he called. “We’ve got to wear you out.”

  I started walking. I was walking fast, letting the stroller tumble me forward. I called out before I even got to him, “Did you tell her we decided not to be married anymore?” I kept moving while I said it, so by the time I reached him it was his turn to talk.

  “What?” he said.

  “Did you tell her we decided not to be married anymore?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Did you tell her something like that?”

  “No,” he said.

  “She says you did.” We both turned to look at her, witness for the prosecution. Her face was a blank, her eyes a mystery.

  “Well, I didn’t,” he said. “I said nothing like that. I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Why would she say that?”

  “Sarah, she’s three. She says that honk monsters are trying to eat her. She says she’s afraid of going closer to stuff.”

  “I just don’t think she would make that up. Where would she even get the idea to make something like that up? And she said you told her that after the wedding. Don’t you think that’s a bit coincidental?”

  “I can’t explain it,” he said. “I can only tell you that I didn’t say that. For one thing, we didn’t decide not to be married anymore, did we?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me. We don’t seem to decide on anything. You decided.”

  “I didn’t decide anything. I acted on impulse, and regretted it.”

  “You decided to act on impulse,” I said. “At some moment you decided. You decided to let yourself.”

  He took a deep breath. “The point is, I didn’t say anything like that to her, and there’s nothing like that I want to say to her or you or anyone else.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t believe me.”

  There is nothing I want more than him in my bed.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s fucking shocking.”

  “Sarah,” he said. “The kids.”

  “The kids!” I said. “The kids! Maybe you should have thought about the kids before you fucked somebody else!” To tell the truth I screamed this last part. My voice shot up on the word fucked, spiked higher on the word else. “Maybe you should have thought about them before you wrote a book about cheating on their mother. You selfish asshole! You motherfucking prick! You want me to decide? I decide! You can’t publish that book! That book is dead. It’s dead and dead and gone. So live with that, why don’t you. Live with that!” His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors’ house. If I’d really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness.

  I decided. I decided then. I couldn’t be this person. I couldn’t live with him anymore.

  This is what it’s like when your husband leaves, because you’ve asked him to. He goes out to his car carrying two small bags that, for once, you didn’t help him pack, and you follow, but hesitate at the door while he goes on down the porch stairs. You stand at the door with the screen held awkwardly open, which takes a constant
application of pressure because the door is broken, something the two of you have been meaning to fix but haven’t, because neither of you knows how. He puts his bags not in the trunk but in the backseat, and normally you would ask why but this time you don’t, which is another way you know things are different. He shuts the car door. Then he looks at you. He waits to see what you’ll do. Will you come down the stairs and say something? Will you hug or even kiss him good-bye? You don’t know. You don’t know what to do. You’re still registering your surprise that he didn’t ask you to change your mind, or cry, because he’s been known to cry about far less. He did go pale when you told him what you’d decided. He did look like he was going to be sick, or faint, or die. But all he said was that he would go, that very night, because you’d asked him to and it was your right to decide what happened next, and he’d find somewhere to stay and call you the next day and figure things out from there. He did say he hoped you’d change your mind about wanting him gone. But he didn’t ask you to. He didn’t ask you to change your mind about the book, or even say he hoped you would. He said he’d call his agent the next day. Does it make it easier on you, or harder, his obvious conviction that he deserves this? You’re not sure, never having tried it the other way.

  You go down the porch steps to hug him, but halfway there you realize that you can’t hug him, because letting go again might be too hard. So you stop, practically midstep, and cross your arms over your chest. He understands what all this means, because he knows you so well he could turn you inside out, so he makes no attempt to approach. He looks at you with wet and tragic eyes, and then he says again that he’ll call you the next day and then he says, and this really breaks your heart, that he hopes you get some sleep. He gets in the car. And then he backs up, and then he turns to the right and points himself down the drive, and then he goes.

  After a moment you follow, hanging back at a distance you hope keeps you too small to see in his rearview mirror. At the bottom of the hill, just before the road curves, the brake lights brighten, and you think that he can’t do it after all, he’s coming back to beg you to let him stay, and you’re glad, you don’t really want him to go, you love him, you love him, you don’t know what you were thinking. Then you see your neighbor making her dogged way across her lawn to the car, her hand lifted in a motion that’s somewhere between a wave and a request to stop. Oh, you think. You hadn’t seen her there.

  Your husband gets out of the car, leaving his door open, and goes around the front to greet the neighbor. They exchange some words. What are they saying? You can’t begin to guess. Then suddenly your husband bends—really bends, because your neighbor is a small and rapidly shrinking woman—and hugs her. You feel a shock of surprise at the sight of her hands on his back. You think he must have told her that he’s leaving, and the thought of him spreading your business around angers you, but now that you’ve asked him to leave you’ve moved this matter into the public domain, and what the hell do you expect? He releases the neighbor. They talk some more. Then he goes back to the car. Just before he gets in he turns his head to look up at your house, and you step hastily back into the shadow of the trees, not wanting him to see you. You’re not sure why it matters if he sees you. He gets in. He shuts the door. He drives away.

  You would like to stay there in the woods, a frozen vertical thing lost among the trees. But your children are in bed in the house above, and at this very moment might be crying, might be calling for you. So you go back. You trudge. That’s the right word, for this moment, and maybe all the moments after.

  And that is what it’s like when your husband leaves you, because you’ve asked him to. In my case, anyway, that is what it was like. I don’t know why I framed the experience as universal. I guess it felt too big to have happened only to me.

  PART II

  CHAPTER NINE

  The morning after Nathan left, Mattie woke at six, an hour earlier than usual. I imagine she called for her daddy, as she always did, and when he didn’t respond, screamed for me. I didn’t hear her right away because I’d only been asleep two or three hours and so was deep in slumber, and because Nathan was the one who got up with her and I wasn’t alert for the sound of her voice the way I was for the sound of the baby’s. When neither Nathan nor I came, instead of getting up to find us, she lay in bed and screamed, and then she began to kick the wall, and that woke not only me but Binx as well. I dragged myself awake to stereo screaming. What I wanted to do was to keep on lying there, and for a little while I did. Mattie cried, “Daddy! Mommy!” and Binx just cried, and I lay there and revisited a thought I’d had the night before, about irresponsibility. How they made the word ugly so you won’t want to embrace the concept. Think of that harsh beginning and seven lurching syllables. Not until you reach the last do you get to make a nice long vowel sound, a relaxation of the mouth, a sigh.

  I got Binx first, although picking him up didn’t stop the screaming, as what he wanted was his milk and he wanted it now, and then I went into Mattie’s room and found her turned sideways on the bed with her eyes squinched shut, her legs up the wall, her feet bang-bang-banging away. “What are you doing?” I had to shout to be heard.

  She stopped. She opened her eyes. “You didn’t come,” she accused. “You left me all alone.”

  “Aw a-wone? You sure have abandonment issues for a child who’s never been abandoned,” I said. I said it with a fair amount of irritation, and immediately wished I hadn’t taken that tone—hadn’t said it at all—when she asked, “Where’s Daddy?”

  I should have prepped an answer to this question, when I wasn’t toting a screaming baby and a head filled with sand. “Why didn’t you just come look for me?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “The deepness,” she said. “In the night movie, a little girl fell into the deepness.”

  “The night movie?”

  “It played up there.” She pointed at the ceiling.

  I looked up, like I expected to see this night movie projected there, the little girl, falling and falling.

  “Usually you have to turn the TV on,” Mattie said, her voice now casual, conversational, although her face remained a swamp of tears and snot. “But with the night movies the TV just comes on.”

  This was the first time she’d told me about her dreams. I was surprised to find out she was having them, even though I’d read somewhere that babies dream even in the womb and wondered how anyone could possibly know that. What did they dream about? What did they know, before they knew anything? Warm liquid, a rocking motion—their sleeping lives no different from their waking ones. And now Mattie’s dreams were scary, her subconscious already turning against her at the age of three. “What happened to the little girl?”

  “I told you,” she said. “She fell into the deepness.”

  Remember my recent emotional trauma, how little sleep I’d gotten—I reacted to this like she was talking about me. “Oh,” I said. “And she never got out?”

  “Once you fall in, you can never get out,” she said, her face ominously blank, the littlest prophet of doom.

  “Maybe you can,” I said.

  “No!” she shouted, suddenly enraged. “You can’t!”

  “Don’t scream at me!” I screamed, and then I whirled the baby around and stormed out of the room, and Mattie started shrieking, “Mommy! Mommy!” as if I’d abandoned her on the side of the road like an unwanted pet.

  So this was single motherhood. And where was my husband? What had I done? My daughter wanted to know that, too. Over her Cheerios she hammered at me like a prosecuting attorney. I put her off with flimsy lies until she asked, “If you go to work, who’s going to take care of Binx?”

  “Oh, fuck,” I said. It seemed unbelievable that I could have failed to consider Binx’s care, and my anger at Nathan flared at the thought that he hadn’t considered it either, at the conviction that it was his fault I’d just cursed in front of our little parrot of a
child. I looked at Binx, who offered me his gummy smile and said, “Ba!”

  “You’re going to leave him all alone!” Mattie wailed.

  I swore again. Mattie cut short her crescendo to repeat the word, looking wicked and delighted. I did not want to have to call Nathan. I did not want to ever have to call Nathan. Although it hadn’t been my intention at the time, I found that I wanted our awkward yet politely melancholy parting to be the end, which wasn’t possible because we had a legal contract and a house and a three-year-old and a baby who couldn’t be left at home—no matter what wild fantasies were flashing through my mind—and couldn’t be brought to the office. I was going to have to call Nathan.

  The message picked up right away, meaning his cell phone was off. “Hi, this is Nathan,” his voice said, sounding to my mind brusque and annoyed. “Please leave a message.”

  I choked. I hung up the phone. I registered that Mattie was singing, “Fuckity fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck,” to the tune of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” which Nathan sang to her when she was complaining on long walks and he told her they were bunnies on the bunny trail and had to keep hopping along.

  It occurred to me that I could call in sick. Or had I used all my sick days with my maternity leave? Suddenly I couldn’t remember how that worked, even though I’d carefully researched the policies beforehand. Anyway no one would question me if I took a personal day. I could say one of the kids was sick, and then spend the whole day in the house, where my husband would normally be, while he enjoyed a little vacation.

  This time his phone rang and rang. So it was turned on now, our number flashing on the screen under the little word, “Home.” But he didn’t answer.