Husband and Wife Page 2

  “I wish you hadn’t told me this right now,” I said. “I wish you’d waited until we got home. Or, no, not right before bed. I wish you’d told me tomorrow. Though I guess then I might have said, ‘Why did you let me go to that wedding and have fun with all our friends when the whole time you knew you were going to tell me this the next day?’ I wish you’d told me in a couple of days.”

  He said nothing. We both knew there was no good time to tell me. He didn’t need to say that. But certainly this was a particularly no-good time. I wished he hadn’t told me at all, ever. Why did I need to know this? Why was I the one who had to decide what to do? Why was I always the one who had to decide what to do?

  “I guess I want to go to the wedding,” I said.

  For just an instant, the normal Nathan surfaced, and he shot me the look that always preceded the question, “Are you crazy?” Then he was gone, and this new, sad—shattered, as if I’d dropped him on the floor—Nathan said, “All right. I’ll put on my shoes.”

  I didn’t wait. I left the room. I wanted to close the door behind me, and it took some effort to leave it open. Then I went, for no reason I recognized, into the baby’s room. It was the coldest room in the house, maybe because the floor was linoleum, the same crappy linoleum as the kitchen. We’d meant to replace the linoleum but never had, because the room had been my study before the baby and it didn’t much matter then. The room had had built-in bookcases and a built-in counter, where I used to sit, ostensibly to write, looking at the field in front of our house and the big tree to the left that I was worried might have some kind of fungus and the hummingbird feeder, which reliably attracted a number of the tiny birds, as long as I remembered to refill it. Our friend Alex had ripped out that counter when I was pregnant—she was handy in a way neither Nathan nor I were, and so confident in her abilities she’d started the task with no better tool than a kitchen knife. So that was gone, and in its place the white crib, slightly the worse for wear, and a wicker dresser that had been a hand-me-down from a friend. The bookcases were still there, but now they held a stuffed green sea horse and Owl Babies and an old wooden train I’d found at a secondhand toy sale and would probably never let the baby play with because I was afraid the paint had lead. I’d boxed up my poetry books, and they were currently sitting in those boxes in a corner of Nathan’s study. Nathan still had a study. All of this might sound heavy on the symbolism. I couldn’t help but think so, when I was boxing up those books to make way for the baby, but really giving up my study was the practical choice. Nathan still wrote, and I didn’t. I’d been going in my study from time to time in the last couple years, on weekends, but not doing much more than reading celebrity gossip online, an activity that made me feel tawdry and useless. Sometimes I could hear Mattie asking, “Mama? Mama?” and Nathan saying, “She’s working,” and I wasn’t, and Mattie went on saying “Mama? Mama?” the question both hopeful and despairing, and I went on sitting there, failing to produce a single word. And then Nathan would ask me if I’d been writing, and I would lie and say I had. Maybe I was doing it for him, keeping up appearances, because he’d married a poet and I thought he still wanted to be married to one. Maybe the other woman was a poet, this woman whose name I never wanted to know.

  It really bothered me that the baby’s room was so cold. Nathan and I had had several fights about it in the baby’s first three months, not because he didn’t agree that it was cold but because he said I was excessively anxious about it. Once I said, “What am I not excessively anxious about? Would you rather I went back to worrying about SIDS?”

  He sighed. He said, “Touché.” For some reason that struck us both as hilarious, and we laughed a long time.

  I heard Nathan’s footsteps in the hall, and so I emerged from the baby’s room, nearly colliding with him. I’m sure I’d startled him, but he didn’t have to look so terrified. He practically flattened himself against the wall to let me go first.

  The children and the sitter were in the kitchen. The kitchen was the largest room in the house, and the sunniest. There was a window at one end, a door to the porch with a pane of glass at the other, and glass doors into the backyard in between. When the white floor was clean, the room looked bright and cheery, crappy and scratched as the linoleum was. It wasn’t clean now. I wondered where the Swiffer was. Did I have time to clean the floor? No, I did not.

  Mattie was sitting on the floor by the glass doors, reading The Cat in the Hat aloud to the baby doll in her lap. Her hair was in her face, as always, because I didn’t want her to have bangs and she always pulled her barrettes out. Her hair was the exact shade of Nathan’s, brown with a shimmer of gold. Neither one of the children had gotten my hair—black, curly—or my green eyes, or the shape of my face, or my Mediterranean skin. They both looked exactly like Nathan, as though I existed merely to return his genes to the world.

  When I say Mattie was reading, I mean she was making up her own story, a mishmash of what she remembered from bedtime readings of this book and a few others, plus her own embellishments. She said, “Her mother said, ‘The fish doesn’t want to fall.’ Her mother said that. Why did her mother say that?” She put a lot of stress on the word mother.

  The baby was in the high chair, the sitter spooning something orange into his mouth. “Hi, Rooster,” I said. We called him “Rooster” because Mattie was named for the protagonist of True Grit, one of our favorite books, and Rooster Cogburn was another character in the book. His real name was Binx, after the main character in The Moviegoer. Nathan and I had admitted to each other, just a couple weeks before, that we had some doubts about naming him that. Nathan and I had doubts. Nathan and I. Nathan and I.

  The baby smiled when he saw me, jerking his arms as his whole body expressed his delight, then immediately began to fuss, banging his hands against the tray. The sitter, who was used to this routine, put another spoonful in his mouth. “Y’all leaving?” she asked brightly. Had she heard Nathan crying? There was no way to find out without asking, and if I asked, I’d give her the very information I didn’t want her to have.

  “Yes,” I said. My voice sounded strange, flat. I tried to mimic the sitter’s bright tone. “Mattie,” I said, “can I have a kiss?”

  She looked up. “No, I’m reading!” she shouted. She threw the book across the floor. She looked at the doll in her lap, considering. Then she threw the doll across the floor.

  “No throwing,” Nathan said without conviction. Normally I would’ve crouched down, looked Mattie in the eye, told her that she knew better and she needed to pick the things up and say she was sorry or she’d lose TV time tomorrow, and so on and so forth. But I did nothing. I was gripped by an image of a possible future: me, smoking cigarettes on the couch, the baby in a dirty diaper on the floor, Mattie eating french fries in front of some mind-melting cartoon.

  There was nothing I needed to tell the sitter, but I asked, as usual, if she had our cell phone numbers and as usual she said she did. I kissed the baby on his warm head. I wanted to scoop him up, clutch him close, run off into the woods to make a new life, just me and him. He smiled at me again. I palmed the top of his head like a ball, rubbed his downy-chick hair. “OK,” I said. “OK. We’re going.”

  Nathan followed me to the door. I had it open when Mattie changed her mind. She barreled toward us, and when I bent down she threw her arms around my neck. “You’re a sweet mommy,” she said. “I’m glad that you love me.”

  “I’m glad you love me, too,” I said, and her little arms tightened. She pressed her face against my cheek in her version of a kiss. Outside, after Nathan had kissed her and I’d shut the door behind us, I said, with maudlin self-pity, “I’m glad somebody does.”

  Nathan turned on me those tragic eyes. “I love you,” he said. “I do.” We got into the car.

  We had a longish drive ahead of us because we lived in the country—out in the county, as Nathan and I liked to say, with just the slightest inflection of a redneck accent—about ten miles from Chapel Hi
ll, between it and another small town called Hillsborough, where several famous southern writers lived in large historic houses. We lived out there, instead of in Chapel Hill or Durham, where I worked, because we’d rented the house sight unseen eight years before, when we were moving from Austin to Chapel Hill for a one-year job Nathan had at UNC. Nathan had wanted an outbuilding. A friend of his had worked briefly as an assistant for a well-known writer who had transformed an outbuilding into a dream of a studio. Nathan had been to visit this friend and seen this studio, and though we were a long way from well-known he had the notion that somehow a studio of our own would make us so. From Austin he searched the Chapel Hill rental listings for a couple of months, until the word outbuilding leapt out, and he called the rental agent, who warned that the house was about to go to another couple. So Nathan, in a frenzy, faxed her our application and overnighted her a deposit even though we’d never laid eyes on the place. It’s not like he did those things without my consent, as I’m making it sound. I don’t know why I’m doing that.

  Anyway the outbuilding proved to be a workshop built by the owner of the house out of spare parts, including logs and garage doors and a glass door that had been hoisted up and turned sideways and transformed into a window. The owner had insulated about half of it, but squirrels had pulled out some of the insulation to make nests, and spider-webs glistened in every corner. I knew the instant I saw the place it wasn’t going to be a studio, not while we lived there. We couldn’t remodel ourselves because when it came to the mechanical we were utterly inept, and we couldn’t pay someone else to do it because when it came to the financial we were totally broke. With Nathan, romantic notions die a little harder. He walked around the place, talking about how, see, it was wired for electricity and phone and wasn’t the view of the woods amazing and it would be perfect, just perfect, until he stopped suddenly in a corner and said, in a new and radically altered voice, “That’s a funny-looking web.”

  It was, indeed, a funny-looking web, because it was the home of a black widow spider, who, as we leaned in, hustled over to an egg sac and clung to it. Looking back, now that I’m a mother, the image gives me a twinge of guilt, because we killed that spider with a stick and squashed her egg sac. She died in vain, because we could never get past the conviction that where there was one black widow spider there might be more. When we walked out of the outbuilding that first time, Nathan was still talking of transformation, but I probably don’t even need to say that the place today is exactly what it was back then, except with less insulation in the walls and more on the floor, courtesy of the squirrels, who are doing their babies no favors by snuggling them down in fiberglass. At any rate we remained the renters, and, eventually—when the owner wanted to sell and we were too lazy to move—the owners of a house in the country that had the distinction of looking like a trailer without actually being one.

  The two acres we owned had once been part of a family farm. Our house was up on a hill, at the end of a quarter-mile-long gravel drive, and across the field from our front windows you could see the original farmhouse, and two trailers, all inhabited by members of the original family. The son of the people who lived in the green trailer at the road had been the owner of our house, and after he sold us the place, because he’d decided not to come back from California, his parents seemed standoffish for a while, as though in our very persons we represented the death of a dream. The parents—hardy country people in their seventies—had been friendly again for so long now that I couldn’t quite remember when that hadn’t been the case. They’d offer us okra and collard greens from their garden, and since the children came they’d dropped off little gifts on our porch from time to time, shyly, never ringing the bell. They hadn’t set foot inside the house since we’d moved in, despite our invitations, and in general we had the feeling that they, and their relatives, adhered to a strict moral code that we didn’t understand but did admire. Once, when a van full of our musician friends drove up to the house, Mr. Dodson had come out waving a gun, and though such behavior, and gun ownership, was generally against our principles, we’d found that the episode left us feeling protected, rather than indignant or alarmed.

  We, we, we. The first person plural is a hard habit to break. We rode down that bumpy driveway, on the way to our friends’ wedding, and when we saw Mrs. Dodson outside, taking her wash off the line, we waved, and when she motioned for us to stop, we did. I rolled down my window and shouted hello. Mrs. Dodson was a small woman with sun-weathered skin, a practical haircut, and surprisingly broad shoulders. Her voice was so soft and her accent so thick that sometimes I didn’t understand her, though I had a policy of not asking her to repeat herself more than once in a given conversation. On this occasion she said, “Y’all be careful tonight. It don’t look good,” and I stared at her openmouthed until she twitched her chin at the sky—which was bright, almost golden—and I understood she was talking about the weather.

  “Is the forecast bad?” I asked. I hadn’t thought to check.

  She shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said. “Just looks bad. Looks like how it did when my cousin up the road was just sitting on his couch, lightning came in the window, killed him. You know Danny’s ex-wife was blown clean off the porch of y’all’s house when lightning struck it.”

  She’d told us these stories before. As a result I had a phobia about lightning, which had increased since the babies came. When I was alone in the house with them during a storm, I’d take them to sit in the narrow hall outside what should have been the linen closet but was instead the kitty litter closet, the only windowless space in the house, redolent with cat pee.

  Mrs. Dodson’s expression changed. “How’s that baby?” she asked. She loved small children.

  “He’s good,” I said. “He’s trying to crawl.”

  “I ain’t seen him in a while,” she said. “I bet he’s getting big.” I heard longing in her voice and felt my eyes tear up. “Well, y’all get going,” she said abruptly, turning toward her trailer.

  “Mrs. Dodson,” I called. She stopped and turned back halfway toward me. “How long have y’all been married?”

  “Fifty-three years,” she said. I heard no inflection in her voice. Was this fact a good thing? A bad thing? Just a fact? She didn’t seem curious about why I’d wanted to know, or if she was, she didn’t show it. She kept on moving toward the trailer.

  Nathan and I had been together for ten years, married for four. We kept on moving, in silence, toward the road.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I think we’re very confused, Americans, about the whole idea of adulthood, and I don’t just mean my generation and the ones after me. “Grow up,” we tell each other, voices dripping with contempt, but we go around endlessly celebrating those of us who never do. We say that growing up is all about disappointment, even as we insist to our young that anything is possible. “Follow your dreams,” we say, and then we spend our free time making fun of the blinkered contestants on American Idol. “I followed my dream,” they bleat, as the security guard escorts them away. An interesting lesson I’ve learned from reality TV—when asked why they deserve to win, most people say, “Because it’s my dream.” Why should you get what you want? the world asks. And we stand there and say, with sweet sincerity, “Because I want it.”

  Adulthood was not conferred naturally upon me, as I’d always imagined it would be. My grandmother used to say, “You do what you have to do,” but she was a child of the Depression. Me, I was a child of the good times. Somehow I made it into my thirties with the notion that you do what you want. I made a decision, sometime after Mattie arrived, to do what I had to do, although at times it didn’t seem to me that that particular version of adulthood fit me at all. But I had adopted it anyway—I had the marriage and the children and the house and the job and the occasional party at which I allowed myself to drink too much and behave with my friends just as I did when we were twenty-five. Sometimes I was so exhausted by my life, I fantasized being hospitalized—a b
ed, a TV, a glucose drip that removed even the imperative of hunger. Sometimes, angry at Nathan, I played in my head a game I liked to call Whose Husband Would You Rather Have? Other times, in a melancholy mood, I took the copy of Jesus’ Son I’d had since grad school from its place in my desk drawer. It was my madeleine, that book—I touched it, and life in Austin flooded back.

  I saw Nathan for the first time at a party, thrown by one of the second-year students in our MFA program to welcome the first-years. It was mid-August and hot, hot, hot, and the party took place at one of those cheap, generic apartment complexes with a pool in a dubious shade of blue. I’d come with my new friend Helen. Helen was a Hollywood-small Korean woman with firm opinions, a confident manner, and an enviable ability to wither with a look. But she had an easy smile and a bubbling, girlish laugh that belied her crisp, all-black ensembles, the sardonic way she raised her eyebrows at you over the plume of her cigarette. She could be goofy. I liked that about her, this promising combination of wary cool and open silliness. She and I were drinking a strange pink concoction we’d found in a punch bowl on the snack table. In the thirty minutes or so we’d been there, we’d backed out of the way of hungry and thirsty revelers so many times that we were now lodged between the snack table and the wall. “I mean,” said somebody, “the woman uses the word postmodern without any irony.” Somebody else said, “Oh fuck that shit. Let’s go find some cocaine.”