Mrs March

by Virginia Feito

  George approached, the drop on his temple still refusing to slide down his face. She quavered slightly as he brushed past her in reaching for the stapler, which was completely visible atop a small tower of books at one corner of the desk. He handed it to her but she hesitated. They were regarding each other in that dogged, disquieting way when she heard herself say, “I forgot.” She paused before continuing. “I have to buy some milk. For Jonathan.”

  George cocked his head. “Ask Martha to get it.”

  “No, it’s fine. She has a lot of ironing to do.”

  “But you just got here.”

  “I forgot. I forgot.”

  She made her way to the front door, opened the small closet in the foyer, searching for her coat and hat, until she realized she was still wearing them, then swung open the front door and slammed it shut behind her. In the hallway, she walked backward to the elevator, keeping the apartment door in sight, wondering if George might be watching her through the peephole, half expecting him to burst through it and come after her, in which case, she determined, she would run.

  When the apartment door remained closed, however, she calmed considerably. She supposed she might as well go and buy the milk now. She would look silly if she came back empty-handed.

  IN THE SUPERMARKET, coated women pushed shopping carts up and down the aisles as a slow, jazzy, almost drunk version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” played over the speakers.

  She took a carton of milk from the humming refrigerator in the back of the store, observing the other shoppers. They appeared to be pushing around their carts aimlessly, walking in uniform straight lines, neatly, on an invisible grid—never colliding, never regarding each other as they filed past.

  She strolled through the aisles, milk carton in hand, and came upon an unmanned cart in the canned foods section, parked in front of shelves stacked with can upon can of Campbell’s soup. She approached the cart with suspicion, expecting the other shoppers to appear around a corner, shouting “You’re it!,” dooming her to roam about the supermarket, lifeless, in their stead until she eventually tricked someone into replacing her.

  There was nothing unusual about the cart at first when she peered inside it. Sausages in their casings, canned beans, mesh bags of potatoes and onions, then—shockingly, cruelly—a copy of George’s novel. She spun around, squeezing her eyes shut, and turned back to look at the book, hoping that it had somehow changed into another book. It hadn’t. The red-and-white Campbell’s walls closing around her, she reached for it and—before she knew what was happening—grabbed it and slid it into her coat, under her armpit.

  She hurried to the cash register to pay for the milk, and while in line she felt sweat forming in her underarms and the book beginning to slip. When it was her turn, she took out her ostrich leather pocketbook as carefully as she could, while pinning the book tightly against her chest. She paid, smiling pastily at the cashier.

  Outside, she turned the book over in her hand a few times, before throwing it into a trash can on the corner.

  THAT NIGHT, she retired early to bed but lay awake for hours, motionless in the darkness. Eventually, the bedroom door creaked open, then closed. She felt George slip into bed beside her, and she stiffened. Lately she was always asleep when he came into bed, and then he’d get up so early each morning she wondered if he had actually gotten into bed at all. Behind her closed eyes as she pretended to sleep, she imagined him suddenly choking her. Raping her. She could not recall the last time they had been intimate. Maybe after that party at Zelda’s last spring? In the beginning their relationship had been quite sexual: George initiated it daily and she had surprised herself by being willing for a number of years. Sex with George had felt easy. Undemanding. Her mind emptied whenever they engaged in it, which Mrs. March found soothing. During one particular sexual encounter with George, back when Jonathan was a toddler, she became unsettled by a growing certainty that it wasn’t George who was touching her. The hands on her shoulder felt thinner, hard-knuckled. The skin on his face, in the dark, was coarser—at that time George was clean-shaven, his beard not yet a staple. She grew agitated, wondering who this stranger was who was fondling her, imagining what his face looked like—sunken cheeks and light green eyes?—until she reached for the lamp switch. When she turned on the light, she saw that it was George on top of her (who else could it have been?), and she offered some flimsy excuse (“I thought I might knock over that vase with my foot …”) and they resumed intercourse. She was so in love with George, she told herself later, that she couldn’t even bear picturing herself with a different man.

  Some years into their marriage, she adopted an increasingly ambivalent attitude toward sex. She eventually began to dread it. The sheer awkwardness of it, the clumsy mechanics, the damp, saline smell of him, the moist texture of him between her thighs. Her body would recoil, instinctively, from the very hint of sex, and over time George initiated it less and less. She hadn’t wished to draw attention to it, and although she vaguely knew of the existence of professionals she could consult on these issues, she would never be able to bring herself to visit one. She had a hard enough time examining them herself, and she would rather die than confide in her husband.

  George’s snores ripped her from her thoughts with such force, she wondered whether she had been asleep. As his snoring continued, she relaxed—he would not kill her tonight.

  A few particularly nasty snow days followed, or what the news described as a “historic blizzard.” At least two feet of snow were scheduled to fall, closing schools, disrupting electricity in some areas, and severely hampering travel. All over the Northeast families stocked up on groceries as they prepared for a momentary lockdown.

  Throughout the first night a whisper of snowflakes fell quietly—almost disappointing in their gentleness after the panic-stricken forecasts. But the snow proved constant, relentless, and soon it was no longer picturesque but draining in its persistence, burying the city and trapping them in their apartment alone, just the three of them.

  By morning, the snow had swallowed parked cars and continued to fall slowly, thoughtfully. They went down to the lobby. The doorman had not been able to make it to work, and so it was chilly and quiet, the lights over the concierge desk switched off. They looked out at the street, at the bleached landscape enveloping them, like the glare of an atom bomb. The nearby trees were barely discernible against the white, branches pointing at them like fingers.

  Jonathan’s school had closed and so the Christmas play was canceled, which sent him into a sulk. It frustrated Mrs. March, too, that the costume she had worked so hard to get the seamstress to finish on time would never be seen by the other children’s mothers, who surely hadn’t made their sons’ and daughters’ costumes from three yards of the finest merino wool (Jonathan was to play a bear in an original play written by his ambitious English teacher about forest animals attempting to bolster the spirits of an insecure fir tree).

  Christmas dinners were called off, and theirs was no exception. Mrs. March’s sister called from the airport—all the flights from Washington were canceled—and promised to make it for New Year’s Eve instead. George’s mother, afraid to brave the storm, refused to attempt the trip from Park Slope.

  The situation was further exacerbated by Martha’s absence. Mrs. March tried coaxing her over the phone but Martha firmly insisted there was no way she could even make it to the nearest subway station. In an alarming bout of joviality, George offered to prepare Christmas Eve dinner for them. “There’s a whole chicken in the fridge,” he said cheerfully, as if this solved everything.

  The chicken dripped pink into the sink as George held it by the drumsticks so that it looked like a headless baby dangling from its arms. Mrs. March watched her husband’s fingers stroke the edges of the cavity, watched them tugging at the folds. He bent over the chicken greedily, almost intoxicated, biting his lower lip with something akin to arousal as his glasses reflected his fisted hand pushing its way into the cavity an
d wrenching out the purplish liver, the heart. Slick and bloated like leeches.

  The three of them sat through a quiet Christmas Eve dinner, during which Mrs. March spit out half-chewed chicken discreetly into her napkin as she wiped her mouth with each bite. Afterwards she threw the soiled cloth into the trash.

  Christmas Day came and went. Jonathan seemed happy enough with his train set, and George gave Mrs. March a very expensive-looking camel scarf. Vicuna wool, said George. As he handed it to her, their fingers brushed. She beamed at him while making a mental note to scour his book for any mention of Johanna wearing a camel vicuna wool scarf.

  TO MAKE LIGHT of their predicament, they pretended that they were prisoners, ambling on all fours through the living room and hiding behind furniture from their mysterious captor (played by George). As the hours rolled on, like unabating waves, Mrs. March began to really consider herself a prisoner and a rash as red as watermelon pulp sprouted across her neck. There was no need for them to attempt to leave the building as they had all the provisions they could possibly need, and the blizzard was scheduled to clear in a couple of days, and yet with every passing hour she found it harder to believe that their confinement would end, that she would return to her reassuring routines—to the street, to the dry cleaner’s, to buy olive bread.

  She began to look forward to any event, no matter how small, to serve as a minor disruption in the monotony. Preparing afternoon tea was now one of the most exhilarating moments of the day. Sometimes she thought she saw spiders rustling inside the teabags—once she inspected a hairy leg poking through the muslin, which turned out to be a green tea leaf.

  Jonathan periodically went up to the Millers’ to play with Alec, or Alec came down to their apartment. Their giggles seeped under the closed door of Jonathan’s bedroom, sometimes sounding like there were more people in there.

  Meanwhile George spent hours alone in his study or watching television—Jimmy Stewart’s bumbling words resonating across the apartment as he unraveled in black and white.

  She recalled having read—in a curious little library book abandoned in one of the bathroom stalls of her dorm—about the Peggy, a sailboat stranded in the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. Drifting aimlessly at sea, all their provisions exhausted, eating buttons and leather, the men decided to draw lots. The “custom of the sea.” She pictured the hunger, the claustrophobia, the hopelessness of it all. The truth dawning on the men that they were slowly going crazy, and there was nothing they could do to keep it at bay, their vision registering nothing but an endless sea and the same haunted, hollow faces of the remaining crew in the wooden bowels of the ship.

  Mrs. March wondered, if it came to that, whether she and George would be capable of eating their own child in order to survive, or whether George and Jonathan would turn on her.

  SHE WAS SITTING on the edge of the bathtub one evening, swatting at an irritating fly she kept hearing but could never see. The buzzing was constant, the fly blowing raspberries at her failed attempts to find it.

  She reached over to the faucet, paused. There was something in the tub. Unmoving. She blinked. A dead pigeon. Wings outstretched, its scaled, metallic-green neck twisted. Its eyes bright amber. She wanted to touch them. She didn’t think she’d ever seen one this close before. Tenderly, she cooed at it.

  Thrilled at the thought of this new, exciting thing, she scampered to the living room to inform George. “I’m afraid there’s a dead pigeon in our bathtub, dear,” she said, whispering in George’s ear, for Jonathan was sprawled on the floor watching television, and she did not want him to overhear and tamper with the carcass.

  “Really?” said George, closing his newspaper.

  “Do you think you could get rid of it?” she asked. “I can’t bear to touch it.”

  And so George rolled up his sleeves and headed toward their bedroom to take care of the bird.

  “What are you watching, Jonathan?” Mrs. March asked. Jonathan shrugged, not even turning to look at her.

  Mrs. March picked up the newspaper George had been reading and, folding it, saw it was dated the day before the snowstorm. “Honey,” George called to her from their bedroom, “come here for a moment.”

  She found George standing, hands on his hips, over the bathtub. He turned to her. “There’s nothing here.”

  Mrs. March stepped over and looked down. The tub was pristine white, clean, completely unblemished—not a drop of blood or a hint of feather remained. She looked up at the small window above the tub. It was closed. She tried to remember whether it had been open before.

  She brought her hands to her face. “It … it was here just seconds ago.”

  “Maybe it flew back out.”

  “No, no—” She wanted to explain how that couldn’t possibly be, how this all rather frightened her, but she stopped herself and looked over at George, who was scrutinizing her, his eyes beady behind his glasses, his hands in his pockets. She chewed her thumb.

  “Maybe you’re just tired,” George said, with a hint of caution, “cooped up in here all this time.”

  She stared blankly at George. He stared back.

  “Yes,” she said. “Probably.”

  SHE CONSIDERED the possibility that George was torturing her. Having his sick fun with her. Or maybe the pigeon had been a warning to her to back off.

  On the last evening of their confinement, as she was making her way to the bedroom for the night, she heard a brusque laugh coming from the living room. She walked in cautiously to find George sitting by himself in his favorite armchair, drinking a glass of whisky.

  “What’s so funny?” she said, clenching in case he had been laughing at her.

  “I was just remembering something my father used to say …”

  “What did he used to say?”

  He looked at her, shaking his whisky, the ice cubes rolling around, clinking against the glass. “I forgot,” he said, smirking. “Oops.”

  She turned to leave, when George said, “He wasn’t a very funny man, my father.”

  Relieved that this didn’t seem to concern her, Mrs. March loosened the belt of her robe and, exhaling, decided to engage. “Well,” she said. “Didn’t he struggle with diabetes most of his life?”

  “Yes. It was horrible. He didn’t take care of it. Couldn’t feel the gangrene setting in. His skin was like graphite. The infection spread to the bone. It came to a point where they just started cutting away at him, little by little. You know, the first story I ever wrote was about his first amputation. ‘Handful of Toes.’” He chuckled, then his features darkened. “Sometimes I find inspiration in the most horrible things. Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

  Mrs. March looked down at George, at his searching, unreadable eyes, at his ambiguous smile that always seemed to mock her intelligence. “No …” she said softly.

  He took her hand, rubbing her wedding band.

  “You always see the best in me,” he said. He fiddled with a hangnail on her finger, then brought her hand to his lips and nibbled it off, gently.

  When the snow at last melted, uncovering cars and revealing bikes tied to poles, slush clogged the streets, and the grit of the city seeped through it like an infection. In the newspaper, families in Red Hook posed gravely on the stairs of their flooded basements. A fallen branch had killed a man in Central Park.

  The Marches were set to host New Year’s Eve dinner for Mrs. March’s sister Lisa, and her husband Fred. George’s mother would be spending the evening with one of George’s aunts, and Paula, predictably, was on a beach somewhere tanning her long toffee legs at the expense of some generous friend.

  Everything was in place when Lisa and Fred knocked on the door. The table was set, tastefully, with a grandiose touch because, although it was a family dinner, Mrs. March couldn’t tolerate her sister going back to her hotel afterwards and commenting to her husband how their table settings were better. The food had been ordered from Tartt’s three weeks in advance, while the desserts prepared by
Martha rested on the kitchen counter—blushing macarons lined up like debutantes in silk-ribboned dresses, waiting to make their entrance.

  The apartment was bursting with an almost suffocating cheer: the tree perfectly trimmed, Bing Crosby crooning Hawaiian Christmas greetings on the stereo, and the holiday cards displayed artfully on the mantel. Today, she moved her sister’s cheap, tacky card featuring a glittery snowman up in front of all the others.

  Mrs. March paused before opening the front door, lest they think she had been loitering in the foyer, waiting for them. She had been sweating in anticipation—she didn’t know in anticipation of what, but it made her anxious in any case.

  As she welcomed the couple inside, greeting them warmly, Mrs. March was thrilled to see that Lisa’s hips, tight under a hideous woolly skirt, had broadened. It always brought her joy, the sign of any physical deterioration in her sister, no matter how slight. From childhood their mother had compared the two, and found Mrs. March, invariably, to be lacking. “Why can’t you behave? Look at Lisa, her grandmother has also died,” she had hissed to a sobbing Mrs. March at their grandmother’s funeral.

  Indeed, Lisa had always been shellacked with a sort of sterilized calm, as if she wasn’t really experiencing things, only looking upon them from a distance.

  Their mother, Mrs. Kirby, had seemed to resent Mrs. March from the beginning—evidenced by naming her after her own mother, whom she detested. Her disdain was confirmed one evening when, drunk on sherry, she revealed that Mrs. March had been an accident, and that she had contemplated aborting her.

  Mrs. March was glad that Jonathan was an only child with no siblings to compare him to—and that her mother had no other grandchild to compare him to. Her sister chose not to have children, often stating how happy she was to be able to travel around the world, and, besides, her hands were full with their mother. But Mrs. March suspected it was really because her sister had always been too thin to conceive a child. She doubted Lisa had been capable of menstruating after losing all that weight in college, and now she was too old to get pregnant.