by Michael Kun
Jane’s sitting on the floor. The toaster’s there too, in a hundred pieces. There are coils and springs and fragments everywhere. I pick up the biggest piece, the silver casing, and put it on the counter.
“She knocked it off the counter when she was reaching in the cabinet,” the man in the kitchen says. “It hit her right on the foot.” He’s all excited and confused, like he doesn’t know what to do because it’s an accident. I’m calm. Things like this happen all the time at work. You just have to stay calm, and then you think of what to do.
I look at Jane’s foot. It’s broken, I can tell. It’s too ugly not to be broken.
“Benjamin,” she says. “Benjamin, it really hurts.”
“You’ll be okay,” I say. “I’m right here.”
The man helps me get Jane up from the floor. She leans on me so her broken foot doesn’t touch the floor. It’s already swollen on the top, about the size of my fist.
“What’s your name?” I say to the man.
“Robert,” he says.
“Robert,” Jane says, “from my English class.”
“Robert,” I say, “go get our car and bring it around front, okay?” I hand him the keys from my coat pocket. “It’s a red Toyota. It’s over on Monument Street.” We hardly ever use the car. We usually take the bus wherever we’re going. If you move your car, you lose your parking spot.
Robert runs out of the apartment, and I listen to him go down the stairs. He nearly trips. I hear him take two steps too quickly. Clump, clump. But he doesn’t trip.
I pull out a chair at the table and help Jane sit, then I go get the coat I bought her from the closet. I help her stand up and put her coat on. I button it up for her, and she hugs me. Her eyes are all red and wet.
“Is it broken?” she says.
“Do M&Ms melt in your mouth and not in your hands?” She laughs.
That’s what Drewson always says at work. He’s the foreman on most jobs.
Whatever you ask him, he says, “Do M&Ms melt in your mouth and not in your hands?” Unless the answer is no, and then he just says no, straight-out.
There’s a teardrop on Jane’s nose, and I wipe it off with my hand. Her skin is very tender. I hug her back. She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved. I never even said “I love you” to anyone else. Holding her there in the kitchen, that’s what I’m thinking about, that and about how she would’ve been a terrific mother. She’s thinking about the baby, not about her foot.
“Everything’s going to be okay, baby,” I say, and then I carry her down the stairs like a fireman. I walk down sideways so she won’t hit her bad foot against the rail, but it happens anyway.
Robert’s at the bottom of the stairs, holding the door open for us. “May I lend some assistance?” he says.
“No, thanks,” I say. “She’s my wife.” I say it softly so I won’t offend him.
Robert holds the back door of the car open, and I slide Jane in, then drive to the hospital. It’s not too far from our apartment, only five blocks or so, but who’s going to put a woman with a broken foot on a bus? Robert sits up front.
Jane’s foot’s broken, just like I said. The doctor puts a cast on it and tells her to stay in bed for six or seven days. She’s not supposed to get up at all. The cast will come off in nine weeks, he tells us. He gives her a pair of crutches and tells her to stay away from toasters for a while. Then he gives me the bill, and we go home. It takes twenty minutes to find a parking space. Robert and I carry Jane upstairs and put her down on top of the bedspread. We bring the TV in and put it on the bureau, just where it was in April, and Robert and I go into the kitchen to make her some tea. It takes a while to find the teapot. I hardly ever have tea.
“Very nasty break,” he says to me. “They normally keep you in a cast only for five or six weeks.”
“Yes,” I say, “but she’ll be fine. She’s very resilient.”
While we wait for the teapot, Robert and I talk about broken bones. I tell him about how I’ve had my nose broken twice. Every one of my fingers has been broken too, all at work. It happens when you’re in construction. Sometimes, even when you’re paying attention, it happens. Then Robert tells me about how he broke his leg skiing when he was a boy. When the water’s ready, we make three cups of tea, and I carry them into the bedroom. We all sit on the bed and watch football.
After Robert’s gone, it’s just me and Jane in the bedroom. She looks tired. She says she wants to go to sleep, so I get one of her T-shirts out of her drawer, then help her get undressed. She lifts herself up with her arms, and I undo her skirt and slide it up. Then she lowers herself, and I pull it over her head. She pulls her blouse off herself. I help her put her T-shirt on. She lies down and closes her eyes, and I lie down next to her.
“Thank you, Benjamin,” she says. She grabs my fingers and squeezes them. Then she kisses them. I kiss her back, right on the forehead.
Jane and I haven’t fooled around in weeks, but we do now.
It’s clumsy with her cast, though. It’s a big cast, very heavy, like a rock. I keep banging my ankle against it. The whole time I’m thinking, “Please, God, have her get pregnant again. Please, God. I love her.” Jane’s laughing. Maybe she knows what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s just the cast.
When we’re done, I go to the kitchen and make us each a sandwich on the hard bread. It’s the only bread we have. The sandwiches are terrible, and we don’t even finish them. They just stay on the plates, half-eaten. Jane takes her notepad from her nightstand and writes, “Get the goddam toaster fixed!” on a sheet and puts it next to my pillow. Then we go to sleep.
All week, while Jane’s in bed, her friends come by. The Archaeologies, the Englishes, the Films, they all come into the bedroom and bring her candy and coffee. Sometimes they bring us dinner. Brenda brings us a pot roast one night. Robert comes by with magazines and xeroxed copies of his notes from class. I stay in the bedroom with them.
Samantha comes on Monday, without the guy who’s normally with her. When Jane falls asleep, Samantha and I go into the kitchen to talk. I fix us some coffee, and Samantha tells me about how she’s taking night classes because she never went to college. She’s a secretary at a law firm.
“I’m trying to catch up with the world,” she says. She has very blue eyes, the color you find in earrings.
Later, she tells me that she’s not seeing Peter anymore. Peter is the guy who’s usually with her. “He loved himself so much,” she says, “that it was an insult to him that I didn’t love him as much. What is it with men?”
“You’ll find someone better,” I say, “someone like you.” I hope she does. She’s very sensitive, and all week, if she hasn’t stopped by, then she’s called to see how Jane is. She says she doesn’t like being a secretary. It’s the typing she doesn’t like.
Thursday is a busy day. Samantha’s over, and so are Denise and Brenda and a new one named Margo. Denise and Brenda are both in Jane’s archaeology class, Samantha’s in her film class, and Margo’s in English. They all sit on the bed, and they don’t talk about any of their classes, they just talk like real women. I bring them all some coffee and some donuts and sit on the radiator, listening.
When Walter comes, I put on my sweatpants, and we go to the YMCA to shoot baskets. He says, “Let’s leave the women to themselves,” which is a good idea. In the daytime, he works in a record store. We go for a swim when we’re done with basketball.
It’s a couple days before Jane gets used to her crutches. She bangs around the apartment and lurches around. There are marks all over the walls from where the crutches hit. Black marks. When she’s ready to go outside, we go for a walk around the block. Just a quick one so she can get some air. Because there’s ice on the ground, I walk right next to her in case she slips. She doesn’t, though. She looks silly in her dark coat and crutches, like those birds you see at the zoo with bandages on their wings. I don’t say anything about it.
I drive Jane to her classes until her foot heals. I come
home from work, take a shower, eat, and drive her to her classes, and I wait to take her home. It’s no big deal. Sometimes I sit in the parking lot and read the sports section until she’s through, and sometimes I go into the classroom and sit in the back. I like it when she says something smart.
After a while, Jane’s friends start saving seats for the both of us. “Jane,” they say, “Ben, down here.” Walter and Samantha do it in film class, and Brenda and Denise do it in archaeology, and Robert does it in English. I like sitting between Walter and Jane in film class. They both pass me notes. I don’t say anything in class, though. Not a word. The teachers might find out that I haven’t paid, and then there’d be trouble. I just listen and read Jane’s books at home.
Jane and I are in the kitchen. She’s wearing a sundress. We’re fixing the formula on the stove, and I pour it into Claire’s bottle and test it on my wrist. It’s warm. I pick up Claire from her high chair and give her the bottle, rocking her in my arms, thinking of the baby in the grocery back in October. Jane turns the stove off.
Walter’s filming the whole thing. He has a camera on his shoulder, pointed right at me and Claire. I look into it and smile.
“Ben,” he says, “act natural. Be yourself. Project yourself.”
I make a face at the camera, and Walter laughs and puts the camera down. “Well, are we going or aren’t we?” he says. He tickles Claire and puckers his lips when he talks to her. He’s very good with Claire. He’s the one who bought her the stuffed cow. It’s brown and white.
Walter talks to her in a high voice. “We’re never going to get there if your mommy and daddy don’t get a move on it. They know this is the last weekend we can go before it’s too cold.”
Jane smirks at him. “Stop talking like a baby, Walter,” she says. “She’s not going to understand you any better if you talk like a baby.”
Jane puts her arms out, and I hand her Claire. I pick up Jane’s beach bag from the chair and sling it over my shoulder. It feels like lead, like she has her whole life packed into this one little burlap bag, but I don’t complain.
The four of us go to the beach. I drive. The baby’s beautiful, like her mother, only she has blond hair and not black. In the rearview mirror, I watch Walter with the baby.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
That was a good one, wasn’t it?
Especially the part about the toast, don’t you think?
We would like to suggest that reviewers remember this story in preparing their reviews. In particular, they should mention the part about the toast.
“Her Night Classes” is a moving story, particularly the part about the toast, might look nice in a review.
Just a suggestion.
Feel free to use it if you’d like.
No need for attribution. It’s all yours.
Of course, there’s no need to mention our unfortunate exaggeration of Michael’s book sales in your review, right?
There’s no need to mention some of the awards we have mistakenly asserted that Michael received. Just because the awards don’t exist doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve each and every one of them!
MY WIFE AND MY DEAD WIFE
The woman at the front desk of the Holiday Inn called me at ten o’clock to say, “It’s ten o’clock,” and I thanked her politely. I’d already been up for nearly three-quarters of an hour, though, already showered and shaved, already brushed my teeth with the special toothpaste for smokers that Julie had bought for me, already dressed, already phoned my secretary to tell her that I wouldn’t be in, that I had to meet with some clients in Newark, already watched a woman on the television win a camper for knowing the exact date the first astronaut stepped on the moon—month, day, year, all of it—already done just about everything I needed to do before going down for breakfast. In fact, I was already out the door and on my way to the hotel coffee shop when I got my wake-up call.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and headed over to the coffee shop, stopping on the way to pick up a paper. The place was empty, and I took a seat at the counter and folded the paper open to the sports page.
“Coffee?” It was one of the waitresses. There were only two: mine, and the older woman eating Fig Newtons and listening to the radio. Mine was young, probably just out of high school, with thin lips, gray eyes, and black hair, shoulder length.
“Please,” I said, and she turned my cup over and filled it while I read. I poured a packet of Sweet’N Low into the coffee and stirred it in.
The girl handed me a menu. “In town for business?”
“Sort of,” I said, nodding. “Really, I guess you could say I’m always in town for business. My office is down on Emmett Street, and I live just around the corner from here,” which was true, more or less. My house is about four blocks away, just past the Kmart.
“Stop by for a quick bite on the way to work, then?”
I looked up from my paper and she was smiling, and I could tell she wasn’t trying to pry, that she just wanted to talk. The other waitress was still off in the corner eating, and because of the difference in their ages, she probably had little in common with mine.
The tag on my waitress’s blouse read SUSAN, and I said, “Yes, Susan. Just a quick bite,” which wasn’t true at all. I had all the time in the world, and I was going to stay until I’d finished my paper.
I ordered two poached eggs and buttered toast, and when she’d written that down and headed back to the kitchen, I called to her to bring some juice too.
It was the first time I’d been down to the coffee shop since I’d been there. I’d been eating in my room mostly, or going across the street to the Burger King for a snack. The day Julie said she wanted me to start calling her Nell was the day I took a room there. Three days earlier was all it was really, but three days in a hotel seems like so much longer in real time.
I’d had a lot of time to think about it, and the more I did, the more I was certain her bridge club had put her up to it. The Nell thing, that is. They’re always putting her up to things, like wearing two-piece bathing suits and making me take her out to dinner and getting her hair cut short like a boy’s.
For a full two weeks beforehand, whenever I’d call Julie Julie, she’d say, “You weren’t thinking of me. You were thinking of Julie.” Julie was my first wife’s name too, the one who’d died twelve years earlier, and now every time I’d say Julie, Julie would give me a dirty look. So, the day I drove to the Holiday Inn, she’d said she wanted me to call her Nell, which is her middle name, just to prove that I love her, and if I called her Nell, then she’d know I did, and if I called her Julie, she’d know that the whole time, the whole four years, I’d been thinking of Julie. The first one. That’s just the kind of thing her bridge club would put in her mind. They’re a devious group like that. Two afternoons a week they sit around eating cake, playing cards, plotting. They’re like gangsters, that’s what they’re like.
Well, I refused to call Julie Nell, and for good reason. First of all, I’ve always known her as Julie, since the first time I met her, at my boss’s Fourth of July barbecue, and I was bound to slip up and call her Julie, which would only make sense, but it would make her think that I’d been thinking of Julie when I hadn’t been at all. Secondly, I have an aunt on my mother’s side named Aunt Nell, and whenever I think of the name Nell, I think of her, and there are certain situations where I’d be with Julie where I wouldn’t want to be thinking of Aunt Nell. In the bedroom, for instance, to be blunt about it.
I’d tried to explain all of this to Julie. I’d said, “Julie…”
“Which one are you talking to?” she had asked.
“You, of course.” I took a couple steps toward her, and she backed up against the kitchen counter. “This is silly, Julie. You know I love you more than anything.”
“How do I know you’re talking to me and not to Julie?”
“Because you’re standing right here in the kitchen and I’m looking you square in the eye.”
“So maybe
this time you mean me, but maybe every other time you’ve meant Julie.”
Julie was being very stubborn about not being called Julie, and I was getting pretty frustrated with the whole thing. “This was your bridge club’s idea, wasn’t it?” It didn’t come out the way I’d wanted it to. I’d meant for it to be gentle, but it came out angry.
“Wasn’t what?”
“This whole thing about not wanting me to call you Julie because you think I’m thinking of Julie.”
“You know, I do have a mind of my own.”
I knew she was lying. The whole thing smelled just like the kind of thing her bridge club would cook up, just like the time she wanted new drapes for the living room. That time she denied that her club had put her up to it, but I knew that they had, and not two weeks later I ran into Jack Hardy in the Medi-Mart and he said that his wife had told him that the new drapes had been her idea.
“Those old witches put this stupid idea into your head, didn’t they?” That time I’d meant to sound angry, and I did.
“It’s not a stupid idea, and you have no right whatsoever to call my friends names.”
I don’t remember exactly what we said after that, but I know she said something about how I would’ve called Julie Nell if Julie had asked, and I said something along the lines of “Julie wouldn’t have asked me to do something so asinine,” and then she said, “Aha!” as if she had caught me at something, and pretty soon she was crying and I was putting some clothes in a suitcase. It was all very sudden, and I forgot to pack my undershirts.
The waitress brought me my eggs, fried instead of poached, but I didn’t send them back. The truth is that I like fried eggs better, it’s just that I always forget to order them when I’m at a restaurant, and when I ask for them at home, Julie always burns the bottoms of them. So did Julie. It’s harder to fry an egg right than you’d think it would be.
