Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  She dashed into her bedroom, climbed into bed, and pulled up the covers.

  When Jed stomped in a half hour later, he looked radiant.

  “Everything OK?” she asked. Why did he look so happy?

  “Yeah. We sat up on the roof of that garage next door to yall. A bunch of cars went by, but no one stopped.” He let his shirt fall to the floor.

  “Honey, would you mind putting your dirty clothes in the bathroom hamper?”

  He looked at her.

  “It’d be a big help.”

  He picked up the shirt between two fingers, gazing at her. He marched into the bathroom and dropped it in the hamper, still gazing at her.

  “Thank you so much, darling. I feel just terrible asking you.”

  “Mama always did it at home. Said it was the least she could do when her men worked so hard all day long.”

  “Never mind. Don’t do it anymore,” she pleaded.

  “No, I’ll manage.”

  “Please don’t, Jed. I like doing it.”

  “You want my clothes in the hamper, Sally, you’ll get my clothes in the hamper.”

  “But I don’t, Jed. I want them on the floor. I don’t know what got into me, sweetie.”

  He climbed in bed and turned his back. She ran her hands under his pajama top and scratched his back with her Eat Me Orange nails. He lay as still as death.

  “Jed, honey, what’s wrong?”

  “What you mean? Nothing’s wrong.”

  “You haven’t held me in weeks, honey. And here I am knocking myself out not to be like a corpse.”

  He said nothing.

  “What am I doing wrong, honey? If I knew what you wanted, I’d do it.”

  “I’m tired, Sally. I just want to sleep, is all.”

  Tears began eroding her Revlon pancake makeup. She sniffed loudly.

  “Goddam, Sally! For Christ’s sake!”

  She sniffed again.

  “Shit, Sally. All right, look: When I said that about screwing a corpse, I didn’t mean for you to go turn yourself into a whore.”

  “A whore? Here I’ve been trying to be exciting, and now you call me a whore!”

  “It ain’t exactly exciting to have a woman all over you all the time. In fact it can get downright repulsive.”

  She wailed.

  “Damn it, will you shut up? You said you wanted to know what I want. Why can’t you act—you know—hard-to-get sometimes? Turn me down when I want you. Like I can’t always have you just because I want you. Or come at me when I’m not expecting it. Surprise me sometimes. That’s what I mean by exciting.”

  Sally digested this. It seemed to conflict with the safe harbor advice. “I’ll try, Jed. I really will. If you want me not to want you sometimes, then that’s exactly what I want.”

  “And when I want you, I want you sometimes to act like you want me, not that you’re just going along with what I want to please me.”

  “Whatever you want, Jed, is what I want.”

  “Fine.”

  They settled for sleep.

  “Jed,” Sally whispered.

  “Ummm?”

  “I just want you to know that I don’t want you now.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He rolled over and ran his hands inside her kimono.

  “I’d rather you wouldn’t,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  He pushed her knees apart as she moaned, “No, please don’t.”

  Sally was rushing around in a flowered muumuu when Rochelle arrived in her grey maid uniform the next morning. There was a purple stain on the white collar, which made Sally recognize the dress as one of Kathryn’s from many years back. The stain was the result of one of Raymond’s failed magic tricks involving grape juice.

  “Rochelle, would you please wash and wax the kitchen floor, and wash the back windows? And the ironing’s already damp.” Even though she’d watched her mother with Ruby all her life, Sally felt uncomfortable telling Rochelle what to do. Even if Rochelle was being paid. It didn’t seem quite right. She could do these things as well as Rochelle, and after all, it was her own house. But Jed was determined for her to have a maid. Said he didn’t want her to break her nails. She pointed out that she could carry a baby in one arm and a load of wash in the other.

  “But you can’t expect no woman to set up ladders and scrub windows,” he insisted.

  “Your mother always did. Besides, Rochelle is a woman, isn’t she?”

  “Neither of them is my wife.”

  True, Sally’s own mother had never washed windows. But Sally still felt awkward. After all, Rochelle was Donny’s wife, and The Five hadn’t believed in bossing each other around. Or rather, they’d taken turns at it. But Ruby insisted Rochelle needed the work.

  “What do you hear from Donny?”

  “Oh, he just fine, thank you, ma’am. Got him a job parking cars up near the United Nations.”

  Sally recalled seeing Donny when she drove Rochelle home one afternoon shortly before he left for New York. He stood on his porch in green work clothes with an ugly scar down one cheek.

  “Goodness, Donny, what have you done to yourself?” she’d demanded through the Dodge window.

  “Car wreck.”

  “You all right now?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am. I just fine.” He grinned.

  Sally stopped in front of the Tatro house. Mother Tatro came out in a bright orange muumuu. As Sally waved, she tried to figure out why they couldn’t get along. At first Jed bad complained that Sally’s turkey stuffing didn’t taste like his mother’s, her biscuits weren’t as flaky, her shelly beans didn’t have enough fatback. She’d started calling his mother for her recipes, but when she used them, she was always disappointed when the results didn’t taste like her mother’s version of the same dish. Sometimes Jed would get his mother to bake him a pecan pie, which he’d bring home to show Sally what a real pecan pie should taste like.

  Mother Tatro would bring over her discarded furniture. Sally would make Jed put it in the garage. When Mother Tatro babysat, Sally would return to find her living room rearranged to accommodate the pieces Mother Tatro had carried in from the garage. She also straightened Sally’s drawers and shelves. Scorning the electric dryer, she’d string a clothesline through the back yard, iron the sheets, take Jed’s rumpled shorts from his dresser and iron them. She’d bake several days’ supply of biscuits and corn bread and spoon bread, as though sending her baby son into a culinary wilderness, and she spread it around town that Sally didn’t keep Laura’s feet covered properly. Sally thought she deserved better. After all, she’d agreed to switch churches.

  Mother Tatro heaved herself into the Dodge like a sack of chicken scratch. “Hey, Mother Tatro. You look really nice. How are you?”

  “Well, I’m just fine, thank you, Sally. How you, honey?”

  As they walked through Myrtle Kendall’s front door, Myrtle put crepe paper leis over their heads. “Aloha, Rose! Aloha, Sally!”

  The room was filled with large ladies in tentlike dresses of bright fabric, with flowers in their hair and sandals on their feet. “Why, aloha there, yall!” they greeted each other. Sally looked around. No women her age. Mostly Mother Tatro’s friends. Their gossip filled the room like bees swarming—whose new car had been repossessed, whose children were turning out a disgrace to their parents. Sally was trying to abide by the saying Mr. Marsh had put on the church marquee last week: “When tempted to gossip, breathe through the nose.” Because she knew how it felt to be the target of gossip. For months after her marriage, as her belly got larger and larger, she’d had to hold her head high as people exchanged glances and whispers.

  “Hear about Coach Clancy over at the high school?”

  Sally strained to hear.

  “… floating in the Whirlpool at the high school.”

  “… dead.”

 
“Dead as a doornail.”

  “… hands bound behind his back, and a plastic bag tied over his head.”

  “… suicide, they say.”

  Sally listened with horror. Oh dear, poor Jed would be so upset.

  Waikiki punch was served. Then open-faced ham and pineapple and cream cheese sandwiches. Dessert was pineapple upside-down coconut pudding cake, which had won a national recipe contest two years earlier.

  After the business meeting, two girls from the high school came out in grass skirts and halters. One played “Little Grass Shack” on her ukulele, while the other did a hula. Then Mercedes Marshall showed her slides of the South Pacific. Most featured either Mercedes or Harvey, or Mercedes and Harvey, against an exotic backdrop—a grass hut, a listing coconut palm, a distant wall of wave with surfers hanging halfway up it.

  “… but you know, ladies, you couldn’t give me one of them palm trees,” Mercedes was saying. “Why, a palm can’t hold a candle to one of our Tennessee poplars. Forty feet of trunk with a little biddy ole clump of leaves at the top—why, it’s just pitiful …”

  On came a slide of the American memorial at Pearl Harbor: “… and I want to tell yall, it brought tears to my eyes just thinking about those brave Amurican boys who gave their lives there on that December morning that we might be together here this afternoon in peace and in freedom. Harvey and I looked at each other, and we was just so choked with emotion that …” Her voice cracked. “Well, ladies, words just fail me, is all.”

  “Lord, I tell you, it makes you think,” someone said.

  “Makes you think about them Reds down at the mill,” someone whispered to her neighbor.

  “Are you trying to say that union members aren’t ever bit as much loyal Amuricans as our boys that died at Pearl Harbor?” Clara Campbell demanded in a loud voice.

  The room erupted. Mother Tatro sat silent, with a son on each side.

  Sally was sitting in the living room clipping a recipe for Cherry Cheese Delight out of Modern Wife when Jed walked in.

  “Hey,” he said, kissing her.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “What makes you think something’s wrong? Can’t a man be in a bad mood without always having to explain himself?”

  “Sure, honey. Here, have a seat.” She went into the kitchen.

  She called, “It’s Coach Clancy, isn’t it?”

  No answer.

  “You must be real sad.”

  “Stop telling me what I feel.”

  “OK, honey.” She was seized with anxiety. What if it wasn’t Coach Clancy? What if it was something she’d done? Was it that she’d asked him to put his clothes in the hamper? Did he have himself another woman who wouldn’t ask him to do this? She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, tracing the faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes with her fingertips. She fluffed up her hair, molded her breasts with her hands and lifted them. Not all that much sag yet. She smiled her pep squad smile.

  For breakfast Sally cooked Jed’s favorite—fried eggs, grits, fried potatoes, sausage, toast and coffee. He declined to speak while eating. Sally only wished she’d been struck dumb before asking him to put his clothes in the hamper. He’d been doing it ever since—and speaking and making love very little. She thought about strewing dirty clothes around the bedroom, so he’d get the idea it really was OK. If he resumed dropping his clothes on the floor, maybe he’d resume speaking and making love.

  During the afternoon Sally was in the kitchen making corn bread for supper, using Mother Tatro’s ghastly sugarless recipe. The kids had just gone down for naps. She heard Jed calling from the garage.

  He was lying on his back under the Chevy with just his legs, in green work trousers, sticking out. She stooped and called, “What, honey?”

  He pulled himself out from under the car. His face and hands were black with grease. “I’m having me a crisis here. I wonder could you run down to Ben’s Body Shop and ask him for an oil pan for a ’58 Chevy Impala?”

  “Will you listen for the kids?”

  “Yeah, sure. Take some money out of my wallet on the dresser.”

  She drove out to the highway, thrilled to have him let her do something for him. Maybe he was going to forgive her. She got the oil pan and crept through heavy traffic back to the mill village.

  As she walked over to the Chevy, she had an inspiration. The kids were asleep. The house blocked the garage from the street. Jed wanted her to surprise him … She crept up to the car, squatted, put down the oil pan. Then she quickly unzipped his green trousers and began stroking his penis, fighting repulsion at the pale squishy little thing.

  A voice croaked, “What the …” He tried to double up. There was a dull thud, and he lay still.

  She laughed. “Just relax and enjoy it, darling.”

  He wasn’t getting hard.

  “Bad idea, huh?” she called anxiously.

  No answer.

  “You don’t like this, Jed?” What a horrible mistake. He wouldn’t even speak to her now.

  “Here’s the oil thing anyway.” She shoved it under the car, feeling frantic. She put his penis back in his trousers and zipped them up. What could she do to win his love again? Who was this other woman she was competing with anyway? Was it someone she saw every week at church, passed every day on the sidewalk, shopped with side by side in Kroger’s? Did everyone in town know about it except herself? Were they pitying her behind her back? How could Jed make it so humiliating for her? What had she ever done except love him and try to make his life easier and more pleasant? She walked in the kitchen door, tears streaming from her eyes. Jed walked out of the bathroom. She stared at him.

  “Any luck with the oil pan?” he asked pleasantly.

  “It’s under the car,” she whispered.

  He started for the back door.

  “Jed?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who’s under the car?”

  “Oh, Hank come over to help me out.”

  “I thought it was you.”

  “Huh-un.”

  He pushed open the screen door.

  “Jed?”

  He turned. She blurted out what she’d done. He laughed. Relieved, she joined him through her tears. They could laugh together. He’d forgiven her for whatever it was she’d done. They went out to the garage.

  “Hank?” he yelled. “How’s that for hospitality, buddy?”

  No answer.

  “Hank?”

  He grabbed Hank’s ankles and dragged him out. He was motionless, a gash across his forehead. “Christ, you’ve killed him!”

  She stood with her hands to her mouth, her eyes wide.

  “Well, call the Lifesaving Squad or something! But shit, how do I explain this?”

  “Just tell what happened.”

  “What, that my wife was playing with my best friend’s dick?”

  “But I thought it was you, Jed.”

  “That my wife can’t tell my dick from my best friend’s? Shit, Sally, what the hell did you think you was doing?”

  “I was just trying to be how you wanted me to be—surprising you and all.”

  “I never asked for no hand jobs under the Chevy.”

  Her chin began quivering.

  “Well, shit, Sally, don’t start crying again. Go call the Lifesaving Squad, and then stay in the house and let me handle it.”

  She sat in the living room reading the Modern Wife “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” It sounded unlikely. The ambulance arrived and departed, Jed with it. Laura began whimpering, and Sally got both kids up and gave them juice and cookies.

  Jed walked in. She was scared to look at him. “How is he?”

  “He’ll be all right. Some stitches in his head and a broken arm.”

  “Broken arm? I didn’t touch his arm.”

  “Well, at first I wasn’t going to tell them lifesavers nothing. But when we got to the hospital, I realized when Hank came to, he might think it was me feeling him up or something.”

>   “You? Why would you do something like that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t.”

  “Why would Hank think you might?”

  “Well, he wouldn’t.”

  “So why were you worried?”

  “Ah shit, I don’t know! I had to tell them something, didn’t I?”

  “I guess.”

  “So I told them the truth. They got to laughing so hard, they dropped him and broke his arm in two places.”

  “Oh poor Hank. I feel awful.”

  “Some of them lifesavers is on over at the mill. It’s probably all over town by now.”

  Sally began putting sweaters on the kids. “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t know, Sally. It just ain’t right. The mother of my kids and all, acting like some kind of … whore or something. And now it’s all over town.”

  Sally clenched her teeth. “I can’t figure out what you want, Jed. If I could, I’d do it. But I just can’t.”

  She strapped Laura in the stroller and took Joey’s hand. “We’re going for a walk. See you later.”

  If only she could turn this feeling in her guts into tears. She tried to, tried reminding herself of the many ways she’d tried to please Jed, and how consistently she’d failed. Boo hoo. The tears wouldn’t start up. She tried quivering her chin. Still no tears. And that awful feeling remained. It was alarmingly close to anger. Except that it wasn’t “like her” ever to get angry.

  Joey galloped half a block ahead, then looked back and waited with tolerant superiority. They came to a low wall. Joey struggled to climb up on it, then fell onto the sidewalk. Sally tried to lift him up, but he pushed her away and resumed his combat with the wall, saying, “Joey can do it!”

  “I’m sure he can,” Sally murmured automatically.