by Andre Dubus
A couple of years ago in this house in Massachusetts, she put Sean to bed on the same dried sheet he had wet the night before; I noticed it when I went up to kiss the children goodnight. That was two days after I had gone to the basement and found on the stairs a pot and a Dutch oven: the stairway was dimly lit, and at first I thought something was growing in them, some plant of dark and dampness that Terry was growing on the stairs. Then I leaned closer and saw that it had once been food; it was covered with mold now, but in places I could see something under the mold, something we hadn’t finished eating. I got the tool or whatever I had gone down for, then I went to the living room; she was sitting on the couch, leaning over the coffee table where the newspaper was spread, and without looking at her—for I couldn’t, I looked over her head—I said: ‘I found those pots.’ She said: ‘Oh.’ I turned away. I have never heard her sound so guilty. She got up and went down the basement stairs; I heard her coming up fast, she gagged once going through the kitchen, and then she was gone, into the backyard. Soon I heard the hose. I stood in the living room watching a young couple pushing a baby in a stroller; they were across the street, walking slowly on the sidewalk. The girl had short straight brown hair; her face was plain and she appeared, from that distance, to be heavy in the hips and flat-chested. Yet I longed for her. I imagined her to be clean; I pictured their kitchen, clean and orderly before they left for their walk. Then Terry came in, hurrying; from where I stood I could have seen her in the kitchen if I’d turned, but I didn’t want to; she went through the kitchen, into the bathroom, and shut the door; then I heard her throwing up. I stood watching the girl and her husband and child move out of my vision. After a while the toilet flushed, the lavatory tap ran, she was brushing her teeth. Then she went outside again.
For two days we didn’t mention it. Every time I looked at her—less and less during those two days—I saw the pot and Dutch oven again, as though in her soul.
But when I kissed little Sean and smelled his clean child’s flesh and breath, then the other—last night’s urine—I went pounding down the stairs and found her smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table, having cleared a space for herself among the dirty dishes; she was reading the TV Guide with a look of concentration as though she were reading poetry, and in that instant when I ran into the room and saw her face before she was afraid, before she looked up and saw the rage in mine, I knew what that concentration was: she was pushing those dishes out of her mind, as one sweeps crumbs off a table and out of sight, and I saw her entire life as that concentrated effort not to face the dishes, the urine on the sheets, the pots in the dark down there, on the stairs. I said low, hoarse, so the children wouldn’t hear: ‘And what else. Huh? What else.’ She didn’t know what I was talking about. She was frightened, and I knew I had about three minutes before her fright, as always, turned to rage. ‘What else do you hide from behind TV Guides? Huh? Who in the hell are you?’
‘What didn’t I do?’ She was still frightened, caught. She pushed back her chair, started to rise. She gestured at the dishes. ‘I’ll do these as soon as I finish my—’ and we both looked at the ash tray, at the smoldering cigarette she could not have held in her fingers.
‘It’s not what you didn’t do, it’s why. I can list a dozen whats every day, but I can’t name one reason. Why do I live in the foulest house I know. Why is it that you say you love me but you give me a shitty house. Why is it that you say you love your children but they go unbathed for days, and right now Sean is lying in last night’s piss.’
‘I forgot.’
‘Goddamnit,’ and I was nearly whispering, ’that’s your TV Guide again, you’re hiding, you didn’t forget anymore than you forgot those pots—’
‘Will you stop talking about those pots!’
‘Shhh. I haven’t mentioned them since I found them.’
‘They’ve been in your eyes! Your Goddamn nitpicking eyes!’
And she fled from the room. I stood listening: her steps slowed at the top of the stairs, calmly entered Sean’s room, and then she was talking, her voice sweet, motherly, loving. Sean jumped to the floor. After a while Terry came down with the dirty sheet; she went through the kitchen without speaking, into the wash room; I heard her taking wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, then putting a new load in the washer. She started both machines. So she had forgotten the clothes in the washer too, was behind on that too; yet neither of those was true. She hadn’t forgotten, and she wasn’t merely behind. She was…what? I didn’t know. For a moment I had an impulse to go through the entire house, a marauding soldier after her soul: to turn over the ironing basket and hold before her eyes the shirts I hadn’t seen in months; to shine a flashlight under the children’s beds, disclosing fluffs of dust, soiled pajamas, apple cores; to lift up the couch cushions and push her face toward the dirt and beach sand, the crayons and pencils and pennies—over every inch of every room, into every cluttered functionless drawer (but no: they functioned as waste baskets, storage bins for things undone). I wanted to do that: take her arm and pull and push her to all these failures which I saw, that night, as the workings of an evasive and disordered soul.
I left the kitchen as she entered it from the wash room. I went on the front porch for a cigarette in the dark. It was fall then, and for a while I was able to forget the house. The air was brisk but still, and I was warm enough in my sweatshirt; I walked down to the end of the block and back, smelling that lovely clean air. Then I went back into the house. As soon as I stepped in, it all struck me: it was there waiting, jesting with me, allowing me the clean walk in the air, the peace, only to slap me when I walked in.
I stayed in the living room with a book. After two pages I laid it aside and looked for one that would serve as well as the autumn night had; I found one, and after two pages I was right, there was neither house nor Terry. The book was Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and I saw myself in the book, a single man drinking gin and loving a married woman. I thought of the sleeping children above me and was ashamed; but I also felt the slow and persuasive undertow of delight.
Then I heard her singing in the kitchen. She was washing the dishes now; beyond her, from the closed wash room, came the rocking of the washer, the hum of the dryer. I didn’t want her to sing. She sings alone in the kitchen when she’s angry, brooding.
So I knew then I wouldn’t be able to keep reading the book; she would do something. I read faster, as though speed would force a stronger concentration, would block her out. I was able to read for nearly an hour. It took her that long to clean the kitchen; the washer and dryer had stopped, but she hadn’t removed the dry clothes and put the wet ones in the dryer. So when she came into the living room, a bourbon and water in her hand, all fright and guilt gone now, her face set in that look of hers that makes me know there are times she could kill me, I looked up at her, then stood and looked scornfully not at her face but past her, and said in a low, cold voice that I would go put the clothes in the dryer.
‘Wait. I want to talk to you.’
We stood facing each other.
‘We can talk while the clothes are drying.’
‘No. Because I’m not ready to fold the others. And don’t look at me like that, I’ll fold them, Goddamnit.’
I sat down, got out of the position of being squared off, got out of range.
‘I’m tired of being judged. Who do you think you are anyway? Who are you to judge me? I did forget Sean had wet last night. If you got them up one morning out of every thousand, if you loved them as much as you say you do—oh, that was shitty, accusing me of not loving my children, it’s the way you always fight, like a catty, bitchy woman—lying innuendos—if you ever got them up you’d know he hadn’t wet for four or five days before that, so I wasn’t used to—’
‘Three days. He’s been telling me every morning.’
‘All right: three. Anyway, I forgot.’ She had finished her cigarette; she found another on the bookshelf. ‘And I did forget those pots. I cooked in them
the night you had the party.’
‘What night I had the party?’
‘Whatever Goddamn night it was. When you were—’ she mocked a child’s whine ‘—so depressed—you and your fucking self-indulgent bad moods—’
‘What night are you talking about?’
‘When you called up your friends to have this impromptu Goddamn party.’
‘They’re your friends too.’
‘Oh sure: me and the boys. They bring their wives over because they have to; I get to talk to the wives. It’s your party, with your friends, in my Goddamn house I’m supposed to keep clean as Howard Johnson’s.’
‘You know my friends like you. We were discussing the pots. The famous pots on the stairs.’
‘You supercilious shit.’ I smiled at her. ‘I cooked in them that night, and you were in your funky mood, and you had to call Hank and Roger and Jim and Matt, I didn’t even have time to clean the Goddamn kitchen, and I put those pots on the stairs, I was going to wash them when everybody went home but they stayed half the Goddamn night—’
‘I recall you dancing.’
‘So I forgot them that night, I probably got drunk, I don’t know, and the next day I wasn’t thinking about dirty pots. I just don’t go around thinking about pots! And I forgot them until you found them. And that’s the absolute God’s truth!’
She went to the kitchen and came back with a fresh drink and stood looking at me.
‘I hate to say this, baby,’ I said. ‘But you’re full of shit. I can believe you forgot them that night, what with drinking and dancing. Although I don’t see why you couldn’t have washed them while these quote friends of mine unquote wandered in—other women do that, you know—I realize you probably had to put your face on and so forth before they came, but after they came I think you could have got someone to talk to you in the kitchen for ten minutes while you washed a Dutch oven and a pot—’
‘Ten minutes!’
‘Fifteen, then.’
‘A lot you know. Would my husband have sat with me? Hell no, he’s busy flirting—’
‘Oh, stop that crap. Now: I can even believe that you forgot them next morning. But I cannot and will not cater to your lie by trying to believe that you forgot them for the weeks they’ve been down there—’
‘It hasn’t been weeks.’
Now her voice didn’t have that shrill edge; it was quieter, sullen, and cunning.
‘While you were describing your ordeal of merging the problem of two dirty pots with the problem of enjoying a party, I was scratching around through my file of memories—I have this penchant for nostalgic memories, you know—and what I come up with is this: the party was on Friday, the twenty-first of September; today is the twentieth of October; those pots were there about a month. Are you going to stand there drinking my booze and tell me that you did not miss those pots for one month? Or, for one month, descend the basement stairs?’
Then she was throwing things: first the glass, exploding on the wall behind me; I got up from the chair and ducked the copper ash tray, but she got my shoulder with her lighter. I started toward the kitchen, where the car key hung on a nail; she got in front of me and choked me with both hands. ‘You crazy bitch—’ I shoved hard and she fell back against the table, bumping her hip. She came after me but I was gone, slamming the door, leaping from the top step and running across the lawn to the car. I heard the screen door opening then I was in the car, locking all four doors and jabbing the key twice then into the slot and as I turned it and the car started she grabbed the door handle; I accelerated and was gone.
I went to Plum Island and got out and walked on the beach. The moon was out and on the water, and a cold wind blew out to sea. I walked until I was too cold and Terry was gone, my head clear, I was only shivering and walking. Sometimes I stopped and faced the water, taking deep breaths, the wind pushing at my back. Then I drove to a bar where fishermen and men who worked with their hands sat drinking beer with their big wives. I sat at the bar, turning the stool so my back was to the color television, and after two glasses of ale I thought surely she must hate me, and I felt good, sitting there in her hatred. I knew what she felt when she came at me with her bright, tearful eyes and shrill voice and reaching, choking hands: she wanted my death. And sitting in the bar, watching the couples, I liked that.
I remembered the night I had called my friends to come over and drink; I had been sitting on the lawn toward evening, drinking beer and watching the children play; then they came to me and sat on the grass at my feet and I stroked their heads like dogs, and talked to them, and when Terry came out I was telling them a story, making it up as I went along, and I put them in the story: When Natasha and Sean Were Cowboys, it was called; they were comic and heroic, mostly heroic, they endured blizzards, they raised a baby cougar, they captured an outlaw. While I told the story, Terry barbecued pork chops. I felt serene and loving but somehow sad. And it was that sad love that made me, when the children were in bed, call Hank and Matt and Roger and Jim.
Then sitting at that bar, watching the couples who looked past and over me at the movie or variety show or whatever, I remembered clearly the lawn, the children, the story, and my mood, and I remembered eating dinner on the lawn too: barbecued pork chops, baked beans, green salad, garlic bread—I sat in the bar seeing my paper plate in the sunset evening on the lawn, back in September. The baked beans. I saw my fork going into the pile of beans on my plate; and I remembered later, in the kitchen, Sean and I standing over the Pyrex dish and finishing the last of the beans. She had cooked on the grill and in a Pyrex dish.
She had lied. Though at first I thought she had only been mistaken. Because I hate lies so, and I didn’t want to believe she would lie. But finally I told myself no: no, she lies. For the story was too good: my mood, my party, had caused her to forget her work. When confronted with the mold and stench of those pots, the urine on the sheets, she reached back for the one night she could use as an excuse.
So she avoided work and she lied. Then what does she want? I thought. What on earth does she want? And right away I knew: to be beautiful, charming, intelligent, seductive, a good cook, a good drinker, a good fuck. In short, to be loved by men and admired by women. A passive life. A receptive life.
I remember once the landlord’s daughter came by, a girl of sixteen; she wanted to go into the attic, she thought she left her bicycle pump there. It was a Saturday afternoon; I answered the door and when she told me what she wanted, I thought: A bicycle pump. My pitiful wife is to be done in by a bicycle pump. Because the house looked as though it were lived in, not by a family, but a platoon of soldiers holing up before moving on. We had had a party the night before. She had at least moved the party mess to the kitchen, where it still was, along with the breakfast and lunch dishes; on the table, the countertop, in the sink; the kitchen floor was sticky with spilled booze; every bed was unmade; and so on. I let the girl in, and called Terry to show her to the attic; then I went out and got Sean and we rode our bicycles along the Merrimack. When we got back, Terry was standing at the sink, washing dishes.
That night Uncle Vanya was on NET. By then our house was in reasonable order, and Terry sat drinking beer and watching the play. Laurence Olivier played Doctor Astrov, and when he said: ‘She is beautiful, there’s no denying that, but…. You know she does nothing but eat, sleep, walk about, fascinate us all by her beauty—nothing more…And an idle life cannot be pure…’ I wanted to glance at Terry but did not. She sat and watched and when it was over she said, ‘Jesus,’ and weaved upstairs to bed. Next afternoon we were supposed to go hear Cannonball Adderley at Lennie’s; I had put the money aside on payday; we were going with Hank and Edith, but all morning and through lunch she said she wasn’t going, her life had reached a turning point, the landlord’s daughter (oh her face! she said; she was so hurt, and so—scornful!) and Uncle Vanya were too much, she would work, she would work, she would start right now by paying for being a slob, she would not go hear Cannonball A
dderley. I told her she was being foolish, that if she were serious her house would need a long, thorough cleaning, and that she might as well wait for Monday morning, the traditional day for taking on a load of shit. But she wouldn’t go. So I went and told Hank and Edith that Terry was turning over leaves. I didn’t have to say more; they like mysteries. Cannonball was playing at four. I got home about eight. The children were in bed, the kitchen was clean, and in the living room Terry was asleep in the warm hum of her portable hair dryer. The house was neither dirtier nor cleaner than when I left. I never asked how she spent the afternoon. I guessed she did normal surface cleaning, and spent a lot of time with the children; it’s what she does when she feels guilty. For three days after that she made all the beds as soon as we got up in the morning; on the fourth day, without a word about Uncle Vanya or girls looking for bicycle pumps, or Cannonball Adderley, her slow momentum stopped, like a bicyclist going up a steep hill: she got off and walked the bike. Everything went back to below normal.
In that bar on the night she gripped my throat, really gripped it—and for how long would she have squeezed if I hadn’t been able to push her away? she had right away shut off my windpipe—in that bar, I saw something: I saw her sitting with the TV Guide among those dishes, with that look of concentration which was real, yes, but it wasn’t concentrating on something, it was concentrating away from her work. She was saying no. And I thought: Why, that’s her word: No. It is what she said to the life that waited for her each morning, perched on the foot of the bed. She simply refused to live it, by avoiding work, by lying about it, and by—yes: I believed it: violence. It wasn’t me she hated, me she wanted to kill: it was the questions I raised. Yet I couldn’t really separate my questions from me any more than I could separate Terry from her house. She is what she does, I tell her; and I suppose, for her, I am what I ask. And that is why, I thought, our quarrels usually ended violently: because she could not or would not answer my questions about pots on the stairs and Sean lying in last night’s piss. So she hit me.
