by Erin McGraw
I don’t have to answer the letter. My job is to keep the column interesting, which is why I will write back to the woman with the farting boyfriend and privately, one-on-one, to the boy with the pencil. Normally I don’t bother with the-magic-is-gone letters, but this is Lonnie, and she is reaching out to me, and it might be my last chance. I’ve seen the moments when her face turns wistful, when she thinks I don’t see and the light filling the yard is heavy and drowsy and as gold as honey. It isn’t easy to turn my back on her and return to my office.
Dear Omaha,
He doesn’t know how to help. Please give him a chance.
I’m leaning so close that my nose almost grazes the computer screen. From behind me Lonnie says my name and I jump and cry out and turn around all at once, and she says, “What are you looking at, porn?”
“I don’t. I wouldn’t.”
“Cool your jets, Dudley Do-Right. Dinner’s on.” Her look is pure sitcom, the exasperated wife navigating around her husband, Captain Clueless.
“Let’s have wine.”
“I have book club tonight. Bad night to front-load.”
“Skip book club. We’ll drink wine and listen to bossa nova.”
“You’re funny. Pasta’s getting cold.”
Dear Omaha,
Do you spend time together? Does he look, really look at you?
Lonnie’s hair used to be black as ink, but gray started to thread in when she was in her thirties. “I’m not going to dye it,” she said, as if I’d ever suggest such a thing. Her hair now is the color of steel wool. When morning light turns it gold, she looks like a Renaissance angel.
“What,” she says.
“Nothing. You’re beautiful.”
“Have you been hitting the wine without me?”
“I do not drink without you. Much.”
After she leaves for book club, I look at the letter again. “Everything we say to each other, we’ve said before. I can hear our conversation all day long without him ever being in the house.”
If the letter writer weren’t my wife, I would respond, You need to tell him what would be exciting for you, but I’ve been in this business long enough to know that the answer is “Another man.” I write, Do you love him at all? Then I delete it because the question scares me.
In two months Lonnie and will celebrate our eighteenth anniversary. Eighteen years is longer than I’ve done anything else, including this advice column. It’s enough time for wistfulness to grow, the putting-away of golden dreams. Lonnie thinks it does no good to talk about these things. O, my girl. Thinking about her gets me to call up phrases I would never think otherwise, sweetly old-fashioned ones like dear heart. Tonight, while she is at book club, I learn that the thought of being here without her brings me to my knees.
By the time she gets home, I’ve got wine in an ice bucket in the living room, crackers and cheese on a plate. “Wow,” she says. “I thought you’d be watching the playoffs. I had a glass of wine at book club.”
“You can have another one with me.”
She collapses into the armchair, where I can’t sit next to her, but she accepts the glass I hand her. “Celia led the discussion. That woman is dumb as a box of hair.”
“Was Dave around?”
“Not a chance. This was an estrogen event.”
“I was thinking while you were gone.” I mean to take just a sip of wine, but I wind up with a slug that takes a second to go down. Lonnie’s face is a little tired, a little tipsy. Dear heart. “It’s been nineteen years.”
“Eighteen, Einstein. Almost eighteen.”
“Nineteen since I proposed. To the day.”
“Let me guess. You got a letter about a proposal that sent you back to reading your old diaries.”
“No.” The lamplight catches on hairs clinging to the sleeves of her blue sweater. Her dimples hover; she’s waiting for me to make a joke. She has always loved my jokes. “I just remember. I didn’t do it right then.”
She straightens up, and her eyes flick nervously. “If you take a knee, I’m leaving the room.”
“Shouldn’t I have done that then, Lonnie? Shouldn’t I have told you that I didn’t want to live without you? Shouldn’t I have said more than ‘Um, what if we got married?’”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Her face is pinched with panic now, but it is brightly alive. I can see myself in her eyes—imploring, yes, but surprised. Now it’s her turn with the mouthful of wine. “You don’t need to do this.”
“But I want to do it. With all my heart.” New, fresh blood seems to be pouring through me, every inch of my skin is sparkling, and I want her to feel as happy as I do.
“If I beg you to stop, will you?”
I think it over, assessing her panic-stricken face. “No.”
Bucket (2)
Eddie comes in the door with his nightly smile already in place. Before we got married, I never knew whether he would come home happy, paid, and reaching for me, or whether he’d roar in like a comet, burning everything he touched. Or whether he would come home at all. It was thrilling, the not-knowing. Every word he said was singed a little at the edges from the rage he carried everywhere.
I don’t know where the rage went. “Eddie seems happy,” my mother says. Dinner is over and Eddie’s stretched out in a recliner, his pants unbuttoned. I wink at him, but he’s looking at the TV.
“Livin’ the good life,” I say, beating him to it. Later he will tell her that he wishes I’d inherited her cooking as well as her good looks. She will say that she did her best with me and he shouldn’t blame her. They will laugh and agree that I’m a stubborn one. I could move to Mars and not miss one syllable.
I met him when I was waiting tables at Denny’s. I kept saying I was going to try college, but there were always reasons not to start. “Placeholder job,” my parents said. “Job,” I said. Eddie came into the restaurant, good-looking, and ordered coffee. I brought him pie, too. He said, “You always this nice?”
“No.”
“What are you doing this weekend?” Turned out I was going shooting with him. We went out to a field he knew where somebody’d set up bales, and he handed me a semiautomatic.
“Where are you going to be?” I said, scared to death, like the gun was going to turn itself around and shoot me.
He slipped behind me, stretched his arms alongside mine, and pressed tight. “Right here. Keep your eyes steady, and squeeze the trigger when you’re ready.” The sound of the first shot coursed through me like lava, so I shot again. We stayed there all afternoon, him pressed to my back, till I had shot all the ammo he brought.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be greedy.”
“I like it. You liked it.”
The air between us burned. That night, in the light from the dashboard, he looked about seventeen, though he was twenty-three. Now, eight years later, he looks forty-five. What’s the difference? Marriage. Me.
So I wrote to Ask Kevin, even though nobody else in his column had a problem like mine. What was I supposed to say? It’s too easy. I want the man I married, not the man I’m married to. I settled for My heart feels like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, which is fancy but gets at what I mean.
The second the letter went out I felt stupid and guilty. I know the rule: Don’t expect anybody to boo-hoo about luck that looks good to them. When Eddie came home I wrapped myself around him like a vine. “Damn. Hold your horses, woman.” He hung up his jacket and poured himself a glass of water. My guilt drained away along with every ounce of desire. I want to love him, and would settle for liking him. My husband, I think, and feel my heart, that bad bucket, gurgle and go empty.
This is life, not an ongoing never-ending date. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be surprised every once in a while.
If Ask Kevin ever writes back, I’m ready for the question about other men. I, Ask Kevin, have seen the fitness center at the Cherry Hills Holiday Inn where I used to work, the comb-overs and paunches looking up hopefully
every time the hotel employee comes in with fresh towels. Ask Kevin, I’m not an idiot. I am well acquainted with the options in Omaha. I’m asking you how to fix my leaky heart so that it will hold contentment and affection. Why do those words always sound like second-best?
Eddie didn’t tell me he loved me until after we were married. My friend Carisse told me it was a bad sign. “He’s withholding. He won’t give you emotional support. How often does he go down on you?”
She asked me that all the time. Her boyfriend never did, and she was convinced every other girl was getting more.
Carisse had it wrong. Eddie went down on me a lot, but he made me wait. The waiting was almost intolerable, and glorious. It was like sex. Everything was like sex. Now he says “I love you” every night, obedient as a wind-up dog. I never asked him to.
“He’s a good man,” says my father with obvious surprise. This means that Eddie hasn’t come to him for a loan, unlike my two brothers-in-law. At holiday dinners, Eddie and Dad sit in the living room. I’m the one who disappears with the naughty brothers-in-law and comes to the table with dilated eyes and a throat filled with giggles. Eddie rubs my leg under the table. My heart could not be any emptier.
He didn’t change. He tells me this with bewilderment when we fight—that is, when I pick a fight, which I’m good at. I thought a guy who picked up the Denny’s waitress and took her shooting was an outlaw. He was just relieved that I didn’t expect him to take me out to dinner.
It was good at first, I wrote Ask Kevin. Does somebody have to be at fault? Because if somebody does, Ask Kevin doesn’t need to bother telling me who’s the guilty party. I married Eddie to be bad, and he married me to have somebody to come home to, and how are those pieces supposed to fit together? When he gently holds my hand, I squeeze his, both hoping and fearing he’ll understand that I wish he wouldn’t be so gentle.
The day he proposed, he drove for a long time without saying anything. I studied the tight line of his mouth and ran my fingernail lightly along the leg seam of his jeans until he said, “Don’t do that.” He drove us over to Seward County, where we could look up into the tops of cottonwoods and silver maples, the branches weaving into a green roof that could hide us. He said, “A hundred years ago, anybody who came here could kill himself and his body would never be found. Or he could kill somebody else. No one would be the wiser.”
The moment between us grew hot and ripe. I didn’t think he was going to kill me. I just didn’t know what he was going to say next, maybe “I killed a man” and maybe “I’m hungry.” He said, “Let’s get married,” and I would have said yes a thousand more times.
Isn’t that love, Ask Kevin? If you even know. If you, with your fancy job, have ever dropped to your knees out of pure want, and wish you could do it again.
Cliché
The house would depress Jesus. My ten-year-old son walked in once right after I started working there and right away saw the nail pops and badly cut drywall; some of the outlet plates don’t even cover the holes. Seven hundred grand, which is what it costs to get bad drywall in Orange County.
The homeowner saw an eighteen-foot ceiling and a bonus room. She didn’t notice that the loft looked into a wall. She didn’t see the corner that dropped away in the living room, probably from a dissolving foundation. She didn’t even see the windows clouding up because they were installed wrong and now the seal was broken. She was not smart. Which was good, because she didn’t see me watching her.
I’d heard the stupid jokes and I knew the clichés, which never applied to me. No client ever slipped off her robe when she saw me coming. I never had to explain to my wife a strange pair of panties in my pocket. I didn’t do that shit, and neither did other contractors I knew, though we laughed over beers at Hollywood’s ideas of our lives. I didn’t like myself for knowing where she was whenever I was in her house. I didn’t like remembering the music she listened to. I didn’t like my eyes for noticing the glints of blond in her hair illuminated by the light coming through the crappy window.
“Where do you want the outlet to go?” With other clients I found out about kids and vacations. I said, “Are you planning to stain this trim?”
She held up two paint samples. “What do you think?”
I couldn’t stop myself—I said, “That one,” because the other one would look like chalk, and it was important to me that she live in a nice house. At night I thought of her and twitched with the need to save her from bad choices.
When I got home I checked my son’s homework and snaked the bathtub drain. I became Superhusband since taking this job, and my wife smiled when I walked through the door. I wondered how much quiet deceit a marriage could contain.
At work the homeowner asked me to recode her garage-door opener. There was a manual; all she had to do was read it. Instead she stood next to me while I read, then trailed me to the garage while I instructed her to punch in her new code. “Don’t tell me what it is,” I said.
“Silly. I trust you.”
“You want to keep the information to yourself.”
Her blouse was buttoned wrong, and it was unbelievably hard not to reach out and fix it.
“Put this manual someplace safe. If you want to change the code, it will tell you how to do it.”
“If I want to change the code, I’ll call you.”
A few times I stayed late, hoping I could meet her husband. It would have helped to shake the man’s hand, but he worked late paying for that shithole house, and his wife was alone a lot. She wasn’t alone. She was with me.
I was hired to work on an addition. Once the addition was finished, she kept finding new jobs for me, and when those threatened to end, I drew her attention to a crack that ran all the way around the downstairs bathroom.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Only if you want your house to keep standing.”
Her face was a cartoon of confusion and sweet alarm. This was what Betty Boop would look like if she was talking to her contractor. I would look like the wolf.
I went back to that house yesterday. It’s brown now, and the trees make it look less crude. Kids’ toys are scattered on the driveway; either she’s a grandmother or she sold the place. I heard that she and her husband split, but I don’t know whether that’s true. Even now I can make myself gasp a little at the idea of her available.
I got out of that job without ever kissing her. All my crazy, pent-up need went into the next job, Marcie, who broke up my marriage. She and I lasted three years. Pretty good, for how these things go. Three years after that my son started to talk to me again. Eventually we pasted the edges back together. He comes and sees me now sometimes just because he wants to.
I live in a house south of town. It isn’t much, but the land is good, and I keep the place clean. I could bring a woman there without feeling too bad. Most of the time I don’t bring women there. That fire burned itself out after the divorce, after Marcie, after I lived through all the destruction that I knew I was bringing on myself, and couldn’t stop. Didn’t stop. Of course I could have.
This house I used to work on looks pretty good now. Somebody’s keeping it up. The gutters look good, and the roof, and the mulch is pulled away from the foundation. If I look at it like this, from the street, it’s a solid house that could hold any number of good lives. If I tilt my head just a little, I can feel the edges of the old thrill. That’s all it takes, that little tilt.
Nutcracker
Mom has been playing that awful, plinky music all morning. Like Grandma’s, her face is smeared with excitement, and if they really want to do something for me, they can take themselves to the Nutcracker and let me stay home.
“I remember the first time I went to see it,” Grandma says. She wants to pull me into her lap, but she settles for stroking my hair. She used to have a cocker spaniel. “I was just your age. The music, the costumes—I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I dreamed about it for weeks afterward.”
“You’re still dreaming of i
t,” I say, which isn’t supposed to be funny.
“You’ve heard the music in ballet class,” Mom says. Her voice is part coax, part threat. “You know some of the dances.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You were a waltzing flower.”
“We didn’t do the real steps, we just used the music. We’re not good enough to do the real dances.”
“It will be exciting to see the real dances, and girls just like you doing them.”
Not just like me. Girls who don’t get dizzy and fall down on pirouettes, girls who don’t clunk in their toe shoes. Girls who, if they aren’t performing, start pestering their mothers in August to get tickets to the Nutcracker.
“I wanted so much to be Clara,” Grandma is saying. “To dance with the Nutcracker Prince! Oh, I used to dream of it.”
“Clara is an idiot.”
“Here it comes,” Mom says to Grandma. “I didn’t think she would start with the ugly until she was a teenager.”
“Serves you right,” Grandma says to her.
“She is an idiot.” Tears start to crowd my voice, and that pisses me off. If we’re going to have this stupid conversation, I don’t want to blubber. “A spooky old man comes into the party and pays her a lot of attention and keeps touching her hair, and then he gives her a special toy. And nobody says anything, they just keep dancing around, the stupid snowflakes and soldiers and flowers, when he’s going to take her away and hurt her. And nobody’s listening.” The tears are everywhere now, and the snot, and Mom is literally holding me by the wrist while she and Grandma can’t stop laughing.
“You shouldn’t be scared,” Grandma says, dabbing at her laugh-tears. “Good grief, child, it’s ballet. It’s pretty.”
