by Kim Wright
“Please. Maybe I was once, but not now. Not for a long time.”
Nancy is frowning, as if trying to reconcile the theory that I’m a sprayer with the theory that my husband and I are having trouble in the bedroom. “I just don’t see it,” she finally says.
“That’s because it isn’t there,” I say, pulling the binoculars from Kelly’s hand.
“Women never see it,” Kelly says. “Men do.” She drops her voice, does a good imitation of the coach’s low-country drawl. “I said to myself, ‘That little Bearden girl is fast…’ ”
We laugh again. Tory has just finished the long jump and she is lining up for the hurdles. She waves and we all turn in unison, like gazelles at a watering hole.
“I don’t know why,” I say, “being a mother would come so easily to me when being a wife seems so hard…”
“On Monday things could look totally different,” says Nancy. “It’s bad luck to even be talking this way. Do you want to end up like Lynn?”
“… or why Tory, my greatest success, would come out of my greatest failure.”
“Don’t say failure.”
“My marriage is a failure.”
“You don’t have to use that word.”
No, you don’t have to, but ever since I said it to Gerry on the plane, I can’t seem to stop.
“It’s the right word,” I tell Nancy.
She grimaces. “There are lots of words.”
I didn’t start calling my marriage a failure all at once.
At first I tried. I tried for years. I made all those little efforts, silly gestures like buying a CD called It’s Not Too Late to Have a Great Marriage. I ordered it from QVC because it had such a needy-sounding title that I was embarrassed to buy it from the local bookstore. With my luck someone would see me holding it in line and report back to all my friends. There’s just the tiniest bit of hypocrisy around the whole issue—everyone agrees you should Work on Your Marriage, but if you’re ever caught actually Working on Your Marriage, you look ridiculous.
And the only thing worse than being unhappily married is being ridiculous.
So the CD series arrived UPS. There was a woman on the front of the box who was pulling her husband by the tie—pulling him playfully toward a kiss. The back of the box explained that this man wouldn’t talk. This man was detached. This woman was weepy and frustrated. She was demanding things he couldn’t seem to give her. (Maybe she was demanding too much.) From the husband’s expression it wasn’t clear how he felt about being dragged against his will into this passionate new marriage.
There were six discs. I was supposed to listen to them for six weeks in a row and I did, squirreling the box away underneath my side of the bed. If I listened to one in the car I made sure to pop it out after each session. It wasn’t just to hide it from my friends—I was hiding it from myself. It’s embarrassing to try this hard. I felt like a political candidate standing by the side of the road on election day, waving at every car that passes. I felt like a dog in a pet shop cage, an ugly girl at a dance. This painful eagerness, this hope that wore down every day but grew back at night while I slept. In time I came to understand that this hope was what I must squash, if I wanted to survive. And then one Sunday I sat there in a pew beside my husband and I looked up at Christ, dangling above me like he couldn’t decide what to do either, and I prayed, “Okay, if you won’t make him love me, at least make me stop caring.” (This is the one prayer that would eventually be answered, although I didn’t know it at the time.)
At the end of the series, on the very last track of the sixth CD, the woman therapist answers twenty commonly asked questions about how to revitalize a marriage. What do you do when he won’t talk? When he works too many hours or you suspect there’s another woman? When you disagree about the kids? When he brings you gifts that aren’t your taste? When you feel so fat and unattractive that you’re sure you can’t draw his attention? When you feel so fat and unattractive that you don’t want to? Did we mention he’s not talking? Do only women live in the land of feelings? What do you do when you’ve tried everything and it still hasn’t worked? What if it’s just not the way you thought it would be? How did you think it was going to be? Can you even remember? The woman on the tape answers every question except one: Why do women stay?
Chapter Five
When I wake up Monday morning, Phil has left me a note on the counter. He wants me to have a complete physical. He has begun to suspect that my problems might be chemical, or even hormonal. Maybe my blood sugar is low. There’s always the chance of early menopause. He has taken the liberty of calling the therapist we were supposed to see today and postponing the appointment. It just seems prudent to rule out any medical causes first. He believes that we can fix this. Everything is fixable.
It is the longest note he has ever written me.
I call Dr. Bennett because he’s the only doctor I know, even though he’s a family practitioner and we don’t see him much unless Tory needs a booster. Usually it takes a couple of months to get in—unless you’re sobbing like hell when you call, I guess. If you’re sobbing like hell when you call they put you on hold and come back and say they can see you that afternoon.
Dr. Bennett is a very kind man who speaks barely above a whisper. His nurse takes my blood and urine and weighs me and asks a bunch of questions about what I’m eating and how I’m sleeping. I’m overdue for a pelvic and he gives me one, only I can’t seem to stop sniveling and at one point, after the Pap smear and before the anal, he looks up at me between the vee in my legs and says, very softly, “It looks like you’ve hit your limit.”
“What?”
“Everybody has a personal limit and it looks like you’ve hit yours.”
This strikes me as being so true and so kind that I start crying again and I say, “Would you please tell that to my husband?”
Dr. Bennett tells me to get dressed and meet him in his office, which has cheerful pumpkin-colored walls and is full of photographs of children on a sailboat. I tell him Phil’s work number. This is a little awkward for him, I realize, for while Phil is a dentist and not a doctor there is still some sort of professional-courtesy issue. He says, “This is Dr. Bennett and I have just finished examining your wife.” He pauses and then says, “No, her blood sugar is normal.” He pauses another minute and says, “She doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to menopause. We did check her levels.” Pause. “Dr. Bearden, your wife is in good health but she’s depressed.” Pause. “No, it’s not a diagnosis, it’s an observation. Have you noticed that she cries a lot?” And then finally, after the longest pause of all, he says, “Yes, I suppose pastoral counseling might be a good place to start.”
I’m fucked.
There was a part of me that knew we’d never actually see that woman therapist. When I called to make the appointment and the receptionist had given me directions, I hadn’t bothered to write them down. Going to see a therapist seems like a big step to a man like Phil, a public admission that something has gone publicly wrong. Phil doesn’t like big problems. Phil likes problems he can solve.
By the time he gets home that evening I’m calmed down and chopping vegetables for a salad. He stops at the counter and puts down the mail. “I guess you’re pissed,” he says.
I shrug. “I thought we could eat on the patio.”
“I guess you’re pissed,” he says again, and without waiting for me to respond, he rushes on. “I know you might have preferred a female counselor, but I don’t think that would have been fair to me. A woman would automatically side with you.”
What Phil doesn’t know about women is a lot.
I look up at him and shrug again, more elaborately this time, so that he will be forced to notice my cosmic indifference to the situation. “She might not have been able to help us anyway.”
My acquiescence makes him even more nervous, like a gambler who’s won an early hand. “The part you might not agree with,” he says, “is that I’d like for us to talk to Jeff. In
fact, he called me today and for some reason counseling just came up out of nowhere. He’s agreed to see us the day after tomorrow.” Apparently I’ve been elevated to emergency status all over town. “And that doesn’t seem quite as drastic, you know, just driving over every now and then to talk to Jeff.”
“Drastic?”
“There’s no need to treat it like that, is there? Like we’re in the middle of some kind of crisis? I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t know we even had a problem if you didn’t keep telling me we did.”
“You may as well start the grill.”
“He’ll be fair,” Phil tells me. “No matter what you might think about Jeff, he’s fair.”
“I guess so.”
“You don’t think Jeff will be fair?”
“I think Jeff will be fair.”
“And he could give us a Christian perspective.”
“Yippee.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Of course we know what’s going to happen. I’m getting ready to get hit upside the head with a Bible. But I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon; I knew where Phil was heading before even he did, and besides, there are advantages to seeing Jeff. It might be good for down the road when I’m gone, and I think like this sometimes, I actually let myself use the phrase “when I’m gone.” Phil will need someone to talk to, so maybe it’s smart to draw Jeff into the situation, to maneuver him toward the hole I’m getting ready to rip in the middle of this family.
But Phil is still troubled by my calmness. He had evidently psyched himself up for a conversation with a hysteric and I’m denying him the chance to use all his best lines. “I thought you liked Jeff,” he says.
“I do, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“He said the two of you had always had a certain rapport.”
“And all this just came up out of nowhere? Come off it, Phil, I was sitting in Dr. Bennett’s office when he called you.”
“Jeff was thinking we could meet with him together one week and you could meet with him alone the next. That way I’d only—”
“Have to come in every other week? That would make more sense, wouldn’t it? Since you’re a dentist and important and I have all this free time.”
“Jeff thinks—”
“No, it’s fine,” I say. “Just have one of your office girls set it up and cc me on the schedule. I’m waiting for you with the steaks, you know.”
Still frowning, he heads outside to fire up the grill. The phone rings. Kelly.
“Turn on Channel 27,” she says. Kelly often begins conversations like this, without preamble, and sometimes she hangs up without telling you as well. There have been plenty of times I’ve been left talking to empty air before I realized she was gone.
I hit the remote. An old movie is on. Elizabeth Taylor looking gorgeous and cracking up, Montgomery Clift trying to save her, Katharine Hepburn riding up and down the elevator in that creepy veiled hat with her creepy voice.
“Yeah,” I say. “I love this one.”
“Turn up the volume,” says Kelly. “They’re fixing to lobotomize that poor girl.”
Elizabeth Taylor is in the asylum and it’s all a horrible mistake. Montgomery is going to figure this out, of course, and save her, but he hasn’t figured it out quite yet. Elizabeth has gotten out of her room and ended up in the section with the true lunatics. She’s walking on a bridge over a pit of people who look crazy, or handicapped, or maybe just unbathed. Can’t they see she isn’t one of them? She’s Elizabeth Taylor, for God’s sake. Her makeup is perfect and her waist is so small. The inmates are shrieking at her, leaping up to grab at her ankles, and I can’t seem to stop watching. There’s no telling what Phil has told Jeff.
“Phil and I talked about it and decided to cancel the woman therapist,” I tell Kelly. “We’re going to see Jeff instead. We have our first session on Wednesday.”
“Oh really?” says Kelly, “Wait a minute—here comes my favorite part.” I turn the volume up a little higher and walk toward the screen. Montgomery is telling another doctor that he’s done a professional diagnosis and concluded that Elizabeth is an erotomaniac.
“I love that,” says Kelly. “Erotomaniac. This is a great damn movie.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to talk about the thing with Jeff?”
“Not now. We’re grilling out.”
“Oh, okay. What are you having?”
“Phil thinks that Jeff will be fair.”
“Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, after all, Jeff is Phil’s best friend and everybody knows he’s just crazy about you.”
“He wants me to see Jeff alone one week and then we see Jeff as a couple the next week.”
“When does Phil see Jeff?”
“You keep forgetting,” I say. “Phil doesn’t need counseling. There’s nothing wrong with him.”
“I don’t like any of this. You should have your own therapist, Elyse.”
“It’s too bad Montgomery Clift is dead. I think he was the only man in America who could truly save me.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” I say. “We’re cooking out. And I don’t really care, Kelly, who I talk to or what we talk about. It’s not like any of this is going to make any difference.”
Phil comes in to get the tray of meat. He points at the phone and I mouth the word “Kelly,” even though she’s already hung up.
“I’ve got a question,” I say.
He continues to sprinkle salt and pepper on the steaks.
“I’ve got a question.”
“Oh.” He looks up, pushes his glasses back with his index finger. “I thought you were on the phone.”
“You know how you’re always asking me why I’m unhappy? I’ve got a question for you. Why aren’t you unhappy?”
“Do we have to do this now?”
“Seriously.”
“Look around you. We’ve got a good life. We’ve got—”
“Yeah, I know. We’ve got Tory and the house and our friends and our health.”
“And we’ve got each other.”
“We don’t talk.”
“It seems to me like we talk all the time.”
“We don’t have fun.”
“Well, there you’ve got me. But I don’t think you’re unhappy because we don’t have fun. I think we don’t have fun because you’re unhappy. This could be fun. Right now. This. With the patio and the corn on the cob and the steaks.”
He has a point. I stare at the TV screen. Montgomery Clift puts his arm around Elizabeth Taylor’s shoulders.
“You get so overdramatic,” Phil says. “You want too much.”
“I don’t understand why you don’t want more.”
“I do want more. I want peace.”
Peace. He goes back out onto the deck. He has forgotten the tray of meat and I hang up the dead phone and carry it to him. He takes it from me and we both pause for a second, wordless, watching Tory beyond us in the yard. She is digging something. He bought her a junior gardener set a few weeks ago so that she could help him with the landscaping and now she is furiously focused, striking the open ground around the hydrangea bushes over and over again with her pink plastic spade. Phil makes a half-gesture toward her but then drops his arm. Our eyes don’t meet. I go back into the house, begin to unload the dishwasher. And then something strange happens.
I always load the knives pointy side down. Phil may think I’m overdramatic, but the truth is I am a creature of habit, cautious and ritualized. I always arrange the knives the same way, but tonight, as I reach into the basket of utensils, there is a single paring knife pointing up. Put there by someone else? No, I’m the only one who ever loads the dishwasher. A single paring knife, left, against habit, pointy side up, and as I reach down to remove it, I stab myself. The blade of the knife pushes right into my palm.
For a second it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t even bleed, but then the sla
sh is obliterated by the blood rising and it pools in my hand and runs down my wrist. I have cut myself, possibly badly.
I could scream. I could call for help. I could go out on the deck and extend my palm toward my husband. I could show him my stigmata and I know that Phil would clean it up, and bind it, and tell me that nothing is ever as bad as it looks. He is good in these circumstances. Kind, calm, methodical. A man so kind that he still gives a day every month to the free clinic, a man who comes to Tory’s school and talks about oral hygiene, who passes out toothbrushes and dental floss and teaches the kids some sort of rap song he made up about plaque. I feel lightheaded, shaky on my feet. My hand seems to have a pulse of its own and little gray paramecia are swimming across the surface of my vision. I twist a washtowel around my palm and shut my eyes. Breathe in and out slowly, press down the bubble of panic that is rising in my throat.
Seconds pass. It does not appear that I am going to faint. When I open my eyes, I go to my purse on the kitchen desk, where I always leave it, because I am a wife and a mother and a creature of habit who always leaves her purse in exactly the same place. Standing here, looking out the kitchen window, I can see my husband and my daughter. She has brought something to show him—a caterpillar maybe, since they’re her favorites, or perhaps a pretty leaf or stone.
It’s the familiar sting I always have when I observe Phil with Tory. He closes the hood on the grill and turns to her fully, crouching to her eye level. They bend their heads together, staring down into her flat palm, and it strikes me how much they look alike. They have the same profile. She is her father’s daughter, but, perhaps even more to the point, he is my daughter’s father. And of course I’m glad he gives himself up to the role, that she lives in the warm glow of his constant approval. Of course I’m glad she never has to work for his attention, and yet, watching them now through the window, there it is, the familiar sting. Because as he bends over her hand I can see that he is capable of caring. That his indifference to me is optional, a choice. Sometimes I tell myself that he is just wounded. This is what women say about men. That they can’t show their feelings, that they can’t speak their truth. That they’re wired differently from us, almost as if they’re a separate species, and that we shouldn’t take their silence personally. But then I see Phil like this, lowering his knee down to the deck, taking Tory’s hand in his, and I know that he’s not as wounded as I have told myself. He could love me. He just doesn’t.
