I Bring Sorrow_And Other Stories of Transgression

by Patricia Abbott

  George Starkey stood out. He was a successful car salesman who worked long hours and had needs I could satisfy. What I brought to the bargain was the maintenance of a clean house, good meals, and serving as a respectable escort at social functions. I detested parties, but I threw him first-rate ones at suitable intervals and sat with him in church each Sunday despite having no such beliefs myself. Salesmen need visibility in the community, and I understood my part of the bargain. I was still moderately attractive, and I gardened, cooked, and cleaned better than anyone, not that it seemed to mean much to him. To me, it meant everything. I am sure a shrink could tell me why, but I didn’t examine my obsession, just indulged it with hours spent on my hands and knees with a scrub brush, at the stove stirring, on ladders cleaning windows, pulling weeds, reordering a closet or a drawer.

  It wasn’t expensive clothes or cars or travel I was after. I wanted what wives of a generation earlier had craved: a quiet, clean suburban existence and a house that invited, no, called out for, inspection. That was our deal, although it was never discussed. I doubt he was even aware of it. But to my mind, our bargain was written in stone. George gave me the money I needed to indulge this lifestyle for a good many years. He never complained and neither did I. Sometimes I wondered if we were both settling for less than we deserved, but I kept such feelings to myself.

  The downturn in U.S. car sales came earlier than the one brought on by Wall Street. George was good at what he did, but even the best salesman cannot save a dealer who has pumped money into bad investments and luxury items rather than his business. And although George had changed bosses over the years, he’d landed at a dealership selling particularly undesirable cars when things went bust.

  “I doubt we’ll ride the month out,” George said at dinner one night. “Plesper was holed up with his accountant all day. Better start tightening your belt.” His elasticized waistband, something we noted together, made a mockery of this expression.

  “I’m sure it will be all right,” I told him, watching him push his peas onto his fork with his index finger.

  Soothing George did not come naturally. I knew I should offer another sentence or two of commiseration but was stuck. So I repeated the same words, and thankfully he didn’t notice. I considered patting his hand but the fork was still in it—with the peas as well—so instead I made that clucking sound that signals support.

  “It’s not going to be all right, Zelda. You might as well get used to the idea that things around here may have to change.” He looked around the room for an example but couldn’t come up with one. “No trips to Honolulu,” he eventually said, which was quite amusing since we’d never been anywhere more distant than Cape May, New Jersey. To be fair, this was more my fault than his. Leaving the house for more than a day or two was very stressful. I too easily imagined the influx of dust, dirt, and decay and was unable to enjoy myself. And the thought that my quiet house might attract vermin—of both the human and animal kinds—doomed any hope of an enjoyable time.

  “I won’t pack my bags anytime soon,” I said, striving for humor, which is another trait that doesn’t come easily to me. He stared for a second—obviously reading it as sarcasm—threw his napkin down on the table, and sauntered off to watch TV.

  George had worked so many hours over the course of our marriage that he had nothing to do with himself on the evenings he was home. I watched that night as he tried in vain to find something that would interest him on TV, finally settling on a show about people blindly bidding for unclaimed items in storage units. In a sense, that was what each of us had done when we married.

  A few weeks later, George announced the final demise of Rader Motors. “Not even a package to grease the deal,” he said. “Plesper’s accountant announced it before we had time to take our overcoats off.”

  “Doesn’t he have to provide severance pay?”

  George shook his head. “Not if he doesn’t have the money to do it. It’s not like I’m working for a big corporation with iron-clad rules for issues like severance pay.”

  “You can collect unemployment until you find something else.” I was anxious to be done with this. The dirty dishes in the sink beckoned to me.

  He nodded. “That won’t be much, and it won’t last for long. Finding a job at fifty-eight will be tough. I’ve never worked for anyone outside the car industry and not many dealers are looking for salesmen now.”

  “A good salesman can always find work,” I said in a final attempt to buck him up. “Every industry uses salesmen.” I knew I should’ve probably supplied more succor here, but such a balm would’ve taken considerably more practice. I was used to dealing out a repertoire of clichés.

  He shrugged, being a man of low expectations.

  George was right though. His age went against him, although unspoken, of course, in every interview he was able to get. And that number was small. We were not on the verge of complete bankruptcy, but a few years of unemployment might mean selling the house and moving to a more modest suburb. He put this idea to me himself on many occasions over the next weeks, and the streak of cruelty in his voice was something new.

  I looked around my house. I’d poured every ounce of creativity, love, and energy I possessed into our home. The curtains were handmade, the wallpaper chosen and hung by me. Every carpet had been picked with great care. The paint was nothing you could find at Sherwin Williams—I had it specially mixed. It was a perfect house and I was both responsible for and devoted to its flawlessness.

  The more George hung around the house, the more that perfection began to show chips. Chips, dents, ashes, stains, burns, dirt he tracked in with his shoes—well, you get the sense of it. George was untidy. He never closed a door, drawer or cabinet. He never put his clothes into the hamper or into his closet. I’d always known this about him, but traits annoying in a man you had to deal with only a few hours a week became unbearable in one around most of the time.

  “You never minded before,” he said when I complained about the seven cabinet doors hanging open in the kitchen. “What else do you have to do?” he said when I spent an hour rearranging the closet I’d only arranged a few days earlier.

  “Why don’t you put the recycling bin where I can reach it?” he suggested, patting the floor next to him when I swept the empty Heineken cans into a bag. He was driving me mad.

  Weeks turned into months. Both George and I grew more irritable, and he began going to the local bar. I was glad for the hours of peace, but the expense of it and the condition he returned home in were unacceptable. If he was untidy while sober, inebriation proved fatal. And I was beginning to wonder if he didn’t enjoy it. Complete idleness may have made a nice change for him.

  I had some experience with remedying a situation like this one—a circumstance that threatened my carefully constructed life. Early in our marriage, George had stopped his car in a rural area for gas and come upon an abandoned dog. No collar, no license, but a friendly mutt. They took to each other and George brought him home. He was a small dog, nice enough as dogs go, and George named him Esso after the gas station where he’d found him.

  Esso turned out to have some bad habits. He was clumsy, sloppy, and he barked too much. He liked to hide things, trotting after you as you searched for them. Once these annoying traits made themselves known, I saw nothing wrong with the dog spending most of the day in our yard. It was a pleasant fenced yard behind the house. But once outside, Esso either dug up my flowers or barked to be let back in. If I shut him up inside a room, he barked too. None of this barking occurred when George was home. When I tried to tell George about Esso’s behavior, he was entirely unsympathetic.

  “You can take care of a little dog, can’t you?” he said. “How much trouble can he be?”

  So, of necessity, I developed a plan. Esso loved to dig so I began standing on the other side of the fence with a nice piece of meat in my hand. Day by day, E
sso got a little more successful in tunneling his way under the metal fence and out of the yard. When a perfect tunnel under the fence stood as proof, I bundled him in the car and took him to an animal rescue facility in a distant town. There the kind people assured me he would be easily placed given his friendliness.

  “You can’t keep him, huh?” the woman said. “Such a delightful dog.”

  “Allergies,” I told her, wiping my nose with a tissue.

  “Ah.”

  Surely dogs have been sacrificed for less than a person’s sanity and the preservation of a house.

  “Esso seems to have run away,” I told George that night, showing him the tunnel with a flashlight. “How clever he was to dig his way out. He must have been practicing for weeks,” I added, pointing to some other spots where the dog had been.

  “He seemed so happy,” George said, kneeling down next to the fence. “Do you smell anything?” I shook my head. The meat lay there for almost an hour while Esso dug his way under the fence so it wasn’t surprising.

  George spent days trying to find him, posting signs around the neighborhood, notifying the police. He met with no success.

  “We’ll have to look for another dog,” George said when his hope dried up.

  “Perhaps in the spring,” I said. He forgot, of course. Those were the days when the auto business was flush.

  Back in the present, George’s behavior continued to worsen, and our arguments increased. One night he took a swing at me, and only a quick move on my part spared me a black eye. He apologized profusely, but the gloves were off. But an all-out fight might destroy the very thing I was striving to save—my home. Many women would have forced him to prepare his own meals, but the mess this involved made it impossible. Withholding sex was long gone as a punishment, and any silent treatment played right into his hands. He’d always complained that my only conversation concerned household matters and it bored him.

  Things grew worse. As the money in our accounts seeped away, he continued to leave the house every night, coming home dead drunk around midnight. He was able to walk home, although the dirty and torn knees of his trousers made it clear he stumbled quite a bit. His breath in the bed next to me was noxious, and I began sleeping in the den. Something had to be done before he either sold the house out from under me or destroyed it bit by bit.

  Since it was unlikely I could turn George over to a rescue center, my actions would have to be more drastic. I searched online for methods of murder, but all of them had limitations in either execution or detection. I certainly did not intend to trade my house, the very object that drove my actions, for a jail cell.

  One night, more out of curiosity than as part of any plan, I followed George to his watering hole. I turned up, as near as I could estimate, about the time he usually headed for home. I watched as he sidled out the front door and around to the side of the building. There, under the glare of an enormous metal lamp in a little alcove, he relieved himself. The entire process must have taken a full three minutes. First his fat hand on the wall steadying his swaying body, followed by a fumbling search for the zipper, the long wait until the process began, the zip-up at its conclusion. He managed to smoke half a cigarette while this ritual took place. That almost made me angrier than the luridness of it all. Smoking! I thought I’d put that habit to rest years before.

  I was sure Bub’s Pub had bathrooms. Why would George choose such a well-lit spot? Because it was a little ceremony, I suddenly realized. As drunk as he was, he would choose to lay down a routine for getting himself home. I’d heard or read that urinating outside was not uncommon for men. In Amsterdam, men insisted that peeing from the canal bridges was a God-given right.

  While George slept a week later, I scouted Bub’s wearing a wig and a non-descript outfit. The lamp George stood under every night—and I checked on that habit two more times—was just beneath the ladies’ room window and affixed to the stonewall with a large metal plate. If I stood on the john and opened the window, I could reach the lamp. It was a huge fixture—surely weighing fifty pounds or more when you considered the base, the lamp, and the fanciful impediments soldered onto it. A large rusty cherub was attached to the base. A bird perched on the finial. It had to pre-date the current use of the facility because its elegance was certainly not contemporaneous with the pub inside. It was probably a brass fixture, although no one had bothered to polish it for years. Sticking my hand through the open window, I could easily reach it. The screws seemed loose and a bit rusty. Should this lamp land on an unsuspecting head, could that person survive? I certainly didn’t want to tend to an addled George for a dozen years.

  I actually did a trial run twice. I ducked into the bar just before George’s departure, headed for the ladies’ room—no worry about him seeing me, as drunk as he was—and practiced loosening the screws from my perch on the john in the left stall. The lamp’s drop would be one of about twenty feet since the restrooms were located on the half-floor above the bar. In the several times I went there, there was never a woman there, although men seemed to exit quite regularly from the room next door. Apparently, George’s proclivity for relieving himself outside was not universally shared. I’d have to be quiet, though, because the wall between the two rooms seemed thin.

  I sound a lot calmer than I was. Even practicing the maneuver made my palms sweat and my heart pound. But day by day, George was making life impossible. And should we separate, I would get only half of a fairly paltry amount. Most importantly, I would lose the house. The house would be on the auction block within weeks.

  I chose a night when the bar would be busy—easier to sneak in and out among a crowd. St. Patrick’s Day, in fact. Green beer flowed from the taps like a river undammed. When the time for George’s exit drew near, I took my place in the stall. I smelled his cigarette being lighted outside. He never looked up, never heard my hands fumbling at the window, and seconds later the massive lamp landed on his head the way I expected. I peeked out and saw a pool of blood beginning to form under his head. It looked black now that the light was gone. The cigarette still burned in his limp hand.

  I nearly blew it, though—one of those things you just couldn’t anticipate. As I let myself back into my house, I looked down and saw I’d tracked tar or some substance all over my carpet. I thought back over the evening. Had I left tracks of tar on that toilet seat? Tar tracks would certainly tip off the cops that the lamp’s fall was not necessarily an accident. It was even possible I’d left a footprint in the stall or on the seat, really pointing a finger toward me.

  Back I went, Goo Be Gone in hand. George was still lying in the same spot. I crept inside where the party was going full blast and cleaned off the toilet seat, which indeed showed signs of my visit. It took only a minute or so and I felt strangely exhilarated by my quick thinking.

  Nothing went wrong after that. Not for a long time. A small group of family and friends buried George a few days later. No one suggested the accident was anything other than…accidental. The screws the cops found were rusty. The lamp was over seventy-five years old, it turned out, its weight considerable. And luckily, any number of people had observed George taking his nightly pee on other nights. “Yes, yes, he did that all the time,” one of them chuckled and then frowned with embarrassment.

  George left me a large enough inheritance to live on nicely. And once his Social Security kicked in, things would only improve. It was during one of my jaunts to the cemetery to scrub George’s grave and headstone a few months later that I ran into trouble. A shady little man approached me as I knelt over the grave, scrub brush in my hand.

  “I have this problem,” he told me when I looked up. He was about my age but looked liked he spent almost no time outside.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Yeah. I can’t seem to do anything about it—my little ritual,” he continued. “You’ll never guess.”

  I looke
d around me for signs of what he was referring to. Perhaps he was the one who left the baby shoes on the benches I’d passed one on my way to George’s grave today. Or maybe it was he who pinned queasy little notes to the headstones. Printed sayings a lunatic might think funny.

  Like, “Here lies Anna White, silent at last. You can thank me later. All those who pass.”

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?” He was crouching down, his breath in my ear. “My problem and where you fit in.”

  I didn’t say anything. Better not to encourage him.

  He reached into his pocket and took out a snapshot. “You’d better take a look.”

  I knew it was going to be some horrible photo. I just didn’t know how horrible. I took a quick glance and gasped. The photo was of me, cleaning the toilet at Bub’s. I was on my hands and knees, giving the john a good scrub. A look of determination distorted my face.

  “How did you get this?” I whispered, looking around. “Are you a cop?” I knew he wasn’t though. No cop dressed like this.

  “That’s where my little problem comes in—my little proclivity I think they call it. Sometimes, and it is often just after the infrequent woman enters the ladies’ room that I find myself in the right stall in the men’s room at Bub’s with a camera in my hand. Well, an iPhone now. Smaller, you know. At home, I have an envelope full of snaps I’ve taken at Bub’s over the years.” He giggled a little. “A history of Bub’s female patrons and the changing fashion in underwear.”

  “You’re a pervert,” I said, still staring at the snapshot. “How did you know I’d be here today?” I looked around to see if other men were hiding in the bushes.

  “You stick to a routine. Thursdays at two, you come here. If it’s raining, it’s Friday. Found out the first week I watched you.”