11 Abbott and the Clenched Jaw
At whom can Abbott be angry? “Another amazing Friday night,” he says to his wife as they clip the dog’s toenails in the foyer. Abbott’s dog lies compliantly on the tile floor, but his eyes are wild with terror and his limbs are trembling. “It’s OK,” Abbott’s wife says to the dog. “This won’t hurt. You’re doing great.” Abbott’s knee hurts. He is angry with the dog, though he understands it is unfair to blame the dog for everything. He notices for the first time that there seems to be some kind of rot in the grout between the tiles. “We should brush his teeth, too,” Abbott’s wife says. “Look at that brown stuff.” “It’s always such a relief when the weekend comes,” Abbott says. “Don’t cut them too short,” says his wife. “It’s a chance to kick back and blow off some steam,” he says. With a little pep and tonal diligence, these words might possibly convey a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity, rather than a jagged statement of anger poorly disguised as a tenderly ironic statement of solidarity. “One more foot, buddy,” Abbott’s wife says. “You’re doing great.” “This is why we work so hard,” Abbott says. “It’s all worth it when the weekend comes.” Abbott’s dog makes a halfhearted attempt at escape, and Abbott pushes him back down to the floor. “Just relax!” he shouts at the dog. “First of all?” Abbott’s wife says. “This is not Friday.” Abbott says, “Fine.” She says, “It’s not even close to Friday.” Abbott says, “The point still holds.” “What point is that?” his wife asks. Abbott is not quite sure he knows what his point is. He has a notion, but it’s too terrible to say out loud. He pets the dog, examines a paw. “Second, it’s not my fault and it’s not his fault,” Abbott’s wife says, “so don’t take it out on us.” She kneels on the tile by the dog, scratching his ear. Abbott has been trying, he realizes, to look down her shirt. “Fine,” he says. “I know.” “And third?” she says, “do you even remember how hard I had to try to get you to go out on a Friday night before we had a kid?” Abbott says, “That’s not true,” which is not true. Meanwhile, the developing fetus can hear this whole pitiful encounter, according to the Internet. You would think the amniotic fluid would muffle sound, but it actually amplifies it. For an analogy, it might be helpful to remember how well you could hear underwater in the county swimming pool of so long ago.
12 Abbott Discovers an Idiom in His Yard
Abbott’s neighbor’s woodpile, against which Abbott pushes his mower this afternoon, is a real woodpile, not a metaphor. Abbott, deep in academic reverie, doesn’t even recognize the object, doesn’t name it woodpile. It’s been reduced to its geometry—it exists only in relation to his mower. As he bumps the mower against the edge of the pile, he is startled by an interstitial slithering in the stacked logs. He sees the scales, so vivid as to seem artificial. Numerous times in his professional life, in hallways and department meetings, Abbott has heard the phrase snake in the woodpile. It’s a stock expression of the paranoid intellectual. I know about snakes in woodpiles, Abbott thinks, sprinting across his yard away from the snake in the woodpile, but what is that snake doing in that woodpile? This is what it’s like living life backwards. He can’t catch his breath. Once again he’s stunned by the real.
13 Abbott Thinks, Yet Again, the Unthinkable
Abbott’s daughter has been napping for two hours and fifty minutes. Abbott, a frequent complainer about her short naps, thinks this one has been going on entirely too long. The monitor is quiet, which means either that she is alive and sleeping or that she is no longer alive. He wishes he had been more patient with her, more attentive. He wishes he had been more focused and engaged during all those hours they spent with the beads and the buttons in the family room. He wonders about the last thing he said to her. He thinks it was, “Have a good one.” When he has wrestled and played with her in the family room, he has put his head on her chest and heard her small heart beating. He has wondered what keeps it going and going. Nobody seems willing to admit that the very premise is outlandish. Abbott’s daughter’s nap is Abbott’s time to get things done around the house or run errands or rest or read, but for the past forty-five minutes he has just been sitting at the dining-room table, waiting for her to wake up. There is no good reason to go in to check on her. If her heart is not beating, then it has already stopped beating. Going in does not change that. Why enter her room only to confirm a dark suspicion? While there exists the possibility that she is alive and napping, Abbott should remain outside her room. If the nap lasts five hours, a week, a month, he should sit right here at the dining-room table with the slim hope that she’s just very tired. Why not live as much of his life as possible with this hope? Why rush to begin the sorrowful remainder of his days? If she is no longer alive, every second he does not know for certain that she is no longer alive is another second he does not have to live with it. He knows it is best to stay out of her room. When he enters her room, she immediately stirs. She is, and has been, alive. His relief is immediately succeeded by regret and self-rebuke. He does not want her to wake up. He could be reading right now, or taking his own nap. He could be working with wood. He tries to sneak from the room, but his daughter sits up and calls out. “Dad,” she says, rubbing her eyes. “Dad. I’m awake.”
14 Abbott’s Imaginary Burst into Subdisciplinary Prominence
“Historically speaking,” Abbott begins before a rapt imaginary audience at the imaginary Royal Institute of Harbinger, Omen, and Portent in Helsinki, “we occupy the epoch after Juvenal and before Armageddon.” He pauses for robust laughter, as his notes instruct. His imaginary paper is called “On the Feasibility of American Burlesque.” Its real thesis is that it’s increasingly unfeasible. The ornate, high-ceilinged lecture hall is stiflingly hot or quite drafty and cold. The atmosphere is electric, charged, and crackling. His artful Power Point presentation culminates with a photograph of the four deceased dolphins that recently washed up in San Diego. “A necropsy confirmed that they had been shot,” Abbott says. “With a gun.” The applause lasts one minute and thirty-five seconds. Flash photographers flout the strict prohibition against flash photography. Abbott’s handkerchief is soaked. He looks up from the lectern, sees members of the audience scanning the conference program for his short and humble bio. It hasn’t been easy to be away from his real wife and daughter for these six imaginary days, but the benefit to his career is inestimable. His absence makes him miss and appreciate his family even more. This trip in all likelihood has strengthened the domestic bonds. Also, he has never been to Sweden, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own. Finland, he means. He has never been to Finland, and he has enjoyed discovering a new place on his own.
15 On the Very Possibility of Kindness
The bananas in the kitchen are overripe, and Abbott’s wife wants to make banana bread. So far the premise is simple and so is the motivation. But there is a complication. Abbott’s wife is tired and busy, and she is having trouble finding the time to make the bread. Right now she has to leave the house to get some milk and swimming diapers. After Abbott puts his daughter to bed for her nap, he walks into the kitchen and sees on the counter the perfectly overripe bananas, the large mixing bowl, and the recipe. What happens next is that he begins to make the banana bread, despite the fact that he has never baked anything. One can’t presume to know another’s thoughts, but Abbott feels certain that his wife did not leave the bananas, bowl, and recipe on the counter so that he might make the bread. He knows it would never occur to her that he would make the bread. Abbott is not even considering this possibility—it’s just that when he sees these items on the counter he feels no twinge of guilt or responsibility, no subtle marital pressure, no implicit request or demand. He knows—to the extent this knowledge is possible—that his wife began to make the bread, but then ran out of time or energy. He knows she is not now at the Big Y wondering if her husband fell into the trap she set in the kitchen. He has already begun assembling ingredients when he notices that his wife has made notes on the recipe card, adjustin
g the amounts of ingredients to make a two-banana loaf rather than a three-banana loaf. He thinks with fondness of his wife, who keeps these adjusted recipe cards somewhere in their home. He doesn’t really think; he just feels fondness. Fondness and a kind of jolt. He follows the adjusted recipe. His motivations for baking are unclear, even to himself. He’s just baking, and at some point in the process he realizes he is enjoying himself, a realization that leads to an overawareness of baking and the enjoyment of baking, which threatens to spoil the experience but does not. He puts the loaf in the oven and waits. As the kitchen begins to smell good, he becomes eager for his wife’s return. He is anxious to witness her surprise. He is anxious, he supposes, to be regarded as a surprising husband. Abbott is beginning to understand that he baked only because he believed his wife had absolutely no expectation that he would bake. Consequently, in making banana bread he could also make himself, at least temporarily, into a remarkable spouse. He may have thought he was helping his life partner, but he was not. Not in an authentic way. He was never baking for her. Now he has gone and spoiled the experience, and when she comes home he is gloomy with the certainty that he has never been and will never be genuinely nice, a quality he admires. He wishes he had not baked the bread. That would have been the nice thing to do. He walks out into the rain to help bring in the groceries, but not in a nice way. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, to which he just shakes his head. When she enters the house and smells the bread baking, she seems legitimately confused. It’s as if—Abbott is just guessing here—it’s as if she can’t remember whether or not she made this bread. She can’t remember making it, and yet the bread is obviously baking, so she searches her mind for other possibilities, finally arriving at her husband. “Did you make the banana bread?” she asks. “Yes,” he says, unpacking groceries. “Are you serious?” she says. She opens the oven door and peeks in at the loaf, which is rising beautifully. Then, concerned, she says, “Did you follow the recipe for two bananas?” “Yes,” he says. “Did you find the baking soda?” “Yes,” he blurts, as if offended. She clearly cannot believe he found the baking soda. He himself had been stunned to find it earlier in the door of the refrigerator. “Well,” Abbott’s wife says, “thank you. That was nice.” Together they put away the groceries in silence. Eventually he says, “I thought you might be surprised.” “I am,” she says. “I am surprised. And I’m grateful. I honestly can’t believe you found the baking soda.” This is not going well; the quality and quantity of her surprise are wrong. The afternoon has arrived at a shameful crisis: Even though Abbott knows that baking bread in order to exhibit his limitless depth is solipsistic and spiritually deficient—the very opposite of generous, in fact, and the cause of his current despondency—yes, even though he knows it, he still wants his wife to notice his limitless depth. “I was just trying to help you out,” he says, casting a wide net across the True/False Continuum. “Listen,” Abbott’s wife says, squeezing the back of Abbott’s neck, “the bread is a surprise, but you are not.” And so it is that Abbott is surprised.
16 Abbott and the Mail
Fucking Thoreau—he could, for his part, happily do without the post-office. Leave it to the childless to be complacent about the mail. You put a toddler in Walden and you’d get new philosophy. For his part, Abbott takes great comfort in the reliable work of the postal service, a representative of which comes to his neighborhood in the mid- to late afternoon six days a week, every week. The mail is an undeniably significant part of his day. It not only signals the blessed arrival of the mid- to late afternoon, it also offers the promise of surprise and wonder. Today there is nothing surprising or wonderful, and in fact there never is. But there is the promise. Today it’s a bill and three more baby catalogues. Abbott and his wife used to feel irked and mildly infringed upon by the fact that these companies somehow knew they were going to have a baby. But then they started flipping through the catalogues, and they found a lot of interesting stuff. Abbott sees four neighbors from four houses on his side of the street, all walking to or from their mailboxes. The mail truck is still moving down the street, and it continues to draw more neighbors from their houses. The scene feels a bit like a nature documentary. Everyone greets one another in a mechanical fashion, waving first to their eastern neighbors and then to their western neighbors. It’s like they’re all riding in a parade. Abbott does not even focus his eyes on a person or people—he just transmits vague signals of salutation to his counterparts. This is, to the best of Abbott’s knowledge, a weekday. Don’t his neighbors have jobs? And what could they all be expecting every day that is so important? Why this desperate rush? The awkward trip to the mailbox is enough to make Abbott want to wait a few minutes each day after delivery before checking his mail. On the other hand, he knows there are limits to what a man can ask of himself.
17 Abbott Adds a Key to the Ring
Abbott does not consider the broken doorknob on the seldom-used front door a high-priority repair, or even a problem. “So we can’t get out,” he says to his wife. “People can’t get in. It’s kind of a nice feature.” “But what if there was a fire?” his wife says. She is a very skilled wife. This afternoon, during the child’s nap, Abbott drives to the hardware store to purchase a doorknob. He stands in the doorknob aisle for fifteen minutes. Faced with a choice between many seemingly identical doorknobs, Abbott purchases the second most expensive one and takes it home in a bag. The installation is supposed to be easy, but it is not. The doorknob and the screwdriver become slippery in the moist air. The dropped screws clatter and vanish. Eventually, Abbott replaces the doorknob, then makes small noises and gestures of completion until his wife says, “Looks good. Nice job.” Since Abbott did not replace the deadbolt, which was not broken, he now has two different keys for a door he does not use. He puts the new key on his ring, which has become heavy and crowded. What is that blue one for? It was only seven years ago—no, six—that Abbott left Texas in a small moving truck, after completing his lease and donating his Plymouth Reliant to an organization that teaches troubled teens to fix transmissions. At that point he had no keys. Not one. A putative adult with an empty key ring. He had forsaken the air-conditioning on his drive out of Texas. He had opened the windows and let the hot wind blow freely through the cab. The last time he told this story to his wife, she laughed and said, “Why don’t you just tell me about a woman you enjoyed having sex with?” Stepping onto his porch with his screwdriver and jangling keys, he recalls the story of the empty key ring with a powerful sense of boredom. He closes the front door and tests the new doorknob and the lock. He turns and pushes, turns and pulls. He listens for the click, and he hears it.
18 Abbott on the Couch
Tonight Abbott is a generality, a tendency, a convention. He is an indistinct and featureless lump beneath a thin blanket. Tonight he is Husband on Couch. The battered cushions sag beneath the weight of his unoriginality. He is complicit, he knows. Nobody can make you be Husband on Couch. Wife in Big Bed can’t. You always have choices. Abbott could hop a freight train, ride the rails, build fires in trash cans. Or he could be Husband on Air Mattress, just for the principle. The fight was painfully stupid. Abbott, lying in bed, asked his wife if her novel is any good. She said, “Oh, you know.” Then he asked what her novel is about. He didn’t even care; he was just making bedtime conversation. She said, “Oh, you know.” He studied the title, the cover. He tried to peek at the author photograph. He said, “I do know. It’s about marriage and secrets and faith. Am I right? And the strange settling sounds an old house makes at night? And that angle of light in the winter?” Abbott’s wife did not say anything. Abbott said, “Loss of youth. Estrangement. A nice meal ruined by the truth. A long walk during which it becomes shockingly evident that the natural world is violent and ruthless.” Abbott’s wife said, “Are you done?” Abbott said, “Passion. Memory. Forgiveness. Seething things beneath a placid surface. A tree cleft by lightning.” Abbott’s wife closed her book and said, “Is there something you�
��d like to talk about?” Abbott realized that he was spoiling any chance of a good night’s sleep for his wife, but he knew if he stopped now it would appear that he knew he was acting poorly, and that was not an admission he was prepared to make. He was operating by a strongly felt but dimly understood sense of correctness. “The smell of the cut grass, the feel of the cut grass on bare feet, the memories of walking on cut grass with bare feet in simpler times.” Abbott’s wife said, “Stop yelling.” Abbott said, “I’m not.” Abbott’s wife said, “If there’s something you’d like to say to me, then say it.” Abbott said, “She lives in upstate New York with her husband, her two children, and her two horses.” Abbott’s wife said she didn’t care about the novel but he was being an ass. And of course she rolled over to face away from him. It had taken Abbott, without premeditation, something like two minutes to wreck the night. Then, apropos of nothing beyond his own insensitivity, he said, “I know about the water in the basement.” He found a tone to make it cruel. He got out of bed and stood up. Abbott’s wife held her book with her index finger marking her place. She did not move and did not speak. Beside her, on her nightstand, that small porcelain dish filled with earplugs. He left the room and arrived unimaginatively on the horrible family-room couch, a stained and cat-tattered mound of soft dough. The dog came with him, but then returned to the bedroom after a few minutes. Abbott does not anticipate falling asleep anytime soon, but the next thing he knows his wife is shaking his leg. He opens his eyes to see her holding her novel and a steaming mug. The lamplight makes him squint. He rubs his eyes, pats the listless cushions for her to lie down with him. “This is my spot,” she says. Abbott extracts himself from the couch and limps down the hallway, dragging his thin blanket like a vagabond. That’s way too fast, he thinks, hearing a car drive past his house.
Abbott Awaits Page 6
