BACKSTORY: The story of a liberating divorce has become something of a staple in short story collections. Being contrary by nature (a family failing?) I wondered what a “stay together” story might be like. Country music in particular offers several excellent examples of such works, but there was one in particular men seemed drawn to: Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line.” Since the male character in this particular story exists completely off the page; since he is a man without a voice amidst all the rapid-fire female ones (another family failing?), letting Johnny speak for him evens the playing field a bit.
RITA WAS NINE YEARS OLD WHEN her parents finally divorced. As far back as she could remember they had been fighting over every little thing—the light bill, the new shower curtain, the dogs Daddy bought and tried to train (but they only messed in the house the more he used the whistle). What Rita remembered after he left was how quiet everything was, how peaceful. When she would come home from school, the only sounds in the house were gentle, feminine ones: the whirl of her mother’s sewing machine in the upstairs bedroom, or the clicking of the crock-pot turning on and off.
When Rita was fourteen, her father came back and her parents remarried. The fights were the same (although there weren’t any more dogs) and Rita began to avoid the house altogether, taking a job at the mall and staying out late with friends. All of them had parents who had either stayed together or fallen apart, not the stop and start of Rita’s life. She would sit on the bleachers outside the school, moaning about the latest round of vicious name-calling in the kitchen. What she didn’t mention was how most mornings, her mother smiled as she fixed breakfast, and her father had taken to whistling.
Perhaps he missed the dogs?
Rita found the whole thing humiliating.
When Rita married John two years ago, she told him that she would never put her kids through all that. And she won’t, or at least, she wouldn’t, because she and John never had kids. Good thing, too, because their marriage is all over. Rita plans to get divorced and stay that way.
“I don’t see his truck,” Rita says as she pulls the car into the driveway of the doublewide where she had lived since they were married. She shuts off the engine and sits a moment, looking at the house, with the door closed up tight and all the curtains pulled. When she left, a week ago, everything had been wide open; she had nothing to hide, after all.
“During the day is always the best time to come,” Traci tells her. Traci is her best friend from high school and has offered to let Rita stay with her for a few weeks. Traci has been divorced twice, and has an apartment in Morgantown with big patio doors that look out over a ravine and a washer and dryer that stack one on top of the other. Everything in the apartment is beige: the walls, the carpet, the sofa and chair. Only the end tables are shiny black plastic.
“Men don’t just miss work on account of a little marriage going sour,” Traci says. Her eyes are angry and narrow. Traci was off today, and Rita called in to the veterinary clinic where she works as a receptionist and said that she was sick with a migraine. So it is obvious to both of them that they care more. They are here and John is not.
Rita pulls out her keys, and has a moment of pure panic. What if John changed the locks? What if she can’t get inside, where all of her things are, everything she owns but the few mismatched items she threw into the suitcase before she left? She’d packed clothes for work, for instance, but not her comfortable shoes. Toothpaste, but no mouthwash. For three days now Rita has been stealing Traci’s mouthwash, just a little at a time so Traci won’t notice, and wearing her Reeboks with skirts and trying to hide her feet behind the front desk at work.
But Rita’s key works just fine, and the air inside is cool. After the soothing beige of Traci’s apartment, the doublewide almost blinds her with its color. The bright gold couch and the green chair are right where she left them. The curtains are red and gold striped, and the wallpaper is green with red flowers. Rita is embarrassed to have Traci see the place, although it is spotlessly clean, which Traci’s apartment is not. Rita is not surprised to note that the room is actually cleaner than when she left it—John is probably pleased that he can run the house the way he likes. The brass lamps gleam when she turns them on. When Traci pushes the tape player (John doesn’t like CDs and spends hours scouring stores for tapes and even vinyl records), Rita hears Johnny Cash.
“Turn that off,” she snaps at Traci, who looks up, surprised. Usually Traci is the angry one. But Traci can’t know that John used to sing the song “I Walk the Line” when they were dating, how much Rita had loved it then. He seemed so confident, so sure of himself. So unlike her father. What she hadn’t known was that he would want her to walk the line, too. Being married to John was like joining the army, she’d told Traci last week.
Rita can see Traci looking around, and knows that Traci doesn’t think much of the doublewide. To Traci, doublewide will always mean trailer, which is true, but isn’t true at the same time, because the rooms are bigger, more like a house. They walk down the hall to the master bedroom. The bed is made, the covers pulled tightly, and Rita finds it hard to believe that the bed is soft or that she ever slept in it.
“So what did John do to you?” Traci asks, sitting in a chair and watching Rita open drawers and drop clothes into a laundry basket she took from the closet. Rita thinks that Traci should offer to help, or at least give advice, having gone through this twice before. What does one pack for a divorce that fits inside a laundry basket?
“Do to me?” Rita asks.
Traci is looking at the bed. “What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?”
“Oh,” Rita says, wondering what to say. “Nothing shocking. I mean, it’s not like he ran off with another woman or something.”
Traci leans forward in the chair. “Did he ever, you know, do anything to you?” she asks. Her voice is lower, as though there is someone else in the house listening besides Rita.
“Do to me?” Rita says, and realizes that she just said this a few seconds ago. But it is like Traci knows a language other than English, which she expects Rita to understand, now that she is getting divorced, too.
“Did he ever, you know, hurt you in any way? Hit you?”
“Of course not!” Rita says, her voice loud. Traci falls back against the chair, as though Rita’s denial has pushed her there. “John isn’t like that,” Rita tells her in a softer voice. “I mean, with John, he just gets quieter when he’s upset.” Rita realizes that Traci, her best friend, doesn’t know John at all.
“Sometimes those are the worst ones,” Traci says. She nods her head as though she and Rita are agreeing on something, and maybe they are, Rita thinks. After she folds her jeans and underwear and puts them in the basket, she’s dismayed by how full it is. She hasn’t yet packed the clock that had been her grandmother’s, or the quilt her great-aunt Mary had made. Her closet is still filled with clothes.
Traci is looking over her fingernails, and Rita worries that she might be bored. “I don’t think it was any one thing,” she says, trying to get Traci interested again. “But lots of little things. You know, like one night we were sitting in the kitchen and I noticed that John seemed to be listening for something.” Her voice wavers a little, and Rita fights it for control. “And it made me upset that he wasn’t listening for me, because obviously, I was sitting right there.”
When Rita has said this, Traci is still looking at her fingernails, although she nods and sighs. Rita goes into the bathroom, knowing that she has let Traci down in some way, but unsure of how to fix it. She opens the medicine cabinet and stares at the tiny bottles of mouthwash that John uses. He has this idea that things will keep longer in smaller packages. Everything in the cabinet is arranged by height. “Look at this,” Rita wants to show Traci. “This is what my life is like.” But she admits that the order makes everything easy to find, and the tiny bottles will be easier to pack.
Rita takes a few bottles and some more toothpaste. She takes the Advil, too, because John never takes anything when he gets a headache. All this in hand, she stares at the pink plastic container holding her diaphragm and the half-used tube of KY Jelly. She can’t imagine having sex with anyone right now, but it seems strange to leave it here for John. Maybe if she takes it, he’ll think that she is having sex with someone else, and Rita is surprised how excited this idea makes her. Maybe then he will call and yell and scream and make a fuss.
She sits down on the toilet, glad to have a minute alone to think. What would it take, she wonders, to make John kick up a fuss? It just isn’t his way. John doesn’t worry about something so much as he does something about it. He’s always trying to keep things from breaking down. Like the Y2K crisis, when the news started reporting about that, he went every week to Wal-Mart and stocked up on gun shells, dried fruit, and kerosene. When Rita asked him about this, he didn’t say much, just that he wanted to be ready, just in case.
“In case of what?” she asked him.
“Things might happen,” he answered. “We need to be prepared.” After that he started buying canned goods, stacking them under the kitchen sink when he ran out of room in the cupboards. Rita teased him about eating canned baked beans until the next millennium. John didn’t think that was very funny.
Just when Rita thought he might be calming down, there came the terrorist attacks. After 9/11, John began again. Rita watched the piles of sheeting plastic grow, and the mounds of duct tape. Bottled water filled one closet. He talked about buying a generator. “I promised I would take care of you. I just want to do my best.”
“How is putting me in a plastic bubble going to take care of me?” she’d demanded.
“I’m just following the list,” he replied, holding it up. The words DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ran across the top.
My home was certainly secure, Rita thinks. Still, she’d managed to get in easily enough with her own key.
She goes back into the bedroom, where Traci is standing up, looking down at the bed with its pillows set so neatly. “When I was married to Dave,” Traci says, still staring at the bed, “he held me down and raped me over and over until I told him that I loved him.” Her voice is low and flat, as though someone has taken it out of her mouth and stepped on it.
Rita feels a wave of sympathy and puts her arms around Traci. When Traci pulls away, she is calm again. She tosses her head over in the direction of the laundry basket. “Are you ready? I want to go home.”
“I’m ready,” Rita answers. And even though she isn’t, she feels she ought to be.
Back in Morgantown, Rita and Traci stop for a cup of coffee. Coffee is one of those things that Traci takes very seriously, and both she and the clerk look disappointed when Rita asks for a plain cup, black. Traci orders a double latte with hazelnut cream.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Traci tells her. They are sitting in the booth at the coffee house, which seems to be filled with students from WVU. Rita is startled by how young they look, how intense.
“I’m not proving anything,” she says, sipping her coffee. It is not as strong as she normally drinks it.
“You’ve been doing it all week,” Traci tells her. “Like the button you sewed on last night, on that blouse. It was like you had to sew on that button or else your whole life was going to come apart.”
“That’s my favorite blouse,” Rita protests.
Traci shakes her head. “I know what it’s like, you know, going through all this. And I know when someone is ordering a plain cup of coffee just to punish herself.” She puts her hand over Rita’s and gives it a quick squeeze. “It’s all right, that’s what I’m telling you.”
Rita looks down at her mug of coffee and can see her own face wavering back at her. It’s true that she used to drink her coffee full of cream and with two sugars, back when she was in high school and working with Traci at Montgomery Ward, standing outside the store giving away toasters and baking dishes to anyone who opened a charge account. She isn’t sure of the exact moment she switched to black coffee. John always took his black and sometimes, when she didn’t want a whole cup of her own, she would take just a taste of his. But Rita can’t remember when she decided that his was better.
“Look at that,” Traci whispers, and points to their left.
Coming into the coffee shop is a tall man wearing a worn flannel shirt and the sandals you wear with socks—something that Rita can’t imagine doing. With him is a young girl, and Rita first thinks that it’s his daughter until she sees them sit down and open up some books. She guesses it’s a professor and a student.
“You can bet he’s sleeping with her,” Traci says, her voice low, but not quite a whisper this time.
The man is wearing a wedding ring, and the girl is not, Rita notices. Still, she is unsure. The girl’s eyes are bright and watch the man carefully, but all of the students in the bar seem to have that look, as though they are waiting for something big to happen to them. As though a package is coming for them in the mail.
“How do you know?” she asks Traci. Rita watches them in small glances, trying not to be obvious about it. She is waiting to see if they touch, but they don’t.
“You forget that I was married to one of them,” Traci says, and that tone is back in her voice, that tone she used at the doublewide, in Rita’s bedroom. She glares at them without even pretending that she isn’t.
“Was that Dave?” Rita asks. Was it a professor that tried to rape you? Was he dressed like that? These are the things she really wants to ask, but doesn’t because she’s embarrassed that she can’t remember. Traci has a life that such stories seem to run together instead of sticking in your mind.
“Morrie,” Traci says, dropping her eyes now. “You’d think that I would have known better, seeing as he was married when he started seeing me.”
“Oh,” says Rita. She has not known this.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Traci is quick to point out. “Morrie had already left his wife.” She looks back at the couple. “He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, for heaven’s sake, and his divorce was almost final.”
“I see,” Rita says, although she doesn’t. For the first time, she thinks about John taking off his wedding band. He could see other women, like Morrie dated Traci. Now that she’s gone, he’s a free man.
Another student comes in, a boy this time, and sits down next to the girl. The professor smiles and says something and they all laugh.
Two weeks later, Rita is still living in Traci’s apartment. Traci hasn’t said anything, but Rita knows she will have to find her own place soon. Nothing as nice as the doublewide, or even like this, but something. Maybe John will give her part of the furniture. She’d like the kitchen table and chairs, which are painted blue with gingham seat cushions on them.
Traci is dating a new boyfriend, an assistant buyer at Ward’s, where Traci still works as a floor manager. Twice they have come back to the apartment and had sex in Traci’s bedroom, which is right beside Rita’s. Rita can hear everything, and judging from the sounds, the sex must be pretty good. They are in there right now, and Rita is trying to talk to her mother on the phone while standing on the little balcony. She hopes that her mother can’t hear them.
“He hasn’t even called or written or anything,” Rita says. Rain is falling and she has to keep a finger pressed against her left ear as she talks in order to hear what her mother is saying.
“Well, what can you expect? I blame myself, your marriage going bad,” her mother says.
Rita was a bit surprised, at first, that her mother wasn’t more upset about the divorce. Instead, her mother seems to feel guilty, as though she is the one getting the divorce instead of Rita.
“It’s not your fault,” Rita tells her, and there is a snuffle on the other line, as though her mother is crying.
“Your Dad and me, well, we weren’t the best example,” her mother says. There is the sound of a nose being blown and a slight cough. “But I do hate the thought of you being there in West Virginia without any of us to help you.” Rita’s parents now live in Florida, in a trailer that is a real trailer and not a doublewide.
“I’m fine, really,” Rita assures her.
“When I think of how humiliated you must have been, your parents getting divorced and all. Why didn’t you tell us, sweetie?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Rita says again. “You and Dad did a great job. I’m not upset with you.”
She isn’t upset, not about the divorce. When her parents remarried again when she was fourteen, well, that was embarrassing. Her mother wore white and her father bought them all enormous bouquets of flowers. After the wedding, there was a reception in the church basement with a cake two feet tall, with a pale blue fountain inside.
“This is the wedding I always wanted,” her mother said over and over. “This is much more real than the first time, driving over the mountain into Oakland.”
Her mother is still talking, but Rita has removed her finger from her ear and can no longer hear her. The rain is falling harder now, and the storm drain at the bottom of the ravine is filling up with water, brown water, the color of the latte with hazelnut cream.
She goes back inside, telling her mother good-bye. When she closes the patio door, she listens in the direction of the bedroom, but all is quiet now. Rita walks around the living room, straightening the pictures on the end tables. All of the pictures are of Traci. Traci sitting on the beach with a string bikini on, her long legs blending into the sand. Another of Traci wearing a baseball cap, smiling shyly at the camera, as though it had surprised her. Traci sitting on the steps of the state Capitol building down in Charleston.
Rita wonders who took all these pictures. Who stood on the other side of the camera, telling Traci to smile? She notices that some of the pictures have been cut, so only Traci remains, happy, waving to the person looking at the picture.
The sounds start again in the bedroom, and Rita is restless. She looks around the living room, but the beige color makes everything run together and there is nowhere to focus her eyes except on the pictures, and Rita is tired of looking at Traci looking at her. She goes back out to the balcony.
The rain is gushing now, washing like curtains down from the roof. Down in the ravine, the creek has become a raging river. Rita watches it rise, sees the water cascading down the steep slopes of the ravine, making the river bigger and bigger.
With this rain, flooding is a possibility, although it is hard to believe that the water could reach this far up. Still, it could happen, that roaring coffee-colored water, pouring in here, making the beige couch a darker brown and swirling away the pictures.
As Rita watches the water, she thinks about the water coming up and up and up, not only into this apartment, but spreading throughout the whole valley like a great, ancient river. Everything would vanish. People would drown.
But John has a boat. They’ve never used it, but Rita knows that it would be in tip-top condition, because that’s just the way John is. And the Homeland Security supplies don’t sound so silly now—after all, they could put the dried fruit and the bottled water into the boat. They could take the cans and some matches and a gun with shells. A fishing pole, a tent—John will know where everything is. She would even pack some of the tiny bottles of mouthwash. It is antiseptic; it could help keep things clean, and John would like that. No matter what happened, they would be prepared.
Rita picks up her purse and scribbles a note for Traci. She does not bother to pack her suitcase. What good would her suitcase be in a boat? Outside, she gets into her car, and drives as quickly as she can for the doublewide. She hopes she is not too late. Rita hopes there is still time to launch the boat and set it floating down the river before the water covers the world.
GRETCHEN MORAN LASKAS is an eighth-generation West Virginian, the setting for her first novel, The Midwife’s Tale. Her young adult novel, The Miner’s Daughter, about the coal camps of West Virginia in the Great Depression, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2007. Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines, including Salt Hill, Pleiades, and Mobius, and is included in the anthology, American Girls about Town. Laskas now lives in Virginia with her husband and son. The Midwife’s Tale has won Appalachian Book of the Year, the Weatherford Award for Fiction, for outstanding contribution to Appalachia, and has been nominated for Southeastern Booksellers Book of the Year and the Virginia Library Award. It also received a Library Journal starred review and was selected as a “Must Read” by Working Mother Magazine and was a Featured Alternate Selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club.