ELAINE HAYES
Like a child at an arcade’s claw game, I cupped my hands against the dining room window and stared out. It was a lunchtime routine I’d abandoned weeks earlier when we’d listed the house for sale, but on this February day, I lingered.
Slush now replaced the icy ruts that had forced drivers onto unintended paths. The warm Chinook winds, heralded by an arch that darkened the sky, had all but cleared the lawn of its mounds of snow. Our “For Sale” sign was down, I realized with a jolt. My eyes filled. Mark had changed his mind.
We’d told Scott and Jen — both young adults and away at university — we were selling the house because it was too big for two people to rattle around in. Mark and I agreed there’d be plenty of time, once the house sold, to tell our kids the truth.
“It’s time to downsize,” Mark told the realtor.
“There’s too much work here,” I added.
The real estate agent nodded and suggested a lower list price than Mark and I had anticipated. It made me wonder if we should have shopped around for realtors. We’d chosen our agent only because his personalized notepads regularly landed in our mailbox. We received so many, I’d taken the surplus to the fabric shop I owned and operated. At the shop, my employees reached for those notepads to record a phone message, or to sketch a design for a customer. At home, Mark and I had reached for them to scratch out our lists of assets and liabilities, inventories of who would keep what.
Without discussion, we’d signed the realtor’s documents.
It was the first time the wounds from our callously thrown words wouldn’t be mended by time, or by a soft smile or gesture, or by the salve of everyday routine. The For Sale sign, erected a few days later, gave our decision a sense of irrevocability. And, as I pulled in and out of the driveway each day, the sign reinforced my resolve. This is what you want, it said to me, and I found myself squaring my shoulders and nodding in its direction. This is what you’ve wanted for a long time.
I knew my sister Louise would blame my decision on menopause, but I also knew she wouldn’t repeat my confidences. She was a lawyer and though her expertise lay in corporate law, she could at least offer some degree of legal advice. It was her other advice I didn’t find so welcome.
Louise, who hadn’t had a period in eight years, blamed her menopause for every twinge of pain, every occurrence of memory loss and every instance of poor judgement. Like an alcoholic who knows the precise details of her last drink, Louise could — and often did — cite the date and duration of her last menstruation. If pressed, she could probably remember the number of tampons she’d used that particular week of June 2009. I wondered if I should have paid more attention to my own last period, particularly since I was asked about it at every medical appointment. (Four years ago? Five?) Even my dental hygienist, before laying the lead apron across my torso, enquired about the state of my fertility. I envisioned someday I’d be bedridden in a nursing home with an aide spooning porridge into my mouth and the aide would ask me, Dear, when was your last period?
I had to start somewhere, though. I had to tell someone. And Mark and I weren’t ready to tell the kids. Sometimes I told myself Scott and Jen would understand. Hadn’t they witnessed enough arguments? Yet what if in the few short years they’d been away, they’d forgotten how miserable, how tension-filled our home had been? What if they continued to harbour romantic notions? What if they asked, Don’t you love each other? My fear — of their questions, their judgements, their rejections — had paralyzed me in the past. It was the sole reason I’d backed down so often.
I announced to Louise I was dissatisfied with Mark. With a relationship that no longer exists, I quickly added.
“Menopause wreaks havoc with your head,” Louise stated. “Dissatisfaction isn’t a reason to throw away thirty years together. God, if every dissatisfied woman got divorced, who’d be left standing?”
Thirty-four years, I wanted to say, not thirty. And I wasn’t throwing those years away. I was simply choosing not to add to them.
Louise ploughed through my thoughts. “Even after all this time — and keep in mind my last period was in June 2009 — my moods are still worse than during my pregnancies. Just last month I threw a battered cod at Roger. He was boasting, again, about our weed-free lawn. ‘Look how much greener the grass is on our side of the fence,’ he kept saying. Well, my biggest client had just pulled his account, the deep fryer was overheating the kitchen, and I couldn’t stand to hear one more word from Roger about that fucking lawn.” She paused for effect and I imagined her before a judge or a jury. “‘Assault and Battering,’ Roger said later, when we were able to laugh about it.”
I stifled a smile; this was a look-at-the-mess-their-relationship-is-in type of story I once would have delighted in sharing with Mark. I shook my head as though water clogged my ears. Don’t dwell on moments like this, I told myself. Besides, I knew if I did tell Mark, he’d make some snide comment about my sister’s long-suffering menopause.
The next person I told was Rosemary, a friend I’d known since high school, a woman who proudly and often claimed she was happily married for twenty years. She’d grin, then add, “To three different men, but happy nonetheless.”
Rosemary told me I should be grateful for good health and financial security. I should be grateful for two children who weren’t drug addicts or dropouts or both. I should be grateful that Mark wasn’t a gambler, a drunk, a cheat, or a hitter. And I should keep a journal detailing all this gratitude.
“I am grateful,” I said. Grateful she hadn’t called me a self-absorbed whiner. Which was, I realized, exactly how I sounded.
Unsolicited advice came from everywhere. My shop’s assistant manager Suzanne glanced at my ringless finger and blamed fatigue. “Hot flashes can suck the life out of a woman,” she said.
“But I don’t have —”
“Maybe not yet, but just you wait!” She grinned, eager to welcome me into her sorority.
“You need a vacation,” Louise suggested after the house had been on the market for two weeks. “Selling a house is stressful.”
I nodded and sighed; it truly was stressful. Mark and I were treading lightly in the house. I got up early every day to vacuum, to wipe away dust and crumbs, all traces of our occupancy. (The master bedroom, though, was easy to maintain. I had moved into Scott’s room and Mark had moved into Jen’s. Our old bed, with its neat line of decorator pillows atop crisp linens, stood unspoiled like a shrine.)
We held an estate sale. From our newlywed days of shopping for our cramped basement apartment, we knew it would garner more attention and higher prices than a garage sale. We lay the knick-knacks and bric-a-brac of our marriage atop folding tables, donned gloves and huddled under the patio heaters we’d hauled from the backyard. We’d agreed about what to sell, what prices to command and what we simply wanted to be rid of. We also agreed to respond to our neighbours’ inquiries by saying we were downsizing and moving to a condo. Those closest to us viewed the “Estate Sale” sign, as they had the “For Sale” sign, silently or with a few murmured questions. Others grilled us about the number of viewings we’d had or warned us about condo living and escalating association fees. A few wrung their hands and asked, “Who died?”
We emptied our giant chest freezer meal by meal, except for the seafood and the curry dishes whose odours would have lingered and might have turned off potential buyers. The freezer had come with the house and we had no idea if it could even make the turn on the basement stairs. We decided to leave it behind.
In answer to Louise’s advice — yet more unwanted advice — I reminded my sister that Mark and I had taken a vacation. I pointed out that on every one of those fourteen days, I’d imagined myself alone or with Rosemary or with her.
“We can’t relive our misspent youths,” Louise replied with a smile.
I smiled back. This was an inside joke; both of us had married early in our twenties. Our youths had been spent pushing out babies or doing macramé or sifting cat poop from sandboxes.
Over drinks one evening, Rosemary advised me that she was doing just fine as a divorcée, but that it was difficult in a couples’ world. She winked at the waiter, flirting, then whispered, “Just don’t make any life-changing or rash decisions until The Change is over.”
I realized how much I hated that expression: The Change.
“My doctor said a similar thing after I had surgery. But that was because I’d just had anaesthetic!” My voice rose in octave and volume. I instinctively massaged my wrist, even though surgery had alleviated the pain brought on by decades of quilting. “Jesus, Rosemary. You make it sound as though I’m incapable of thinking clearly because there’s no blood flowing between my legs. This doesn’t mean the blood has stopped flowing to my brain!”
At breakfast, Mark had wordlessly lifted his feet as I swept up granola crumbs from under the kitchen table. With the realtor’s sign erected, I’d stopped nagging him to not overfill his bowl. I had given up the fight.
As honeymooners, Mark and I were that clichéd, old couple that bickered over every sink hair, every turn made without a directional signal. But we weren’t old then; we were young. So very young. And in a blink, we were middle-aged and still bickering. Maybe I simply couldn’t face old age knowing it would be more of the same. It wasn’t just Mark. I was guilty too. If I had to pretend everything was fine, if I had to adopt a false behaviour every hour of every day, what did that say? We weren’t husband and wife anymore; we were roommates trapped in a long-term lease.
Maybe we were never truly happy together. There was always an edge, and not the erotic tension kind from the Harlequins my sister and I once stole from the drugstore. Not the endearing dysfunction of those bloody sitcoms. Now that we’d put the house up for sale, though, we didn’t argue. We didn’t disagree about who would keep what. We were civil and amicable. There was no anguish. We had a simple, quiet routine. A routine of apathy. We weren’t unravelling over this. We simply realized it was over.
I stepped back from the sink as Mark approached with his cereal bowl. He carefully washed and dried the bowl, his spoon and his coffee mug. He wiped down the counter and polished the tap and folded the tea towel. We were so comfortable now moving around each other. Why was it we’d never been able to achieve this ease, this peaceful, conflict-free existence? I mulled this over as I watched Mark leave the house.
As for menopause, I knew that it changed women physiologically and psychologically. But, maybe it was called The Change because women of menopausal age finally realized that change was exactly what they needed.
I’d told this to Louise on a day we were out shopping. I even explained how Mark and I had a routine of apathy. We were standing at the cosmetics counter sampling hand lotions.
My sister rummaged in her purse. “Maybe you should see someone. I can—”
“I’m not depressed, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“So you really think you’ll live to a hundred and ten?”
“Huh?” I examined the freckles on my skin. How long had it been since Mark and I had held hands?
“You said you and Mark were middle-aged and still bickering.”
With a finality that declared our conversation terminated, she popped a Xanax from her purse and paid for her purchase.
Now, as I wiped my handprints from the cold dining room glass, I thought of all the years I’d scrubbed nose smears from those mullions and those panes. When Jen and Scott were babies, Mark would come home for lunch every day. He’d always worked close by and I’d position the kids at the window to watch for his car. It was a little competition, to see who could spot him first, and the kids were thrilled to spend time in a room normally out of bounds.
Soon after Scott was born, the dining room became my sewing room, a dangerous place for young children. In that room, I chose quilt patterns, measured and cut fabrics, and marvelled at the promises each bolt held: the ability to be incorporated into an award-winning art quilt or be simply utilitarian. A baby quilt that would be peed on, dragged under a stroller wheel, or wrapped unmercifully around a kitten’s head. At first, I’d picked up the mess after sewing, but as the kids grew more responsible, I stopped tidying, even when hosting friends. “This is what I do,” I told anyone whose eyebrows lifted at the sight of the sewing machine and the cutting boards and the numbered piles of fabric slices on the table. “This is my business,” I explained as fabric fibres floated like dust motes in the sunlight.
Mark’s habit of joining us for lunch at noon had long ago evolved into coming home to eat lunch with me on my days off. But now, with the house on the market, he stayed away. Our dining room hutch became once again a display case for crystal and china and wedding gifts we never used. I set the table for four. A family lives here, it suggested. I dusted the place settings daily.
A glint of silver jutted out from a snow bank as I stepped from the window. I returned to the glass and peered out. It was a corner of the realtor’s sign, its post pointed skyward. Mark hadn’t taken the sign down, I realized. It had fallen on its own. The warm Chinook winds must have thawed the ground enough to loosen the metal stake that had held the post upright.
I dialled the realtor’s number. In anticipation of his calls, I was tethered to my cell phone; I carried it from room to room and slept with it next to my pillow. As I finished dialling, Mark pulled into the driveway. I drew back quickly, afraid he might have spotted me, embarassed he might think I was pining away for him.
The Chinook wind pushed and pulled at the air inside the house as Mark entered. He came up behind me and put his arms around my waist. He buried his face in the crook of my neck.
“You took the sign down,” he said, his voice catching. “I knew—”
“You’re home.”
“Wright Realtors,” a voice said. “How may I direct—?”
Mark took the phone from my hand, pressed End Call and then rested it atop one of the place settings. “I came back for my gym bag. What were we thinking, letting it go this far?” He shook his head. “I’ll tell them we’ve changed our minds.”