She’s taken the pictures off the walls of the dining room and nailed up four large slabs of corkboard in a five-foot-thick stripe. She noticed those slabs of corkboard as she headed toward the checkout of the craft store, carrying modeling clay and some small tools. She can pin things up on them: pictures and quotes for inspiration, or plans, sketches, work in progress.
Funny, she thinks, I never did this for my garden designs. The sense of commitment feels good. It may not be specifically to the clay; she’s not sure yet. But she’s claimed the room, which was shared and formal, just as a homesteader would stake a claim, by pounding markers into the territory. In this space, she will make something out of nothing.
Eve has always tended to be responsible, cautious, even self-denying. She has always kept her home as if ready for inspection: everything tidy, with minimal signs of personal activity, particularly downstairs. Now she covers the dining table with plastic, taping it tight over the edges. She empties the decorative dishes out of the dresser and stashes them away; this will be her supply cupboard. The sparseness of the few packages of clay and tools on the shelves energizes Eve. They will not be sparse for long.
She hardly turns on the television or reads a book. Clay is all she wants. Some days she spends four, six hours at it. She sets herself tasks of increasing difficulty, like a pianist practicing scales: a beetle, a turtle, a bird, a cat. She buys an articulated wooden horse from a thrift store and tries to reproduce that delicate equilibrium between fineness and power. Most of her pieces, even the successful ones, she breaks down, melding them back into the clay’s bulk. As she does so, she feels that she’s infusing the clay with more potential. She does not yet know what she really wants to make. She does know that she will not arrive at it by rational means.
Becoming a good sculptor isn’t the point. She’s starting at a late age, and anyway she will never be Michelangelo or Rodin. The satisfaction comes with getting better, competence developing incrementally, a direct function of time invested. Still, she’s not counting. When she is working with the clay, time disappears, and then progress comes in thrilling leaps that make her say out loud, just to hear the words, “I did it.”
If she makes nothing of value, it won’t matter. The claiming of space and time to do what she wants to do is victory.
A few times in the past she thought of buying some clay, but Larry’s presence deterred her. She did not want to be watched, her output judged as if the results, rather than the doing, were what justified the time spent. Nor did she want to trivialize what she might do by treating it as a once-a-week evening-class hobby. Lurking in those thoughts was a sense that Larry exerted a degree of ownership over her time and energy, and that she accorded it to him as part of their marriage contract. Even after Larry began his spiritual practice, which by analogy allowed Eve her own solitary pursuit, she did not begin; it was tainted by the feeling of revenge, and tenuous if it depended for justification on Larry’s agenda and on behavior that caused Eve pain.
So the urge lay fallow. Meanwhile, her business gave her the necessary excuse to take snatches of time for herself.
The pleasure of getting her hands dirty with the clay is like gardening, but without the hot sun, the labor of weeding, and the grind of profit and loss. Eve’s mind wanders to the prehistoric cave paintings, the soot-stained fingers of the Cro-Magnon artists as they smudged aurochs and antelopes onto rough limestone with charred sticks. Everyone was dirty then, but—feeling a kinship across the millennia—Eve imagines that the artists held a special fondness for the resinous grime on their hands, the tracks of the animals they had conjured from nothing.
The more competent she gets, the prouder Eve is of the grit in her cuticles and under her nails that the nail brush can’t reach. She feels like a revolutionary as she goes about her errands in the suburban archipelago of nail salons. She is quickly developing a hatred of them and their insistence that a perfect manicure is a requirement of civilization. Long nails are the modern equivalent of footbinding, she’s decided: just another way to hobble women. To prevent them from actually doing anything for themselves under the guise of suggesting that they’re so precious and desirable they don’t have to. To induce learned helplessness.
Larry’s Acura is still in the garage, a ghostly remnant of Eve’s former life. She wonders if he will ever come and get it, or ask her to sell it for him. She’d like it gone. She’d rather feel like a woman with a future, when she comes home, than half of a defunct couple.
She takes a single grocery bag out of the back seat. It’s light; she’s pared her needs down to the minimum. It’s November, she’s got less than four thousand dollars in the bank, and she’s looking at months of no work in the garden design business. She’s hoping she can hold on financially until Allan returns from Cambodia, and he will help her figure it out.
Most days she tries not to think about it. She is too proud to tell her sisters, who are both on the other side of the country, wrangling teenagers. Bill’s death created a distance between Eve and the two younger girls; they didn’t feel the loss as deeply as she did, nor did they feel Eve’s terror that Bill’s wildness might be in them too. The three of them tried, over the years, to bridge the distance, but the bridges were weather-dependent: if life was easy, the bridges stayed strong, but in stormy times they weakened and sometimes collapsed, and when the sisters rebuilt them they were less robust. During those many years when Eve didn’t want to admit how unhappy she was, they sagged away.
She takes off her coat, hangs it on the rack, then heads into the kitchen. The mayonnaise is on the counter, top off. Sitting at the table, eating a sandwich, is Larry.
“Hi, Eve,” he says.
It’s as if an eraser has wiped out her ability to speak.
“The job in Arizona wasn’t the right fit for me,” he says. “So I came home.” His tone is light, as if this is good news and nothing particularly remarkable. But she detects anxiety behind the facade. This inner spark of knowing gives her something to hold on to.
“You don’t live here anymore,” she says. She hears her words as if they’re being spoken by someone else.
“Of course I do,” he says, adding with a sly grin, “wolves mate for life.”
His attempt at charm turns Eve’s stomach.
“You’re a human,” she says, “in a manner of speaking.”
The managerial flatness of her voice, which sounds like a hospital receptionist, pleases her because it signifies not the dullness she used to live in, but an utter absence of feeling for Larry. She’s looking at a familiar stranger: someone she knows well but doesn’t care about at all.
Larry’s eyes skitter sideways. “Blaine wasn’t the man I thought he was. He didn’t deserve my trust.”
“Sorry. If I hurt you.” Then, realizing that’s not enough, he adds, “I made a bad call.”
And that, Eve knows, is all the apology she’s going to get.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” He stands and approaches her. “Like, maybe, you’re glad I’m back?”
She’s too stunned to move away. He plants his lips on hers, hard, and for long enough that Eve wonders when he will pull away. Evidently, he feels it’s more authoritative if it’s a performance, even though the only audience is the cat.
She feels like a fire hydrant. That wasn’t a kiss. It was a marking of territory.
She has to get away from him, figure out what to do. If she goes upstairs, he will follow her, and the likely result of that will be a pathetic attempt at sex. Her old self would have submitted; this self will not. She knows that Larry doesn’t have it in him to force her.
She goes into the utility room under the guise of putting things away. On the floor next to the laundry basket is a pile of his clothes, left there for her to deal with, as she always did.
“You’re not really an asshole,” she says, coming back into the kitchen with an armful of his dirty clothes. “You’re just acting like one because you don’t know what else to do. I get that.”
She dumps them on his lap. They bury the sandwich. Some fall on the floor.
“You don’t live here,” she says. “Leave. Now.”
“Fine. Then I’ll go.”
He reaches for her without getting up—this time, as if he’s going to pull her onto his lap. Eve grabs the back of his chair and pushes hard. He tumbles backward, banging his head on the floor.
“What the hell, Eve. That’s assault!”
She stands over him, wondering whether this is hate that she feels, or just contempt.
“You could have told me, Larry. That you lost your job. That you were planning to leave. You just pretended I didn’t exist.”
“It seemed easier,” he says.
That word sends her over the edge. She kicks him, hard, in the ribs. He yelps.
“Liar.” Her breath is coming in hot bursts. “You’re a liar.”
“Eve, I’ve never lied to you—”
“No, it was easier to say nothing! To let me think everything was okay. You were lying to yourself. Every pathetic little thought, trying to convince yourself you’re right and noble and worthy of respect, every one of them was a lie. You lied to me for twenty-six years. You made yourself out to be an honorable man.”
She kicks him again.
“Because it was easier! And I believed you.”
She grabs the phone, dials 911.
“What’s your emergency?”
Eve holds the phone away from her ear so that he can hear the voice and know she’s not faking it.
“Police,” she says. “An intruder in my house. But I think he’s leaving. He’ll find it easier.”
She’s been transferred; there’s no person there anymore, just ringing. Thank God it’s not a real emergency. Who knew they took so long to answer?
“I took my suitcase upstairs,” he says feebly.
“Let me,” she says.
She goes upstairs, still holding the phone, and throws his suitcase out the window.
“My ex-husband,” she says when someone finally answers. “He broke into my house.”
She gives her name, address, Larry’s name, the basic facts. She feels like she’s in a movie, speaking dialogue that someone else wrote for her.
As she comes back downstairs, she sees Larry on the lawn, stuffing his dirty clothes into the suitcase through the half-opened zipper. She raises the kitchen window so he can hear her.
“He’s leaving,” she says into the phone, holding it away from her ear again so that Larry can hear the voice on the other end.
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” he says, dragging his suitcase toward the garage. It’s pitiful, this last attempt at dignity.
“Fine,” she says.
The sound of his car recedes down the road. She pulls out the phone book and calls a locksmith.
How hard did she kick him? She has no memory of the resistance of his flesh against her shoe. She never imagined she could ever do something like that. This is domestic violence, it’s not okay. It’s no more acceptable for a woman to attack a man than for a man to attack a woman. She feels queasy.
This is where in the movie Eve would pour herself a drink, she thinks. Or punch the air. Or collapse in a torrent of sobs. Crying would be a relief, as if water might put out the flames of her fury. But no tears come.
She’s disoriented. Her sense of time and space is fuzzy, yet the kitchen is crystalline in its immediacy: the ruddy beige of the granite countertop that she’s always hated (that was the color on sale when they remodeled), the dent in a cabinet door where Allan slingshotted a penny at it, the tired magnets on the fridge. None of it has anything to do with her at all.
Not knowing what else to do, she sets the chair upright, throws away the sandwich, puts the lid on the mayo and replaces it in the fridge—then changes her mind and tosses the mayo, too. Larry was the one who used mayo. Why was it still in the fridge at all? Was it some subconscious wish that he’d come back? She should have thrown it out months ago.
When Eve wakes the next morning, there’s a heaviness pinning her to the mattress. In the adrenaline rush of the previous day, she’d expected to awake feeling liberated, light, enthusiastic, energetic. Instead, it’s like she’s trapped under the rubble of an earthquake: shattered concrete certainties, sheared-off edges, the broken edifice of what she’s spent her entire adult life building. The downward pressure of nostalgia—all the years she spent with Larry, the child they raised together, the home they created together—crushing her.
There are no rescuers. She will have to push her own way out from under the past. Every muscle movement feels like a step up the last ridge of Everest.
Eve had thought she was done with mourning. It’s an ugly surprise that she is not. Here is another cache of dead dreams to mourn: the old hopes for what her life with Larry could be. Not that they were coming true, but now it’s confirmed: they’re aborted, miscarried. As wispy as the names she once thought she’d name daughters, other sons.
Before yesterday, she thought she’d take Larry back, if he came back. She’d gritted her teeth and tried to speed up the dreadful forgetting, categorizing Micajah as a dalliance, fleeting as a sunset. Her affair did not have to be a marriage-breaker, especially as the sequence of events was ambiguous. It was a ripple in the fabric of her life, not a tear. When she thought about Larry, which was more often than she used to—because that was the most effective way to head off thoughts of Micajah—she no longer felt angry or betrayed. She rolled out one possibility after another. What if she received a lawyer’s letter asking for a divorce? Would she soak him for every cent or agree gracefully? What if she got a phone call to tell her he was dead? Would she cry or celebrate? What if he came back, begging forgiveness? For some reason, thoughts of kicking him out seemed unreal; literally kicking him hadn’t even occurred to her. In one scenario, she behaved as if he’d merely been away on a business trip and she welcomed him home in their usual way: dinner on the table and whatever CSI he wanted to watch. (That was before she staked her claim to the dining room.) In another, he wept and pleaded and she, rising above her hurt feelings, offered forgiveness, though not without strings. The secretiveness would have to stop. He would have to respect her autonomy. But they could develop new mutual interests, travel the world together maybe, go away for weekends and try to fall in love again.
This was the main reason she thought she’d take Larry back: because she couldn’t imagine being alone. She used to feel Larry’s need for her like a dragging weight, but now, having cast it off for good, she feels light-headed, unanchored. She did not want to be single ever again: she would have dragged that weight of Larry to her grave.
Do I need someone to be of use to, in order to justify my existence? she wonders. Do I need someone to desire me, in order to feel alive? Do men ever think like this? She remembers her grandfather, after her grandmother’s death: without someone to look after and protect, he got bitter and crotchety. Every man for himself, he’d say, screw the world—and now Eve can hear what he didn’t say: if there’s nobody in it who has a use for me.