Elizabeth tightens the cardigan, around her shoulders, across her back. Her arms are crossed, the wool she’s holding bunched into fists. Straitjacket. She stands in the hall, watching the front door as if she expects someone to come through it. But she doesn’t expect anyone to come through it. Doors are what people go out by, in their own ways. The doors close behind them and she’s left looking at the place where they’ve just been. Conscious, semiconscious, semiconscience. Piss on them all.
Nate has just gone through the door, carrying a cardboard box. He set the box down on the porch so he could turn to close the door carefully, ever so carefully behind him. He’s pedaling off to screw his stringy ladyfriend, as he’s been doing for weeks, pretending otherwise. This time he’s taking some rasps and chisels with him. Elizabeth hopes he will put them to good use.
In the ordinary course of things she wouldn’t have minded this liaison. She doesn’t feel she’s a dog in the manger: if she doesn’t want a particular bone, anyone else is welcome to it. As long as Nate does his share with the house and children, or what they’ve wearily agreed is his share, he can help himself to any diversions he chooses. Bowling, building model airplanes, fornication, it’s all the same to her. But she resents being taken for a fool. Any ninny could have told he was packing; why did he bother to deny it? As for his moronic performance with the midnight fried liver and Harry Belafonte records, a two-year-old could see through it.
She turns away from the door and heads for the kitchen, her body dragging, suddenly heavy. She was calm, she’s pleased with how calm she was, but now she feels as if she’s swallowed a bottle of aspirin. Small holes glow red in her stomach, eating their way into her flesh. A bottle of stars. All she wanted was a straight confession, and she’s accomplished that. He admitted he plans to move his workshop from their cellar to some unspecified place. They both know where this is, but for the moment she’s resisted the urge to press further.
She decides to make herself a cup of coffee, then changes her mind. She will eat no more acid this evening. Instead she pours boiling water on a chicken Oxo cube, and sits stirring methodically, waiting for it to dissolve.
She walks through the future, step by step. From this point it can go two ways. He will leave, gradually, without further prompting. Or she can speed up the process by telling him to go. There is no third way. He will not stay now, even if she begs him to.
So she will have to ask him, tell him to go. If she can’t save anything else from the wreckage she will save face. They’ll have a civilized discussion and they will both agree they are doing the best thing for the children. She will then be able to repeat this conversation to her friends, communicating her joy at this solution to all their problems, radiating quiet confidence and control.
Of course there are the children, the real ones, not the fantasy ones they will drag out as counters in the bargaining process. The real children will not think this is best for them. They will hate it, and Nate will have the advantage of being able to say, Your mother asked me to leave. But she will not be deserted, she refuses to be deserted against her will. She refuses to be pathetic. Her martyr mother, sniveling in a chair. She knows she’s being manipulated into this position, by Nate — by Nate! — and she dislikes the thought intensely. It’s like being beaten at an intricate and subtle game of chess by the world tiddlywinks champion. But she has no other choice.
She’ll go on a diet, later, after he’s actually gone. That’s part of the ritual. She’ll tart herself up, maybe get her hair done, and everyone will say how much better she’s looking than she did before Nate left. She finds these tactics squalid and disapproves of them when she witnesses them in others. But what else is there? Trips to Europe she can’t afford, religious conversion? She’s already had a younger lover; she isn’t in any hurry to do that again.
She rocks slightly in her chair, hugging her elbows. She’s shivering. She wants Chris to come back. She wants anyone, just some arms that aren’t hollow and knitted. The cracks between the boards of the table are widening; grey light wells from them, cold. Dry ice, gas, she can hear it, a hushing sound, moving towards her face. It eats color. She pulls her hands back from the table, clamps them together in her lap. There’s the grip of veins in her neck. Fingers twisting hair across her throat.
She’s staked to this chair, she can’t move, a chill moves up her back. Her eyes flicker, sweep the room for something that will save her. Familiar. The stove, pot on it, frying pan unwashed, the cutting board by the sink. The frayed and blackened oven glove, not that. CLEAN UP. The refrigerator. Nancy’s drawing from Grade One stuck to it, a girl smiling, the sky, the sun. Joy, she thought when she placed it.
She stares at the picture, pressing her hands together, and for an instant the sun shines. But there’s no friendly smile, malice is there in the yellow, in the hair. The blue of the sky too is an illusion, the sun is blackening, its tentacles curl like burning paper. Behind the blue sky is not white enamel but the dark of outer space, blackness shot with fiery bubbles. Somewhere out there the collapsed body floats, no bigger than a fist, tugging at her with immense gravity. Irresistible. She falls towards it, space filling her ears.
• • •
After a while she’s in the kitchen. The house is ticking around her once more, the furnace hums, warm air sighs through the registers. From upstairs comes the chuckle of television; she can hear water singing in the pipes, one child or another running carelessly from the bathroom along the hall. So far she can always get back. Self-indulgence, Auntie Muriel would say. Make yourself useful. She concentrates on the yellow circle made by the top of the cup, willing her fingers to unclamp, move forward. She lifts the cup and warms her cold hands with it. Liquid slops onto her lap. She sips, filling time. When her hands are steady she makes a piece of toast and spreads it with peanut butter. She will take one step at a time. Down to earth.
She rummages for the felt pen she makes the grocery lists with and begins to jot down figures. In one column, the mortgage, the insurance, the electricity and heat, the monthly food bill. Children’s clothes and school supplies. Dentists’ bills: Janet will need an orthodontist. Cat food. They don’t have a cat, but she’s bloody well going to get one and charge it to Nate. His replacement. Repairs. She’ll have the roof fixed, finally, and the porch step.
In the other column she puts the rent from the tenants. She doesn’t want to be unfair, just accurate, and she’s willing to offset the tenants’ rent against the mortgage.
Already she feels better. This is what she needs: small goals, projects, something to keep her busy. Other women knit. She can even sense a hint of that lightness of spirit she hopes to be able to describe, later, to her acquaintances. And really it may not be so bad. Freedom from that other set of rules, that constant pained look which is worse than nagging. Living with Nate has been like living with a huge mirror in which her flaws are magnified and distorted. Fly-eyes. She’s been forced to see herself measured constantly beside his set of East York domestic standards, his pious nun-faced mother with her awful Melmac dishes and her faint smell of old wool and cod liver oil. She’ll be free of that. It will mean she’ll have to carry out the garbage bags herself on garbage day, but she thinks she can live with that.