Things Withered (7 page)

They shot the shit for a minute; she lit a smoke and dragged on it. It was cold out and the smoke blurred her face and he could hardly see her. She offered him one. He didn’t smoke. Just pot. You gotta stick to the safe shit.

“Hey,” she said. “Can you give me a ride home? I’m just a couple of blocks over.”

She tugged up her hood and tucked her hair into it on both sides. She looked her age suddenly.

He thought about it. He was busy. The seat was vibrating in idle, the vibrations shaking his lower half. Felt good. Gave him a chubby.

“I can’t,” he said, finally.

“Come on, Corey. It’s fucking cold.”

She was so small. No more than a hundred pounds he figured, and she was begging him with her eyes. He was sorry for himself and lonely. Things were not great. He wasn’t sleeping well.

“Please?”

He didn’t want to.
He didn’t want to.
The engine purred, the beauty of German engineering reached inside him, soothing away edges, calming him.

“Okay,” he said. “But you have to get in on my side—the door’s jammed.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see a tiny hard curl of silicone gel sticking up out of the lock. He got out his side to let her in.

“There’s something in the back,” he said, his voice smooth, even.

She hopped in.

That’s what he remembered. He took the corner to hit the highway, heading out to Berk’s field. The load in the back shifted and rolled. His fingers were sticky, sticking to the steering wheel. The front of his jacket was a little sticky too.

But there was weight in the back of the truck, and she handled beautifully.

It was noon by the time Karen got around to the dishes. Ted would want lunch any minute, and there she was up to her elbows in soap suds and dirty plates.
A real woman would have timed this better
, she thought. At least the water was in the sink, and she could add the lunch dishes in after Ted had eaten.

She had a specific order that she did the dishes in, learned six billion years ago in a home economics class when they still taught things like how to vacuum in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting, how to sew an invisible hem, what constituted a well-balanced breakfast, and what order to wash your dishes in: glasses, porcelain, plastic, flatware/silverware, with pots and pans pulling up the end. If the dishes were done when Ted ate, then she could start over again, with his glass, plate, etc. If he finished before she was done, then the order would be skewered—maybe the plate mixed in with the flatware, or the fork being stuck with the pots—it would never do.

(Would it?)

For a moment the conundrum seized her, and she thought once and for all she would be discovered to be the fraud she was. The household police would come into the house—wipe your feet—and point their guns at her.

“SHE’S A WHORE!” they would scream, and she would have to go with them.

Karen decided that she would feed Ted
after
she did the dishes, and start all over again, with his.

Sometimes she had a great deal of trouble being organized. Other times, like today, she would whiz through the house, having the dishes done, the carpet vacuumed, and a load of laundry in the dryer before noon. Those were the days that she kept a list, a written reminder of what she had to do: a note to herself to keep on trucking, don’t let the bastards get you down;
act normal
.

Once, she remembered, this guy and her were walking down the street, she was drunk, she couldn’t remember if she’d even known at the time if the guy was drunk or not, but they were walking down the street at about four in the morning, and he saw someone he knew, and he said to her, “Shh, act normal.” She tried.

It was one-thirty and she was doing Ted’s dishes and he said to her, “Didn’t you just do the dishes?” and the conundrum seized her again, and she wondered if she wasn’t supposed to do dishes more than once a day, if it was suspicious, if she would be caught, found out, taken.

(act normal)

She looked at him and he was smiling, amused at her. Oh, this was one of the things he considered her
idiosyncrasies
; she relaxed, let out a breath. She giggled, “Well, you know,” she said. He kissed her on her forehead and said he was going out to the garage. He gave her upper arm a little squeeze on his way past her and she felt so much better, and it was, it was, okay. She was happy. Yes.

The bell on the dryer went and that was her second load of laundry that day. She was a successful housewife, getting her work done. She let herself feel it for a moment, imagined the self-sacrificing satisfaction of children running in and out, and her thinking about making something special for supper because they were celebrating a small occasion in a normal life, a goal scored in hockey (a hockey mom), someone getting their ears pierced, an A in Science. She should cut her hair short. So far she just hadn’t gotten around to it, besides, Ted liked it long. These days she wore it up in a ponytail, or sometimes she curled it so that the sides framed her face and made her look—slightly, and from an angle—like Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
. On those days she always had a list, and always got the work done, and usually felt exactly as she should by the time night fell and she and Ted were in bed, lying close but not touching and she was going over the day in her mind, giving herself good and bad marks.

(A in House Science, A in Drama.)

At night, she let herself be.

The funny thing was, she had expected the guilt. She had prepared herself long before the ring was on her finger, but the plan was in her pocket, that she would feel bad from time to time, as though she was feeding Ted a line, betraying him. That long ago she had still had a certain opinion of men, and it had been easier to warn him silently, “caveat emptor, caveat emptor,” or to imagine his mother should have brought him up smarter, some mothers do raise fools, etc. He had, after all, been lumped in with the others: as a member of the sex that she had to put up with, work with, be with, but she didn’t have to like it. It was like faking an orgasm, something she was adept at. Could she fake it for the rest of her life? That had been the only concern she’d had then. Not getting caught.

She had been prepared for the guilt. The guilt was something she had simply learned to live with, now, and she barely felt it. It was like having bunions and faking orgasms. How long could she do it? Forever.

She had not been prepared for the mind-numbing boredom that seemed to accompany the safety; she had also not been prepared for Ted to become a person to her, to lose his status as man and become lover, friend.

(victim)

At night she listened to him sleep, and if she was feeling okay, if she’d had a good day, maybe she’d changed the sheets that morning and she could smell the faintly present fabric softener—the liquid kind, not dryer sheets—and could feel the cool softness, the clean feeling, then she let herself smile while listening. His breath would go in and after a long time, it would come out. Sometimes he was disturbed in his sleep and his breathing became erratic, or he would mumble and rustle, and she would wonder if he was dreaming of her.

Karen rarely fell asleep before two. She had a lot of thinking to do before she fell asleep, like that poem, “Miles to go before I sleep; miles to go before I sleep.” Except the poem made it sound clean and goodhearted, the way a day of hard work felt after the fact. The problem was, her miles to go were fraught with snakes and awfuls and bads and secrets; before she could sleep she had to convince herself that no one had read those things on her during the day, during an unprotected moment, say when she was dusting a window ledge and the motion reminded her of something bad. Did it show on her face?

Like this one time she was in the back seat with her friend’s date. They were smoking a joint and it was about ten at night and they were waiting for her friend who had gone into this building to score some beans and she and this guy smoked the dope and she gave him a handjob. The motion was just like dusting a window ledge.

On Tuesdays Karen helped at the old folks’ home. Jane Meyers, who had a four-year-old, asked her to help out at the co-op daycare in the neighbourhood. Karen had told her she just didn’t feel comfortable around small children just yet. It was one of the many convincing lies she could have told, and had actually thought of:

“Well, you know Jane, Ted and I are still trying, and sometimes it’s hard to be around the little ones.” Sympathetic pats on the arm.

“It’s just that I’m not used to children, Jane, and I don’t seem to have the patience just yet. Maybe when I have some of my own.” Understanding and slight envy.

“Fact is, there were no children in my life for so long, what with working and all, I just don’t know how to deal with them.” Obvious envy, followed by self-serving contempt for childless-by-choice women.

What she had ended up saying was that she just wasn’t comfortable with small children, but she said it in a self-deprecating way so that Jane would assume something kinder than a lack of patience or affection for children.

(It was very dangerous to mention past careers since past careers might be remembered and asked about, or worse, just remembered by her.)

Tuesdays were good, long and good. Karen did the dishes in the morning, after Ted had left for work. Sometimes she cried if she did the dishes in the morning. Ted liked to make love best in the morning and somehow the cleanliness and simplicity of making love to her husband and doing the dishes made her weep with self-loathing. But it was better once she was in the shower and thinking about one day when she would be old and the past would really be the past and someone would be preparing to forgive her, or she would die and her secrets would die with her.

There was an old woman in the home named Mrs. Taylor. Karen called her Margaret when they were alone, but when they were in the lounge or the lunch room, Karen was supposed to call her Mrs. Taylor because all the nurses did. Mrs. Taylor was ninety. Karen liked her best because she could almost read the death on Margaret’s face, see the peace about to be there, the relief in sight, from holding in your breath, keeping all those secrets inside; Margaret would soon die, and let out her breath. Karen sometimes imagined that she was Margaret and peace was in sight. But to Margaret, Karen was just another worker who had some funny stories.

The mind-numbing boredom was never more than an inch under the surface of her skin.

“Ted?”

He was reading the newspaper. He didn’t look up, but just tilted his head so that she would know he was paying attention, without really having to; it was cute. It was what Karen imagined husbands doing. At ten o’clock he would turn the news on. On Wednesdays he watched
Star Trek
, and she liked
Roseanne
on Tuesdays.

He said, “Hmmm?”

“I think I’m going to go for a walk.” Was that right? Did people really, “get some air,” in real life or was that just for TV? How was the grammar. She didn’t say
gowin
; she said
going
.

“Sure honey,” he answered. As though it were nothing.

(act normal)

Karen and Ted lived in a small semi-suburb, where the people who wanted to live in the suburbs lived, the people who couldn’t quite afford the suburbs, but still had decent lives and jobs and some kids that needed a decent school where they didn’t teach swearing and safe sex, and where a kid could still get through grade six without smoking.

Once, she stole a pack of cigarettes off a table at a party, and lied when confronted. “Fuck you,” she said to the guy. She said they were hers. They had just been opened. She smoked the whole pack.

Karen stood outside the store. It was open twenty-four hours because they weren’t exactly in the suburbs. It was the sort of place you’d imagine getting robbed, or a woman being abducted from. If some guy mistook her for some fragile little housewifey he would be in for a big surprise. She didn’t have a knife on her but she wasn’t afraid to gouge some guy’s eyes out. She would love it. As she approached the pool of light thrown out in a wide arc from the store window, and from the outside lights in the parking lot, and the sign, she realized that if she gouged his eyes out she didn’t think she would be able to stop there. All the secrets would come out and turn into madness and she would rip his skin off with her bare hands and tear his insides out and punch and punch and punch.

“Marlborough Golds,” she said to the man behind the counter. She picked up a package of matches from the counter. She didn’t know this man, she rarely came to the store at night. He wouldn’t know her. She suddenly realized that if Jane or Louise or Dana came into the store they would see her buying cigarettes and they knew she didn’t smoke.

(What else are you lying about?)

“Wait a sec,” she said to the man. She went to the sliding door fridge at the back of the store and bought a small container of half-and-half cream for the coffee in the morning.

(If they saw her she could say, “Oh, I’ve just had this
craving
for cream in my coffee,” and they would smile and wonder if she was expecting, or maybe even say it. “Maybe you’re
pregnant
!” Then they would laugh.)

The man put the cigarettes and cream into a paper bag. She smiled and said thank you, not forgetting her manners. That pleased her, but it didn’t make up for the cigarettes.

Outside the air was cooler and less stifling than in the store. Outside the air belonged to everybody, not just people who belonged in the store, late at night, in the suburbs.

There was no real place she could go to smoke a cigarette. She only wanted to have one, and then she would throw the pack away. She just needed to have one. She wasn’t addicted anymore. She just needed to have a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in eight months, and had no intention of blowing everything for one cigarette.

She took the road that ran behind the store, the darker place where a car full of men would be parked, ready to abduct her and they would get a healthy surprise. There was no one there. The road went all the way to the highway, past the houses almost, into the industrial park, where the huge, mountainous buildings would be dark, and quiet and frightening—even at night when empty—with their power.

When she was past the last house before the industrial park, she was past any house that had anyone she knew in it. She stuck the cream and bag into her jacket, stuffing it hard into the pocket, forcing it in a way that quality-conscious housewives, with an eye for longevity and getting their money’s worth, would never do to a jacket. She was too far away from the houses to remember that.

She unravelled the cellophane from the cigarette pack, crumpling it up and stuffing it into the other pocket. She did remember that it could be found there, if Ted went looking for something or other in her pockets, after all they were married and they had no secrets from each other

(except some)

and he could surely look in her pockets for the car keys or some change for the parking meter, couldn’t he? She tossed the cellophane into the wind. It was so quiet, she could hear it rustling on the concrete of the sidewalk as the wind took it away.

The cigarette was smooth and white in the glow of the street lamps; it was cool in the air. It was perfect.

What she would like to do would be to sit on the ground, leaning against a building, and smoke that cigarette, listening to the sounds of people talking, deals being made, business, while she inhaled and exhaled and thought about getting stoned.