men. The men sat on the patio under the awning in the summer and downstairs in the finished basement during the football season. They got the big screen TV, we got the kitchen table and the fridge.
I don’t think I exchanged more than five words—“Fine, thanks,” and “Take it easy”—with Buddy in all the time I knew him. We were barely inside the door, Bobby and me, before he’d go in one direction and I in the other, to the kitchen with the women. It was like we were different species.
None of the women worked. None of their husbands wanted them to work, they said. They all said it as if they were a little curious, like they wondered how come Bobby let me, like they’d discussed it among themselves, like they were waiting for me to let them in on the secret. None of them knew that there were ways in which Bobby made me pay for the luxury of working my butt off at South Bay five, sometimes six days a week.
“I got enough to do around here,” said Marie.
I remember wondering whether that was it, whether if I stayed home and made silk-flower wreaths and decoupage boxes Bobby wouldn’t be so mad at me all the time. Except that it didn’t seem that Bobby was mad at me, exactly, just that he was mad, and I was the one who happened to be there.
Annmarie went home early one evening, before the rum cake and the coffee, and Marie leaned toward us and said, “That poor girl, I tell you. He’s had someone on the side for two years now. She thinks his family is still pissed about that toast at the wedding, but they can’t look her in the face because he knocked the girlfriend up.”
“Get out!” said Terri.
“Swear to God,” said Marie.
“Why doesn’t she leave?” I said.
“Where would she go?” said Terri. “She should screw up her life because her husband is a pig? She just repainted the whole house. She papered the hallway.”
I told them about Patty Bancroft, too, when she came to the hospital. They’d already seen her on television, talking about how a woman could get lost in the great expanse of America with a little help from the right people. “We’re better than the Witness Protection Program,” she said on one afternoon talk show.
“All Buddy would have to do would be to raise a hand to me once, and I’d knock him on his ass,” Marie said.
“You don’t know,” said Terri, and I looked at her, looked at her brown eyes with their thick fringe of mascara, like spiders around them. She didn’t look back at me, and I wondered. But wondering was all any of us would ever do. We’d put on silky cocktail dresses and blow-dry our hair and walk into the weddings and christenings and confirmations, our husbands checking the coats, slipping the tickets into the pockets of their suit jackets, and we’d look like happy couples, and some of us maybe were, and lots of us likely weren’t, but none of us would ever talk about it. I’d beenstupid when I got married, figured it was just like an extended dating relationship, one dinner and movie after another, sex in a real bed or even on the kitchen floor. I should have known by the way the photographer made us behave for the wedding pictures—“Now look down at the ring … look up at him … hold up the flowers”—that a lot of it would be putting up a good front, day after day, week after week. Until if we were lucky, if there wasn’t cancer or a car wreck, our grandkids would someday toss us a fiftieth anniversary party in a catering hall and toast us, their eyes wet, for the simple fact of our stubborn marital longevity, confusing it with love.
And yet, and yet. At Robert’s First Communion party Bobby and I sat side by side at the table as our son thanked everyone for coming, solemn at age eight in his little navy blue suit and his first tie, red-and-blue striped, and my right hand found Bobby’s left, and I looked at him and saw the father of my son, the beginning of my grown-up life, the person who slept every night on the right
I don’t think I exchanged more than five words—“Fine, thanks,” and “Take it easy”—with Buddy in all the time I knew him. We were barely inside the door, Bobby and me, before he’d go in one direction and I in the other, to the kitchen with the women. It was like we were different species.
None of the women worked. None of their husbands wanted them to work, they said. They all said it as if they were a little curious, like they wondered how come Bobby let me, like they’d discussed it among themselves, like they were waiting for me to let them in on the secret. None of them knew that there were ways in which Bobby made me pay for the luxury of working my butt off at South Bay five, sometimes six days a week.
“I got enough to do around here,” said Marie.
I remember wondering whether that was it, whether if I stayed home and made silk-flower wreaths and decoupage boxes Bobby wouldn’t be so mad at me all the time. Except that it didn’t seem that Bobby was mad at me, exactly, just that he was mad, and I was the one who happened to be there.
Annmarie went home early one evening, before the rum cake and the coffee, and Marie leaned toward us and said, “That poor girl, I tell you. He’s had someone on the side for two years now. She thinks his family is still pissed about that toast at the wedding, but they can’t look her in the face because he knocked the girlfriend up.”
“Get out!” said Terri.
“Swear to God,” said Marie.
“Why doesn’t she leave?” I said.
“Where would she go?” said Terri. “She should screw up her life because her husband is a pig? She just repainted the whole house. She papered the hallway.”
I told them about Patty Bancroft, too, when she came to the hospital. They’d already seen her on television, talking about how a woman could get lost in the great expanse of America with a little help from the right people. “We’re better than the Witness Protection Program,” she said on one afternoon talk show.
“All Buddy would have to do would be to raise a hand to me once, and I’d knock him on his ass,” Marie said.
“You don’t know,” said Terri, and I looked at her, looked at her brown eyes with their thick fringe of mascara, like spiders around them. She didn’t look back at me, and I wondered. But wondering was all any of us would ever do. We’d put on silky cocktail dresses and blow-dry our hair and walk into the weddings and christenings and confirmations, our husbands checking the coats, slipping the tickets into the pockets of their suit jackets, and we’d look like happy couples, and some of us maybe were, and lots of us likely weren’t, but none of us would ever talk about it. I’d beenstupid when I got married, figured it was just like an extended dating relationship, one dinner and movie after another, sex in a real bed or even on the kitchen floor. I should have known by the way the photographer made us behave for the wedding pictures—“Now look down at the ring … look up at him … hold up the flowers”—that a lot of it would be putting up a good front, day after day, week after week. Until if we were lucky, if there wasn’t cancer or a car wreck, our grandkids would someday toss us a fiftieth anniversary party in a catering hall and toast us, their eyes wet, for the simple fact of our stubborn marital longevity, confusing it with love.
And yet, and yet. At Robert’s First Communion party Bobby and I sat side by side at the table as our son thanked everyone for coming, solemn at age eight in his little navy blue suit and his first tie, red-and-blue striped, and my right hand found Bobby’s left, and I looked at him and saw the father of my son, the beginning of my grown-up life, the person who slept every night on the right
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