had fallen in love with—I could be her, I thought, and I inhaled and exhaled and was pretty sure that it was all just fine.
Is everything okay? Aren’t you hungry?
He looked at me hard in the eye, the way an optometrist would.
21
On occasion , Werner said as we watched the color drain from the sky on one of those repeated nights, I consider three possibilities for the world. One, the women have it worse. Two, the men have it worse. Or three, everyone has it equally bad.
This was a few weeks into my stay at Werner’s. We had established a safe routine of staying out of each other’s way, though sometimes we’d end up standing in the kitchen at the same time having tea and toast, not speaking. Once he brought in a few clippings of lemon verbena, put them on the kitchen table, and said, It’s lemon verbena , and I just nodded. After I’d done to the garden what I could do to the garden I’d go walk in the woods or hitchhike to town to release the impulse to buy something, to have a coffee or a beer or to consider going but never actually go to the library to send an email to my husband, to let him know I was fine and not to worry, not to bother worrying because there was nothing to worry about anymore and I was fine with my new, tiny life of just a few words and a few people and plants.
And , Werner continued, it is not often that I have a female mind to consult about these possibilities and so, I bring this question to your attention, if you will attend it.
Men have it worse … women have it worse … or no one has it worse?
These are the options we can consider. This is my ridiculous game for us to speak of, here, as we view the ravine.
We should establish categories , I said, and assign points to each category depending on how important that category is to overall life happiness. There should be a winner for each one. We should keep score.
That seems fair.
After debating and assigning points, then tallying them up while the possums scrambled in the darkness around us, we agreed that men had it better.
* * *
Weeks vanished. In the garden I was a thing with a particular use: pumpkin-vine waterer, bean-stalk trimmer, tomato-root coverer. I was suddenly essential. The pumpkins would shrivel without me. The tomatoes would die of thirst. The summer would have sunned them dead.
After dinner I read or did nothing and sometimes in the morning I swam in the muddy bay, backstroking to nowhere and coming back to where I’d started. At night I slept on a thin, knotty mattress and had dreams that were never about operating a dishwasher. And I began to believe that you could exchange your life, send it back for a different model, and I knew that wasn’t really true but I also knew that it wasn’t, here, entirely untrue.
And I did not fold fitted sheets or meet deadlines or go to the grocery store or do our taxes or call 1-800 numbers to complain. I did not wear electrodes or answer questions.
I did not hear my husband opening the front door or closing the front door.
And I did not feel guilt; I did not feel guilty; I forgot all the things that could have caused any warm ounce of that feeling.
* * *
Werner was standing in the kitchen struggling with the lid on a jar of orange marmalade, his face compressing and filling with blood. He looked up and put the jar on the counter, scraped something out of the sink, and tossed it out the window. The population of flies seemed to have tripled overnight and they circulated in the kitchen, more active and audible than usual; when I tried to brush one away, it would stay, indignant, on my skin or fly a tiny circle and return to the same spot.
I picked up the marmalade and opened it with a pop. We stood and ate jagged slices of toast with the marmalade and Werner didn’t say anything about how I had opened the jar, but as I was about to head back down to the garden Werner broke the silence, saying, You are a strange creature. A curd of orange
Is everything okay? Aren’t you hungry?
He looked at me hard in the eye, the way an optometrist would.
21
On occasion , Werner said as we watched the color drain from the sky on one of those repeated nights, I consider three possibilities for the world. One, the women have it worse. Two, the men have it worse. Or three, everyone has it equally bad.
This was a few weeks into my stay at Werner’s. We had established a safe routine of staying out of each other’s way, though sometimes we’d end up standing in the kitchen at the same time having tea and toast, not speaking. Once he brought in a few clippings of lemon verbena, put them on the kitchen table, and said, It’s lemon verbena , and I just nodded. After I’d done to the garden what I could do to the garden I’d go walk in the woods or hitchhike to town to release the impulse to buy something, to have a coffee or a beer or to consider going but never actually go to the library to send an email to my husband, to let him know I was fine and not to worry, not to bother worrying because there was nothing to worry about anymore and I was fine with my new, tiny life of just a few words and a few people and plants.
And , Werner continued, it is not often that I have a female mind to consult about these possibilities and so, I bring this question to your attention, if you will attend it.
Men have it worse … women have it worse … or no one has it worse?
These are the options we can consider. This is my ridiculous game for us to speak of, here, as we view the ravine.
We should establish categories , I said, and assign points to each category depending on how important that category is to overall life happiness. There should be a winner for each one. We should keep score.
That seems fair.
After debating and assigning points, then tallying them up while the possums scrambled in the darkness around us, we agreed that men had it better.
* * *
Weeks vanished. In the garden I was a thing with a particular use: pumpkin-vine waterer, bean-stalk trimmer, tomato-root coverer. I was suddenly essential. The pumpkins would shrivel without me. The tomatoes would die of thirst. The summer would have sunned them dead.
After dinner I read or did nothing and sometimes in the morning I swam in the muddy bay, backstroking to nowhere and coming back to where I’d started. At night I slept on a thin, knotty mattress and had dreams that were never about operating a dishwasher. And I began to believe that you could exchange your life, send it back for a different model, and I knew that wasn’t really true but I also knew that it wasn’t, here, entirely untrue.
And I did not fold fitted sheets or meet deadlines or go to the grocery store or do our taxes or call 1-800 numbers to complain. I did not wear electrodes or answer questions.
I did not hear my husband opening the front door or closing the front door.
And I did not feel guilt; I did not feel guilty; I forgot all the things that could have caused any warm ounce of that feeling.
* * *
Werner was standing in the kitchen struggling with the lid on a jar of orange marmalade, his face compressing and filling with blood. He looked up and put the jar on the counter, scraped something out of the sink, and tossed it out the window. The population of flies seemed to have tripled overnight and they circulated in the kitchen, more active and audible than usual; when I tried to brush one away, it would stay, indignant, on my skin or fly a tiny circle and return to the same spot.
I picked up the marmalade and opened it with a pop. We stood and ate jagged slices of toast with the marmalade and Werner didn’t say anything about how I had opened the jar, but as I was about to head back down to the garden Werner broke the silence, saying, You are a strange creature. A curd of orange
Similar Books
