Zero K by Don DeLillo

the needs of their men. Ever-accommodating, self-sacrificing, loving and supporting. Madeline. That was her name, wasn’t it? Your mother?”
    I waited, uneasily.
    â€œDo you know that she stabbed me once? No, you don’t know this. She never told you. Why would she? She stabbed me in the shoulder with a steak knife. I was at the table eating the steak and she came up behind me and stabbed me in the shoulder. Not a four-star-restaurant steak knife with macho overtones but it hurt like hell anyway. It also made me bleed all over a new shirt. That’s all. Nothing more. I didn’t go to the emergency room, I went to the bathroom, ours, and doctored it pretty well. I didn’t call the cops either. Just a family disagreement although I don’t recall now what the disagreement was. Getting rid of a nice new shirt, that’s what I recall. Maybe she stabbed me because she hated the shirt. Maybe she was getting even with the shirt by stabbing me. These are things in a marriage. Nobody knows what’s in the marriage next door. It’s tough enough figuring out what’s in your own marriage. Where were you at the time? I don’t know, you were beddy-bye, or at summer camp, or walking the dog. Didn’t we have a dog for two weeks? Anyway I made it a point to throw away the steak knife because I didn’t think it would be a suitable utensil for us to use again even if we’d all gathered together and devised scrubbing methods that would render the thing blood-free and germ-free and memory-free. Even if we’d all agreed on the most fastidious methods. You and I and Madeline.”
    There was something I hadn’t realized until now. Ross had shaved his beard.
    â€œThat night we slept in the same bed, as usual, she and I, and said little or nothing, also as usual.”
    His tone of voice in this final remark was softer, somewhat haunted. I wanted to believe that he’d reached another tier of reminiscence, deeper and not so bleak and suggesting an element of regret and loss, and maybe a share of the blame.
    He went back to the wall and began to pace, arms swinging faster and higher, breath coming in regulated bursts. I didn’t know what to do, or say, or where to go. These were his four walls, not mine, and I began to think of the mindless hours, time zones home, the steady murmur of return.
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    When I was fourteen I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.
    I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.
    When she was at work I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back. What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back. Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.
    I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was in our modest garden apartment, in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word steep was the whole point. Once I decided to steep myself, there was no need to read