Happy Marriage

  The appliances are doing her in. Emily can barely make it past the neighbor's front gate without pulling into their driveway, backing out, and heading back to her house to check -- once more, just once more, if the oven might still be on from last night's meal. She tells herself it is just one thing she's checking, just the oven, but she makes the rounds -- the curling iron, the burners (number one is off, number two is off...), the toaster and finally the ancient wall heater.

  At work she calls her machine and waits to hear it pick up. If the machine is still working, she figures the house has not burned to the ground. She presses the phone to her ear hard, so her coworker who sits on the other side of a flimsy partition can't hear Emily's voice picking up on the other end of the line: "Hello you've reached Emily and Ian." She imagines the smoldering foundation of her home with nothing but a telephone and answering machine nestled in the cinders, still ringing, still recording her breathing. It has been five months. It is getting no better.

~

  At night Emily dreams of disaster, each scene morphing into the next. She dreams of flying in planes that are hopelessly rickety, planes with wooden seats and drunken pilots. The man next to her orders fajitas from a smiling stewardess who brings the flaming cast iron pan to him. "Don't you know you can't have fire on a plane?" Emily shrieks.

  She dreams of taking a gondola up a ski slope with four high school boys who rock the carriage back and forth on its cable, laughing, high fiving, gaining momentum, swinging like a rocking horse as Emily braces herself for death. She wakes up on nights like these, her back wet against the sheets and sees the dog's twitching face just a few inches from her own.

  "You're having dreams like that because you feel a loss of control over your life," her friend Lucy tells her gently.

  No shit, Emily thinks.

~

  Thursday morning Emily calls in sick. She knows her absences have been noted. She even suspects she's close to being fired, but the word "fired" doesn't have the same deadly ring it once did. Ian called yesterday. He told her he was coming over Saturday with a moving truck for the rest of his things. "As in this Saturday?" she asked.

  After leaving a message with her boss, Emily lies in bed late, then eats a carton of yogurt while she sits in the bath. For an hour she adds hot water to the cooling tub and waits for the Humane Society to open. The day Ian left, the cat left too as an added kick in the teeth. Late at night, Emily walks through her neighborhood stopping to crouch on the asphalt and pan her flashlight under cars. She's hired Sherlock Bones, finder of missing pets, who sends mailers out that look like Wanted! posters from the old west. Everyday, Emily visits the shelter hoping the cat has been picked up.

  Emily takes the long route, going out of her way to count Volvos, aiming for 38, Ian's age. She's done it every day now since Ian left. When she comes up short, she thinks she will pay for it later, that perhaps she will arrive at work to find she has been fired or that she'll come home to a flooded basement. At traffic lights, she tells herself that if she can hold her breath until the light turns green, she will find the cat today. It is her own brand of religion.

  In the hallway between feral cats and adoptable cats, she stops a volunteer who has cat lover written all over him: "When is it okay to stop looking?" she asks.

  He shrugs and gives a pained expression. "I don't know. I can't tell you that." He's been asked this before, she thinks. It is not his place to grant permission to give up.

~

  "That cat is halfway to Florida by now," Lucy says, as if the cat had succumbed to wanderlust. "Long gone. You're obsessed. It's not healthy. It's like when you went to the dentist with those imagined cavities."

  She nods into the phone. Years ago when she was planning her wedding for 300 people, she'd gone to the dentist thinking her teeth were going to fall out. He'd smiled and chucked her under the chin: "Didn't you say you were getting married? That's why. Your teeth are fine. You're clenching your jaw, I can tell from here."

  "Are you listening, Em? I'm giving you some good advice here. All this crazy stuff you're doing -- it's all a manifestation of your grief."

  Why, Emily wonders, does everything these days disguise itself as something it isn't?

~

  She was in the financial district of San Francisco when it happened. Five months ago, near Christmas. The traffic was worse than usual. She and Lucy were trying to find a gallery showing a bunch of Hockney lithographs. They were lost. At a stoplight, Lucy looked for a street sign and as she looked to her right, she cried: "Hey! Isn't that Ian?"

  Emily turned and there was his Volvo that was supposed to be in long term parking at San Francisco airport and, there was her husband who was supposed to be in Virginia. He was in the front seat hunched over and laughing and as he leaned back into the seat, she saw there was someone with him, a woman with chunky black sunglasses and closely cropped blonde hair. Lucy looked back at Emily's face, white and distorted with confusion, and whispered: "What's the matter?" Then the light turned green and Ian was gone, lurching into traffic.

  The whole way home in the car, Lucy, who cried easily since her mother died last year, tearfully begged Emily to talk. But Emily couldn't speak, she could think only of the phone call from Ian the night before. He'd called from his hotel room. There was a sit-com on in the background; she could hear a laugh track. A woman's voice on the TV was relaying a bad date story to a roommate. Only when Emily put down the phone did she realize she was watching the same show, and Virginia was three hours ahead.

  Emily dropped Lucy off at her house, Lucy's handbag almost getting caught in the seat belt as she sped off. At home, she sat at the kitchen table making lists. She made three: House/Garden, Job, and Life. She filled the House and Garden page front and back with chores she'd put off for years. On the Job list she came up with seven ways to improve her career. On the Life list, she wrote only: "Get better sunglasses"

~

  Emily wonders now if it had been the trying that kept them together. She and Ian had tried to get pregnant for the better part of five years with fertility clinics playing a major, if eventually futile, role. Over the years, she began to feel her body slipping away from her, as if she had lost control over the space she inhabited.

  Combined infertility meant a variety of factors conspired to keep them babyless. Neither of them was to blame, which meant both of them were. A year ago, he told her he was tired of trying. They should "get on with their lives" he said, a statement that made Emily jittery with panic. He'd suggested adoption, offered up as a consolation prize, but Emily wanted her own baby, not someone else's. Ian knew that. Though a year ago Emily agreed to give up after one last in-vitro attempt, she continued to chart her cycles, entering her morning temperature on graphs after Ian went to work.

~

  On Friday Emily calls in sick again, reasoning that two sick days are more convincing than one. She busies herself with her House & Garden list, dusting above the window ledges, pulling out weeds in the front yard. Along the fence in the back, she stakes up tomato plants, tying them with green plastic ribbons. A piece of ribbon flits away from her, then down the driveway to the street and she chases after it. When it drops down a grate by the sidewalk, she imagines the word "Litterbug" indelibly marked on the report card of her soul. In the house, folding laundry, she times herself. By the third load, she has herself down to three minutes from dryer to drawer. When she unloads the dishwasher, she holds her breath to see if she can unload the top rack without exhaling. She exhales only when she feels her lungs fizzling, her heart slowing.

  By late morning Emily is exhausted, splayed out on the couch, remote-control in hand. She stops flipping when she hears the raucous yelling of a talk show. On Channel 2 a man is sitting, head in his hands on the stage. He is wearing a hairpiece; it's dangerously close to falling off. A woman is draped across another man who has one fist raised, pumping the air. Victory, says his grin.

  "If you gave me what I needed, I wouldn't have to go anywhere else!" she shouts at the man who was covering his face. She makes that it's not my problem it's yours face. Everyone is laughing, booing, whooping. The man pulls his face up from his hands and for a moment they catch each other's eye. Then she turns back to her new lover. "Slut," the man says to the side of her head. Then, "Fucking slut," but the first word is bleeped out. The censors aren't kidding anyone though. You don't need to be a lip reader to see that. The woman stands up and strides towards him, all spandex dress and overstuffed sausage legs. In one sweep, she plucks his toupee off his head and sends it like a Frisbee over the crowd. The crowd is on their feet, stomping their cheap shoes, the toupee lost somewhere on the dusty floor, kicked at like roadkill. The talk show host is smiling, amused despite himself. "So," he says loudly into the microphone, his voice barely carrying over the chaos, " . . . does this mean divorce?"

  It occurs to Emily that the only difference between her and them is that the people on stage have chosen to play it out on television; the plot lines of her life and theirs seem remarkably similar.

  At a commercial, the phone rings. Emily knows it's her mother; she can tell by the ring.

  "Are you sick? I called at work, they said you were sick."

  "Sort of. Not really."

  "Meet me for lunch 1:00 p.m. California Café."

  "Not today, Mom." But her mother has already hung up.

~

  "I was thinking," her mother says, pushing the menus aside.

  Here it comes, Emily thinks.

  Her mother shakes her head "no" at the waiter walking towards the table, then leans in. "I was thinking you'd like to go to the cabin this year. Maybe with Ian."

  Years back when her father had some success as a poster artist for the Filmore in San Francisco, he'd bought a rotting pile of wood by a lake in Massachusetts. Her mother referring to it as a cabin was like calling a blow-up raft a luxury liner.

  "Ian and I don't live together anymore, Mom, he moved out months ago. You know that already. He's coming for the rest of his stuff on Saturday."

  "This Saturday? That's tomorrow." Her mother straightens her back against the booth.

  "Listen, remember what a good time you and your sister used to have in the summer there. Maybe you could mention a trip to the cabin when he comes over."

  Her mother pulls a large paperback from her bag and slides it across the table to Emily. On the cover are the words: "How To Be Your Own Handywoman," which Emily thinks at first is a self-help guide.

  "I'm not sure what state the cabin will be in when you get there. You may need to do some repairs."

  In the last few years her mother had changed her tune about the cabin, referring to the summers at the lake as "marriage saving field trips," as if years of marital discord could be repaired with the addition of sun and water. She used to hate the cabin, referring to it as "your father's indulgence."

  "Who said I'm going to the cabin?" Emily asks.

  "Open it."

  Tucked between the table of contents and the title page is a photo of the whole family standing on the deck of the cabin. She remembers the photo being taken. It was at the beginning of one of their summer trips. She and her sister are in bathing suits and flip-flops. Emily is about eleven; not yet self-conscious, still willing to have her photo taken. "Let's take a photo while we're all still friends," her father had said. In the picture, he is holding her mother like his new bride, his elbow crooked under her legs. It's an odd photo; everything looks staged.

  Her parents fought about money every day that Emily could remember. Her father had quit his city engineering job to design album covers and rock posters. It was sporadic work and for years the air in the house was heavy with waiting. There was never enough money to get the car fixed or the washing machine replaced. Every time something broke down, Emily and her sister made themselves scarce knowing a fight would follow. Once, driving downhill on the way back from Half Moon Bay, the stick shift came off in her father's hand. As he held it aloft, wires dangling like broken arteries from the vinyl sheath, Emily thought that this here was it; this here was Divorce. Her mother didn't speak to him for three months after that. At the dinner table, she'd turn to Emily or her sister and say: "Would you please ask your father to pass his plate?"

  Emily looks closer at the photo. They look so happy, it's jarring.

  "It doesn't even look like us," Emily says.

  "Don't be ridiculous. Of course it does."

~

  Emily spends Saturday morning crossing items off her House and Garden list. She tells herself if she can finish the list by the time Ian comes over he will change his mind. But she moves slowly, stopping frequently to rest or read bits from the newspaper. She still has four items left on the list when Ian backs the truck up the drive. When he slides out of the truck, he looks different, relaxed, slightly tanned even. He looks shorter too.

  At the door of the garage she watches Ian open and close cardboard boxes. She packed up his things so long ago that when he closes a box, a puff of dust rises in the air.

  He wipes his palms on his pants. "Is the cat back?"

  "No."

  "Maybe someone's feeding him down the street."

  If you gave me what I needed I wouldn't have to go anywhere else.

  Ian heaves a box into his arms and walks past her out of the garage, heading towards the truck. She sees then why he looks shorter. He is wearing sandals instead of his usual dress shoes. He has never worn sandals, let alone ones like these. They are woven, flimsy things that advertise a recent trip to somewhere tropical.

  I'm ready to give up on a baby, Emily thinks, trying it out.

  "I don't even want a baby anymore," he says and for a moment Emily wonders if she's said it out loud.

  When the last of his boxes are in the truck, he moves to hug her, but the exchange is awkward, and he bumps her chin with his arm. He smells of mothballs from the closet they once shared. How long, she thinks, will it take for the smell of their life together to leave his skin?

~

  Later, Emily walks down the street, pulling down cat flyers and putting them into a trash bag as she goes. When she's gotten them all, she sits on the front stoop with the bag at her feet. Across the street, a woman comes home and passes her husband watering the lawn without so much as a nod in his direction. Maybe talk shows weren't as staged as everyone said they were, Emily thought. Maybe they were a cross section of America: Someone was cheating, someone was lonely, every one wanted different things.

  She remembers the photo between the pages of the Handywoman book and considers she's wrong. Maybe her parents had been happy and Emily was just a poor judge of happiness. She thinks of Lucy's dad who remarried eight months after the death of Lucy's mother. Lucy says it's proof her father can move on, proof her parents had a happy marriage. She thinks too of Lucy's mother who, as she lay dying in the hospital, taped her wedding ring to her finger with bandage tape to keep it from falling off.

~

  Emily arrives at the airport an hour early. Waiting at the gate, she begins counting planes taking off, then stops and closes her eyes. She knows she should call her boss from the bank of pay phones, but she stays there, listening to the sounds of the airport - people chatting, staticy announcements playing over the intercom.

  On the plane, Emily holds the armrests loosely and waits for takeoff. As the plane becomes airborne, gravity pushes her spine gently into the seat back. She looks out the window, and after a while she sees the highway snaking along below, then beyond that, the green and tan postage stamps of land. Though she knows she can't see it, she looks for the house where her marriage had been and wonders if the wall heater that she's sure is still on, has finally set the whole place alight.

* * *

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