Everyone but You

by Sandra Novack

  I want to say, can’t we all get along? Isn’t Earth the right place for love? What I end up realizing, however, is that kitchen renovations must sometimes be a last-ditch effort to save a marriage. Like babies, but something you can later sell.

  I hate when I overhear arguments because, as is often the case, other people’s woes and heartaches often cause me to dwell more incessantly upon my own, and I find that too much introspection is bad. Thinking too long, feeling too much—neither of these things does me any good. So I concentrate on wood instead and my karmic future as a lumberjack. I slide a piece of balsa out from its holding frame and run my hand over the smooth surface in an admiring way, as if I’m stroking a lover.

  A skinny kid in an orange smock catches me in this act, red-handed. He asks me if I need any help.

  Well, I say. I’d like to build a house.

  He grins. By yourself?

  Okay, so what? I ask. It’s true I am five feet tall with a small frame and dainty features, the kind of woman who surprises people by speaking more loudly than they might originally expect. But I have the crooked nose of my ancestors, and let me tell you something: They were a people who knew how to get a thing or two done. Anyway, I really would like to build a house.

  A house, I repeat, as if he is stupid.

  That’s balsa wood, he says, and points in an accusing way.

  Yes, and? I ask. I think, Here is a boy, a freckled-faced boy who, at eighteen, thinks he knows something about me and my capabilities. I wonder what he’ll end up doing with his life that’s so tremendously interesting. I think at this rate of interrogation he’s likely to be a lawyer or go into marketing, like, welcome to those crowds.

  Seriously, he says. Do you belong in this aisle?

  I object to that, I say. Strike the question from the record.

  THE PERSON I SUSPECT my husband’s having an affair with is his cubicle neighbor. I call her Betty Boop behind her back, not only because she has implants and big blue eyes and cropped blond hair but also because there’s something about her—about the situation with my husband—that, on a good day, I find vaguely cartoonish. They think they are very sly, have worked it out so that we are all “friends.” Originally, back when he was courting her six months ago, my husband said he thought Boop and I would really hit it off. As if. And he said he had met and liked her husband, Mr. Narcolepsy, but I don’t know why anyone would like Boop’s husband, because he’s really such a bore at the dinner table. You can be talking about metaphysics or the nutritional value of a pastry crust or infanticide—it hardly matters—one, two, three, he’s down for the count and snoring. It’s all so blatant, this affair situation, which is the one reason I hold out hope that maybe I’m misunderstanding, maybe I’m blowing things out of proportion and my husband and Boop aren’t fucking at all. I’d like to be optimistic here: My husband and I have been married eight years, and that’s eight years that should be worth something.

  Later, while my husband plants hostas and sweats in the melting sun, Boop calls. I can go for a week or two without hearing from her, and then I suspect she and my husband are meeting in the hour after work ends, the one hour that is always unaccounted for.

  Hi, Jen, she says. I’ve just missed you so much.

  Hi, you, I say back. And I add: I bet!

  Because I refuse to let her be the reason that my marriage ends, Boop and I plan another get-together, and then we make small talk for a few minutes, about her dog, China—I hate small dogs, and China is a Chihuahua, the worst kind of small dog—and about her husband, who fell asleep in church while standing up. Like that’s a surprise, I say. But Boop is genuinely unsettled. People in the congregation said maybe the Spirit possesses him, she tells me. She adds, I don’t know how to feel about that, I just don’t. I asked him if he remembers anything after he comes through, and he tells me it’s always the same dream, that he’s falling, and right before he hits the ground, a force pushes him back up suddenly, into the air, and he’s saved. Now, usually that happens when someone is nudging him awake, but now I think maybe there’s more to it, like God is trying to speak through him.

  Wow, I say, because I can hardly pretend to care.

  Is Harry there? she asks then, too innocently. There’s an important work file I need to talk to him about.

  This is code, I suspect, for, I really need a fuck. Really? I ask. Working on the weekend?

  I labor, she says, while other people just sit around.

  I know what Boop probably thinks, that she labors and works in her cubicle and fucks my husband while I do nothing with my time; I hardly even cook dinner. Truly, I have been lazier than lazy of late. She’s asked many times what exactly it is that I do, but I’ve been depressed about my job, and anyway it’s difficult to explain. Not like I’m a spy or anything—it’s not that glamorous, or even secretive. It’s just hard to put into words, and words are one of the few mediums we have as humans; you can see how I’m screwed. I’m a writer, actually, and when I tell people that, they usually tell me they are, too. Okay, I tell them, shrugging. Why not?

  Anyway, when my lack of a “real” job description doesn’t make her happy, Boop openly questions why I haven’t fulfilled my moral obligation of having children. I think she wishes I were fatter because she herself has something of a bottom, that round sort of plumpness that goes beyond the word curvy. All that space, that big house, and for what? she once asked me. Not even a cat to scoop up after.

  So maybe I’ll get a cat, I had told her. What’s it to you?

  After he gets off the phone with Boop, my husband says, Important account. She (meaning Boop) needs to meet to discuss the financials.

  I lean back in the kitchen chair, regard him, and make light of the situation so that I don’t cry. You sell paper clips, I tell him. How important can it be?

  Paper clips, he tells me, hold a lot of things together. You’d be surprised.

  You know what holds the economy together? I ask. Besides marriages? Walmart, I say. I’m thinking of getting a job there. A real job. At the Walmart. What do you think?

  He grabs his car keys and scans the kitchen as if he’s forgetting something, like us.

  Hello! I say. I’d like to discuss job possibilities, new career starts, spiritual vocations. I pull out a chair. Take a load off for five minutes, I tell him.

  No, he says. I don’t have time to open that can of worms. But I think the blue smock would make you look sulky, he tells me. Besides, those people would eat you alive.

  I consider this. Do you think, really? I ask, not about people—that is true: All those needs, all those long lines, all the senseless waiting. And shopping at all is a little like marriage, in that whatever you get never satisfies you completely. Still, the smock statement is a shocker because I think, somewhat conceitedly, that I could pull it off. Why not?

  Walmart is another reason why we’re up to our eyeballs in carbon debt, I remind him. I’ve calculated our personal impact on the environment, and it’s not good.

  So what else is new? he asks, but he is distracted because Boop is waiting, and now, despite myself, I do cry.

  Jen, he says, and he stares at me too long. Are you okay?

  I nod. Sure, why wouldn’t I be?

  He says nothing, fiddles with the keys.

  Well, I say. Give Boop a big wet sloppy kiss for me.

  He winces, and I suppose I am the one who is now being cruel.

  I DO ACTUALLY HAVE a job. Mostly it involves sitting around all day, often for weeks at a time, and dreaming up weird narrative juxtapositions, which is exactly the charge that most people level against me when they say I have no job at all. Sometimes when I am bored with my job and my thoughts and myself I sit around and drink or watch reality television or, when I’m feeling old-school, play Pac-Man on my computer or watch Disney flicks. When I’m feeling new-school, I sit around and social-network all day, checking the feed and then checking it again, so that I can obsess about nothing at all until such nothingness
eats away at the fringes of my life. Anyway, what I’m saying is that I am a person with a serious abundance of anxiety, which is also why I take walks regularly to get away from the downloadable entropy of my life.

  There are about twenty houses in the neighborhood, sprawled out on winding roads that are lined with tall, straight pin oaks and long-leaf pines. A large lake reflects the evening light. Birds and frogs chatter, and geese float along the water’s surface. Our house is a large three-story Victorian with balconies on each floor and dome-shaped windows that give the impression of eyes staring outward at the world. What could be better? my neighbors ask. Mr. Gun-Metal, who lives across the street from me, has said it’s a veritable palace, though he then added that a Victorian, in these parts, is totally out of place.

  Today, I bring in my neighbor Laurie’s mail because she’s on vacation. My neighbors often find chores for me to do. For them. It’s a win-win scenario, they tell me, because it gets me out of my house and into another’s. Here, I hold keys, so many keys it is almost its own occupation. I am like the janitorial custodian of the hood. I check to see if stoves have been left on, if garage doors absentmindedly remain open. I retrieve mail for vacationing couples, water the dying hydrangeas and wilted roses. I walk Labradors and Boxers, scrub algae from goldfish tanks, drop pellet after pellet into tanks that house hermit crabs. It’s always a strange experience to be in another person’s house when they are absent. What if I rummaged? Went through their pantries? Tried on their lingerie? Found all their sex toys and arranged them in a provocative manner? What if I were nosy and hunted around for their bank statements? Checked on their state of affairs? I don’t do any of these things, of course. I do what I need to and get out. But the thought that I could do all this is alarming; the thought that there are no limits when no one is watching unsettles me, makes me distrust myself. A part of me would like to snoop. A part of me thinks there’s probably a lot of good material in each home, there’s probably a lot of deep, dark secrets and stories.

  THE NEXT DAY, I watch the news after my husband leaves for work. Of course the fires are all the rage. Driven by recent winds, they burn uncontrollably. On television, entire forests incinerate before my eyes, animals flee and take cover. Three counties over there are evacuations taking place, declarations of emergency. It’s always the same. One moment things can seem optimistically fine and tranquil—everything plunking along at a good pace, everyone happy, everything ordered—and then suddenly something happens and everything changes, something breaks or explodes or ignites, something fails to take hold, or someone dies. Disaster often strikes, sometimes in a big way, that’s true, but more often, I think it’s the little things that ruin us.

  The phone rings. I’m dying, my father says.

  When I hear the distance that six hundred miles can make, I want to get out my Life Is Good cap again, or think happy thoughts or wade in the murky waters of denial. Why, hello to you, too, I say. Because between my father and me, I am usually the chipper one.

  You’re home entirely too much, he tells me. I always expected that I’d die alone. Now I think when it happens I can phone you and at least that base is covered—at least I’ll hear some voice calling out from the other end of the tunnel.

  I’d come over right away, I tell him.

  Yep, you’d be there in ten, he says jokingly—even though I haven’t been home in over a year, and my father has never once visited my house. At his age travel is difficult. This saddens me because I’d like to know what my father thinks about my house. He is astute about things. I’ve often wondered how the space would feel to him, if he’d think it inviting or cold, if he’d sense that, in it, my husband and I occupy separate rooms—my office, his office, my workout space, his den. I would also like to know if my father would think it’s a good house, in terms of floor plan and foundation, if it is a structure that can withstand the wear and tear of time.

  The fires are on the news, he says. Even here in the cold country.

  They’re a few counties over, I say. I don’t smell any smoke.

  Don’t be dense, he tells me. You don’t have to smell smoke for there to be flames.

  All right, I tell him. So, what’s new with you?

  Other than I’m dying?

  I thought you were going to die last week, I tell him.

  It’s a process, he explains.

  You’re not dying, I say.

  You always say that, he tells me. It makes me worry about you. Before I die, he adds, I’d like to understand what you do. The most I can surmise is that you sit around and think about things. Where’s the action in that? By your age, he tells me, I had already built two houses.

  I know, I say. You’ve mentioned that before.

  Of course, he says, you work hard all your life and the bank gets everything anyway, the company goes belly up. Not for you, though, because I don’t know if you work at all, so you wouldn’t ever have to consider an actual pension. Your mother says I’m not supposed to pick on you. I’m not supposed to tell you I’m dying, either. She says you’re too sensitive about things and blow everything out of proportion.

  Oh? I say, and wonder if it’s true—maybe it’s just me. I do have a thing for weird juxtapositions. Once, when I was a young girl of maybe nine or ten, my father drove me and my mother to the coal region, to see the house in which he grew up. It was a real shithole of a house—a simple wooden structure with uneven clapboards and a rickety foundation. It was a real shithole of a town, too, though it wasn’t as bad as the ghost town three towns over. Anyway, we were talking about the general decline of the area when a couple of boys came running down the street. They were chasing a calico kitten, pelting it with stones. My father ran the boys off. The kitten had a cut over its eye, the flesh split open like a blood orange. I wanted to take the animal home, but my mother wouldn’t allow it. Later, I wrote a story about a cat that got trapped in an old house and died, all while a neighbor boy tried to get it out and save it—it was one of my “dark” tales.

  Maybe I am too sensitive, I say now, to my father. Anyway, as for what I do, I’m thinking about getting a job at the Walmart. I decide, secretly, that’s something you don’t have to explain. People understand the Walmart.

  You wouldn’t last a day working there, he says, surprising me. My father worked blue-collar jobs all his life. He even dug graves, like in Hamlet, but never once found a skull to teach him anything. He tells me, simply: You’re not cut out for Walmart.

  What am I cut out for, then? I ask.

  No offense, honey, he tells me, but I’ve never been able to figure that out. Anyway, I only called to tell you I’m practically a goner.

  Okay, I tell him. Goodbye. Call me back tomorrow or the next day, if you’re still breathing.

  Will do, kid, he says. Keep an eye on the smoke.

  I will, I say.

  My father is very matter-of-fact about things.

  We are very matter-of-fact together.

  IT’S A FAMILIAR SCENARIO, one everyone has played out. If I were trapped in a burning building, as well as my husband, my father, and a fluffy little kitten, who would I save, my husband wants to know, and in what order?

  Well, I say. We should really add Boop and Mr. Narcolepsy to this scenario, too.

  Why? he asks.

  To make the choice of who to sacrifice first easier, I explain.

  Right, he says, and smiles tensely.

  It’s evening and the news has been on for hours. Outside and in, we pretend everything is tranquil, the quiet supper, the geese floating along on the lake, the moon that is already rising. But the news tells us otherwise, and it’s hard sometimes to reconcile the disparity. I break asparagus, throw the tips into a pot for steaming. The smell of swordfish fills the kitchen. My husband is of course doing the majority of the cooking.

  A part of me would like to say I’d save the kitten first. And already I know I’d probably leave Boop to the flames. Mr. Narcolepsy can sleep through anything, so I don’t wo
rry very much about him. Between my husband and father it’s difficult, because my husband is having an affair and my father and I aren’t that close, but at least he’s alarmingly honest. Finally, I’d hate to think I’d be the type of person to only think about self-preservation, but there you go: Maybe, if it came down to a real life-or-death situation, instinct would take over and I’d simply save myself.

  My husband glances up from whisking a bowl of tahini, lime, and dill. Well? he asks. You’re stalling.

  I’ve never been involved in a life-or-death scenario, I tell him. Once, maybe. Once when I was younger. This is actually a true story. I worked at a prison to pay for my college tuition. It was a cold day in December, and a light snow fell. I was walking downtown on my lunch break, minding my own business, when a man jumped out the ninth floor of an old, historic hotel. First I heard a sound, a swoosh, and I thought that snow had perhaps released from an awning. For a moment, it was all very confusing, the sound, the odd feeling it gave me. But when I looked up I saw a man, free-falling through the air, coming down fast. I often think about that flight, and his inevitable fall. When he leapt from that great height, did the man have a brief moment when it seemed he might soar? Be somehow miraculously saved? Did he think the ground would wait, that it wouldn’t swell up to greet him in all its hard, concrete dimensions, that he could hang in the air forever?

  He landed, of course. Hard, so close to me that blood spattered on my high heels and stockings. It was the first time I’d ever heard so many bones breaking, all at once. No one this close up looks beautiful. Still, I bent over to help, reached for him. Sir, sir, I said, in a ridiculous way, as if he’d absentmindedly dropped a handkerchief and I was calling to him after having retrieved it. The blood pooled around him. The man lifted his head. I think about this moment so often. Before he died, did he see the face of a girl who, though squeamish, was desperate to help? Did he feel connection at the thought that someone—anyone—might reach for him? Sense that the world is not such a bad place after all? Did he regret everything?