The Pretend Wife

by Bridget Asher

  “A wish?” he said. “Oh, well, I just want you to be happy.”

  “You’re supposed to wish something for yourself,” I said. “It’s your birthday.”

  He gave me a scholarly stare that seemed to say: That is a wish for myself, my darling little dope. He ate his cake, pressing the crumbs with his fork.

  “If you’re not going to use your wish, then I will,” I said.

  “Feel free—you know I’m frugal and hate to waste,” he said.

  “Then I wish that you would tell me the truth.” I stared at his plate. I couldn’t look at him.

  “The truth? About what?”

  I felt my eyes sting with tears. “Mom,” I whispered, struggling to find my voice. “What really happened? The truth …”

  The room was quiet. The heater ticked on and hummed. My father put his hand on top of mine. “I want to show you something.”

  “Okay,” I said, feeling a little unsteady if only because this was so unusual for him. I felt like we were in some new part of our relationship, and I was a little disoriented. He’d always been the guide—the one who led by example, his example being how to let things sit, how to avoid.

  I followed him upstairs to the hallway where he pulled on the thin rope attached to the attic stairs, which unfolded from the ceiling like spindly legs.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Come on up,” he said. He walked up the stairs first, the hinges tightening as he made his way, the stairs squeaking under his weight. Once he pulled the string on the bare bulb, I climbed up too. The air was cool and dry. It was a huge attic, running the entire length of the house. The fake Christmas tree stood in the corner, some tinsel still dangling from its limbs. The rest of the space was filled with boxes, floor to ceiling, packed in tight. I recognized the one marked Gwen in thick black marker. It contained my yearbooks, cap and gown, a few grade school report cards, likely gnawed at by silverfish, and a few odd trophies. I’d never wondered what was in the rest of them—every house had boxes. I shivered and crossed my arms against my chest.

  “Watch yourself,” he said. “Only step on the beams.” The rest of the floor was faded insulation, which was probably too flattened to do much good.

  “This is where I put all of your mother’s knitting. I boxed it up and put it here. I didn’t know what else to do with it.”

  “Which boxes?”

  “All of them.”

  I was astonished. I let my eyes tour the room. There must have been over fifty boxes, big boxes taped up and unmarked. “All of these boxes are filled with knitting? All of them?”

  “My mother’s punch bowl is in that one and there are some old picture frames in there,” he said, pointing. “But the rest is knitting,” he said. “Jam-packed, in fact.”

  “But, is that even possible? There’s so much!” I said. “When could she have had enough time?”

  “She didn’t sleep much,” he said.

  “Even still …” I walked along a beam to a stack of boxes, dragged my fingers along their dusty tops.

  “She knitted a lot,” he said.

  “But this much? That’s crazy,” I said, turning a slow circle to take it all in.

  “Yes,” he said, quietly.

  And then I turned and looked at him. He was tapping his fingertips together nervously. “It is crazy,” I said again, seriously now.

  “It is,” he said.

  “What you’re telling me,” I said, “is that my mother was crazy?”

  “She was suffering,” he said, clasping his hands together and bowing his head, almost in a posture of prayer. “It’s different.”

  I thought about my mother—suffering? I hadn’t ever considered it. She was dead. That had been enough for me to manage, to feel guilty about. But she’d been suffering? “In what way?”

  “Well,” he said, suddenly a little flustered with anger. “Crazy sounds like something she might have done on purpose, for fun! Being wild and crazy!”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” I said apologetically.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s just that there’s so much,” I said, taking a step forward.

  “Be careful,” he reminded me. “Only step on the beams.”

  I secured my footing. “This just seems so sad to me,” I said, picking at the tape on the lid of the closest box. “It’s just that there’s so much … suffering,” I said. “Why didn’t you show me this before?”

  “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see it, to know. I thought it might scare you to know.”

  “I think I had a right to know!”

  My father glanced around the room. He patted down the sparse hair on his head and then said, “You did. I just didn’t want to scare you.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by this, but I felt like he was insinuating that I was frail in some way. “You thought I’d be afraid that I’d go crazy too?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “She scared you sometimes when you were little. You’d sit with your head in her lap and she would hum you to sleep, and she would be knitting so furiously the whole time. You knew something was wrong—the way kids know without knowing … It was in the way you sometimes looked at her. I can’t explain it.”

  I needed facts. “She was compulsive.”

  He shook his head. It was clear that he still wasn’t comfortable talking about her problems. “She suffered.”

  “Was she depressed?”

  “Yes,” he said, buttoning up his cardigan. “She was anxious and depressed, both.”

  I looked at the boxes again. It seemed like they were pressing in from all sides. “I want to go through it all,” I said.

  “The boxes?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, don’t,” he said, looking teary-eyed. “It’s too much. It’s all packed away. Let it stay packed away.”

  “I want to go through it all,” I said again. “I’m going to.” I turned and looked at him. He stood there, his hands clasped together in a gesture I didn’t recognize. Supplication? “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to tell you something about her. This is what I had to offer.”

  “I’m going to go through it all,” I said.

  “The boxes are cumbersome. I’ll help you bring them down,” he said. “Let me help.”

  I started out quickly, frantically, in fact. I worked for hours rummaging, picking things up, making piles of folded blankets, sweaters, mittens, and socks. After I had some kind of order, I spread one of my mother’s blankets on the floor. I knelt down on it, my eyes blurred by tears. It had tassels on the ends of it, and I remembered their wooliness from my childhood in a vague way. The volume of knitting—scarves, pillowcases, hats, sweaters—told me one story, but I decided to study one blanket in particular, only one, deeply, to see what I could learn about someone from her knitting alone. I knew very little about knitting. I’d only gone through a short phase of it myself, in college. It had reminded me of my mother at the time. I’d only known that she’d knitted things for me as a child. I had no idea that it had been an obsession. I ran my fingers over the stitches as if trying to read Braille.

  My father brought me a cup of tea, and would occasionally amble in to ask, in a quiet voice, if I wanted any more.

  “No, thank you,” I’d say.

  He would pause there, waiting for me to tell him what I saw or, at least, what I was looking for, but I had nothing to offer on either count. He would always say, “Okay, then. Let me know if you need anything,” and he would retreat to his notations at the dining room table.

  One of the things made immediately clear was that my mother was not compulsive about the perfection of her work; far from it. There were rows that were taut and fretful, too close and knotted, and then some evenness might be regained for a while, but the small knots would invariably appear again. And then there were loose patches, as if done in a period of distraction. I assumed
that I was the distraction.

  At the bottom of one of the boxes was a set of oversized paperbacks on knitting. The pages were dog-eared. She’d circled certain patterns and lessons with a blue ball-point, and at one point, a purple crayon, which I assume was what she’d had handy. But the other stitches—lace, cable, ribbing—never showed up. She seemed to stick to the basics.

  I knelt down on the blanket, which was stretched out on the floor. I could see the pattern of a few days—the intricate flow of emotions, a fraught desperation that gave way to a wandering despair, the lilt of anxiety and depression. I called my father into the room. He came quickly as if he’d been hovering just on the other side of the doorway. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes expectant.

  “I have a question,” I said, and I stood up so suddenly that I felt light-headed. I still held on to the blanket with one hand, squeezing a woolly tassel.

  “Yes?” This was my father, standing in the doorway, duck-footed, his cardigan buttoned up, his cheeks soft and tinged pink, his unsteady eyes.

  I wanted to cushion the questions somehow, to make it easier for him, but I didn’t know any way to disguise it, and, as much as I wanted to protect him, I was tired of protection—his protection of me and mine of him. I was tired of hiding things. “Was she suicidal?” I asked.

  He froze for a moment then nodded. The room went silent. In the distance, I heard a leaf blower. His eyes welled up and then he shook his head again. “She wouldn’t have tried to kill herself with you in the car. She never would have done that.”

  “Where was she driving that night with me in the car?”

  He sat down in an overstuffed armchair, rubbing his chin as if he wanted to stop it from quivering. He looked small and frail. “She was leaving me,” he said in a quick exhalation of air.

  “Leaving you?” I sat down on the couch and stared at all of the piles of knitting, the stack of books, the emptied boxes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “She would have come back,” he said, although his voice revealed more than a hint of doubt. “I know she would have.”

  “Did you have a fight?” I didn’t remember my parents ever raising their voices, no squabbles, no shouting. When I was younger, I wished they’d been more volatile so that I could have had memories—even bad ones were better than a vague nostalgic memory that left me nothing to hang on to.

  “No,” he said. “She was too fragile for that. She didn’t have any fight in her. She wasn’t that kind of person. It was an erosion, she told me. She felt eroded, and she needed to be away from me to see what that feeling meant.”

  “Where was she going?”

  “To a friend’s house, a girlfriend from her Mount Holyoke days.”

  “How did the wreck happen?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “The roads were wet. There was construction. She was exhausted. She hadn’t slept in days.” I imagined her tugging the wheel in a sleepless haze, the damp air, the flashing lights—maybe they were disorienting rather than clarifying. Maybe she was already asleep.

  “But someone came in and saved me.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A man named Martin Mendez. A stranger. He and I had coffee once.”

  “You had coffee with him?” This stunned me. Martin Mendez and my father—two men in a diner, talking about what, exactly? Did he describe the accident site, the skidding car, my mother’s death?

  “I felt like I needed to know as much as I could,” my father said quietly. “He was a good man. He died a few years ago.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said that he saw the accident. He watched her car careen into the water. The car started to fill.” My father stopped for a moment. “He said that the water was cold. But when he went in, he saw you thrashing and she wasn’t. And so he saved you first. By the time he got out, someone else was there. He went back in and pulled out your mother, but she was already gone. She likely died on impact.”

  I turned and looked out the bay window at the weedy lawn, the crumbling sidewalk, the rusty mailbox, a boy walking a terrier down the empty street. “If you’d told me earlier, I could have asked Mendez these questions myself.” Martin Mendez was dead. I’d never get to hear his version for myself, to help me rebuild my memory.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said, but I didn’t want his apologies.

  “I want to see the bridge,” I said, standing up, suddenly furious. “What kind of car was it? I want to talk to the paramedics. They came, didn’t they? I want to talk to them!”

  My father stood up. “No, no,” he said. “It’s over. It’s history.”

  “I want to talk to the paramedics!” I shouted.

  My father walked to me and touched my shoulder. I shrugged him off, and he let his hand fall to his side. “Sweetie,” he said. “Gwen.”

  “Look at all of this,” I said, pointing to the ransacked boxes, the piles of sweaters and hats and mittens, the stack of knitting books, the blanket on the floor—this secret that my father kept all of these years, boxes and boxes of secrets, and now unpacked, let loose. I wondered why he’d needed to hold on to the secret so tightly. “If you’d told me earlier,” I said. “If you’d only … I would have been able to put it together for myself. All of these boxes, it’s all so unhealthy, so poisonous, packed up there for all of these years and years. How did you live? How did you live and breathe with all of those heavy boxes up there in the attic collecting dust, just up there, over your head all the time?”

  “It’s over,” he said again.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that she was leaving you? All these years, I blamed myself in so many stupid ways … Why didn’t you tell me the truth?”

  He stared at his hands. “I thought I was shouldering all of the blame,” he said. “I thought I was sparing you.”

  “No,” I said. “You were wrong.” I picked up my pocket book and walked to the door. “You were completely wrong.”

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE DRIVE home, only that when I walked into the apartment, Peter was making a casserole—one of his mother’s recipes—and I knew that I’d forgotten some plans that included a potluck. He always made this for potlucks. He was wearing his thick white chef’s apron, the one he wore when making this meal.

  I’d come to some not yet fully formed notion of the role of secrets in our private lives. I couldn’t have articulated how pointlessly dangerous they often could be. My father showed me my mother’s knitting. He let go of his secrets, finally. This changed everything. My mother’s knitting, the attic so weighted with all of her sorrowful and frenetic stitching—it was too much. I only knew that I’d decided not to live with secrets any longer.

  I put my keys and pocketbook on the dining room table. I walked into the kitchen. Peter looked up from topping the casserole with bread crumbs. I stared at him for a moment. I knew that I was about to change everything, and I wanted one last look, one last glimpse of this man. I loved Peter in this moment—the apron, his quick hands, his broad shoulders. I loved the way he glanced at me and smiled, like a little boy who’s proud of himself for being so grown up. I felt sorry for him because I knew what was coming. I wanted to spare him. I would have if I could. I’d have transported him to some future when maybe the two of us could be friends—like comrades who’d been soldiers side by side in these pretty trenches we’d dug for ourselves. I would miss this life, this apartment, this steamy kitchen, this man. But I knew that he would never be enough. I knew the truth, and it was time for me to start saying it.

  I said, “I’m in love with Elliot Hull.”

  He paused, put the canister of bread crumbs on the counter. He didn’t look at me. “What?”

  “I’m in love with Elliot Hull.”

  “Did you sleep with him? Are you having an affair?”

  This response infuriated me. It seemed recklessly territorial and demeaning, and yet came so naturally. “No,” I said. “It’s worse than that.”

  “No,” he said. “Having sex with him wo
uld be the worst. Trust me.”

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t move. I just stood there.

  “Are you leaving me for Elliot?” he asked, and then he kind of laughed, as if this were absurd, and I suppose all of this must have seemed absurd.

  “No,” I said. “I think he’s seeing someone.”

  “So you’re in love with someone who’s seeing someone else,” he said, as if he were trying to cast this off as a matter of my stupidity instead of betrayal.

  “I’m not leaving you for Elliot.” I hadn’t yet gotten very far in my thinking, but an odd calm settled over me. I said quite logically, “But I don’t think I can be married to you and in love with someone else.”

  “Please,” Peter said. “People do it all the time.” He picked up the casserole, put it in the oven with an angry jab, and set the timer.

  “Do they?” I asked. Was this his definition of marriage? How could we have been together for so long and I didn’t know that he held this belief? And he’d said it with such steadfast conviction that it shocked me.

  “Sure they do. Of course. Don’t be naive. You’ll get over Elliot. And that’ll be that.” His tone was casual now, and again, I couldn’t help but feel like I was being patronized. I’ll get over Elliot? And that will be that? I was infuriated, but at the same time, I knew that I couldn’t push him. He was responding the way he knew how. But still, I was confused by what he was saying. What was he saying exactly? What did he mean people do it all the time—stay married to one person while in love with someone else?

  “Have you been?” I asked.

  “Been what?” He got a beer from the fridge and was opening it on his apron.

  “Have you been married to me and in love with someone else?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and then wagging a finger at me admonishingly. “Not at all. This is your problem. Don’t turn on me.” He pulled his apron off roughly over his head and stuffed it through the handle of the fridge. “Fix it,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying here. Just fix it.” He walked to the living room.