The Hole We're In

by Gabrielle Zevin

  She woke in the morning with a crick in her neck from sleeping on the sofa. Her husband was standing over her clad in the green and gold Buckstop Academy gymsuit that constituted his business attire.

  “Sorry about last night,” he said.

  “Gymsuit’s looking a little snug there,” she replied.

  “Yeah, think I left it in the dryer too long.”

  “Maybe that’s it, moose knuckles.”

  “You don’t exactly look skeletal yourself, Patsy,” he said.

  She snorted at that. “It’s all muscle.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Wanna arm wrestle me?” She put her arm palm up on the coffee table.

  “I don’t want to have to crush you, woman.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Seriously?” he said.

  They both got on their knees and put their elbows on the faux wood coffee table.

  He was stronger than she’d anticipated, so she fought dirty and twisted his wrist a little.

  “Hey, you’re fucking hurting me, Patsy!”

  She twisted his wrist a little more and then she slammed his fist into the table.

  “I win,” she said.

  AFTER HE LEFT, it occurred to her that it might have been wise to have slept with him the previous night, if only to have begun the charade that the sweet little parasite inside her might conceivably be his.

  She meant to get off the couch that day—maybe take a drive or go for a run or call the VA office—but somehow it never happened. Instead, she watched all the morning talk shows and by the time that was done, it was afternoon, which seemed too late for the commencement of pursuits more ambitious. She made one more circuit around the channels, and found a show she’d never heard of called Antiques Roadshow. At first, she found it about as stimulating as watching her husband tweeze his nose hairs, but then, without warning, she was hooked. The segment that did it was a million-year-old guy with a million-year-old gravy boat. The gravy boat was worth $32,000 because it had belonged to none other than General William Tecumseh Sherman.

  It occurred to Patsy that she, too, had a ton of junk—more than she knew what to do with, in point of absolute fact—and she wondered if she, too, might be harboring a $32,000 gravy boat. She roused herself from the sofa in order to go comb through her kitchen cabinets.

  All she found was a collection of chipped Fiestaware, a bequest of Magnum’s dead mother.

  She hadn’t eaten since yesterday, so she looked for rations instead. The refrigerator was empty except for a chunk of rapidly graying cheese.

  Next to the fridge was the walk-in pantry, and what she found there disturbed her. Magnum was hoarding a lifetime supply of Betsy Ross snack cakes. There were All-American Pies, All-American Bars Chooey Gooey Brownies, Choco-Nutsy Bars, Sunny Plops, etcetera. He had the whole product line. If this had been his primary sustenance since her last trip home, it was no wonder he looked like the Michelin Man.

  She had worked at Betsy Ross during the winter of her senior year. (Most everyone from Buckstop ended up working there at some point or another.) It was during that stretch that she and her husband had ended up getting back together for good.

  Patsy had found several mouse droppings near the brownie batter machine, and she had told the supervisor, who, in turn, had told her to mind her own business.

  “You really don’t care that there might be shit in the brownies?” she’d asked.

  The supervisor had shrugged.

  “You won’t even, like, investigate it?”

  He wouldn’t.

  She quit. She was seventeen—it wasn’t like she had a mortgage or car payments.

  Magnum had overheard what had happened so he decided to quit with her. He offered her a ride home. They bitched the whole way about how disgusting their former employer had been.

  “That time Arthur Proops lost his finger in the separator, and no one would even stop the assembly line!”

  “I once saw some guys jacking off into the whipped cream machine! I tell you, there ain’t a more disgusting animal by-product than that!”

  “And those health bars are like seventy-six percent fat!”

  At some point, she had asked him if he was going to regret quitting his job—unlike her, he did have car payments.

  “Naw,” he had replied. “I’d been looking for a reason to leave for a while.” They were stopped at a traffic light, so he turned to look at Patsy. “And I knew you’d be needing a ride.”

  By then, she’d already broken up with him twice: once, because she’d been in “stupid puppy love” in Texas, and again, because she thought Magnum had gotten too clingy after she’d consented to relations with him at Bible camp. In truth, she’d always thought Magnum was not quite enough. Not smart enough. Not aggressive enough. Not impulsive enough. Not enough. That afternoon at Betsy Ross had forced her to reconsider her initial findings.

  A year later, they were married.

  She closed the door on Magnum’s Betsy Ross stash and returned to the living room for another episode of Antiques Roadshow.

  Around eight, Magnum came home with an entirely chicken-free meal from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Patsy still didn’t eat meat, out of habit, not religious observation. After KFC, he went into the kitchen and called to her, “I’m having a Betsy Ross. You want?”

  “No.”

  He returned with an All-American Bar, which was essentially a chemically preserved pound cake coated in patriotic-hued lard.

  “Say, Magnum, what’s with the pantry?”

  “What about it?”

  “Why do we got enough Betsy Rosses to get us through the end of days?”

  “Just stuff I got for free.” He delicately peeled off the cellophane wrapper.

  “From your friend?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He started licking off the frosting. “About that. It’s actually Pharm’s girlfriend who works there.”

  “Jesus Christ. Pharm’s got a girl! What’s she like?” In all the years she had known him, the Pharm had never expressed much interest in that sort of thing.

  “I don’t know. She’s, uh, a girl.” He bit off the first half of the denuded pound cake.

  “Yeah?”

  “She, uh, works at the Betsy Ross factory.” Magnum popped the rest of the cake into his mouth.

  “Yeah, you mentioned that already.”

  “I don’t know, Patsy. He don’t like to talk about it that much. You know how secretive he can be.”

  At 11:35, Letterman came on, and the guest was Al Franken, who Patsy remembered from Saturday Night Live. Al did a bit about visiting the troops in Iraq. He described seeing a posting entitled, “Suggestions for Soldiers Making a Phone Call Home.” “Number one,” he read, “ask how your loved one is doing BEFORE you ask about your car or boat.”

  Magnum asked her if she had ever seen the list.

  “Not that one specifically. But stuff like it, I guess.”

  “’Cause it’s funny. You always used to ask about your car before anything else!”

  “That ain’t true, Magnum!”

  “Yeah, it is. It was always, did you make the payment? Did you remember to get it washed? And you better not be driving it neither if you know what’s good for you!”

  “That’s not true.”

  But she didn’t know. It might have been.

  After Dave, Magnum said he was going to bed. “You coming?”

  She told him that she thought she’d stay up a bit longer.

  “You going for some sort of TV watching record, Patsy?”

  “Yeah, better call up the Guinness people,” she said.

  Patsy Pays the Bills

  THE NEWS PISSED her off, but she watched most everything else, and her days became a series of agreeably anesthetic sound bites:

  Leshawn, you are ...not...the father.

  Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

  Come on down!

  You teach people how to treat you.

  John Tra-Vol-Ta
!

  Gimmee Gimmee Gimmee.

  In other Brangelina news...

  She nearly dropped her baby.

  The tribe has spoken.

  What’s next for the Boy Wizard?

  It might have gone on like that forever, except one morning she was interrupted while watching the 11 AM Maury Povich (there was also a 1 PM). About four times a week, Mr. Povich had shows featuring paternity tests, and these tests had become Patsy’s favorite thing in the whole viewing universe. She appreciated the black-and-whiteness of the tests—someone was either the father or he wasn’t. Mystery solved. She also appreciated Maury’s showmanship, particularly the dramatic pause he took before revealing whether a man was a father or a fool.

  She was in the middle of watching such a program when the cable cut out. The interruption happened at a most inconvenient time for Patsy—just as Maury was saying, “ANFERNEE, YOU ARE—” Though she knew the gesture was likely futile, she banged the side of the television just in case it was the kind of problem that responded to force.

  She tried to call Magnum on his cell, but the phone went straight to voice mail. She dug around the house until she found the number for the cable company, and after spending an age on hold, an operator came on the line and informed her that no one had paid the cable bill for three months.

  “There’s got to be some sort of mistake,” Patsy said. “Can’t I just put a check in the mail right this instant?”

  “No.” The account was “seriously delinquent,” though Patsy was welcome to pay by credit card. “You’d best do it today on account of the holiday weekend ’cause otherwise your cable’ll be turned off through the Friday after Thanksgiving,” the operator said.

  How had it gotten to be Thanksgiving. “You didn’t happen to be watching Maury, did you?” Patsy asked.

  “No, ma’am. I’ve been working.”

  Patsy found her credit card, and about a half hour later, service was restored. Anfernee and his paramour Ayesha were long gone by then—he was either the baby’s daddy or another goddamn cuckold; she would never know now. Although Patsy was a mere twenty-three minutes from the second Maury of the day, she didn’t feel her usual enthusiasm. The whole episode with the cable company had left her uneasy. She wondered what else her husband had been neglecting to pay.

  She decided to dig around the house a bit. The usual: mortgage, car payment, and credit card statements. Magnum had taken no pains to hide them. If she hadn’t been in such a foul mood, she might have even been touched by how organized he had left things. After skimming the documents, she concluded that Magnum had indeed been experiencing financial difficulties. Although he was current on most everything (except cable!), he had made several late payments across various accounts over the last year. She found a credit card bill that said they owed $17,000 and another one where they owed $13,000. She found the paperwork for that stupid pool he’d been trying to build for her. He had paid a $3,000 deposit on it in January, right after she’d last been home, but then he’d never paid the rest. A letter detailed the whole fiasco: the pool was going to cost more than the original estimate due to an “unanticipated number of rocks in the backyard.”

  She located their bank statements last. All her money from the military—her paychecks (paltry though they were), her enlistment bonus money, the re-up money that she’d been paid to date—should have been in there. Approximately $24,000 from her added to whatever Magnum had managed to save from his job at the school.

  The account was nearly depleted. They had $997.97.

  By the time she’d gone through all of this, she’d missed the second Maury, and it was well into the 2 PM Antiques Roadshow. She watched that, but again, did not feel her usual enthusiasm. A little girl brought her great-grandmother’s paper doll collection, and the paper doll collection was worth...

  Eleven hundred dollars. Nothing spectacular, but more money than she and Magnum had, put together. The paper dolls would have been worth a whopping $1,500 if the girl hadn’t been such a fool as to have played with them.

  Where had the money gone? Aside from the hole in the backyard, Patsy detected no physical improvements to the house. If anything, it was more of a wreck than the last time she’d been home: soiled and mismatched furniture, cracks in the ceiling, a kitchen that had been the height of modernity fifty years prior, an insidious black mark underneath the apple-printed bathroom wallpaper, etcetera. If he was going to spend all their money, she thought the least he could have done was purchase a new couch.

  At 3:00 PM, Dr. Phil stuck a person who hated thin people with a person who hated fat people in a house together, and although this should have been a most intriguing scenario, Patsy could derive little enjoyment from it. She decided to pay a visit to her husband at school.

  Since she’d been back, she hadn’t yet attempted to leave the house. In the garage, she found another surprise.

  Her car was gone.

  For the next thirty seconds, she lived up to her reputation as an honorary man.

  The car had not been anything special: a baby blue 1999 Toyota Corolla. Four wheels, a hood. But it had been her car.

  It had been hers.

  She found it difficult to imagine her husband selling the car behind her back and then not informing her. Not to mention, he’d had just about the perfect opportunity for confession when they’d been watching that Jewish comedian on Letterman. No wonder he’d never bothered her about sitting in front of the television, she thought. He’d probably liked her that way. All fat and docile and unquestioning.

  She decided to run over to the school. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to avoid running while pregnant, but she didn’t really care.

  The school was only a mile from their house, but she was sucking wind by the time she got there. She threw up on a patch of daisies and took a moment to marvel at how quickly her body had gone to hell. She then went straight to the gym to have it out with her husband.

  “Where’s teacher?” she asked. All the children were looking at her, and they seemed impossibly young, even though she was only twenty-two herself. “Where’s your eff’n teacher?”

  After a while, a little blonde girl, who might have been the Ghost of Patsy Past, replied, “Mrs. Poker stepped out, but we’re supposed to be stretching. And you really shouldn’t curse in front of children, ma’am.”

  Since when did tiny Buckstop Academy have TWO gym teachers? Only 150 kids went there. Patsy asked if someone could tell her where the other gym teacher, Magnum French, was?

  The kids snickered.

  “What? What?”

  Finally, one said, “He doesn’t work here anymore, ma’am.”

  HER HUSBAND CAME home around seven o’clock dressed in his gymsuit.

  “You have a good day teaching gym?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “What sports the kids doing this time of year?” she asked.

  “Basketball,” he replied without even a moment’s thought.

  She’d been planning to play it cool. Basically, give that shit bag enough rope to hang himself. But the word basketball triggered something in her. She jumped off the couch and tackled him to the ground. “WHERE THE FUCK’S MY CAR? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE NEST EGG? WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN PAYING OUR BILLS?” And other things of that nature.

  At some point, he said to her, “Patsy, honey, stop choking me. Just let me explain.”

  “If you can speak, you’re not choking,” she said. Still, she removed her hands from his throat, and he coughed a bit as prelude to the story of their financial woes.

  January, right after her last visit home, Magnum had been watching either Dateline or 60 Minutes—he couldn’t remember which for certain. It had been a show about how kids were getting fatter and fatter. As a physical education teacher, Magnum had observed this to be true. The show got him thinking, though, and thinking had always been a dangerous thing for her husband. The show got him thinking that maybe he could do something about all the fat kids in his own
classes. He hatched what he thought was a brilliant plan to stop teaching sports and start working on weight loss. At this point, he was imagining himself getting written up in the newspapers and receiving a medal from the president.

  Magnum went back to school all riled up, and he gave a speech to each of his classes about how America was getting fat, but Buckstop Academy was not America, and he, Coach French, would not let Buckstop Academy get fat, not on his watch. By seventh period, he’d given the speech six times and felt it had been refined into an honest-to-goodness thing of beauty.

  The trouble began the next day. Magnum had decided he would start by getting all the kids’ measurements—their heights, their weights, etcetera. Lacking this information, how could he track all the progress they were about to make? Unfortunately, some of the kids did not take too kindly to being weighed. There were tears, flat-out refusals, and someone even punched him.

  By evening, irate calls had started coming in from the parents: Coach French had traumatized their chubby children. Coach French needed permission to take measurements. Coach French had deviated from the accepted teaching methods. Coach French hated puppies and Jesus Christ and firemen and babies and all that was good in America.

  The next Monday, they asked him to resign.

  Magnum refused, feeling that he had done nothing wrong. “How could such a little thing as weighing a bunch of kids cause such a ruckus?” he asked. He also felt rather put upon. He had given them an honest-to-goodness thing of beauty, after all.

  As he would not resign, they fired him in the last week of January. Magnum looked for another gym teacher job, but gym teacher jobs were few and far between in the middle of the school year and even further between for someone who’d been fired from his prior post. Summer came and went, and Magnum had yet to find a new teaching job. In September, he took a position outside of the physical education field—way outside of it—at the Betsy Ross factory, which, at the very least, settled the question of the bounty in the cupboard.