by Debra Monroe
I’d had menial jobs. Now I had a job with a future if I was assertive but not too assertive. I saw Sally watching out the window as Hiram and I went to the front porch, the wide-open one. Sally once dreamed she was wearing a waitress uniform as she cooked and cleaned, she’d told me, and she had a revelation: “Serving gives us power. It makes us needed.” This had been the rationale for wives for at least forever. But once you tinker with so-called normative gender stereotypes, the established division of labor and rewards gets confusing. I was paying rent, utilities, the car note, credit cards, my student loans. Chet was making money but spending it, like the stockbroker’s wife who shopped and called it work. Hiram sat down. “Are you management or labor?” he asked me.
A few weeks later, Hiram came back and fixed a door latch and put up a light with a motion sensor. “To make you feel safer coming home. To make you feel safer inside.” I already felt safer in my caged bedroom, dimmer by day—gray mesh—but secure and breezy at night, a fan stirring the lace curtains. Hiram and I sat on the porch, eating Moravian cookies he’d brought me, sipping iced tea, and he talked about his brothers, three who’d worked in the mills, two who’d worked down in the mines, all dead now.
When Chet came home, he called Hiram my seventy-eight-year-old boyfriend. But Hiram was my friend, period. During the Depression, Hiram told me, the WPA had sent bookmobiles to the mills. “That’s how I got to be a reader.” He’d quit school at age fifteen. His brothers had too. He still read books from the library. He asked about my job.
I explained what it meant to be tenure-track. He said, “Probation. What you’re saying is they got you on probation for now, girl. You got to look sharp.” I nodded. It would take hard work and good luck for me to publish in time for tenure. I told Hiram that Chet coming home for the summer—he wouldn’t have new contract work until fall—was bad timing. Chet’s TV, his two TVs, as I explained, echoed through the small house. I’d shut the door to my study, but Chet had trouble letting me write, coming in, for instance, to ask where we kept the SOS pads so he could clean the backyard grill. Under the sink, I’d say, deep in the logic of a paragraph that had nothing to do with SOS pads.
Chet wanted to use his last check to buy a truck for $1,800 to rebuild its engine—to keep busy, he said. I’d admired old trucks. We needed another vehicle. Yet we’d gotten by with one so far, and I thought we should use the money to pay bills. But it was summer. Even though the air conditioner was on high during the day, I worried Sally could hear us argue. So Chet and I headed into the country to buy a sky-blue 1959 short bed Ford. Chet worked on the truck on the driveway a few feet from my study, where I tapped away on my big computer. Sally, seven months pregnant, admired Chet’s handiwork. Ginna, selling Amway, dropped by and said, “I admire a man who can do all that.”
Hiram looked in on the project one day too. He was polite—visiting another man’s wife. Yet he frowned as Chet changed his diction to speak to Hiram. When Hiram arrived, Chet said, “Howdy.” Then: “An old truck is like a pig in a poke, hey.” Hiram nodded, wary. Chet had learned this countrified talk from summers he’d spent with his crazy grandma and revived it for Georgia, where he bartered with farmers for power company easements for the lowest price. Down-home talk helped farmers see Chet as one of them, Chet explained, not as a smooth-talking city slicker. “That is smooth talk,” I said. Chet said, “It’s my job to make the best deal. That’s what business is.”
When I tried to understand this marriage, broken but still running, advice from my mother’s era made the most sense: couples argue about sex, children, and money. Chet and I didn’t argue about sex, because neither of us was interested in it with each other. We wanted children. Yet you have to have sex to have them. You have to have money, I’d think as I watched Chet skateboarding with Sally’s children. He was like a kid, not a father.
The arguments that heated up, then, were about money. Most couples will argue about money, I told myself. Lately, because he’d been gone so often, Chet and I argued over the phone. When he was home, he sometimes made feints as if to hit me. I ignored these—like a teenager’s bad moods. But in the daytime, we both tried to keep the noise down. I quietly said how hard it was to pay bills. He quietly said, “We call that robbing Peter to pay Paul.” So I robbed Peter to pay Paul because I believed in, if not happy endings, then ways forward I hadn’t discovered yet. And if I disagreed with Chet that an old truck was an essential purchase, I was grateful he had an outside interest—outside my window.
He sometimes needed someone to hand him a tool. So he’d borrowed Sally’s baby monitor and put the mother’s half in my study and the baby’s half by the truck, and he’d be under its engine and call my name. I’d stop working, go outside, hand him a tool. I made headway on my second book as I heard the musical tinkle of a dropped wrench falling on concrete, followed by Chet cussing, then my name: Debra! At the end of the summer, I had a hundred new pages and a truck to drive when Chet went back to work in Georgia.
One day when school hadn’t started yet but the town was filling with students, I stepped outside just as the undergraduate, Kip, drove by. He rolled down his window and commented that I wasn’t wearing my usual gray, black, or beige clothes. “Of course not. It’s not winter,” I said. I had on a lime-green miniskirt I’d bought on the cheap, a white T-shirt Ginna had decorated with daisy trim on the sleeve edges, and white Keds. I was trying to look local. Kip said, “Wear, wear those clothes so bright.” He went on in this vein, mongrelized Dylan Thomas, as I opened my truck door. It was a handsome truck, stepside, with custom chrome and four on the floor. I liked driving it. I liked that people didn’t expect me—an egghead, a professional woman—to be its driver. Kip asked for a ride.
We circled the neighborhood, and when I approached the last stop my foot on the brake pedal went all the way to the floor, but the truck didn’t stop. I pumped and pumped until the brakes grabbed again. Kip said, “Not the best sort of auto malfunction, you know.” I called Chet. He said, “An air bubble. It’s worked its way through the line now.”
He was right, it seemed. The brakes worked fine until, a few weeks later, I was driving, with Ginna in the passenger seat. She was hooked on a TV show, she said, Unsolved Mysteries. I said, “On PBS? A mystery, not gory?” She shook her head no. “It’s unsolved murders in life.” I was trying not to focus on crime this year. “Wouldn’t it be better to watch something soothing?” I asked. She said, “I’m getting a burglar alarm. My ex is paying for it.” The brakes went out again, and this time pumping them didn’t bring them back quickly. We sped through a stoplight, drivers honking. Ginna started yelling, “Lordamighty.” Then the brakes worked, and I drove Ginna home, her eyes wide. When she got out, she said, “It’s a good thing your husband loves you, or I’d think he was out to get you.” She giggled. “And you’re right I need to stop watching that show.”
I tried to phone Chet to tell him. He’d be home in a few days, because my father and stepmother were coming for a long weekend, arriving Thursday, leaving Monday. I didn’t necessarily expect Chet to be in his motel, but I’d leave him a message. He wasn’t registered; I’d misunderstood. I called his supervisor’s office. The secretary answered. I’d spoken to her before, and she always called me by my husband’s name. “How are things with you, Miz Crosswater?” I wasn’t meant to answer truthfully, to say that bills were accruing, that our house was not so nice or big as the one in Utah yet certainly more peaceful with Chet working. But people had such emphatic Southern manners, even in small talk that’s mere social duty, mere recognition of another human presence, that I sometimes felt tempted. I said I’d forgotten to ask Chet where he was working, and I needed to call him. She said, “Back in a jiffy.” The next voice on the line was Chet’s supervisor.
“Miz Crosswater, this is unpleasant to relay, but Chet’s not in Georgia.” Where was he then? I asked. Or something like that. I shouldn’t have. Because the supervisor said, “It’s unpleasant to relay that I have no idea
. He’s not working for me now.” I said, “Did he ever?” Of course, the supervisor said. Chet just wasn’t working now. He was scheduled to work—the supervisor checked his calendar—next Monday. “Thank you,” I said.
Chet had left me, I thought. Another husband gone. As anyone married a second time knows, a second divorce seems both harder and easier. Easier because you realize how quickly the promise, the covenant, dissolves. Harder because you resist serialized failure.
I’ve always agreed with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, paraphrased here for modernity: soul problems vanish if your bank account is empty. I checked it. No more empty than usual. I’d sometimes get a few thousand extra dollars, money from the small press, or university grants, and I’d put the extra money on credit card balances—like floodwater, I thought, rising no matter how fast I dug trenches. But what would I tell my dad and stepmother as, husbandless, I drove them around in a truck with bad brakes? Then I realized that Chet had left me in my own car, the registration and promissory note in my name. But a few minutes before I was supposed to go meet my dad and his wife at the airport, Chet pulled into the driveway, smiling and waving, no clue I knew he’d been missing.
I had the drive to the airport to probe the mystery.
He blew up, panicked. I’d called his supervisor’s office?
I said, “You gave me the number. I’ve called before. How was I to know this was different? Where were you?” He’d been camping, he said. He felt like a pent-up animal in Greensboro. He’d rented time on a fishing charter boat too, and he knew I’d object. “Like I’m on an allowance.” I said, “You did this alone?” I pictured Chet with a mistress who fished. We were speeding to the airport. He said, “Yes.” Then a line so familiar I once heard it in a movie: “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” I never found out, and I never will, where Chet went. Maybe camping. Maybe gambling. One of Chet’s brothers had a gambling jones. Another had just been arrested for soliciting a prostitute.
At the airport, Chet and I acted happy, greeting my dad and his wife. I felt like I had in the ER in Utah, this visit another crisis Chet and I would weather. In a relaxed moment, I told my dad and his wife that Chet and I were on a tight budget—paying off expenses, Chet’s work just picking up—and they were shocked because they’d thought that, after the rigmarole of a PhD, and a book award that had warranted a feature story in the Salt Lake Tribune, I’d be paid like a real doctor, not like Dr. Monroe, Department of English.
Sunday night at seven p.m., the big phone that was a fax machine rang, and Chet’s supervisor asked to see Chet the next day in the office, a hundred miles south, and when Chet came home, he told me the supervisor had lectured Chet for putting the supervisor in a difficult position, and the supervisor wasn’t interested in mitigating details like there wasn’t another woman, just the peaceful ocean versus an ongoing marital squabble about how to spend money. Chet was fired. It was my fault, he said, for meddling. Then my sister phoned and said my dad had enjoyed the visit, Chet especially, but that I’d seemed tense.
Sally told us about someone who needed part-time help painting houses. Chet would come home, spattered, passive, and work on jigsaw puzzles, one of his TVs on nearby, a cable extender from RadioShack snaking across the floor. I told his mother by phone that he was painting houses, that he’d fixed the truck brakes and master cylinder. I’d helped, pressing and releasing the pedal as he’d yelled my name. “He’s as handy as a pocket on a shirt,” I said, a jaunty phrase I’d picked up from Ginna. Chet’s mother went silent. Then she said, “He was the brightest of my boys. I expected more for him.” The My School Years checklist for boys, I thought: Doctor, Banker, Fireman, Policeman, Farmer, Pilot. I thought of this list again as I sat on the porch with Hiram, who didn’t have children, and he told me one of Wyatt’s sons had never latched onto a job. “If you don’t get something steady lined up in your thirties, you’ll flounder for the rest of your life.”
One Sunday, I was across town with the truck because the Subaru was full of Chet’s office supplies from Georgia, also housepainter’s gear, and I was buying bulk groceries.
As I neared the last stoplight, a four-lane intersecting with a six-lane, the stoplight was yellow, then red, and my brakes vanished—defunct, gone for good. I picked up speed as I flew past semitrucks like barges with their blaring horns, cars with bleating horns. I got to the other side, yanking the hand brake, turned into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, but I couldn’t stop, donut customers jumping out of my way as I circled the building too fast, exited, and rolled down the street into a gas station and up onto a curb, into weeds and trash, just missing a Dumpster. I called Chet. I was leaving the truck here and wouldn’t drive it again until a real mechanic fixed the brakes, I said. Chet was watching football, he said. I said: “You’ve lost your mind. Come get me right now.” If a woman who’s walked away from a truck listing on a curb, now half-sobbing into a phone, seems odd, like a gas station clerk might stare, no. I was in the low-rent part of town.
Hiram drove over with Chet, and they hitched our truck to Hiram’s and towed it to a place called the Brake Guys. Hiram drove me there to pick it up and tried to pay the bill, $69. “No way,” I said. Hiram smiled. I paid with a credit card. The owner said, “Thank you. You and your father have a nice day.” Inexplicably, Hiram and I were familiar, fond, but we conveyed this in a veiled way, talking in generalities about life’s changing demands.
Sally and I talked about cooking, housekeeping. But not often now, awkward since I saw her daily. She’d asked me to be the baby’s godmother, and I felt I couldn’t. I loved her baby. Or not him: all babies. I’d been groomed to be a mother, but this was a physical urge, to hold a baby, any baby, smell it, stare in its face. And I liked Sally’s older children, their knock-knock jokes that didn’t make sense, their anthropological take on adult customs, their frank conversation, no hidden agendas. But it wasn’t my time for children. I had to launch Chet first, find him his place in the world. “Where will I be as he grows up?” I’d said. Sally said, “But you’re one of my best friends. My kids love you.”
I said I couldn’t because I had to be at work on the day of the baby’s christening. “A Sunday?” she’d said. We had an event on campus, I said, improvising. I had to go early to set up—a probable impossibility, a fiction that, according to Aristotle, is more believable than an improbable possibility. But I never wrote down the date, and I was reading on the private porch when Sally’s minivan pulled up and her husband got out, her children did, and she did, carrying the baby in his white bunting. She peered through the dark screen, came to the porch door, handed me a church program. “Here,” she said, hurt.
So it was Ginna who met the self I’d kept hidden. One day she asked how I was, and I told the truth. Pensive, she chewed her lip. She said, “I have the solution.” She always did. Amway laundry booster. A burglar alarm. She’d recently heard weddings were a good place to meet eligible bachelors, so now she was finagling invitations to weddings. She said, “Move—you have bad geographical luck here. Some regions are bad for some people.”
That wouldn’t help with Chet, I said. She said, “Leave him.” I said, “I need him to leave me.” But I couldn’t figure out where he’d go. Onto the streets, spending nights at a homeless shelter? I couldn’t just throw him out. I’d talked to him about where he wanted to be. Texas, he’d said. But his stepfather had a rule about no grown children moving home, too many grown children, first of all, and a safety net makes people weak, he felt. This anti-incentive had worked for the stepfather’s children. They’d also been raised by a different mother and had different genes—nurture and nature accounting for the fact that they got something steady lined up so as not to flounder, and Chet and his brothers never did. Ginna said, “Move. It’ll shake him loose, either all the way loose, or he’ll get out of his rut.” The nomadic cure, I thought, moving as a release from unsolved problems.
I looked at the national job list. There’d been no ads for jobs
in Texas when I’d finished my PhD. But this year I found two. I applied for both, and one in Mississippi too, because it looked interesting, another new life that beckoned. I flew to the national convention on the red-eye, did all three interviews in one day, and straight home on another redeye. I had calls for campus interviews, but I only went to two in Texas, because, as Chet said, we wouldn’t like Mississippi. I accepted a job in Texas in March. I hurried to campus to resign. My department chair was shocked. “But not mad?” I said, irrationally, panting from the brisk walk. I’d felt duplicitous, two-timing my job. He said, “No, saddened. I think I speak for many of us when I say I thought you’d succeed here.”
So my stint in North Carolina ended.
Before I left, Hiram arrived to take me out to lunch, and I got in his truck and rode to K & W Cafeteria, where we slid trays on rails and ordered food. I worried about Hiram’s tray as he walked to the table, his half-dozen different plates clinking, his wobbly glass of tea, which slid to one side, and the tray fell to the floor. Hiram bent down and tried to pick up the crockery shards, to swab spills, but a cafeteria employee got a mop and told him to load up another tray. I asked to carry it for him. Grim-faced, he said no and brought it carefully to the table. Because he was embarrassed, the conversation was stilted, partial. He died that summer. Wyatt phoned me in Texas. Hiram died in the middle of the day in a rocking chair on his porch. Wyatt said: “A peaceful end. I know he was your friend.” He had been. That afternoon after we’d eaten at K & W Cafeteria, he brought me home and said, “Best of luck to you, girl. I will miss you.”
Kip, the undergraduate, invited me to a going-away meal too. His roommate would be there, and my husband was invited. I couldn’t possibly, I said. Kip said, “What? Who cares? You’re moving. They can’t fire you.” So I went. Kip made hamburgers and his favorite childhood dishes. Frozen spinach baked with Hidden Valley Blue Cheese Dressing Dry Mix. Summer squash sprinkled with Butter Buds. Freezer pie made with a graham cracker crust filled with a Cool Whip and limeade concentrate. After dinner, Kip’s roommate pulled out a bag of pot. He and Chet smoked. I did too. I hadn’t since I’d written my master’s thesis. Pot had either gotten stronger in the intervening years, I realized, or I’d lost my tolerance. The next forty-five minutes felt like hours, or like I’d taken LSD—Kip’s face, his roommate’s, Chet’s, cartoonishly young. Then I felt fine, but dazed.