Married Go Round

Danita Berg

The wife put her hands on her hips and considered her husband with what she hoped looked like good-natured tolerance. She surveyed the neighborhood, with its established trees and two-storied homes, so rare in this state. "You are being a little picky," she said. Her old mailbox was rusty and black and worked just fine.

"It's all perfect, really, except for this one thing," he said, wobbling the new mailbox's flag. He frowned at its subpar performance. "It just needs to be tightened a bit. It's almost there." He pulled a quarter out of his pocket to tighten the screw.

"Oh, do come on. It not like anyone's going to notice," she said. She placed her hand over his. "I mean," she said, gesturing to the house's façade and the grand purple bougainvillea bush in the yard, which, they were sure, the neighbors coveted, "look what we have for window dressing!"

He didn't wish to displease her, what with her uneasy history. He pulled her into him and kissed her on the forehead, which made her feel diminished, but she didn't say anything. "Whatever makes you happy, honey," he said, "We'll leave it as it is. For now."

They'd been there for weeks now. The unpacking was almost done. The wedding presents had been brought inside: a gilded picture frame from his old fraternity buddies, kitchen utensils from his mother. Into the union she offered smaller items from her family and her few friends: common glasses, a cookie jar, a knife set from a households store. The latter presents drifted into the corners of the house just as assuredly as her friends had drifted away after the wedding ceremony, waving gently as they walked from the church steps. They didn't want to stay for the lavish reception where their clothes didn't shine in the right way.

He'd already lifted her over the threshold after the honeymoon, commenting almost jokingly about his strained back under her heft. She knew she had no heft, so she smiled even as she filed his comment away for later consideration. He stumbled over the doorway and cursed over the uneven floor. She thought he'd tripped over his own foot but his fits of anger unnerved her, so she chose to keep it to herself.

Inside she'd unpacked the new china, murmuring condolences to the psychedelic orange plates her mother had given her before placing them gently in the trash can, unable to allow them to break. "It seems a shame, really, to just toss these old plates out," she called out. She felt only mild irritation, just a flash of light behind her eyes, watching him watch the television and not answering her. She unwrapped the salt-and-pepper shakers from newspaper and put them on a shelf. The salt-and-pepper set was a gift from a prominent businessman, a friend of his family who'd just last month been featured on the cover of the local business magazine. She thought the set was rather cheap, coming from a man who was supposed to be so respected, but then all she had to defend herself were the plates, and currently they were in the trash.

"They're just plastic, they don't matter," he finally called from the living room. She began to answer that they used to be her mother's and maybe it would be just as good to take them to Goodwill so someone else could use them now, but then she was just thankful that he'd been listening after all, so she didn't say anything. Maybe she'd take the plates out of the trash and hide them in the shelves above the refrigerator where he'd ever think to look, but it seemed like too much of an exertion, one of those lackluster efforts that never really went anywhere. She looked one more time at the plates.

They'd found the house just one month before the wedding, after weeks of searching other people's homes to see if they'd fit into them. This house had been vacated so it was easier to see themselves in it: no couches or other furnishings to distract them. It was established in the right neighborhood. She admired the quaint turrets and he liked the doublewide driveway.

The real estate agent, a shellacked, big-boned woman with hair teased to disguise its thinning, had pointed out the house's obvious fine points: the renovated kitchen with its maple cabinets and granite countertops, the newly glassed-in shower. "Last owners did a great job, but they couldn't keep it," she said, eyeing the couple to gauge their interest. "They're in pre-foreclosure. You could steal it." She opened the door to a back bedroom and winked at them. "Room for a baby." The woman, then still a fiancée, clutched tightly at his hand.

When the moving in was done they toured the neighborhood, taking careful inventory of the people they were just getting to know: the over talkative retirees across the street, the 80-year-old next-door neighbor who kept trying to talk her into nude sunbathing: "So freeing. You should try it." He'd waggle his eyebrows and she would laugh, looking over his shoulder for her husband to rescue her. Everyone was so eager to meet the new couple, polished like pennies, full of the hope that they'd discarded long ago. "It must be so nice to have a man to help with the lawn work!" called out the widow who lived on the corner, secretly hoping that the youngsters might take some pity on her, and the new couple smiled at each other with smug satisfaction. When they drove around the neighborhood in the car they kept their hands close to their laps even as they pointed at their neighbors and discussed who they might be, making up lives to suit them: Lonely widower, angry mistress whose lover just left her—she noticed that his eyes lingered a bit too long on her window as they drove past, so she turned up the radio—but then they were already driving past another house, and that neighbor surely just lost his job, he's holding his shoulders so loosely, and can you believe he is on the lawn in his bathrobe? She drew closer and laid her head on his arm, pretending not to notice when he jogged his shoulder, complaining that the air conditioner must need recharging.

When the women who lived together two doors down brought them flowers from their front yard, the husband and wife offered them lemonade in one of the new glass pitchers. The women cooed over the nice china and the couple's too-green lawn.

"Cecilia, here, she's the one with the green thumbs. She goes the extra mile for our plants," the stockier one said, thumping Cecelia on the back. Cecilia smiled and stared vacantly over the yard. "Mine"—the stocky woman held her hands up for emphasis—"they're all black."

"Goodness!" the wife had said, and they'd all sat on the front porch, drinking the lemonade and trading trips about fertilizer. The husband rolled his eyes behind their backs, causing his wife to giggle, even as she thought about what a nice picture they made, sitting there in the evening's balmy heat. The women made the appropriate comments about how the married couple's names were perfect, such a nice balance of alliteration. "We knew, we just knew," the husband had said, and tittered in what the wife thought was a rather effeminate titter. Still, she smiled indulgently, and rubbed at the tingle in her shoulders.

When his parents, her in-laws, came to visit a month later, they inspected the electrical work and jiggled the flagstones. "Needs some work," said the father, a grey-haired man with distinguished flecks in the cloth of his suit.

"We're doing what we can, every day," the wife said, and her in-laws rolled their eyes at each other behind her back. When the wife tried to please them with a pre-dinner snack of crackers and cheese served on the plate the in-laws had given them for the wedding, the mother-in-law clucked her tongue and said she was glad that she'd brought some frozen lasagne to thaw in time for supper. "That sounds great, Mom," said the husband, who seemed to have thinned in recent days, his pants in constant need of hitching. He looked much more like a son than a husband as he led his father off to admire the new flat-screen television.

The wife perched on the arm of the husband's chair and tried to look perky and attentive, and even took her father-in-law's shushing good-naturedly when she tried to make small talk during the game. The wife put her hand on her husband's back and noticed how her skin seemed more translucent, which pleased and frightened her.

She leaned into her husband. "This is pleasant," she said, and she ignored the thin ringing in her ears, which might have come from the high decibel of the television except it also made her mouth taste of tin. She looked around her house, admiring how she'd placed the furniture perfectly, and forced a yawn to clear her ears and head.

The mother-in-law beckoned to the wife from the doorway. The wife followed her into the kitchen, where the lasagne was already cooking in the stove. Some of the china had been moved to different shelves. But the wife was already being led past the kitchen to the empty back bedroom, where the husband had been storing boxes that he'd kept meaning to break down and burn, once football season was over. The mother-in-law turned on the light in the room and shook her head. "Empty rooms need to find a purpose," she said, and she traced her nails lightly up and down the wife's arm. "Otherwise they become shrines to nothing."

The wife smiled thinly and turned out the light. "Let's just enjoy the dinner," she said, knowing she'd talk to her husband about this later, and he would set things straight.

After the in-laws left and the husband had not set things straight, and they were in bed, she had felt her loneliness pass through her painful as an orgasm, scraping between her legs and singeing her fingertips. She lied there, poignant, and buried her head against his turned back. He murmured something unintelligible and rolled over clumsily to embrace her.

"Everything all right," he mumbled, more of a lament than a question, his voice thick with sleep.

She felt her mouth working, forming silent words. "Yes," she whispered, "just can't rest."

He was already falling asleep again. He patted clumsily at her breast, a marital trespass, and uttered something incoherent and perhaps comforting.

"Maybe I'll go out on the couch until I'm more tired," she said, and he mumbled I love you but out on the couch she felt no better. Shadows danced on the walls when a car passed the house, and a thin light trailed down to the hallway to rest on the door of the room with no purpose. She felt new and exposed and she remembered the sunburn she once suffered as a child, when she'd stayed on the beach too long, and how she had cried when her mother pulled her wet suit away from her singed legs.

In the morning she felt foolish when she woke, hearing her husband's shower already running. One of the neighbors had propped the morning paper against the door for them—such a nice neighborhood this was, really! They were so lucky!—and when she brought the paper in she made sure to pose it carefully against his breakfast saucer, where it made a pretty picture with his scrambled eggs and coffee.

He ate distractedly, she making him nervous with her hovering, so he finished quickly and rushed out the door, where he felt he could breathe again. He called from the car—"Be home at the usual time, love you, what's for dinner tonight?"—and she opened her mouth to tell him that she'd just made breakfast, how did she know what would be for dinner? And how funny it was, how he could sandwich his declarations of love between coming and going, and when he might eat again, but then she remembered the plastic plates and told him she loved him too.

She decided to call her mother, who lived on the other side of town in a place that seemed further away than it was.

"How's my lucky gal?" her mother said. Her daughter heard talk-show television through the receiver and closed her eyes. A pain ran down her nose and she wondered if she should take something for her sinuses.

"Everything is good," she said determinedly. "Do you think you might come for a visit?"

"Ha!" said the mother. "You come to me. Wouldn't feel right, over there."

"But you're my mother."

"That kind of thing doesn't matter when you drive a car like mine into a neighborhood like yours."

The daughter hung up the phone and wondered what else she might do, and how much time had passed, both in that day and in her marriage. It felt like hours; it felt like years. She was having trouble keeping track of the seasons, in that state, with its unfailingly good weather. She found herself out in the yard, and she blinked in the sunlight and considered the bougainvillea, which had sprouted unruly branches. She looked to see if the neighbors noticed; no one was in the yard, but they could come out soon. She hurried into the garage and returned, armed with hedge clippers. Keeping an eye on the shadows of her neighbors' houses, she began attacking the wayward branches. The sun beat down on her from above and below and rose through her sandals from the baked ground. She pushed sweaty hair from her eyes and thought of her mother, who had always been able to coax plants from hard dirt.

The elderly neighbor, sore because the couple hadn't offered to help her with her yard work, called out, disrupting the young wife's thoughts: "You shouldn't be doing that! That's a man's work! Don't you have a man to do that for you?" The wife forced the hedge cutters down on a particularly thick branch, which lashed back and cut at her arms. She felt the eyes of all the neighbors on her, perhaps those of Cecilia, two doors down, who might have seen her husband leaving so quickly this morning. She felt her neighbors' eyes as surely as the eyes of the house were on her now. It watched her solemnly from windows that were dark against the harsh sun. She put her cut forearm to her mouth and sucked, regarding the house, tasting tin again, longing for its air conditioning but staying rooted outside, at least for now.

When the husband found her on the floor of the spare room that evening, she was holding her knees, looking at the empty boxes. The remaining daylight cast a sliver of light onto the floor and she lied in it, a slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

"Honey, what's wrong?" he asked, taking her arms into his hands, inspecting them, tracing the bloody trails on her skin. He considered her uneasy history. "What is this? Why are you like this?" She looked at him fondly and barked out a laugh, startling them both, but then they laughed together at her foolishness, and he partly out of wary relief.

She sat up. "I'm sorry, I don't know what gets into me," she said, and that was the truth, because she didn't really know what pulled at the insides of her, that painful ache that she wasn't able to subside with jewellery making or reading novels and most recently, increasing visits to the liquor cabinet. She wished what was gnawing on her insides would stop.

"I'll go look in the kitchen, right now. I'm sure your mother left something in the freezer for you." She moved quickly out of the room, feeling the heat of the anger he held inside him even as he smiled warmly after her; she being a nuisance, really, just lying there on the floor. He started to say that his mother had left food for both of them, not just him, but really he knew better and so he kept it to himself. He began to wonder about her and thought he should consider things, but then there was his work, and he was hungry, and really, what was the harm in taking a little rest on the floor when no one else was watching? As she kept busy in the kitchen he searched the house, looking for clues as to what might have gotten into her, but found only the tightly made beds, the perfectly lined-up furniture, the freshly dusted television, which distracted him, so he sat down to watch.

In the morning he patted her and made a joke about the circles under her eyes. "You'd think you were the one paying the mortgage!" he said, and made a show of putting his palm against her forehead, checking for fever. Before she could respond he patted her again like a favored pet, his step quick, going out the door and calling out about bringing something home for dinner, if she'd like, please let him know if that would be helpful. She waved wanly out the window at his retreating car before she began stacking the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher, before she tossed the salt and pepper set into the trash.

She found herself at the door of the empty room again, and she put her hand against it, testing it, like she'd been taught in grade school: if the door was hot, surely she shouldn't go in. The door was cool but when she pressed her ear to it she thought she heard a faint scuffling inside, which caused her to back away quickly, and to head back to the safer part of the house, to the bathroom with its cool predictable tiles and the bathtub that enveloped her with its smooth exterior. She rested her head on the porcelain and thought of wallpaper with blue stars and dancing moons, something both childlike and celestial, something that could fill her days and make her feel more there. She wondered when he'd start paying attention. She wondered what time it was.

The sewer system backed up before he got home, he cursing as he came in the door because the thorn of a bougainvillea branch had stuck into the expensive leather of his shoe. She was trying to push the ill-smelling water back into the bathroom, where it had seeped out of the toilet and the drain of the shower stall. "Do you have to use the new towels?" he'd shouted. A vein showed in his neck. She started to say there wasn't time to find her old towels, it was all just damage control, and she was so thankful that he was home because she had no idea what to do. And she didn't want to admit it but she felt like she might be slipping again, and after they fixed this mess, could they fix her too? Instead she palmed a tear out of her eye, bit the inside of her mouth, and walked away.

After the plumbers were called and an estimate of retooling the septic tank was given, the husband sat at the kitchen table, tracing the estimate's large numbers with the expensive pen she'd bought him for Christmas the year before, when neither of them were so obligated and still lived in apartments. "I knew we shouldn't have bought such an old house," he said, more loudly than he'd intended. "I told you we should have bought in a newer neighborhood. Now look," he said, waving the estimate at her. He noticed, with some alarm, that the circles under her eyes were growing thicker and darker, the smudges reminding him of dark-flowered, rotting plants, and he regretted his tone but it was too late to take it back.

"I made dinner," she said quietly, and she placed a plate of sloppy joes in front of him.

"What is this?" he asked, trying to make his tone lighter, like he was kidding. "What are these?" He knew he shouldn't push her but he couldn't help himself. They should be envied, look at where they lived! They should not be eating … this, and from these plates. He picked up the common sandwich and wagged the cheap orange plate at her. He felt the vein throb at his throat. "I thought you'd gotten rid of these." He began to say more, but she went into the living room with her own plate, staring blankly at the television and so he just ate, swallowing his anger with every bite. "I love you," he called out, because he thought he still could. She nodded absently, watching a rerun. She'd taken to watching Christmas movies to pass the time, even though he pointed out to her that it was much too early in the year for seasonal frivolity and that he didn't really much like the movies anyway.

"They cheer me up," she said, watching an odd man running down the street, declaring something about love, and then she cocked her head, as though she heard something. He couldn't help but grab at his arms when a foreign chill ran through him, something that felt like it moved through the house and to the back where he'd packed the boxes that he kept meaning to throw away.

He thought about calling her mother but he knew she didn't like him much, and anyway, he was enough for his wife, he knew that too, he kept telling himself that. That night he took care to hold her in bed, and was surprised at how her body had changed, how she was more fleshy and colder and yet warmer at the same time, at her hands and neck. "Thanks," she said, and he couldn't wait for her to fall asleep, so he could roll back over to the cool safety of the other side of the bed, which he felt he could better understand. He listened to the house settling, its creaks and the thin high pitch of something electrical turning on, and remembered that they still hadn't put their wedding picture in its frame.

The next day he brought her flowers. He found her out on the porch with a pitcher of lemonade, shared between her and the women neighbors from two doors down whose names he'd already forgotten. He held something under his jacket that wriggled. He waggled his eyebrows at her in conspiracy but she turned her back. He sat the flowers down on the new table he'd picked out for the lanai and sighed more theatrically than he'd intended. He knew better, especially in front of the neighbors.

"Cecilia was just wondering how you made that bougainvillea grow so robustly," said the bigger woman. "I mean, didn't you just trim it? And there it is, already reaching for your rooftop again!" Cecilia chewed at the insides of her mouth and looked across the lawn.

"I can't control it," the wife said, and he was sure he heard her voice tremble slightly, "I keep coming out here with the garden shears, but still …"

What he heard in her voice made him produce what was wriggling under his shirt. The dog had called out to him from the puppy shop all week, tapping at the glass when he walked by it on his way to his lunch spot, it looking so sad, really, that he had to rescue it. It reminded him of something before, long ago, that he could not put his finger on. "Here, this is for you," he said hopefully, now, and gave his eyebrows one last hopeful wag.

He didn't understand it when she rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hand. The dog jogged between them. "He's very cute," she said finally, when she saw the women giving each other conspiratorial looks.

"Not as cute as you!" he said with gratitude, and he reached to pull her over to him, pulling her shirt up to expose her stomach, stroking it with determination. "Isn't my wife so pretty? I mean,

I've seen other girls let themselves fall apart as soon as they get married, but look at her!" She struggled to pull her shirt down, and the women looked at each other, raising their eyebrows.

The dog considered them both. It walked over to the man, rubbing its face against his shoe. The man absently picked it up. The wife squinted at the dog and wondered at her husband's words. Her stomach burned where he had touched her. "It's very sweet, but it's not exactly—¬"

"Not yet," he said, "we're not ready yet." He felt the hot flash of his anger rising from his stomach. It wasn't fair, really, that she was allowed to act like this; she was exhausted, exhausting, and now he was tired too.

They sat in their discomfort. He scanned the lawn, which was deep green. He watered when the county told him not to because of the drought in the state. He was prepared to pay the fines if necessary: he paid a service to treat the grass with chemicals and to trim the lawn's edges. He was prepared to pay whatever it took, it was an enviable lawn, even with that fucking bougainvillea, God it grew so fast, but surely if he paid some more the lawn service would take care of that too? He felt the sick heat of his anger in his stomach again, because, c'mon already, what did it take?

The air crackled with dry heat, and the nervous women began to make quick excuses about needing to get home before it started to rain. He closed his heart when she started to cry. He swallowed bile and knew, then, that a puppy wasn't going to be enough to seal the deal, and what would, he just didn't have in him. He thought of the financial files he stored upstairs, which he'd have to make sure to bring with him if he left her tonight—when he left her tonight, he knew now that he'd do it before it got worse. Time had passed, how much he had no idea, but this was not what he had pictured when he'd lugged her into the house, over the threshold, that time ago. He held the wriggling dog too close to him, it struggling to be let loose, and thought of the single girl down the street, and how she might not be as much trouble. The heat of the house pulsed through him again and he knew he'd had quite enough, already, and perhaps there was not as much reason as he'd originally thought there was to try to stay put. He felt a strain in his back. The sun was hovering low, but in this state that could mean anything. He had to look at his watch to discover the time. An uncharacteristic breeze pushed through the neighborhood and the branches of the bougainvillea swayed and dipped. The wife looked towards the end of the house, where the room that held his empty boxes stood, and her mouth worked. Her lips stretched over her teeth but then she just looked down at her feet and mumbled something about needing to make dinner, and couldn't they excuse her?

That night, after the neighbors made a clumsy escape and she'd cleaned up, without speaking, the piddles the puppy left on the floor in the dining room, she went into the living room, where he was watching something on TV. She sat down next to him, because she couldn't think of what else to do. There was no place to go in that big house, which enveloped her and made her feel as though she was trespassing. She looked out the picture window, at the lights in her neighbors' houses, and wondered what they were doing: fighting? Worse, sitting in their silence? Or were they just eating together, talking about things that wouldn't matter tomorrow, but were somehow important today? She was envious of what might be going on.

She looked at her husband, his weak chin and countenance, his leg nervously jogging as though he had somewhere to go, and felt a surge inside her, white hot and electric. She began to move her hand to place it on his knee, but he stared vacantly at the wall. She wished he would hold her, that he'd put his arm around her shoulder, not out of obligation but out of need. She wondered why he would start now.

"We could still make it work," she said. "We could—"

"We'll do whatever you want to do," he said before she'd taken in air to say the rest and then headed upstairs to pack up the files he'd been thinking about before she had time to reply. The house was silent. The air conditioning clicked on. Both listened to the puppy's toenails click on the tiles as it explored the corners of the living room. Finally her sobs shuddered through the house. He cried too, although silently, and he bit his lip hard to make himself stop before going downstairs.

"This is only for a little while," he said, scooping up the puppy. "I want to clear my head. We'll talk later," he said before walking into the night. But they both knew that wasn't true.

Later she'd remember his sparse chest hair and how his toes had just enough fuzz on them to be adorable. She'd remember these last remnants of him after she'd packed the orange plates and the picture frame they'd never gotten around to putting a picture in, after her mother had finally showed up at the house to help pack her belongings with her untold I told you so's. She'd wonder if they couldn't have tried harder, even though she hadn't known what to do differently. She'd tell people that he'd been cold, and he'd say she'd taken to drinking, he could smell it on her like dead leaves and fear. Both would say the other had been ungrateful.

When the mother offered up the wife's childhood bedroom for a while, just until she figured out what to do, the wife just shook her head. "I think I just want to be alone for awhile," she said and then laughed her wild bark and told her mother not to mind her, she was tired.

The wife wiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands as she pulled out of the driveway for the last time, the few things she wanted from the house tossed into her backseat. She saw Cecilia arguing with her mate on their lawn and the single girl pulling back the curtain to watch her go. Before she'd left the wife had already placed her fingers to her lips and then placed them upon the spare room's door which still pulsed with heat, although it was lessening, to the point that the wife wondered if perhaps she'd just imagined it, gone crazy, gone loco, gone nutso just for a little awhile.

The retired woman paused from her gardening to watch the moving truck leave the house. She hadn't seen the husband for weeks; apparently someone had come for his things. A For Sale sign, marred with the picture of a shellacked woman, had been erected in the lawn; she hoped that someone else would claim the house soon, before the lawn became overgrown and the bougainvillea bush became even more unruly. The woman walked over to the house and shuddered; at night, when she looked over at it from the comfort of her own home, its too-big windows and front doors seemed to yawn at her, although in the sunlight, the house was merely overwhelming and not shocking at all. She pulled her light sweater tighter around her; she wondered if an odd chill had just run through the neighborhood, but she wasn't sure; her skin and bones felt frailer every day.

She looked at the grass and frowned. She shook her head at the tread marks left in the yard. Someone would need to fix that; blemishes like those weren't allowed in this neighborhood. "No matter where you go, somebody always has to leave a mark," she said. She rubbed at the earth with her shoe.

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