“And work in a beige, five-foot cubicle for ten hours a day? With no sunlight? Surrounded by stale air and browbeaten, angry people? No, Peter. I can’t spend my life like that. I’m going to terminate the lease on the front forty this year and buy more chickens next spring. I’m going to be a farmer, like my father, and his father. I’m going to sow my fate with the land.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The weight of her decision blanketed the room, silencing both of us, forcing us to confront what we’d both known. Eventually she finished the dishes, hung the rag over the faucet to dry, and sat down across from me.
I looked at her, really looked for the first time in months. The transformation I’d sensed, and resented, in her was complete. The girl I’d married had long, glossy locks of blond hair streaming from beneath her veil. Her cheeks had been flushed as she walked up the aisle and her eyes glowed with tears and simple, untainted emotion. The woman in front of me sat practically emotionless, radiating only a calm confidence. All the romance had been carved from her like baby fat, making her strong, making her whole. Her description of the trees echoed through the air between us, plain poetry that could have graced the pages of any number of pastoral novels, and I realized how beautiful she was, and how insignificant I’d become to her.
“So this is it? It doesn’t matter what I want?”
“You’ll have to make your own choice. Whether you want to stay with me or not.”
“How am I with you now? We don’t talk to each other. We haven’t had sex since last fall. Christ, what happened to us, Mary?”
She was quiet for a minute, to the point where I thought she’d retreated into her silence again, but then she drew a breath and made a quiet admission.
“I think it was easier to be angry with you because you hated it here than be angry with myself because I hated the reason we were here.”
Before I could reply, Elsa shuffled into the kitchen, coughing weakly and asking about dinner. We went through the motions. I helped Elsa to her chair and Mary served something from the crockpot that I ate without tasting. By the time I went upstairs to stare out our bedroom window at the chicken barn, any ire I’d harbored toward Mary had turned inside out. Her honesty was contagious. I’d always assumed I was a good person—eating right, running, living consciously, whatever the fuck that meant—when the exact opposite was true. I was the guy who cheated on his wife while she took care of her dying mother. I was absolute slime.
I stripped off my clothes and was searching for pajamas when Mary came upstairs.
“Under the sheets in the basket,” she murmured and brushed by me, changing into her own.
We both climbed into bed and lay there for a minute. Mary turned on her side and I felt her looking at me. Jesus, she would have been better off with anyone else. Maybe that guy, that window guy, had a crush on Mary in high school. They could have had three kids and a chicken farm dynasty by now. Instead she had a dead father, a dying mother, no children, and a selfish, asshole husband. She deserved so much more.
“You’re right about the windows,” I said.
“I know.”
Another minute passed while I stared at the ceiling and neither of us pretended to fall asleep. Then she propped herself up on one elbow.
“Will you stay?” she asked. “I know things haven’t been good, but that can change, can’t it?”
What changed was that her hand moved under the covers, snaking over my chest.
“Mary.” Everything I couldn’t say was wrapped up in the two syllables of her name. No, Mary. It’s too late, Mary. When you shut me out I didn’t wait for you, Mary.
Her lips touched my neck and I closed my eyes. Inhaled. Her hand slipped down my stomach and I caught it, holding her off.
“This isn’t a good idea.”
“Peter,” she murmured. “Let me try.”
I had no right. Self-loathing coursed through my veins as her hand wriggled free and found a rhythm. And then I was trying, too, rolling her to her back and trying to return her unexpected gesture, trying to act like a husband should, trying to make up for the fact that, even now, Hattie beckoned from the shadows of my mind.
HATTIE / March 2008
SPRING BREAK in Minnesota sucked. There was always still snow on the ground and only the choir people got to go anywhere, because they competed in a tournament in Nashville. I hated country music and Nashville was probably the last place I’d visit, but it was better than Pine Valley. Portia was an alto and she’d brought up the trip constantly ever since Peter posted the cast list for the spring play.
I’d gotten the female lead of Lady Macbeth. Portia was cast as my understudy.
And go figure, that’s also when she started getting really weird about this curse stuff. At first when Peter posted the casting call, Portia had mentioned the curse of Macbeth, but it was all in her gossipy, I-know-more-than-you voice. After she found out she wasn’t in the play, all of a sudden the curse was real. She spent every rehearsal telling us about famous Macbeth accidents, and by the time we held our last session before spring break, everyone was doing her insane cleansing ritual.
The deal was this: if anyone said “Macbeth” inside the gymnasium when we weren’t directly rehearsing the lines, they “invoked the curse.” To pacify the curse gods, they had to immediately run out the door, race around the outside of the gym, spit over their left shoulder, and recite, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us.” Then someone else had to officially admit the person back into the gym before we could continue rehearsing.