What he left behind was: my clothes; the rest of the kitchen appliances and flatware, including the coffee machine, for which I was grateful because I always favored drip coffee; as well as the kitchen table and chairs, the bedroom chest, the beautiful wooden bed frame and all the bedding (except, strangely, for one pillow); the big red leather chair I bought with my Christmas bonus two years ago; all of our photo albums, which sat on the otherwise empty bookshelves; and the table near the front door, the oversized glass ashtray that sits upon it, and all of the change contained within it.
I looked for a note in the ashtray and also on the refrigerator, which he used for note-leaving sometimes. There was none. I sat on the couch and stared at the space where the entertainment center used to be. I realized I would be driving the truck from now on because of the decision I had made a few days previous, and now I had to live with it. The wrong car, I thought to myself. I picked the wrong car. I’m stuck now. I’m stuck. I made the wrong decision. I am completely stuck.
HE KNOWS A LOT of old jokes, she’s heard them all before. She wants to hear new jokes. He wants her to cook more, look at all of these appliances; she wants him to try just a little harder to make her laugh. If you could just try a little harder. Just try to be interesting. Do something.
I cut a man once, she tells her husband. She says this after they’ve been married for two years, and he’s certain he already knows everything about her. This is just her way of letting him know: Boy, were you wrong.
I cut him right here. She slid her finger sharply across his upper thigh, near the groin. I slashed him. She is sitting straight up, neck and head held high, no pretense, no guise, just her.
Maggie, come on. You did no such thing. His wife is the nicest woman he knows.
I did, too, Robert.
And when did this alleged felony occur?
Robert has been watching too much Law & Order, she thinks.
The summer before my junior year of college, she says. I went a little crazy.
THAT SUMMER, her father made her live with him in Evanston, in a huge, dusty rented house with wood floors and walls so dark and cool, she felt like she was living in an icebox. He was running a writing program as he did every summer, at a school there. He was a famous writer who led a fancy, famous life that she and her older sister, Holly, were usually absent from because he had abandoned them when they were young and moved to California.
But once a year he would be somewhere wonderful, usually on the West Coast, and they would join him, and it was always exciting because there was an ocean! And blue skies! And there was silence, too, and wide expanses of land and trees and sand that were so enormous and inspirational that Maggie and Holly would forget for exactly three months that they were supposed to hate their father. They would nestle together under the stars at night, in his backyard, and talk about their favorite constellations, while their father was off screwing one of his students.
Evanston was not California. Evanston had a lot of trees, but the houses were too close together, and flaccid Lake Michigan was a poor substitute for the untamed, wild beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Evanston made Maggie want to nap all day long.
It was the last summer she was supposed to live with him—her sister, Holly, had already made it out of the system with a self-financed trip to Europe; she sent weekly postcards from beautiful cities, each one reporting both a major work of art she had seen and how many beers she had drunk the night before—and every day, every meal, every conversation with her father made Maggie feel like she had some sort of terminal illness, that she was slowly being killed by a potent and painful boredom. But as she kept most of her feelings inside—mostly because it was more fun in there, but also because she was never proven wrong that way—that boredom turned liquid, like pus inflating a sore.
AND THEN HE made me get a job, she says now to Robert. He wanted me to be an assistant at the English Department. Staple papers. Make copies. File. Or he said he could get me a job doing research for a friend of his doing a book on feminist iconography in contemporary music.
Robert raises his eyebrows.
Madonna, she says.
That actually sounds fun, honey, he says. You didn’t want to do that?
I didn’t want to do anything he wanted me to do, she says. Exasperated, like: you should know how I feel about him by now. She feels like stinging today.
SHE GOT A JOB waiting tables at a country club within walking distance of their house. She had to wear a black polyester dress with a white collar as a uniform. There were tiny black buttons down the front that buttoned nothing, they just hung off the dress. She was told to wear her hair back, so she fastened her thick auburn hair with silver Goody barrettes she bought at the 7-Eleven. She bought black flats with comfortable soles and a dozen packs of tan nylons at Payless. And then she went next door, to the makeup outlet shop, and bought a tube of frosted pink lipstick.
When she walked downstairs the first morning for work, her father said, “Jesus Christ, I didn’t send you to Princeton so you could look like the fucking maid.”
HE HAD A POINT, says Robert.