Harriet's Story,
This Time With Feeling
Walter never made sense to me.
I married him because it's what you did. It's what my mother did. My grandmother. It's what all the girls in my neighborhood did. They found men, and they supported those men through thick and thin. In my life, women were crutches. Stepping stools. Vacuum cleaners with breasts.
My husband never had any sense of elegance, no grasp of sequence or consequence.
When a storm rides up the coast, it leaves debris. Loose boards, paper cups, flotsam, jetsam. Nothing but discards and broken things.
That was Walter. He'd come home from work – sales manager at a pigment plant, where they sold dyes and pigments to cosmetic manufacturers, mostly – and his process was a casting off, a dismissal of the order I'd created.
That's what I remember most about Walter. The signs of his passing.
He'd have pigment on his shoes, and there'd be blue footprints on the carpet.
He'd kick those shoes off under the coffee table and leave them there.
Dirty handprints on a shirt, a curtain, the armrests of his chair.
A tie hanging on a doorknob or the headboard to our bed.
A greasy highball glass on the corner of the nightstand.
His very touch was like cancer. He'd take a good thing – organization, cleanliness, perfection – and subvert it, diminish it, dirty it up and dry it out.
Our intimate life was no different. He'd lie atop me, grunting and thrusting. Always with that grotesque slapping of skin, like the sound of a chorus of frogs or toads forever applauding.
His hands were always so sweaty. His hair, too, by the end of it. I felt drowned in the stuff. He ate submarine sandwiches during the day. Oil, vinegar, onion, garlic. It came out in his sweat; wherever he touched me, he left that odor behind. I felt greasy. Pawed. Molested.
Walter was a clumsy ape.
Three years into our marriage, Walter wanted to have children. He told me so right after dinner. We never ate together; it was always him at the coffee table and me in the other room, at the breakfast nook, waiting for him to be done so I could go try to clean up his messes before they left a permanent mark.
That night I'd made rigatoni in pink sauce, a vodka sauce. I remember this as plain as day. One of the noodles had jumped the edge of his plate – he was always so sloppy with his eating – and sat there on the carpet. It was like a worm, burrowing in. The melted Parmesan cheese had already stuck to the fibers. The pink sauce had already soaked in. I thought, I'll need to steamclean the whole carpet. Again.
That's when he said it.
He stood up, put his hand on the small of my back as I bent over to pick up the fallen noodle, and said it so matter-of-factly.
"Let's have kids."
Three words. Each word a clump of dirt. Each a dirty noodle on the carpet.
I stood up and I had my first moment of rebellion.
I said, "We'll have children when you stop acting like a dirty little baby."
Walter had a chance there. He could have saved himself. He could have said something nice or just said nothing.
But he opened his mouth and said, "You watch your goddamn mouth."
And he did this… thing. He grabbed my wrist – the wrist that led to the hand that still held that stupid rigatoni noodle – and he gripped my wrist tight, so tight it hurt. He meant for it to hurt. I saw it in his eyes.
I pulled my hand free.
"That settles that," he said.
Then I walked into the kitchen.
I went to the blender. It was old, an Oster two-speed with the beehive base and the heavy glass pitcher.
I picked it up by the handle, and I marched back into the living room.
Walter had slumped back down in his chair. He looked up at me as I stood there.
"What are you doing with that?" he asked.
And I bashed it over his head.
It didn't knock him out, but it hurt him very badly. He fell out of the chair, bleeding, and couldn't stand up no matter how many times he tried.
I pulled him into the kitchen.
I got out the block of kitchen knives, plus a meat tenderizer, plus a meat cleaver.
I cut him apart. Starting out and moving in, so he was alive for much of it. Fingers whittled down. Toes. Fillets of calf, thigh, bicep. Two hundred pounds of flesh. And buckets of blood settling into the grout-lines of the kitchen tile.
I put his bones in trash bags. I put his meat into the garbage disposal.
The disposal was a good one. It only jammed at the end, with his scalp hair. It broke it, actually. Smoke drifted up from inside the drain's mouth.
I didn't know what to do, then, so I called the police and waited.
They arrested me. I didn't resist.
No bail for me. The community was apparently quite shocked at the turn of events. Our neighborhood was quiet, middle-class; the most that ever shook the sheets was a domestic abuse charge, or maybe some kid setting off car alarms.
A wife chopping up her husband was a big deal.
It made national news for a while – just a blip, but an important blip.
It attracted Ingersoll to me.
They went to transfer me to the courthouse for trial, but it's not like they had me under intense scrutiny and security. I was an early-thirties housewife who had quietly gone along with everything they asked.
They didn't expect a truck to broadside the van.
They didn't expect me to be extracted and whisked away.
But that's what happened. Ingersoll found my story, and believed that something very important – something very useful to him – could be found in me.
He was right. He's been spending the better part of ten years grooming me. Cultivating my cruelty the way you might prune a bonsai tree. It's more about what you cut away than what you leave behind, I assure you.
That's where I'm at, today. I owe him everything. That's why what I'm going to do today, with you, pains me so very much. The last thing I want to do is disappoint him.
But this is what he instilled in me.
I do not enjoy competition. Too many mouths and not enough food. You see?