They were at the top of the stairs. Or she was. She was on the landing. He was balanced on the top step, one hand braced against the wall. He was in a walking cast because he’d broken his ankle stepping drunk off a curb. They’d been fighting all morning and all she wanted was for it to stop. She’d gone upstairs to escape him—he’d been shouting that she’d never really loved him, in that way he did when he had no other argument to make in the face of her complaints. When his apologies weren’t enough, he’d try to make it her fault—his drinking, his cheating, his sorrow and guilt—and then when he couldn’t he’d sob. He’d beg forgiveness. He’d say he wished he was dead and she’d have to comfort him. She’d have to put her soothing hands in his hair. She felt too tired for that, she felt well beyond tired. So she’d tried to escape.
But he’d followed. He’d followed quickly, despite the way the boot on his foot hobbled him, and he seemed so vivid with anger that though he’d never hit her in all their many years together her heart was a rabbit in her chest, and she had the thought that maybe he loved her enough to kill her. “You can’t leave,” he said. “You know Zoe will stay with me. And you can’t take Milo. I won’t let you. I won’t let you go.”
“How will you stop me?” Her voice was strangely calm. She heard curiosity in it. She really wanted to know.
He shifted his weight, but he still looked unbalanced. He’d always been so at home in his body, even when he was drunk beyond sense, that it was strange to see him off-kilter. “I don’t think I’ll have to,” he said. “I don’t think you can do it.”
She stared at him. He seemed so certain.
“You’ve never been able to before,” he said. “All these years, you’ve never been able to do it.”
“I can do it,” she said.
“You can’t,” he said. “Stop trying. You’ll never leave me. I know you won’t. You don’t want to. That’s the problem. You really don’t want to go.”
He reached for her. Who knows what he intended? To hold her tenderly? To beg forgiveness? To grip her wrist like a handcuff and tell her, You are mine, you have always been mine?
She had a flash of pushing him, watching him tumble down the stairs. For a moment she thought it had happened, but no—he was still standing there, angry and forlorn. Slowly he let his hand fall to his side. She’d stepped back before he could reach her.
“You won’t go,” he said. Strangely, he said it sadly.
He was right. She knew he was right.
But not long after that he died.
Margaret
Shall we continue with your story where we left off? he says.
I’ve forgotten just where that was, I say. This is not quite true, but I wish to see if he has really been listening to me, or just pretending to.
—MARGARET ATWOOD, ALIAS GRACE
The Ordinary Extraordinary
Once upon a time there were two girls. One was named Marilyn Kay, but everybody called her Kay, and the other was named Margaret Jean Riley, but they called her Maggie Jean. They were young girls, nurses. It was wartime, and the posters said someone needed them. When they got to the war, it wasn’t quite what they’d expected. When is war ever quite what you expect? For months they’d been getting ready. Basic training in North Carolina, field school in England, even sleeping in their bedrolls in mud near the channel—all this had taught them next to nothing about what would happen to them.
All their lives they had known things, Kay and Maggie Jean. They understood each other, the two of them, because many of the things they’d known were the same. When they were children they knew their mothers loved them and were reasonably sure their fathers did too. They knew their sisters didn’t like them much but in certain moods could be fine playfellows. They knew what they read in books. They knew they were smart. They knew their multiplication tables. And then when they were student nurses they knew such a host of things. Even before they’d learned how to insert an IV they knew what time they had to be up in the morning, what time they had to be back at the dorm, what chapters they had to study for the next day. After they found jobs they knew their patients’ names, what their vitals had been the day before, what meds they’d been given, even what they’d had to eat. It was all right there on the chart. In basic training they knew what bed they were going to sleep in that night. In England they knew not to say bum and what was meant by biscuit and where they could find the pub.
Then they got to the war. They got to the war, Jennifer.
This is how it is when you keep moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary and back again: the world expands to include a fleet of ships; a coastline; the sky, black with planes; and then contracts to the wet heat of your clothing, the taste of salt water in your mouth, and later the routines of helmet baths, amputations, waking to the whoosh and smash of shells, and all of that is ordinary, ordinary. The very ordinariness of it is the strangest thing you could have imagined.