You fuckers, you masochists, you wolves in sheep’s clothing: Whereare you?
“This reality show blows,” I say aloud as Maeve tugs me back to the house. The wind whistles in reply.
16
At first Caleb arguedthat he didn’t need a job.
“We have money,” he said. “What’s the rush?”
He would go to graduate school in a year, he said. Or the year after that. Or we could travel.Let’s take the baby toRome!We could feed each other handmade raviolis at some patio table tucked away on some cobblestoned alleyway while Clementine slept peacefully in one of our laps. He would get a jobeventually—finance, maybe, or law; he could teach, or own some business; he’d always been fascinated by the world of day traders, or maybe he could open a bar!—but there was no need to rush into it. Why not enjoy this special period of our lives, newlyweds with a newlyborn?
By the end of this argument, which was delivered to me at least a dozen times, my teeth would be so clenched that my jaw felt wired shut, and I would have to take several long breaths before I could reply, as coolly as possible, that the idea of taking our one-month-old to Europe made me want to stick my head into an oven and turn up the burners.
“Fine,” he would say easily. “No Europe. No travel. Let’s buy that farm!”
At which point I would shake my head and say in exasperation, “Do you know how much work afarmis? I can’t do that with a newborn!”
“I think it would be fun. We could get some chickens and cows. I’ve always wanted to ride a horse!”
“We’re not buying a farm right now, Caleb.”
“Okay, then let’s buy a house. Settle down. Grow some roots.”
“Buy a housewhere?”
He gestured out the kitchen window. “How about here?”
I imagined buying a house on my mother’s street. Caleb’s father would undoubtedly give us the money for it. We could pay cash. Our expenses would be negligible. And each day, as all the husbands drove home to their families, at least one man would glance over at our house, where the car would already be parked, the football game already on, and slowly, the word would get around: the new couple in town were a shameful pair.
You had to hand it to my husband, this fairy-tale fever dream of a man-child I’d married: he’d offered the only vision of the future that felt more damning to me than the one of us carrying a screaming infant around Italy.
It was hard to keep my cool during these conversations; hard, even, to think straight when I felt a desperation so overpowering it verged on self-harm. My husband’s lack of ambition was astounding, quite literally hard for me to comprehend. I’d never known a man who didn’t want to work. Then again, I’d never known a rich man. Was this what happened when you were born into such wealth and preestablished power? Or was this the only clear way in which my husband, the father of my child, was special?
“People don’t just work for money,” I tried. “They do it to create meaning in their lives. To establishorder.”
At this, he smiled wide, revealing his yellower-than-I-remembered teeth. “Why can’t I stay home and help you with the baby?”
Because your idea of helping with the baby is saying “Awww, isn’t she cute?”I thought but didn’t say.Because you aren’t even remotely helpful with the baby, you can’t clip her nails or apply her diaper cream or give her a bottle in the dark without causing her to wake up, and because I don’t need you to be a nanny, I need you to do the things I cannot do and be the things I cannot be. I need you to get a job, dear husband. I need you to be a man.
“Because it’s not healthy to do nothing!” I screeched instead.
These conversations always ended in some relatively agreeable place, where Caleb would promise tolook aroundonline forsomething that might fit.And then five days would pass, and I would ask him how it was going, and he would give me a blankly shameful look, the look of a dog who’d briefly forgotten they weren’t meant to piss inside, and then I would have to walk into the bathroom, shut the door, lock it, turn on the shower and the bathroom faucet, and scream into one of my mother’s lovingly embroidered hand towels.God bless this house!
And then one afternoon Caleb came home with the weekly grocery haul and a new yoga mat. “For exercise,” he said, when my mother asked nervously what he planned to do with it.
“Ah!” she said. “Of course.” But she kept glancing at it with a look of genuine terror, like it might just become a murder weapon if she didn’t keep tabs on it. Eventually after dinner, she picked up the yoga mat and disappeared down the hallway. When she came back, the yoga mat was gone. She caught my eye and winked.
But my husband had other plans. The next day he wandered around the house, whistling absently, opening drawers and closet doors until he found the mat rolled up behind the umbrella stand. He took the mat, stepped outside, rolled it out in the driveway, and dropped to his stomach in the early morning sun. I watched through the kitchen window, stricken, as a seemingly infinite line of cars rolled past us on their morning commute, a long procession of men in suits glancing out with suspicion at the young father frozen in downward-facing dog on a Tuesday at 8 a.m.
This was it: the moment I lost my patience. So I did what any good Christian woman would do when she can no longer bear to do nothing: I went to my mother in tears, and she instructed me to callhismother in tears, and then his mother calledhimin a hurricane of humiliation and fury.
The journey to California was silent. Caleb drove the whole time. He was angry with me, obviously, but I think he was also shockedby what I had done. And do you know what? It was strangely gratifying to watch him sit there in the driver’s seat, grinding his teeth with anxiety, occasionally looking over at me and just as quickly looking away when he caught my eye. I’d spent the last month becoming slowly horrified by certain aspects of my husband’s character, traits that were emerging only long after the opportunity had passed for me to change my mind about picking him, so it felt like the inevitable next step for him to become equally horrified by me. I could practically watch his brain as it made slow, thoughtful jumps toward grand conclusions: Natalie, the perfectly agreeable wife, was capable of going behind his back and complaining to his mother. Natalie, the prim and faithful girl, was not afraid of snapping at her husband’s neck. Maybe even: Natalie was not as pretty as he remembered. (Was it just him, or was her face a bit more …angular,perhaps, than it had looked at their wedding? Had her chin always been so pointy? Had her eyes always been so lifeless, so cold?) Oh, what a shame, what an absolute shame. Poor Caleb had been conned, bamboozled, tricked! His young, beautiful, fertile wife had been so relaxed for the first year of marriage. So easygoing. So quiet! She hadn’t demanded a single thing. Now—cue the horror movie soundtrack in his head,dun dundun!—she’d started to speak up. She’d started to make some demands.
As we drove through the flatlands in silence, I could practically hear our minds moaning in unison:It isn’t fair.
Six hours into the twelve-hour drive, Caleb cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t know that—”
“Volume,”I whispered in terror. I was practically sitting sideways in the passenger seat, glancing backward at the car seat every thirty seconds. Clementine was napping fitfully; each little squeak she let out made my back go rigid with fear. I glanced over at him, then whispered proddingly, at the volume I wanted him to match, “What didn’t you know?”
