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Newsweek
magazine on
the small table beside the chair.
“Would’ve been nice if you’d remembered.”
“Bonnie, I said—”
“And I said stop it.”
He turned the pages of the magazine, not reading. There was only the sound of
her ripping the strips of wool. Then she said, “I want this rug to look like the
forest floor.” She nodded toward a piece of mustard-colored wool.
“That’ll be nice,” he said. She had braided rugs for years. She made wreaths
from dried roses and bayberry, and made quilted jackets and vests. It used to be
she’d stay up late doing these things. Now she fell asleep by eight o’clock most
nights, and was awake before it was light; he often woke to hear her sewing
machine.
He closed the magazine, and watched as she stood, flicking off tiny bits of
green wool. She bent gracefully and put the strips into a large basket. She looked
very different from the woman he had married, though he didn’t mind that
especially, it only bewildered him to think how a person could change. Her waist
had thickened considerably, and so had his. Her hair, gray now, was clipped
almost as short as a man’s, and she had stopped wearing jewelry, except for her
wedding band. She seemed not to have gained weight anywhere except around
the middle. He had gained weight everywhere, and had lost a good deal of hair.
Perhaps she minded this about him. He thought again of the young couple, the
girl’s clear voice, her cinnamon hair.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.
“You just got back from a drive. I want to make some applesauce and get
started on this rug.”
“Any of the boys call?”
“Not yet. I expect Kevin will call soon.”
“I wish he’d call to say they were pregnant.”
“Oh, give it time, Harmon. Goodness.”
But he wanted a whole bushel of them—grandchildren spilling everywhere.
After all the years of broken collarbones, pimples, hockey sticks, and baseball
bats, and ice skates getting lost, the bickering, schoolbooks everywhere,
worrying about beer on their breath, waiting to hear the car pulling up in the
middle of the night, the girlfriends, the two who’d had no girlfriends. All that
had kept Bonnie and him in a state of continual confusion, as though there was
always, always, some leak in the house that needed fixing, and there were plenty
of times when he’d thought, God, let them just be grown.
And then they were.
He had thought Bonnie might have a bad empty-nest time of it, that he’d have
to watch out for her. He knew, everyone knew, of at least one family these days
where the kids grew up and the wife just
took off,
lickety-split. But Bonnie
seemed calmer, full of a new energy. She had joined a book club, and she and
another woman were writing a cookbook of recipes from the early settlers that
some small press in Camden had said they might publish. She’d started braiding
more rugs to sell in a shop in Portland. She brought home the first check with
her face flushed with pleasure. He just never would have thought, that’s all.
Something else happened the year Derrick went off to college. While their
bedroom life had slowed considerably, Harmon had accepted this, had sensed for
some time that Bonnie was “accommodating” him. But one night he turned to
her in bed, and she pulled away. After a long moment she said quietly, “Harmon,
I think I’m just done with that stuff.”
They lay there in the dark; what gripped him from his bowels on up was the
horrible, blank knowledge that she meant this. Still, nobody can accept losses
right away.
“Done?” he asked. She could have piled twenty bricks onto his stomach, that
was the pain he felt.
“I’m sorry. But I’m just done. There’s no point in my pretending. That isn’t
pretty for either of us.”
He asked if it was because he’d gotten fat. She said he hadn’t really gotten
fat,
please not to think that way. She was just done.
But maybe I’ve been selfish, he said. What can I do to please you? (They had
never really talked about things in this way—in the dark he blushed.)
She said, couldn’t he understand—it wasn’t
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