“So you thought you’d fill up a little of that time by fucking someone?” he asked bitterly.
That stung her, but she continued on grimly, tracing it out as best she could, not raising her voice. He had asked. She would tell him.
“I didn’t want to be on the Library Committee and I didn’t want to be on the Hospital Committee and run the bake sales or be in charge of getting the starter change or making sure that not everybody is making the same Hamburger Helper casserole for the Saturday-night supper. I didn’t want to see those same depressing faces over and over again and listen to the same gossipy stories about who is doing what in this town. I didn’t want to sharpen my claws on anyone else’s reputation.”
The words were gushing out of her now. She couldn’t have stopped them if she wanted to.
“I didn’t want to sell Tupperware and I didn’t want to sell Amway and I didn’t want to give Stanley parties and I don’t need to join Weight Watchers. You—”
She paused for the tiniest second, grasping it, feeling the weight of the idea.
“You don’t know about emptiness, Vic. Don’t think you do. You’re a man, and men grapple. Men grapple, and women dust. You dust the empty rooms and you listen to the wind blowing outside sometimes. Only sometimes it seems like the wind’s inside, you know? So you put on a record, Bob Seger or J. J. Cale or someone, and you can still hear the wind, and thoughts come to you, ideas, nothing good, but they come. So you clean both toilets and you do the sink and one day you’re down in one of the antique shops looking at little pottery knickknacks, and you think about how your mother had a shelf of knickknacks like that, and your aunts all had shelves of them, and your grandmother had them as well.”
He was looking at her closely, and his expression was so honestly perplexed that she felt a wave of her own despair.
“It’s feelings I’m talking about, not facts!”
“Yes, but why—”
“I’m telling you why! I’m telling you that I got so I was spending enough time in front of the mirror to see how my face was changing, how no one was ever going to mistake me for a teenager again or ask to see my driver’s license when I ordered a drink in a bar. I started to be afraid because I grew up after all. Tad’s going to preschool and that means he’s going to go to school, then high school—”
“Are you saying you took a lover because you felt old?” He was looking at her, surprised, and she loved him for that, because she supposed that was a part of it; Steve Kemp had found her attractive and of course that was flattering, that was what had made the flirtation fun in the first place. But it was in no way the greatest part of it.
She took his hands and spoke earnestly into his face, thinking —knowing—that she might never speak so earnestly (or honestly) to any man again. “It’s more. It’s knowing you can’t wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It’s knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman—no, for me—that’s a brutal thing to have to face. Wife, that’s fine. But you’re gone at work, even when you’re home you’re gone at work so much. Mother, that’s fine, too. But there’s a little less of it every year, because every year the world gets another little slice of him.
“Men . . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are. They never live up to the ideal, and it breaks them, and maybe that’s why so many men die unhappy and before their time, but they know what being a grownup is supposed to mean. They have some kind of handle on thirty, forty, fifty. They don’t hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down.
“And what a woman does—what I did—was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone. Once, do you know—this is crazy—I was in his room, changing the sheets, and I got thinking about these girlfriends I had