Ruth had imagined that with the old woman finally out of the house, things would be different, but they weren’t. For one thing she wasn’t really gone, at least not as Zack saw it. He missed her and confessed that some mornings when he came downstairs, still half asleep, he could smell the cinnamon rolls she used to bake. Once or twice he even imagined seeing his mother there, bent over the stove. To him, these were apparently pleasant experiences. Ruth supposed it was fine for a man to love his mother, but his ongoing devotion to such a mean old bat seemed both morbid and unhealthy. Furthermore, she was sick of having to share a home with a woman who (1) hated her and (2) wasn’t even there. To banish Mother Ruth completely, Ruth suggested they remodel the kitchen, which was antiquated and ugly, but Zack, mortified by the suggestion, reminded her that his mother still owned the house. Besides, he said, it would be expensive and they didn’t have the money. The real reason, she suspected, was his fear that in a remodeled kitchen he’d never again smell those cinnamon buns, never see Mother Ruth bending over her stove like she’d done when he was a boy. She couldn’t bear to tell him, of course, that he wasn’t the only one who pictured Mother Ruth in that kitchen. Ruth saw her there, too, every fucking day, which was why she wanted to gut it.
Today, entering that still-unremodeled kitchen, she was not greeted by the specter of her mother-in-law but rather the ghost of her husband’s lunch, last night’s leftover chicken-with-rice casserole, now converted to ripe midafternoon methane. How, she asked herself, and not for the first time, had she come to marry a man whose single genetic imperative was to break, in every conceivable way, his own containment? She slung the crusty lunch plate and dirty silverware he always left there on the dinette into the sink, the clatter causing him to pause in the doorway with an expression of fear, mixed with guilt and disapproval. Oh, please, she thought, do say something, but instead he just shook his head and continued on into the front room.
Returning to the dinette with a wet rag, she banged her hip on the corner of the counter hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. How, she wondered, could the room feel even smaller and more cramped now than it had when Mother Ruth was still standing foursquare in its center, impossible to get around, little Janey crawling back and forth between her trunk-sized legs. Why, especially of late, was she always banging into all the sharp corners and edges? Each morning in the shower she saw new ugly bruises on her shins and hipbones. She never banged into things at the restaurant, which was every bit as cramped, and there was more to bang into.
The front room, where Zack was now pulling on his pants, was dark except for the nervous flickering of the TV (an old Popeye cartoon, one of her husband’s many favorites). On hot days he always kept the place closed up, believing it stayed cooler, so the aroma of flatulence was even more pronounced in here. Feeling her gag reflex kick in, Ruth went from window to window, throwing back the curtains and wrenching the windows up as far as they’d go in their dry, warped frames. She could feel her husband watching her, no doubt puzzling over exactly which bee had invaded her bonnet, but still he said nothing, evidently as determined to avoid a fight as she was to pick one. Only when the last of the windows shrieked up did he finally say, “What’d I do now?”
She opened her mouth, prepared to let him have it with both barrels, then abruptly changed course. “Is Tina here?” Their daughter tended bar most nights and didn’t get home until late, so their granddaughter more often than not ate dinner with them and slept over. If she was upstairs in the spare bedroom, the kind of fight Ruth had in mind would have to wait.
“Uhmm?” said Zack, clearly trying to scroll back. Had Tina come in? “I don’t think so…”
When he started out to move the car, she said “Zipper,” since his shirt was visible in the gap in his fly.
He yanked it up. “Anything else?”
“Actually, yeah. Explain something to me,” she said. “Why do you have to take your pants off to watch television.” Because she really did want to know. Her own father had had the same habit, her brothers, too. Marriage, unless she was mistaken, was some kind of trigger, as if the words “I do” were a signal for them to take their pants off the minute they stepped indoors. Say this for Sully. If he took his pants off he had a reason to, and when the reason no longer applied he put them back on again. Why had she been so hard on him today? Until Roy came in, he’d barely said a word. Him just sitting there at the lunch counter staring into his empty coffee cup had made her every bit as pissed at him as she was at her husband now. Hadn’t she once loved the man? Didn’t she still? And what if, as she suspected, he was sicker than he was letting on? What in the world was wrong with her? In the restaurant, with Sully, just a few hours ago, she’d resolved to treat her husband better; now at home, with Zack, it was Sully she regretted being so hard on. Was it possible her anger had nothing to do with either one of them? Were they simply handy targets, stand-ins for what she should actually be aiming at?
Zack shrugged at her question about the pants, offering her his lopsided grin.
“No, really,” Ruth insisted. “I’m dying to know why men have to take their pants off to watch TV.” A fool’s errand, of course, like an ape trying to explain the kind of behavior he engages in out of sheer instinct. You might as well ask him to explain particle physics.
Naturally, Zack shrugged. “More comfortable, I guess.”
“How’s that?”
He shrugged again. “More freedom?”
“But you don’t take off your shirt. Or your socks.”
“No reason to take them off.”
Ruth massaged her temples even harder this time. “Go move the truck.”
When he headed for the kitchen, she said, “Where are you going?”
He threw up his hands. “I need to—”
“I should let you get all the way out there,” she said, pointing at the big wooden ashtray on the coffee table, itself a landfill acquisition, where his keys sat, plain as day.
Once he was gone, Ruth surveyed the living room. Spread out on the coffee table and sofa were the parts to at least one small appliance — a toaster oven, by the look of it — and, on the nearby love seat, two ancient vacuum cleaners that hadn’t been there this morning, which meant he’d had, for Zack, a good day. At fifty-eight, he was as determined as he’d been at thirty to corner the market in broken, worthless crap, to bring it all home, take it apart and leave the pieces strewn over every flat surface in the house. She’d long ago given up trying to change him, but until recently she’d hoped to reign him in, much as America had once hoped to prevent the spread of communism. On purely philosophical grounds she’d considered her own battle worth waging, but had she really figured it was winnable? The living room before her did not represent mere defeat. She’d been overrun. Blitzed. Routed. How had that happened? Well, one bloody skirmish at a time. A small concession here, a tactical error there, troops deployed to the wrong sector, failures of imagination too numerous to count, leading in the end to spiritual exhaustion, despair and, finally, ignominious surrender. That would about sum it up.
No doubt her strategy had been flawed from the start. Why inform the enemy of your endgame? Why let him in on what you cared about most, what you meant to defend at all costs? Collect all the crap you want, she’d told her husband, just don’t bring it in the house. Even birds know enough not to shit in their own nests. And with this declaration the long proxy conflict had begun. Its first arena had been the garage, which had two large bays, with room to spare for both their vehicles, or so she’d thought, although the flatbed truck Zack used to haul his shit in was half again as wide as the largest pickup. When the floor-to-ceiling shelving started going up along the interior walls, she’d thought, Overkill. (Failure of Imagination Number One: underestimating both the enemy’s ambition and his tidal persistence.) By the end of that year every last shelf was bowed and groaning under the weight of more and more crap. Then, down the middle of the garage, in the space between their vehicles, came the lawn mowers — push and power — as well as rusty bicycles with flat tires and brake pads dangling from detached cables, assorted posthole diggers and Weedwackers. Suddenly the whole place was so booby-trapped that you had to go slow and pay attention both driving in and then stepping out, because there were land mines everywhere — skateboards, Wiffle balls, Hula-Hoops, even lumps of Play-Doh. Along the exterior walls, dented metal drums appeared. Into the empties Zack poured used oil and grease. The others — some decorated with smiling skulls and crossbones — contained the industrial solvents and toxic chemical baths he needed to remove rust from bike chains and other hardware.