Another Tuesday night I went out and bought plants. I used my American Express card and got seventy dollars’ worth of plants and some plant hangers. The woman in the store helped me carry the boxes out to the car. I went home and drove nails into the top of the window frames and hung the plants. They did not need to be watered yet, but I held the plastic plant waterer up to them, to see what it would be like to water them. I squeezed the plastic bottle and stared at the curved plastic tube coming out of it. Later I gave myself a facial with egg whites.
There is a mouse. I first saw it in the kitchen — a small gray mouse, moseying along, taking its time in getting from under the counter to the back of the stove. I had Dan seal off the little mouse hole in the back of the stove. Then I saw the mouse again, under the chest in the living room.
“It’s a mouse. It’s one little mouse,” Dan said. “Let it be.”
“Everybody knows that if there’s one mouse, there are more,” I said. “We’ve got to get rid of them.”
Dan, the humanist, was secretly glad the mouse had resurfaced — that he hadn’t done any damage in sealing off its home.
“It looked like the same mouse to me,” Henry said.
“They all look that way,” I said. “That doesn’t mean—”
“Poor thing,” Dan said.
“Are either of you going to set traps, or do I have to do it?”
“You have to do it,” Dan said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t want to kill a mouse.”
“I think there’s only one mouse,” Henry said.
Glaring at them, I went into the kitchen and took the mousetraps out of their cellophane packages. I stared at them with tears in my eyes. I did not know how to set them. Dan and Henry had made me seem like a cold-blooded killer.
“Maybe it will just leave,” Dan said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dan,” I said. “If you aren’t going to help, at least don’t sit around snickering with Henry.”
“We’re not snickering,” Henry said.
“You two certainly are buddy-buddy.”
“What’s the matter now? You want us to hate each other?” Henry said.
“I don’t know how to set a mousetrap,” I said. “I can’t do it myself.”
“Poor Mommy,” Joanna said. She was in the hallway outside the living room, listening. I almost turned on her to tell her not to be sarcastic, when I realized that she was serious. She felt sorry for me. With someone on my side, I felt new courage about going back into the kitchen and tackling the problem of the traps.
Dianne called and said she had asked her husband if he would go out one night a week so she could go out with friends or stay home by herself. He said no, but agreed to take stained-glass lessons with her.
One Tuesday it rained. I stayed home and daydreamed, and remembered the past. I thought about the boy I dated my last year in high school who used to take me out to the country on weekends, to where some cousins of his lived. I wondered why he always went there, because we never got near the house. He would drive partway up their long driveway in the woods and then pull off onto a narrow little road that trucks sometimes used when they were logging the property. We parked on the little road and necked. Sometimes the boy would drive slowly along on the country roads looking for rabbits, and whenever he saw one, which was pretty often — sometimes even two or three rabbits at once — he floored it, trying to run the rabbit down. There was no radio in the car. He had a portable radio that got only two stations (soul music and classical) and I held it on my lap. He liked the volume turned up very loud.
Joanna comes to my bedroom and announces that Uncle Bobby is on the phone.
“I got a dog,” he says.
“What kind?”
“Aren’t you even surprised?”
“Yes. Where did you get the dog?”
“A guy I knew a little bit in college is going to jail, and he persuaded me to take the dog.”
“What is he going to jail for?”
“Burglary.”
“Joanna,” I say, “don’t stand there staring at me when I’m talking on the phone.”
“He robbed a house,” Bobby says.
“What kind of a dog is it?” I ask.
“Malamute and German shepherd. It’s in heat.”
“Well,” I say, “you always wanted a dog.”
“I call you all the time, and you never call me,” Bobby says.
“I never have interesting news.”
“You could call and tell me what you do on Tuesday nights.”
“Nothing very interesting,” I say.
“You could go to a bar and have rum drinks and weep,” Bobby says. He chuckles.
“Are you stoned?” I ask.
“Sure I am. Been home from work for an hour and a half. Ate a Celeste pizza, had a little smoke.”
“Do you really have a dog?” I ask.
“If you were a male dog, you wouldn’t have any doubt of it.”
“You’re always much more clever than I am. It’s hard to talk to you on the phone, Bobby.”
“It’s hard to be me,” Bobby says. A silence. “I’m not sure the dog likes me.”
“Bring it over. Joanna will love it.”
“I’ll be around with it Tuesday night,” he says.
“Why is it so interesting to you that I have one night a week to myself?”
“Whatever you do,” Bobby says, “don’t rob a house.”
We hang up, and I go tell Joanna the news.
“You yelled at me,” she says.
“I did not. I asked you not to stand there staring at me while I was on the phone.”
“You raised your voice,” she says. Soon it will be Tuesday night.
Joanna asks me suspiciously what I do on Tuesday nights.
“What does your father say I do?” I ask.
“He says he doesn’t know.”
“Does he seem curious?”
“It’s hard to tell with him,” she says.
Having got my answer, I’ve forgotten about her question.
“So what things do you do?” she says.
“Sometimes you like to play in your tent,” I say defensively. “Well, I like some time to just do what I want to do, too, Joanna.”
“That’s okay,” she says. She sounds like an adult placating a child.
I have to face the fact that I don’t do much of anything on Tuesdays, and that one night alone each week isn’t making me any less edgy or more agreeable to live with. I tell Dan this, as if it’s his fault.
“I don’t think you ever wanted to divorce Henry,” Dan says.
“Oh, Dan, I did.”
“You two seem to get along fine.”
“But we fought. We didn’t get along.”
He looks at me. “Oh,” he says. He is being inordinately nice to me because of the scene I threw when a mouse got caught in one of the traps. The trap didn’t kill it. It just got it by the paw, and Dan had to beat it to death with a screwdriver.
“Maybe you’d rather the two of us did something regularly on Tuesday nights,” he says now. “Maybe I could get the night of my meetings changed.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Maybe I should give it a little longer.”
“That’s up to you,” he says. “There hasn’t been enough time to judge by, I guess.”
Inordinately kind. Deferential. He has been saying for a long time that our relationship is turning sour, and now it must have turned so sour for him that he doesn’t even want to fight. What does he want?