The next morning, I made breakfast again. While we were again eating on the bed, I said, “You didn’t get to the housework yesterday. Do you think you could get to it today?”
“Oh,” she said. “Sure.” Although she had a rather confused expression.
I took another bite of bacon. Then I looked at her and grinned. “Have you ever cleaned a house before?”
I think she laughed. “No,” she said. “I don’t think I have.”
“Really,” I said, “it’s not that hard. Come on. When we finish eating, I’ll show you.”
When we got finished, I took the dishes in to the sink. “I know you can wash dishes,” I said. “I don’t have to show you how to do that.” I got the broom and the dustpan from beside the sink. Marilyn followed me back into the living room. “You move the furniture out from the wall,” I said, pulling out the bed, a bookshelf, the phone table, the chair. “Sweep behind them,” I explained; and in a minute, I brought a small pile of dust to the middle of the floor. “You just get that up with your dustpan and push the furniture back. Not difficult, huh?”
She shook her head.
I leaned the broom against the living room wall and set the dustpan down beside it. “Have you ever made hospital corners?”
“No,” she said.
I went to the bed, pulled loose the sheets from the foot, and went through the summer-camp operation. “Tuck in the foot. Lift in a forty-five-degree angle. Tuck again. You try it on this corner.”
With pursed-lipped concentration, on the other side of the bed’s foot, Marilyn made her first hospital corner. “You don’t have to do that with the top sheet up at the head. Just the bottom. The rest is just spreading it up.”
My model for all this was my mother or one of her sisters showing a new cleaning woman How Things are Done in This House. As such, I’m sure it was shot through with an intolerable arrogance. Still, years before, Mom had spent a fair amount of time instructing me on how to clean. “You’ll probably have to teach your wife how to do all this,” she’d said back then. “You might as well learn it now.” And here it was, happening just as predicted. It all seemed great fun and terribly amusing.
“Okay,” I said. “If it takes you half an hour, I’ll be surprised. I said two hours yesterday just because I figured you’d be pleasantly surprised how much faster it was.” I kissed her on the nose. “Well, I gotta go. We had steak last night,” I opened the door to leave. “What do you want this evening? Chicken or chops?”
“Oh,” she said, standing in the middle of the living room in her robe. “Chicken. Unless you want chops.”
“Chicken it’ll be,” I said. “See you this evening.”
That evening, after work, I got back to the apartment with a cutup broiling chicken, some spaghetti, and frozen beans in a brown paper bag. As I pushed into the apartment, I glanced at the living room.
The broom was leaning against the wall, where I’d left it that morning, the dustpan on the floor beside it. When I took a step toward the living room, I saw that the dust I’d swept up that morning was still in the middle of the floor. The bed, with two hospital corners at its foot, was untouched.
I said, “Hello …?”
From the living room, Marilyn answered, again cheerily, “Hello.”
I turned back to the sink to put the groceries down on the enameled counter — where the dishes were still in the sink. I went into the living room. Marilyn, in her robe, was sitting in the chair. She was most of the way through another thick book — the night before, I remembered now, she mentioned thinking about rereading Daniel Deronda. She was pretty much finished with it, by now.
I scratched my head. “I guess you got caught up in your novel,” I said, “and didn’t get to the housework.”
She looked up, with a small frown. “Hm?”
“Did you just decide you didn’t want to do it?” I asked.
“No,” she said, with a kind of bewildered look, as if I’d just asked her a very silly question.
“Then why didn’t you do it?” My belligerence, I’m sure, was starting to come out.
“I don’t know,” she answered with annoyance, as if somehow I’d mistaken her for Ben and had just asked her some impossible mathematical problem.
(Ten years later, when, by chance, we were discussing this again, Marilyn broke my heart describing how, eighteen, pregnant, and very frightened, she would sit through the first days when I would go out to B & N, sure someone was about to break in and do what, she could not even imagine, afraid to move, flinching at every sound outside on the stairs, not eating, trying very hard to pay attention to the book in her hand, wondering how long it would be till I would be back, her heart pounding when she’d hear, finally, someone push in the door — with a wash of relief moments later, on realizing it was only me. But in the thirty years I’ve known her, I have never heard Marilyn say, as an immediate response to any situation, “I’m frightened,” or “I’m scared.” Taking refuge in her own fears has never been her style. This means, as it often does with incomprehensible actions, there was a certain bravery in what she was doing, even if I missed it at the time.
(That night, however, this was nothing that I knew anything of. And it became an argument:)
“If you didn’t want to do it,” I said, “couldn’t you just say so? ‘I don’t feel like it. I’d rather read a book.’”
“That’s not the point,” she insisted. “Why is housework all that important? You said yourself it was only half an hour of work.”
“Was I unpleasant when I asked you to do it? I mean, after I left, did you say, ‘Fuck him, I’m damned if I’m going to do it’? Really, I’d understand that. It would make more sense!”
“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t think about it at all. Why is sweeping the floor such a big deal?”
But the result was that from then on — at least for the next few months — I did the housework. What was frightening, at least to me, was that I now knew (whether it was because of Marilyn’s refusal to articulate her own fears, or her inability to acknowledge mine) there were going to be vast areas to our relationship that were just “not thought about,” that were not going to be spoken of. And any attempt to articulate them would be met with blank incomprehension that, if pressed, would only lead to anger, hurt, and resentment.
7.2. 1961’s was a hot September. Outside, among the domino games on the sagging bridge tables at the sidewalk’s edge, grubby kids without shirts, in shorts and sneakers, opened both ends of empty beer cans (this was pre-poptop; this was when some women carried a “church key” [a pocket can opener] to rip the necks of muggers or sexual assailants) and used them to deflect arcs from the spuming hydrants up through the harsh purple light of the newly installed vapor street lamps, high enough to spatter our second-story windows with bright drops, while I crouched on the daybed in the living room, working in my notebook in red ball point on a one-act play, The Night Alone, inspired by James Ramsey Ullman’s novel, The Day on Fire, which, though it contained the best, if fragmentary, translations of Rimbaud’s prose poems yet to appear in English, seemed (to me) to have no understanding of the young poet’s psychology.