Beatrice was unhappy. Well, not exactly unhappy, she thought, correcting herself, but not happy, either. Somewhere in the space between. Maybe “not happy” would be better. Yes, she was “not happy.” That left some wiggle space. But why wasn’t she happy? It was hard to pin down a reason. She was thirty now, a week ago she had left the age of the twenty-something and had entered the realm of the mature adult. Another gray area, the space between twenty-something and middle age. She wondered if this birthday meant that she needed to stop putting bright colored barrettes in her hair, or if she should wear only earth tones. Should she buy a suit for her job at the office?

Beatrice sighed and rolled over in bed. Her husband shifted in his sleep next to her. She looked at him and sighed again. Charlie. Her husband. Five years now. That seemed like a long time, and even longer when she counted how long they’d been dating, how long they’d known each other. They’d met in college, in a sociology class. He’d asked so many questions, Beatrice couldn’t help but notice him. She kept noticing him until she couldn’t stand it any longer and had to ask him out to coffee. Then he had invited her to dinner. A good story, it always had been, how she approached him first. And now he loved her, and she loved him too, she supposed, though she really thought about it only when the possibility of losing him came to mind. She supposed that was love.

Kicking her feet out from under the bedspread, Beatrice fell into a light slumber. She began to dream, and was aware that her dream was not reality, but something she could end if she chose to wake up. She was back in college, in her old dorm room. She was naked, lounging in her dorm bed with Charlie, who was smoking pot and flipping through the late night shows on her small television set. Suddenly, Beatrice remembered that she had a job interview that she had to get to. In the dream it seemed perfectly logical to have an interview well after midnight. In a panic, she threw a coat on over her nakedness, and put shoes on without socks. Charlie drove her, but he was so high he kept forgetting to watch the road and stared at her, flashing her a goofy grin. During a particularly dangerous swerve, Beatrice remembered that she was dreaming and made herself wake up. A strange desire lingered in the back of her mind, to fall back into the dream and finish it. But before she could return to the car and Charlie, the alarm went off.

“Ah what? Time already?” Charlie groped for the clock, knocking over a framed picture on the bedside table. Beatrice sat up and watched him fumble for the snooze button. His eyelids were stuck together; he could hear only the beeping. Beatrice sighed, reached over him, and hit the off button.

“Thanks honey, I needed that,” Charlie mumbled, as he resettled himself and dozed back to sleep. Beatrice reset the alarm. He always looked like a child when he slept—it was tempting to let him sleep till noon.

She walked to her dresser, peeling off her pajamas. She tossed the silky material into a drawer, and opened the closet. Charlie had organized the closet. It would have been easier to have separate closets. Then she could have been more haphazard without noticing the mess she made. But next to his orderly suits, ready for courtrooms and law offices, her pastel blouses and soft sweaters had to be neatly hung on their hangers. So many suits, and all those slacks—everything the same few colors. Charlie being a paralegal still seemed incongruous with his character— that seeming child, sleeping still, working with lawyers to defend people that likely were guilty of whatever they’d been accused of. Beatrice pulled a cream colored blouse off its hanger and slipped it on. When wearing this blouse she always remembered to straighten her back, and hold her head up.

As she munched on toast downstairs in the dining room she heard the water begin to run in the upstairs bathroom. Charlie must have finally gotten out of bed and into the shower. It was half past seven in the morning. She had to be at her desk in the publishing office by eight. While gulping down orange juice she put on her coat and shoes.

It was breezy outside, and gray— the orange and yellow leaves on the trees in the yard seemed to emit more light than the sun. Sliding into the car, Beatrice felt the workday routine taking over.

***

Beatrice pulled back into the driveway at a quarter to six that evening. She always arrived home before Charlie. Sometimes it was lonely returning to an empty house, but today wasn’t one of those days. The office had been crazy—deadlines were coming up and people were growing irritable. Just a few minutes alone in a quiet house without anyone or anything clamoring for her attention, that was all she needed. The sun had broken through the gray clouds, but only long enough to set. The bricks of the house seemed to glow in these slanting rays of sun.

Walking up the steps to the front door, Beatrice remembered when Charlie had carried her past this “threshold.” It was two years ago, and summer. They had paid the down payment, and had just finished moving the last of their things into the house. Charlie had suddenly caught her around the waist and lifted her—he had practically dropped her. They had fallen down together in the mudroom, laughing. She smiled and hung her coat up in the mudroom. It was dark in the kitchen, but she didn’t turn on a light. The house retained its feeling of emptiness, of peace.

Beatrice climbed the stairs to the bedroom, and took off the filmy blouse. She pulled an old t-shirt over her head and kicked off her pumps. On her way to the bathroom she nearly tripped over the picture frame Charlie had disturbed that morning. It was a picture from their wedding—he was smearing white frosting on her nose while she scrunched her face up, laughing. So unlikely, the way memories worked. That scene was engrained in her memory—how the frosting felt on her face, gritty with sugar— yet she couldn’t remember what she had eaten for dinner last night. She placed the picture back on the nightstand.

In the bathroom she washed her hands and splashed her face with water. Brushing her hair back into a ponytail, she noticed something glinting in her hair. One strand of hair refused to lie flat with the rest and curled up from her scalp. It was gray. Beatrice held her breath for a moment. How strange. When had her mother’s hair gone gray? When had she started to dye it a darker shade of brown? Impossible to remember. She didn’t want to pluck it. She tied back the rest of her hair and let the one strand remain, standing apart. It would be silly to dye just one strand of hair, and yet, how could she allow it such a conspicuous position. Beatrice opened the medicine cabinet. All the products she had bought over the last couple of years. So many half empty bottles of different colored liquids. There the hair gel was—behind the eye makeup remover that stung and brought tears to her eyes whenever she used it. She squeezed out a dollop of gel, and smeared it over the renegade hair.

The front door thumped shut. Beatrice straightened up, listening.

“ Hey Bea, where are you! I’m starving!” Charlie called.

“I’m upstairs!” She called back, walking out of the bathroom. His footfalls could be heard on the stairs. “Hey honey.”

“Hey! You look comfortable, are you wearing one of my shirts?”

“Oh, I might be. I just threw something on when I got home from work. Everyone’s so stressed out at the office, it’s lovely to be home again.” She sat down on the bed and kicked her feet back and forth over the floor—that tickly feeling of the carpet fibers sliding between her toes.

“Yeah, ditto that—” Beatrice watched her husband as he took off his suit jacket and dress shoes, and put them back in their places in the closet. He then plopped down next to her on the bed, and kissed her lips. “Your hair looks different,” he said, frowning.

“How so?” It was a leading question. She didn’t want to tell him about the gray hair, she wanted him to discover it on his own.

“I don’t know, the ponytail thing is so—youthful and fresh looking.” He looked at her more closely. “Oh look there—you have one gray hair. Hold still.” Beatrice tensed her muscles and furrowed her brow as she felt him grab the hair, and pull. It detached painlessly.

“Thanks.” The wrinkles on her forehead disappeared, and she could feel the muscles in her back and shoulders relax and expand. The question of the gray area between twenty something and middle age was so easily averted by the plucking of a hair. Charlie held it out to her, now a harmless, insignificant anomaly. He grinned. She took the hair and tossed it in the sink.

“Let’s get dinner going! Aren’t you starving?”

“Always.” Beatrice bounced to her feet. Going down the stairs she was tempted to slide down the thin banister. The blinds were closed over the kitchen window. When had she done that? Charlie never bothered with the blinds, never worried about people seeing in. She hurried across the linoleum to open them. “No wonder it was so dark in here earlier—there, look at the sunset!” Sunsets were always prettier when there were clouds to be stained with color. If one looked long enough, really drank this image in, could it be burnt into memory? Impossible to turn away when faced with something beautiful.

“Very impressive.” Charlie rubbed the back of her neck.

“Whatever we’re fixing, I’m in charge of chopping the vegetables—assuming that dinner involves veggies.” Beatrice planted herself in front of the window, and Charlie brought her onions to chop. She peeled off the papery layers—always hard to figure out where the outside stopped and the inside began. The first layer, thin and moist, came off with the crackly covering. Taking her time, she reduced the onion to a pile of semi-transparent cubes, pausing at times to watch the clouds turn from pink, to orange, to purple. Even after the rest of the sky had turned to a deep blue, the clouds seemed to retain some color. She relaxed with the sounds of the kitchen—the fridge humming, water boiling on the stove, Charlie scratching the sides of the pot with a metal spoon as he stirred pasta into the boiling water. The same sounds every night. No ruptures, no milestones, change was slow and disguised by these routines. Time would slip by, but slowly. Not everything was black or white, and everything in between was much more than just gray.