Keeping House

By Alex Sladky

 

Late August, we drove up to the house in the rented moving van and toasted each other with champagne all the way there. I filled and refilled the plastic champagne glasses from the bottle we got for the occasion. We toasted the real life, the grown-up life, jobs for the next thirty years. It got to my head pretty fast and I held to the place on Jack’s knee just beneath the steering wheel. We sat in the uncomfortably straight-backed seats of the van, bouncing against the gravel road that wound up the steep hill. Jack looked over at me and in between gulps of champagne told me that we were going to love the place for maybe the fortieth time that day. He gunned it up the last stretch of the hill. The van jerked and gravel spit when he made the halting stop.  I held the champagne bottle between my thighs. I drank most of it. The van jerked our bodies forward.  I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

The landlady sat on the front stairs. She got to her feet when she saw us coming. Jack made this big show of it. He opened my door for me and took my hand to help me down from the van. My heels slipped on the gravel and then sunk into the dirt of the front yard, right before the front steps. I took them off so I stood barefoot in the grass. The landlady shook our hands. She had the papers in her left hand and a pen too. We signed without a word. His signature then mine. It was official.

Jack picked me up so my body hung over his shoulder, my hair in my face, my head level with his belt. I laughed too loud again, holding onto his belt loops and he started up the stairs. 

The woman said, “I don’t want no shenanigans up there now.”

I held my breath then. The same as I had for six years before – not sure what I was waiting for, and not sure what I was supposed to be expecting. I waited until we were on the porch to laugh more, after Jack put me down, and his shoulder didn’t push into the soft part of my stomach. Blood rushed back down from my face and it felt like I was floating. Jack’s hand slipped twice when he tried to get the key in the lock. I thought for a moment that it was almost like we were getting hitched. Something didn’t feel quite right.  I couldn’t get my thoughts straight, but there wasn’t anything new there. I stood in the kitchen and Jack asked didn’t I love it. He didn’t wait for my answer, but headed back down to the van, which we had rented by the hour.

We moved all the boxes in then. Jack carried them up, two at a time, and I opened them with the Swiss Army Knife, the one that Jack kept on his key chain. Box after box of books, I started to wonder if we’d have to buy more book shelves – and how did we end up with so many books in the first place? He got all the boxes up and stood just inside the open door, his arms crossed over his chest. He watched me. It was warm, August heat and the champagne got to me at the same time, I was sweating and my face was red. I pushed the bangs out of my eyes as I looked at him. He stepped over the boxes, as though my gesture was an invitation.

“I’ll be back.” He touched the side of my forehead and kissed the edge of my lip where I could feel damp sweat. He carefully picked his way back over the boxes.

“Where are you going?”

He waved a hand over his head on the way out the door and was gone.

Facing the lower shelves, I sat back down on the floor to wait. I placed each book on the shelf deliberately. This was the life we were building.

Jack returned with a flat of pansies and paper bags with whiskey and gin and tonic water. It was getting dark. With drinks in hand, he sat down beside me near the bookshelves. It was a cardboard city in there, but we sat around the clutter like it was nothing.

By four A.M. we had all the books organized, and Jack sat at the counter – on one pad of paper he had an outline going for the shelves he was going to build, on the other he had a few lines of poetry. I had a paragraph or two down of a story. It didn’t take long and he was down to half the bottle of whiskey, and I had gone through just as much gin. There was a whole lime cut into wedges in a sad pile on the counter. We ended up on the floor, leaning against the cabinet doors with the handles level with our heads.

Jack kissed me and topped off my glass.

My stomach burned and I didn’t know if it was from the wanting him, or from the gin, but it felt good. Sometimes what we know for sure is what we need at least for that moment. He kissed me and I felt the tile floor on my back, cool and hard. There was no moon out, but the stars were bright through the trees and even through the window. I stared out at what looked like void through the window over the sink, and thought you couldn’t get more perfect than this.

“Do you think we can make this work?” Jack pulled back and looked into my half closed eyes, he held my hair back from my cheeks. His eyes were glossy.

I framed his face with my palms and said, “This is all I want.” And it was true. What a thing to say, what a thing to admit. That would make it into one of his poems I was sure. And then I’d read it and know he really meant it, know that we were in it for good.

Jack rested his head on my breastbone. Maybe he was crying, maybe it was sweat. But he was breathing hard and unevenly. We almost fell asleep like that, on the tile floor beside the kitchen sink. And sure, nothing changed. Not really. That was just it, I thought to myself while I felt the tiles leaving a checkerboard pattern on my back. We were the same as we had been six years ago, only now we had the house and the jobs. It was a wonder that our plates and cups and forks weren’t made out of plastic. It was a wonder that we were there with all of our big ideas about life was supposed to be like. We were playing house. Nothing changed, not as much as we thought.

***

In the morning, I woke up on the bare mattress of the bed, the one without a frame. Jack was not there, but I heard him kicking boxes flat on the front porch. When it was quiet, after I heard the car pull out of the driveway, I got up from the bed and found the note on the counter written on the torn flap of a cardboard box. He had gone to the hardware store. It was noon already. In the mid-day light the place looked wide open and empty. It was hard to tell if we were moving in or moving out. The only thing was those flowers on the countertop. The window boxes outside the kitchen window above the sink were filled with dry summer leaves. I sighed and dug into the box labeled “bedding.” Feather pillows and comforter. I carried them into the bedroom. Piece by piece, I laid them in a pile on the bed.

It was maybe four when Jack got back. I had to walk over books to meet him at the front door. A few piles ended up knocked over. There were so many books. I told Jack that I had the bedroom almost done.

“Good,” he said. “We won’t have to sleep on a bare mattress.” Then. “Mark called this morning. They’re going out tonight. Last minute. Him and Addie and Sam and Molly.”

I looked down at the counter top, “Why not?”

Jack set the bag onto the counter – an electric drill and a whole case of bits. “All right then, we’ll go.”

He walked into the bedroom with the drill and left it just inside the door. He saw the blankets in a heap on the bed and made some joke about how he thought I said the bedroom was almost done. I half laughed.

We started getting ready around six. Jack mixed the drinks. We stood in the bedroom, Jack had his head in the closet, and I leaned against the doorframe. It was so quiet I could hear the hangers rub against the metal bar in the closet. I crossed my arms over my chest, and a droplet of water ran down the side of the glass onto my foot. With the ties draped over the lifeless shoulders of the hangers, he held two vest and tie combinations up to his chest. The idea was that I choose which one looks best. It was like choosing different flavors of ice cream – it’s all ice cream no matter how you look at it. But maybe that was what we’d come to. I took a long sip from the drink.

“The one on the left.”

Jack considered this for a moment. Once he had it all on, I straightened the tie and adjusted the vest. We stood side by side before the mirror. He would be too hot in the vest and tie and button down shirt. I was not much better in my cardigan. It was still August, after all. I thought that we ought to be going to school instead of to the bar. I sighed and finished off my gin and tonic and Jack was there to kiss my wet lips before I’d even swallowed the whole gulp. I wondered what happened to all the shirts I used to wear when we all went out in grad school. They were probably in one of the boxes we hadn’t unpacked yet, one of those that was still cluttering the living room, stacked up in the corner like a piece of furniture. Still thinking about it, grad school wasn’t that long ago, all those parties weren’t so long ago either. A few months and it was gone, and we were toasting our new life. I fished the lime out of the ice cubes in the bottom of the cup, and squeezed it into my mouth.

On our way out the door, I refilled my glass: half gin, half tonic. On the way down the stairs from our half of the house my heels clicked and Jack took my hand. He kissed me, quickly on the cheek, then the forehead. They were nervous kisses, and I tried to think back to the last time we did this, or even went out to dinner just the two of us. The landlady sat in a chair by the front window. I tried to make my glass inconspicuous, it didn’t work. I waved anyway and she shook her head at me, her lips pursed and serious. I couldn’t think if we ever saw her smile.

Jack and I got into the car. The drive to the bar was easy. Once we were down the long stretch of hill, it was a straight shot right at the end of Main Street. It was at the edge of town, past the apartment complexes, standing like saltboxes of red brick, to the very end of the road. The fluorescent advertisements for all different kinds of beers lit up the parking lot. I downed the rest of the drink and left the cup in the car. I held onto Jack. He was being responsible, and I reminded myself that I should say something nice about it later that night when we were alone.

The lighting in the bar was dim and the air was hot and stagnant. Jack adjusted his tie, loosening it. We made our way towards the back of the room, to the table next to the jukebox. All four of them stood up. Molly and Addie hugged me at once, and they laughed loudly. Sam and Mark shook hands with Jack. The green and purple neon lighting from the jukebox made everyone look pale and pasty. Jack looked like he was trying to remember how this worked. No one else seemed to notice. Molly and Sam started right in with the news. It had been a while. Molly and Sam and Mark and Addie had their weddings at the beginning of the summer – so there were honeymoons then and keeping houses. Not long after that there were new jobs and they each came home to just one other person, too tired to go out just any old time. Those things needed planning and preparation now. It was hard to hear, and Jack touched my arm before he got up to get our drinks.

Molly held the silver chain she wore around her neck towards our faces, “They told us we couldn’t wear our rings at work. Isn’t that absurd?”

I looked over at Sam: he didn’t have anything around his neck. The ring was probably at home on the dresser.

Molly rubbed Sam’s thigh underneath the table. “It’s not like we’re screwing around in the break room.” She paused. “Anymore.” 

Addie hardly waited a beat and then said what we were all thinking, “That’s exactly what you’re doing, and we all know it.”

Molly looked wounded for a moment, then tossed her head in an elusive manner. We laughed.

“Don’t you think you’re getting kind of old for that kind of thing, Sammie boy?” Mark shook his head in mock seriousness.

Sam winked at Molly. “You’re never too old for that kind of thing.”

Addie sighed and rested her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. “Nothing that exciting happens where I work.”

I waited for Jack to tell a story about us: I never heard it. He didn’t have one. I thought about how this looked, all of us sitting at the table. Addie and Molly had their hair done, their make-up perfect. It was easy to tell we were fresh out of grad school. I listened to their stories. I waited for Jack to say something. There was nothing. I tried to remember what didn’t seem appealing about getting married at the beginning of the summer. It would have been nice to have the same easy, light conversation. We weren’t ready. I knew that, a little too well. I told myself that, if we continued not to be ready for long enough, it wasn’t meant to be. It couldn’t be that easy. Jack brought me another two drinks. 

“How are those kids at school? Giving you any trouble?” Sam finished off his beer. 

“Oh, they’re good kids. They’re just kids is all, but they’re good.” Jack looked at me. I couldn’t think of what he was looking at me for.

“You know,” I said, “it’s fun. A whole lot of stress, and a whole lot of energy.” I bet we looked exhausted too. 

I waited for Jack to say something more. He didn’t. No one told us we couldn’t wear our rings at work. It was simple and easy and we were bored out of our minds. I couldn’t say that then though, not to Mark and Addie and Sam and Molly. Not before I told Jack. Which sounded easier than it was. I watched him spin his glass and napkin around in a slow circle on the waxy wooden tabletop. Sam and Mark exchanged glances, and Addie and Molly looked at me, like I was supposed to fill in the blank.

“Barely any time to breathe, you know? Hardly any time to get things in order. Our house is still a mess. We’ll have to have a house warming party once everything is in order.” I was rambling. “But you sound like you’re all doing just fine. Isn’t that right?” I nudged Jack. I looked at him for some sort of guidance and I wondered what had happened. I looked at the group around the table. They were laughing again, and joking. I was glad they thought of something more interesting than what I had to say. I couldn’t even think of something dumb one of the kids did, something that made me laugh. I couldn’t think of one, single thing I’d gossiped about in the teachers’ lounge. I couldn’t remember a moment when Jack wasn’t there with me. All I could think of was the quiet. It was so quiet I almost couldn’t hear the sounds in the bar.

Jack brushed my knee with his fingers and nodded in the direction of the door. I checked my watch and it had barely been two hours. The light made Jack’s eyes look watery and tired. I finished off my drink and nodded yes, it was time to go. What we had was is quiet, it was good, I reminded myself. It was easy to do.

Molly ordered up shots of tequila and told us we had to stay. "Just one more. Then you can go back to your tower on the hill, Mona honey.” She linked arms with me, as though I was any better off than she was, and the others followed us to the bar.

We formed a half circle around one corner of the bar, we passed the salt shaker around and dusted salt over our thumbs. When the shots came, we licked the salt off our hands, knocked back the shots, and sucked the limes into our teeth with heavy breaths. We shook hands and gave hugs once more. I wasn’t sure when we would see them again, or soon. I thought, though, that we had a good time, when you got right down to it. To get out to the car, I had to hold on to Jack. We got in and fastened our seatbelts. Music played dimly on the radio, some CD we had on repeat since July.

When the car hit us on the way home, Jack was even being responsible. There was a drink or two before we left the house, and only the shot of tequila at the bar, maybe something else, I thought then. And, anyway, I hadn’t been counting all that well. The night air, cool, had sealed our sweat from the musty bar room against our bodies. My mascara got rubbed away. 

The road back from town twisted and curved, snaking uphill to our half of a house. It was on the turn just over the notch that it happened. The headlights were so bright that they might cut glass, and before a gasp or a word could escape my mouth, the nose of our car was up against the guardrail and the mountainside, and the other car, dark and whale-like, had its front end pushed up against the passenger side. I stared at the door, pushed inside and at an angle close to my knee.

Jack said, “Shit.” And then, “fuck.”

I looked over through the windshield at the driver of the other car. There was a stream of some sort of steam, but I thought she looked like she might cry. That was what I would have liked to do. There was no one around, no one to stop and check if we were ok. I slid out of the car through the driver’s side, straddling the automatic shift and the emergency break, into the cold night air and held onto Jack’s arm. He smelled like smoke and cigarettes and whiskey, there was nothing new there. The woman in the other car did the same deal: she leveled herself out of her car carefully. I watched her on her cell phone, Jack didn’t move for his phone. I guessed he assumed that she had it handled.

It was a long process. Even though it was warm, I was shaking. Jack held onto me so tight that I could hardly breathe, and it made me dizzy. The other driver got back in her car after she told us in a hollow voice that the cops were on their way. She had the right idea, but Jack was crying against my neck, and my hair was getting wet and sticking to my face. I didn’t have the heart to tell him this, and he just kept holding on. 

After a moment, I walked with Jack over to the car. He introduced himself to the woman.  He said, “Good to meet you, although I wish it were better circumstances.” He sounded like he knew what he was doing, and no one could see the tear marks on his face from only a few moments ago. I listened to them apologize back and forth, profusely.

It was funny that I thought of it all after the impact, it was like getting hit twice. It was one solid instant out of nowhere, although it seemed everything had been heading there from the beginning. I saw it all laid out before me, like in a museum, artifacts in their glass cases, paintings hung up on walls. Jack had the whiskey, I had the gin and tonic. Glass after glass with their ice cubes, sweating on coasters on the kitchen counter, the desk, the nightstand by the bed. The whiskey always used to be in Coke. When did he start drinking it straight? I wracked my brain for a good time, before grad school even. I thought of our first place together, and I knew that there would be more, maybe even one with a white picket fence. Maybe there would be children who would look like us and laugh like us when they’re twenty-five. The air felt like fall was coming.

We stood by the car, leaning against the trunk and the back bumper. “Jack?”

He wouldn’t look away from some spot on the pavement.

“Jack? What happens now?”

We saw the lights on the police car before anything else. Bright and blue, I had to shield my eyes, and when I turned to put my face against Jack’s shoulder the street spun out of place. I listened to Jack talk to the police. He was a pro at talking to people, sounding knowledgeable. It wasn’t hard for him.

That’s when I started to wonder. In that instant, while he signed the papers with his signature that was meant for the inside covers of his books, I thought about walking away. I couldn’t decide if I would walk back to the bar or back to our house. Mark and Addie and Sam and Molly would still be at the bar, and I was still drunk enough so that it wouldn’t be hard to catch up and be on the floor with them in not too long, unable to get up and singing to whatever bad song was playing. It would be good. Worth it, even. Although I knew, somehow, that my place wasn’t with them either. They had their marriages and everything else. I didn’t want to sit in between them, like the lost one, the one who didn’t know what she wanted. Jack stood beside me after he finished filling out the papers. I knew that I wouldn’t turn around; I wouldn’t walk away, no matter how much I wanted to. Maybe one day he would propose and we would live happily ever after with never ending offers for book deals. It would get quieter and quieter and maybe one day the only sound there would be was the sound of our words on the pages of our books.  I didn’t know what that meant. My head started to hurt. And I said, out loud, “What a life.”

Jack walked back to me with his hands in his pockets. He looked relaxed and I wanted to ask him why he looked so relaxed. But I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth and Jack held me up while we walked the rest of the way home.

***

In the morning, I stood over the sink with the gin and the whiskey. I had the tops off, and I put them back on and took them back off over and over again. Finally, trying not to think too hard about it, I put the tops on as tightly as I could and shoved them under the sink with the cleaning supplies. The door to the cabinet made a hollow sound when I slammed it shut. I waited to see if the sound woke Jack.

That day was the turning point of the season; I could feel it. The air was cool, almost light. It was beginning to smell like dry leaves. I made coffee and went out onto the wooden deck. I started on the window boxes. The dirt was clumpy and dry, the kind of clumps that break when you touch them. I cleared out all the leaves, scooping them in handfuls to the floor of the deck.

I dug my hands into the dirt and made deep holes with my fingers. One by one, I placed the flowers with their tiny roots into rows. When I looked up, Jack was standing in the doorway. His eyes were heavy with sleep, and his body unimposing and slender. I thought back to how that body held me up, every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Then, later, Wednesdays too. We drank six packs, walked across campus in the bitter cold of winter holding beer cans, leaning into each other. The thoughts that ran through my head then alternated, I thought about how cold it was and then I thought that I couldn’t believe I was standing there with him. I didn’t want to be any other place. Inevitably, glamour fades, you grow up, you sober up.

“I don’t think these flowers are going to live like this.” I didn’t say it very loudly.

Jack shrugged. “They’ll make it.”

I looked back to the flowers, continued to push my thumbs into the dirt. Jack walked into the kitchen and I heard him opening and closing the cabinets. My heart skipped a few beats. He reappeared on the deck with a cup of coffee in his hand. I wondered what it would take for him to make me happy, for me to know that it was real and true and good. I thought of all the poems that he had written. I didn’t even want to read them anymore, the ones that weren’t published, the ones I hadn’t already read. There were so many poems about us. They told our whole story. I didn’t want to read a single one, but I knew that once I’d read one, I’d read them all. He sat down beside me and kissed my cheek. He asked me how I was feeling, he told me he loved me, like nothing had happened.

“I dumped the alcohol.” I lied. I wasn’t even sure why I said it – to try it on, I guess.

“We were doing just fine.” Jack sipped on his coffee. 

“We aren’t anymore. So I dumped the alcohol.” I wondered if he looked beneath the sink and saw that I hadn’t really gotten rid of it. I wondered if he had seen the inside of the trashcan. 

Jack touched my head, his fingers brushed through my hair, it felt like a ghost. “We can be ok. We can be fine, though.”

He looked out over the railing of the deck. I got up from my place on the ground and walked inside. The bottles beneath the cabinet were only half full, if even that. I unscrewed the caps, my hands shook and the glass slipped in my sweaty palms. When they finished draining, the gin bottle fell into the stainless steel sink and Jack came back inside.   

“I thought you said you already got rid of those.” Jack pointed toward the bottle.

“Now I have.”

I opened the lid of the trashcan and dropped the bottles in. Jack walked back out onto the deck. I was alone in the kitchen, standing over the sink, my hands pressed against the countertop, fingers spread out in a wide fan. From the window all I saw were the trees, green and leafy. It looked like we were settled in a tree house hidden between branches, raised above everything else. I stared long and hard until my eyes hurt and my hands were shaking a little more, and wondered how it was we were supposed to get down from here.

 

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