This Angel on My Chest Read online

  That’s the way he was. He had a special way of doing everything. He developed a method of eating watermelon with a knife, cutting slices so thin the seeds would slither out, and setting aside the juiciest fillet from the middle to eat last. There was an order in which to read the newspaper (sports, business, style, metro, front page). The two of you never left a football or a baseball game until the last second had ticked off the clock, regardless of a lopsided score or a ten-below wind chill or being late to meet someone for dinner. He always carried a pen in his pocket and kept long lists of things to do and places to see on little yellow sticky notes inside his wallet.

  If someone had told you about a person who did all these things, who imposed these rules on himself, you would’ve thought he was odd, annoying. But you found out piece by piece—like putting together a puzzle—and now you couldn’t imagine your husband being any other way.

  You watched him eat malted milk balls one Easter morning (you’d made two little Easter baskets, setting them up on the kitchen table, each different because you liked different kinds of candy), reading the Sunday paper in his usual order. You were about to tease him, to make him talk around that gob of candy, to see if he’d bite down just this one time, but before you could say anything, he mumbled something to you, and you didn’t say, “What?” because you knew exactly what he’d said; there were always more ways to say, “I love you,” and through a mouthful of malted milk balls on Easter morning was only one.

  EIGHT

  He hated his job for years. You lay in bed and listened to him grinding his teeth at night, unsure whether to wake him. You fantasized about waking him: “Let’s talk,” you’d say, and he would tell you all the things he was thinking, tell you exactly why he hated his job and how he really felt about the long, endless reports he wrote that no one ever read. You would offer sympathy, advice, kindness; you’d tell him to quit his job, offer to do his résumé on the computer; or maybe the two of you would just cry and hold each other tight.

  But that’s not what happened the times you did wake him. He told you he was fine, told you he was tired of complaining about his stupid job, told you to go to sleep. He used kinder words than these, but his voice was expressionless, like a machine that runs on and on by itself. And then you both pretended to be asleep, and then he really was asleep, because he was grinding his teeth again.

  You tried to bring up the subject during the day. “No job is worth this,” you said when you called him at his office.

  “I can’t talk now,” he whispered.

  “Then when?” you asked.

  There was a pause, and you heard his boss being paged in the background. He said, “My father worked for forty years on the line at Chrysler. You think every day was great?”

  “This is different,” you said.

  And he said, “Nothing’s different.”

  The conversation never went farther than that. It was his boss; it was the nature of the business; it was turning thirty; it was stress; it was long hours; it was making enough money that most other jobs would be a step down; it was too much overseas travel; it was overly ambitious coworkers and unambitious secretaries; it was rush-hour traffic; it was sucking up taxpayer money to fund projects that improved nothing except the bottom line of the firm; it was living in an expensive neighborhood in an expensive city on the East Coast; it was a wife who wanted to be a writer and consequently was earning no money; it was needing his health-insurance plan because that was when you still thought you could have a baby together; it was being the oldest child, the responsible one; it was being raised in the Midwest; it was trying to prove he was as tough as his father and his grandfather—tougher; it was being brought up to despise weakness and whiners. You knew it was all those things, but you suspected there was something more that he didn’t want to or couldn’t explain but that you could help with . . . if only he would talk.

  This is what you thought about on those nights when you pretended to sleep: You prayed for him to talk, even though you hadn’t been to church in ten years. It felt strange to ask God to make a man talk. You thought about numbers: How many Monday mornings are there in a year? How many Fridays when he had to work late? How many quick lunches at a desk? What do you get if you divide X amount of dollars in his paycheck by Y amount of unhappiness and multiply the result by a year, two years? How many times can one man grind his teeth in a single night?

  “It doesn’t have to be me,” you told him. “Talk to anyone. A friend, your dad, a therapist, a bartender. Just talk. Please.”

  “There’s nothing to say” was all you got from him.

  The silence was thick and hard and invisible, like air before a storm. You waited and waited.

  One night, you woke up and he wasn’t next to you. When he didn’t come back to bed, you got up and found him downstairs at the kitchen table writing on a yellow legal pad. A tiny moth circled the overhead light; you watched it instead of him. You asked, “Working late?”

  He shook his head, kept writing, flipped the page over, wrote some more, and finally said, “I’m writing a movie.”

  He might as well have said he was being beheaded in the morning; it was that surprising.

  The moth flew too close to the light bulb then dropped onto the table next to him. You leaned in, brushed the dead moth into your cupped hand, threw it in the garbage, and went back to bed.

  The next day, he told you the plot of his movie: a guy who hates his job goes to baseball camp to relive his childhood fantasies and wins the big game—not by blasting in a home run, but by bunting.

  It took him months to write the screenplay. He thought he was going to sell it in Hollywood and buy a house with a pool and retire. By the time he realized that wasn’t going to happen, it didn’t matter, because there were changes at his job, new projects that he’d developed and was implementing, ideas that made sense, that made people pay attention. It wasn’t the same old story.

  You liked that he was happy at work. He talked to you about what he was doing, about his projects, about the results of his work.

  The handwritten manuscript of his movie stayed on your night-stand.

  NINE

  The combination to the lock on the garden shed (0–14–5), where you keep the lawn mower, the rake, the snow shovel, the garden hose.

  Every fall, mice took over the shed; you never actually saw them, only the traces they left behind—dry droppings like caraway seeds; a corner chewed out of the box of grass seed; footprints crisscrossing the dust. He looked into poison. A neighbor across the street told him the right kind. “It shrivels their body from the inside,” the neighbor explained, “so they dry up: no smell, no mess in a trap, no nothing. Clean and easy.”

  You didn’t like mice. No one likes mice. But what kind of way to die was that, leaving nothing behind?

  He set out the poison anyway.

  Now, when you open the shed to drag out the lawn mower, you look for some sign of the mice, but he cleaned out the shed in the early spring, swept up all the droppings, hosed away the dust. You think that maybe you thanked him, but maybe not. After he was gone, faced with so much more to do than anyone could imagine, as if the world’s to-do list had ended up on your own, you were relieved that cleaning out the shed wasn’t on the list.

  Now you’re somehow disappointed that there are no mice, no way to know they were once here. You think, They’ll be back in the fall. And you know that during the winter you’ll keep the shed locked, that you won’t look. Then you can think, The mice are there, never checking to see if you’re right or wrong.

  TEN

  You cheated on him. Once. Barely. Not enough to count, not really. But it was with his best friend, the one he’d grown up with, the one with the odd nickname you never quite understood, the one who met you at the emergency room and cried as hard as you did.

  It happened in your kitchen at a party one night when you were drinking too much and your husband was drinking even more than you and, even though it was hi
s birthday, you weren’t talking to him, and he wasn’t talking to you, but no one knew this except for his best friend, because you both acted how you were supposed to act at a birthday party. You were telling his friend your side of the story, why you were right, and he was agreeing, and the next thing you knew, you were kissing the friend, not a quick, simple kiss, not an embarrassed kiss, but a real kiss, lingering.

  It was that sudden.

  You thought about that kiss for a long time afterward. You remembered every detail—and that, as much as the kiss, was the cheating part, wasn’t it?

  The friend said he wouldn’t tell, but he did. You didn’t find this out until a couple of weeks after the funeral, when you were talking to him on the phone late one night because neither of you could sleep. (There were a lot of long, late nights; each time, you thought, There couldn’t be a longer night, but it seemed the next one was always longer.)

  “Yeah, I told him,” the friend said. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “What did he say?” you asked.

  “He broke my nose,” the friend said.

  You remembered the broken nose, the funny story about walking into a ladder.

  “I thought things were pretty much fine between us after that,” the friend said, “because we were talking and joking again. But now I think there was something different. I can’t say what.” There was a pause. Then he said, “What’d he say to you about it?”

  There were so many ways to answer that question, so many lies you could’ve told this friend, but you picked the easiest: “He was furious. Absolutely furious.” Then you faked a yawn, said you were getting tired and wanted to grab some sleep while you could. But you didn’t go to sleep for a long time—OK, not at all—because you were trying to remember a time, any time, a minute, a second, anything, when there was something different between you and him. But there was nothing to remember, nothing.

  That’s how much he loved you.

  And that’s the thing you know most of all.

  ACQUIESCENCE

  The body flew on a different plane, arriving in Detroit two days ago, at 7:37 A.M. She tracked its arrival online. Not a soldier or a famous politician, just her husband, age thirty, suddenly dead.

  His mother wanted him buried in Detroit. Did it matter where someone’s dead body was? Did it matter that someone’s dead body ended up in the place they had fled?

  Now she was in suburban Detroit, being carried along an anonymous highway in his mother’s Lincoln. People drove as if they were tense, feeling the crush of that low, gray sky she remembered from their visit two Christmases ago. The graveside service was in an hour, followed by a “celebration of life” at a country club. There would probably be balloons released outside, heartfelt notes tied to them with ribbon. She stared at the parade of silver-paned office buildings out the window. His mother’s voice was something broken that wouldn’t stop making noise.

  Finally they reached the cemetery, that modern kind, with stones flat in the ground to make mowing easy. The spot his mother selected seemed exposed, exactly in the center. She was taller than any of the slender trees.

  People pressed her hand, clutched limp tissues. There were old high school girlfriends, all pretty. Though it was cold, no hats. The box with the body in front, blanketed with white roses. A stand displaying his smiling graduation photo. A CD of songs he wrote for his college band, The Elements. The scene felt arranged, like a movie set of a sad funeral. She imagined everyone at home afterward, sponging off makeup, peeling away costumes, slipping into bathrobes to relax after this hard day of work.

  A minister with a square head spoke. God this, heaven that. She’d heard it all before.

  His mother wept so loudly the crows looping overhead were startled.

  When she exhaled, frost clouded the air.

  Later, his mother pulled up to the airport curb and said, “Promise you’ll come visit,” and they both knew she wouldn’t. She watched people wheeling black suitcases, in a hurry to leave Detroit. Though she didn’t believe in God or heaven or worshipping a flat stone, she half-envied those who did, those who thought it could be so simple. She said to her former mother-in-law, “Maybe spring.”

  “The marker will be in then,” his mother said.

  “It was a beautiful ceremony,” she said. “I’m so glad. All those Mylar balloons in the sky.”

  “Did you get a photo?” his mother asked.

  She nodded, patting her coat pocket as if a phone was in there. “There’s just one last thing.” She hadn’t cried today, and it was important that she not cry as she said, “It was bugging me the whole time that maybe they’d put him in upside down.”

  “Upside down?”

  “That his head was where his feet should be.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” his mother said. “They don’t make those kinds of mistakes. There’s hinges on one side.”

  “I kept thinking about it,” she said, which was true. “I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

  His mother spoke urgently: “It doesn’t happen like that.”

  “Don’t lots of things happen that we think won’t happen?”

  His mother tightened her face. “Have a safe trip.”

  The sound of the car door opening, then closing, was loud. Strange not to have luggage, to float so lightly.

  On the flight home, she knew there’d be a time she might wish she hadn’t acquiesced to the anger nudging her to speak those unforgiveable words to her former mother-in-law. But that wasn’t today.

  A QUIZ

  The following questions are multiple choice. Please select the option that best reflects the correct answer. Do not make more than one choice.

  1.

  You are at a housewarming party. You’re wearing a new skirt that you bought half-price earlier in the day because you went to the mall because you thought you shouldn’t want to be alone. You don’t know the hosts of the housewarming party but your friend does and she’s supposed to be meeting you but she’s late, so you’re standing in a corner holding a plastic cup of pinot grigio, discreetly trying to rip out the tacking threads you forgot to remove from the back slit of the skirt. A man approaches you. You know that most women your age—not quite forty—would find this also-not-quite-forty man attractive enough with his product-bristled hair and loose smile, but you’re annoyed that his front teeth are too big. You’re annoyed that the tacking thread is stubborn and still there. You’re annoyed that you’re drinking pinot grigio at a party instead of Maker’s Mark bourbon at your house, alone. You’re annoyed that your friend is late, that she’s always late even when she promises not to be late.

  The man says, “Hello, I’m Vince.” You say:

  A. “Nice to meet you, Vince.”

  B. “I’m not going to ask you what you do, because everyone in DC asks that, and isn’t that so annoying?” and then laugh in a throaty, flirty, fetching way, as you confess that you’re a lawyer and wait for him to laugh and tell you that he is too.

  C. “Can you see this tacking thread in my skirt?” and then spin around, arching your back a bit as you point down to the thread, knowing he’ll be happily confused by this sanctioned opportunity to stare at your ass. Laugh in a throaty, flirty, fetching way. Later, follow him to his place in your own car.

  D. “Hi, Vince, you’re probably a nice guy, but you should know that my husband died of a brain aneurysm six months ago and he was only forty-two.”

  The correct answer is D. Choose D. Vince will slither away, and when your friend hears what you’ve done, she’ll threaten never to take you to another party. When you get home, you will pour bourbon into a tall glass and sip it slowly in front of the dark fireplace, obsessively rattling the ice cubes every couple of minutes.

  2.

  You’re at the grocery store, eyes scanning rows of canned tomatoes—diced, petite diced, whole, stewed, crushed, sauce, sauce with basil, sauce with garlic, diced with basil, diced with garlic, fire roasted, low sodium,
no sodium, paste. In another aisle, there is also tomato juice. But you’ve forgotten what you’re looking for, what you might have planned to cook with tomatoes. It’s a breathless amount of choices and forms for just a tomato. Your cart is empty. You have stared at yogurt, at cereal, at detergent and frozen vegetables and soup, but how is it possible to pick one, you wonder, terrified that you will make the wrong choice, that you will bring home the wrong form of tomato, the wrong cereal, that what you do will be wrong in some ill-defined way. “Excuse me.” It’s a woman wearing black yoga pants and a too-tight ponytail. “Do you happen to know where the barley is? It’s one of those things I can never seem to find.” She smiles, the kind of woman skilled at netting people into her life, the kind of woman unafraid to ask for help or call for directions or beg for a favor or show need.

  Do you:

  A. Smile back, and say, “Aisle 4, near the rice, on the bottom shelf.”

  B. Smile back, and say, “Aisle 6, near the oatmeal,” even though you know barley is actually in Aisle 4, near the rice.

  C. Not smile, but speak sincerely: “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  D. Smile back and say, “Check near the rice, though you should know that my husband ate a lot of whole grains, but he died anyway, of a brain aneurysm, six months ago when he was only forty-two. You might as well eat Pop-Tarts every day.” Keep smiling until your skin feels tight enough to snap off your face.

  The correct answer is D. Choose D. She will swing her cart around and barrel back up the aisle, ponytail sawing side to side. You will not buy tomatoes. You will abandon the cart in Aisle 5 and slink out to the parking lot and sit in your car for ten minutes in chilly silence, watching people load bags of groceries into the backs of their SUVs. You’ll decide that maybe you wanted petite diced tomatoes for a jambalaya casserole that you used to make for Super Bowl parties and potlucks. At home for dinner you’ll eat the last can of the black beans from the “emergency” cupboard in the basement and chuckle bitterly when you see that the expiration date stamped on the top was six months ago. You will not bother heating the beans and you’ll eat them straight from the can and you’ll tell yourself they actually taste better that way.