THE HOUSE OF SHAME

THE HOUSE OF SHAME

They were an unattractive couple.  She was short and round with a pale round face adorned with a tiny nose.  She kept her light brown hair cut above her ears, a style that accentuated the roundness of her face.  He was no taller, bald, with a long thin ski-slope nose and a receding chin on which he wore a two-days’ growth of dark brown hair.  Though he was narrow in the hips, he had a belly that hung over his belt.  Side by side, they raised eyebrows wherever they went.  He was more social, but when she held forth, she eclipsed him.  Her voice was loud and grating, her laugh a touch insane, and her conversation usually, whenever she was free to direct it herself, derisively about his handicaps and hang-ups.  He seemed not to mind this obnoxiousness and to take her in good humor.  It was this easy way that made others like him and made others wonder, also, about the two of them together.  Her rudeness aside, they seemed made for each other—like two rowboats in a basin full of yachts; but most who knew them couldn’t put aside her rudeness. 

     They had been married some seven years and had no children.  The absence of children was a sign that, unfortunately in our time, could not be properly read, though had it been, it is questionable whether it would have made a difference, for the events that unfolded in the eighth year of their unhappy marriage had a certain fatedness to them.  And they were, for all their unloveliness, simple people engaging in the rounds of everyday life, so that their story comes to us as an emblem of ourselves.

Over the years of their marriage, Grace’s behavior toward her husband had become more and more publicly abusive.  She was unashamed of this behavior and often, because it had become so habitual, unaware of it.  It was at its worst when they visited his family, and at its least when they visited her own.  This is because his sisters and parents hated to intervene and get involved, but also because they were sensitive to the charge she was always prepared to hurl at them that they favored him at her expense.  So they stayed out of the couples’ lives and watched and sometimes prayed—fearful that their brother and son might some day return to them an even unhappier man than he seemed presently to be. 

     But among her own, Grace tended to sweeten herself.  Her family having no vested interest in her husband could not be intimidated by the same charge she threw at his family.  Instinctively, she tried to behave respectfully toward him when among her own, though her not-so-well-hidden feelings, when prodded by some thoughtless word from him, would erupt with their typical violence.  At these times, her brothers and sisters, her parents, her aunts and uncles would get glimpses of a truth that was easier to suppress than to deal with.  And so the years passed, and the couple had no relief from the causes and conditions of their unhappiness.

     When the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon cruse to the Bahamas, Grace, much less round in those days and still bridal, had a long and intimate talk with her mother about what was supposed to have taken place during the nights in their costly and romantic berth.  This conversation was, as mentioned, intimate and deeply private, and so its implications were kept locked up in the one person who might have made a difference.  But even Grace’s mother never knew how grave the problem was.

     While John’s family was relatively small, consisting of one set of grandparents, parents, and two sisters, Grace’s family was unusually large, consisting of more than a dozen aunts and uncles—counting both sides—and some fifty cousins, not to mention her own two sisters and three brothers.  When all the children were added, Grace’s family amounted to a large society, and it was among them that she and John did most of their socializing.  The family were an accomplished lot, as well, counting among themselves doctors, nurses, professors, businessmen, ministers (and one priest), accountants, lawyers, artists, diplomats, and so on.  John was a janitor in the fire station only three blocks from his home; Grace drove a bus. 

     Their home was modest, and in the early days of their marriage they worked hard at keeping it neat and attractive.  But as the years passed, it fell more and more into ruin—an obvious sign, to anyone who would see it, of the inward state of their lives.

Grace’s mother was nearing her seventy-fifth birthday, and Grace’s sister was planning a gala affair to celebrate the milestone.  The brothers and sisters were all doing their part to help.  All accept one.  Grace’s second brother was the only one in the family to live abroad.  He would be arriving with his wife a few days before the party and staying for a few days afterwards.  Because he had little contact with his youngest sister, she being always too financially strapped to travel, he had made it known that he wanted to stay during his time at home with her.

     Everyone had their doubts about the wisdom of his decision.  But, they hoped, maybe his coming would be a spur to Grace and John, and they would restore some order to their household and clean up and shear the place.  They tried, but only half-heartedly, for the years of neglect had caused them to fall out of the habit, and then there was just too much to do.  Like unwilling children cleaning their bedrooms, they did more to hide the decay than to restore their home. 

    

Vern and Sandra Wilde were cultural attaches to the American embassy in Rome.  Before Rome, they worked in the same capacity in Madrid, and before Madrid, Athens.  Their time abroad, however, was nearing an end, and they would be returning to Washington only two months after their trip home.  And so it was with great joy that they came to Grace and John, knowing that they would be beginning a relationship they had not had a chance to all their adult lives and anticipating developing it intimately in the future.

     It was late evening when they arrived, and Grace had prepared a bedroom for them, with fresh sheets and new pillows, new curtains on the window, and polished furniture.  Of course, in the dark outside, nothing could be seen of the house and the property, and John did not put the car in the garage.  After much handshaking, hugging, and kissing, a light snack, and phone calls to the rest of the family, the guests retired for the night, and Grace and John looked at each other, shook their heads, and went nervously to their own bed.

Sandra rose early in the morning, while the rest of the household was still asleep, including her husband.  It was Saturday, and being midsummer, it was already bright.  She and Vern had spent three days in Milan on Consular business before leaving for the States, and they both had suitcases full of worn clothes, so she decided to wash and dry these before Grace and John got up so as not to inconvenience them with her needs.  But finding no washing machine or a washroom on the main floor of the house, she looked for the basement stairs.  Finding these, she descended after turning on the light. 

     The basement, which once had been finished, was not merely untidy, messy.  It looked as though it had been deliberately destroyed, with wiring hanging from the ceiling, ceiling panels hanging, broken, some scattered across the floor, wall paneling torn off the walls—the exposed studs looking hacked at with an ax—and the doors to the several rooms removed from their hinges and stove in, as though they had been rammed.  

     Sandra stepped carefully amid the debris, her arms filled with clothes, more puzzled than alarmed at what she saw, and peeked around a doorframe, nearly tripping on the battered door lying at the threshold.  What she saw inside in the grainy light coming through the basement window made her gasp.  It was the laundry room.  But on the floor in front of the washer and dryer was a mountain of clothes—both Grace’s and John’s.  There were more clothes heaped on the floor than would have taken Grace and John a year to wear and toss there. 

As she entered the dimly lighted room, she had to press her way between the heap of clothes and the two machines.  She emptied her arms, putting the clothes she carried on top of the dirty dryer, and looked around for laundry detergent.  She pushed her way further between the machines and the heap of clothes towards the back of the room, where a sloppy, soap-dripped container of liquid detergent rested upon a shelf.  She reached for and grasped it, letting out a long-held breath, and pushed her way back to the washer.  She lifted its lid and turned it on to make sure it worked, and when it started to fill, she measured the amount of detergent she needed, drained it in, let the machine fill some more, then, wiping her hands on her and her husband’s soiled clothes, dropped them in.  Once upstairs, she sat at the kitchen table, made herself some coffee, and wondered.

The basement was torn up, that was one thing.  What did that mountain of clothes mean?  It stank badly. She shuddered to think what it said about her sister-in-law.  But, true to her nature, instead of making her want to leave, what she saw determined her to help—she was going to get to the bottom of whatever the problem was, as well as to that mountain of clothes.

As no one was up and about but her, instead of getting breakfast, she returned to the basement and began sorting the pile.  She made room by pulling the broken door from the threshold; then, noticing a broom in the corner beside the dryer, she took it and began to sweep a clearing around the pile.  She started sorting, making three smaller piles, one for whites, one for coloreds, and one for large items, like sheets and towels.  The pile was so immense, her three subpiles quickly filled their spaces without making a noticeable dent in it.  But as soon as her own wash was out and in the dryer, she started another.  Before Grace had even gotten out of bed, Sandra had washed three loads.  She carried the dried clothes, including her own and her husband’s, up the stairs and dumped them on the couch in the living room and began folding and stacking.  She had amassed numerous stacks of clothes—some on the recliner chair in the corner by the window, which she noticed was clung with cobwebs, and some on the coffee table in front of the entertainment center, which had on its shelves half a dozen 8x10 glossy photos of TV wrestling stars, and some stacks on the end of the couch—when she was joined by her sleepy-eyed sister-in-law, who was wrapped in a pink terrycloth robe, several sizes too small.

“What are your doing?” Grace asked gratingly, not in the least embarrassed.  She plopped heavily on the couch beside a pile of clothes warm from the dryer and began to fold along with Sandra. 

Sandra was silent, embarrassed herself, but persisted.

“I know what this must look like and what you’re thinking.  It’s not because I don’t have time.  Anyway, it’s not what you think.”

“I don’t think anything,” Sandra replied.  “It’s your business.  I’m here, so I’m helping.  That’s all.”

They sat and folded in silence for a while.  Then Sandra asked, casually,

“Why is the basement so torn up?” adding, in the same tone, observing her sister-in-law’s white round face out of the corner of her eye, “It looks like you guys had a whopping good fight down there.”

Grace didn’t flinch or redden at the observation, but she didn’t respond, either.  So Sandra dropped the matter and said instead,

“You two sure have a lot of clothes.  What do you do?  Wait till you have nothing left to wear before you tackle the wash?”

“No,” Grace said nonchalantly, as though they were talking about common things.  “When I have nothing left to wear, I go to the store and buy another month’s worth of things.  John does the same.”

Sandra only nodded, as though it were perfectly normal to buy instead of wash clothes.  She had never heard of such a manner of living.  It was not only insanely wasteful, it had to be costly beyond the means of the two of them.  There was trouble in this household, she needed no special lenses to see that, and she resolved to get to the bottom of it.

“Why do you stack your dirty clothes in the basement?  Why not just throw them out?”  It occurred to Sandra that the huge pile in the basement had to mean something—either that Grace and John anticipated resolving whatever was troubling them and getting their lives in order again; or the pile was being used as a kind of symbol—a weapon, perhaps—that one was using against the other.  “Where are you going to put all these things once they’re washed?  Do you have room?”

Grace didn’t respond to either question for a while, but then she said, thoughtfully,

“I figure someday it will enter John’s bald head to go downstairs and wash some clothes instead of going to the store.  When that day comes, things will change, I guess.”  She sighed then, a short little whimper of a sigh, then said, in a changed, caustic tone, “You haven’t been outside yet.  Wait till you see how nice he keeps the yard and the house.”

A dozen questions popped into Sandra’s mind.  But two things held her back.  As she sat and talked with her sister-in-law, she could not help but to feel that the woman was deranged, and she didn’t know Grace enough to feel free to talk intimately.   “In time,” she thought.  “Matters will come up of themselves.  I only need to listen.”

“I’m hungry,” Sandra told her sister-in-law.  “How about making us some breakfast.  I’ll go down and throw another load in the dryer.”

While the men slept, the sisters-in-law ate together and worked together and came to know each other a little.  It was mid-morning before Sandra heard her husband moving about.  He emerged from the bedroom darkness and came up the hall into the kitchen.  He had smelled the remnants of the women’s breakfast, and feeling hearty and glad, he entered the kitchen in a spirit of fun.  Closing in on his sister, he threw his arm over her shoulder and said,

“Are you as good a cook as mom, Gracie?  What’s up for breakfast?  It smells good in here.”

Grace loved it.  She had never had any of her brothers or sisters stay the night with her.  She never had any of them over for dinner, either.  They all had their own homes, of course, and those homes were large and spacious and fit to entertain the large numbers family dinners involved.  She was always the guest in her siblings’ homes, never the host in her own.  Her brother’s presence and his cheerfulness and his warmth filled her with a pleasure she was unaccustomed to. 

“I’m an OK cook when I put my mind to it.  Really, I am!” she said, the idea of having to fix their evening meal suddenly occurring to her, a possibility which she had not actually entertained until that very moment.  “But breakfast is just breakfast.  You don’t have to be a good cook to make sausage and eggs and toast.  That’s what we had,” she said, pointing to Sandra and herself.  “Do you want it?  I’ll make it, I’ll make it for you and John, and you can have breakfast together.  How about it, Vern?"

She poured him a cup of coffee, and he rubbed her shoulder, saying, “Sounds great.  John’s up.  I heard him when I came out.”

He looked out the kitchen window and was silent for a long while as he gazed.  Grace noticed, and her smile dropped into a frown, and that Sandra noticed.  She had not looked out into the yard and wondered what her husband was seeing.  He spent an awful long time looking out that window, and Grace’s demeanor sagged the more he gazed.  When he turned, he only smiled, sipped some coffee, and slid into a chair at the table beside his wife. 

Grace sighed as she busied herself at the stove.  Vern joked with her and Sandra laughed and the mood in the kitchen turned merry.  When John walked in, everything changed.  His mildness of character, expressed in his perpetual, empty grin, provoked intense harshness from Grace.  Her voice turned into a growl, and her body language shouted ill will.  Then silence reigned as she forked crisp sausage links out of the pan.

Vern and Sandra were dismayed by the suddenness of the turn in Grace’s mood and by its vehemence.  John’s grin didn’t change at all.  He expected nothing else.  He put the Saturday Newsday on the table.  Vern felt the tension slacken, and with a glance at Sandra, picked it up and pretended to read.  The hour passed, though not without its strained silences.  These were punctuated by phone calls.  All the family were planning for the big day and trying to involve Vern and Sandra.  As they made plans, Grace found her hold on her brother and sister-in-law slipping away.  She resented this captivation of Vern and Sandra by her brothers and sisters because they never included her in their doings, and she felt left out. 

Sensing her resentment, the idea struck Vern to invite all his siblings to Grace and John’s for that evening, so he could get to see them all at once on Grace’s ground.  The idea pleased her, and as they accepted the invitation one by one, she excitedly drew Sandra into planning for a festive meal.  It soon became obvious that the house was too small for so large a crowd.  Vern suggested they do it picnic style outside in the yard, with plenty of wine and beer to last the night.  Grace’s excitement turned to despair. 

“You don’t know my brothers and sisters,” she complained to Vern, as though he were not also her brother.  “This one drinks only martinis, that one only drinks one kind of wine, this one only that kind of beer, that niece won’t eat hamburgers, this one don’t like steak.   Everybody’s weird and they all get offended if you don’t cater just to them.  Like it’s such a big deal.  It takes a month to get everything straight!  I hate them.  No one ever asks me what I want, though.  And besides,” she said, almost in tears, “no one has ever come here for dinner.”

     “So?” Vern said, trying to lift her from the depths.   “We’ll tell them I planned it all, and if they have anything to say, say it to me.  You can stay out of it.”

“Have you been outside?  Vern?”

It was her first allusion to the state of the property.  He hadn’t been outside since last night, and it was too dark then to see anything.  What he saw through the window earlier in the morning came back to him with a twinge of alarm.

It was worse than he expected.  He had gone out back with John after breakfast to take a look around.  It was warm and sunny and a bit humid, and he realized he would have to go back in and put on shorts.  He was standing on a cement patio which was cracked in a dozen places.  From the cracks grew weeds and grass a foot high.  All along the foundation of the house grew the same weeds and grass.  The lawn was overrun with weeds, tree sprouts, uncut grass, and littered with wind-blown debris.  A huge pile of weathered and broken boards, old pool paraphernalia, and trash filled one side of the yard, and the other was occupied by a dilapidated shed whose doors were hanging off their hinges and which was rotted away from roof to floor.  Along the fence in the back grew untended huge bushes of various sorts—hydrangea, forsythia, rose-of-sharon, arborvitae—all shaggy and overgrown and clung with newspaper pages, paper and plastic bags, Styrofoam hamburger boxes; whatever blew around the neighborhood from careless hands and slovenliness was entangled or impaled there. 

“Well, let’s get busy,” Vern said to his brother-in-law, trying to sound positive for his sister’s sake, and suppressing what the neglect told him of the lives both of them were living.  “We can make this place presentable by this evening.” 

John showed no embarrassment at all.  He looked around with a seemingly professional eye, as though the place were not his own, taking it in as though he were seeing it for the first time, and suggested an order for the labor—begin at the house and work toward the bushes. 

While the women worked indoors, cleaning and sprucing up the house, planning the meal and the shopping, the arrangements of patio furniture, and the making up of a bar, the men ploughed into the yard.

It was sweaty, grimy work, for it hadn’t rained in several weeks, and the ground was dry and dusty.  Their sweated bodies were covered with grit, but they made a great deal of progress in a very short time.  Late in the afternoon, when almost everything was done, John backed his pick-up around the house into the yard, and Vern began to toss the pile of debris into it.  John hammered apart the old shed and loaded it as well.  The plan was to load it all and pile on as much of the trimmings of the bushes as the pick-up would hold and carry it to the dump.  The last thing to be done was to pass the lawnmower over the cleared out yard. 

It was turning four o’clock, and they had finally got the truck loaded.  Vern pulled out the lawnmower, and John drove off.

When he was done mowing, Vern leaned on the handle.  He looked around and approved the changed aspect of the place.  It was unattractive at best, nothing they did was going to change that, but it was neat and orderly and would do fine for a picnic.  He went in, grimy and achy, to shower and dress and found Sandra alone.  Refusing Sandra’s help with the shopping, his sister had taken off an hour and a half before.  Since the market wasn’t far away, Sandra was now concerned at her prolonged absence.

“Don’t worry about it, Sandy,” he said.  “Remember what she said about everyone’s pickiness—they all want to be catered to.  She’s probably going crazy trying to shop for everyone’s personal tastes.  She’ll be back soon enough.”

By six in the evening, all the brothers and sisters were there.  Everyone, that is, but John and Grace.  There was no food, there was no beverage, and there were fidgeting, grumbling, short-tempered children, and a rising sense of alarm.

     Learning very early in her married life, indeed on the very first night in the honeymoon berth, that her marriage was more a document than a reality, Grace yearned for the bliss she believed was her right.  Not timid by nature, she was nevertheless intimidated by her own anger and the scope of her frustration.  She also was intimidated by her family.  More than anything she feared their callous judgments.  For years, it was in mockery that she vented her emotions.  As she grew heavier and unlovelier, her hopes failed and her fears mounted. 

     Then one day on her bus route she met a man.  He was older by far than her—indeed, he was as old as her father.  His approach to her was gentle and gradual, and over the course of several weeks he managed to exact from her the promise of a date.  On that occasion, Grace discovered her womanhood and her life changed.  He wanted her just as she was, he wooed, his little white moustache dancing on his lip, and he was as successful as he had dreamed.  He had a youthful woman to warm his wintery bed, and she had the bliss she yearned for, ardent lips and restless hands and sighs and contentment.  Going home was torment, and that torment led to ever more vicious behavior toward John.

     John was not ignorant.  He discovered early on his wife’s infidelity.  He had stalked them on their dates several times and knew where the old man lived, where was the bed of his shame.  These discoveries had a strange impact on him.  They did not make him angry, at first; they made him curious.  The thought of his Gracie in the arms of that old man provoked no outrage, no personal shame, or torment.  It provoked a desire to see, to know first hand what they did.  Though he never satisfied this crazy curiosity, he did imagine what it was like for Gracie, as far as his imagination would stretch, and it was only then that he began to feel the shame of it.  Relations between them had deteriorated, but in the last three months, all their violent emotions had been suspended by the upcoming event and the planned visit of Vern and Sandra.  Both Grace and John entered a kind of emotional hibernation then, each independently of the other.

     It was thus when John set out in his black pick-up for the dump.  He was rolling slowly towards the intersection of his residential street and the main thoroughfare when he saw the old man wheel by, and behind him, Gracie in her own car, its back seat filled with supermarket bags.  A sudden flame in his breast sent his limbs into action.  Before he even thought about it, he was in second gear, two cars behind Grace’s little red Neon.  He followed them to the old man’s house but drove on as a disinterested passerby.  He made his trip to the dump, where black smoke rose from burning and gulls scavenged in the refuse, and on his way back, the stink of the place still in his nose, passed once again the old man’s house.  Gracie’s Neon was still there, the brown paper bags crowded thickly on the back seat, and something snapped in John’s brain.

     He wheeled his truck to the curb across the street and turned off the engine.  Instead of getting out, he sat and stared at the house and at Grace’s car.  It took him an hour to get to the dump and clean out the truck and almost that long to get back.  He imagined what she had been doing during that time.  He looked at his watch.  Already Grace’s brothers and sisters were arriving at the house.  It was not irritation he felt, a sense of exasperation over her choosing this moment to meet again with the old man.  That was a feeling he might have felt yesterday.  But today Vern and Sandra were in the house, and they, John and Grace, had bent to their wills.  He felt that a small glimmer of promise had risen in the heat and the dust and the sweat, and that Grace, inside all day, had nevertheless felt it, too.  It was, instead, staring at her car, a mixed feeling of hopelessness and loss he felt, a feeling forced by the dead certainty that she had crossed a line, that there was no going back to the way things were, to the wretchedness, the fighting and guilt, to living on the edge financially, and the blame, and the letting go of things until their lives were submerged by it. 

What did she mean being there so long?  He looked again at his watch.  Being there at this time, when so much they had planned for was happening at the house?  It was his despair at what he thought she meant that provoked him.  He opened the door of the truck and hesitated, knowing that when he stepped out, something irrevocable was going to happen, that the life he had been living would come to an end.  He hesitated, stepped out, and gently shut the door of the pick-up.

There was no sign of life in the house, except the two cars on the drive.  He stood beside Grace’s Neon, his hands in his pockets, and looked at it calmly, as though he were contemplating taking it for a ride.  Then he turned to the front door, his hands still in his pockets, and calmly walked along the cement walk between the driveway and the steps.  As though the house were his own, he reached for the handle of the storm door and gently depressed the button and pulled the door open.  The inside door was unlatched and left an inch ajar.  He made a mental note of what that told him about the two inside. 

Calmly he pushed the door, and noiselessly it swung open.  He stepped in, holding his breath, surprised by his boldness, making sure the storm door did not bang behind him.  Then he stepped in beyond the inner door.  What he could see of the house was neat and clean.  Light from the bay window brightly lit the living room to his right, which was large and handsomely appointed with light-colored furniture and which held no television.  The dining room to his left was equally brightly lit by another bay window, facing the street as the other did, its heavy, dark furniture contrasting with the living room but leaving, nevertheless, as that room did, an impression of richness and lightness.  He walked through the dining room and into a hallway, and this he followed into darkness, stepping carefully on the thick carpet to make no noise.  He could hear them talking as he approached a door.  The door was open.  He peeked in and saw them.  They were both dressed.  The old man was sitting contentedly on the bed, and she was standing all aglow in front of the dresser mirror, fixing her hair.  He felt a thrill at their unawareness of his presence.  He stepped back quickly out of sight to listen and leaned against the wall.

“My brothers and sisters would never approve,” he heard her say.  And then him,

“Why should you care?”

“Because they’re my family,” she replied.

“But you have a right to your own life,” he said quickly, gently.

“I know.  That’s not it.  Outside of my family, I don’t know anybody.  It’s too bad I’m stuck with John, but I am stuck with him.”

“And what am I,” the old man said with a laugh, “a pastime?  A toy for you to play with?”

“Oh, you’re much more than that,” Grace said worriedly, heatedly.  “You’re the man John isn’t.  Between you, I have one whole person.”

“But what about me?  I’m a whole man in case you haven’t noticed,” the old man said, a note of sarcasm in his voice.

“You!” Grace replied humorously, her voice rising, “You’re getting all you want.”

“So, you’re content to go on just the way we are?”

“Unless you want to do something about it.”

“Like what?  What do you have in mind?”

The old man was quickened by this suggestion, and John could hear a change in his voice, an arousal of interest, as though he, the old man, expected something large to come of it.

“I don’t know.  I’ll leave that to you.”

John could sense the disappointment in the old man’s silence.  Even though he was the object of the “doing something about,” he a felt twinge of sympathy for the old man.  Grace had that way of twisting you, of using your feelings the way another would use a screwdriver.  He thought he knew what Grace meant by “doing something,” and wondered for an instant whether the old man dared.  Then she turned violent, or her voice did, and he straightened up against the wall and drew his hands into fists.  

“I can’t live with him anymore!” she burst out in a seeming rage, “I don’t know what to do.”

A long silence followed and John was tempted to peek around the doorjamb again.  But he didn’t.  He was about to step away, feeling trapped in the hallway, when she burst out again,

“I don’t want to go back to that house.  I hate that house.  Let them all drop dead in it!  I can’t bear him.  I can’t bear him!” she shouted.

She had begun to cry, and John heard the old man rise from the bed and say soothing things.  His face burning, his body uncontrollably trembling with the desire to run away, he turned and fled quickly but softly back to the dining room and then out of the house.

The children were noisy and overexcited from running in the yard and in and out of the house.  The families were all arrived now and Vern’s brothers, sisters, and their spouses were sitting in the living room, dining room, and kitchen—wherever there was space.  To quiet the children, Sandra searched the refrigerator and cupboards for food or snacks.  There was very little.  That was why Grace left for the supermarket.  Vern searched the cupboards for liquor and found only a nearly empty bottle of gin.  His older brother laughed and said they would have to do it themselves.  Vern left with him to buy beer, wine, and fixings for other drinks, while Sandra accompanied Vern’s sister to the fast food places.  It was getting too late now to cook, but they decided to picnic in the yard as they had originally planned, with or without Grace and John, though they had all begun to worry. 

At first their talk was all about how the place had been changed by the work that day, and Sandra told of the mountain of clothes in the laundry room and of Grace’s explanation of it.  That story produced excesses of amazement among the women and a not-so-surreptitious visit to the laundry room, where the pile of clothes, half its size now, but still immense, drew further excesses of more amazed amazement.  None of them came to visit Grace and John, and so they had no awareness of the depths into which that relationship had fallen.  All agreed to blame Grace as the one who was most difficult to get along with, and all commiserated with John. 

     The evening passed, and the brothers and sisters began to leave, all pleading with Vern and Sandra to come away with them, not to spend another night in that house.  But Vern decided to stay because Grace and John knew they were there, and he suspected that sooner or later he would hear from them.  When that happened, they would need him, he said, and he couldn’t walk out on them.  Reluctantly, they all left, and the house had fallen quiet.  Vern looked at Sandra and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “What do we do now?”  Vern’s older brother had called the police earlier in the evening and given all the information he knew and was told the family would hear if anything turned up.  There was nothing they could do now, she said.  In spite of their tiredness from the traveling and from the day’s labors, they sat in the living room and waited.    

When he left the house and got back in his pick-up, John had no idea what he would do or where he might go, only that going home and trying to explain was not the right thing to do.  He put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine.  Instead, he rested back, his hands in his lap, and stared again at Grace’s car.  He did not feel rage—the rage that any man would feel who found his wife in another man’s bedroom saying the things he heard Grace say.  He didn’t even feel anger.  He felt, instead, sorry—sorry for all the years they had lived the way they did; sorry for the hopelessness that led to the scene in the dark hallway; for the emptiness he felt after their fights, for the insults she threw at him in front of his family, and the humiliations in front of hers, and the rancor in the evenings; sorry for the unfaithfulness, for all the hurt, and the tears the old man tried to soothe away.  He felt tears burning his own eyes, but he forced them back by taking a breath and staring straight ahead up the street.

     He looked at his watch.  He had been in the house for only a few minutes, just long enough to hear what he felt he should never have heard.  He considered whether he would have been better off not to have gone in, not to have followed her here, so that she might have returned eventually to the house, and their lives have continued as they had been, with perhaps the presence of Vern and Sandra making enough of a difference to help her reconcile to the way things were.  He considered how some things are better not known.  He considered how their lives were going to change, now; how his life was going to change. 

He could not ignore what he had heard, he decided, as he sat and stared, sometimes up the street, sometimes at her car.  He thought about how having heard would affect him when he next saw her, and when that might be.  He thought about telling her he had been there and seen and heard, and slapping her in the face, and demanding that she never see the old man again, but he knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t say and do those things.  It was because he couldn’t that she continuously ridiculed him in front of his mother and father and sisters.  He always put his hands in his pockets when she carried on, which helped him to keep calm, and tried to smile pleasantly and to ignore her.

What he didn’t know as he sat in the truck and thought all these things was that Grace and the old man had come out of the bedroom and into the living room and were hugging and saying goodbye, for Grace, having vented her emotions and spent her ill will, had decided to go home, after all, and bask in the glory of hosting all her brothers and sisters, when they had seen him through the bay window sitting coolly and threateningly in his black pick-up and staring at Grace’s car.  He didn’t know the terror they felt at being found out, especially the old man, who trembled in fear of the consequences he could only half imagine in his state but which undid him almost on the spot.  His fear amplified hers, and her heart beat heavily as she looked out at her inoffensive husband who was, perhaps, even at that moment contemplating his inability to slap her in the face for taking up with another man.

“What are we going to do?” the old man said, his fear making his breath and thus the words tremble. 

But just at that moment, John saw them looking out at him through the window.  They both quickly scampered out of view, even more frightened, one on each side of the bay window.  Grace was breathless with terror, her discovery now being certain, her infidelity witnessed in the flesh by John.  It was too much.  She had a vision of herself running from the house shrieking, getting into her car, and peeling away, never to return.

The old man, leaning against the wall and clutching his chest, anticipated being beaten, even killed, and as he looked out the window at what he could only assume was an enraged husband, he regretted the sweet moments he extracted from this vulnerable woman. 

In this state of clutching fear, they awaited John’s move.  But John wasn’t moving.  When he saw them through the window become aware of him, he felt ashamed, and all his contemplations vanished.  He didn’t know what to do, whether he should drive away or wait for her to leave first, or get out of the truck and go up there.  He was deciding very bravely on the last when the door opened and Grace stuck her head out.  She called to him and held her palm out as though gesturing for him to wait.

She stepped back in and told the old man that this was the last time they would see each other.  Still clutching his chest and leaning against the wall, he nodded and said, “Yes, yes.  That’s the right thing.  No more, no more.”  Then, unhappy with the sudden end to her sensually satisfying trysts and even unhappier with the old man’s failure to offer to defend her—he was disappointingly, depressingly quick to end their relationship—she walked out.  She didn’t know what to expect from John.  She knew what it all looked like from his point of view, and this filled her with dread as she approached the truck.  But she, too, had a point of view, she thought, and her side needed to be considered.  She was thinking about how she could put her side of things first when John rolled down the window. 

“I’m going home, now,” she said in as controlled a voice as she could manage.  She was ready to make any admission and to acknowledge all that he wished.  She stepped in close to him, and he looked at her.  For a moment they looked into each other’s faces.  And then he said,

“We need to go somewhere.  I’m not ready to go home.  I went in, Gracie.  I went in and walked up the hallway and saw you in the bedroom.  You said things.  We can’t go home.”

Grace stood staring at him, uncomprehending for many moments, until the images shaped themselves in her mind, images that made her shut her eyes in shame.  It was much worse than she imagined in the house, when she saw herself shrieking and driving away because he had seen them through the window.  It was so much worse, she didn’t know if she could bear it.  She felt faint and grabbed at the truck to steady herself.

“Can you drive?” he asked her, concerned that she appeared to swoon.

“Yes,” she said, quaveringly.

He put his hand on hers holding onto the frame of the truck window and said, “Can you follow me in your car?”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Somewhere, somewhere where we can be alone.”

She looked at him for signs of what he was feeling.  The last thing she wanted now was to be alone with him.  She didn’t think it was safe, especially since it was getting late and would be dark soon. 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be alone, right now,” she said.

He looked at her when she added that “right now” and couldn’t help but to smile.

“I trust you not to hurt me,” he said, knowing what she was implying.

For a moment she didn’t know if he was joking or serious.  She looked at him and he wasn’t smiling anymore.  Did he see himself to blame for her infidelity?  For a moment, she almost thought he did, and for a moment, she almost thought it was true.  It occurred to her that maybe he was more afraid of her than she was of him, and some of her old confidence began to return.  But only for a moment.  As she looked at him, trying to sense how the severity of his mood was affecting the meekness of his character, he added,

“And you can trust me not to slap you.”

She smiled, then nodded and said OK.  Yes, she thought, things were going to work out.  It was a long hard night.  At the end of it, they returned home, still husband and wife; still husband and wife, but with no guarantees.