Together Again Susan McMillan

Susan McMillan

The rotten apple on the kitchen counter could be a clue, but since I’m not a sleuth, it’s just a mildewy fruit rather than a spoiled after thought, or a forgotten thought. Is it mine? It could be Ted’s, or the repairman’s. So I leave it on the counter only to recall, later, that Ted is dead and that the repairman, well, I don’t know that there ever was a repairman. The kitchen faucet still drips. Did I call anyone about it?

The point is… Perhaps you get the point. I’ll possibly miss the point again, later, when I wake up from my third nap of the day or finish reading the chapter in the book on the coffee table, the book that I began reading today or that I’ve been reading for days, I just don’t know. Anyway, I’ll wake up, or I’ll put down the book, and I’ll wander into the kitchen and there will be the apple, lying in an even more rotten repose. I know that Ted is dead. But that doesn’t extinguish him. In the night, if I listen closely, I can hear a soft snore and snuffle next to me, then the mattress tilts as he shifts in his sleep. Some days I don’t get the morning paper because I feel the draft when the front door opens and hear the rattle of coat hangers in the front hall closet upon his return. When I meet up with friends, I see their gazes shift to my side, looking for Ted but seeing only an empty half of a now-nonexistent whole. With just three weeks gone since his stumble and gasp outside the coffee shop, the clamor of sirens and voices, the knees of my tights torn from kneeling on gritty pavement, I may still be able to tug the fraying remnants of time back, to wind them into a tight enough ball so that if I leave them alone they will mend of their own accord and in the morning Ted will rise, put on his slippers and shuffle into the bathroom. We’ll start anew, the same old same old, like water dripping from the faucet. The point is time. The point may also be memory, although I can’t recall

for sure.

Sometimes I remember the credit card receipt I found in his pants pocket when I pulled them from the dryer. The receipt, soft and frayed around the edges but still legible, was for a beachside hotel the week he said he was in Des Moines for business. I’m not proud that I searched his computer for clues, 31

although I was bemused that the first password I tried (Secret) worked and that he populated his Instagram account (created using his childhood pet, Roscoe, as a pseudonym) with Glamour Shots of his lover. But after the recriminations and pleading (mine; his), I put it all behind me. It’s in the past, and not worth remembering, primarily because it never occurred. Nor did my affair. If I’d had one, it would have been with a golf pro, one at least ten years younger. Some mornings, sitting in the living room drinking coffee, the morning paper forlorn in the driveway, I imagine how the pro’s golf shirt rippled across his shoulders as he demonstrated a putt, or how he stood behind me breathing into my right ear and holding my wrists to coach a proper swing. Ted broke down when I told him I was leaving him for Leif (a name I’ve always adored), and that I’d qualified for the LPGA. If only we’d joined a country club and I’d taken up golf, Leif could have been a reality. This is what I contemplate as I lean against the kitchen counter, the apple and I watching the faucet drip like grains of sand through an hourglass. The torrid rendezvous at the beach, the clandestine golf affair: they would have been much more interesting than the quiet disintegration of a marriage. How to pinpoint when I stopped telling Ted my days’ minutiae or when he ceased to recall my favorite dessert? Does it matter that the years during which he left me random love notes numbered far fewer than the years in which he didn’t, or that his habit of abandoning half-eaten apples on the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the garage work bench went from charmingly eccentric to annoyingly piggish? Outside the coffee shop the warm spring day was in full swing. The plum trees cast a heady scent just shy of cloying, so when Ted crumpled onto the sidewalk it was ridiculous that I looked to see if he’d slipped on a patch of ice. The EMT’s worked on him for thirty minutes, and then for another ten minutes after I alternately pleaded with them and harangued them. “Heroic” and “futile” I heard a bystander whisper, but he skulked away when I turned and glared at him. I knew it was futile: the EMTs’ grim expressions: Ted’s gray mask. But to stop was so final, a defeat consigning me to a future with only myself to critique. And for Ted, much worse, of course. When time knits itself back together, Ted and I will have a good row. I’ll throw a plate. He’ll stomp around in the iris beds. I’ll demand that he introduce me to his slutty paramour, 32

and he’ll threaten to have the country club axe the golf pro. I’ll pour Scotch on his computer. He’ll accuse me of ogling the repairman. Somewhere in the fury, perhaps when we stop to catch our collective breath, there’ll be a glint of happiness at feeling jealousy and rage and betrayal, at feeling something other than tedium, and regret. For now, I’ll keep shifting the memories and figments around as I move from bed to couch, to picking up the book then putting it down, to conjuring things that might have been and mourning those that will never be and to being confused as to which is which. I’ll collect clues and pretend I’m not. I’ll let the sink drip. I’ll leave the apple a bit longer.