"You think you could ever pick up around here!" Janet shrieked at me. Shrieked. If I was not mistaken I had just got home from work and she does not work.
It's her goddamn job to pick up around here.
I opened the paper, tried to ignore her, and started reading.
"Gordon!" Janet stood in the dining room, the remains of our meal on the table. A meal, I might add, that I paid for.
Janet and I hadn't been married that long, and we didn't live in the greatest house and it was on the bad side of Tulsa. Teenage punks pretty much had the run of the streets. Janet hated that. She eyed them all like they wanted to rape her or rob the house or car jack the car. I, on the other hand, didn't really mind them. They were kind of like wild animals. Don't bother them, they won't bother you. Besides, she seems to forget it wasn't that long ago that we were teenage punks ourselves.
"Gordon!" Now I was getting irritated. I peered at her over the paper. She still stood in the same spot, hands on her hips, and glared at me.
"What?"
"What! What the hell is wrong with you? You ate this meal, too! Now come help me clean it up!"
I didn't want to get into it with her. I wanted to read the paper. Maybe catch the six o'clock news, put my feet up. Because I shlupped my ass to that Godless factory every day so she could have food, and clothes, and the bills paid. And what did I ask in return? Not much. Not much at all. Just that she clean the goddamn house.
"Janet," I said calmly, because I was calm. I was in control, "I have worked all day, all week. All I ask, all, is that you clean up dinner," There may have been a bitter, brittle edge to my voice and I tried to remember how it was when we got married. How beautiful she looked…
"Fine, Gordon. Fine," Silently she began to pick up the dinner, scrape food into the trash, fill the sink with warm soapy water.
This was my least favorite time of day. When my dinner sat like a greasy lump in the center of my stomach, when the light drained from the sky. When everything seems too bright, too loud. I'm not tired and I'm not awake. I just got home from work and it's nearly time to go back again. It's this time when it would be easy to just, I don't know, end it all.
Janet does her chores with more clanging and banging then is necessary, I'm quite sure of that. Her lips are compressed into a tight line.
The words on the newspaper started to blur, and even though I know the newspaper is written at the 5th grade reading level, it had become like Greek, and I put the paper down. I listened as Walter Conkrite started his broadcast, that man's face as comforting as my father's. I tried ignoring the bangs and clangs from the kitchen.
Bedtime. 11 o'clock. Janet still wasn't talking. Her lips were still compressed into that terse line.
In bed, she read her love novels with burly Austrian men and roses on the cover. I read chronicles of World War II. I lived by the adage, "Don't go to bed angry," I put a hand on her thigh. My hand was on top of the covers. Her thigh was under the covers.
She slapped it away.
"Hey," I said. She continued to read.
"Hey,"
"Hey what?" Still not looking at me.
"Hey let's not be mad, okay?" My voice was soft. She put the book down and turned to me with such a look of hate on her face that it was staggering.
"No, it's not okay," There were tears in her voice and in the corners of her eyes.
"I asked you to help with one thing, and you can't. You won't. I didn't ask you to do everything, Gordon, just that one little thing. But you couldn't do it. So where does that leave me? Us? What kind of a marriage is this?"
She looked at me with narrowed eyes and I knew she wanted to punch me. But she didn't. She rolled over and I was left facing her back.
I knew I should have touched her shoulder, told her I was sorry, and that our marriage was a partnership. That I was wrong.
I didn't feel wrong or right anymore. I just felt tired. I just felt that I hated my dead end job and I saw those men there in their 40's, 50's, and God help us, their 60's. They'd been trapped in that factory since they were my age, never promoted, never seeing or finding a way out.
Oh dear God no, not me, please. Please?
So I wasn't right or wrong. Just exhausted.
"Fuck this," I said, jumping out of bed, pulling on my jeans, slipping into my shoes without socks, pulling my coat on over my tee shirt.
"Fuck this," I grabbed the car keys from the dresser.
"What are you going to do? Leave? Oh you are just naturally a great guy, aren't you?" There was a thinly disguised edge of panic in her voice. I didn't care. I left.
In the car, driving around the neighborhood, I felt almost drunk with anger. Something my father said came to me, something he said the night before I got married.
"Gordon," he had said, "after the fun of the honeymoon, the real work of the marriage begins," My father had a heavily lined face, his gray eyes lost in a net of wrinkles, his forehead furrowed like a good field. I loved every one of those lines.
I guess I was starting to understand what he meant.
I saw a kid stumbling around, up on the sidewalk then out into the street. I had to swerve not to hit him. This was not as uncommon as you might think. As I said, I lived in a bad neighborhood. But this kid looked hurt. I pulled over.
"Hey, kid! Want a ride!"
"Huh? Oh. Yeah, I guess so," The kid said. He got in. I looked at him. He was bloody and looked kind of dazed, like he had a high fever.
"Are you all right, kid? You look like you've been in a fight,"
"I have been. A rumble. I'm okay," This was one kid who did not look okay.
"Hate to tell you this, kiddo, but you're bleedin' all over my car seats,"
"I am?"
"Your head,"
He touched the side of his head, looked at the blood on his hand, then looked at me.
"Gosh, mister, I'm sorry,"
"Don't worry about it. This wreck's been through worse. What's your address? I'm not about to dump a hurt kid out on the streets this time of night," The kid told me and I drove him there.
"Thanks a lot," he said. He seemed like a nice kid.
"I'm just naturally a great guy," I said, and watched him stumble up to his house.