A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [88]
The stain had gotten smeared and was worse than it had been at the start. In the weeks that Alice had been gone I had done my best to keep up appearances. If we let ourselves fall apart the neighbors, or the police, might descend upon us and pick our bones clean. Even though I had vacuumed and disposed of old tuna cans for the sake of normalcy, there were certain tasks I didn’t do well. For one thing, I was not in harmony with the soiled shirt, the way my mother would have been. For another, I couldn’t work up sympathy for extraneous items such as throw rugs. Why wash the table, sweep the floor, settle the rugs, swab the counter after every meal, when we’re coming back within four hours to disrupt what I’ve labored over to make right? I ask the question only half-jokingly. Alice always said I had a high threshold for filth and squalor. When we first knew each other in Ann Arbor she had me pegged as a nose picker in the car, the kind of person who wipes his hand under the seat if there isn’t a Kleenex. I said, “What’s the alternative?” She looked over her sunglasses at me as if the answer was obvious. She used to occasionally get on the bandwagon after she’d been with Theresa for an evening. She’d rail on, something about how my household dysfunction was a habit my mother had nurtured in me from infancy. There’d been clear female boundaries in my birthplace, she said, across which males did not venture. I assume she meant the chain-link fence around the broom closet and the dishwasher. So I was cultivated to be an unremorseful slob. Dairying has only reinforced my natural tendencies. I’m outside all day long, in dirt and dung and chaff. It’s unwieldy in nature, no cap on dust, or broken machines that must come to rest somewhere. There’s no end to bailing twine, rusty nails, old fencing materials a person might someday want to use again. Beyond a certain point I’ve given up trying to bring about order.
“We’re in here,” I said to Theresa as I opened the door. I wondered if she knew about Alice’s arrest. I wondered if she was going to quote some Scripture or put my eye out. She looked around herself as she set foot in the door. She saw, I guess in one penetrating glance, that I’d been doing the best I could. She saw that my best effort wasn’t worth much.
“I’ve been trying to get a cherry stain out of Emma’s white T-shirt,” I said, to explain why everything else had gone by the wayside.
“Let me,” she said, reaching for the dish towel in my hand. “Hold still, Em.” I relaxed some then, figuring that if she was going to worry over a spot, she might not know. She kneeled, massaging the shirt for a minute. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “Boil water, Howard. For a fruit stain you pour hot water from above. You hold it way up—there’s something about pouring from a distance that makes a difference. It’s all in the heat and distance.”
“Heat and distance,” I repeated. “Better take off the shirt, Emma.” I filled the kettle at the sink and then walked across the room to the stove. “Here,” I said on my way, pulling out a stool for Theresa. After I fiddled with the temperamental knob on the one working burner I went to the table and stood across from her, trying to casually lean on a chair with my elbows.
We watched Emma taking off her shirt, trying to work her way around the wet spots so they wouldn’t touch her face. I couldn’t remember ever having been alone with Theresa before, without other adults. I can’t say I actually knew her outside of the context, the strictures, of other people’s associations with her. She was my wife’s good friend. She was my neighbor’s wife. She was the mother of our children’s playfellow. If our families had dinner together, Dan and I would often stand outside before the meal was ready. We’d talk about whether I should buy the new high-tensile wire fences or stick with what I had, about the Potawatomi Indians, about storm systems, local history, town politics, national politics, the Brewers, the achievements of our daughters. At dinner, around the