Annabel - Kathleen Winter [121]
She remembered, or thought she remembered, a time when her husband had stayed at home for more than a week or two at a stretch, and had looked at her when they spoke instead of looking at the stove, or out the door towards the kindling, or farther, to the sky and to gulls and scoters and other birds that moved in that sky. She tried to remember that intimacy. Had it been an illusion? She was sure it had not. And it was no illusion either that she now floated in an existence in which she remained untouched. No one touched her body, and now that Wayne had gone away, no one touched her soul. She had become unreal, she thought, to anyone outside herself. And as a result she was losing a sense of her own effect on the world. She had an effect on the kettle if she put it on the stove. It boiled. She made tea. If she drew the curtains the curtains remained closed. She had no problem having an effect on the curtains. Her slippers lay where she had placed them after their last use, as did her glasses, her cup, and her saucer. But as for an effect on the larger world, which she had had as a mother and did not now feel she had as a woman living practically alone, that effect had lost its power.
When Treadway came home in the spring, he saw that she was not sure whether it was a Wednesday or a Saturday, and that was when he wrote to Wayne that he thought she was confused. But she was not confused, not in her own mind. She watched Treadway tidy the house and open the curtains and doors and windows. He even washed the windows, which surprised her. He washed them with Windex and did it in the methodical way he had with every task, using a system that included three types of cloth. When they went to bed, he kissed her goodnight on the cheek as if he were kissing a niece or a nephew goodbye at the train station, then he turned his back to her and began his soft snoring almost instantly. She had never been bothered by his snoring, which was a kind of music to her, but she was sure she remembered a time in their marriage when being with Treadway while he was sleeping did not feel the same as being with him while he was awake.
Now he did other tasks that belonged to the month of May. He climbed a ladder to the roof and cleaned the chimney, and he descended into the root cellar and brought up last year’s old, soft potatoes to use as this year’s seed potatoes in the garden. He did not know she had bought potatoes at the store while he was on his trapline. She had done this because it was nicer to walk outside in the daylight and buy clean, unsprouted potatoes than it was to go down the cellar steps and carry up potatoes that had to be washed and that had sprouted long white tentacles and developed wrinkly skins. So there were plenty of seed potatoes remaining, and Treadway laid them in a pile on the front path and began to cut them in pieces so he could plant them before he left. In the past it had been normal for him to stay at home in the summer. His new pattern, his wish to be away in the wilderness all the time, went unacknowledged.
He sat on the chopping block, a chunk of birch he had rolled over from the woodpile. Sun shone through its loose bark and turned it red gold, and when he cut the potatoes with his small knife, the task looked inviting to Jacinta. The fact that Treadway had carried the seed potatoes up from the dark,