Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [74]
Her parents had left that morning. Her mother wanted to stay, but her father had been anxious to get home. “I’m like a circus elephant. I need a routine,” he’d said.
“What are you going to do?” her mother asked as Alison sat on the floor of the TV room, playing with Noah and watching her pack.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want my advice?”
“No, I … ” Alison sighed.
“You need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Unh,” she grunted.
“Just to find out your options.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little premature?”
“Maybe,” her mother said. “Maybe not. It can’t hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Alison said. “Maybe it can hurt. Maybe I’m—we’re—blowing this whole thing out of proportion.”
“That could be,” her mother said diplomatically, holding her roller suitcase down with one hand and zipping it up with the other. “But Alison—you’re a housewife. If Charlie wants to abandon this marriage, you’re not in a strategic position to get what you need.”
“I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
“Talk to a lawyer,” her mother said. “A good, smart, feminist lawyer. Then whatever happens, you’ll be ready.”
How had it come to this? All through the afternoon, as she made Noah a sandwich and cut it into stars and hearts, folded a basket of laundry, hung Annie’s dresses on hooks in her closet, Alison turned things over in her mind. Nothing about her life at the moment was what she’d envisioned for herself when she got married. For one thing, she and Charlie had always planned on staying in the city. They thought they would raise their children to be like the teenagers they saw on the crosstown buses after school, precocious and watchful and savvy; they’d juggle full-time jobs with the help of a nanny and take their kids with them to restaurants and gallery openings after work and off-Broadway plays on the weekends.
Instead, they had moved to the suburbs. Now Alison felt as if she were inside a giant bubble that moved with her wherever she went, shielding her from extremes, a bubble of middle-class suburban life—a life composed of errands and repairs and strolls to the playground, of chitchat with acquaintances in the grocery store, of scheduling electrician visits and car maintenance, of thumbing through magazines and catalogs that fell through the mail slot every afternoon at two, of her book club and health club and pediatrician appointments, of late-night lovemaking that evolved less from desire than from proximity, of bland kid dinners, fish sticks and chicken nuggets and Annie’s macaroni and cheese and Classico sauce with spaghetti on an endless loop.
“You’ve turned into a nag,” Charlie had said one evening several months ago when he announced he planned to go to a Saturday afternoon basketball game in the city, and she said she wished he wouldn’t. He was gone all week, she protested; it wasn’t fair to leave her with the kids for a whole day alone on the weekend (yes, she loved them fiercely, but enough was enough!). Also, she’d made a list of a few simple chores he needed to do around the house, like repairing a window in the attic and unclogging the basement sink.
Nag. It was such a retro, politically incorrect word that it made Alison seethe. She could not believe he had said it. She felt unfairly typecast as a character in a fifties sitcom: the hausfrau with the commuting husband she scolds and cajoles and manipulates, their gender roles as clearly drawn as the edging cut into the grass along their front walk. (For that matter, how had it come to pass that fixing windows and sinks were his domain; cleaning them was hers?)
“So I’m a nag and you’re the henpecked husband, huh?” she said. “Is that how it’s going to be?”
“Oh, stop it,” he snapped. She knew Charlie couldn’t really refute her objection; in her position—and they’d always resolved disputes that way, by trying to see each other’s point of view—he’d probably feel the