Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [75]
“What does moving out of the city have to do with it?”
So many of their arguments were about pushing the other person to articulate the things they’d been threatening to say that were just under the surface, wounds that had scabbed over but refused to heal.
Not talking about things that matter was one of those surprises of married life that Alison wished someone had told her about in advance. She and Charlie could go for days, weeks even, without discussing anything more important than the phone bill. It wasn’t that they didn’t have time to talk; it was that the time was never right. Alison’s lurking fear was that Charlie’s silence masked a fundamental disappointment—that she wasn’t interesting or exciting enough for him; that he thought he had “settled.” That he felt trapped in a maze of bourgeois concerns and aspirations, that he resented having to work so hard to maintain their way of life.
There was plenty that Alison kept quiet about, too. She didn’t feel she had any right to articulate how powerless she sometimes felt as an unsalaried stay-at-home mother, how raising children essentially alone often felt like drudgery, how distant the mundane realities of marriage were from her idealistic girlish notions. She had chosen it, all of it. But with those choices came great anxiety. Together they had constructed a life that was, if not a lie, then some milder form of delusion. Charlie made $130,000 a year, and they could barely make ends meet. They lived on the knife edge of their means; each month they slid further into debt, until February, bonus time, when they could pay off their credit cards. They chose to live in a town with astronomical taxes so that their children would go to reasonable public schools; they chose to buy a “preowned,” still-above-their-means Volvo because they wanted a safe car; Alison chose to stay at home. But their fear lurked just under the surface.
Sometimes late at night Alison would whisper, “Maybe we should just leave all this, go somewhere—Kansas, maybe, or North Carolina—”
“But you’re the one who wanted this life,” he’d say.
“We had to go somewhere. We couldn’t afford to stay in the city.”
“Not with children, it’s true.”
“What are you saying? You wanted children. Are you saying you didn’t?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he’d say. Then it would become about that—about who wanted what kind of life. That was the problem with talking about anything. One of you might say too much, reveal too much, and there would be no going back.
For months Alison had chalked it up to their busy life, the hectic grind of parenthood. It had been ages since Charlie had looked at her—really looked, the way he used to—but she had barely noticed. She wasn’t looking at him, either. She was bandaging Annie’s feelings and Noah’s scraped knees, asking Charlie to hand her the antiseptic cream, it’s on the dresser, honey, in the orange bowl, thanks, without looking up. After the kids were in bed, Charlie would collect the recycling or the trash, depending on the day, and pour himself a Scotch, and sit down to pay some bills. If Alison made dinner they might eat it standing up at the counter, and ask each other perfunctory questions about their day. With friends, some evenings, over wine and candles, they might laugh about married life—the sex they weren’t having, the romance they’d sacrificed to a constant round of dirty diapers and ear infections, the endless repetitive motion of raising kids.
But thinking back now, Alison could see where the cracks had started to form. She hadn’t been looking closely enough. She extrapolated from parts to the whole. She built a bridge in her head over the spaces between them. A morning kiss, a bouquet of flowers, a Mother’s Day card—it had been enough for her, enough to ignore the gaps in their conversation, the white gully of sheet in the middle of the bed.
WHEN CHARLIE’s CAB pulled into the driveway at