How to Be an American Housewife - Margaret Dilloway [55]
In some instances, it may unfortunately be necessary for a Wife to seek outside employment, such as when the husband is dismembered or is dead.
—from the chapter “A Map to Husbands,”
How to Be an American Housewife
Two
Yesterday, I had been innocently wasting my life away at work, unaware that my mother was about to arrive, asking me to take her to the Commissary. I would have been less surprised to see a UFO land in the parking lot.
This morning I called my father as soon as I got to work. “Is Mom all right today?”
“She is. She goes through spells sometimes, just like she always has.” Dad sounded reassuring, chewing food, the television in the background. Everything was normal, I wanted to believe.
“But why did she come up here alone?”
“I was busy.” Dad crunched on something. “Sue, don’t worry, everything’s fine. We’ll see you for dinner.”
Now I tapped my pen on my desk, staring at the half-alive fern I kept near my monitor. Dad must be right. A seriously ill woman wouldn’t be making spaghetti sauce from scratch, the kind you had to cook all day long. No, she would use a jarred sauce. But your mother is stubborn, I reminded myself, and pushed the voice away. Dad was there. My mother was, if not well, then the same as always.
The phone rang, then stopped before I could answer. I was a New Accounts manager, as soulless a paper-pushing processing job as you can get without actually turning into a zombie. People opened accounts, I input their information. I listened to employees ask for raises that I couldn’t grant. The joke was that my company, PFD Financial, stood for Pays Fewer Dollars. I had worked there, I was ashamed to say, for nearly ten years. Ever since Craig and I got divorced. A steady paycheck and benefits were worth a little grind, though.
Every year I told myself this was the last. I’d start something new. Once upon a time, I’d wanted to teach. It was a modest goal, especially compared to my early daydreams. Yet it had proven unachievable so far. The night-class teacher education program cost too much; no use getting in debt for the sum of one’s entire first-year salary. The cheaper state-school program scheduled classes during the day while I was working. I couldn’t figure out how to manage. The only answer I came up with was to wait until my daughter had finished school. I’d still be young, relatively speaking, with twenty years left until retirement.
On this day, I looked at the coffee cup on my desk and realized that I’d taken fourteen breaks that day. Dreaming at the water cooler, looking into space. I heard the gasping cackle of the woman next to me, the low hum of the dim lights.
I thought again about my mother, arriving at my office the day before. A trip she had never made or asked to make, to see me. A trip to buy groceries that she would never dare make alone.
Ever since I could remember, Mom’s heart had been no good. Always tired, always needing to lie down, barely enough energy to make dinner. Why had they had me, so late, at age forty-two? She had had a murmur before that; it had turned into something worse after she’d had me. “Your mother couldn’t pick you up after you were a month old,” Dad had said matter-of-factly. “You were too heavy.” I had worn her down. How else would you explain it? Babies are hard on bodies. I knew this, and I had only had one.
And nobody could say what had happened to her with certainty. Genetics or environment, radiation sickness or scarlet fever, a simple virus—anything could tweak the heart, make it weak.
As though I needed to atone for my own strong heart, I began to run. I ran every morning, up at four, two and a half miles around the park next to my house, before Helena woke up. I ran even if I got painful shin splints, even if my knees got puffy. I ran fast, until I couldn’t talk, until my heart thumped in my ears, hard rain on a tin roof. The doctor told me that when my heart couldn’t speed up, that was the time to worry.
When I first began running, pushing Helena