The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [68]
In the chair across from his, the woman steps on its front paws to hold them firmly, while, back legs in her left hand, she uses the right to strip the hide down. Bigelow watches as the pelt turns inside out. He was hungry when he arrived, but something about the creature’s feet, its long tarsals with their gummy-looking pads and dirty nails, like those of a grotesquely large squirrel, nauseates him.
The hide, when she gets it free, swings neatly from her fist, and she lays the carcass on the table to turn the skin right-side out and examine it, the density of the mud-colored fur, the surprising length of the white guard hairs. She looks thoroughly absorbed, perhaps deciding to what use she might put it; either that or its value on Front Street. How many toffees it might command.
The complete calm with which she accomplishes a task seems to mock his turbulence, his nights of agitation, of wondering how possibly to guard himself against what seems like her capriciousness, another unexplained disappearance. She will leave. She will leave. She will leave. He’s made the three words into a refrain, sung them over and over as a kind of defensive training. But how laughable. How pathetic and useless an exercise.
Abruptly, Bigelow is jolted into a wild temper. He jumps up from his chair so suddenly that she looks from him to the stove, as if assuming he’s been burned, a cinder must have flown out of the open door.
In a minute he’s on her, he’s pulled the oily-feeling pelt from her hands and thrown it across the room, picked up the naked animal and dashed it on the table so that its head makes a dull thud.
“I hate you!” he says, yelling the words. “Stupid! You’re no better than a dog the way you sit there!” He flails at her, without actually making contact, and she steps out of reach.
“Come back at me!” he cries. “Why don’t you!” He lunges forward, grabs her shoulders to shake them, and she eludes him with a neat swift twist, so that he’s left with empty hands; and she, standing some distance away, regards him impassively, as if she’s seen things he can’t imagine. What could he do that might surprise her?
Nothing, judging from her calm regard, and yet this doesn’t stop him from wrecking the house as she watches. He turns over the table and chairs, stomps on one so that he breaks its back leg, splinters a stretcher. At this she looks pained, but it’s a kind of look reserved for spills, for wear and tear—she’s not threatened. Not by that or by his hurling everything he can get hands on, parkas and boots and cups, ladles, broom and dustpan, box of toffees, canister of tea. Tobacco and pipe and tub and towel. The kettle and the frying pan.
Throughout, the woman stands to the side, avoiding his touch. It’s as if he’s nothing, nothing personal. Like wind or water, like the weather itself, soon he’ll be spent, he’ll have worn himself out and she’ll right the furniture, she’ll go on with her chores. A man, that’s all he is, the outline of his psyche like that of his cock, one minute all puffed up hard, bellicose, the next spent and shriveled.
Bigelow falls facedown into the furs that he’s pulled off the bed and, inside himself, keeps falling. Down and down, into wracking seizures of sobs. The more it seems that words are useless, the more of them he uses, while she sits silent on the stripped bed.
“What do you think! That you can just leave, just like that! No warning! No explanation! I came here. You were gone. I came back. Every day. I was here every day! I waited. I waited because I didn’t believe that you would just go. Disappear without telling me somehow.”
He has to force himself to lift his face out of the fur, to look at her sitting on the stripped bed, bits of straw poking through the mattress ticking. He wants to put his head in her lap, but there’s nothing in her posture, her crossed arms and set lips, to indicate