Thirty - Jill Emerson [3]
January 12
It snowed today. The snow that we already had was just about gone. For the past week or so it’s been turning brown in the gutters, becoming slush, and bit by bit finding its way down the sewers. (You would almost think it was human.) So now it’s snowing, coming down in big wet sticky flakes. I sat at the window and watched it and thought how beautiful it was, and how depressing.
Why is my first reaction to everything to think how much damned trouble it will be? Why don’t I enjoy things?
January 14
Marcie Hillman thinks I should have an affair!
She came over this afternoon for the pause in the day’s occupation she calls the housewife’s hour, before her kids were due home from school. I made real coffee in honor of the occasion. The nice thing about instant coffee is that there is no way to screw it up. Not so with this afternoon’s pot. You would think that after seven years of marriage I would know how to make a simple thing like a pot of coffee. You would think that, wouldn’t you?
We sat in the kitchen and pretended the coffee was all right. And, like fighters warily circling one another in the opening round, we played Who’s Depressed? (That’s the first time I’ve named our game, but not the first time I’ve seen it as such. If there were a way to package it as a board game for two or more players, a way to introduce dice and spinners, I think it would outsell Scrabble.) We fence around, Marcie and I, alternately bubbly and sulking, until through some hard-to-follow process we mutually determine who will be patient and who will be therapist. The roles float back and forth from day to day and week to week. Her hangups are at least well defined, and I guess pretty standard. She keeps going on and off diets and forever weighs I guess twenty-five pounds more than she should. And she is periodically incapable of keeping her house as clean as she wants it, and never capable of keeping it as clean as Edgar wants it, Edgar being her husband. She is, for all of that, a tall and pretty blond with a pretty if ample body. She is also a year and a half older than I am, which is to say that she is thirty, has in fact been thirty for a half a year, and it hasn’t seemed to destroy her.
“You,” she said, “are in a bad way.”
“I suppose.”
“What’s the matter? The periodic distress of the female ilk?”
“Ilk? My periodic ilk isn’t due for a week.”
“And maybe you won’t have it.”
“Oh, I’ll have it.”
“You could be pregnant right now, kiddo. And then you’ll glow with motherhood, and all the doubts and fears—”
“Oh, sure. Anyway, I’m not pregnant.”
“I don’t like to keep harping at it, but this one particular doctor is supposed to be fantastic. Every woman who goes to his office comes home pregnant.”
“From his office?”
“I didn’t say that exactly right.”
“It sounded as if he screwed them himself.”
“Well, whatever works, doll. American pragmatism in action. Better things for better living.”
“Uh-huh. Who wants to be knocked up, anyway?”
“I thought you did.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Oh?”
“Maybe I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing.”
So we tossed the age pillow around for a little while, and other things, and then Marcie cocked her head—I think that’s the word for it, set her head at an angle and swung her eyes at me—and told me I ought to have an affair.
“You know what?” she said. “You ought to have an affair.”
“Just what I need.”
“You think I’m kidding, don’t you?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Oh, for Christ’s—”
“For your own sake, kiddo. Not J.C.’s. You’re letting yourself go stale. Your whole marriage—do you mind home truths?”
“Go ahead.”
“Right where the angels fear to tread. All right. I get the impression that you and what’s-his-name are running out of each other. That it’s all turning sour.”
“That could be