THE SMALL DEATH

A short story

© Jane Piirto. All Rights Reserved.

            First comes the shock.

            You are rummaging in a wastebasket for a misplaced bill as you write the monthly checks to pay the creditors.  You see an envelope, a little rumpled, with the type face your good friend uses, and a postmark from her small town.  You never throw out her letters, so you retrieve the envelope.  It is addressed to your husband.  To a post office box here in your town.  You didn’t even know he had a post office box.

            You read the letter.

            “Dear love,” it begins.

            “I am missing you so much.  Why can’t we be together more often?  I am thinking of your body close to mine, in me.”

            You stop breathing.  Then your heart races.  You keep reading.

            “I won’t be able to meet you in Minneapolis, as we planned.  Things are pretty awful around here.  Nick is out ’til all hours after he closes down the restaurant, probably with one of his girls, but I don’t care, I have you, now.”

            I should put this away.  I don’t want to read it, your mind says.  Your arms start to jangle; your fingers move to crumple the letter up and throw it back into the wastebasket, but you are a fast reader and your eyes have taken over your will.

            “I long for us to lie together, but I can’t ask my mother to take care of the kids while I go down to The Cities to see my lover.  While you are there, think of me, and I will sleep with you soon.  We will make love, sweating and touching, and my legs will curl over yours until morning.  This is my fondest wish, love.  I am sorry to write you such a longing letter, but I think of you day and night.”

            Your child enters the house, sauntering as new teenagers do, and she yells, “Mom, what’s for supper?  I’m starved!”  Doors slam.  The back door, the refrigerator door, the bathroom door.  You sit in the den, eyes closed, head pounding, silent.  The child’s bedroom door slams.  You hear the sounds of a Top-40 radio station through the ceiling.

            You open your eyes again and turn the letter over.  “I won’t be able to make it to Michele’s performance next week, either, my love.  I had hoped to see you then, and perhaps we could have had some time alone. (I am thinking of your hardened nipples as I write this.)  Nick has a new act opening at the restaurant, and I’ve got to be there.  One of those Dinner Theater things.  I love you and I miss you.”

            The letter is signed with Virginia’s familiar flourish.

            Your head is banging.  You are breathing hard and fast.  Your eyes unfocus.  You shake your head, unbelieving, and read the letter again.  You have memorized the words with one reading.  They are engraved on your brain.

            You walk slowly with your heart beating rapidly, into the kitchen.  You open up a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup and put it on low on the gas burner.  You walk to the laundry room and you pile a wicker basket full of whites, underwear and socks, warm and fluffy from the dryer, which has just rung.  You walk into the living room, sit on the couch, before the four o’clock movie.  It is a love story starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as Irene and Vernon Castle.

            The black and white lovers dance and dance, swirling around and around.  Ginger has a fluffy skirt on, that floats as Fred turns her.  You sort socks by the colors of the stripes on top.  They don’t match.  Your son comes in, tossing a football.  He is chewing bubble gum and smacking.  “Ma, I’m starved, what’s for dinner?”

            You yell as if you are out of breath–you are having trouble breathing–up the stairs,  “Cindy, there’s some soup on the stove.  Make sandwiches for you and your brother.  I’m going for a ride!”

            You take the letter from the desk in the den and you put it into an envelope.  You print, very carefully, your husband’s name on the envelope.  B-R-I-A-N.  You seal the envelope and leave it by the living room lamp, where you always leave notes for each other.  You always sign your notes X and O, kiss and hug.  You don’t sign this.

            You pour a plastic glass of white wine and start to leave the house.  “When will you be back, Mom?” your son asks.  “You promised to take the guys to the show.”

            You stop and take a few breaths to calm yourself.  “Your father will take you when he gets home.”

            You climb into the station wagon.  You need a cigarette, even though you have quit.  You need gas, too.  You check your purse for money.  Not enough.  You run back into the house and upstairs to yours and Brian’s, yours and your husband’s, bedroom, where you make love and curl your legs about each other until morning.  As you take twenty dollars from the cash envelope in the top drawer, you open the second drawer, where your nightgowns and underpants lie.  You rummage through and take out a chaste nightgown, the kind you wear when you visit your in-laws, and you also take out a pair of underpants.  The underpants are your sexiest, low-cut bikinis, lacy and brief.  You stuff them into your purse along with the money.  You plan to stay in a motel, you guess.

            There is the telephone.  You are rushing to get out of this place.  Get out of here! you shout to yourself, but your heart is beating so hard you stop.  You look into your address book and find the telephone number of Virginia and her husband Nick and their three children Susan, Bill, and Theresa, in another area code one hundred miles away.  You are such good friends you have the dates of the children’s birthdays there, also.  You dial their number.  Why am I dialing this number?  You put the phone down.   I am too cool a person to do this, you mutter to yourself.

            You dial the number again and do not hang up. With “Hello?” you hear Virginia’s voice over the miles. 

            “You adulterer!  You bitch!” you say.  In a low voice so the children won’t hear, although you want to shout it.  “This is Michele,” you say.  You hang up the telephone.

            After getting gas and cigarettes and a bottle of white wine you head the wagon out to the freeway.  You push the buttons until you reach the stop nearest the country western station.  Then you turn the dial.  They are singing, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,”  and you turn the radio up louder.  You are driving slowly, as if you are an old, old lady, moving mechanically.  Your reflexes have disappeared and you are an old crone, chugging along with both hands on the wheel, while all the traffic passes you.  You are usually a fast driver.  A sports car, Corvette, with two lovers, passes you.  The woman reaches across the console to hug the man as they speed by.  She has long brown hair, like Virginia’s.

            You turn off twenty miles later.  A song about a woman called Ruby taking her love to town is on the radio.  The sign says Lake Ojibway State Park.  The pretty, blond, young ranger sees your sticker and waves you in.  She has big breasts, like Virginia’s.  You brush your own, flat, chest, with your arm as you reach for another cigarette.

            You drive past the sign that says Do Not Litter, and past the sign that says No Alcoholic Beverages, and the one that says Pets On Leash, and past the sign that points to the boat access.  You have been here many times with Brian and the children, pulling the boat into the water, sunny and laughing, ready for water skiing.  The wind has come up and the parking lot is empty.

            You drive to the two-rutted trail that says No Access.  You look behind you and to the side, and then drive in.  If a ranger finds you, you will start to cry.  The trail is not bad, not many ruts, and you end up at a lookout just above the lake.  You stop the car, wind down the window, and turn down the radio.  They are playing a song where a man says the woman should lean her head on his shoulder.  You used to know his name.

            You lean up to glance at yourself in the rear-view mirror.  Your eyes still won’t focus right.  Your mouth is turned down and there are lines on your face.  You look fleshy.  You rummage in your purse and pull out your lipstick.  You comb your hair.  You wink at yourself and practice a smile.  Your mouth keeps turning down.  Your pulse has slowed, but you still cannot breathe well.

            Next comes the imagining.

            You stare ahead.  You have opened the wine bottle and have poured another plastic glass of wine.  You take a sip, light a cigarette, and place the wine glass into the crevice where the seats bend forward.  You remember when you learned that’s a safe place to put a drink.  You were a hostess in Nick’s restaurant.  After the bar closed, you employees would have a drink or two.  Then you’d take a drink home, at three a.m.  The house would be quiet, Brian and the kids in bed.  You loved the solitude and would read plays and memorize the lines for the female lead roles.

            You look out over the sun coming out behind the clouds.  The wind is dying.  The last time you saw Virginia, when was it?  When your two families spent the weekend at their house on the lake.  The last time you saw Virginia she was in her black maillot bathing suit, her hair tied in a bun, her long legs tan, her big boobs.  You gave her a long goodbye hug and a kiss on the cheek.  Brian shook her hand and pecked her cheek.  Brian shook Nick’s hand and slapped him on the arm a few times.

            What torture it must have been for them that weekend, you think.  Stolen kisses in the hallway when Nick’s and my backs were turned.  The radio is playing a song where the man sings about a tear fell when I saw you in the arms of someone new, and then another song about wishing he and not the other guy were the one at the wedding standing there with her.  You had gone dancing at Nick’s Place that weekend.  Nick was busy playing host, talking with the customers, so you and Virginia had danced and danced with Brian, laughing, giggling, making remarks about sharing him.  Only you hadn’t caught the real joke, had you?

            You remember his hip lightly touching her hip as they danced.  You know how to rub your hip there just right so he will get hard.  You remember he did get hard during a slow dance.  Just the usual dance reaction for Brian.  Was it for me or for Virginia?   You felt renewed in love with him that weekend.  Then your mind sees it, remembers it.  Then their arms move from the conventional dancing position and her arms encircle his neck, her fingers stroke the small hairs on the back of his neck, she leans her head back and pushes her hips in, swaying.

            “Virginia sure looks voluptuous,” was Brian’s first remark as you drove up that Friday and glimpsed her through the front windows through to the back  where she was sunning herself on the deck in a lounge chair in her chartreuse bikini.  Was his breath a little short?  Was he getting hard?  Was he longing to bury his face in her breasts?  Voluptuous.  Right between her breasts.  Licking and sucking, sweating and moaning on the floor of the living room, his friend Nick’s living room.  Or did they do it in Nick’s bed?  Or your bed the last time Virginia and Nick visited, when was it?  When you and Nick went to the farmer’s market on Saturday morning with the kids, and neither of them felt like coming?

            “I’m at Nick’s and Virginia’s,” Brian would say when he called from there when he made business trips to their town, one every two months or so.

            “Oh great.  You’ll save motel bills,” you always answered.  “Say hi to them.  Tell Virginia I really enjoyed her last letter.  She sure is descriptive.  No, let me talk to her myself,” and you and Virginia would talk for fifteen minutes on the phone.  Nick was always at work.  Was Brian nibbling her ear and caressing her thighs while she talked to me?

            You know his belly button so well, the way the hair grows around it, the size of his nipples and his testicles, the soft lump of just-a-little fat, love handles, on the top of his ass, that you use to pull him into you as you make love.  You imagine Virginia pulling him into her just that way, or with a little more elegance and finesse, Virginia is very classy and tall.  You know her arms will reach lower and pull him firmer.  He must have gone wild.  You know how he is when he goes wild, panting and breathing, sweating and glistening.

            “Brian sure sweats a lot, doesn’t he?”  Virginia had said as you suntanned and watched him rig the sailboat.

            Your breath won’t come again.  Your eyes want to be closed, no, open, no closed.  Be logical.  Stop imagining.  Nick treats Virginia shamefully, always having an affair with some woman or some young girl, you saw it yourself when you worked there that summer, Virginia needs to have an affair with Brian, a safe affair with a friend, to prove she can be attractive to other men.  Try to understand.  Be sympathetic.

            It doesn’t work.

            Your logical mind won’t work.  Your body won’t be calm and understanding.  Look out for that woman with Bette Davis eyes, the radio tells you.

            “Dear Michele,” Virginia’s last letter to you.  “It’s only six days since you guys were here and I miss you already.”  Singular or plural you?  It was so good talking and talking.  It is so hard to come into this house, but you know me, I try to keep laughing.  My sense of humor keeps me going.  And my friends.  I’ll be there for your play, come hell or high water.” 

            Rehearsal.  I forgot to go to rehearsal.

            “You’re going to be fantastic, Michele.”  Lotte Lenya, watch out!” 

            She doesn’t want to come to see me perform.  She wants to come to see Brian and I was just an excuse, my being in the show is just an excuse to come see him.  They could sneak out during intermission for a quickie.  While my own daughter Cindy babysits her kids.

            Your logical mind reasons.  It’s not that you’ve never had a lover or anything, you have had a few encounters with strangers at teacher’s conventions and stuff, so why are you acting like an injured party?  Because my fling doesn’t matter.  I am injured.  I want to die.  You shut your eyes and decide you will just laugh this off.  You will treat it like a soap opera, a bad play, right?  Your laugh won’t laugh.

            Let’s go back to Texas to live the simple life, Waylon sings with Willie on the radio.  Yeah, simple, Willie.  Until the IRS knocked on the door and sold all your goods and you had to beg for dollars.  Maybe it’s time to get back to the basics again, they sing. 

            Your head is clear.  The bottle of wine is half empty.  You have smoked seven cigarettes.  Your head is clear and your mind keeps going as you put the car into reverse and back out.  Every woman for herself, that’s what you’ve just learned.  There is no sisterhood where men are concerned.  My best friend has just fucked me over.  You can laugh now.

            You remember when you and Virginia and the others were in the same consciousness-raising group.  You’d talked about this very thing.  Attention from men is more important than friendship with women.  Liberation?  Baloney.  One week the subject had been, What Does Sex Mean?  You still don’t know the answer.  Sex has new meaning every time something like this happens.  Another time, you’d discussed Monogamy, Pro and Con?  and Open Marriage:  Is It Possible?  You had concluded it was.  You and your closest women friends.  Hah!

            You bounce over the ruts, too fast, scraping the bottom of the wagon.  You want to talk to Brian.  You want to ask him “Why?”  What have I done?”  I thought we loved each other.  I thought we understood each other.  Why are you fucking my friends?  What have I done?  I love you, Brian.

            “Can’t you read signs?” the ranger says as he steps into your headlights when you turn off the trail.  No.  No I can’t.

            “I didn’t leave any litter,” you tell him.

            Then comes the acting out.

            You get back home faster.  Smoother.  You are angry now.  You want to scream and shout and kill him.  Brian’s Volvo is in the driveway.  You pull up behind him.  The house seems empty as you enter.  There is one light burning in your bedroom.  You use the bathroom, wash up, put fresh lipstick on, comb your hair.  Brian likes me to look nice.  You turn the living room lamp on and sit there, picking up the novel you have been reading.  You don’t remember what it is about, but you pick it up and begin simulating reading.

            Brian enters.  “Where are the kids?” you say.

            “I let them stay overnight with friends,” he says.  “I think you should call Virginia,” he says.  “She’s called here three times tonight.”

            “Must have been nice to get a chance to talk with her when I wasn’t around,” you say.

            “She said you called her and called her a bitch,” he says.  “You’d better call up and apologize.”

            “Why?  She is a bitch.”  You walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator.  “I’m starved.  I missed dinner.”

            He pushes the refrigerator door closed, grabs it from you, and pushes against you.  “Where have you been?” he asks, his voice just above normal.

            “Thinking.”

            “Thinking?”

            “Yes.”

            He leaves you, picking up his accounts book, walks into the den and snaps on the desk light.  You can hear him shuffle the papers.

            “Behind my back!” you yell.  “In front of my nose!”

            “It has nothing to do with you,” he shouts back.

            “I feel like such a fool!” you shout.  You begin to weep.  Finally you weep.  “I am so humiliated!  You liars!”

            “Was that foolish or not, opening my mail, rummaging in wastebaskets and sneaking, reading my mail?”

            “I was looking for the J.C. Penney’s bill!”

            “You were snooping.  I never read your mail.”

            “You can read my mail anytime you want.  Nobody longs for me!  Nobody wants to meet me in Minneapolis!

            “Michele, be civilized.  We are grown-ups.  Have some dignity.  This has nothing to do with you.”

            “Liars!  Liar!”  You are shrieking at him.  Fishwife.

            With that, he strides into the kitchen behind you, where you have opened the tap and have poured yourself a glass of water, standing, shaking, drinking it.  He knocks the glass out of your hand and the water splashes all over.  The glass doesn’t break.

            “I’m not a liar! We’re not liars!” he shouts.

            “What are you, then?  Omitters?  You are, you are, what do you call that, sneaking around behind mine and Nick’s backs, if it’s not lies?  Liar!”

            He starts toward you and hits you, a slap, hard, on the head.  He hits you again on the other side of your head.  You retreat, weeping, covering yourself, bending over.  He cuffs you again and your head rings.  You think that you should be doing the beating, not he.  He knocks you down on the floor and you curl up, protecting yourself, your hands over your head, your knees up.  He kicks you in the belly, hard but not full-strength.  He is in control.  He rushes out of the room.

            You rise, body ringing, and stumble into the living room.  You light a cigarette, as if you are calm.

            He follows you there.  You are furious at the very nerve of him, beating you up, just like some brute.  You are subdued, also, as if you needed it, needed something to be knocked out of you.  Tears run out of your eyes as if you are very sad, as if your father has died.  You mumble, “What a fool I am, what a fool I am, where is trust, where is trust?”  You realize you are bent over, moaning, keening, as if you are in grief.

            “I apologize for hitting you,” he says, calmly.  “I really do.”

            “I thought she was my friend.  I thought you were my friend,” you say.

            “She is,” he says.  “I am.”

            “Friends don’t have affairs with their friends’ husbands.”

            “She’s my friend, too,” he says.  “She needs me.”

            “I need you too,” you say.  “Her big tits,” you say.

            “Christ.  I’m going to call Virginia, call her up right now and tell her you said that.  You said I love her big tits.”

            “I didn’t say that.  I said, ‘her big tits.’  You said you love them.”

            “Shit!”  he strides out of the room, leaving you there.

            You sit and try to read.  Your head still rings.  You think you have been over-reacting, or is it over-acting?  Is this the best play you’ve ever been in?  The message machine is blinking.  One. You retrieve the message.  “Michele, where are you?  We’re going to start without you.”  Rehearsal.  You forgot rehearsal.  You begin humming Mack’s song, which you will sing, and then you begin shouting it.  “Oh the shark has pearly teeth babe, and she keeps them out of sight.”   Brian ignores you.  He has turned on the television and you hear the McDonald’s commercial.

            You suppose you should call Virginia so she won’t worry.  You know how the women love him, he listens to all their problems and seems so concerned and understanding as they say how different he is from their own men.  So Virginia fell for it too, and he scored, and you are still sisters, right?  He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.  I love you, Brian. We all do, Brian.

            You pick up the phone and dial the number you know by heart.  Virginia answers.  “This is Michele,” you say.

            “Oh, Michele, where are you?”  The voice of the concerned mistress.

            “Home.  Brian just beat me up and reasoned with me and I’m calling.”

            “Well, you didn’t see the bruises under my bathing suit that Nick gave me, last time we had a fight,” Virginia says.

            It is just like old times.  You are friends confessing the dark secrets to each other, blood sisters, friends.  But you wouldn’t have an affair with Nick behind her back, though you are now thinking, as you listen to her familiar voice worrying, that Nick is a very sexy man.

            “He loves you,” Virginia says.  “Brian loves you.  There’s never been any question of that.”

            “So you were just a convenient roll in the hay?  How many times did you roll over with each other?”

            “Well, not that, either.  But he loves you.”

            “Sure,” you say.

            You chat for awhile.  It is ridiculous to be so calmly discussing your husband’s love affair with his lover.  How mature you are.  How grown up.  It is all without any meaning.

            “She says you love me,” you say to him as you walk into the room and turn off the television.

            “She’s right.”

            You leave the room and go to turn the pages of your book.  You rise and go back into the den where he is sitting at his desk and you stand next to him.  He has his head down in his hands as if he is sad.  You nudge right next to him.  His arm encircles your thigh.  His fingers knead it, and then move up.  You are easy.

            Soon you have all the lights out and are standing in the green glow of the FM indicator, smooth music on, with all your clothes off, strewn about the room, lying where you threw them when you undressed each other.  You touch each other with light fingers moving up and down in the old familiar way.

            Maybe that is the trouble.  Maybe you are too old and familiar.  You have made love thousands of times.  You remember the electric excitement you yourself have experienced with strangers.  You are experiencing electric excitement now, as you make love in the comfortableness of knowing the crannies of each other’s body, in the knowledge of each other’s sexual rhythms.  You have known the trembling of pure lust, both of you, and you have satisfied that lust.  This isn’t lust, this is ritual, religion, healing, communion.  You are my man and I am your woman.    

            And then you don’t think, as you dance with each other to your old familiar tune, moving and muttering your love words, stroking each other’s face silently and pressing all, all to each other at this moment.  Father of my children.  And then you begin to weep again, for the wonder of it all, and you ask him, “Do you love me?”  And he says, “I love you, Michele.”

            Then, in the morning, you discover you can’t talk to him.  No words will pass up your throat.  He strides about, normal as hell, wondering why bleach was spilled on his work shirt.  Counting out underpants for the business trip he’s getting ready for.  He tells you a story about Joe, one of his clients, who lost a thousand dollars betting on greyhounds, dogs, can you believe it?  You just sit on the couch with hazed eyes, staring at the spider plant that glows in the watery translucent morning light of your familiar house where this cozy domestic scene will never again be typical.  You can’t wait for him to leave.

END