Everyone but You (26 page)

You and cows, he says. What gives? And anyway, what does it matter?

Details, I say. It’s about details.

That’s not the point, he explains, as if he has this down.

Okay, I tell him. I’m beginning to feel a little tipsy, which generally makes me gregarious and
better
with people, but today it’s hard to conceal my disappointment. I wanted to know the cow’s color, and possibly also its breed. There are all sorts of cows, I want to say: red Angus and Butlers, Herefords and shorthorns, Texas longhorns,
et cetera
.

I let this all slide. So what is the point, then? I ask.

The point is, within seconds everyone in our neighborhood had out their guns, he says. Except you, you probably don’t own a weapon; you probably don’t have a single weapon in this house. I could kill you now if I wanted, he adds.

I have a butcher knife, I say, even though I’ve only ever used it to cut watermelon.

You know what you are? he asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. Says, You’re a passive Yankee tree-hugger.

But why? I ask. Not about me being a tree-hugger and passive—both are mostly true—but about the guns, as in,
Why pull a gun on a cow?
What would be the point, I might ask. It’s not as if the cow is going to rob your house or car. And
why
, because this is always my first question, and it’s never a good question with which to start anything.

Why? he asks. What do you mean,
why?

Why get out a gun as a first response? Why get out a gun at all? Was it like a cow militia, or something?

Maybe, he says. Regardless, you don’t want to know the outcome.

Oh, I say. I think I really don’t like where this is going.

Want to know who pulled the trigger?

No, I tell him. I don’t.

I did, he tells me.

That’s a surprise. So, I ask, what did the cow ever do to you, to warrant murder? The whole thing pains me, but I listen anyway. This is semi-true: It’s a semi-true story.

He leans back in the chair, crosses his arms, and stretches his legs. Wouldn’t get off my lawn, he says, as if the point were obvious. That cow was on my private property and eating my zoysia. He asks: Do you know how much I pay for zoysia? Do you know how much I pay for privacy these days?

I do, actually, because I am an insanely private person. Still, to kill a cow because it’s eating grass? And what were my other gun-ready neighbors thinking, as they watched this massacre take place?

I look at Gun-Metal sternly. This is all very unsettling, I say.

He grins, rubs his hand over his jaw. You’re easy to unsettle, he tells me.

I say nothing.

For the record, Mr. Gun-Metal and I aren’t friends. I don’t know why he stops by my house unannounced. I actually don’t know much about my neighbor, either, short of the one story he likes to tell: He was a combat soldier and won a Purple Heart for pulling an injured man out of a Humvee after an explosion ripped the vehicle apart. He and his injured buddy hid in the upland region for several days, waiting to be rescued. His friend suffered from shell shock, so my neighbor held a gun to him the entire time, saying,
You make a sound, I swear I’ll put a bullet in your head, fucker
.

He’s looking at me. He pours another glass of wine.

So then? I say, though I don’t want to know, not really.

So, nothing, he says, shrugging, and this is why I realize things are truly going to hell. There is no sense of consequence, no sense of an arc, no enlightened moment of change.

Nothing, he says again.
End of story
.

A
UGUST HERE
is a lot like July, which is a lot like June: balmy, ridiculously hot. I hate monotony. Everything is mostly brown or a blanched, brittle green, and a brush fire ignited today, several counties over from where we live, set on purpose by someone
with a love of fire or with a gripe against trees, or both. The fire has been burning uncontrollably, sweeping across the hills and valleys, which are plentiful here. From the Home Depot, I can see the irritable smoke billowing in the distance like a fallout cloud. Brush fires aren’t typically common where I live, but we’ve been in a drought for what seems like thirty years. Everything is blanched and brittle, easy to ignite.

Most of the people at Home Depot are pleasantly benign enough, like those visitors to Disney World: They are dressed in colorful, tacky shorts and tank tops that make their tanned arms look flabby, and really the only thing they are missing is frozen, chocolate-covered bananas in their hands. Even though it’s ninety-five degrees, even though it’s more than sticky-humid, I wear jeans and long sleeves and sweat in brute defiance. I hold out my desperate hopefulness for cooler weather. Today, people mill about, picking out pampas grass and dahlias and primrose—
primrose
, such a fussy name and milky smell. People emerge from exits with mulch and fertilizer, and most of them smile. I always think: Everyone looks good at a distance, everyone.

My husband, aka Post-it Man, aka Harry, is a tall, wiry person. He’s thirty-nine—three years older than I—and he has short blond hair, square glasses, and a sloped nose. At Home Depot we take on a divide-and-conquer mentality with tasks: He will seek out hostas, while I get cleaning supplies. I am wary about the hostas, and I say so. These days our garden isn’t much of a garden at all. I tell him the ground won’t keep anything past a week, but Harry tells me to think happy thoughts, like Tinkerbell. Then he kisses me before parting and I feel slightly condescended to, because even though my husband is smart, he’s not
smart enough to cover up the fact that he’s having an affair. He works at an office—an office that sells staples and other office supplies. Harry practically lives in one of those tiny cubicles, one laden with sticky notes that have pithy sayings on them like,
Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company
. I’ve often wondered if this statement is an indictment against corporate America, but most likely he put it up there to impress Boop. She likes to think of heaven and hell a lot; she’s a heaven-and-hell sort of girl.

Tinkerbell, I say, absently now. I make a fluttering motion with my arms and then pull down the rim of my
Life Is Good
cap because de-Nile is not just a river in Egypt. Then I walk to aisle six, which is near to God and filled with cleaning fluids that we buy in bulk. I admit to my fondness for Clorox cleanup wipes. My husband has told me this—that I am
Clorox Clean Compulsive
.

I suppose this is his way of being cruel.

Can I live with an affair, I wonder, toss it up to something that will pass? And after it passes, will it create in me renewal, a feeling of love’s costly though resilient worth? I do not know the answer to this, but I do know the following: Right now I’d like to scream at Harry and pop him a good one, right in the nose, and I’d like to take a butter knife to Boop’s heart and extract it slowly. Very slowly.

I
GET SIDETRACKED
at the Home Depot so easily, which is obvious and nothing new. I bypass the cleaning aisle when I see all the lumber. As with my bleach fascination, I also hold a strange devotion toward wood, all kinds—cypress and white pine and ash and birch and cherry and poplar. If I come back in another life, I’d like to be the sort of person who builds things. Or maybe I’ll just say
Screw it
and come back as a lumberjack, increase my carbon debt, and go with the flow.

Usually people in this aisle are so into planning some major home renovation they barely bother to talk. Today, though, a husband and wife argue over stupid choices. The woman, a short-statured blonde in L.L. Bean, says, God, I hate you, Clyde. I can’t
be-lieve
you’d prefer cherry over mahogany for the kitchen. Are you dim? she asks. She purses her lips. Her eyebrows furrowed, and her husband, well, he’s standing there with a
Fuck you, chickie-babe
look.

I want to say, can’t we all get along? Isn’t Earth the right place for love? What I end up realizing, however, is that kitchen renovations must sometimes be a last-ditch effort to save a marriage. Like babies, but something you can later sell.

I hate when I overhear arguments because, as is often the case, other people’s woes and heartaches often cause me to dwell more incessantly upon my own, and I find that too much introspection is bad. Thinking too long, feeling too much—neither of these things does me any good. So I concentrate on wood instead and my karmic future as a lumberjack. I slide a piece of balsa out from its holding frame and run my hand over the smooth surface in an admiring way, as if I’m stroking a lover.

A skinny kid in an orange smock catches me in this act, red-handed. He asks me if I need any help.

Well, I say. I’d like to build a house.

He grins. By yourself?

Okay, so what? I ask. It’s true I am five feet tall with a small frame and dainty features, the kind of woman who surprises people by speaking more loudly than they might originally expect. But I have the crooked nose of my ancestors, and let me tell you something:
They
were a people who knew how to get a thing or two done. Anyway, I really would like to build a house.

A house, I repeat, as if he is stupid.

That’s balsa wood, he says, and points in an accusing way.

Yes, and? I ask. I think, Here is a boy, a freckled-faced boy who, at eighteen, thinks he knows something about me and my capabilities. I wonder what
he’ll
end up doing with his life that’s so tremendously interesting. I think at this rate of interrogation he’s likely to be a lawyer or go into marketing, like, welcome to
those
crowds.

Seriously, he says. Do you belong in this aisle?

I object to that, I say. Strike the question from the record.

T
HE PERSON I SUSPECT
my husband’s having an affair with is his cubicle neighbor. I call her Betty Boop behind her back, not only because she has implants and big blue eyes and cropped blond hair but also because there’s something about her—about the situation with my husband—that, on a good day, I find vaguely cartoonish. They think they are very sly, have worked it out so that we are all “friends.” Originally, back when he was courting her six months ago, my husband said he thought Boop and I would really hit it off. As if. And he said he had met and liked her husband, Mr. Narcolepsy, but I don’t know why anyone would like Boop’s husband, because he’s really such a
bore at the dinner table. You can be talking about metaphysics or the nutritional value of a pastry crust or infanticide—it hardly matters—one, two, three, he’s down for the count and snoring. It’s all so blatant, this affair situation, which is the one reason I hold out hope that maybe I’m misunderstanding, maybe I’m blowing things out of proportion and my husband and Boop aren’t fucking at all. I’d like to be optimistic here: My husband and I have been married eight years, and that’s eight years that should be worth something.

Later, while my husband plants hostas and sweats in the melting sun, Boop calls. I can go for a week or two without hearing from her, and then I suspect she and my husband are meeting in the hour after work ends, the one hour that is always unaccounted for.

Hi, Jen, she says. I’ve just missed you so much.

Hi, you, I say back. And I add: I bet!

Because I refuse to let her be the reason that my marriage ends, Boop and I plan another get-together, and then we make small talk for a few minutes, about her dog, China—I hate small dogs, and China is a Chihuahua, the worst kind of small dog—and about her husband, who fell asleep in church while standing up. Like that’s a surprise, I say. But Boop is genuinely unsettled. People in the congregation said maybe the Spirit possesses him, she tells me. She adds, I don’t know how to feel about that, I just don’t. I asked him if he remembers anything after he comes through, and he tells me it’s always the same dream, that he’s falling, and right before he hits the ground, a force pushes him back up suddenly, into the air, and he’s saved. Now,
usually
that happens when someone is nudging him awake, but now I think maybe there’s more to it, like God is trying to speak through him.

Wow, I say, because I can hardly pretend to care.

Is Harry there? she asks then, too innocently. There’s an important work file I need to talk to him about.

This is code, I suspect, for,
I really need a fuck
. Really? I ask. Working on the weekend?

I labor, she says, while other people just sit around.

I know what Boop probably thinks, that she labors and works in her cubicle and fucks my husband while I do nothing with my time; I hardly even cook dinner. Truly, I have been lazier than lazy of late. She’s asked many times what exactly it
is
that I do, but I’ve been depressed about my job, and anyway it’s difficult to explain. Not like I’m a spy or anything—it’s not that glamorous, or even secretive. It’s just hard to put into words, and words are one of the few mediums we have as humans; you can see how I’m screwed. I’m a writer, actually, and when I tell people that, they usually tell me they are, too. Okay, I tell them, shrugging. Why not?

Anyway, when my lack of a “real” job description doesn’t make her happy, Boop openly questions why I haven’t fulfilled my moral obligation of having children. I think she wishes I were fatter because she herself has something of a bottom, that round sort of plumpness that goes beyond the word
curvy
. All that space, that big house, and for what? she once asked me. Not even a cat to scoop up after.

So maybe I’ll get a cat, I had told her. What’s it to you?

After he gets off the phone with Boop, my husband says, Important account. She (meaning Boop) needs to meet to discuss the financials.

I lean back in the kitchen chair, regard him, and make light of the situation so that I don’t cry. You sell paper clips, I tell him. How important can it be?