Five Days (6 page)

Dan's reaction was direct, to the point. And though I initially considered it just a little brusque, in time I realized he had cut to the heart of the matter when, after musing about it all for a moment or two, he just shrugged and said:

‘So now you know that everybody has secrets.'

Cold comfort. Dan never does touchy-feely. But at the outset we did function well as a couple. We had little money. We had a big responsibility as new parents. We coped. Not only that, bills got paid. A house got bought. We managed to hold down two jobs and simultaneously raise two children without any sort of serious childcare (except the occasional babysitter or mother-in-law). We suffered broken nights courtesy of babies with colic and were able to laugh about our four a.m. tetchiness the next day. We were frustrated about our lack of latitude. But even though we both felt a little closed in, a little overwhelmed with children and financial obligations, what I remember most about those years together was the way we fundamentally got along, dodged so many potential areas of conflict, helped each other through rough patches without ever playing the ‘I did this for you, now you do that for me' game. We seemed to be a reasonable match.

A reasonable match
. It sounds so profoundly pragmatic, so down-to-earth, so devoid of passion. Well, ours too has never been the love story of the century. Nor, however, is it one of those marriages where the last time we made love Clinton was president. Sex is still there – but even before Dan lost his job and began to disengage from me, it had lost its basic exuberance or the sense of mutual need that fuelled it for so long. When we met the attraction was (for me anyway) the fact that he was stable, unflappable, together, responsible. Unlike the man who came before him and was . . .

No, I don't want to think about that . . .
him
. . . today. Even though, truth be told, I think of him every day. Even more so over the past two years when the realization was hitting me so constantly that . . .

Stop
.

I have stood still.

Stop
.

You lose things and then you choose things.

Didn't I hear someone sing that somewhere? Or as my dad once ruefully noted when he said to me, in passing, during the weekend of his seventieth birthday, ‘To live a life is to constantly grapple with regret.'

Is that the price we pay for being here: the ongoing, ever-increasing knowledge that we have so often let ourselves down? And have settled for lives we find just adequate.

Stop
.

This morning underscored for me what our life together has become. Dan sleepily reached for me when the alarm went off, as always, at six a.m. Though half-awake I was happy to have his arms around me, and to feel him pulling up the long men's shirt I always wear to bed. But then, with no attempt at even a modicum of tenderness, he immediately mounted me, kissing my dry mouth, thrusting in and out of me with rough urgency, and coming with a low groan after just a few moments. Falling off me, he then turned away. When I asked him if he was OK he reached for my hand while still showing me his back.

‘Can you tell me what's wrong?' I asked.

‘Why should there be anything wrong?' he said, now pulling his hand away.

‘You just seem . . . troubled.'

‘Is that what you think I am?
Troubled?
'

‘You don't have to get angry.'

‘“
You seem troubled
.”
That's
not
a criticism?'

‘Dan, please, this is nuts . . .'

‘You see! You see!' he said, storming out of bed and heading to the bathroom. ‘You say you don't criticize. Then what the hell do you do? No wonder I can never,
ever
win with you. No wonder I can't . . .'

Then, suddenly, his face fell and he began to sob. A low throttled sob – so choked, so held back. Immediately I was on my feet, moving towards him, my arms open. But instead of accepting my embrace he bolted to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. I could still hear him crying. But when I knocked on the door and said: ‘Please, Dan, let me—' he turned on the sink taps and drowned out the rest of my sentence.

Let me help you. Let me near you. Let me . . .

The water kept running. I returned to our bed and sat there for a very long time, thinking, thinking, despair coursing through my veins like the chemical dye I have to shoot every day into people who may be harboring a malignancy.

Is that what I am harboring here? A cancer of sorts. His cancer of unhappiness, caused by his loss of career, and now metastasizing in so many insidious directions that . . .

The water was still running in the bathroom. I stood up and went over to the door, trying to discern if I could hear him still crying over the sound of the open taps. Nothing but cascading water. I checked my watch: 6:18 a.m. Time to wake Sally – unless she happened to hear all the shouting earlier and was already up and concerned. Not that Sally would ever show much outward concern – her one comment after being nearby when Dan railed against me a few weeks ago was a blasé:

‘Great to see I come from such a happy family.'

Were we ever a happy family? Do I even know a truly happy family?

I knocked lightly on her door, then opened it an inch to see that she was still very much asleep. Good. I decided to let her have another fifteen minutes in bed and went downstairs to make coffee. Dan showed up a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his gym bag in hand.

‘Heading off to work out,' he said, avoiding my line of vision.

‘That sounds like a good idea.'

He moved towards the front door.

‘See you tonight.'

‘I'll be home at the usual time. But you know I have my weekly book talk with Lucy at seven. And tomorrow—'

‘Yeah, you'll be heading to Boston at lunchtime.'

‘I'll make all your dinners for the weekend tonight.'

‘You don't think I can cook?'

‘Dan . . .'

‘I'll take care of the dinners myself.'

‘Are you angry I'm going to Boston?'

‘Why should I be angry? It's work, right?'

‘That it is.'

‘Anyway, if I were you I'd want a break from me.'

‘Dan . . .'

‘Don't say it.'

‘You have me worried.'

He stopped and turned back, still not able to look at me directly. Then, in a half-hushed voice, he said one word:

‘Sorry.'

And he was gone.

Now, nearly eleven hours later – turning down my road after having spent much of the working day trying to keep the entire unsettling aftertaste of the morning somewhat at bay – a certain dread hit me. A dread that has been so present since that day twenty-one months ago when Dan walked in from work and said that he'd just been laid off. The economic downturn had meant that annual sales at L.L.Bean had fallen by 14 percent. The people on the executive floor decided that they could shave some excess off the info tech department – which handles all the online sales and marketing for the company – by cutting the two people in charge of ever expanding its sales capabilities. One of these people happened to be my husband. He'd put in twelve years at L.L.Bean – and was floored by such a summary dismissal, just four days after New Year's Day. The look on his face when he came in through the front door that night . . . it was as if he had aged ten years in the ten hours since I'd seen him. Reaching into his back pocket he pulled out a letter.
The letter.
There it was, in hard typography. The notice that he no longer had a job, the regret of the company at ending such a long association, the assurance that a ‘
generous termination package would be offered'
, along with ‘
the services of our Human Resources department to help you find new employment as quickly as possible
'.

‘What a joke,' Dan said. ‘The last time they laid off a bunch of people from my department none of them found any work for at least two years . . . and the only people who did find new jobs had to go out of state.'

‘I'm so sorry,' I said, reaching for his hand. But he pulled it away before I could touch it. I said nothing, telling myself at the time the man was so understandably floored by what had happened. Even if Dan was never the most tactile or outwardly affectionate of men, he still had never pulled away from me like that before. So I reached out again for his outstretched hand. This time he flinched, as if I was threatening him.

‘You trying to make me feel bad?' he said, the anger sudden.

Now it was my turn to flinch. I looked at him with shock and just a little disbelief.

I quickly masked it by changing the subject, asking him about the sort of ‘package' they had offered him. As these things go, it wasn't too mean: six months' full salary, full medical insurance for a year, plenty of free career counselling. At least they had the decency to wait until after Christmas before delivering the terrible news – and it wasn't just the IT department that had suffered cuts, as around seventy employees across the board had been shown the door. But as soon as Dan said ‘six months' full pay' I could almost hear what I was thinking simultaneously:
We're just a bit screwed.
Only three months earlier we'd taken a $45,000 home-improvement loan to reroof our house and deal with a basement that was riddled with damp. As home upgrades go they were hardly sexy – but absolutely necessary. We took them after much dinner-table discussion and scribbled calculations on the backs of assorted envelopes. Our roof was leaking, our basement was wet. We were filling the space between these two encroaching molds. We had no choice but to borrow the money, even though we knew it would strain our already stretched household budget. Between our $1,200 mortgage per month, the $15,000 it cost to send Ben to U Maine Farmington (and that was a bargain, compared to a private college like Bowdoin), the $250 lease on the car that Dan drove to work (my vehicle was a twelve-year-old Camry with around 133,000 miles on the clock and in urgent need of a new transmission), and the $300 in essential monthly premiums to cover Ben and Sally under my hospital insurance scheme, the idea of burdening ourselves with another $450 per month for ten years was disheartening. Add all these essential outgoings together, and we were already spending close to $3,500 per month. Now Dan earned $43K per year and I earned $51K. After tax we had a combined net income of $61K – or $5, 083 per month. In other words, this left us with just under $1,600 after our main outgoings to pay for all our utilities, all our food, all our clothes, all Ben and Sally's additional needs, and whatever we could squeeze out every year to fund a one-week vacation.

I knew many families around us who were making do on far less. Even though Sally did complain that we always seemed to be counting pennies she finally got wise and started using her weekend babysitting money to buy all the iPods and funky earrings and the butterfly tattoo (don't ask) that she came home with after a day out with some girlfriends in Portland. Ben, on the other hand, never asked us for a penny. He had a part-time job at the college, mixing paints and stretching canvases in the visual arts department. He refused anything more than the room and board we provided for him in addition to his annual tuition.

‘I'm living
la vie de bohème
in Farmington,' he said to me once when I tried to press $100 into his hand (I'd done a week's worth of overtime). ‘I can live on air. And I don't want you to lose the roof because you slipped me a hundred bucks.'

I laughed and said:

‘I doubt that is going to happen.'

Actually we decided to pay off part of the new roof loan with Dan's severance. The basement was now dry. And Dan turned in his leased car and used $1,500 to buy a 1997 Honda Civic that never made it above 60 mph. But at least he had wheels while I was at the hospital. The one-salary situation meant that money was ferociously tight. We were just about making all our bills every month and had absolutely no cash to spare. Dan had knocked on every door possible within the state. Perhaps the most terrible irony of his story was that, around eighteen months after he'd lost his job at Bean's, he discovered that they were readvertising his old post. Naturally he contacted the head of personnel. Naturally the guy spun some yarn about sales upturn allowing them to re-expand the department they had just reduced. Naturally the guy also told Dan he should reapply for the job. Then they went and hired someone else who was (again according to the head of personnel) ‘simply more qualified'. Shortly after that Dan also lost what seemed to be that shoo-in position in the State of Maine's IT department in Augusta – and the outbreaks of rage really started, perhaps augmented by the fact that, just two days ago, the head of personnel at Bean's called and said they did have an opening – but it was in the stockroom. Yes, it was an assistant supervisor's position. And yes, after six months he would be back in their health insurance system. Yet it only paid $13 an hour – but, hey, that was almost twice the minimum wage – and just about $15K a year after taxes.

That extra $15K would give us just the necessary breathing room, and avoid debt (which I have been so damn determined to dodge, but which we are careening towards very quickly). It might even allow us to borrow Dan's brother-in-law's condo in Tampa for a week during Christmas and have a proper family vacation in the sun. Of course Dan knew all that. Just as I also so understood he hated the idea of going to work in the stockroom – and for half of what he used to be making within the same organization.

‘It's like he's throwing me a bone,' he said to me on the evening it was offered to him. ‘A crappy consolation prize – and a way of soothing his conscience about having fired me.'

‘It wasn't him who fired you. It was the boys upstairs. It was their decision to make the cutbacks.'