Bernadette rides next to me in the Fairmont, not speaking. We're traveling at speed along the freeway, and she’s in a rare contemplative mood. She often jabbers away like a relentless engine about different things—real estate values, bus schedules, the foolishness of young women she knows—mostly things I’ve heard many times, but we’ve been apart for two weeks and she's quiet now. I'm content that she doesn’t fill the humming ambience with her staccato rhythms. She just sits there, potato-face forward, harboring her private thoughts as I harbor mine. Miles follow silent miles as we sail along in separate realms through the overripe green of August. It seems good to have her back. I’m cautiously optimistic.
“What are those flowers?” she asks suddenly, piercing the demilitarized zone between us, finding her range. We're passing through lowland meadows where patches of purple wildflowers stand out vividly against the leafy background of trees and grasses. “Loose Strife,” I say with a foreboding that doesn’t seem justified since she’s only asking about flowers, and anyway I’m pleasantly elated that I knew the answer—shocked, actually.
But the ping-pong has begun, the familiar volleying that leads directly to open conflict. “Please stop the car,” she says, in full disarming simplicity. “I would like to pick some of them.” We proceed to have an absurd argument about the dangers of stopping along the highway, where non-emergency stopping is illegal in any case and even the breakdown lane is full of charging SUVs at rush hour, but she doesn't see the difficulty. “They're just wild flowers,” she says, “and you are afraid.”
So there we are, the match is over, and once again I remind myself of her many charms—her funny little ears, her nose that looks like it’s made of clay, the little spikes of hair that frame her face when she's sleeping—but we're only ten minutes from the airport and already I can feel the rings contracting around my arteries. Doctor Rasmussen explained that they become like high pressure fire hoses. At first I thought he was over-dramatizing when he told me how damaging that can be. “You could die,” he said, the tone of his voice falling an octave on the word “die.” But I followed his advice, changed my diet, even switched careers, and now I walk to the stores instead of running errands in the fusty old Fairmont. I no longer spend as many hours at the computer and live a more physical life. There isn’t much more I can do short of taking medication, which of course I’m also doing since that is what everyone does now. It’s the state of things in the medical business. Health is intangible, like happiness, so what’s needed is a product, a physical commodity, and now doctors are not much more than drug dealers who receive a fat bonus for every new prescription, every addict. I know this, yet I reach into the glove box for an Atenolol and wash it down with saliva, doubling my daily dosage and wondering if I can afford one of the newer, sexier drugs.
Sunday afternoon, we're getting ready to go out. I walk into the bedroom in my boxers and sit down on the bed to cool off in front of the Vornado, making some remark about the heat, but she's apparently not listening, because she bends down and turns off the fan. Then she opens the curtains, exposing my striped underwear to eighty or ninety windows around the courtyard. We live in a diorama, like specimens in a museum. “Did you hear me?” I say, jumping up to grab my jeans from the bureau and pulling them quickly over my legs. She has three times the testosterone of the average Caucasian female, which I know with medical certainty since I’ve seen the printout of her blood analysis.
The first thing to go is the phone. I stop paying the bills, and after receiving several dire warnings from the phone company, the line goes dead. Of course it means that nobody can reach me and I find myself cut off from things, but Bernadette can't call me every few minutes from work either so some ground has been gained. Naturally she’s offended. “You don't want to help me,” she says. Eight years of helping her escape from her dangerous crook of a husband and then acquire a green card plus unlimited use of the Fairmont and dozens of repair jobs in the buildings she manages—all that might be considered helping her, but that's an old story.
These are not forgiving times. We now know the truth about history, which is that it was full of bloody and horrifying injustice, with dominant groups subjugating others based on race, sex, religion, hair color, shoe size, every imaginable difference. So now the time has come for those who have been wronged to call in the chips, to step up and correct the accounts. There has been an equalization between the sexes, for example, and maybe I'm a neanderthal since—god help me—there are aspects about the old days I long for, but it has been my experience that women are often unreasonably demanding. First they want your job, which is no great difficulty since most jobs that pay decently are torture, then they want other things and now scientists are working on procreating without sex so it's possible to imagine a world without men. And what is our response to all this? All we can do is run around smashing things like spoiled children. I'm not saying I wasn't around when the shoe was on the other foot, though I was young, and maybe I have forgotten or never knew the meaning of “normal behavior,” but it is now clear that the day will never arrive when I’ve helped Bernadette enough.
I lied. In fact the phone was not the first thing. Several years before, I had denied her physical intimacy—of any kind—and it was when she adjusted to that cozy disaffection that things started to go in a funny direction, to get out of hand, as it were, big time. I understand rationally how this occurred. I had low tolerance for guilt and wanted it to be her decision to leave, but when I flew into a rage and lugged the bed out to the street and leaned it up against a tree for the trash trucks, was that not definitive?
I don’t know, but what she did was to haul her massive sewing table into the bedroom where it took the place of the bed, and of course then her other sewing supplies and fabrics started accumulating. Before I could object, the bedroom became her work room and we started sleeping on the L-shaped couch downstairs in the living room, lying at ninety degrees to one another, with her on one leg of the L and me on the other. It's hard now to believe that I went along with this, harder to understand why we continued sleeping in that arrangement for over six years.
Bernadette specializes in garbology, and never buys anything new. She routes her daily errands through the local streets to pick up discarded items. She knows the trash schedule and goes prospecting on the days when large articles will be waiting out on the sidewalk for the trucks to pick up. Right now she's upstairs, running the big industrial sewing machine that she found down on Fourth Avenue and asked me to cart back home on a piano dolly. The machine rumbles intermittently like a snoring rhinoceros as she masterfully zips together a new outfit from cast-off clothing she found hanging on a fence. My house overflows with fancy broken shoes, short ends of fabric, rained-on self-help books and semi-functional appliances that she has gleaned from the streets. I have four sewing machines in various states of repair sitting in the upstairs hallway, three bread machines stuffed into the little galley kitchen, dozens of pots and numerous extra telephones turning up everywhere, and various other unrecognizable gadgets hiding in the corners waiting to be fixed. All the horizontal surfaces are covered with little piles of worthless treasures. My wonderful apartment, which I spent three years remodeling to accommodate all this clutter, adding two mezzanines in the high-ceilinged rooms and dozens of built-in shelves, drawers, closets, once again feels like one of those junk shops full of third-hand items. I keep telling her this is a problem, over and over, but she must have grown up in a messy house and is comfortable living this way.
“I don't have time to put things in better order,” she explains in a tired voice. I point out that she seems to have plenty of time for sewing. “That's my relaxation, Malcolm,” she replies in a rising tone, using my full name as if she were scolding a child. “I work hard all day while you sit at the computer.” She's not quite yelling, but her raucous staccato can be heard out in the courtyard, and she's got me dead to rights. The tech downturn left me jobless, and I'm now at a point where I should probably move to Bangalore where, with luck, I might earn enough to avoid dying of malaria. It isn't that I mind the handyman jobs I do now, patching holes, fixing things, but the money isn't the same.
Bernadette is obsessed with assembling her special outfits, and I must admit she looks good in them. She knows all about materials and weaves and can even create her own patterns. I have no problem with that, but she applies the same authoritative energy to everything she does, insisting on doing things her own way and criticizing everything I do, especially in the kitchen, where it seems I can't even boil water properly. She doesn’t trust the washing machine either and stands over it like a dictator, turning the dial back and forth to prevent it from following it’s own program. Almost everything she says to me is some sort of critical remark or complaint and I live in terror of what she will say next. My friend Laverna tells me this is just the way she is and I should understand and put up with it, and I do. I clearly do put up with it, but why?
I’m living with a hyperactive policewoman named Bernadette. She’s a member of an elite unit of the Homeland Guard. She gets up every morning and puts on her green uniform, hangs the strap of her impressively compact weapon over her shoulder and goes out in search of infiltrators. She’s fully indoctrinated in the Manichaean dogma of security and fires without hesitation or remorse. With several notches already on her belt, she’s in line for promotion, so there’s a new ambitious edge to her ferocity. Due to the dangers of nuclear terrorism the authorities have loosened requirements for verification, so I must watch my step or she’ll come after me.
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Hi Dave!
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