EVERY SILLY THING by Diana Joseph
She’ll remember this day as much more hilarious than she’s finding it now. Right now, Charlotte isn’t having any fun. This is the day her husband left, and with him, Danny took his clothes and his steel-toed work boots, his fishing poles and hunting rifles, the piano stool where he sat to eat supper when he was a child. Danny took the dirty red collar that once hung around the neck of his favorite blue heeler. His stacks of Field and Stream. Danny took the harmonica he never learned how to play and the snakeskin cowboy boots he had to have but never wore, claiming they made his legs look too wobbly.
Charlotte doesn’t know it yet, but before he left, her husband chatted up over fifty dollars in long distance. Danny called both of his brothers, the older and the younger, to tell them about her, his bitch of a wife, about her sneaking, cheating, trampy ways, about his broken heart. Here you sit all broken-hearted, said the younger brother. The older one said, The woman is a grade-A, first class, bona fide bitch of the highest degree. I recommend you forget about her. I know a girl named Tiffany you should meet.
When he left, Danny took his collection of baseball cards, his collection of baseball caps, the bat he’d swung hard enough to hit a home run, winning the state championship his senior year. From the kitchen wall, Danny took the picture of John F. Kennedy that his grandmother clipped out of the Pittsburgh Press in 1963, then hung in a wooden frame on the wall in her kitchen. Danny took the pop-up tent, all three sleeping bags, the kerosene lantern and cast iron Dutch oven: even if Charlotte went camping, which she doesn’t – she hates camping – she still finds it reasonable that her husband take these things. They belonged to him.
Charlotte won’t always be thrilled about owning up to it, but there was once a time when she loved this man. Danny is her first husband; she is his first wife. They have a son as old as their marriage – seven years. Over this last year as husband and wife, they’ve managed. Managing was saying please pass the mashed potatoes and thank you very much and would you mind not screaming six inches from my face, I’m not deaf, you know. Managing meant they paid the rent almost always on time. Managing included some heavy duty fighting, fighting that was bad enough for the old lady downstairs to pound a broom against her ceiling, but not so bad that she ever followed through with her threats to call the cops. As husband and wife, Charlotte and Danny managed to save five hundred sixty-eight dollars and eighty-eight cents. Lucky, Charlotte is thinking. Lucky it was an even amount because Danny took half.
She didn’t think it would be good parenting to give a child his father’s leaving as a memory, so Charlotte had taken their son to Lincoln Park where they spent the heat of the day watching golfers practicing their swings and dogs chasing Frisbees. Carleton has been pining for a dog of his own. He clips pictures of them – cocker spaniels and golden retrievers, border collies and Irish setters, chocolate Labs and mangy mutts – to paste in his notebook. He’s given them names – Rufus McHenry, Sparky, Lance Armstrong – and he’s assigned them heroic personalities. Dogs who will greet him when he comes home from school. Dogs who will sleep curled at the foot of his bed, licking his face when he has a bad dream. Dogs who will rescue him when he tumbles down a deep dark well or is trapped inside a burning building.
And because she was at the park, explaining to her son once again that a dog of his own was someday-not-today – What does that mean? the boy wanted to know – Charlotte wasn’t there to see her husband back his pickup into the lot, then lug cardboard boxes wrapped in duct tape and overstuffed garbage bags patched with duct tape out of their apartment.
Later, she’ll wonder about if she had been there: would she have tried to stop Danny from carrying away some of the other things he took, little things that belonged to her?
Probably not. Danny is hurt, and he’s angry, and Charlotte doesn’t blame him. In ninety days, Colorado law, her husband will become her ex-husband: her doing, which as everyone knows, means her fault.
Danny took her grade school report cards and her high school yearbooks and the tiara she’d worn as Homecoming Queen. He took the canvas sack full of love letters other boys had written her, and the bundle of love letters wrapped in ribbon he wrote to her, and the Thom McAn shoebox full of little cards and drawings their son had given her – Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter and Christmas, Danny guiding the crayon in Carleton’s hand, To Mom.
These are things Charlotte wants, but can – if and since she has to – manage to live without.
But that Danny took still other things. Meaner things. More spiteful. Charlotte is more surprised than she ought to be. After all, the man has a talent for catching her off guard even when she really should know better. It’s one of the reasons she fell in love with him. Charlotte knows she should be mad, she’s attempting furious, but she isn’t even close. Guilt blocks the way to anger, and mostly she feels tired. Mostly, she would like very much to sit in a dark room, smoking cigarettes and watching television with the sound turned off.
But here in the apartment, there’s a mess in every room. Chairs turned upside down. Drawers pulled out. Balls of newspaper, blankets in heaps, a broken jar of paperclips snagged into the carpet. Charlotte sees it’ll take days, weeks, maybe even months before she catches on to everything that’s missing.
There’s also her son following her from room to room, watching her peek in closets and tug open cabinets. Carleton is a small, serious child, pale-skinned, brown-eyed and dark-haired, a dimple like his father’s on his chin, and Charlotte notices, not for the first time, he’s badly in need of a haircut. “What’s happening?” he asks. It’s the right question.
“A game,” Charlotte tells him, “like we’re playing What’s Wrong With This Picture. Your dad is a very silly man. It’s fun, huh?”
“It’s weird,” Carleton says. “When’s Dad coming home?”
“A nickel,” she says. “I’ll give you a nickel for every silly thing you find missing.”
The racks out of the oven. The burner coils from the stovetop. The vegetable drawers from the refrigerator. Her bathing suit and winter coat, the laces out of her loafers. Cushions from the couch, pillows from pillowcases, the sheets from their bed, her only matching set. Her husband had punctured the foil and popped out each one of her birth control pills, leaving behind the pink plastic dial.
There’s a strange logic to what Danny has taken, bits and pieces of things. He took the ceramic pot, but left the spider plant. He took the filter tray, but left the coffee maker. He took shades, but not lamps; spoons but not forks; the flap that holds the batteries in the remote control. He took the plunger along with the knowledge that she’ll never make it through a day without the toilet backing up.
He took the entire contents of her underwear drawer.
Six months from now, when it’s Christmas morning and Danny is married to his second wife, he’ll come to pick Carleton up for the day, and he’ll hand Charlotte a tiny foil-wrapped box. In it, she’ll find a baggie full of birth control pills. Danny will tell her Happy Holidays, kiddo and Let’s put the past in the past and I want you to know none of what happened the day I left was my idea. Danny will blame it all on his brothers. He was acting out of hurt, he’ll say, egged on by a couple of guys who understood how low he really felt.
Danny won’t be telling the truth. The truth is he conjured the whole thing up all by himself while pushing a wet broom against a block of strawberry ice cream melting on the sidewalk outside their kitchen window. The bristles against the concrete sang a song he couldn’t resist: Charlotte’s a whore, Charlotte’s a whore, Charlotte’s a stinking sneaky whore. When Danny told his brothers about his plan to let his trampy, cheating bitch of a wife in on what a broken heart feels like, the younger one said, Hey, man, that’s right. You came to shit and only farted. The older brother said, That’s the stupidest of all your stupid ideas. Forget about that slut. I know a girl named Lola you should meet.
What Charlotte knows is him, Danny, her husband. He won’t tuck in his T-shirt because he thinks it makes him look too skinny. He won’t eat eggs in the morning, but he doesn’t mind them for supper. A roomful of children at Carleton’s last Christmas pageant, their hands clasped and their faces solemn as they sang O, Come All Ye Faithful turned him weepy.
Danny was himself once a boy in the park whose soccer ball rolled out of bounds to where Charlotte sat in the grass. When she tried to return kick it, she missed the ball but sent her shoe, hitting him squarely in the chest. When Danny brought her shoe back to her, he knelt to slide it on. He was sweet to her! She was charmed by him! They were nice to each other, and Charlotte fell in love. It’s no more complicated than that.
She pictures him flinging her bras and panties out the window as he speeds up and down I-70, looking for a cheap place to spend the night.
It isn’t an unrealistic thing to imagine. Danny has a strong arm and a history of hurling objects out the window. On their wedding day – he was nineteen and wearing the paisley tie he’d bought just for the occasion; she was a year younger, not even trying to hide a pregnant stomach behind white stretch pants – Danny crumpled up the mean note Charlotte’s father wrote then tossed it out the truck window. Good luck, kiddo, it said, in this bed you have made. Last night, Danny tossed a half gallon of strawberry ice cream out the window because he hates strawberry. He said Charlotte knows he hates it. He said its presence in his freezer was evidence enough that she has a lover.
Which she does, but denied and will continue to deny for years and years, long past the point where it should still matter.
Because there was once a time when she loved him.
There’s only one thing missing from their son’s room: the black hooded sweatshirt Carleton had worn the night before then left crumpled on the floor despite the hamper just inches away. It’s Carleton who finds the note, folded in thirds and propped against the dump truck on his dresser. When Charlotte pulls it away from him, Carleton asks, “What’s it say?”
Your mother broke my heart. I want you to know that.
“Nothing. It says Dad will call you first thing in the morning or else he’ll call the day after that, and he hopes we’re having fun.”
“Are we?”
“You betcha! Your dad is the silliest darn man there ever was.”
“This is weird.”
“But also fun.”
“I’m hungry.”
“There’s cereal.”
In the kitchen, while her son pours milk into a bowl before adding cornflakes, not by shaking them out of the box, but by scooping them out in handfuls, Charlotte is not thinking about how little it takes to fall in love and how much hassle is involved with falling out. That thought won’t kick in until bickering about visitation and custody and child support cranks up a few months from now.
Nor is she thinking about the silverware drawer, how in it there are forks and knives, a potato masher and a spatula, but not a single spoon, and she just told her son to fix himself a bowl of cereal.
That particular crisis is just moments away.
Instead, Charlotte is looking out the kitchen window. She’s smoking a cigarette and thinking about her mother. Charlotte’s mother could tear a kitchen apart in search of something sweet. The burnt crust of a brownie. A stale Oreo cookie. A chocolate chip the color of dust that had fallen behind the microwave. But never in front of Charlotte’s father. When he was there, her mother said, What can I get you? and You look tired and How about I rub your back? Your shoulders? Your feet? When Charlotte’s father was there, her mother denied swiping candy out of Christmas stockings and Easter baskets and the pillowcase Charlotte used for trick-or-treating.
Charlotte doesn’t turn her head in time to see her son bat the bowl of cereal off the kitchen table, but she does hear it hit the linoleum. She sees the milk splash. Carleton’s hair hangs scruffy over his eyes and jagged over his ears. To his horror, he’d recently been mistaken for a girl by an old lady in the grocery store. He’s giving Charlotte a dirty look. “When is someday-not-today?” he demands.
“Let’s order a pizza,” Charlotte tells him. “You can have pepperoni on it! Doesn’t that sound good?”
Charlotte’s mother and father live in Pennsylvania, and they’re waiting for her to call. She already knows what they’ll say. What did you expect? The man is devastated. In his house on Main Street, Charlotte’s lover is waiting for her to call, and she knows, too, what he’ll say. What white trash melodrama. The man is out of control.
All of them will be right, but none of them are people she feels like dealing with. If there’s anyone she wants to talk to, it’s her husband, it’s Danny, it’s to say, Okay, all right, I get your point.
But her husband doesn’t want to talk to her and she can’t blame him. Last night, when he came in from sweeping off the sidewalk, Danny locked himself in the bathroom and stayed there. In a low calm voice Charlotte could barely hear, Danny said he just knew she sucked that guy, her boyfriend, and he was positive she’d laid under him, and he was also sure she’d hung her legs over his shoulders. Don’t tell me you didn’t. I can’t even stand to look at you, he said. When you told me you loved me, I believed you, Danny said, his voice so quiet Carleton, in bed, asleep, didn’t wake to hear it, and the old lady downstairs didn’t need to bang a broom against her ceiling.
“I love you, Carleton,” Charlotte is saying now. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
The scissors, in the kitchen junk drawer, are not among the items Charlotte’s husband has taken. While they wait for the pizza guy, Charlotte hoists her son up on the counter, and she starts chopping. Hunks of dark hair from the back of the boy’s head fall to the floor, snips of hair from around his face float in the air, and while Charlotte is trimming his bangs, her husband is standing in a Wal-Mart parking lot where a couple of hippies, a guy and his girl, are cooing over puppies in a cardboard box. Free to a good home, the sign says. They’re curly black puppies, no bigger than grapefruit, with fat wormy bellies, weepy dark eyes, and tiny pink tongues. They’re about the sweetest things Danny has ever seen.
Charlotte doesn’t know this, will never know this, but her husband is about to do her an enormous favor. Not that Danny isn’t tempted – it is something he’s debating – but he’ll finally decide against scooping one up, tucking it under his shirt, and taking it home to his son. Charlotte, he knows, would never forgive him.
Diana Joseph’s new story collection is called Happy or Otherwise (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003). Recent stories have appeared in Threepenny Review, Puerto del Sol, and Mid-American Review.