EIGHT ERRORS OR MORE by John A, McDermott
Saturday Night: Riding on “E”
The orange light on the dashboard’s burning, a dot on the otherwise blue-tinged deck, a dot from the spectrum I didn’t expect. Other colors are burning all around us, the lights from University Avenue bright, gas stations and Thai restaurants, video stores and 24-hour pharmacies, yes, plural, two pharmacies, though who’d believe that many people need midnight cuticle trimmers and 2 a.m. hair removal creams, perhaps support hose at dawn. Mira’s on my right, shotgun as she says, and she’d probably like one right about now, halfway between our house and her boss’s. Geoffrey. She likes to say his name, the word popping out of her mouth like she’s throwing something, her talented teeth and lush lips forming the J-sounding G and the coming together for F’s that belong in other, more forceful, F-ing words, like fountain and fission and frog and – well, you know the sound – and she’s saying, “Geoffrey’s is still a good ways away and you’re telling me we haven’t got any gas?”
“I’m not telling you. I just said, ‘Oh, look, the light’s on.’”
“Well, the light means something, Tim. It means we’re running out of gas.” She sighs: long, weary, parental, though she’s never had any children. It’s just parental-sounding, an imitation.
I may be riding on E, but she’s riding G-E-O-Double F, that’s what I’m thinking, humming in my head. Ever since I accused her yesterday it seems even more accurate, but maybe it’s just because it seems that, since I gave her the idea, maybe now she’ll pursue it. As we round the corner of his cul-de-sac, his dead end, I aim for the yellow-lit driveway up the short incline. Just a little hill. G-E-O-double F. Fine. And with the turn of the key, the engine, the radio, the air conditioning, and the light go out. The dashboard’s dead as I listen to the engine tick and watch Mira step lively, swing her long legs out of the car and up the asphalt.
Asphalt. Yet another word with an internal F sound, but no F around. It sounds like ass-fault. How appropriate.
The Previous Tuesday: Forgetting to Buy Milk
for Tomorrow’s Breakfast
Mira wants her bran flakes – no, amaranth flakes – for breakfast. Who the hell’s heard of amaranth? Is it a drug, I ask; it sounds like a drug. We’ve been trying to get her pregnant, a project that’s taking longer than either of us had supposed. “You shouldn’t be taking drugs if you’re pregnant.”
She rolls her big brown eyes and her nose wrinkles for just a moment, but long enough to tell me I’m a dunce. Her nose says “stupid,” and then her voice follows, of course.
“It’s a grain, Tim. The Mayans ate it. They cultivated it,” she says, “cultivated it widely.”
Or did she say the Aztecs? Doesn’t matter. Sacrifices all around and I forgot to make mine. A half gallon of skim – fortified blue water, if you ask me, which she did. Not about its looks, I mean, but would I pick some up after work, and I said yes, and then forgot. So, no milk.
I’m not sure why we’re trying to have a child. We’ve been at it so long, maybe it’s just habit now. Even if she did get knocked up, would it be mine? Or would it be a friend’s, you know, Friend with a capital “F,” like in fine, fountain, fission. G-E-O-double F, free. Fine. Let her have his spawn and eat some Mayan drug flakes.
She eats them dry, picking them out, one by one, with her manicured fingers. Red nails and brown cereal. She takes the empty metal bowl to the sink, rinses it, lets it clatter against the drain, and pads up the stairs in nyloned feet to finish getting ready for work.
My problem was in saying yes. Not in forgetting to buy the milk, but in agreeing to do it in the first place. Never agree to nothing. There’s a double negative I can live with.
The Previous Wednesday: Leaving Cupboard Doors Ajar
“Keep the beasts in, Tim. Keep the beasts in.”
The beasts in Mira’s vocabulary are plates. Cans of soup. Forks. Anything behind a small door, a door that should be shut at all times when you’re not either pulling a beast out or putting a beast back in. In my childhood, we snickered and said a kid who came out of the lavatory with his zipper undone was “leaving the barn door open.” I don’t know where Mira picked up the bit about the beasts. I would have responded better if she’d said, “Tim, don’t leave the barn door open.” Maybe I wouldn’t have been so compelled to let the beasts out. Jars of martini olives. Towels.
In my den, I leave my desk drawer ajar, just a little. I know she never goes in there, so it’s just for me. My stapler is free to roam. Beasts escape. The barn door is open.
Mira rolls the toothpaste tube up from the bottom. I didn’t do that when I met her. She trained me. Now I do. She never complains about that. The gaping doors are my little rebellion. The toothpaste would be too much, too messy.
The Previous Thursday: Breaking the Spine of a Book, Any Book
I remember reading about a man once, a famous playwright, I think, who was arrested in Britain for cutting out the colored plates in expensive art books he’d borrowed from the great library in London, the one where Marx wrote Das Kapital. When they arrested him he admitted to it all, the snipping he’d done surreptitiously, the gluing of pictures in various volumes. He liked to cut out pictures of the Queen in particular, and repaste them in unexpected places. Despite being a respected writer and a bit of a celebrity, they threw the book – an unmolested book – at him. I think he did time for the vandalism.
He should have been punished. I don’t like vandals, people who deliberately sabotage other people’s belongings, other people’s projects.
But it wasn’t a library book I left open on the arm of the living room couch. It was a mass market paperback, a seven-dollar novel, nothing to consider sacred.
Mira hates a broken spine.
She didn’t say anything. She just picked up the book, slipped a bit of torn napkin into it to keep my place, and set it back on the couch. She’d told me enough times before not to damage a book. “It’s a crime,” Mira said. “And really avoidable, once you pay attention.”
Perhaps that’s why she married me, you think. You’ve been listening long enough. I don’t have a spine to break.
The Previous Thursday Night: Loosening My Tie,
Unbuttoning My Collar
“You look drunk,” she says anytime she catches me with my tie pulled out and my top button undone. “Either wear it right or take it off completely.”
She scolded me last night.
No. Wait. It’s time to tell you the truth. Loosening my tie and unbuttoning my collar aren’t really the crimes she’s angry about today. I mean, yes, slovenly apparel or, rather, nice apparel worn slovenly, does upset her. But last night, after cocktails, after she reminded me about my shirt, she went out on an errand. The grocery. Maybe. Maybe something more errant than errand. Maybe Geoffrey. Maybe not. But she came home earlier than I expected.
What she’s really mad about is finding her husband in the den with his pants unzipped and his hand working away, sitting at the desk chair she bought him last Christmas, the good chair with the adjustable seat to comfort his bad back, while ogling some naked woman on his computer screen – the flat screen she convinced him to buy in August, even though he thought it was too expensive.
That might be more the reason she’s sharp with me on this Friday morning. Glaring over her modest juice glass, eyeing me occasionally over the comics.
“What are you doing?” she’d blurted, one hand still on the doorknob, the light from the hallway cutting into the small, dark room like a scalpel. “What – ”
“Mira,” I said, simultaneously crouching, zipping, cringing. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh, no. I’m sure it isn’t.” She shut the door. I could hear her heels click on the wooden floor as she walked away from me, away from my den of iniquity. “What – are you fourteen?” she called loudly. “You’re not old enough to be a father.”
I sat, staring at the girl on the wide screen, her mouth open, her legs apart.
I shouldn’t have agreed to anything with her. Buying milk, marriage, trying to have a kid.
The Previous Friday: Catching the Fringe of a Persian Rug in the Suction of a Vacuum Cleaner
Vacuuming is one of those chores I don’t mind doing. It’s loud, it’s laborious, pushing the sucker around, but I like it. Where once there was dirt, now there is none. Whoop. Zip. Done.
But Mira hates it when I do the Persian rugs and catch their long fringe in the roller. The belt always seems to catch and burn, the smell of singed rubber stinging my nose. You can’t cover up that smell. Not with scented candles or sulfur. She wrinkles her pert nose and scowls. “You vacuumed.”
“Yes,” I say, waving one arm like a gameshow hostess displaying the prizes. “The living room. The dining room. My den.”
“You messed up the belt again. I can smell it.”
“Only for a minute. I freed it up in a jiffy.”
Mira sets her briefcase down on the marble top of our kitchen bar. I ducked out of work early, so my bag is already there. Been there two hours, at least.
“Whatever stains you’ve left in the den aren’t going to vacuum out,” she says.
“Very funny,” I say. “There are no stains.”
I’m bent over, wrapping the black cord around and around, neatly coiled vertically against the long metal handle. She’s flipping through mail, dropping unopened envelopes and slick catalogues on the counter.
“You shouldn’t be whacking off anyway. You’ll lower your sperm count. You shouldn’t be wasting your stuff on some picture-slut. They’re supposed to be working in me.”
I pause, ready to push the vacuum back into the closet and close the door. I was all ready to make certain no beasts escaped. I stand with both hands folded over the top of the curved, rubber-gripped handle. I feel like a woodsman posing with his rifle for a daguerreotype.
“Aren’t you getting enough extra stuff from Geoffrey? I figured, with him on the job you didn’t need me.”
Mira looks up from the last envelope, cream-colored paper, expensive. A solicitation from some group with money. Money enough to spend on nice paper.
“You think I’m sleeping with Geoffrey? With Geoffrey?”
I shrug.
“Fuck you,” she says. She looks at me a moment, holds it for a moment more, then stomps to the cupboard above the sink. “I’ve been faithful. Every day of our marriage.” She takes out a tall glass and runs the tap. She holds her slim fingers under the steady stream. She fills the glass. “I’ve played by the rules, Tim. I’ve been a team player.” She sips. “I wanted this child. I thought you did, too.” She swallows. She leaves lipstick on the rim of the clear glass. “Where do you get off accusing me?”
I point to the cupboard left open, the door’s sharp corner level with her hardening eyes.
“The beasts are getting out, Mira,” I say, pointing. “You better close it.”
This Saturday Morning, Very Early: Cutting the Tags from New Clothes and Leaving the Plastic String Scattered over the Bedroom
Snip, snip, went the plastic-handled scissors, our most useful wedding present, the gift we used most frequently in our marriage, apropos of the sharp edges of our relationship, Mira’s ability to dead-stare through thick plaster walls, my own ability to sever wire with grinding teeth. Once more back-to-back with her in bed, no communion, no connection, but then she bolts upright and flicks on the overhead light and curses, then curses again, whatever it is she holds between her right thumb and index finger. Her well-manicured nails are pointed and blood-red in the after-midnight light. “What is this, Tim? Fuck this. What is this?”
I open the other eye – it takes two to tangle with Mira – and hold out my hand. She drops the flea-sized felon on my chest and I pluck it off the comforter, ah, misnamed throw, and bring the tiny, hard criminal closer to my nose. It’s the t-bar and half an inch of thin plastic line, the thing that secures a price tag or size card to a piece of clothing.
“It’s nothing,” I say, turn to the bedside table and drop it on the shiny wooden top. I notice it needs dusting: the coaster by the clock radio has shimmied from its dedicated spot and its ring is embarrassingly visible, or would be embarrassing if anyone else were to come into our bedroom, and even when we’re here we try to keep our eyes closed as often as possible. I flop back into the warm groove of my previous huddle, and Mira drops another hard little flea on top of my hip. Then another, And another.
“What did you buy? Or are these just growing here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Dress shirts. Yesterday. I bought two dress shirts. And a coat. A sport coat.”
She fluffs her pillow, taps it, then gives it two good belts. She held her hand to the light switch and paused. “Well, pick up after yourself. These things are pokey.”
In the blue-black of the room I can feel her breathing next to me, her back lifting with inhalations, exhalations, exasperations. Her foot brushes mine, a brief touch of cold, then scurries away, an animal under the covers.
I remember unfolding the white shirts, stripping off their clear plastic wrappers, laying them flat on the bed, patting their creases. I held the tags up like a circumcising surgeon and judged carefully where to cut. I didn’t want to slice any threads inadvertently and unravel it all.
“Don’t forget we have a party to go to tonight. Geoffrey’s.”
“Geoffrey’s? You sure you want me to come?”
“What does that mean?” Her voice was brittle. Hard and fragile at the same time.
“I’m not sure,” I said, avoiding the joke I was about to make. Not much of a joke, really.
I remember the scissors were cold in my hands. Snip. Snip.
Mira sighs. “You can wear one of your new shirts.”
“Sure,” I say. We are silent.
Not only scissors can sever. I feel like a vandal.
Saturday Night, Still: Shouting in Public
I have the driver’s side door open, one foot on the asphalt, one foot in the pedal well. Mira is on the front porch, the light from an overhead bulb casting a circle around her like an actress on a stage. Geoffrey, or someone like him, is still in the shadows, out from the backlit front door. Mira hands the man the bottle of wine we brought. She brought. She pulled it from the small stash we keep in the kitchen. I wouldn’t have remembered to be so thoughtful. The keys are in my hand, but the steady ding of the “door open” bell is still in my head. I stand up and put both hands on the roof of the car. Mira is laughing, stepping from one high heel to the other, as if it were cold. It’s not. It’s late August.
“I’m going to go get gas,” I say, first to myself, then louder, so the people on the porch can hear. The people are my wife and Geoffrey, or someone like him.
Mira turns. “What?”
“I’m going to fill up the tank.” My voice is steady, but I wait for it to crack like it did two lives ago. Fourteen. Twenty-eight. I’m forty-two. But fourteen fades and doesn’t fade. It’s always with you, that terror and faith. You’d think I’d grow up.
“Now?” Mira is clutching herself, holding her bare arms close, her long fingers wrapped around each bicep.
“If I don’t, we won’t have enough to get home.”
“Do it later. Come in.”
“I’ll be back. Go on.”
She turns to the man and says something I can’t hear. I start to get back into the car.
“Hey, Tim,” she calls.
“Yeah?”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I look at Mira, really look at her. Her hair is down, the way I like it. She shakes her head once, just a quick shake to the glowing house behind her. It’s a small move. It could be saying, “Come on. Come in, Tim. Don’t let me go in this house alone. It isn’t where I want to be. Not without you. Come on.” That’s what a head shake can mean.
If she really did that. It doesn’t seem possible. It was so quick, I could have just imagined it. And she’s still shifting from leg to leg, like the porch was her own little boat. Hers and Geoffrey’s, or someone like him.
“No, no. That’s all right,” I call, tapping the roof with my hands, the keys wrapped tightly into my palm. I can feel their deliberate edges. “You don’t have to.”
“Are you sure?” Perhaps her head shakes again. “Don’t go,” it says.
“Yeah, I’ll be back. You go on in.”
I shake my head, one quick jerk, as if the car were behind me, my destination is over there, it says, and wave one hand. I shoo her. Go, my hand says. I’ve got the strength to shoo you.
Mira nods back – yeah, you do – but stands still on the porch, no longer swaying, not her or the house. I watch her there as I back down the drive.
John A. McDermott’s work has appeared in Meridian, North Atlantic Review, South Dakota Review, The Southeast Review, and The Threepenny Review.