A NIGHT TO REMEMBER by Linda McCullough Moore
It’s sticky summer. Not my favorite season. I try not to have a favorite season. I’m boxed in enough as it is. It’s after supper, a time defined by what no longer is, and Jake and I are taking our marriage for a walk. It’s not unlike a canine whose needs necessitate our gearing up and going out in every sort of weather. And over time it has become the kind of dog you keep around out of a sentiment no more absorbing than dull pity and long habit.
We walk the neighborhood. It would be overreaching to venture further off than that; the marriage like that old dog might die en route and have to be carried home, a too-soon-stiffening body of fur, dead weight. Things shouldn’t die out on the public thoroughfare.
We don’t talk. We have both heard and said enough. Two kids on bikes zoom by followed by a dad on a vintage one-speed, a girls’ bike at that.
“Can we do something special?” The girl sings back over her shoulder. “Can we, Dad?”
It isn’t a child’s question. Only adults categorize experience, describe and evaluate the things they do, and rate and score the thing before it’s even done.
“Let’s do something special tonight,” I say to Jake. “Can we, Dad? Can we?” Even speaking it I know it for a scary question.
Jake scowls. It’s what his face does for a living.
“I mean it,” I say. “Let’s do something so amazing that we will remember it even when all the rest is Alzheimered to smithereens.”
“Fine,” Jake says.
A word said in a way a jury of my peers would deem a justifying motive for a bullet.
True story: A guy I used to date cracked his leg cast in half in the middle of the night. I drove him to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City at 3 a.m. and when we hobbled in, a stunning woman was haranguing the triage nurse in carefully enunciated patois, “How much longer is my husband going to be? I’m double-parked, the kids are in the car, I couldn’t find a sitter. I swear to God that I would not have shot him if I thought that it would take this long.”
I don’t know why she was surprised. A wife will be required to pick up the pieces every time. I personally believe that’s why there are so many husbands walking around unwounded.
But I don’t want to shoot Jake, or if I do, I want the bullet only to be a big pink rubber eraser, a cartridge of white-out, to make it so that he won’t be. That’s really all I want.
But barring that I want to do something tonight so special that it will be remembered by us both, or at the very least by me, forever.
“What is it that you want to do?” I think my thoughts are scaring him.
They’re scaring me.
“Let’s walk downtown.” I turn and am surprised when he follows me.
“Do you want coffee or ice cream or what?” he says.
I let it be. There’s no room left in his sin registry.
He made one once for me. A register of sins. I found it in his briefcase when I went to get a blank check out. It was a calendar, a freebie from the bank, with two-inch squares, one for each day, and for eleven months each box held one or several sins.
“Today I wanted to charter a boat but Margaret had a convenient temperature of 103.”
“Margaret forgot to put the trash out while I was away and now we have two weeks’ worth crammed in the can.”
“Margaret says my family can stay in a motel next time.”
“I wanted to set off some fireworks but Margaret said she had to sleep.”
“Margaret ran out of gas (again) and I had to leave work to go pick her up (again).”
Eleven months with no square blank, a catalog of sins so petty that the words whine on the page. A pity party where the guest of honor devotes whole moments of this, his one precious lifetime, to this slimy enterprise. I want to put an ad in the newspaper to say what he has done, but I am ashamed on his behalf. His garnering the little piles of refuse of a day, picking through the hours and the moments to see if he can find a bad thing I have done, that he can catalog and save to treasure.
“He’s saving shit for a divorce,” my best friend says.
“I just wanted to see if there was some kind of pattern here,” he says when I confront him after midnight, when I decree he shred each page, each month, each day, afraid, if anybody saw it, just what they might think of me for having chosen out of every man alive this man to share my life with.
“I could go for a slice of pizza,” he says.
“That would be special,” I say.
The knife fight is not a bit like knife fights on TV. In the first place, we’re in the middle of it, before we know we are. One minute we’re strolling and the next minute two crazed lunatics are circling us with pointed blades, using us as some flesh barricade. I freeze. I don’t know what Jake does. I don’t know if he’s still there. I’m all alone on Main Street, all alone in life and knives are drawn and near enough to end me.
I hear Jake breathing – asthma sucking air – so he must be there, and I sense, not see, a crowd of people gathering round and roaring whispers, but no other sounds beyond a radio that plays a song that says, This is the only thing I want to feel tonight. My mind’s gone wacky. I think someone should throw the radio at one of the knife fighters’ heads. I think that Jake and I, or I alone, should turn sideways and slip away. Now a policeman is moving in. He’s got a gun.
If I’m not knifed I will be shot. My arm flings out of its own volition and it slides down full length across the blade and the policeman fires and Jake is down, and people scream, and an old man walks out of the crowd and says, “Wait just a minute here. Nobody meant anybody any harm, and you all know that every pain that’s ever happened in the history of the world was all one big mistake.”
I shake my head, and the man behind the counter asks Jake does he want the pizza heated, and what size soda do I want?
And we had a very special night; we ate pizza and walked home, and drank some wine and went to bed where we conceived the son that we’d been wanting for a million years. Well, at least the pizza part is true. Jake had one slice with too much sauce, a little skimpy on the cheese. I had a Diet Coke. We came home. Jake read. I must have watched TV. It was the kind of night that you remember your whole life.
Linda McCullough Moore is the author of a novel, The Distance Between (Soho), written under the pen name Eliza Osborne. Her fiction and essays have been published in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train, and The Boston Globe. This is her fifth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.