[NOTE: I almost submitted this with a pun in the cover letter. The rejection is still pending.]
The Sinister Possibilities of Hearty Whole Wheat
If Richard had been home when the inciting phone call came, this would have happened differently. But he told me that morning he had a late meeting with a client and wanted to prep at the office, which is conveniently located across the street from Beef Villa. Richard would eat there all the time if I let him, if I didn’t pack his lunch in the morning and throw fits when he doesn’t come home for dinner. When he eats with us I have to ladle a helping of vegetables on his plate and glare until he eats them, almost as bad as Amy. But I didn’t bring up the suspicious proximity to beef goods, I just said “okay” and “I love you” and tried not to let it bother me when all he said in return was “you too.” When I first met Richard he had All-American Richie Cunningham good looks and Fonzie’s swagger. I had a head full of 1970s reruns and thought, like an idiot, that if a one man blend of Happy Days characters tells you you’re pretty when he bums a cigarette, it is - or should be - love. Over the next twelve years Richard became the slightly chubby guy who gets people approved for mortgages. It’s a job he thinks he’s too good for so he doesn’t really try. That night I didn’t want to give him any excuse to fuck up the deal and lose the commission, so I didn’t complain and tell him he was a shitty husband for not coming home, again. I was docile and supportive, like an idiot.
After I put Amy to bed and told her that Daddy would have to read her a story tomorrow, I settled on the couch just before the phone rang. I skipped to the kitchen and picked it up on the second ring, certain that it was Richard and crossing my fingers for good news. “How did it go?”
“Who is this?”It was a man’s voice, but he didn’t sound like Richard or any of the burly truck drivers who pick up their paychecks on Friday. He sounded nervous and a little frail, like maybe he got beat up as a kid or took people cutting him off on the interstate as a direct challenge to his masculinity.
“I live here. Who are you?” I narrowed my eyes as I spoke and tried to sound stern, like when I have to reprimand Amy for calling her snot-nosed classmates “poopface” instead of snickering and saying “attagirl.”
“Please will you tell your husband to stay away from my wife?” His voice rose as he talked, escalating into a falsetto squeak. I’d have been tempted to laugh if I hadn’t felt every part of my body start to quake.
“Excuse me?” I asked. It was my turn to sound frail.
“My wife, tell him to stay away from my wife!” His voice cracked into a sob on the last word and he hung up. For a second I couldn’t move; I just stood there with the phone in my hands, my fingernails digging into the plastic seams, the blood pounding in my ears. Disbelief, more than anything else. I’d told Richard at his brother’s New Year’s Eve party what I would do if this happened again. I warned him, in that low, even voice I have but rarely used. I might only be five feet tall and weigh half of what he does, but he was a fool for trifling with me.
Richard and I had a pact to quit smoking, so I withdrew my pack of Virginia Slims from behind the cinnamon and nutmeg in the spice cabinet and went to the garage. I closed the door behind me and sat on the cold concrete step. I lit up and took two drags before hanging my head between my knees. My eyes began to burn and I felt weak. I should have left him so much earlier, when he was in downstate in Decatur and I was in Algonquin, and he slept with some sorority slut and told me it was because he was lonely and he wouldn’t have if I’d been there.
Then I’d stayed because his mother heard that I told him to go to hell. She called and told me that I was the only one who had ever loved Richard, really, and if he was going to make anything of himself I’d have to be behind him, pushing and prodding every step of the way. Maybe I felt bad that no one else, not even his parents really, loved him. Maybe I thought I could make something of his cleverness and friendliness when I was failing accounting and thought I couldn’t make anything of myself. Maybe I was terrified of being alone and thought that no one with as much charm as Richard would ever love me again. Maybe it was all of that and a smorgasbord of issues, but that was the first mistake, and I’d been making more of them ever since. Weakness.
I couldn’t tolerate more weakness. More inaction. I had to follow through. Back in January I said that if it happened again I would destroy him, and this was the time for punishment. Retribution. Justice. I had to kill him. The anger escalated with the cigarette dangling from my hand and my head between my knees. It might have been the nicotine, or the blood rushing from my head back to my body, but when I sat up and blinked, empowered by a righteous rage, I saw it. The answer to my problems on a footstool behind the bikes. Salvation in a kitchen appliance.
The Breadmaker.
It was perfect. Richard is prone to health problems, and besides the asthma and sleep apnea he is allergic to everything. Dogs, cats, peanuts – once he ate a peanut and almost died in a hospital bed surrounded by machines – pollen, sandalwood, goat cheese, and live yeast. We found that last one out with a loaf of raisin bread – which I hate but Richard loves and gets excited because it’s swirly. The Breadmaker releases live yeast into the air while it bakes, and a fifty-eight minute quick bake cycle in the kitchen while he was snoring through an afternoon upstairs turned his entire back and arms red with hives. He complained and itched for three weeks. The Breadmaker was banished to the garage; if I wanted fresh bread I had to get it out and plug it into an extension cord.
As far as executions go, it was a better option than a peanut, which would look suspicious, given his medical history, and was too tiny to be satisfying. I needed to do something dramatic, even if I was the only one who knew it. I could have adopted several animals from the pound, let them loose around the house, vacuumed up their hair, and strewn it all over Richard’s side of the bed. But that was ridiculous and would make Amy cry when she realized that her new pet friends were instruments of justice that she couldn’t keep. Plus, goat cheese is expensive, pollen is scarce in November, and I didn’t have easy access to sandalwood.
No, the Breadmaker was convenient and perfect. And I suspected that if it gave Richard hives from the kitchen, it would do far worse in our bedroom closet, three feet away from his lungs.
I went through three more cigarettes and plotted until I heard a faint knock on the garage door. I dropped the cigarette, snuffed it with my shoe, and kicked it into the dustpan. “Amy, you’re supposed to be in bed,” I said so that my voice carried. It came out more stern than I meant it.
“I had a bad dream.” I sighed, rubbed my eyes and opened the door. Amy’s bowl cut was all disheveled and she was looking at me with wide, concerned eyes. She had Rabbit, an old stuffed animal she’d won at a raffle, cradled in her arms. It was floppy, the once white fur tinged the dirty gray of loved childhood toys. One of Rabbit’s legs was stretched out and hung at an angle that’s awkward, even for stuffed bunnies. I’d threatened to throw out Rabbit so many times that Amy started hiding him. She only exposed him to my dangerous gaze when her distress overcame the need for his protection.
I sighed, again, and sat back down. For once I had to look up at her. “What happened?”
She swallowed and quickly began. “There was a big red monster named Ralph-”
“You haven’t had dreams about monsters since you were five. That was so long ago.” Amy likes to feel like a big girl, and even two years ago the monsters didn’t have names.
She didn’t freeze like she does when she lies, and she wasn’t consoled. “But he was big and scary and his name was Ralph and he said that he was going to eat me because my Daddy was never coming home.” Her eyes began to well, and she hid them in Rabbit. My heart broke a little more, but in a way that made me stronger. That possibly imaginary bastard Ralph and that very real bastard Richard weren’t going to get away with this.
I picked Amy up, and she pressed her little nose into my shoulder. I held her tightly enough to crush Rabbit and carried her upstairs. The bathroom light was on and shining onto the end of Amy’s four poster bed. I tucked her in and snuggled with her in the room that had belonged to Richard, once upon a time. The walls were redecorated for Amy with antique carousel wallpaper; before they had been a steely blue. Richard and I used to spend hours here when his parents were gone and mine thought I was at work. He played me songs he’d learned from the radio on his guitar and daydreamed. He wanted to sell out more concerts than Pink Floyd, or cure his mother’s cancer, or at the very least pay for the research. And he wanted me to be there with him. That’s the only part that came true. When we were setting up the room for Amy, I had to arrange the furniture in a way that was as different as possible from before to remind myself that I was a mother and didn’t have time for nostalgia.
I put my arm around Amy and stroked her terrible haircut as I lied to her. “Daddy will come home. He’s just working late tonight.”
“Promise?” she asked.
“Promise. Tell me your sixes.” Richard had started teaching Amy how to do multiplication a few weeks ago and she’s spent hours with flashcards, even though the other kids in first grade are still struggling through addition and subtraction. If I had tried to teach her she wouldn’t have listened, but because it was Richard she sat at the table with him and frowned at the grid of numbers until she almost understood them. Amy isn’t what I expected. I thought that having a girl would be like having my own living, moving doll who would want to grow up and be just like me. When she was smaller, I used to dress her in expensive frilly dresses with dainty matching socks. She always got grass stains on the dresses and fed the socks to my parents’ puppy. It drove me insane.
If you place Amy’s baby pictures next to mine they look almost identical. My button nose, my infant baldness, my smile. But ever since then she’s been moving away from me and closer to Richard. It’s strange –difficult – to love her so much it overwhelms me, while knowing at the same time that she loves Richard so much more.
Once Amy’s breathing slowed, and the tension on her face eased, I tucked her back in. I lifted the comforter at the end of the bed and pulled out the two Boxcar Children books Richard was supposed to read with her. Bastard. How could he not know what he had? How could he need me to force him to come home and pay attention to her? Even then his attention came and went in spurts. Like the whole multiplication thing – she shouldn’t have to spend hours with flashcards like some crazy robot child just so that Richard is impressed by her math. At best she’ll turn into a ridiculous perfectionist; at worst she’ll become female Richard. I was convinced of better things for Amy, and at that moment I was determined to be the strong female role model we both needed and do what was necessary.
The light was still on in the bathroom. I stood in front of the white porcelain sink that was so clean it reflected the light from the fixture. My mother always said that you could tell the quality of a woman by the cleanliness of her house. It’s her only advice I’ve taken seriously. I leaned on the sink, putting my face up to the mirror. I looked for my pores, a leftover habit, but instead found faint, almost imperceptible lines moving out from my eyes. God, I hated getting old. It’s pathetic, reaching that place where I would have loved to see a blackhead and be able to count the pores on my nose. That’s another reason. When I saw him come in from the balcony with that whore on New Year’s Eve, both of their faces flushed, I calculated how long it would take me to pack my shit. Two hours, max. But instead I sat on a barstool in a navy satin dress and asked myself what I would have if I left him. I’d be thirty and have a high school diploma and a daughter who just wanted Daddy to come home. I sat there and cried until my mascara ran into my champagne.
This time, though, things would be different. I would be different too, if I had to. Fiercer. Stronger. I stood upright and took my most expensive lipstick out of the drawer. It was a deep red color, “Vixen Rouge,” the tube said. I’d never had the guts to actually wear it. I started to put it on my lips, but that wasn’t enough of a departure. I needed to channel the spirits of Amazonian female fighters and maybe Xena, Warrior Princess, so I drew two diagonal lines on each cheek underneath my eyes. Then I put on a bandana and a black racerback tank-top and got to work. I unplugged the Breadmaker from the garage and carried it up the stairs to my side of the closet. I’d forgotten that it weighed twenty pounds, but used the weight dragging down my arms as an excuse to grunt. I rested it among the dresses I wore to church every Sunday. The cord wasn’t long enough to plug it in without setting up a tripwire, which was tempting, but would also give everything away. I dug around in Richard’s tools, finding a pack of cigarettes and condoms in the process, until I unearthed the extension cord. I routed it through the closest, under a rug, then underneath the bed to the outlet hidden behind the headboard.
Every bed is dusty underneath, no matter how clean the rest of the house is. I emerged from the space between the box spring and the wood floors with dust clinging to the lipstick war paint. I took a shower and tried to concentrate only on the pulsating hot streams of water colliding with my skin, almost burning. I tried not to think of how many showers Richard took right after getting home - It averaged out to at least three per week. When I finally put on an old t-shirt and pair of shorts, it was 2 AM.
Richard still wasn’t home. Since I wouldn’t be able to kill him that night, and there was no other reason why I’d feel obliged to share a bed with that asshole, I went downstairs to the hall closet and pulled out the guest linens. We never have guests. The sheet, blanket, and pillow that reside at the top of the closet are exclusively used by Richard when I’m pissed. At some point in our marriage, it became more convenient to keep the linens of exile in the coat closet on the same floor as the couch, rather than with their more benign counterparts upstairs. I tucked the sheet into the edges of the couch, fluffed the pillow, and arranged the blanket. He might be getting kicked out of our room, but the presentation of his fate would not reflect badly on me.
In the morning, he apologized. He got up from the couch, still in his dark pants and dress shirt, with his hair sticking up on one side, and apologized. He kissed me on the cheek and told me that he got the account and went out with the guys to celebrate. He celebrated a little too much and had to wait for the buzz to wear off before he could drive home. I said “Whatever” and “You’d better come home tonight.”
Amy gave him a big hug and recited her eights. When I told her she had to get ready for school, she turned to me and said, “Mommy, can Daddy drive me today? Please please please?”
I glanced at Richard. He shrugged so I nodded. When they left, Amy was holding Richard’s hand and they were both singing 5’s to the tune of “Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes,” Richard’s favorite Paul Simon song. I told myself that she only wanted him to take her because he was indulgent and would stop for donuts on the way. He would let her listen to her choice of music and turn the volume up, but I kept the radio dial tuned to the weather. It wasn’t anything more than that. It wasn’t.
The entire day at my desk I couldn’t focus on any of the invoices. I just kept staring at the little red truck logo so that my eyes wouldn’t drift over to the picture frame on my desk. Richard’s holding Amy in the picture when she is approximately eleven minutes old and it’s typically adorable. I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he loved me, a little, and maybe I was a little shrewish and obsessive and tended to yell first and ask questions later and maybe Amy needed him. Maybe. At lunchtime I turned the frame so it was glass down, stand up, but it didn’t help. I told myself it was the jitters, just the jitters, and maybe it’d be a good idea to leave work early and pick up some food for Richard’s last meal. Prisoners on death row usually get a last meal, right? One last steak? I counted down the minutes until I could leave early without bringing too much attention to myself.
At the grocery store I associated the things I had done for Richard with every item I bought for his death meal. The asparagus was the double shifts I’d worked at K-Mart while he was getting a BA in Finance to get a job he performed satisfactorily at best. The fillet mignons from Omaha were the hours I’d held him when his mother died, when I stroked his hair and listened to him tell me the same seven stories twelve times. The potatoes were the objections I didn’t voice when he sang Prince in falsetto at local open mic nights. The chocolate cake was the lunch I made him every day and the coffee I bought and brewed but didn’t even like. The merlot was the agreement to buy his parents’ house. But the bread mix, the bread mix was for me. I was a good wife, and I didn’t deserve to get phone calls from unnamed men telling me to keep my husband away, and Amy didn’t deserve a father who couldn’t keep his pants zipped or be a normal, responsible, respectable man.
I cruised the bakery aisle, trying to decide whether hearty whole wheat or traditional French would make a better murder weapon. Hearty whole wheat won out – it had 30% less calories and I’d probably have to eat the evidence to have a chance at not getting caught.
Richard came home promptly, with an apology bouquet of flowers. I smiled at him through dinner until my jaw ached. He taught Amy math tricks I’d never learned in the first place while I washed the dishes. When I sat down at the table, Amy asked me if 346 is divisible by three. Apparently it’s not, but any number with digits that add up to a number that is divisible by three is also divisible by three. Amy related this in her serious voice that she uses when she explains the rules of Lego village or why we should get a puppy. Richard smiled at me over her head. She was sitting on his lap holding a pencil and his tie was flung over his shoulder. His eyes still got this dreamy look whenever Amy was in the room, little dimples emerging from the corners of his mouth. I thought of how many times I’d seen that smile:
When I came home from Halloween at K-Mart in my unsexy walrus suit, waved around a “FIRST PLACE COSTUME” ribbon and babbled exhausted nonsense.
When he rolled his eyes over his mother’s should while she said I would make a good addition to the family because my aristocratic bone structure would carry on the family aesthetic.
When I lost Amy’s baby fat and cried because my size 0 hips were permanently size 4 hips and he kissed me and said he hadn’t even noticed.
The moments blended into a blur and I had to go downstairs and take too long to change a load of laundry. I bent over the Maytag washer and cried, and when I was finished I wiped my face on clean, fresh towels. Jitters, I told myself, again. Just jitters. Repeat his crimes and fold towels. There were the sorority sluts and that whore at New Year’s Eve. Those were just his priors – the ones that I knew about. There were other things, too. Telling me we needed the money so I couldn’t stay home with Amy. Treating me like an accessory at social gatherings. Criticizing my cooking skills, but never making anything himself except eggs. Leaving his dirty socks on the coffee table. Going out with the guys until he was too drunk to drive home. Never helping me clean, not once, not ever. Making Amy love him better. And the last straw, the final blow, cheating on me with a married woman and breaking up her family, too, instead of just ours. Last week’s Dateline said that they stone women for adultery in Saudi Arabia. Releasing live yeast into the air was more humane.
I loaded the whole wheat mix into the Breadmaker as Richard read to Amy from her Boxcar Children books. I tried to think of a title for our dysfunctional situation. Boxcar Children Mystery #435, The Case of the Revenge Loaf. Richard went to bed after the Tonight Show monologue, and I stayed up with my book until 1:15 when he was fast asleep and snoring like a gorilla. I opened the closet door and pushed the power button. All I had to do was push quick bake, the button directly to the left, and the Breadmaker would start, and the yeast would be released, and Richard would be quietly ushered out of the land of the living. I placed my index finger over the button, felt its grooves, felt its power. I pushed the button in, felt it depress and release.
The Breadmaker went to work. It was louder than I remembered, but not louder than gorilla-man who I usually slept through just fine. I couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe that’s normal – maybe you’re not supposed to be relaxed when you’re depriving people of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of infidelity. But Amy, Amy sitting at the kitchen table with her pencil reciting multiplications burrowed into my head and wouldn’t leave me alone. What I had been repressing for vengeance’s sake came to me. I thought of the Ralph monster and the fact that I was bringing her worst fear, the one she could only acknowledge through “dreams,” to life. If I killed Richard before he had a chance to fuck up his relationship with Amy, she would just go looking for him later. She’d end up married to the same kind of asshole. I’d be in jail and unable to do anything because, really, I was going to get caught and this wasn’t any kind of foolproof plan. And then twenty three years from now she’d be where I am, trying to kill her husband with a toaster. I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t predestine Amy to husband-icide.
And maybe a part of me, the part of me that loved Richard in the first place, loved him still. Loved him enough to hate him, but not enough to kill him.
Seven minutes into the fifty-eight minute quick-bake cycle, I got out of bed and tried to turn the Breadmaker off. Apparently, to my surprise and momentary apprehension, a quick-bake cycle is something that can’t be shut off. The plug to the extension cord was underneath the rug, but I didn’t ruin my most expensive tube of lipstick, and channel the Amazons just to lamely unplug a machine. That wasn’t enough. I bit my lip and tried to decide what to do, and the answer came to me then just like it did when I lifted up my eyes in the garage and saw the Breadmaker the night before.
I jumped onto the bed, feeling the mattress move under my feet. Richard jolted awake. “Em?” he asked, drowsy, but I ignored him. I crossed the bed to the window and undid the locks, pushing it open and letting in the dusky autumn air. It swirled around the room as I yanked the Breadmaker free of its constraints, hobbled with it over to the window and set it on the sill. I paused for half a second before extending my arms and pushing it out. The Breadmaker hit the grass with a dull thud and bounced as it broke apart. In the moonlight the mix spilled out from the top, covering the grass like ashes. The white plastic shell split into pieces, revealing its metallic mechanics. I looked at them glinting underneath the moon and I began to laugh, loud and shrill, until my stomach hurt.
“What the hell?” Richard sat upright in bed, his hair sticking up like always.
“Your daughter just saved your life,” I said, and left our bedroom. I think Richard went back to sleep – he probably thought he was dreaming until he woke up the next morning and lumbered to the window. I figured he’d scratch his head and ask me about it and I’d have to either make something up or tell him the truth. Then I’d probably start crying and cause a scene that Amy would overhear from the top of the stairs, but at that moment I didn’t have to deal with it. I went to Amy’s room and climbed onto her bed. She woke up and before she had a chance to say anything I said, “I had a bad dream. Ralph was there. Tell me your nines.”
Amy closed her eyes and snuggled into my chest, reciting, “9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90, 99, 108,” until we both drifted off to sleep.
