Hospital Wives

In the waiting room, the wives sat with their backs to their husbands, who sat with their backs to the wives. Everyone stared ahead blankly. When Katherine arrived, she looked at both rows and said, "Hey!" and they seemed to snap awake. She held her palms up to ask, "Where is he?" Ellen started to stand up, but hesitated when the row of men rose in unison.

"He's in surgery," Joshua said.

"They say he'll be fine," Julian said.

Abraham stood with his arms hanging limp at his sides. He kept his eyes on the ground.

"I'm going to talk with the doctor," Katherine said and walked away, toward the nurses' station. She stood in front of the desk and stared at the tiny gray dots in the countertop. One of the nurses saw her and asked, "Can I help you?"

Katherine just looked up and said, "I needed to get away from my family."

She leaned against the desk and set her gaze in the direction of the waiting room. Ellen would be driving herself crazy with anxiety, trying to decide whether or not to join Katherine. Josie would be pretending to watch television while she watched Ellen out of the side of her eyes, ready to pounce with scorn if she left her place in the row. And Katherine had no idea what the men would be doing. She tried to imagine them talking with their wives or offering one another comfort. She couldn't see it. All she could see was the two strange lines they formed in an otherwise sterile environment.

Good Days

She didn't hate her husband. She couldn't place the feeling that came over her when he sat at the table and spent his day staring at one sheet from his legal pad. She thought about how she'd ended up in a cottage baking for bearded men who wrote poems, sometimes sewing with their wives - women who didn't seem to like one another much, but bound themselves together out of necessity. 

It was necessary because they needed the company. 

On the days they lost their partners to art, they could cling to one another. 

Katherine sighed. She looked out her front door. She leaned against the frame and looked past the tree that never once wore a swing, and beyond that to her patch of wildflowers. Roby dug the space for her on their two year anniversary. They brought rocks up from the creek to contain her space. They tilled the soil together. It wasn't a large plot. It wasn't a whole garden. It was a lovely gift from a husband who once upon a time encouraged her to love wild things.

Once they'd prepared the spot, he left her alone to toss handfuls of seeds onto the dirt. She didn't want a designed garden with perfectly aligned plants. She didn't want a designed life, either, she thought. And that's how she ended up in a cottage baking for bearded men who wrote poems. Her marriage was the result of tossing seeds at the dirt. Some stick and grow. Some don't make it. 

And some end up in a vase on a table under a window where she once fell in love with the light.

Renegade Wife

While Roby was on the road, Katherine met with the other wives to sit in a circle, sew and knit, and exchange polite conversation. They always met at Mellie's house, and her husband, Adam, was always home. He stayed in the attic, and Katherine had once joked that he was "the madman in the attic," locked away from polite company and the pleasantries they exchanged. Josie, the oldest of the wives, looked at Katherine over her reading glasses and said as slowly as she rocked in the chair, "Is that some college thing?" 

It wasn't a college thing, but because no one else seemed to think it was funny, Katherine just nodded and went back to binding the baby quilt she was making. She planned on giving it to the mother of her favorite student, who was having her third child. Her student, Sally, was very sweet and very excited to have a little sibling of her own. Her big sister was five years older, and always telling Sally that she had something that Sally didn't: a little sister. 

"Well, you have something she doesn't have," Katherine told her. "You have a big sister."

"I don't want something my sister doesn't have," Sally said. 

That was good enough for Katherine. 

Katherine didn't have brothers or sisters. Her parents were elderly and living in a facility of their choosing, with money they'd saved for just that occasion. She supposed she should be grateful. She wasn't expected to care for them or pay for their care. She wasn't expected to be their sole means of entertainment. They were content with the weekly call she made to check on them, which they always showed up for, even though sometimes they seemed distracted and often had board games or card tournaments needed to rush off to.

She looked around the room at the women, the wives. She wondered about their ambitions. She wondered how often their husbands read their work to these wives. She wanted to ask questions. She inhaled, about to ask Ellen about the gift baskets she made for baby showers, but before she could speak, Josie said, "Ellen, I hear Horner's is stocking fine teas now."

Horner's was the local department store. They'd asked Ellen to create baskets for them numerous times. Every time, she said, "I'm flattered, of course. But I just wouldn't have the time." 

"I heard that, too," Ellen said. 

"We should have a tea party," Katherine suggested. 

Ellen looked at Josie, although Katherine could see the light in her eyes. Josie squinted at Katherine, who then said, "Maybe one night while the men make their poems." 

To Husband's Home

Roby brought her to live in a country cottage he inherited from his grandmother. The small house was painted a pale yellow and stood alone on two acres several miles from the nearest town. Katherine imagined hanging the laundry out to dry on a line she'd run from the house to a tree in the front yard. Roby had told her about the tree. He promised to hang a tire swing for her so she could hover a while.

When Katherine first laid her eyes on the house, she thought it was romantic and immediately fell in love with the light that came through the kitchen window. "We need a table right there," she said and pointed to the spot that would become Roby's writing place. At the time, though, Katherine imagined coffee dates with her handsome husband. She imagined passing him the newspaper and buttering toast at the table. She hoped he'd read to her while she sat and embroidered pillow cases - a skill she learned from her own grandmother who wasn't fortunate enough to see her only granddaughter grow up and marry a man who knew how to hang a swing and tend a beard.

She leaned against the kitchen sink and looked out the window she'd loved the first time she saw it. She could see the tree clearly. No clothesline was ever connected. She dried laundry on racks in the basement. No swing was ever hung. She didn't hover, or drift, or give her mind any time to roam on its own. She quit daydreaming. She started baking.

The Vacuum

Usually, the back and forth motion soothed her. Jeannie pushed the vacuum cleaner forward and pulled it back to her and she pretended it was rowing practice for a minute. She wouldn't allow herself to get lost in a fantasy. She tried to stay present while she cleaned, especially the floors. She liked tending to the ground she stood on. She swept the floors and vacuumed the carpets and pressed her bare feet onto the wood and then the rug and thought about how much she enjoyed caring for a space she inhabited.

She saw Roby sit at the table and start scratching away, taking notes, making things. She looked down at her feet on her floor and flinched. Both actions, writing and sweeping, were repetitive and never produced perfect results. She looked up at the ceiling and saw that she was way behind on knocking the spider webs from the corners. She didn't enjoy that task as much. Maybe it was the guilt she felt over destroying a spider's masterpiece, their home, and their massacre spot.

Jeannie never once wiped the table. She only cleaned the tablecloth if Roby remembered to put it in the hamper. She tried to think of the last time she sat down there. The idea of sitting at the table felt as foreign to her as the possibility of spending time in a spider's web. She'd get stuck. She'd be among killers who made intricate things.

Bearded Poet Finds Wife's Poem

He found her digging through one of the five steel filing cabinets that lined a wall in the garage. Some people had work benches for tools and shelves for gardening equipment. Some people parked their cars in their garages. Roby and Jeannie and kept their papers in theirs'. Jeannie claimed to know just where to find old recipes, tax returns and papers from her freshman year at college. If Roby needed old poems for a contest he wanted to enter, she sent him out to his cabinets - the three closest to the door. Sometimes, Roby would spend hours out there, browsing through his body of work.

She was thinking about her own history with the written word when he found her pulling folders out from the two cabinets that she claimed.

"Looking for a recipe?" he asked.

"No," she said. "I thought of something earlier. Something from a long time ago."

"What is it?" he asked.

She shook her head. She didn't want help. She would find it. She had to find it.

"Will you check on the soup?" she asked him. He shook his head.

"I want to help you out here," he said.

She stopped what she was doing and they stared at each other. He knew what she was looking for. He knew she'd read his latest contest submission. She knew that he knew.

For all the ways she supported him through the years - the baking, the encouraging, the financial support - she never once thought he'd take more from her. She never once thought he'd feel entitled to her words.

He stole her poems and passed them off as his own. He'd already sent the manuscript. She knew because she dropped it off at the post office.

"What do you have to say to me?" she asked.

He leaned against one of his filing cabinets and rubbed his beard with his ink-stained hand for a minute. Then he crossed his arms and shrugged.

"Nothing," he said. "Which is what you were doing with that stack of old stuff."

"You're right," she said, and started to nod her head slowly. "You're right. I was doing nothing. Which is what I've been doing all these years with you, too."

Bearded Poets Opening

For six years, Jeannie made baked goods for her husband's poetry night. When Roby and his three burly friends gathered around her tiny kitchen table, she placed a platter of warm scones or muffins or cookies in the center. They placed their whiskey glasses and steno pads in their spots, and tore into the treats as if all the words they'd need for the night were hidden somewhere deep in the dough. Later, Jeannie would clean up crumbs and finds discarded drafts, wadded up pieces of steno paper, littered on her floor like the trash they were. She always sneaked a peek, and she got to know a little about each poet's obsessions.

For instance, Joshua wrote a lot about mermaids. At least, he wrote a lot and threw away a lot of poems about mermaids. Julian wrote about gardening tools. Abraham wrote about his youthful travels. And Roby, the man to whom she pledged her life, abandoned poems about the futility of baking.

He kept the poems about his disappointment in pastries.