The Time It Took

 

After forty-seven days at sea, Eric Walker caught a ride home with a

fellow submariner who lived in the same subdivision he lived in and got

out of his buddy's pickup saying Thanks when it got to the entrance to

Forest Lakes and walked calling Hello through his empty house and took

off his uniform neatly and hung it properly in the closet with his shoes

 

on a shoetree and consulted his wife's schedule which he had entered

into their personal computer to see when she would be home and put

Marvin Gaye into the CD player in the bedroom but didn't turn it on and

put on a navy blue Navy sweatshirt with its sleeves cut away and cool

nylon shorts and shot baskets in the driveway for twenty minutes and

stood at the line he had painted straight with a yardstick on the

concrete and made fifteen free throws in a row just like a machine and

went inside for a nice cold beer but just one and groaning Damn had to

settle for a cold Diet Pepsi instead and showered and lathered and

rinsed and repeated and dried with a fluffy yellow towel and hung it to

dry and flipped through the channels which were no longer programmed the

 

way he had them before he left and folded all the laundry he found in

the dryer and stacked it on the utility room shelf to be put away and

met his wife at the door and felt the sunshine spill from over her

shoulder onto his bare legs and didn't compare this moment with those

dark ones beneath the sea as he had done when he had first gone onboard

and the irony was fresh and said her name, Sandy, again and again as he

nuzzled her auburn hair and green nubby sweater and nuzzled into the

shadows beneath her auburn hair and took her down the hallway by hand

laughing and turned the CD player on and crooned Let's get it on and

made love with her for nearly an hour after first leaping from the bed

to draw the curtains all the way closed and shut out the sunshine and

shut out the neighbors' stares

and lay beside her and touched her and laughed with her and talked about

 

people they knew and talked about family and talked about her classes

and stroked her and kissed her in a way that made her feel wanted as a

person not only as the object of his sailor's raging desire and gave her

 

advice about accounting and world history and tried to make love with

her again but too soon and wormed his way with an unconvincing joke at

his own expense out of the sheets and blow-dried the wet spot and made

the bed when she got up to shower and went down the hall to where her

books and papers lay where she had dropped them right next to a table

she could have easily put them onto and took them to the kitchen and

stacked them on the counter where the knives lined up in a holder that

sharpened them each time you pulled one out to use it and was examining

with mounting disgust a barely passing paper about Self-Referentiality

from Contemporary Women Writers when she came up laughing and grinning

and wearing a silk robe he had bought in Korea last year and told her to

 

focus when she wrote and have a thesis such as Like stylistic

experimentation for its own sake, self-referentiality is a clever

gimmick that has just about played itself out and stick to the point and

 

each paragraph should have a topic sentence and not try to be clever or

funny or witty when it might go over the teacher's head because some of

them are only graduate students and some of them are just going through

the motions because of tenure and some of them are in English because

they can't hack it in real disciplines and ask him if she ever had

questions

about anything anything she ever took in college, okay, Sandy?, and

reminded

him that he had made 1540 on the SAT before deciding to go into the Navy

 

and then reminded her that it did cost something after all to go to

college, that books cost an awful lot even if she had managed to get the

 

non-traditional student scholarship named for some ardent churchwoman

from Kansas, and that she must not take it lightly and went to the

kitchen cabinet to look for canned Franco-American spaghetti and

meatballs and just stared and stared and glared and slammed a cabinet

door and opened it

back up and slammed it again but even harder and the cookie jar shaped

like a cow rattled and said What has happened to these cabinets and when

she said What are you talking about said back to her What has happened

to these cabinets, I had them organized before I left, and in the time

it took to get back look how you've let it fall

apart, look how you have let every single thing fall apart, and swept a

whole row of canned green beans and canned yellow corn and canned baby

limas from the cabinet and onto the floor when she said It's organized,

okay?, I organized it, and he was still naked when she said Look and he

felt a breeze from the suddenly operating air conditioner behind his

back when she said I know where everything is so just and I and saw her

books and papers and he thought well this is ridiculous this is just

nuts this is what happens when a man goes off and lives fucking

underwater incommunicado for what seems like forever but it is only a

couple of months so how can it all fall apart so fast so he threw her

through the glass patio door.

 

He had thrown her so hard that she sailed over most of the broken glass.

 

She lay on the patio for a while, not bleeding, not really hurt, just

lying. The sunshine made her feel sleepy, that and making love so

recently. She thought about dozing off. That would be a nice ending for

a story in Contemporary Women Writers, she thought, even if she would

never have the guts to actually write a story. Split infinitive, she

heard him say somewhere deep in her head. You should have thought

actually to write. Then she rose slowly and walked back in, sliding the

frame of the patio door along its track

though she could easily have stepped through the jagged hole she had

made when he threw her out. She went to the counter and watched her

hands take up her Contemporary Women Writers paper to have something to

hold.

 

I, he said.

 

That's all, she said. Not this time. Not again, not ever again. Not

again.

 

I know, he said. That's okay, I understand, I wouldn't respect you if,

then went off to dress.

 

Not again, she said, not again, to herself in the empty room.

 

She still clutched her paper while she was on the telephone, smoothing

it while she was on hold because the dispatcher didn't consider this an

emergency and finding a misspelled word that neither her professor nor

Eric had seen. She looked for a pen to correct it with and found one

right where it should have been where Eric stored all their writing

supplies, in a drawer next to the cutting board. In the time it took for

the police to arrive, Eric returned to the kitchen wearing ironed jeans

and a golf shirt and reorganized the cabinet and answered nicely when

his wife, out of habit, asked him about a sentence she was thinking of

revising.

 

Jimmy Dean Smith