Free Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Page B

are now feeding into a brick oven on an immense paddle. In their spotless dresses, they look as improbably put-together as June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels. Sometimes they work together, as in the images that show men and women picking cabbages (the man carries his in a basket balanced on his head) or harvesting olives.
    The work wasn’t easy. Think of the strength and endurance it took to cut wheat with a sickle and bind it into sheaves and heap up the sheaves in stooks, all day long, day after day in harvest time, beneath a sun that filled the entire sky. Think of the labor of shaking the olives from every tree in the grove, the leaves hissing and flashing silver, the tedium of gathering the fallen fruit and pressing it into oil. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God tells the first, fallen couple. “In toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.” These are the words that make Masaccio’s Adam cover his face and weep. Yet in most of the medieval images, the men and women look happy or, if not happy, content. This may be testimony to the value of the debitum, not just the sexual debitum but the entire system of mutual credit and debit, boon and obligation, that formed the
economy of marriage. Beyond its harsh beginnings, the haggling and ritual rape (and sometimes real rape, too, which the victim was expected to forget once the rapist did right by her), the system was pretty fair. And there was probably added comfort in the simple fact that wife and husband worked together—sometimes side by side—and not alone.

    Inwardly, I’d vowed not to write Bruno another e-mail or leave another message on his voice mail until I heard from him, but I broke my promise later on September 30, when I sent him a “missing cat” flyer I’d made up when I was supposed to be reading students’ manuscripts. I asked him to make copies of it and put them up around the college and, as long as he was up and about, on some phone poles, too, just the ones in the neighborhood.
    I don’t remember whether I consulted F. about the wording. She probably would have thought it was too much to mention Biscuit’s sinus problem, and, really, I question why I did, since the photo would be enough to show anyone what she looked like. I may have wanted to explain the discharge under her eyes. I have few pictures of her that don’t show some; it’s embarrassing.
    I left the reward unspecified because $100 seemed too cheap, and I didn’t want to say $1,000 for fear it might incite scam artists or even a backwoods home invader. And anyway, I didn’t have $1,000, though I guess I could have borrowed it.

    The word “economy” comes from the Greek words oikos, “house,” and nomos, “manager”: hence, a household manager or steward. Traditionally, this was a man’s job. The stewards in Jesus’s parables are men, as is the Reeve, or steward, in The Canterbury Tales. Economics is a stereotypically male profession; witness the gender balance on the president’s Council of Economic Advisors. Only at the turn of the twentieth century did home economics emerge as a field of study for young women. By the time F. and I were teenagers, it was a required subject in most public high schools, though only for girls. A few years later, in the purifying glare of the women’s movement, it would vanish from many curricula. Maybe it would have been better if boys had had to take it too. Who isn’t better off for knowing how to sew on a button? I don’t know if home ec traditionally included learning how to pay bills. In many households, that was the wife’s job, even if she did it with her husband’s paycheck. F. and I have never worked out this aspect of our domestic economy. Both of us pay bills, grabbing the checkbook off each other’s desks. Only I bother balancing the account. F. just writes down what she spent and waits for me to