Free Things Withered by Susie Moloney Page A

it’s hard to be around the little ones.” Sympathetic pats on the arm.
    “It’s just that I’m not used to children, Jane, and I don’t seem to have the patience just yet. Maybe when I have some of my own.” Understanding and slight envy.
    “Fact is, there were no children in my life for so long, what with working and all, I just don’t know how to deal with them.” Obvious envy, followed by self-serving contempt for childless-by-choice women.
    What she had ended up saying was that she just wasn’t comfortable with small children, but she said it in a self-deprecating way so that Jane would assume something kinder than a lack of patience or affection for children.
    (It was very dangerous to mention past careers since past careers might be remembered and asked about, or worse, just remembered by her.)
    Tuesdays were good, long and good. Karen did the dishes in the morning, after Ted had left for work. Sometimes she cried if she did the dishes in the morning. Ted liked to make love best in the morning and somehow the cleanliness and simplicity of making love to her husband and doing the dishes made her weep with self-loathing. But it was better once she was in the shower and thinking about one day when she would be old and the past would really be the past and someone would be preparing to forgive her, or she would die and her secrets would die with her.
    There was an old woman in the home named Mrs. Taylor. Karen called her Margaret when they were alone, but when they were in the lounge or the lunch room, Karen was supposed to call her Mrs. Taylor because all the nurses did. Mrs. Taylor was ninety. Karen liked her best because she could almost read the death on Margaret’s face, see the peace about to be there, the relief in sight, from holding in your breath, keeping all those secrets inside; Margaret would soon die, and let out her breath. Karen sometimes imagined that she was Margaret and peace was in sight. But to Margaret, Karen was just another worker who had some funny stories.
    The mind-numbing boredom was never more than an inch under the surface of her skin.
    “Ted?”
    He was reading the newspaper. He didn’t look up, but just tilted his head so that she would know he was paying attention, without really having to; it was cute. It was what Karen imagined husbands doing. At ten o’clock he would turn the news on. On Wednesdays he watched
Star Trek
, and she liked
Roseanne
on Tuesdays.
    He said, “Hmmm?”
    “I think I’m going to go for a walk.” Was that right? Did people really, “get some air,” in real life or was that just for TV? How was the grammar. She didn’t say
gowin
; she said
going
.
    “Sure honey,” he answered. As though it were nothing.
    (act normal)
    Karen and Ted lived in a small semi-suburb, where the people who wanted to live in the suburbs lived, the people who couldn’t quite afford the suburbs, but still had decent lives and jobs and some kids that needed a decent school where they didn’t teach swearing and safe sex, and where a kid could still get through grade six without smoking.
    Once, she stole a pack of cigarettes off a table at a party, and lied when confronted. “Fuck you,” she said to the guy. She said they were hers. They had just been opened. She smoked the whole pack.
    Karen stood outside the store. It was open twenty-four hours because they weren’t exactly in the suburbs. It was the sort of place you’d imagine getting robbed, or a woman being abducted from. If some guy mistook her for some fragile little housewifey he would be in for a big surprise. She didn’t have a knife on her but she wasn’t afraid to gouge some guy’s eyes out. She would love it. As she approached the pool of light thrown out in a wide arc from the store window, and from the outside lights in the parking lot, and the sign, she realized that if she gouged his eyes out she didn’t think she would be able to stop there. All the secrets would come out and turn into madness