Free Running the Bulls by Cathie Pelletier Page B

not seen the red shirt creep into the batch of innocent whites. Even a myopic bull would’ve noticed this red sweatshirt, the one from his retirement party, the one with white lettering: The Best Is Yet to Come. But it was in there all right, turning the water to blood. Thinking of it all now, Howard’s sweatshirt should have declared: Study the Past, If You Would Divine the Future.
    When drying the pink clothing didn’t remove the stain but only seemed to welcome it in further, Howard unloaded everything from the dryer, shoved it all back into the washer, poured several cups of Clorox bleach into the tub, and then set the whole mess churning again.
    â€œFire burn and caldron bubble,” he muttered, as he stood watching the water turn the color of a blush wine. He wondered if putting the clothing out in the sun to dry would be better, the solar energy acting as a kind of natural bleach. Or maybe he should have put the bundle out of its misery by shoveling it all into the garbage, burying it like a dog’s treasure in the backyard. He had considered calling Ellen—he had a good excuse, after all, his golfing clothes were among the spoils—but he refrained. Maybe Patty, when she and Eliot came home from the birthday party, would have an idea about what to do. Even theater types needed clean clothing, but theirs was probably all a shade of pink anyway, even the men’s. Or he could ask John when he got home from his Saturday racquetball with the guys from work. From what Howard could tell, John and Patty were hardly ever home together. And if Eliot had a school function, or even a social one such as a birthday party, the question was not, “How do we, his parents, work this into both our schedules?” but “Which one of us is free to take him?” During the few days that Howard had been living in their house, they had not once seated themselves at the dining room table for a sit-down family dinner. He had always assumed that the modern family, what with women now out there in the workplace, was very much like his and Ellen’s family. But Patty seemed more concerned with theater than with laundry. And John knew by heart the phone numbers from every restaurant in Bixley that had a delivery service. Howard now had to admit that maybe his wife had been carrying more of the domestic load than he. Maybe that’s what had kept his own family life rolling along smoothly. He felt a wave of guilt over this, that very emotion Ellen didn’t think men capable of feeling. But then he remembered her deception. Perhaps it was her own guilt that had obliged her to carry that extra load. In an instant Howard rued the day he had ever lifted a finger to make a single meatloaf, much less the half dozen or so he had created in those years of his marriage. He let the lid of the washer slam down on itself.
    Upstairs in the bathroom, Howard went in search of John’s aftershave, opening one cabinet door, then another. Patty seemed to own every facial cream and body lotion on the planet, not to mention facial masks, and moisturizers, and cleansers. Avocado. Peach. Cucumber. Lemon. Who the hell invented all those concoctions, much less went out and bought them? When had the family medicine cabinet become a salad bar? All Howard had ever seen Ellen use, for all the years of their marriage, was a simple jar of Pond’s moisturizing cream. He pushed aside a basket of strawberry soaps, and that’s when he saw the single Kotex pad, lying on its back on the bottom of a shelf. He thought again of that day—Christ, it must have been almost thirty years earlier—when he had trudged home from the convenience store with that horrid blue box under his arm. A bedridden Ellen, suffering from severe menstrual cramps, had pestered him to buy it for her until he finally gave in.
    The shaving lotion now forgotten, Howard picked up the pad and held it in his hand, balanced it on his palm. He wondered