The Woman He Called No Fun
After Our Sixth Baby My Husband Said I Was No Fun So I Reminded The Whole Town Who I Was
The night Greg said it, we were standing in somebody else’s kitchen in Cardwell, Indiana, with the counters full of crockpots and a window fan pushing the August heat around, and I had Eli on my hip because he was six weeks old and would not take a bottle from anybody but me.
Greg had a beer in his hand. He was telling a story to Dale Furnish and two other men from the plant, and he was good at it, the way he has always been good at a room, loud and easy, the center of the light. I laughed at the part where I was supposed to laugh. I bounced the baby. And Greg looked over at me like he was seeing something he had forgotten to throw out.
“She used to be fun,” he said. He said it to the men, not to me. He said it the way you would talk about a truck that used to run. “You should have seen her. Now she’s just tired.”
The men laughed because they thought it was a bit. Dale’s wife, Carol, did not laugh. She looked at me, and I looked at the floor, and I bounced the baby, and I felt my face go hot the way it does right before you cry, and I did not cry because I had taught myself a long time ago that you do not cry in another woman’s kitchen.
I want to tell you I said something. I didn’t. I carried Eli out to the porch and I stood in the dark by the chest freezer and I listened to the men laugh through the screen, and I told myself he had been drinking, and I told myself he was tired too, and I told myself a lot of things that night that were just softer words for the same hard fact.
My husband thought I was used up. And the worst part, the part I am ashamed of now, is that I had started to think so too.
Let me tell you who I was before.
I grew up four miles out of Cardwell on a county road that floods every spring, the youngest of three, my daddy on the line at the stamping plant and my mother, Glenda, cleaning the school and taking in sewing. We did not have much. What we had was music. My mother sang alto in the choir at Cardwell Methodist and she sang at the sink and she sang in the car, and she taught me harmony before she taught me to read, the two of us doing the high part together on the hymns until my sisters told us to hush.