The Woman He Called No Fun

I started to disappear even to myself. I would catch my face in the mirror over the bathroom sink and not recognize the set of my own mouth. I had gotten a hard, closed look, a look like my own mother’s got in her last bad years, and I was only thirty-eight. I stopped doing my hair. I stopped singing at the sink. When a song I loved came on the radio in the truck I turned it down, because it hurt, because it was a photograph of a person I used to be and had somehow agreed to stop being.

The low point came in October, a year after Eli was born, almost to the day.

It was the night of the Cardwell fall harvest supper. The harvest supper is the biggest thing our town does, bigger than the fair almost, a pork and bean supper in the fire barn that the volunteer department has thrown every October since before I was born, with long tables and the auction for the fire truck fund and, at the end of the night, music. There has always been music at the harvest supper. For twenty years, until I quit, that music was mostly me.

Greg wanted to go. I did not. I had Eli and a sink full of dishes and I had nothing to wear and I did not want to stand in that fire barn and watch somebody else up on the little plywood stage where I used to stand. I told him I would rather stay home.

And Greg stood in our kitchen, in front of all six kids, and he said the thing that finally broke something loose in me.

He said, “You know what, Dana? Stay home. Nobody out there wants to look at a sad sack anyhow. You used to be the best-looking woman in this county and the most fun and look at you now. I don’t even know who you are. The kids don’t either. You’re just the lady who does the laundry and cries.”

The kitchen went dead quiet. Maddie, home from her first year at Ivy Tech, set down the plate she was drying. Eli, in the high chair, banged his spoon into the silence. And I looked at my husband, the boy who about forgot to breathe, and I did not feel sad. For the first time in a year I did not feel sad.

I felt done.

I did not scream. I want you to understand that I did not throw anything or cuss him or any of the things you might picture. Cold is worse than hot, I have learned. I just looked at him until he looked away, which he did, and then I dried my hands on the towel, and I went up the stairs, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long time.

And then I did something I had not done in a year. I opened the closet, all the way in the back, and I took down the red dress.