The Air Mattress in Our Basement
“How did you get down the stairs?” I said.
“Rick carried my bag.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She looked at her sleeves. “I went slow.”
Her feet had been numb since the third treatment. She had told me the week before that walking felt like walking on somebody else’s feet. I pictured her going down those open steps on somebody else’s feet, one hand on the only railing, and my husband behind her with her overnight bag, and I had to hold on to the furnace duct for a second.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Angie. Don’t you start anything on my account.”
“I’m not going to start anything.”
That was the truth, as it turned out.
Rick had moved on from the peanuts to a beer. He was leaning against the counter with his ankles crossed, and he had the look he gets when he has already had the argument in his head and won it.
“Before you say anything,” he said.
I waited.
“It’s been six weeks. Six weeks, Angie. I’ve been doing the league books on a tray table in the living room. I can’t find anything. I can’t hear myself think. I told you at Christmas a couple weeks would be fine, and it’s the middle of February.”
“She has six more treatments.”
“And she can have them. Nobody’s throwing her out. I put her right by the furnace. I put a sheet on it. That’s a perfectly good bed down there. I’d sleep on it myself.”
I want to be careful here, because that sentence mattered later. He said it without my asking. I’d sleep on it myself.
“She can’t feel her feet, Rick. There’s no bathroom.”
“She’s got the bowl.”
I looked at him for a while after that one.
He must have heard it too, because his neck went red, and when Rick is embarrassed he gets louder instead of quieter.
“I’m not going to stand in my own kitchen and get looked at like that. I work fifty hours a week at that parts counter. I pay the note on this place. I’m asking for one room. One room, in my own house. I’m the man of this house, and I’d like to be treated like it for five minutes.”
There it was.
I have been married to Rick for nineteen years. I know the things I could have said. I could have told him that his office was a place where he did the bowling league’s books twice a month and watched other men shoot elk on the computer. I could have reminded him that my mother rocked his son through colic for three months so we could both sleep.
I found that I did not want to spend a single one. Not because I was being noble. Because I was tired clear through, and because I knew that if I argued with him he would get to be a man in an argument, and he was good at that.
So I gave him something he had no practice with.
“You’re right,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re right. It’s your house. You’re the man of it. You should have your office.”
He stood up a little straighter, the way you do when you brace for a shove and nobody pushes.
“Well,” he said. “Okay. Good. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I hung up my coat on the hook by the door. I set my purse on the chair. Then I went back down the thirteen steps.