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Sometimes I Think I Want to Live Alone
After twenty years of marriage, that thought began coming to me while I cleaned up.
Three small cases of drinks sat on our living room floor in the damaged cardboard boxes they had arrived in. We had bought them for our children’s school fair. The teacher might ask us to bring them in early, so my husband had ordered them ahead of time.
The fair was still a month away.
I asked him why he hadn’t dealt with the boxes. He said we would be taking the drinks to school anyway, so they could stay there. I looked at the torn cardboard and tried to imagine walking past it every day until the teacher gave us a date. He had ordered the drinks, which was one part of the job. Somehow the part where they stopped living on our floor had fallen to me. I opened the boxes and carried the drinks into the kitchen.
Afterward, the living room looked fine. I was angry for much longer than it had taken to clear the floor.
This happens with smaller things all the time. My husband leaves a room with the fan still running; I turn it off when I pass. He gets out of bed without making it. In the morning, his things are often on the kitchen table, and I put them away one by one. A cup he has used might be sitting in some corner of the living room. We…
