Slob

Edith Emaline Lynch

Evening was the end of a day of physical catharsis. Lee Anne with hands washed, sitting at the table rather studiously avoiding her veggies and making neat, geometric segments of dinner in preparation for the evening meal.

Edie remembered how absurdly prosaic it seemed, whenever she thought of Ed, how he hated food that wasn't neatly divided on the plate. Some over-reaction to military chow, she supposed. Ed even ate in little sculpted layers and she could still visualize him scraping each edge of the ice cream or the mashed potatoes in meticulous, draftsman perfect lines.

It had been a Saturday that would not go down in history as far as she was concerned. A day of hard work done with a vengeance, a day of heavy clouds of depression and sorrow that followed her every move, refusing to go away even as she attacked tiny footprints, waxy build-up, and the assorted detritus that littered the kitchen floor, just Edith and her old pal Mr. Clean. A long Saturday that still wasn't over.

"Let's eat!" Lee Anne was ready to pounce on dinner.

"Would you like to say grace tonight?"

"God is good god is great thank you [mumble] on this plate. Amen."

"Dear Heavenly Father," Edie said, taking a deep breath and feeling the return of a killer headache, "thanks for giving us this food. Many will go hungry tonight.

"Lord, thank you for letting us have each other to love. Even though we are sad for those we miss, we know our loved ones are with you and are at peace now, Heavenly Father, and many will be lonely tonight. We have much to be thankful for.

"Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of life, and we ask you to guide us and be with us always, and help us to do more Thy way. We ask these things in Jesus's name. Amen."

"Amen let's eat."

"Amen."

"Mom, why isn't there any blue food?" Lee Anne asked, attacking her hot dog.

"Well, perhaps when the Lord made blueberries and blue potatoes, He decided that was enough blue food. And he thought it would be nice to have something green and yellow and orange, which is why you have those mixed vegetables on your plate that you're going to enjoy so much."

A mouth full of hot dog and bun said, "Yuk, I hate mixed vegetables. Are there really blue potatoes?"

"By coincidence that's what we're having for dessert tonight." Lee Anne laughed impishly, showing her missing front tooth space. Edie smiled and took a bite of food, chewing slowly, tasting nothing.

She'd thrown herself into a paroxysm of premature spring cleaning, after having woken up filled with some nagging paranoia in a bed that she could never quite get used to, and spent an hour dawdling over coffee and a piece of toast. She had read everything on the cereal box as if it had been written by Dostoevsky and by the time she forced herself into action she had memorized the entire nutritional contents of a dubious breakfast concoction that promised "all the essential vitamins and minerals," and the recipe for a highly suspect party mix that would allow one to consume even more of the product.

It was an exorcism. A physical cleansing in more ways than one. Ed's old ties had slipped down into a dark pile where they gathered dust, twisted together like snakes. An errant slipper. A hat lodged in the blackest, far corner of a closet, anything of his she'd overlooked or couldn't stand to touch in her initial, grief-stricken whirlwind of reminders gathered up for Goodwill. She emptied bottom drawers, too-tall shelves, catchalls and hideaways and rat-pack caches long forgotten.

A heartbreaking comb with its teeth still holding strands of a dead loved one's hair, a lost cuff link, a dog-eared family Bible—each of these memory triggers inspired ten minutes of wordless fantasy conversation with her deceased mother, husband, and a favorite aunt, as she sat mesmerized by a framed bevy of family photographs, absentmindedly brushing her own hair with one of Ed's brushes. She was proud of her long hair, a luxurious abundance that he'd called her mane, and at thirty-eight it was still naturally dark and lustrous. Her skin was fair, with a light freckling, her eyes wide set and beautiful. They were darkly brown and hazel by turns, changing mysteriously in each light source. She had smile lines of wrinkling crow's feet at the corners of her eyes, and just the beginnings of lines at each corner of her mouth. Her nose was rather large, not straight, and in the center of another face it might have been unattractive.

She had never been pretty in the classic sense. She hadn't been an attractive child, but she was maturing into one of those interesting if somewhat forgettable looking women that other women describe as "poised" and "self-assured," and that men are sometimes drawn to partially because they seem so unapproachable. She was hot the snow queen she appeared to be.

In bed there was a natural lustiness and she had always secretly known that she was much the more—what's the word? Not carnal. But perhaps the more elemental of the two of them. She was closer to her genuine feelings. Edie was one of those rare creatures who didn't have an insincere or mean or malicious or selfish bone in her body. And she had given herself to the man in her life the same way she did everything else. Wholeheartedly. Honestly. With kindness and with the attitude that the real pleasure was in what you could give.

Sex had been pleasurable for her but not a wildly exciting or all-consuming thing the way it had been with so many of the kids she'd gone to school with. Edie had seen marriage after marriage crash against the rocks of divorce and sink. And many of those marriages were those in which the female had confided to the girls about the hot, burning flames of sex that kept the relationship with their spouse a thing of explosive, emotional extremes.

She had been born into a devoutly Christian home, but as she grew older and left her home in a West Virginia town that she joked was so impoverished that 'it made Coal Miner's Daughter look like it'd been shot in Beverly Hills," she had drifted away from the church. It was a thing that just happened. She'd blamed it on work schedules, illness, any number of convenient excuses. But the need for Jesus in her life had left an emptiness inside her.

Not long after she'd gone to work as a secretary for Chicago Carburetor she'd met a salesman named Ed Lynch and they had some dates. Ed was gentle, funny, and he was a good man with a strong religious faith. Now she started letting Ed lead her back and found herself looking forward to going with him. At first on Sundays. He'd pick her up and they'd go to church, and then around eleven-thirty or twelve head for a little place where they liked to eat lunch.

Soon she was going back on Sunday nights with him, and then they'd go to the Wednesday-night Bible studies, and before long they were regulars at the church socials, picnics, pot-luck suppers, fellowship classes, and she had given herself over to the Lord again. After a few months she got up in front of the congregation and confessed that she'd sinned and she asked the Lord to allow her to rededicate herself to Jesus. That evening Ed had proposed to her.

What Ed lacked in imagination he made up for in intensity. Sex with Ed was what she was sure God had meant for it to be, a warm and honest coupling between marriage partners. She appreciated the biological beauty of the act as a release but neither she nor her husband had been particularly preoccupied with it. Physiologically, it had assumed no more import in their lives than any other bodily function.

Once he had told her, "You know what I like about our love life?"

"Everything, I hope," she'd murmured to him with a smile.

That's right. Everything. But what I like about it most is you. Doing this with somebody else"—he shook his head—"it just wouldn't matter"

"I feel like that too about you," she'd said, kissing him. Ed had made her a hot, loving, and complete woman. But now she had closed the door on that part of her life.

She found some old cologne in an unfamiliar bottle and tipped it to a finger, sniffing and saying aloud, "Arpege," to the mirror. She had cleaned out the freezer, gifting a next door neighbor with all manner of perfectly edible garden goodies, catfish Ed had cleaned, some unknown tinfoil-wrapped and unmarked leftover surprises, all of which the lady surreptitiously dumped in the garbage. She headed for the silver, then changed her mind and broke out the Easy-Off and cleaned the oven until it sparkled.

She made a shopping list, cut coupons, prepared a cup of decaffeinated coffee, and drank a third of it. Wrote a month-overdue thank-you note to someone she didn't know, took a long, hot bath, put on her best underwear, a long, suede skirt with high-heeled, leather boots, a blouse with a suede vest, and golden hoop earrings. Looked at herself, undressed, put on a ragged sweatshirt and her oldest blue jeans, threw out a piece of bric-a-brac that she was tired of dusting, retrieved it in a small rush of guilt, and decided she was spinning her wheels and quit for the day.

She chewed something, grateful for the sound of eight-year-old chatter nearby, a lovely thing to hear, now audible only subconsciously like the sonorous murmur from the TV set with the volume turned not quite all the way down in the living room, and she struggled inwardly to keep from thinking any depressing thoughts. None of this feeling sorry for yourself, missy, she thought, as she remembered thinking while she cooked dinner tonight that her life's wholeness had somehow drained like the liquid from a broken glass.