After shopping, she may stop for lunch at the little deli nearby. Their sandwiches are excellent, made with bread they bake each morning in the back. At teatime she’ll meet her monthly book club, intelligent, pleasant women, several of them in their late sixties like her; she is ready for the meeting, with a page of notes on
It does not strike Mrs. Pritchett that her life is small and contained, filled with bourgeois pleasures. If it did, she would not consider that a bad thing.
SHE IS RUNNING LATE, AND THE LITTLE CAFE IS EMPTY WHEN she gets to it, the lunchtime crowd gone. This disappoints her for a moment; she loves to people watch. But no matter. She orders ham and melted cheese on rye and bites into the crusty bread with vigorous pleasure. Then she sees the couple walking in. They’re old; the husband has age spots on his face and trembly hands with which he guides his wife. She has aged worse than he. She wears thick, Cokebottle glasses and shuffles with painful slowness, leaning on a cane, one of those ugly aluminum quadruped things. Mrs. Pritchett watches them with a mix of pity and fear. One day soon, she and her husband will come to this.
The couple has reached a table. The old man lets go of his wife’s arm and pulls a chair out for her. He helps her off with her coat, an action that takes some maneuvering as she shifts her cane from one hand to the other. But he is patient, and when it’s off, he hangs it carefully on the back of her chair. He flicks a speck off the sleeve before he turns back to his wife and helps her sit down. The couple discusses the menu, the woman pointing with sudden animation to items while the man inclines his head toward her to hear better. Then he nods gravely and summons the waitress. Mrs. Pritchett dawdles over her sandwich; she is curious about their order, which turns out to be a sugar-dusted lemon square and a decadent, oversize eclair. The man cuts each in half so they can share them. It’s the flicking of the speck off the sleeve that gets Mrs. Pritchett-the caring behind the gesture, even though his wife with her poor vision would never have noticed whatever was on the coat sleeve.
THROUGHOUT BOOK CLUB, MRS. PRITCHETT CAN’T STOP THINKING about the couple in the cafe. In her distracted state, she forgets to bring up her best points during discussion. At home, the Satie makes her want to weep. She stares blankly at the oven while the lamb roasts, trying to figure out why she is so obsessed with the old man and his wife, and when she finally understands, she cannot move. By the time Mr. Pritchett returns from the office, she has made a decision. After dinner, when the men swoon over her trifle and the women clamor for the recipe, which she writes down for them on monogrammed notecards, she tells Mr. Pritchett that she has a terrible headache. Would it be okay if she slept in the guest room? He agrees easily, as she knew he would.
In the room that has rarely harbored guests, she thinks about the children Mr. Pritchett and she could never have. This not-having has been a dull ache at the back of her mind all her life, but today she’s happy about it in a bitter way. If there had been children, she could not have done this. She takes from the pocket of her robe a bottle of sleeping pills-they belong to Mr. Pritchett, who occasionally suffers from insomnia-and takes the entire bottle, along with two glasses of wine.
At first all goes well. On the bed she lies on her back, her fingers linked over her chest like an image on a sarcophagus. The pressed sheets smell of lavender. She feels herself suspended like a jellyfish in the darkening waters of her mind. A little more, a little more. But then her body, wiser perhaps than she is, rebels, forcing her to double over with cramps. She starts to vomit and can’t stop. Mr. Pritchett, who has been catching up on some work-there’s always work to catch up on, even though he’s seventy and could have retired years ago-hears her and comes running, and she ends up in the hospital, getting her stomach pumped.
WHAT TERRIBLE DISCOVERY DID I MAKE THAT PUSHED ME INTO this desperate action? It was this: my husband did not love me the way I needed him to.
Don’t misunderstand me. Mr. Pritchett was a good husband. He provided me with everything I needed and many things I did not need. At dinner he listened (though often with only half his attention) when I told him about my day. How can I complain? When he spoke of his achievements-new companies he’d acquired as clients, or old clients whose financial disasters he’d adroitly avoided-I struggled to hide my own boredom.
There were many things we enjoyed together. Mr. Pritchett was proud of the beautiful and expensive house we lived in, and now that I’ve heard his story, I understand his pride better. He loved to show it off to people he knew, and I loved to show off my cooking skills. And in return we got invited to beautiful, expensive homes with pleasant people in them. (But when I was about to kill myself, I couldn’t think of one person among them whom I would miss, or who would miss me.) We went to the theater and had dinner afterward in a little Italian restaurant on Columbus where the food was superb and the maitre d’ knew us by name. We went to the movies, mostly action films and sci-fi, which he liked and I didn’t mind if there wasn’t too much gore. Early in our marriage we used to travel. Europe, Canada, even New Zealand. One year we went on an Alaskan cruise. But it was hard for Mr. Pritchett to be away from the office. He would carry his computer with him everywhere. And when I saw how he struggled upon returning to catch up with his clients, I didn’t feel like suggesting further trips. My favorite activity was lying in bed after dinner, reading, he with his business journals, me with a novel, snuggled under a quilt that I had made.
But after I saw the couple in the cafe, a great dissatisfaction washed over me. I remembered the old man tilting his head attentively, listening to his wife making her menu choice. Her eyes had shone through her thick glasses as she watched him cut up their desserts for sharing. There was nothing like that tenderness in my life. And without it, what use were the things I’d built my days around? My garden, my home, my activities and friendships, even the time Mr. Pritchett and I spent together-they were all so many zeroes. With the “one” of love in front of them, they could have been worth millions, but as of now, I was bankrupt, and it was too late to start over.
THE FIRST DAY IN THE HOSPITAL, I MOVED IN AND OUT OF A haze that was alternately pain and numbness. On the second day, I began to feel a great shame. I refused to talk to the people waiting to see me: my doctor, the hospital psychiatrist, a social worker, and my husband. I spent the day with my face buried in my pillow, my arms aching with IV needles, plotting how I could do this more efficiently once I was released.
I wasn’t sure when the night nurse came into my room. I awoke and found her standing at the foot of my bed. The lights were off and she left them that way. In the glow of machines I could only see a silhouette, short and thin. Her hair was tied back neatly in a bun. The darkness had turned her uniform gray. When she greeted me, from her accent I guessed-because Mr. Pritchett had many clients from that country-that she was Indian. I pretended to be asleep. Being a nurse, she could probably tell I was awake, but my pretense didn’t annoy her. She hummed softly to herself, a foreign-sounding tune, as she stood there. I waited for her to do nurselike things- check the machines, feel my pulse, give me a shot-but she just stood there. Then, in a whispery voice, she told me that this was her last night at the hospital, and I was her last patient.
I hadn’t expected that. Surprise made me blurt out, “Are you retiring?”
“You could say that,” she said.
“What will you do now?”
“Some people think I should go back to my birthplace,” she said. “But I’ve decided to go where no one knows me. I want a new life.”
Moving to live where no one knew you, shucking off your worn-out life like old snakeskin! The idea ran through me like a shiver. And though I’d been determined not to give anything of myself away in this place filled with concrete and chemicals and cheerlessness, I found myself saying, “That’s what I want also. A new life. This one’s too painful.”
“Why?”
Maybe it was her casual tone. Or the fact that we would never see each other again. I said, “It’s like
“Death is a breaking out of sorts,” she said. “But you won’t necessarily end up in a better place. Especially if
