Home from the Vinyl Cafe (29 page)

The next morning Morley got up and went into the bathroom, and her toothbrush was already wet.

She said, “My toothbrush is wet. Why is my toothbrush wet?”

The family gathered solemnly around her.

“See?” she said, flicking the bristles. “It’s wet. And I haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”

Sam and Dave stared glumly at the toothbrush, full of concern. It was as if she were telling them the dog had been hit by a car.

“That’s
my
toothbrush,” said Stephanie quietly. “The red one is
my
toothbrush.”

Morley felt her heart turn cold. “The red one,” she said, “is mine. I use it every day.
You
are green.”

“I am?” said Stephanie. “I thought I was red.”

“Me, too,” said Sam. “I thought
I
was red.”

Morley screamed and disappeared downstairs.

“What’s the matter with her?” said Stephanie.

-----

The kitty litter was Maggie’s idea. Maggie’s fault.

Maggie, who has three boys. It was Maggie who told Morley that she’d had it with washing around the toilet.

“I told them if they planned to keep using our toilets, they were going to have to sit down when they went from now on,” said Maggie.

Maggie’s husband, Russ, said if he had to sit down every time he went to the bathroom, he would leave home. Russ said it was a humiliating thing to ask of a man.

Maggie said okay. And then she dumped an entire bag of kitty litter around the base of the toilet.

Morley said, “You’re kidding.”

She didn’t stop to think that the difference between her house and Maggie’s house was that Maggie didn’t own a cat.

When Galway saw the kitty litter around the upstairs toilet, she assumed it had been put there for her.

It took Morley a day too long to figure out what was happening. Removing all the litter took nearly an hour.

Convincing Galway to give up on her new second-floor litter box took even longer. It was not until the middle of November that Morley was able to stop reminding everyone, guests and family alike, to barricade the bathroom against the cat. Even now, whenever she sees the cat slinking down the hallway toward the bathroom, Morley shouts and rushes madly after her.

In the middle of September, the cast of
The Seagull
moved from the rehearsal space across the street into the theater. An outline of the set had been marked off on the black stage floor with masking tape. Without flats, and with all the curtains raised, the stage looked like an empty aircraft hangar. You could see the dirty brick wall at the back of the building and the iron stairs leading to the catwalks. Standing alone on the
stage, Morley was struck, as she always was, by the space above her. The black bars holding the rows of lights seemed impossibly high.

Thursday afternoon was a technical run-through. Anna Lindquist arrived carrying a large mirror. She played the entire first act holding the mirror no more than six inches from her face. Her eyes never left the mirror.

No one said a thing. Not even Martin Tidmarsh, who was playing her young lover. He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, pushing his lips around the mirror as if she always carried it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

This was how crazy she had made them.

Ralph, the director, knew what she was doing. She was checking the lighting.

“She has approval of the lighting,” Ralph said to Morley when she slipped into the theater to see how things were going. “If she complains, I think Gordon is going to quit.”

They were sitting in the middle of the empty theater. Ralph had his feet jammed against the row of seats in front of them. Morley was holding a large green binder.

“Why,” said Morley five minutes later, “is she facing
that
way? If she’s talking to Martin, shouldn’t she be facing him?”

Anna Lindquist had her back to the entire cast. Everyone else was stage left except Anna, who was delivering a passionate soliloquy, to stage right.

“This way,” said Ralph, “her left profile is facing the audience.”

“She said my lights make her look old and crumpy,” said Gordon to Morley an hour later. “We don’t have to take this, you know.”

Morley was sitting in her office working on the first draft of the next season’s budget. “Come in, Ralph,” she said, flipping
off her computer. “I was just going to get a coffee. Do you want one?” She could work on the budget at home.

Thursday night at nine, Morley went upstairs, announcing she was going to take a bath and go to bed early. As she passed Stephanie’s room, she stopped and said, “Have you hugged your mother today?”

Stephanie rolled her eyes and got up from her bed and leaned her arm around Morley’s shoulders and then slouched back into her room.

Dave was downstairs helping Sam with math homework when Morley screamed.

Dave said, “Stay here,” and ran up the stairs. Two at a time.

Morley was standing in the bathroom. She had her bathrobe on.

“It’s happening again,” she said. “There are more toothbrushes in this bathroom than there are people in this house.”

She assembled everyone and lined up the toothbrushes. “Where did this
purple
toothbrush come from?” she asked.

Nobody would look at her.

Friday, Dave phoned Morley at lunch.

“I think I’ve solved the toothbrush mystery,” he said. “I think that during the day, when the house is empty, there are people coming into our house to brush their teeth.”

Morley said, “This isn’t a joke, Dave.”

On Tuesday morning, Ralph came into Morley’s office. He sat down beside her desk. When he began to speak, it was with uncharacteristic intensity.

He said, “She refuses to hold hands during curtain call.”

It struck Morley that Ralph didn’t look well.

“I am not going to tell you what she says about Martin,” he said. “I am going to tell you this instead. If you don’t get her to hold Martin’s hand during curtain call, then I’m leaving and I am never coming back.”

He stood up carefully. Morley noticed that the act of standing required more thought on his part than usual. He pushed the chair deliberately behind him. He turned at the door. “One more thing,” he said.

His deliberate calmness was starting to worry Morley.

“You tell her that if she slaps Melissa for real in Act Two, I am going to press charges. No more of this ‘heat of the moment’ crap. And I don’t care if she needs time off to be Rolfed. There is a rehearsal tomorrow morning, and if she can’t make it, we’ll get Joanna to play the part. And if Joanna plays tomorrow morning, Joanna opens tomorrow night.”

Anna Lindquist opened Wednesday night. Gordon was on the lights; Ralph was in a seat at the back beside Morley.

The next morning all three papers weighed in favorably, two with raves. The play was a success. The mood at the theater was buoyant.

Friday morning, Morley decided to stay at home. The house looked like it needed bulldozing.

Morley had been so preoccupied with the theater and Anna Lindquist that she hadn’t noticed how bad the house was.

When everyone was finally off to work and school, she wandered into Sam’s room. There were dirty clothes everywhere. She felt a heaviness descend upon her as she bent over to pick up a blue sweatshirt.

By eleven o’clock she had done seven loads of wash.

One more, she thought, and maybe I’ll have time for a load of my things.

She was doing fine, thought she had broken the back of the laundry, until something made her look behind Stephanie’s door. She found another pile of dirty clothes.

The relentlessness of the task overwhelmed her.

She could wash everything she could get her hands on, she could clean everything in the house, and no one would ever notice, no one would thank her. They would just put on the clothes and get them dirty again.

The washing machine, open beside her, seemed to understand what it was doing. It seemed to be saying, “I’m a bottomless pit. You’ll never be done with me.”

Morley started to cry. And then she started to struggle out of her shirt.

“Take this,” she said, throwing it in the black hole at the top of the washer.

“Have more,” she said, pulling off her jeans.

She was really crying now, pulling off her socks. “Have it all,” she said.

At that precise moment Dave walked in the back door.

Morley quickly wiped the tears from her face and turned slightly as Dave walked into the kitchen to find his wife standing there with no clothes on.

He had read about things like this.

A goofy, lopsided grin spread across his face.

He winked at his wife.

He started to unbutton his own shirt.

There are small moments of misunderstanding in a marriage that can be cleared up with a simple apology. There are other moments that require elaborate explanations and fast talking. And there are moments when neither an apology nor an explanation will do.

These moments require time and patience and great faith for the air to clear. Sometimes they require even more.