Black Olives by Martha Tod Dudman

Author:Martha Tod Dudman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

No car goes by and from down the road I hear a dog bark once in a lonely way. Although it is only the end of September, already it’s like winter in his town. The summer people gone. The roads all quiet after dusk. No wonder he got lonely here, living alone in his big house, waiting for me.

David’s cellar door is always unlocked. It’s dark and damp and dank in here. Piled with bags and boxes to take to recycling. Just inside the door I can smell the smell of old newspapers bunched together, their pages sticky with the autumn damp. He’s left a light on in here, and the cellar looks exactly the same as it did a year ago—or whenever I was here last; before the breakup. The washer and dryer heaped with shirts he says he’s going to iron.

His workbench with a clutter of tools and little tubes of glue and half-started projects. I used to think, when we were first together, that he was the kind of man who could fix things, but he isn’t. He’s the kind of man who takes things to be repaired, but not until after he’s left them for a good two years on his workbench intending to fix them. At that point he either takes them to be repaired or simply throws them out. So the wooden box that belonged to his grandfather. So the drawer from the little table beside his bed.

I remember this smell. The mildewy, damp, sad smell that was the smell in his truck, the smell of his jacket. The smell of his hair sometimes. The smell of his life. A lonely, damned, damp, sad, wintery, abandoned smell. The smell of loneliness. The smell of neglect. The smell that he inhabited and resented and presented to me.

The cellar steps are steep and narrow. It’s an old house. He is proud of it. He told me how much he loved his house, complained about how little time I spent in it. That was in his final letter, after the night when he said he needed a break, before I understood that meant a permanent break. A total break. A silence. Before I understood all that, I had sent him an e-mail in which I tried to say everything I felt but which seemed, months later, as I reread it, a thin thing, a small thing, a twig of a thing—too kind, too soft, too understanding.

Later I thought I should have yelled at him—at least on paper, since that night I did not yell. I should have hurled accusations. Instead I only said that I was sad. That I felt some responsibility for our breakup. That I hoped we could recover something from all we’d shared, as if his leaving were some sort of terrible tornado that had ripped through our houses and had broken everything, sent all our possessions, all the memories of the last ten years in all directions. Through the windows. Chairs flying, glass smashing, the sink itself.

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