Men Giving Money, Women Yelling by Alice Mattison

Author:Alice Mattison [Mattison, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9780688161064
Google: FaCx2I65_AoC
Amazon: 0688161065
Barnesnoble: 0688161065
Goodreads: 226282
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I WENT INTO the house much later—too late. I had made a path two shovels wide, both on the sidewalk and the walk, but my back hurt and I was cold deep inside myself. Ida looked up from the tests she was marking and said, “That was childish.”

“I wanted to do it,” I said.

“You have a mechanical soul, Tom,” she said. “Now I see why you’re a carpenter. You like achievements that can be lined up and counted. I bet before you quit work every day, you count how many goddamn screws you put in.”

“Not as many screws as you, apparently,” I said. I said it because my feet were heavy with cold.

Ida stood and the papers in her lap fell down, though she grabbed at them. She came toward me and I saw she was too angry to speak. Her face was ugly with it, and that was something I never thought I would think. She walked past me into the kitchen and began making coffee. She knew I hardly ever drink coffee, but I wanted something hot so badly, coffee would be fine. Except that it made me additionally angry: she’d probably drunk coffee with her married lover, at cute little coffeehouses.

Maybe at least he was divorced. “Was he divorced?” I said.

“I don’t know why I should talk to you about it,” she said. “Do you think I did wrong on purpose?”

“You went to bed with the father of a student by mistake?”

“I didn’t know who he was.”

“You didn’t meet him on report card night?”

“I guess the mother came up.” I tried to remember whether my mother or my father would have gone up. “When I realized,” she said, “I knew I had known all along. But I didn’t know I knew.”

“That just doesn’t make sense, Ida.”

“Well, sorry,” she said. She poured milk into her coffee and put the container back into the refrigerator so I had to go get it for myself. I felt awful about everything. I ordinarily like winter, but right then I hated the cold and snow. There were great things I could have done on a Saturday in January. I could have gone cross-country skiing. A friend of mine had said it wasn’t hard and we could rent skis at a store nearby and ski in a park or on a golf course. If I hadn’t been sitting there, I pointed out to myself, I’d have been cross-country skiing.

Outside, a dog walked by. The fences between the backyards weren’t tight and he was ambling from yard to yard—over one fence with the help of a snowdrift, through a gap in the next. Ida and I both love dogs, and for a minute we almost made up, talking about him, but then we had another fight. We argued about whether dogs are (a) a nuisance but worth it, which was my position, or (b) not a nuisance at all, which was what Ida said. “People who don’t appreciate dogs have little minds,” she said.

“I love dogs,” I insisted.

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