Price of the Haircut_Stories by Brock Clarke

Author:Brock Clarke [Clarke, Brock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Workman Pub Co
Published: 2018-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

That Which We Will Not Give

On Thanksgiving, when the Murray family gathered at the house on Wasson Road, there was always a time when—after the food had been served and consumed; after the table had been cleared; after the Murray women had washed the dishes, and the Murray men had sat at the table and wondered as a group why they had eaten, say, so much of the creamed onions when they didn’t even like creamed onions; after the Murray women had returned to the table, taking off their yellow rubber gloves (they wouldn’t wash a dish without first snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves) and, with their faces pinched, looking very much like physicians just after conducting a particularly unpleasant invasive exam; after each after-dinner proposal (to have another drink, to play a board game, to go see a movie, to take a walk, to do something) was made and then rejected—then and only then would one of the children ask, “Do you remember that Thanksgiving when Mom asked Dad for a divorce and he wouldn’t give it to her?”

This was in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the east side of the city, in one of those formidable brick Victorian houses that you couldn’t dynamite off its foundation and that had pocket doors long since removed, for fear, maybe, of something being hidden behind them, and gas instead of wood fireplaces, because of the inevitable termites in the wood or soot buildup in the chimney or inconsistency in the heat. It was Mr. and Mrs. Murray’s house, the house in which their children, Dudley and Penelope (they were twins) and Winslow, had grown up. The Thanksgiving that Mrs. Murray had asked for a divorce and Mr. Murray refused to give her one, Penelope and Dudley were thirteen, and Winslow was five. That Thanksgiving, they’d eaten their meal, but Mrs. Murray and Penelope hadn’t cleared the table, and the turkey carcass and the untouched watery cranberry roll and half-eaten pumpkin and apple pies were still there in front of them, as if in reminder of some unfinished business. Throughout the dinner, Mrs. Murray had, at regular intervals, asked her husband for a divorce, and each time he had said no. Mrs. Murray had been asking for a divorce and Mr. Murray had been refusing to give her one for months and months, and the children knew this, knew also that their mother almost always got what she wanted, and so they had begun to view their parents’ divorce with a sense of grim inevitability, as if it were not a matter of if but when, which was why Dudley (he was always the impatient one and years later caused a big scene at the IGA by cursing at the cashier, who, Dudley claimed, was making the already-long line longer with her “fucking small talk”) finally asked, “Dad, why don’t you just give it to her?”

At this, Mr. Murray—who was always playing fiery Tybalt or bloody Coriolanus or one of the

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