Too Much Happiness

She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom where his shaving things still were, and the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments that he refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen that had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window-through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be starting a striptease.

Or in the study. That was where of all places his absence had to be most firmly established. At first she had found it necessary to go to the door and open it and stand there, surveying the piles of paper, moribund computer, spilling files, books lying open or facedown as well as crowded on the shelves. Now she could manage just by picturing things.

One of these days she would have to enter. She thought of it as invading. She would have to invade her husband’s dead mind. This was one thing that she had never considered. Rich had seemed to her such a tower of efficiency and competence, so vigorous and firm a presence, that she had always believed, quite unreasonably, in his surviving her. Then in the last year this had become not a foolish belief at all, but in both their minds, as she thought, a certainty.

She would do the cellar first. It really was a cellar, not a basement. Planks made walkways over the dirt floor, and the small high windows were hung with dirty cobwebs. Nothing was down there that she ever needed. Just Rich’s half-filled paint tins, boards of various lengths that might have come in handy someday, tools that might be usable or ready to be discarded. She had opened the door and gone down the steps just once, to see that no lights had been left on, and to assure herself that the switches were there, with labels written beside them to tell her which controlled what. When she came up she bolted the door as usual, on the kitchen side. Rich used to laugh about that habit of hers, asking what she thought could get in, through the stone walls and elf-sized windows, to menace them.

Nevertheless the cellar would be easier to start on; it would be a hundred times easier than the study.

She did make up the bed and tidy her own little mess in the kitchen or bathroom, but in general the impulse to manage any wholesale sweep of housecleaning was beyond her. She could barely throw out a twisted paper clip or a fridge magnet that had lost its attraction, let alone the dish of Irish coins that she and Rich had brought home from a trip fifteen years ago. Everything seemed to have acquired its own peculiar heft and strangeness.

Carol or Virgie phoned every day, usually towards supper-time, when they must have thought her solitude might be least bearable. She said she was okay, she would come out of her lair soon, she just needed this time, she was just thinking and reading. And eating okay, and sleeping.

That was true too, except for the reading. She sat in the chair surrounded by her books without opening one of them. She had always been such a reader-that was one reason Rich said she was the right woman for him, she could sit and read and let him alone-and now she couldn’t stick it for even half a page.

She hadn’t been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit-and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich’s death but with her own immersion in illness. Then she had thought the change was temporary and the magic would reappear once she was off certain drugs and exhausting treatments.

Apparently not.

Sometimes she tried to explain why, to an imaginary inquisitor.

“I got too busy.”

“So everybody says. Doing what?”

“Too busy paying attention.”

“To what?”

“I mean thinking.”

“What about?”

“Never mind.”

One morning after sitting for a while she decided that it was a very hot day. She should get up and turn on the fans. Or she could, with more environmental responsibility, try opening the front and back doors and let the breeze, if there was any, blow through the screen and through the house.

She unlocked the front door first. And even before she had allowed half an inch of morning light to show itself, she was aware of a dark stripe cutting that light off.

There was a young man standing outside the screen door, which was hooked.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I was looking for a doorbell or something. I gave a little knock on the frame here, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“I’m supposed to look at your fuse box. If you could tell me where it is.”

She stepped aside to let him in. She took a moment to remember.

“Yes. In the cellar,” she said. “I’ll turn the light on. You’ll see it.”

He shut the door behind him and bent to take off his shoes.

“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s not as if it’s raining.”

“Might as well, though. I make it a habit. Could leave you dust tracks insteada mud.”

She went into the kitchen, not able to sit down again until he left the house.

She opened the door for him as he came up the steps.

“Okay?” she said. “You found it okay?”

“Fine.”

She was leading him towards the front door, then realized there were no steps behind her. She turned and saw him standing in the kitchen.

“You don’t happen to have anything you could fix up for me to eat, do you?”

There was a change in his voice-a crack in it, a rising pitch, that made her think of a television comedian doing a rural whine. Under the kitchen skylight she saw that he wasn’t so young. When she opened the door she had just been aware of a ski

“See, I happen to be a diabetic,” he said. “I don’t know if you know any diabetics, but the fact is when you get hungry you got to eat, otherwise your system all goes weird. I should have ate before I came in here, but I let myself get in a hurry. You don’t mind if I sit down?”

He was already sitting down at the kitchen table.

“You got any coffee?”

“I have tea. Herbal tea, if you’d like that.”

“Sure. Sure.”

She measured tea into a cup, plugged in the kettle, and opened the refrigerator.

“I don’t have much on hand,” she said. “I have some eggs. Sometimes I scramble an egg and put ketchup on it. Would you like that? I have some English muffins I could toast.”

“English, Irish, Yukoranian, I don’t care.”

She cracked a couple of eggs into the pan, broke up the yolks, and stirred them all together with a cooking fork, then sliced a muffin and put it into the toaster. She got a plate from the cupboard, set it down in front of him. Then a knife and fork from the cutlery drawer.

“Pretty plate,” he said, holding it up as if to see his face in it. Just as she turned her attention to the eggs she heard it smash on the floor.

“Oh mercy me,” he said in a new voice, a squeaky and definitely nasty voice. “Look what I gone and done now.”

“It’s all right,” she said, knowing now that nothing was.