The Wife

A short story by Mary W. Walters

(previously published in Herizons, and in the story collection Cool, and broadcast on CBC Radio Alberta)

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AS KLEWCHUK SCORED his third consecutive goal, Malcolm Burgess yawned and dropped the second section of the paper onto the rug. “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

Katy’s face appeared over the front-page headlines. “You didn’t pick up the steaks?”

He studied her, puzzled, for a moment and then looked stricken. “Oh, God. It’s our anniversary.”

She sighed and swallowed the last of her beer, placing the glass precisely over the damp circle on the end table so that the surrounding dust would be less obvious. “Never mind. I’ll order a pizza.”

She folded the first section of the newspaper over the grey spot on the couch beside her. “You want another beer?”

“If you’re going.” Malcolm raised his empty glass toward her in a toast. “We could go out for dinner.”

“I’m tired. And you have marking to do.”

He groaned as Katy moved her briefcase from the coffee table to the front hall, where she had to nudge aside a pair of sandals and one galosh before she had room to put it down.

“I’d rather be writing,” he said.

“If you’d spend less time writing, you’d get caught up with your marking.”

“When the book’s published, I’ll never have to teach again.” Malcolm sighed. “He Shoots…,” he said absently, testing the sound of the title.

Katy was certain that the only way Malcolm’s novel would see the inside of a bookstore would be if he carried the manuscript into one, but she didn’t say so. She tossed an empty cigarette package onto the haphazard stack of magazines on the coffee table, picked up the beer glasses, and started for the kitchen.

“How’s it coming?” she asked.

“’Nother hundred pages ought to do it.” He’d followed her into the kitchen, and was leaning against the counter.

“Careful,” she said. “You’ll get grease on your slacks.” She had one cold beer in each hand and she pushed the door of the refrigerator closed with a stockinged foot. “Where did I put the beer glasses?”

“Here.” Malcolm reached for two glasses behind yesterday’s unscraped dinner dishes. He looked away from the lump of cold potato squatting in a puddle of congealed fat.

“How’s it going to end?”

He looked unhappy. “I haven’t decided that yet. That’s just the problem, Katy. I need time to work it out.”

Katy ordered the pizza, then came to sit beside him on the couch as the referee dropped the puck to start the third period. For forty minutes by the kitchen clock, and eighteen by the one at the Coliseum, she didn’t say a word.

“I can’t stand the mess any more,” she said quietly at last.

“Right after the game. I’ll start on the kitchen, and you can make the bed.”

“I thought you were going to do some marking?” She re-crossed her feet.

“Why don’t we try another cleaning company?”

She shook her head. “We always spend hours cleaning up before they get here so they won’t think we’re slobs.”

As the Rangers tied the Oilers, Malcolm folded his arms across his chest and leaned forward.

Suddenly Katy sat up straight, put her feet on the floor, and said, “I’ve got it!”

“Got what, Dear?” asked Malcolm, still looking at the TV.

“What we need is a Wife!”

“I’ve already got one. Did you see that check?”

“No, you don’t. I’m talking about roles here, Malcolm. Roles. What you’ve got is a spouse. What we need is a Wife.”

“Penalty? What the hell are they talking about? That was a good clean check!”

She moved to stand between him and the television, her hands on her hips. He peered around her. She pressed the button to turn the television off.

“What are you doing? The game’s tied!” He came across to turn the set on again, but she held his wrist.

“I’m trying to talk to you about a Wife. We need a Wife, Malcolm. She could have dinner ready for us when we came home, pour us drinks, do the laundry…. It would be perfect.”

He reached around her and the announcer’s voice burst into the room. The game was over. The Oilers had won.

“They scored short-handed, Katy. I missed it.” He sounded close to tears. “You go ahead and get whatever you want. Just let me watch the summary.”

So Katy went ahead. It wasn’t easy, by any means. When she phoned the newspaper to place the ad, the woman at the other end of the line explained that there was no appropriate classification for what she wanted. “How about ‘Domestic Employment’?”

“No,” said Katy. “We don’t want to pay her, for God’s sake.”

“You want a servant?”

“No. A Wife. A Wife!”

“Well, even if there were such a classification, it would have to read ‘Husband/Wife Wanted.’ Equal opportunity, you understand.”

“But we don’t need a Husband. We’re discussing roles here, not gender. Husbands change light bulbs and earn money, and we’ve already got two of those. We need someone who cooks and cleans and sews.” Katy paused to think. “It could be a male, of course. But it has to be a Wife.”

The woman at the other end suggested the Personals column and sounded relieved when Katy agreed. They phrased the ad carefully. “Attractive, warm, youngish couple seeks kind, intelligent Wife (male or female). Goal: mutually rewarding, long-term relationship.”

Katy was pleased with her ingenuity when the ad appeared, but at the end of the week the only responses had been from a handful of the types she supposed frequented those video peep-show places.

Confident that a Wife would be arriving soon, the Burgesses had paid even less attention to the house than usual. Newspapers, medical journals and magazines were strewn from front hall to back porch, there was not a single clean plate or glass in the entire house, and the anniversary pizza box on the kitchen table appeared to be growing a new pizza.

“This is ridiculous,” Katy said. “I’ve been taking showers at the hospital because the sight of our bathtub makes me ill.”

Malcolm nodded miserably.

“How do other people find wives?” Katy asked him.

“Meet them places, I guess. Bars, dances, things like that. Ann Landers is always suggesting church gatherings.”

“You take the bars, then, Malcolm, and I’ll hit a couple of churches. We’ll come up with something.”

But they didn’t. Malcolm reported that none of the women he’d talked to had been interested in permanent relationships: their sights were set on careers and travel. “I feel badly that I only talked to women,” he said, “but I just couldn’t bring myself to ask a man if he’d like to be a Wife.”

Katy understood. Her search had been equally fruitless. The women she’d found in the churches all seemed adequately outfitted with Husbands and Homes already.

Malcolm sighed, stood, and picked his way through the debris to his briefcase in the hallway. “I give up. We’ll just have to do the work ourselves, I guess. But first, I’ve got to get back to my book before I lose my train of thought.”

Katy watched him spread his papers on the coffee table, shoving paper plates and flyers absently to the floor to make room for He Shoots…. Within seconds, he was hard at work.

* * * * *

As it turned out, the Wife found them.

She was selling crocheted pot holders door to door to support herself. Katy invited her into the vestibule while she went upstairs to find her wallet. When she came back down fifteen minutes later, the woman had one arm full of newspapers and was sorting the shoes in the front-hall closet into neat pairs.

She dropped the papers when she saw Katy. “Excuse me, Ma’am,” she said. “I just can’t help myself.”

Katy proposed on the spot.

Lydia proved to be an exceptional Wife. She was strong enough to carry the carpet cleaner and the floor polisher up the stairs one appliance in each hand, and healthy enough that she wasn’t puffing when she reached the top. She was tall and blond and solidly built: pleasant-looking without being beautiful. She preferred crocheting in front of the television set to expensive evenings on the town, and she said nothing when the Burgesses left the top off the toothpaste tube or shuffled the newspaper sections before she had a chance to read them.

Within a month, the house had been cleaned from top to bottom, and Katy was growing accustomed to returning from the hospital to chilled wine in a clean glass and the comforting aroma of dinner already in the oven. The clothes were clean, ironed and neatly hung in the closet, and every loose button in the house had been securely reattached.

The only problem seemed to be with Malcolm, who found the transition from total disorder to total organization more than a trifle unsettling. He complained that he couldn’t work because every time he got up to go to the bathroom, Lydia re-stacked his papers and dusted the places where they’d been.

“I can’t write up here. I’m going to the basement.”

“But it’s dark down there, Malcolm. And cold. And probably dusty.”

“I doubt that it’s dusty, and I don’t care if it is. I’ll take a lamp and a sweater. I’ll use the card table. Don’t worry about me. Just tell that Wife of ours to stay upstairs, you hear me?”

More and more often he retreated morosely to the basement after dinner, and Katy once thought she heard him mutter on his way downstairs, “If I’d wanted a Wife, I would have married one.” She decided she must have heard him wrong.

The Wife was such excellent company that Katy barely noticed Malcolm’s absences. Lydia didn’t appear nauseated when Katy enthusiastically described some surgical procedure, and she uttered not a murmur when Katy changed the channel in the middle of a program. She just sat and crocheted.

Just after Thanksgiving, Katy noted with consternation that Lydia’s crocheting was taking on new and alarming dimensions. The project she was sewing together now was already as large as the living-room couch and the stacks and stacks of granny squares began to acquire form as they were attached to one another. She finally discovered that Lydia had crocheted The Last Supper in two-ply acrylic orlon with a 4.5 mm hook. At that point Katy decided she’d better do something.

“That’s quite a blanket,” she said.

“Yes,” replied Lydia, threading a strand of purple wool through a large-eyed needle. “The biggest yet.”

“Where in the world did you find the pattern?”

“Made it up as I went along. I’m going to try The Dinner Party next. Full scale.”

Katy swallowed. “And what are you going to do with this one when it’s finished?”

“Sell it. I got five hundred for the last one.”

Katy blanched. What had started out as a simple hobby was about to turn into a Career, and Katy knew what that meant. If she wanted to keep the Wife, she’d have to keep her busier.

“We could move to a larger place,” she mused.

“Oh, no,” replied Lydia. “The nice thing about crocheting is that it folds. I’ve got plenty of room right where I am.”

Katy eyed her suspiciously, but her expression softened as she hit on a solution.

“We’ll have a family,” she said.

* * * * *

“I suppose if you’re to become a mother,” Katy said later as Lydia loaded the last of the dishes into the dishwasher, “we’ll need a father, too.”

“I suppose we will.”

“We’d better go get Malcolm.”

Katy turned toward the basement stairs, then hesitated.

“No. He won’t do. Fathers know how to build model railroads and they wear jeans on Saturdays when they putter in the garage. That just isn’t Malcolm. Now a Father wouldn’t necessarily need to be male, of course…..” She looked at Lydia, thinking. “Although in this case I suppose he would, since you turned out to be a female. We’ll have to advertise.”

Lydia shook her head. “I know someone who’d be perfect. He makes the frames for my crocheting.”

Katy narrowed her eyes at the Wife, but she said nothing. They’d never discussed fidelity before and there wasn’t much point in doing so now.

* * * * *

Harold was, as Lydia had predicted, an entirely satisfactory Father. While Lydia crocheted scallops to sew around the collar of her maternity dresses and little things in yellow and pale green, Harold papered the guest room in pastel colours and carved a cradle, afterward giving it two coats of unleaded paint. Katy looked on, approving.

For a long time after the arrival of the baby, life at the Burgess household was pleasant, if a trifle overcrowded. But gradually Katy became aware that she was seeing far less of Lydia than she was of Harold and the baby. Meals lacked creativity, and the ironing was haphazard. Sometimes the dust became visible on the furniture before it was removed. Lydia spent a lot of time in the bedroom, which Katy had attributed to post-partum depression until she realized that the baby was six months old.

She knocked on the door of the bedroom and the Wife and Mother opened it just a crack and peered through. A wisp of pale gold wool trailed from her shoulder.

“What’s going on here, Lydia?”

“Crocheting, Katy. But the light is wrong. Harold and I are going to have to move.”

Katy was aghast. “You can’t do that! You’re the Wife!”

“I’m sorry. I truly am. But I’ve sold The Dinner Party now, and we can afford a place of our own.” Lydia shook her head. “It’s bigger than I am, Katy,” she said. “Crocheting is my life.”

* * * * *

As Katy approached the card table in the corner of the basement, Malcolm looked up.

“It’s perfectly clear how it will end,” he said. “I can’t imagine why I didn’t see it sooner. He’s going to miss the net.”

“You can finish it upstairs now,” Katy said. “They’re gone.”

Malcolm shook his head firmly. “It’s too clean up there.”

“Won’t be for long,” she said.

Katy ran her finger through the thick dust on the borders of the card table.

“I guess it wasn’t worth the trouble after all,” she said quietly. “They just don’t make Wives the way they used to.”

– the end –

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