Science, surrender, surprise
It has been so unbearably hot, that I decided we’d go to the Museum of Science. I get to be in an air conditioned place, and he gets to run around looking at neat things. The rule at the museum is simple: You can go anywhere you want to go, but you can’t run away without telling me. He did pretty well.
Our visits start and end in the same place: the George Rhoads kinetic sculpture. He can stand in front of it for 20 minutes at a time. His arms pull back a little as he looks back, his legs twist as he makes his way around the sculpture.
His next favorite thing is the oldest exhibit in the whole museum: The cases full of gears. I stand by each case and press the button for as long as he wants to watch.
Sometime after our late lunch, he started getting a little disorganized. I think this is when his medication runs out. He starts running from exhibit to exhibit, pressing buttons for the sake of pressing buttons. That was the signal that it was time to leave.
When we got back to Beth’s house, her car wasn’t in the driveway. We had agreed to meet at 6pm, and I was a little early. The boy had noticed Ellen, Beth’s neighbor, working on her lawn. The boy suggested we go see her. We went across the street, and said hello.
“Hello,” Ellen said. “How’s bachelor life?”
“It’s OK, but it’s not something I was looking for.”
This is the first time that I’ve spoken to Ellen since Beth told her we were separating. That was almost a month ago.
“She loves you deeply, you know.”
At first I don’t know what she’s talking about Then it occurs to me that she’s talking about Beth.
“She never said that to me,” I tell her.
And I don’t think Beth said that to her, either.
“I do appreciate you and Jim being around to watch over her.” Beth goes over to drink gin and tonics with them sometimes.
“Someone did it for me,” Ellen says. “It’s worse than a death, worse than a death.”
The boy and I take our shoes off. I roll his pants up, and we stick our feet in Sue’s pool. It’s so hot and sticky that the cold water on my feet is a relief.
Sue sits next to me. “Tell me about this huge yard of yours.”
I haven’t told her about my house, so I can only guess where she might have heard about it.
“It’s a small yard, the whole front and back are smaller than your front yard.”
She laughs. “And you use that reel mower running it back and forth?” Beth must have told her that I took the reel mower to my house.
“That was the idea, but I ended up getting a lawmower.”
Sue turns serious. “You bought a lawnmower?”
“An electric one. With all the rain, the grass gets too high by the time I get around to cutting it.”
“Huh.”
I’m puzzled by the change in tone, and then I realize what has happened. I bought a lawnmower. This is serious.
I can imagine Beth complaining that now I’ll mow my lawn, and that I never mowed when I was with her. I can imagine this complaint branching to all the things I didn’t do with her that I do now, like spending time with the boy, keeping my house clean, cooking.
As I think about it, I can see why she’s so irritated at me. It must look to her like I was holding something back. And in a sense I was.
I’m beginning to realize how much my own tastes and preferences had been subsumed to hers. It began, I suppose, as a gesture of trust: the furninshings of the house were more important to her than they were to me. But as time went on, my acquiescence became surrender and it spread to other things beyond furniture.
This isn’t something she did to me. Surrendering was something I did.
It was nice to have all these things taken care of, to have decisions made, to have the illusion that I was involved in their approval. It was easy, and benign, to go along with her tastes in bold floral prints, in what we had for dinner, the kind of bookshelves I would have in my office.
She came to expect this attitude in all things, and I gave her no reason to think otherwise. And when I began taking back some of the things I had acquiesced to, I became difficult to live with. I think she thought that I would soon come to my senses, acquiesce, and surrender again.
So no wonder she’s irritated when she sees me. No wonder she was surprised that I left.