deeplyshallow // eleanor no. 42

eleanor no. 42

Spring comes, and wakes Eleanor in the middle of the night. The sound of its arrival is like an iceberg crushing a tin boat. She wakes Harold, which is an ordeal, since Harold sleeps as if the world has passed him by, and since he lately sleeps on the far shore of their mattress. It is a California king, this mattress; she hates it, but he bought it the day after they were married all the same, convinced that she deserved luxury. In this nowhere town, a bed named for California fits the bill. Unless you happen to be from California, or anyplace else.

It’s just the snow falling off the roof, Harold says. Go back to sleep. He says this after just one touch of her hand, which has her puzzling: was he awake, and waiting? Did it wake him, too? If he’s awake, why is he sleeping so far away?

The sound she likens all of this to is not so far off the mark. The ice and snow breaks and slides down the roof and falls onto the metal garbage cans that Harold keeps tucked into a half-fence beside the house.

It’s kind of a nice sound, she says. She means once she has figured it out, once she is certain that it isn’t a runaway car smashing through their kitchen wall. Once she knows that it is just the sound of the temperature swimming back up from the bottom of the thermometer. Harold doesn’t answer. In waking him she has moved across the bed, so that there are only a few inches between their bodies. When they first were married, that first night and the months of nights that followed, Harold slept naked, and she would settle her body against his and trail her fingers over his skin, lightly, until they both would sleep. Harold now sleeps in his clothes, and so Eleanor does, too.

It is early in their marriage. They have not slept together in nearly two weeks, and this is the first time Eleanor has encountered such a thing. Until now they have collapsed into sleep, exhausted and sweaty, every night, only to wake in the pale early hours and fall upon each other again. She does not know what it means that Harold comes to bed in a T-shirt with his high school mascot on the front, in peeling iron-on. She does not know what it means that when she touches him, he looks away. But even she, never married, and naive until he touched her, can understand that it can mean nothing good. She doesn’t know if she is allowed to ask. But she cannot bear another night of uncomfortable silence, and the morning of rushed toast and hurried dressing that will follow on his part.

Harold, she says. He is either asleep or careless enough of her that he does not answer. Harold. She listens for a change in his breathing. He is either asleep or attentive enough to the detail of faking it that he convinces her.

She touches his shoulder, then rubs his back quickly in an alarmed circle. This should wake him, and it does, if he was even asleep. Goddammit, he explodes, louder than is necessary, harsher than she has heard him before. Eleanor flinches. Harold turns severely and faces her. What? What is so goddamn important?

In the face of his outburst Eleanor is at a loss, and so begins to cry. She cannot help herself, and Harold regards her with hard, annoyed eyes that do not soften. She says I’m sorry. He holds his stare on her, then turns over again just as harshly. She lies there and the room is so still. She fights to quiet the hitch in her breathing but she cannot stop imagining Harold yelling at her, and so she cries more. She feels like every ragged breath is a megaphone in his ear, and he must too, since after a minute he gets up without looking at her and stomps to the closet and takes down a blanket and takes his pillow and goes out of the bedroom. She can hear him settle in on the creaky couch in the living room. He is muttering something. She does not know what it is, but to her ears it might as well be This marriage sucks, my wife is stupid, I hate my life.

Eleanor does not sleep that night. She does not know if Harold sleeps. She hopes that he does. His job requires early mornings, and takes an awful lot out of him. In the morning he comes back to the bedroom to gather his clothes. She pretends to be sleeping. She doesn’t know why. It just seems important to pretend. Harold showers quickly. The coffee pot burbles. He is gone a moment after, and Eleanor lies awake. She moves through the morning after in a bleary haze, and by afternoon her body gives up the fight, and she sleeps on the swing. She sleeps too long, and Harold’s voice wakes her. She does not hear what he has said, but the tone is derogatory. He doesn’t wait for her to wake. He goes inside. The screen door bangs behind him.

The weeks preceding, Eleanor soon realizes, were a sort of grace period. This, now, is life with Harold. This is her life. Her heart hurts, but with the realization comes a form of acceptance. What is beyond her ability to repair will not keep her from sleep, and so she does, every night, alone and in her cotton pajamas, perched delicately on the cliffside of their bed, her back to the man who is not Jack, and who probably looks at her and thinks that she is not somebody else, too.