Small Change by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online Page A

way they pushed up like knobs, some small, some large – doorknobs under her skin.
    A few weeks later she was in the hospital reading Mary McCarthy’s
Cast a Cold Eye
(her husband had brought her the book), awful stories about marriage, she said, she couldn’t understand why he had given them to her. And she related one about a woman who had a garden. The woman decided she would leave her husband after the petunias bloomed, and she did. But she had no plan. She called friends who all said they couldn’t see her until the following week, or the week after that. So she stopped living – she went to movies – she did nothing until finally she went home again. The garden, when she opened the door, was full of weeds. She stood in the doorway, disbelieving, and her husband stood beside her. He said in a shocked voice, “Look how the weeds have taken over.” Then he took her hand and said how much he loved the garden, or loved her in the garden, or loved the fact that she had loved the garden – something she knew to be a complete lie – but she didn’t know what to say, and so she squeezed his hand in a false and outward show of emotion since nothing else occurred to her. She didn’t know what else to do.
    Jill lay in her hospital bed telling me the story in great detail, a story she said was too awful to read, and I listened,remembering it partially, the way I’ve recounted above, with the image in my mind of Jill’s garden and the tall tomato plants her husband had pruned to within an inch of their lives.
    Then I told her a painful story about my husband. An old friend of his, his colleague Rudy Jones, had been fired some months ago. Jill had never met Rudy, so I described him to her as plump, milky-faced, bone-lazy; a wonderful talker, funny, charming, eloquent, but less than useless when it came to work. Everyone except Ted said so. For a year he and Ted had shared the same office and the same views. Ted had covered for him, boosted his ego, talked him up to the other people at work. After Rudy was fired he blamed Ted for not quitting in protest, and dropped him cold. He dropped us both cold.
    One night when Ted and I were sitting together in the living room after the kids were in bed, I said to him, “You always considered Rudy a closer friend than he considered you.”
    Ted said, “I guess you’re right.”
    I was the one who expressed the anger he felt, then felt the anger he no longer wanted to feel. He spoke about Rudy only once. He said, “The biggest mistake I made in that job was to let my friendship with Rudy interfere with my judgement.” That’s all. He said it in passing.
    His attitude mystified me. It seemed completely kind and good, a felicitous quality he had been born with. Things would come right, there was nothing bad that didn’t have some good.
    “And Hitler?” I asked him. “Show me the silver lining.”
    Yet I envied his steadiness – sanguine and very male – whose true value became apparent in friendship: he always saw the best in people, he always gave them credit. I, on the otherhand, took friendships between my teeth and shook them the way my old dog shook snakes. Day after day I found myself rooted to the sidewalk shouting at Rudy in my head. The din was terrific. Through some perverse magnetism I had drawn to myself all the clatter and clamour and weaponry of male combat, I lumbered around under its weight while Ted walked free, neither angry nor remorseful nor stricken, but a friend.
    “He’ll come around,” said Ted.
    “No. He won’t.”
    “In time.”
    “No. He’ll never come around.”
    Ted remained reasonable (because I was so unreasonable. He was good because I was bad.)
    I told Jill that I thought many women filled this role. They were vessels for their husbands’ antipathy. They lost friends so their husbands could keep them, they slew the dragons of neglect so their husbands could feel benign. Then the husbands, witnessing the exhaustion of their wives