Absolution
MARY PIERCE

Norma Keslor is caught in a holding pattern, circling around and around her cramped kitchen, looking for a place to land. She's scared. She hasn't told anyone this, but she's afraid that she isn't a good wife, that she doesn't try so hard anymore to make her marriage work. If she could be more patient, more understanding, everything would be fine; but deep down, she's not sure she cares anymore and this, she believes, is unforgivable -- women are supposed to care.

Inertia, dull and dry as dust, hovers around the edges of her days, and at night strange dreams invade her sleep -- dreams in which she wanders, sweaty and out of breath, in and out of empty, windowless rooms. When she wakes up, she feels disoriented, confused, as though she's suddenly found herself in someone else's bed.

Norma had such a dream last night, and an unsettled feeling still clings as she moves in slow motion, trying to shake the uneasiness of it. She makes a lunch for Steven, the same lunch he has requested every day that they've been married: two bologna and ketchup sandwiches on white bread, no butter; a package of Twinkies; and a small bag of corn chips. Norma asked him once if he'd like something different. "How about a roast beef sandwich, or ham maybe? Don't you get sick of the same thing all the time?"

"Nope. I like bologna," he'd said. End of discussion.

Truth is, she is tired of making the same thing. She hates the slimy, plastic feel of bologna between her fingers. Sometimes, for variety, she makes his sandwiches with a fork -- stabbing the bologna slices, slapping them across the bread, even spreading the ketchup with it.

Norma slides the sandwiches into a lunch-size paper bag, followed by the Twinkies, then the chips on top -- because Steven says he likes to eat them first.

A silence hangs between them these days -- silence as thick and fetid as musty air in a damp cellar. She feels hemmed in, as though she were about to be swallowed up -- the way she felt last week, when she was hanging out the wash. She had been standing between the clotheslines, surrounded by yards of wet, billowing fabric, when she turned suddenly and ran up the stairs, absolutely certain that if she stood there a second longer, all that laundry would wrap itself around her, and she would disappear -- pfft -- without a trace. Later, in the kitchen, she laughed at herself for feeling that way. Such a silly, silly thing.

Steven gets up, drops his coffee cup in the pan of soapy dishwater and stares out the tiny window above the sink at the expanse of brittle, yellow weeds stretching out in a desolate mosaic behind their building.

"What are you looking at?" she asks.

"Nothing. That vacant lot out there, I don't know. I'm wondering what the hell we're doing here."

He and her mother. Yesterday, Norma's mother, Ruth, had appeared without warning, swooping through the door in a flurry, like a large, predatory bird. "God, it's hot as blazes in here," she screeched at Norma. "How can you stand living in this place? Poor Steven."

Norma's mother loves Steven. More than once she has reminded Norma of her great good fortune in finding someone so dependable. "And not hard to look at," she always adds. Ruth believes that one day Steven will make manager at the Sears Auto Repair where he has worked as a mechanic for ten years. "You could have done worse," she likes to point out, if Norma gripes. Norma's father is completely neutral on the subject -- about everything, in fact. He's a salesman. He sells insurance during the day, and in the evening he falls asleep in his Lazy-Boy recliner while watching the Discovery Channel.

Norma puts the bread and ketchup back in the refrigerator, and brushes stray crumbs from the table into her hand. "I had a very weird dream last night," she says to Steven.

"Yeah?" he replies. With a corner piece of toast, he mops up the last streak of runny egg on his plate, then pushes his chair away from the table.

"Well, I don't have time to listen right now, so save it." Then he walks into the bedroom to look for clean socks.

"Okay, forget it," she says, and she wonders if there was ever a time when he was willing to listen. Maybe when they were dating, he'd at least made an attempt. When she talked to him then, he'd watch her with eyes so soft and brown she thought she could forgive him anything. "Oh, come on Norma," he'd interrupt after a while. "Why do you have to be so serious? Lighten up a little, will you?"

"But, this is important to me Steven," she'd say.

"The trouble with you is that you have no sense of humor. Life's too short," he'd tell her. Then he'd laugh. "You're pretty cute, though, so I guess I'll have to keep you." And he'd put his hands on either side of her face, kissing the top of her hair, and for a time, she would forget about whatever it was she had wanted to tell him.

"You're so lucky, Norma," her friend Jeanne had told her when Norma and Steven decided to get married.

"Really? Sometimes, I don't know," Norma would worry. "What if he gets tired of me one day?"

"Are you kidding? From here on in, the only problems you're going to have is being fat and happy, and having half a dozen kids and a husband who love you." Jeanne threw up her hands in mock resentment. "And me, I'll wind up an old maid." And they had laughed together at that, because they were young and life was full of promise.

Norma watches Steven lacing up his boots, and thinks about how lately, in the evening, when she's fixing dinner, and she's trying to tell him about something that's happened to her at work that day, she'll glance over and see him watching T.V. or pouring over the sports section in the newspaper, and she knows he hasn't heard anything she's said. Those are the times she really feels how small the apartment is, and she hates the silent void that surrounds them, and she wonders what she ever saw in Steven, what it was that drew her to him.

"I have to get going, Norma. I'll see you later." Steven grabs his lunch from the table and turns toward the door.

Norma pours the last of the coffee into her mug and gazes around the apartment at the cluttered three rooms and a bath. Two, if you count the kitchen and living areas as the one large room it really is. The bedroom is definitely a separate room, but it opens right off the living area through an archway without a solid door -- and it has no closet. "Christ, it isn't any more than a hole in the wall," Steven had cracked when he saw it. What had he expected?

They'd had a house once, after they'd been married a few years. They were only renting it, and it was small, but it was a nice house with lots of windows, cheery white walls, and plush, cream-colored carpets covering the floors. She'd loved the way those carpets felt against her bare feet, and the soft, low padding sounds that issued from them, like a whisper, when she walked across the room. Then Steven had gotten an idea.

"Why should I waste my money making someone else's mortgage payment?" he announced one morning.

"Your money? What about me? I work, too, or doesn't that count?" Norma reminded him.

"Don't give me a hard time, Norma. You know what I mean. We could save for our own house if we didn't have to pay rent."

"Oh, and where do you propose we live in the meantime?" She'd known, of course, but had hoped he'd say something else.

"Your parents offered to let us live with them for a while. It won't be so bad, it'll be temporary, Norma -- six months, a year at most. I promise."

Norma goes to the sink and rinses out the brown plastic dishpan putting it, along with the clean dishes, into a large, enameled steel cabinet that leans next to the sink. She has to squeeze the dishpan in, the cabinet is so packed with all the things she's lugged around, for one reason or another, since she's been married: the cracked and yellowing melamac dishes she got from her grandmother, who had still believed that girls should have hope chests; a crock-pot, minus its glass cover, lost in one of their early moves, before the little house even -- Norma uses tin foil as a lid; a box containing two hundred and fifty laminated recipe cards she and Jeanne put together for home-ec class their senior year in high school. (When Norma was the first to marry, Jeanne had insisted, "You keep the cards, Norma. You have more reason to use them.") There's a crêpe maker she has used only once; a hot dog steamer she has never used; a fondue pot with an extra can of sterno, and an iron with a frayed cord that needs to be replaced -- all shower gifts from friends she has long since lost touch with.

She glances up at the top of the cabinet to check Steven's supply of Twinkies. Enough for a week. Looking to see if there is anything else they need, she surveys the length of the shelf, her eyes scanning each item, checking off a mental list. Canned raviolis, Hamburger Helper, boxes of macaroni and cheese dinners, chips, Vienna Sausages and Pop Tarts. Norma rarely uses the recipe cards anymore.
She closes the cabinet door and goes into the bathroom to brush her teeth, then stands in front of the bathroom mirror as though she's forgotten what it was she was going to do. Studying her reflection, she wonders how she will tell Steven about the time she is taking off work this morning; three whole hours she won't be paid for. And she knows he won't approve of the lecture she's going to attend at Wendell's Bookstore. It's one of those places filled with the odor of incense and the dreamy, tinkling sound of synthesized music, where placid, smiling people offer their assistance in soothing voices.

"Those people are crackpots," Steven had sneered one afternoon when they were walking by the bookstore. Norma had wanted to stop to look at the display of crystals in the window --she liked the way the sunlight poured through the window and splashed across the craggy surfaces of the stones -- but Steven pushed his fists into his jacket pockets and kept walking. She watched him and, in the fraction of a second that it took her to weigh all her options, decided it would just be easier to forget about it.

Last week she had been walking by the store again, alone this time, and had gone in. That was when she had seen the poster -- "Understanding Your Dreams." She decided it had to be fate that she had wandered into this store, at this time, and learned about the lecture. Still, after she'd written the time and date on the back of an old grocery list, folding it into a tight little square and putting it in the bottom of her purse, she'd felt a nagging sense of guilt.

Every day since then she thought about telling Steven. Every day she had the same argument with herself -- she should tell him; not telling him was as good as lying about it, and anyway, he had a right to know. But she also knew he wouldn't want her to go and she would acquiesce -- she always did -- and just this once, she wanted something new and different. Something just for her. It was understandable, wasn't it?