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Sally wraps herself up in a sweater, coat, scarf, and hat before she goes out. It’s routine, but it seems to take so much more work now—not to mention bending down to lace up her shoes.
And the winter is only halfway through.
She sits at the dining table for a while, gaze resting on nothing, trying to decide whether or not to eat. She wants to (she always wants to) but the morning nausea is bad this morning, and of course there is also the entire process of making something . . .
“Wilbur?”
For a moment, there is no answer. A carriage rolls by outside.
He appears, fumbling with his tie, wavy hair mussed. He’s missing his glasses. She beckons him over and he crosses the room to let her fix his tie. She pulls him down a little harder than necessary to reach.
“Big day today,” he blusters, for no reason other than to fill the silence. “Auditions for the next show.”
“Which one?”
“About the chimney sweepers, and the bats and all.”
“Mm.” She has heard all about it. “And you’re helping?”
“Me and the director are ‘working together’, remember?” He rolls his eyes, packing paperwork into his bag. “Whatever that means.”
“We should have him over for dinner sometime,” Sally tries. That’s what people do, right?
He gives her a look. “Here?”
She falters, glancing around. The apartment is . . . not in the best state.
The kitchen is a mess, dishes clean but not put away, things abandoned here and there when they didn’t know where to put them. The mail piles up in a corner, yet to be sorted. None of the three windows have curtains, and one is still cracked from when Wilbur was trying to move the chair in and lost his balance. The one bookshelf is crammed with things, not books, and needs dusting.
Even if all that were cleaned up, the walls will remain.
They are covered with sheet music. Wilbur buys notebooks of it and rips all the pages out immediately so he can line them up freely. He takes down songs and puts up new ones every few weeks, and so the pages are clustered in odd shapes—one by the dining table, two in the space behind the couch, another four on the blank wall by the bookshelf. Sally has been able to save their bedroom from the invasion, for now, but who knows how long that will last.
“. . . you’re right.” Maybe someday they’ll have a home good enough to invite people into, but . . . not yet. “I think I might stay home today. Sort through the mail, clean up, organize. You know.”
He pauses getting ready, glancing at her. “Oh? What about work?”
“Once the baby comes, there will be none of that anyway . . .” She touches her stomach absently. “It’s getting a lot harder. Going to work, taking care of things here . . . all that.”
“You’re already dressed.”
This was true.
“. . . Do you think I should go?”
“I don't really care either way,” he says unhelpfully. “But I don't have time to go tell them you're not coming, so you might at least do that. And will we be all right without the extra income?”
“We’ll be fine.” The extra income has never even been helping them. She’s barely used any of the money she made from her accounting job for the family—all of it goes into savings—savings Wilbur cannot get to and thus cannot spend irresponsibly.
He resumes packing, ducking his head under the strap of his satchel. “So . . . that's it? You're quitting? I mean, I knew you would eventually, just . . . today?”
It will be a big change. “Probably not, I’ll see.” Decisions, decisions. Too many of those, these days.
“Well.” He picks up his violin case. “I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tonight.”
“Oh—okay. I’ll tell you what I decided then, I suppose.”
He smiles, halfway out the door already. “If you're still awake.”
“. . . right.” She props her chin on her hand, running a nail along the cracks in the table. “Don't forget your glasses.”
It is the first day she stays home.
Wilbur grabs her arm before she can head out the door. “Whoa, where are you taking that?”
Sally backs away guiltily, pressing herself against the door frame. “. . . it’s for the cat.”
He puts his hands on his hips. “I told you to stop feeding it.”
“It doesn’t have anybody else to take care of it!” she argues, tightening her hands on the little bowl of leftovers. “We won’t eat it. I’m just going to throw it out anyway, and the cat might root through the trash for it. And then the landlord gets annoyed with us cause the trash is everywhere, so really—really this is the best option.”
Wilbur just looked at her, eyes hard. “And when it keeps coming around, wanting food? What then?”
“There will always be leftovers . . .”
“Come on.” He pulls her inside, closing the door. “You’re letting the cold in.”
Sally stands there, staring at the bowl in her hands.
It is only for the cat, who must be cold and starving with no one to care for it, no one to offer it a gentle hand or cuddle it under the blankets on cold nights. No furnace to keep it warm. No companions to bring it joy. It is solitary in these quiet, grey and white streets, and Sally has heard that cats are solitary creatures, but she doesn’t really believe it. No animal likes to be alone—not like that.
If it was her cat, out in the cold, she would want someone to take care of it. Even if it meant losing the cat to someone else, she would be glad it was happy. Even if it was the ugliest cat in the world, for it to be content and loved would be a blessing.
Maybe, somewhere, there is a child hoping its little cat will come back safe, and that it will be all right. Maybe, if Sally doesn’t go help that cat right now, it will die in the night and never return to its family again. Maybe it will get run over. Maybe she will never see it at the back door again. There’s a good chance that such a thing will happen.
Maybe, if only she’d stood up for herself a little better, the little cat would be alive.
She takes a deep breath.
There are hills worth dying on.
Sally yanks the door open and darts down the stairs, ignoring Wilbur’s shout from inside the room. She has a mission. She has a passion.
However, the steep stairs do not care for missions, however passionate. And Sally, seven and a half months pregnant, has the balance of a lopsided egg. She manages most of the steps just fine, skipping down them like she is a spry girl of twelve, but in her haste she forgets the dip in the third stair to the bottom, a deep divot right in the center of the ledge.
She slips. The bowl goes jumping out of her hand.
There is a terrible, terrifying crash, loud enough that Sally is more scared than hurt—though her shin aches and she’s landed somewhat sideways against the last stair, which presses painfully into her back.
There is a single second of silence, like a wave pulling in before crashing onto the pebbles.
And then Wilbur hurries down the stairs after her. “Sally.”
She pushes herself up with a groan, a hand cupped over her stomach.
And then doors open. At least three neighbors come down to check on her, including the older couple right below them who like Wilbur’s playing, and the middle-aged man who lives alone, and the two working girls who rarely seem to be home—but they’re here now, and they all cluster around Sally like she’s a dead fish caught on someone’s hook.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh, sweetheart, you must get up off the floor—”
“Mr. Soot, you can’t be letting her go around like that! She’ll hurt herself!”
But Wilbur is quick to realize that Sally is uncomfortable with so much attention on her. He helps her to her feet, catches her eye to check for any serious injury, and finding none, shifts in front of her slightly. “She’s fine. Everything’s all right, she just slipped on the stair—you know the one.”
The cluster moves back, almost like one creature. “But—”
“She’ll be fine,” he insists. “Right?”
“I’m okay,” she puts in, widening her eyes to show she means it. “Thank you all, but I’m okay.”
There is some confusion over the broken bowl, which a few of the neighbors volunteer to help with. Wilbur fends them off, and eventually they all go back to their rooms, some reluctant, some thankful.
“Go on upstairs,” he tells her, and his eyes are tired and annoyed, so Sally obeys without complaining or trying to help. Sometimes Wilbur makes out a plan in his head, and to try and propose another is just a blazing argument waiting to happen.
Going up the stairs is always worse than going down, and she is forced to slow down and acknowledge the various aches and pains the fall has given her. Her legs hurt. Her back hurts, and in a new place than normal.
So by the time she reaches the top of the stairs, she’s feeling the fall all over her body, and she can hear Wilbur picking up the shattered pieces of the bowl she dropped, and, oh, that isn’t fair to him—but on the other hand, she can’t do much while she feels heavy and sick and horrible all the time, but it is all the time, so she can’t be as good a wife as she wants to be, but it’s hard, and she really has no idea what being a wife is supposed to look like, and her best is never enough and so often it feels like she’s approaching everything from the opposite direction that she ought to.
Sally leaves the door open for him. She drifts to the bedroom.
None of this would’ve happened if he’d just let her feed the cat. She only fell because she was trying to get down there before he caught her, and because it might’ve been a little fun for the both of them, but then it wasn’t, and she hurt herself and he’s even angrier than before.
By the time Wilbur comes upstairs, she’s buried herself in the blankets on the bed, in the nest of pillows she’s collected from the rest of the house. Wilbur closes the door behind him rather sharply.
She hears him come into the bedroom.
She hears him sigh.
“Sally?”
She does not answer.
“Sally.” He sits down on the mattress. “You’re actually all right?”
“. . . mhm.”
“Then what are you hiding for?” He doesn’t actually sound worried, just annoyed.
If only he would just go away. Sally is getting hot with her breath puffing back against her face. “I don’t know.”
“Well.” Wilbur does not go away. In fact, he shifts closer and pulls the blankets from her head. As much as she doesn’t want it to happen, the puff of fresh air feels nice. The lamplight burns her eyes. “Come out then.”
They watch each other for a tense moment.
“Running down the stairs was a bad idea.”
“I know,” she bites.
“Then why’d you do it?”
She lets her head flop against the pillow, facing away from him. “Why do people go through with any of their bad ideas, Wilbur?”
“. . . look at me.”
She swings her head back around, more violently than necessary. “What?”
“You can’t keep reacting like this,” he sighs, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Something will happen, something small, and you’ll go isolate and refuse to do anything, and you’ll treat it like some great tragedy. I knew you were going to get a little hysterical while you were pregnant, but really. Can’t you try? You're impossible to deal with.”
“To deal with?” Sally squawked, sitting up by the force of her own fury.
He rolls his eyes. “Here we go again.”
“No! No, you don’t get to say something like that and brush it off.”
“This is exactly what I’m talking about! I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you, and you catch on to the slightest detail and derail it!”
“But—you—fine! Fine, I’ll ignore that, even though I shouldn’t.” Her hands fist in the blanket. “I don’t isolate. Most of the time, I keep on doing whatever I was busy with, but today you told me to go upstairs and let you handle the mess! Besides, there’s no real isolation in this small of an apartment—”
“Yes there is: when you refuse to talk to me.” He puts his glasses back on. They flicker the light into her eyes and she is forced to look away.
“It’s not like we ever have anything to talk about. It’s more like you talking, and me listening.”
“If you listened—” He stops himself, closing his mouth. Glorious. Her husband is trying out restraint for once in his life. “Look, I’m just saying. You’ve been touchy.”
And Sally knows she should accept the criticism and go on with her life. She knows that’s the right thing to do, the good thing to do, but . . . it’s hard. And sometimes it’s harder than she’s willing to deal with.
She takes a deep breath. “No. No, you— God, Wilbur, you just don’t get it! I’m touchy all the time because you do little horrible things all the time. I wouldn’t be touchy if there wasn’t something to be touchy about.”
“Oh, so now you expect me to be perfect, is that it?” He shifts away from her, leaning back on his arm.
She could kill him sometimes. She could kill him in his sleep, she could poison him, she could—she could do a lot of things. “No, I just—there’s just . . . things, that you do, that you do often, and they add up! It’s never big things.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that—”
“No, Sally,” he interrupts, using her full name. “I don’t want to hear about it. I’m taking care of us. I offer to help you with dinner, though you always refuse. I’m home in the evenings, I’m present. I have a reliable job and we have money. What more could you want?”
She hates him. She hates him, she hates him, she hates him.
“You don’t know what being a husband is,” she says softly, tears sliding down her face. “You think you do, but you don’t.”
He scoffs. “Oh, and you do.”
“I know it doesn’t look like this! You keep me here all alone, without any friends, without any family. I don’t know anyone in town because you made us move—”
“I had to get away from—”
“Your family! I liked them, and they liked me well enough—or at least put up with me! But no, they weren’t good enough, or you weren’t good enough for them, and so you had to bring me here. I have nobody to talk to, nobody to complain to, no—” she sobs against her will. “Nobody to tell me how I’m supposed to be a mother, or how to take care of myself when I’m pregnant, or how to— ugh. There’s nobody!”
“You can talk to me!”
“You’re gone all day,” she corrects, stabbing a finger at him, “and I don’t see you, and I’m alone in this horrible room and it’s—” She growls low in her throat, actually properly growls in frustration. At any other time, she would’ve laughed at herself. “And sure, I cook. I try to keep things clean but you hate when I move things because you can’t find them, and sometimes it feels like you don’t want me to help because you want to do everything on your own. But you married me! I’m not going to just fade into the background. And I want—” Her voice breaks, and she cries harder, properly hard, which is terribly embarrassing and untimely— “I want to make this place a home, not just somewhere we live, but you won’t let me take down that horrid sheet music! It’s everywhere! I can’t go anywhere without seeing it! I wake up, and I see it. I cook, I see it. I worry, I see it. I have nothing to do, so I just stare at the wall and there it is!”
He recoils. “I didn’t know you had such strong opinions on it.”
“I do. It—I can’t ever have anyone over for dinner, even if I had someone to invite. You treat the whole house like your own personal office.”
“It is my apartment,” he says dryly.
“Oh, go—go jump out the window, then,” she hisses, throwing off the blankets and climbing to her feet with more than a little effort.
“Sally, please, sit down—”
“No! I’m going to go be useful, because apparently that’s all I’m good for!”
“Sally!” He storms after her, footsteps thundering a warning, like the foghorns on a ship. He catches up with her before she’s even left the room, fingers wrapping around her arm.
“Now what?” She asks through the tears, trying to seem intimidating and not pitiful, even though she is scared. “Surely even you know that’s not how a husband is meant to act.”
Wilbur’s grip does not loosen. The wedding ring on his finger is cold enough to hurt her bare skin. “A lot of men would disagree.”
Oh. Right.
Sally lets out a shaky exhale.
Wilbur wouldn’t hurt her. Hasn’t hurt her. They fight plenty, but it’s just yelling—it still feels awful, and sometimes it takes days to make up, but it is only noise. Besides, she instigates it, too. It is balanced. Sometimes you just need to yell to get the emotions out of your system, and that’s fine.
They stomp around the house and yell and argue and it helps, every once in a while. They always end up sleeping next to each other anyway, and the forced proximity helps, too.
Sally has been afraid of Wilbur before, but even in the moment, she always knew it was irrational.
Now, not so much.
He leans toward her, almost over her, shoulders tense, brows low and angry, eyes sharp despite their soft brown, mouth a harsh line. He watches her face, gaze catching even the most imperceptable shift.
He sees something that makes him pause.
Wilbur stops.
It’s astonishing, actually, how quickly his demeanor changes. His forehead smooths, his eyes widen in something like boyish guilt as his lips part. He seems to shrink, shoulders falling, retreating. He lets go of her arm.
“I’m sorry, I—I didn’t . . .”
But it doesn’t matter.
Sally wants to snap at him, but she realizes that starting up the argument when there’s an end in sight will drive them further apart. She just cries. It’s all she seems to know how to do these days. She cries, and Wilbur stares, surprised that he could scare someone, or perhaps surprised that he would.
He reaches for her, with both hands this time, and Sally accepts the embrace, leaning her weight against him. It’s not like there’s anyone else to comfort her.
He holds her carefully, as though she might break. His chin settles against her hair. “I—I’m sorry. Really. I wasn’t trying to frighten you.”
“Weren’t you?”
Wilbur’s arms tighten around her. Is it wrong to think of the embrace as protective, even now?
“. . . I’m sorry,” he says again.
The next morning is a rainy one.
She hadn’t been able to sleep last night, too busy thinking about everything that had happened, worrying about Wilbur and the baby and everyone and everything she could think of. She’s not sure exactly when she’d finally been able to go to sleep, but she was still tired now, halfway into the day, and that said plenty.
Sally wakes up far later than she usually does—she can feel it just by the way the light falls in the bedroom, light and airy despite the pattering on the window. Wilbur is not beside her—he’s probably gone for work already.
There are things she has to do. If she tires herself out, she might just be able to go to sleep on time tonight.
She goes through the usual routine of getting ready, skipping a few layers of clothing, as recommended by an article in the Ladies’ Journal she’d read about pregnancy. Now that she thinks about it, there’s really no way of knowing whether that journal was right, but . . . no harm in trying, right?
She has to sit down after getting dressed, out of breath, and then she realizes just how ridiculous that is and forces herself up again.
Food first.
The living room is just as much a mess as it was last night, but as soon as she steps past the doorway, something moves— falling down from the counter.
Sally screams, backing away from . . . from . . .
Her cat.
The little grey one, with the scraggly whiskers and patchy fur.
It meows loudly at her, sounding so scratchy and hoarse that she’d believe it had never drank water in its life.
Oh, yes, that one’s hers.
She lets out a light laugh, hand over her chest to recover from the fright.
“Oh, you, hi.” She drags a hand along the door frame as she crouches down. “Hey, little guy. How’d you get in here?” No windows are open. The door is shut.
The cat recognizes her, taking a few hesitant steps forward. She holds out a hand, leaning forward slightly, and the cat stretches to sniff at her fingertips, but just as it’s about to make contact, she tips, overbalancing, and is forced to sit down rather suddenly, other arm braced on the floor behind her.
The cat skitters away, meowing again to show its displeasure.
“Yeah, yeah, I hear you. No good being pregnant, is it.”
But after a few seconds, the curiosity becomes too strong, and it comes forward again, smelling her hand and then rubbing its whole face against her knuckles.
Sally thinks she might just about die.
She croons over the cat for a while, letting it circle about her and investigate for anything dangerous. It sniffs carefully at her belly, stepping up on her leg to take a proper look.
“That won’t always be there,” she assures it. “Trust me, I’m ready for my body to be back to normal size, too.”
On the counter, there’s a note in Wilbur’s unsteady hand.
Let the cat in. You’ve been feeding it leftovers, so I’m sure it’ll eat just about anything. I put water out, and some of our food from last night. Breakfast should be on the stove—warm it up if you need to (DON’T complain about my cooking. At least I made it for you) I’ll be back at the normal time.
- Wilbur
Cat name????
She smiles fondly, exasperatedly, glancing at the stove, where . . . there isn’t any food. A quick glance confirms what she feared—the food has made its way onto the floor, picked over by the newest inhabitant of the apartment, who meows for attention.
The cat is very startled when she picks it up. It didn’t really think that was a possibility. Honestly, she hadn’t been sure she’d be able to bend down to get it either.
“You’re ours now, darling,” she says, peering into its smart yellow eyes. “I hope you like violin.”