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In marriage Miriam changed name and laundry day. She hadn’t anticipated the shock, or the shame, of mixing her own dirty clothes with Alan’s; it seemed to imply more intimacy than did the sex act itself.
The first Tuesday she collected their combined laundry, she hid it in the trolley beneath her family supper basket: cold cuts, sesame buns, red-wax cheese, and bread-and-butter pickles the color of snot. This she wheeled directly home. She put their laundry away, pointlessly folding and stacking his underwear; then, realizing that Alan would be at work half an hour yet, she returned to the closet. She chose a button-down shirt, slacks, socks, and his brown walking shoes, then laid them out on the sofa in human form.
She was in the kitchen repurposing some elderly green beans when Alan found her. He paused in the doorframe, squinting, still carrying his nylon briefcase, and Miriam thought: My husband.
“You did that?” he asked, tilting his head toward the living room. She looked down at the counter and nodded.
“You’re a weird one, Mom,” he said from the hallway.
There was a pall over the whole decade; the eighties felt like late afternoon in late fall, ominously dark too soon.
Miriam crocheted the first five squares of an afghan in the dark, watching a special about the AIDS crisis that one of the brothers had taped to VHS. She was pregnant, and would presently tell Alan.
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