Alice Martin
445 Paul Hardin Dr.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
The Junk Pile
It was Greg’s idea to move to Jonestown. He told me we would be able to see the stars at
night, hear the bullfrogs at the beginning of summer, have dinners on our back brick patio. He
told me we wouldn’t have to deal with our rude neighbors that we could hear on the other side of
our thin apartment walls or those loud sirens with their jolting noise that ebbed and flowed
during the nights in the city. He told me life would be different.
Greg didn’t lie. Life was different in those pseudo-suburbs, a quasi-redneck community
that was still infused with the occasional mainstream family, looking to escape from the peer
pressures of inner-city living. It was the first time we were going to own a house together and the
only reasonably sized place we could afford would have to be out of the city limits. I liked the
city, but buying a house was part of the plan, like in that board game Life, it was the next step.
Go to college. Advance to getting married. Proceed to buying a house. This was just like placing
another candy-colored card facedown, another step in order to move forward.
Martin/Junk Pile…2
The house was pretty, with its quaint, blue-painted alcove around the door. I liked that the
house had splintering window boxes and trails of ivy creeping over one side like crooked fingers,
cradling our new home in the palm of its leafy hand. These little things were what excused what
was missing.
It was about a one hour commute to my old job at the downtown library, so Greg didn’t
want me to do it anymore. I missed the soft smell of shampooed carpets in the lobby and the
gentle tapping of fingernails against keyboards. Greg still worked as a PA at the hospital and
soon after we moved, he would work late to cover whatever wages had been lost when I stopped
working. When he’d come home at the end of a day, looking for a beer as he dragged himself to
the comfort of an orange, threadbare couch we’d bought at a yard sale years ago, I would envy
him his exhaustion and his satisfaction of having a busy day behind him. Sometimes, he would
tell me about work, but more often he wouldn’t. When he did, he would talk about his patients,
about their families, about the new nurse Anna, whom he claimed was too talkative. I knew
better.
It was one of those nights that he didn’t want to talk after work. Greg was in the
bathroom attached to our bedroom, washing his hands. He had his white shirt sleeves rolled up
past his elbows, the hairs on his forearms standing up on end from the cold water.
“What would you like for dinner?” I asked him. I leaned my shoulder against the
doorjamb and settled the side of my head against the door’s hinge.
“I’ll eat whatever you had,” he said but he didn’t look up from the sink bowl. Sometimes
his voice surprised me, how it would be so familiar and yet still so different every day. I’d found
the word for it once, while I was folding his boxers in the afternoon, waiting for him to come
home: detached.
Martin/Junk Pile…3
“I haven’t eaten yet,” I said. “I thought we could eat together.”
He lifted his head slowly. His eyes were the last to rise. He wouldn’t turn around but he
looked at me in the reflection of the circular mirror above the sink. A year ago, when we’d lived
in the city, he’d had a shallow, stubbly beard. Now, it was clean shaven. His pale chin and the
sliver of meat that had grown on his cheeks made him look like a boy again, one barely out of
high school. His blue eyes caught mine and he sighed.
“Claire,” he said and then looked away. “I was going to go out with some of the guys
from work. I thought I could just eat here before I left. I really don’t have time to wait.”
I crossed my arms protectively over my chest and I could feel how my heart beat fast in
my chest. As if I was afraid of him.
“Well, could I come?” I asked. “You always come home from work so late. I eat a lot of
my dinners alone.”
“We have breakfast together,” Greg said.
He yanked the hand towel that hung by the sink off its hook and dried his hands, his eyes
intent on the gold embroidered birds on the cloth. His mother had given us the set for our
wedding shower.
“I know,” I said.
He tossed the towel into the sink bowl and strode past me, out of the doorway, unrolling
his cuffs. He made his way down the narrow hall toward the front door, his footsteps sending the
creaks of the old floorboards scattering through the house. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes
since he got home.
“Greg,” I called, following him. This felt like drowning, I decided. Like being pulled
under by a wave that I couldn’t stop from falling over me.
Martin/Junk Pile…4
“It’s just one night, Claire,” he said. The door closed.
A Beatles song was being piped into the grocery store. I thought I knew you, what did I
know? It sounded warped and wrong as it echoed around the nearly empty Harris Teeter. I
fanned my fingers out on the plastic grip of the shiny metal pushcart. You don’t look different,
but you have changed. The floor around the produce section was sticky and the wheels made a
cyclical smacking noise as they coasted along the beige speckled tiles.
“I’ll take the salmon,” I said to the man in a water-strained smock behind the counter.
I watched his plastic-covered hand probe the specimens in the case. I hated the smell by
the lobster tank where I was standing. It was like I could sense the creatures’ fear through their
thick outer shells and the gallons of water separating us. Then, the wrapped salmon package was
in my cart and I was pushing toward the salads. The fluorescents were doing cruel things to my
legs, I noticed, as I looked down at them sticking out from my wrinkled khaki shorts. The skin
looked almost translucent and I could see my pale, blue veins racing up my thighs like vines.
Those veins were a sign that old age was setting in. They must have shown up recently,
an unwelcome houseguest in the last year or so, because they certainly hadn’t been there when
I’d married Greg. They hadn’t been there the summers I used to begrudgingly go back home to
Charlottesville, Virginia to visit my parents.
Their house had always made me feel like I was a little girl again. When I was in high
school, it was a sensation that used to make me feel sad. In college, it just annoyed me.
One morning when I was home on a break, I woke up in my old bed with its purple
fringed bedspread and white wicker headboard late in the day. I stared at the old pictures of me
Martin/Junk Pile…5
and my high school friends I hadn’t seen in years and my high school boyfriend who had joined
the Navy after graduation. The room belonged to a different girl now, not the one who had gone
to college and gotten engaged to Greg Summerset.
Once I went downstairs, I padded across the linoleum floors in the kitchen, bread and
cereal crumbs sticking to my bare feet. My red toenail paint was chipping and I could feel my
bedridden hair slipping out of its misshapen bun and sticking to my neck. It was a weekend, so
Dad was sitting at the breakfast bar with his collared golf shirt and old, worn Birkenstocks on.
“Hey, Kiddo,” he said, closing his laptop and taking a sip of his coffee instead. I knew
Mom hated it when he drank coffee. She said she wouldn’t kiss him afterwards but I’d never
seen her kiss him anyway. “Good night sleep in your own bed?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Want me to whip you up something for breakfast?”
“I can get it myself, Dad,” I said as I moved toward the refrigerator. Every available
space on the fridge was covered with pieces of paper meant to embody me, held there by
magnets I’d made for arts and crafts in elementary school. An old calculus test with gray
smudged eraser marks smeared across the page. A picture of me tucked between my parents on
vacation at the beach. My acceptance letter to college, still scarred by the folds from when it
came out of the envelope.
“But I want to make you breakfast,” he said, getting to his feet. “Do waffles sound
good?”
I held in my sigh. Why shouldn’t I let him? These visits were more for the benefit of him
and Mom than they were for me. And what was I so impatient for anyway? It never should have
been to grow up.
Martin/Junk Pile…6
On my way to the bathroom, I passed a wall coated with my annual school pictures.
There I was when my black hair was cut to my chin. And there I was then I had a broken arm on
picture day from falling off my bike. I’d never ridden again after that. I’d never been good at
accepting failure.
I passed the open door to the guest room. The sheets were rumpled and I saw clothes
peeking over the edges of the drawers. A pink bra. A pair of pantyhose. I cast my eyes away
quickly. Mom hadn’t slept in the same room with Dad during my first three years of high school
but I’d thought she’d moved back into their master bedroom before I’d left for college.
Mom was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, a tube of mascara in one hand
and the coated mascara wand in the other, when I arrived. She always held her mouth open like a
fish when she put on mascara, and she was doing so now, her eyes so wide I thought they might
slip right out of her head and drop into the sink drain. Her hair was still in curlers but she was
already dressed in a jean skirt and white blouse. The whole room smelled like wilting flowers
and powdered blush. She jumped when I walked into the bathroom, smearing mascara on her
eyebrow.
“Gracious, Claire Bear, you scared me,” she said with a fake falsetto laugh. “Need to use
the potty?”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Okay, I’ll just use the mirror in the living room.” She began to collect the tubes and
small plastic cases from the sink top and dump them in her pink leopard print makeup case. She
turned to leave.
“Mom.” I stopped her.
Martin/Junk Pile…7
She poked her head back into the bathroom, the radiantly bright lights reflecting in her
half-made up eyes, chunks of mascara clumping her lashes.
“I saw the guest room,” I whispered. As if Dad didn’t know. “Why do you two keep
doing this? I won’t keep coming back forever. You can’t expect me to keep holding you two
together.”
Mom’s red lips pressed together. The lipstick made each wrinkle in her lips more defined.
The skin around her eyes slackened like a balloon slowly losing air. She suddenly looked old to
me.
“Because that’s what a marriage is, Claire,” she said. There was a stubborn desperation in
her eyes that I knew I would never envy. “It’s sticking to it. It’s making it work. I am going to fix
this.”
I couldn’t even manage to nod as she pressed a kiss to my forehead, a wet one in which I
could feel the creamy texture of the lipstick against my skin. I kept thinking that there were some
things that couldn’t be solved with a quick fix and I feared my parents were part of that junk pile,
the unable to be repaired.
----
I was still awake when Greg came home. My eyes flashed to the digital clock beside our
bed as the front door closed behind him. I closed my eyes as I heard his footsteps on the stairs,
the cream colored carpet softening the blows. I could hear him come closer down the hall and
him following his usual habits. His shirt was untucked with the soft sliding of cloth against cloth.
Martin/Junk Pile…8
His belt was undone with a whip and a loose snap in the air. I heard him groan, run a hand
through his hair. He was at the doorway now, his body casting a shadow over mine.
“Claire?” he whispered.
I faked deep breathing but he wasn’t fooled. We’d lived together too long now. I knew
what kind of toothpaste he liked (Crest whitening) and what kind of dinners gave him bad
indigestion (spicy Mexican). We knew each other too well but still, somehow, not enough.
“I know you’re awake. And I’ know you’re mad,” he said. “I bought you this house
dammit. I work so you don’t have to. I make you breakfast in the mornings.”
“I know,” I said.
I felt his weight on the bed, the creak of the springs. He smelled like cheap alcohol and
some kind of fruity perfume that didn’t belong to me. But it wasn’t hard for me to guess who it
did belong to. I could sense his body, how hot and tense it was.
“You know, don’t you?” he said.
We both knew he wasn’t talking about breakfast anymore.
“Of course I know,” I said, relieved that it had been spoken, at last.
He stood up again, and then sat down. He leaned over and I could feel the heat radiating
off of his palm as it hovered over my forehead. I scrunched up tighter inside myself and waited,
dreading this touch. In it there was pity and something regretful, but, even more so, something
desperate. I could see him in my mind, pockmarked skin from acne in his youth, dark half moons
under his eyes from not sleeping. And seeing this uncensored vision of him, I could only feel
sorry. I unraveled, my joints loosened, my eyes unclenching. I turned to him before he could
lower his hand to my skin.
Martin/Junk Pile…9
When he saw my face, he hesitated. There was silence, broken only by the bullfrogs he
had promised me. And between us we shared what would probably be our last moment of that
complete, unspoken understanding between a husband and wife. We shared that knowledge that
this could never be fixed.