Educated

When we arrived home from the service, Dad was incensed that lunch
wasn’t ready. Mother scrambled to serve the stew she’d left to slow-cook, but
after the meal Dad seemed equally frustrated by the dishes, which Mother
hurriedly cleaned, and then by his grandchildren, who played noisily while
Mother dashed about trying to hush them.
That evening, when the house was empty and quiet, I listened from the
living room as my parents argued in the kitchen.
“The least you could do,” Mother said, “is fill out these thank-you cards. It
was your mother, after all.”
“That’s wifely work,” Dad said. “I’ve never heard of a man writing cards.”
He had said the exact wrong thing. For ten years, Mother had been the
primary breadwinner, while continuing to cook meals, clean the house, do the
laundry, and I had never once heard her express anything like resentment.
Until now.
“Then you should do the husband’s work,” she said, her voice raised.
Soon they were both shouting. Dad tried to corral her, to subdue her with a
show of anger, the way he always had, but this only made her more stubborn.
Eventually she tossed the cards on the table and said, “Fill them out or don’t.
But if you don’t, no one will.” Then she marched downstairs. Dad followed,
and for an hour their shouts rose up through the floor. I’d never heard my
parents shout like that—at least, not my mother. I’d never seen her refuse to
give way.
The next morning I found Dad in the kitchen, dumping flour into a glue-
like substance I assumed was supposed to be pancake batter. When he saw
me, he dropped the flour and sat at the table. “You’re a woman, ain’tcha?” he
said. “Well, this here’s a kitchen.” We stared at each other and I
contemplated the distance that had sprung up between us—how natural those
words sounded to his ears, how grating to mine.
It wasn’t like Mother to leave Dad to make his own breakfast. I thought
she might be ill and went downstairs to check on her. I’d barely made it to the
landing when I heard it: deep sobs coming from the bathroom, muffled by the
steady drone of a blow-dryer. I stood outside the door and listened for more
than a minute, paralyzed. Would she want me to leave, to pretend I hadn’t
heard? I waited for her to catch her breath, but her sobs only grew more
desperate.
I knocked. “It’s me,” I said.