THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 59
M
ary Jane follows her hus-
band, Daniel, from room
to room, words pouring out
of her, yammering. Or hammering, as
he has said, as if she must hit every
nail on the head. What does he mean
by that, she wanted to know.
What do you mean by that? she
had asked, but Daniel shrugged.
No idea, he said.
She follows Daniel into the living
room, where he sits in the big blue
chair he likes to relax in after dinner,
watching home-improvement shows
on his device. Mary Jane has her own
device, though she is slightly less cap-
tivated by its offerings—the games
and apps and streaming services—
which is not to say she is above it, she
is definitely not above it, no, just
slightly less captivated. She often
checks the weather. In several cities.
But where was she?
Living room. Blue chair. Daniel.
Has he put in his earbuds? They dis-
appear into his ears, so she’s never
sure until she spies the tiny white tube
of plastic—stem of plastic?—bisect-
ing the earlobe. There was the time
in law school when Daniel decided
to pierce his earlobe with some-
thing—a safety pin? She hasn’t
thought of that in years.
Daniel looks up as if not quite re-
membering Mary Jane, or maybe he
did not register her following him
into the living room in the first place.
Regardless, here she is, or there she
is, a bad penny, an aching back, an er-
rand to run. She wears what she al-
ways wears these days: her fuzzy
sweater and leggings meant for yoga;
her hair is pulled into a ponytail,
though that sounds considered. She
most likely has not brushed her hair
at all. She most likely has grabbed the
shank in one hand and stretched an
elastic band around it. This she most
likely has done first thing in the morn-
ing, after splashing cold water on her
face and brushing her teeth, noticing
the dank smell of the formerly soft
white towel in their bathroom and
commenting on how that happened
so quickly—has he noticed as well?
And didn’t she just do the wash yes-
terday? These are the things she may
consider as she grabs the shank of her
hair and comments on how it has
never been longer, not even in law
school, stretching the elastic band
around the mass of it, looping once,
then twice. To her recent question of
whether he likes it gray, Daniel had
answered, Depends.
What do you think? she’s asking
now.
Is it a good idea or a so-so idea or
a terrible idea or what?
I can’t decide, she says.
I mean, I vacillate, or fluctuate—I
can never tell which word is right—
about the whole thing, but the ques-
tion is, would you?
I mean, what do you think? Do
you have thoughts? she says.T
o his credit, Daniel did not jump
into the whole home-improve-
ment fad when everyone else did
during the past year. It’s been a more
gradual thing. And for a long time he
hopped around from show to show,
never quite deciding if it was a waste
of time or if he was learning some-
thing useful, something he might
eventually apply to his own life.
His father had been a hobbyist,
which is to say, his father had had
many hobbies, including refurbishing
old furniture from junk shops—chairs
and dressers and the occasional table.
Daniel remembers the basement. His
father kept his complicated hardware
there in a fishing-tackle box; when
you opened the box, the drawers
popped up and out in three tiers, and
all its contents—tangles of coiled cop-
per wire, pins and dowels, drilling
screws and machine screws, hex nuts,
flat nuts, washers, caps, carriage and
toggle bolts—were suddenly, majesti-
cally, revealed.
The fishing-tackle box sat on the
hollow-core door that sat on the saw-
horses that served as his father’s work-
table. His father sat on a metal stool
he had salvaged from a dump, three-
legged and rickety. Next to the work-
table and the rickety metal stool was
the broken-down Victorian sofa that
had belonged to his father’s mother,
a woman Daniel had never met.
Her name was Gertrude, and by
all accounts she had been a beautiful
woman with a certain flair. The bro-
ken-down Victorian sofa was a tes-
tament to this: the way Daniel’s fa-ther told it, Gertrude had bought the
sofa with the paltry allowance she re-
ceived from her no-good husband, its
sturdy ornate frame—cherry—and
silk upholstery as grand as the par-
lors and drawing rooms it had passed
through. If that sofa could talk, Ger-
trude used to say, and it was true, it
looked as if it had a few stories to tell,
although now it sat next to the rick-
ety metal stool and the makeshift
worktable, silent. Something about
Gertrude’s death had taken the spunk
out of it, according to Daniel’s father,
and so he let it be as he puttered in
the basement, re-caning a rocking
chair, the Victorian sofa, flecked with
mold, having somehow lost a claw,
forgotten.
Given Daniel’s father’s hobby, you
might think that Daniel had learned
the names of all the complicated hard-
ware in his father’s toolbox during the
hours the two spent together in the
basement, but Daniel’s father pre-
ferred his hobbies solo, switching on
the light outside the basement door
after dinner and then descending,
alone, the f limsy stairs, dangerous
given the shaky bannister and the
concrete f loor below. Daniel had
learned the names much later, long
after his father had passed on.
Sometimes, as a child, Daniel had
imagined flicking off the switch out-
side the basement door, throwing his
father into total darkness; then his fa-
ther might be devoured, or at least
momentarily terrified, by the wet toads
that lived in the rain gutters just out-
side the basement windows. They
were hard to see, but Daniel knew
they were always there, camouflaged
in the brown decaying leaves that no
one ever bothered to clean out.M
ary Jane has no interest in home
improvement. She has other
fish to fry. Big fish. She wants answers
to life’s questions, or at least discus-
sions about them. If these questions
can’t be debated now, when time has
slowed to a standstill, what does that
say about all of it? What does that
say about everything?
Besides, the children are far away
and no longer children. Every few
weeks, she sees one or the other in a
kitchen or against a dark window