The Darker Domestic Arts

The trench is about two feet wide by six long and a mere one foot deep. About five percent the volume of a standard grave. Clearly it needs enlarging, perhaps another two feet in each direction. When it’s more like twenty-five percent of a grave I can plant enough asparagus for a family of six plus more for freezing.

Not that we’re a family of anything anymore. The youngest is finishing college and moving away and we won’t need nearly that much veg of any kind, possibly ever again. Nevertheless, I set about widening the trench.

My friend and neighbor Lana peers over the fence into my garden.

“New bed?”

“Asparagus.”

“Seems big.”

Lana knows I like asparagus, so the vastness being dedicated to it should be unsurprising. 

Then again, who knows what people know? Who knows what they see? Sure, they see the laughter and the four grown children and the cheerful yellow house with a smiling wife in a burgeoning garden. But what else? Do they see the rigid shoulders? What about the quivering lips or shoddy excuses or excess makeup in oddly positioned splotches? Do they see, not see, or deliberately ignore? Maybe in twenty four years of friendship Lana has never cottoned on. Maybe I’m actually invisible.

“I love asparagus,” I say, to help her see the big picture. “I’ll freeze the extra, have it all year.”

“Oh, I know you do. I know you will.” She laughs. Because it’s funny, the way I plant so many tomatoes, and how I make so much goddamn jam. How I bake so many hateful cookies and cram my freezer with the tons of fucking pies that prove my dedication to hearth and home.

I laugh along.

*     *     *

As a respite from trenching, I turn to winterizing. Weeding, a bane to many, is quite satisfying to me. The roots pull readily from moist soil, providing a sense of easy dominance one doesn’t often get to enjoy. As a new gardener, I offered great generosity to the weeds, giving them most of the season to blossom or indicate they contributed something to the garden collective. “Please become lovely,” I cajoled, hesitant to be too impatient or too harsh a judge. Each day was an act of forgiveness. Now I show no mercy. Years of disappointment—betrayal, really, when I’d been so willing to let them surprise me, gave them so many chances, begged so fervently—have hardened me. The adorable spreading ground-cover with its round, ferny leaves and perky yellow flowers seeds an infinitude of goats-head burrs that produce jolts of agony in unexpected moments. The soft, sage-like bush promising a pop of silver becomes leggy, messy, and ungovernable. They all spread with such ease, absorbing resources intended for the more beloved plantings, not behaving as members of the collective should by providing some benefit in return for all they take.

They deserve to die, and I oblige, and I enjoy it.

My attention turns next to the honeysuckle smothering the fence that separates my home from Lana’s. Technically it’s her plant, but I can see that a blight has started to touch the leaves. The well-being of the plant takes priority over any specific limb, and even over the legal household boundary. I pare away the rot, choosing which pieces of the whole must die for the greater good. Through my judgment, the plant will sweep forth healthier next spring than it has been in years.

The days are getting colder and shorter. Soon the frozen ground will resist further trenching, so the asparagus bed must be finished if it is to be ready for planting early in spring. It needs to be ready; I have great hopes for next year.

Simon, my eldest, will be giving me a grand-baby early next July. Hugo and Felix will have their business up and running in Moab by late June. Marie will be home after graduation in late May for a few weeks before heading off to get settled back east and starting medical school. All the boys plan to come home for a quick celebration of their baby sister before retreating again. I hope to give them reason to stay longer this time, but I can’t blame them for the distance. We understand one another.

Steven will take his week of fishing as soon as the ice breaks, typically early April, which is also about the right time to get the early planting done. That’s the time to get everything done, so I can enjoy the summer visiting all those flourishing lives.

I rent a backhoe to speed the trench along.

*     *     *

Lana is laughing at my ineptitude, pointing out where I’ve gouged the earth far deeper than the needed eighteen inches. As ever, I’m laughing along. We fill all silences with laughter. We get louder, elevating our mirth above the din of the vehicle.

“Knock that noise off.” Steven’s slender, compact body has been angled up against the screen door frame for some time, watching, wondering. He doesn’t care for asparagus. Why am I putting this kind of labor into something that is not explicitly for his benefit? He’s wondering whether he should insist that I desist. Yet he enjoys showing off the garden, this fecund evidence of a wife’s subjugation to the domestic arts. Perhaps the new bed will reflect suitably on the lord and his domain. Perhaps I should be allowed—even compelled—to continue. And yet he was disturbed from his own quiet afternoon by our fuss. He suffers an inchoate distress from the evidence that we can enjoy ourselves without reference to his presence. Once conceived, no matter how poorly understood, the unfocused rebuke must dominate. “Come inside. It’s getting late.” Even from fifty feet I can see his ominous scowl. Lana’s laughter cuts off abruptly without any hint of confusion. Steven is definitely not invisible.

“I’d better go,” I tell her, deploying my superpower of feigned nonchalance. Her wide eyes flick between me and my husband, whose brow is contracting with each extra minute it takes to put away my tools.

Maybe it’s gratitude for Lana’s perception, maybe it’s all the digging that’s made me stronger. Or maybe it’s the high hopes I have for the coming spring. For whichever reason, my back is a bit straighter, my step a bit firmer than usual as I go inside to await Steven’s displeasure.

*     *     *

Rushing, I finish the trench in the dead of night, trusting that windows closed against the deepening chill will keep the sound from disturbing anyone, although I notice the all-seeing Nancy Tenant next door peering out through her blinds. When the trench achieves the needed size, I refill it slightly to create a loose, well-drained region below the level of the asparagus plants, to help them along. Now I can add some compost and leave the bed to be perfected by spring’s warmth, ready for planting.

Whether a flower, a cookie, or a child, any form of creation has always struck me as profound. Something that wasn’t now becomes, and by my own agency. Rage, I think, must arise from frustration of that generative impulse. Poor Steven, denied the ability to gestate, whereas I marveled as each baby left my body, a complete new person. As they grew, their independence always came as a bittersweet surprise. Each time one taught me something I didn’t know, or expressed an opinion opposite to my own, the wonder returned with the realization that having once existed as a single entity was no guarantee of perpetual union. Their separateness was hard, but always a surprise, always a delight.

In some ways we are forever joined, of course. Long after my body was theirs to inhabit, it was still there for their protection, a windbreak ready to take the blows and weather the storms that their young forms couldn’t withstand. Over these past several years I’ve encouraged their flight—from me, from him, from home, from any obligation to bear witness—and it has felt like another creation, this time birthing a grown adult. No less painful, no less joyous.

As comfort during this labor to transplant living parts of myself, I turned to gardening. The planning, the concern, it feels very familiar. The fussing over seedlings that, if you look away for a long moment, rush forth and amaze you when next they catch your eye. It all becomes worthwhile when an actual vegetable materializes on the plant. It’s not a human life, but it’s creation and it feels powerful.

And it suits me. I am meticulous, and I’m a planner.

I studied the basic principles of horticulture, adopting different treatments for different beds. I stayed up late into the night tracking down seed varieties adapted to our climate. My physical strength grew. My confidence grew. My aspirations grew. I cultivated myself.

If only Steven would join me in this garden rather than merely claiming it. But that’s asking the impossible, I know.

And so I’m standing over the trench, my masterpiece, just in time. The air is turning from chilly to flat-out angry; a hard freeze is imminent. It was difficult work. Worthwhile, but difficult. This bed will support a perennial resurgence, offering sustenance that grows each year with greater vigor and volume. Such thoughts sustain me as winter, with its long nights, isolation, full sleeves, and high collars sets in with a vengeance.

*     *     *

January is hard.

Rather, January is long, cold, and dark. It’s Steven who’s hard, rendered tetchy by the completely foreseeable, clockwork circumstances of nature. He resents that once again his spring fishing excursion must wait for spring. Imposing his own clockwork order, Steven stalks the living room in the evenings, hunting faults that require correction.

Savvy in the law of our jungle, I hunker down in my den, the kitchen, looking busy and therefore above reproach. By Valentine’s, the freezer will be stocked with cookies, pies, lasagna, stew, and meatloaf, meals to be choked down in wary silence for months on end. In the quiet moments while each batch bakes, simmers, or cools, I sit still, drawing no attention, holding Ares on my lap.

Ares is the second-smartest inhabitant of the realm. In his prime, he was a noble and fierce protector of the tribe, hence his lordly name. The years have not been kind and his waddling, patchy, odorous form is lately found objectionable. The wise elder, like me, avoids the hunter. We solace one another.

It occurs to me that though I am an old dog, I’ve learned some new tricks and perhaps Ares is also capable of more. I begin a regimen of rising early for long walks. We must be home by 6 a.m. to avoid Nancy Tenant next door, who rises at 7 a.m. every day to begin her ritual surveillance of the neighborhood. If she sees Ares off leash, as I intend him to be, it will be Major News; I might even receive a visit from Animal Control, which won’t help anything.

So I rise in the dark of not-yet-morning and coax the old beast from his bed and into the cold, where we walk out the back of our yard, through a small wood, and down to the river before we turn and head home. My pedometer app says today was two miles and forty-five minutes at our slow pace. I am invigorated by the chill on my face, whereas Ares collapses back into his warm bed without eating breakfast.

Discipline is key. Discipline of self, I mean, not what Steven might call discipline. I don’t skip a day and within a week my partner in crime rises eagerly to greet me in the dark. The following week I attach the phone directly to his collar and eschew the leash. We are no longer pet and owner, but mid-life walking companions supporting one another with our self-improvement goals.

The next week is trickier. I open the door and Ares eyes me, confused, waiting. I usher him out but he only wanders around the yard. It takes days to convince him to venture without me, but even then, checking the app I can see he only went in circles just outside our property. I change tactics.

Now I walk each night as well, leaving a trail of his favorite treats in strategic spots along the route. We back up a week, walking together. Ares is delighted to find tasty treasures en route to the river. Eventually I reduce the treats to be less predictably spaced and even skip some days; I’ve read that intermittent reinforcement is more effective, and that sounds right. That’s how Steven trained his own pack, after all, keeping us always on alert, always on our toes. And indeed, by February there is no more hesitation. Ares bolts out along the path given half a chance. 

By March, I have installed a new dog door, the fancy kind with a timed lock. At each 5:15 a.m. click he races out to find his snacks. The app confirms he goes at his best-but-still-slow pace all the way out and back by 5:55. I’m now the delighted one, pleased with Ares’s geriatric renaissance. If I achieve nothing else this year, at least the dog is happy.

*     *     *

The asparagus crowns arrive in late March. I offer to share with everyone I know because in my foolish haste last fall I bought a gross of the dormant roots instead of the couple of dozen I intended. Lana gets twenty; Rudy across the street takes another ten. I doubt they’ll actually put in the effort but they briefly fantasize about doing it and I’m happy to support the dream. Pretty soon everyone in town knows I’m trying my hand at asparagus.

Weather reports indicate frosts looming in early April. Steven must delay his trip and I my planting. He cannot master his disappointment, so he masters me. But I am patient. Spring is inevitable.

*     *     *

Lana pops up and offers to help place out the crowns.

“Thanks, but no need. This is the last one.” It’s ten in the morning and I’m exhausted after a sleepless night, but a second wind moves through me as I position the final root-octopus. I am giddy with all I’ve accomplished over the past twenty-four hours.

We stand back to admire my handiwork. I’ll add a couple of inches of dirt every few weeks as the plants establish and by next year I’ll be harvesting pounds of the good stuff every week.

“I hope you guys really do love asparagus,” says Lana. 

“I do. Steven hates it, though.”

“All this prime real estate for a crop only one person eats?” 

There’s no answer, really. Perhaps in my middle years I’ve decided to treat myself. To consider my preferences alone rather than juggle six people’s competing desires. Perhaps I think Steven will come around when he tastes the home-grown goodness. Or perhaps I think Steven can go fuck himself. Lana is welcome to assume any of these interpretations.

“Where is Steven, anyway? Mike says he hasn’t been at the gym.”

“Fly fishing.”

“Hoback?”

“Green River.” Despite my best effort, I can’t suppress a tiny shudder as I add, “He should be home to dinner.”

*     *     *

“And when did you expect him home?”

The officer appears skeptical. They must get this all the time. Well, not this, precisely, I would imagine.

“He was supposed to drive home Sunday.”

“And you waited to call until today?”

“No. I called Sunday, and was told it wasn’t long enough. Again on Monday, and again on Tuesday. Today is just the first day anyone has been willing to talk to me.”

It’s true. I’ve been burning up the phone lines.

I recite the details: his plate number, his cell number. His plan to stop near Superior for lunch and a quick visit with his mom. They call the care facility and check the visitor logs, but Steven doesn’t appear to have been there. His mother thinks she saw him yesterday, but she thinks yesterday was 1962, and that Steven is her father. 

Within a week they’ve confirmed his phone has never left Wyoming; the last known general area for the signal was in a region of notoriously bad coverage more than four hours away.

The next day, the detective returns with more routine questions. Lana and her husband, Mike, are with me for support. She’s holding my hand; he’s trying to pretend that he’s not watching some game on his phone, whatever game he and Steven would have been watching together.

Maybe Steven is having an affair? Maybe he left me?

I say no—Steven would never, under any circumstances, leave me, affair or not. I am utterly certain that my husband would never cede the field of battle. The cop only smiles politely at what he assumes is denial. Lana and Mike catch the implication and back me up—the idea is ludicrous; Steven barely leaves home other than for work, has never so much as looked at another woman, not in decades. 

Does anyone have a grudge of some sort against him?

Again, Mike jumps to Steven’s defense. In Mike’s telling, my husband is the most upright, straight-shooting family man one could imagine. Jovial, generous, responsible, devoted. He’s not wrong; the image of Steven has always been delightful. Lana says nothing as her eyes flick between the yellowed fingerprints on my collar bone and the small patch of scarred scalp where a clump of hair failed to re-grow.

I decide on candor; it will inevitably come out anyway. “Steven is charming and well-liked but I’ll be honest with you, if anyone has a grudge against him it would be me and the kids. He can be violent.”

Mike feigns outrage until Lana gives him the Spousal Look and he backs off.

The officer thinks he has just come up with a new idea. “Why not leave him?”

How to answer? How to explain that there is no leaving someone whose entire self-worth derives from domination—he will find me, he will hound me, he will win. So I finally tell a lie. “He’s the father of my children; we have a life together. He’s difficult, but I love him.” Mike is appeased.

Does he have a life insurance policy?

“Yes,” I say to the entirely obvious question, “but it’s quite small now. Few months ago, I had him reduce it—smaller premiums, you know—and remove me as beneficiary. Now that the kids are grown, out of school, I wouldn’t need that money, so I thought we could cut out the middle-man.” I add that the kids don’t know about this. I do not add that I’m hopeful when they receive their small payouts, it will in some way mitigate the worst of the images from their childhoods.

The next question is also expected and I have to suppress a laugh when the detective finally gets there: “What’s that, over there in the garden?”

I explain about the asparagus. The cop nods, says something vague about his own wife and her garden. And yet the next day he and his team arrive to execute a search warrant. It is, after all, a mound of freshly dug soil that is very nearly the outline of a grave.

What is not expected is how I react as they dig up my precious new plantings. I’m standing at the fence, shaking badly, when Lana comes to see what this new bother is all about. “Shh, honey, it’s ok, we can replant the crowns.”

It’s true, we can replant the crowns. This is a temporary disturbance; their new lives will not be stopped. But I’m nearly frantic with a need to protect these innocents as I wasn’t able to protect others before them. I take deep, soothing breaths but my theatrics have spurred the team to dig with eager determination. Their faces are almost comical with shock when their shovels hit the porous layer of tuff two feet down that sheathes all the surrounding area.

As if anyone would be stupid enough to bury their husband in an obvious grave within sight of their own back door.

The detective sheepishly begins to gather the asparagus crowns so rudely expelled from their perfect bed. Lana helps me reposition and cover them. 

Not entirely deterred, the team canvasses the neighborhood. Lana tells the detective that we had a girls’ night on Steven’s last scheduled night away—ice cream and French fries, and to bed by midnight. Nancy Tenant is overjoyed when her moment arrives. I hear her shouting that she’s had her suspicions. She also knows that she didn’t see or hear me come or go all weekend. Saturday, she went to bed a bit early, she recalls, because she was under the weather, her spring allergies, sinuses, fatigue, and it was so kind of me to bring her some soup, but I’m like that and it’s been a hard winter and I’ve been helping her a lot. She confirms that she always hears our garage open: It faces her bedroom, and she makes a point of hearing it, of hearing everything. Except for her hours at church on Sunday, she keeps tabs on everyone. She cows the detective with her self-image as neighborhood godhead.

Back in the house, I’ve regained my cool. I can hear Lana explaining in the next room about how hard I worked, for months, to establish that planting, and how my steady appearance now is really just force of will—evidently I’m devastated by Steven’s disappearance, and the garden damage was just the final straw. When they return to the kitchen, the officers show some warmth and compassion for the first time. We chat over coffee like three old friends.

The detective tries to remain upbeat. Excited to think I’d buried my husband in a shallow grave in full view of the living room, he is now fighting disappointment. He’ll confirm my movements but is now leaning toward the most prosaic explanation: Steven left, reason unknown. With any luck, he’ll turn up soon. “And it’s good you don’t need the life insurance. It’ll be years before the company will agree to pay out.”

“Never mind the insurance; I’m hoping he’ll be back, officer.”

He is properly chagrined and calls in the missing person report to the correct Wyoming district and they promise they’ll send search teams and question other sportsmen along the river. I nod gratefully, cheered by their effort. 

The policeman leaves. Lana prepares a meal. In such times, keeping the machinery of life in motion feels like all one can do to help.

When I am finally alone, I pull out my cell phone from the drawer to take along on my routine daily errands. Once home, I mark a date two years in the future on my calendar app, when I’ll look into having Steven declared dead. Not that I’m likely to forget.

*     *     *

It takes a month for them to find him. I’m packing for Marie’s graduation when I get the visit. It appears he was shot in his tent, his gun, wallet, gear, and wedding ring all stolen.

How to respond? It’s something I’ve pondered repeatedly and failed to decide. Am I to be frantic or stoic? Enraged or resigned? In the end, nature takes over and I sink, shaking, into a chair, struck dumb with just a few tears leaking over quivering lips. The officer clumsily pats my hand, offers condolences, unaware that he’s witnessing the lifting of fear, the emotion of profoundest relief.

*     *     *

Except for its morning commutes on Ares’s collar, my cell wintered in a drawer, alongside some gladiola bulbs. When the police checked it and the phone records, they saw that I’ve got about the most boring habits possible. I drive to the grocery twice a week. I call my sister and my children. I walk to the river every single morning at 5:15. Any records will show that I used it to call Steven a few times since he left on his trip. Always from home, and as recently as the evening before he went missing, in fact, when I asked which camping site he was in. That’s all part of the public record, whereas records will definitely not show evidence of an eight-hour drive into Wyoming and back in the middle of the night, nor the single Ambien I put into some chicken barley soup, the tire tracks that stop some two miles from Steven’s tent, or a wedding ring at the bottom of Lake Marie.

*     *     *

It’s funny, holding old, scented Ares in my lap and looking about the house, how little has changed to account for the sense of light airiness in the space. There are new baby pictures on the fridge alongside some graduation photos, and a few more of a bicycle repair shop ribbon-cutting. There’s a calendar on the jam cupboard marked with the dates of all my upcoming trips to friends, family, and those precious adult children.  Otherwise, no difference, and yet such a change. 

Nothing is lacking. There’s no sense that a living member of this household has disappeared. Steven was excised with no apparent loss to the familial organism. Expendable, like a tumor. The children affected grief and immediately moved on to asking when I could visit and for how long. They’re as ready to share their newly burgeoning lives as they are to see mine. This has been my greatest fear, that they couldn’t forgive. But I underestimate them; they not only saw, they understood. They welcome me all the more eagerly because I can now visit unencumbered.

*     *     *

I did not know, but hoped it would be that way. I hoped it while training Ares and while making sedative-laced soup for Nancy. I prayed for it when Steven gaped up at me from his sleeping bag well before dawn that Sunday morning. The belief in his irrelevance steeled me against the recoil from each discharge of his own shotgun. My resolve was sustained along the frantic drive home, timed to arrive during 8 a.m. mass, by the near-certainty that within a year he’d be forgotten as a husband and father, remembered only as a blight in the otherwise lush ecosystem of our family. I retained just enough energy to be caught finishing the asparagus planting by Lana.

He didn’t show any confusion. If he had appeared to wonder why, I’d have felt sorry for a man so lacking in insight that he drove his entire family to hate him. I might have hesitated. Instead, he nodded slightly, granting that this turn of events was entirely explicable. Aside from my children, it’s the only thing across thirty years of marriage that I’m grateful for.

Looking out from the large window into the garden, only one summer into a new life, I see a jungle of squash and tomato vines. Eggplant are ripening into blackish smears against the verdant color scheme. The okra I tried as an experiment are shouty, with their burgundy pods pointed defiantly into the sky, and small round melons poke out here and there below them, hinting at enjoyment to come. Next to it all is a yellowing forest of soft, ferny shoots—early asparagus that mustn’t be harvested yet. This year was for patience and planning; the next year will be for feasting.

TESS LIGHT

Tess Light lives in the high mountain desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Her work has been produced or read across the United States and overseas, and tends to incorporate any or all of the following: sarcasm, death, sarcastic death, Buddhism, foodism, poetry, song, and Shakespeare.