Man Overboard

1 2 1 R M A N O V E R B O A R D J E A N M c G A R R Y There came a day when, damn it, he just couldn’t take any more. He’d o√ered the pearl-skinned girl a home, a little gal of her own, and upkeep. She’d quit her job, got as fat as she could, and outsmarted him in every way. Entering his own clean and decorated house, he felt skinned and gnawed, burnt by judgment, hobbled in his wants, urges, and habits by the scorn, digs, cracks, jabs, and smack-downs. It hadn’t started that way, although there were signs. Were there signs? he asked himself, as he hauled a wheeled bag, a shopping basket, and three nautical totes, wearing the clothes he’d woken up in the night before, every hour on the hour, puzzling over his fate. Everything here was his, but trying to take even his clothes upped the ante. As he packed, she grabbed things out of his hand, ripping the pocket of his favorite jacket and stretching his two best sweaters, maroon and navy; stamping on his French beret, and spitting on his summer boater, boring her kitten heel through the crown, tossing the chapeau to the little gal, wide awake and ready for action, who jammed it on her own head. She was a tiny twin of the original. It hadn’t started out that way, but were there signs? The pearl 1 2 2 M c G A R R Y Y gal liked to throw back the cold ones and tall ones, and roll in the hay, although there was a dryness, a prick in the back, when the back was turned. He’d married, and to his grief, into a family of oddballs: an old mother, all one color – no color – who lived to roll her cart to the A&P (never learned how to drive) and pile up things for the pantry, the icebox, the kitchen cabinets, the back of the stove, the cellar steps, and the kitchen table. Having enough in the pocket of her housedress to range the aisles for hours on end, estimating volume and weight for the ten reliable recipes in Fanny Farmer, and buy, buy, buy – this was her goal, her ideal, the reason she’d married the toad who died early, leaving the two girls, although one was never a girl, looked older than the mother from day one, or so he suspected. The giant older daughter ruled the roost until, twelve years later, the pearl came along, and the order of things upended. The father, soon to die, never amounted to anything in that Amazonia. They all liked to sit in the stifling middle room (the parlor left intact for the annual visits of the Right Reverend, the pastor, and His Excellency, the bishop). They sat in the stifling middle room talking back to the talk shows on the Bendix, and talk they could. They lived to talk, or chew the fat, as they put it. His entry into the stifling middle room came after the pearl had moved out and had her own digs, very di√erent indeed, set up for one thing, and one thing only, to trap a man – everything of a softness, a richness, where all roads led to the high altar, a fourposter piled with layers of satiny pu√s and furry throws, and pillows of every size and shape, a glorious (to this day, he remembered , licking his lips, and sweating a little) pen of pleasure, with nothing on the walls to distract, and a neatness and cleanliness that, for this family, was against nature. But return to the stifling room he must, as soon as the second month of daily dives passed, without a snag or slowdown, for that was the day and the age of virgins and ladies, and saving it for marriage, or later, or never. Two months and the visitation was on the to-do list, a daily reminder. Into the room he went, but there was no chair for him, arrayed in a...