The Helpmate

Fiction

She is angry.

Come to think of it, she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t angry.

She wakes up angry.

She makes breakfast angry, pours coffee angry, packs the children off to school angry. She cleans the house angry, does the shopping angry. She is angry when she meets the ladies for bridge and angry when she sits under the dryer at the salon, flipping through another vapid women’s magazine.

Some would say that society doesn’t teach women to express their anger, to channel it into something useful and constructive. She would argue the opposite.

All society does is prepare women to funnel their anger into useful action. Women’s anger keeps the world going ‘round. She sees it everywhere she looks, women positively incandescent with fury, directing that anger into scrubbing dishes and polishing windows. The world absolutely runs on women’s rage, the batteries constantly charged by the never-ending series of slights and offenses dealt by well-meaning, and patronizing men; and the women bought into the system - relishing the power they had shrewdly acquired and frantically pulling the ladder up after them. Women’s anger keeps the world going.

She is no different, she knows.

She doesn’t march her fury into the street, screaming about the mediocre men she sees running the world while brilliant women make Sunday roasts and organize bake sales and run carpool. She doesn’t direct her fury to her husband when he walks in at dinner time, fully expecting his dinner to be laid out, children scrubbed, and his wife mid-iced tea pour.

She doesn’t say anything, knowing he spends all day in his office at the church, writing sermons and counseling young married couples and making the occasional visit to a shut-in while she cleans and shops and cooks and visits the ladies of the parish, always bringing a pound cake or a tin of homemade cookies.

She does not ask him to help her clear the table or do the dishes after dinner. He retreats to the living room to play with the children, watch television, drink his sherry, read his book. She clears the table and washes the china from their wedding registry, polishes the silver plate flatware (she doesn’t believe in saving the nice but uses it regularly), puts away leftovers, washes pots and pans - angry.

He will always tell her to leave the heavy stuff for later and he take care of it, after the children are in bed, but she knows he always underestimates how long that process will be, how many bedtime stories and drinks of water there would be with three squirmy children fighting sleep. He always forgets how long it takes to check closets and under beds for monsters, how many people there are to ask God to bless, how long the dog will pace back and forth before choosing a child to sleep beside. By then, no one wants to do anything, much less scrub a casserole dish, so it is just easier to do it now, powered by her regular rage, and not the burning fury that lights her up when he puts his hand on her waist, kisses her forehead and said, “I’m just going to go make a few notes, honey, I’ll be right there to help,” only to disappear into his study until the small hours of the morning, losing track of time amidst sermon notes and parish prayer lists and correspondence with the bishop.

She graduated top of her class at Radcliffe. She had a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies, like her husband, but no divinity school would accept a woman for their master’s program, even if she pinky-swore that she would NEVER EVER DREAM of pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church, or even with the Methodists (Lord only knew what THEY would get up to). She was engaged by then, planning a small but lovely afternoon wedding with a cake-and-punch country club reception, and she knew better than to even suggest she have a career, but she so wanted to learn.

She didn’t grow up in this world, the world of country clubs and mothers wearing pearls; fathers who read the newspaper every morning with their coffee; and children with scrubbed faces and shoes that always fit, tights that never had holes. Her world was harsher, more hard scrabble.