When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books under 200 pages .TXT) 📕

I say, over my shoulder, “Sorry, there’s nothing ready. I didn’t have a chance. I didn’t know you were coming back today, I mean, I guess I forgot. I haven’t eaten either. You want to order something?” We’ll just figure out dinner and I can tell him, tell him about…that I’m…

“What are these?” He holds up some frozen dinners. Ready meals, that’s the English word for them. “Can I have one of these?” He’s sharp, testy.

“Sure,” I say. He chooses spaghetti carbonara for himself and puts the other boxes back in the freezer. He doesn’t offer to heat one up for me. I didn’t even realize I had bought that—frozen pasta. I’ve betrayed every Italian grandmother on Staten Island.

“How do I do this? Microwave or oven?” Harry asks me, annoyed, tired.

“I don’t know, read the instructions. Those are oven ones, I guess.”

“What temperature?” he shoots back at me.

“I don’t know, Harry. Read the box.” I can’t tell him anything.

“It’s been a long day.”

“OK, so now you can’t read?” Why is he doing this?

“Not now, Gigi.” It comes out sterner than he meant it to. Or not.

Another long silence while he tries to figure out how to feed himself. Sliding off the cardboard sleeve, poking holes in the plastic film, saying without words that he’s annoyed that, once again, nothing was prepared for his arrival. That he’s worked all day and traveled and what is it that I do all day? I can hear him thinking it, What does she do all day? as he flips over the cardboard sleeve to check the temperatures again.

I pretend not to notice. Change the subject. I need therapy, I’m struggling, the doctor gave me a prescription for drugs weeks ago and maybe I should take them but I say, “I have to pay for Johnny’s cricket membership.”

“Fine.” Harry holds the cardboard sleeve close to his face to decode the instructions.

“Also the bill for the dentist,” I say, finding it hard to stay composed. I can’t stand this. He’s a fucking grown man and he has to make a show of how he’s “making dinner.”

“OK, I’ll transfer some money to the house account.”

“There’s the card for your aunt on the table to sign.”

“OK.” Because I do that too now. Remember his fucking shit for his fucking family. Even though that aunt calls me Georgina because Gigi isn’t a “proper name.”

He flounders around the kitchen looking for a, “Baking tray? What’s a baking tray? Do we have one? It says put on a baking tray.”

He wants me to do it. Find the baking tray, make the food, be the wife. Let him focus on his one very important task, his one thing, his work. He’s too important to heat up this ready meal because he works. He’s forgotten I have a job, that I know what it means to work. That when I did my work I came home and did all the home stuff too. I didn’t make anywhere near the same money as him but dammit if I didn’t work as hard at both my jobs.

“There’s a baking tray in the bottom drawer. Johnny has a game, I mean a cricket match, on Saturday. Can you take him?” Because I can’t. Can you take the baby too? Can someone take the baby because maybe if you took the baby for a day—

“OK, where is it?” He’s half shouting.

“Surbiton.”

“No, the baking tray.”

“The bottom drawer.” Please, just for that one day, because if I can get to Saturday and he just takes the—

“I’m in the bottom drawer, I can’t find it.”

“It’s there.”

“Where?”

“Well, ordinarily, if something’s not right on top you might find that using your hands to move other things out of the way may help you to find it. That’s called ‘looking for something.’ You live here, you should find out where we keep shit.”

It goes on and I let it. The fruitless search for the hidden pot holders, the camouflaged serving spoon, the missing condiments that are visible only to women. There’s an implicit meaning in every clang of a pan, pans that should not even be clanging because he’s making a fucking frozen dinner.

Twenty minutes of silence while I sort the laundry mindlessly and he checks the window of the oven compulsively so he doesn’t burn his food. He finally sits down to eat. Alone. He opens his laptop to read the news. Then, “I’m out tomorrow night and the night after.”

“But you just got home.”

“It’s part of my job, you know that.”

“Lucky you.” I leave him to his pasta and load the washer and try to figure out how this went wrong. How I went from needing him to hating him so fast. How I went from wanting to tell him everything to saying nothing.

“I’m going to bed. I’ll be in the guestroom.”

“I just got home, as you said, but of course you will,” he says to his screen, winding spaghetti absent-mindedly on the fork.

I stop in my tracks and say, with my back to him, my head bowed, “Why should I go up and down stairs all night when I can just sleep near them?”

“It’s fine, I understand, you just haven’t slept in our room for I don’t know how long.”

“And you haven’t gotten up in the night for I don’t know how long either.”

“I have a deal on. I have work. It’d be nice if you would acknowledge me and what I do for this family. It would be nice to have some support sometimes.” It’d be nice, Gigi, if you could just have sex with me when I want it and make fucking dinner and not be mentally ill or make me dread coming home every night to listen to you complain about the life I’ve made for us. There’s a silence and then he says it again, “It would be nice.”

“Yeah, it would.” Yeah, it would.

“I’m under a lot of stress.”

“Of course you are. I can’t imagine.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. You know that’s not what I’m