Letter

Husband,
It is Sunday Morning, followed by a week in which I spent too much time away from my children and searching for my keys, a bill to be a paid, or my brown slacks for work that morning, or perhaps a form that I have been told to fill out, hidden under stacks of workbooks and papers. I am exhausted and resentful of the endless forms sent as email attachments in the same way I resent laundry, both of them seem to be trivial, keeping me away from real life’s work, teaching and motherhood. I am also tired of being myself today. I am tired of being the sort of person who is in trouble at work because I have forgotten to sign out in the office, or in trouble with you for leaving my bobby pins and earrings on the entertainment center or talking too much at dinner. We are in the midst of a difficult time in our marriage, this time without the intensity of anger I have felt in the past. Perhaps it is the new home that has taken the sting out of my anger, with enough spaces for me to escape our arguments in the sanctity of my bathtub. (We have paid the home builder extra for the real tile instead of getting the pre made plastic shower stall which he have grown to hate from years spent in shitty apartment complexes). I am writing to you, inspired by a favorite black female writer’s published letters to her ex husband,* also a white man, which I have read again last night and this morning, while hiding in the bathroom pretending to be on the toilet, embarrassed at wasting time that could be spent cleaning or being somehow useful. The letters I read frighten me, the thought that you and I could one day be so distant from each other. In weak imitation of this, I am writing to you out of fear. I feel confused sometimes, and uncertain of our marriage, and more uncertain of what real love is. I believe it to be this feeling that I have often mentioned to you when you are shaving and I stand behind you, watching in the mirror. It is a feeling that it is my own face being shaved and that I can almost imagine I am able to feel the razor across my cheek. You nod whenever I tell you this but only look confused. I am thinking of this look in your eyes, and now realize what is so familiar in the quality of these letters that I have read, and what makes me feel as if the words on the page could have been my own. It is the certainty of the author in writing the letter that these are words that will never be read by the person who they are written to, or if read will not be answered. You have spent most of the past week after work in the garage, retreating from my demands and the noisiness of the children, refinishing a chest my mother bought for my sixteenth birthday, which has become scratched and dull from too many years spent in storage. I have asked you to write a love letter and place it inside the box when it is complete, and although you have agreed, I wonder what your internal reaction to this and to me must have been. I feel fleetingly guilty, wondering if in this like in so many other things, I have pushed you into a zone of discomfort. The guilt is growing from the same tree that holds my feelings about how normal you are, how truly white and middle class. I think often (and mention to you in a baiting way), how comfortable your life could be if you had chosen someone who was, if not blond and white, than perhaps not quite so angry, someone who was not boycotting the Wal-Mart.
Love,
Your Wife

* The book referenced is Alice Walker's The Way Forward is with a Broken Heart