A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis

wife, who had to take the shuttle and might decide to stop off first at Bloomingdale’s. Once a week he paid the cleaning lady before he filled the ice bucket. The other four days he went straight to
    the refrigerator first thing after hanging up his coat. In the summertime he made his wife a whiskey sour and prepared a gin and tonic for himself. In the winter he drank whiskey and soda and set aside a glass of sherry for his wife. Then he turned on the television and watched while he waited for her to get home. For the first year after they bought the set, he was in time to watch
Gigantor, the Space Age Robot
. Then
Gigantor
moved to a new time period and he watched
Speed Racer
. He’d seen all the episodes twice. When his wife came home he turned off the set and they made supper together while they had their drinks. Occasionally Lowell would bring in a pizza or some little paper buckets of Chinese food or, very rarely and only as a special treat, a complete Pakistani meal from a restaurant down on Broadway. They took such quiet pleasure in cooking supper together that they almost never went out, and Lowell tended to become uneasy if his routine was disturbed. Whenever he brought food in, he regretted it. No sooner did he place his order than he knew he wouldn’t like it, and he never did.
    Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice. Her mother still had a nice spare bedroom ready in case her daughter came to her senses, and while there was no danger of this ever occurring—at least, not that way—the knowledge that his mother-in-law continued to nourish hope was a source of considerable irritation to Lowell, especially because he suspected that she was doing it at least partly to get his goat. As he conceived it, his mother-in-law’s mind was a place of dim shadows and brooding malice, and he could find nothing in it to recommend her, but curiously his wife had made friends with her mother almost immediately after they came to New York, and they were now fast friends. They went to
    S. Klein’s together and called each other up on the telephone and talked about people with comic-opera names like Marvin and Irving who lived in comic-opera places like Canarsie and Ozone Park—people Lowell had never met but about whom his wife unaccountably seemed to know volumes. It gave their conversations a peculiar, other-dimensional quality that profoundly disturbed him, as though his wife had a second identity that was completely alien to the one Lowell knew and cherished, a whole separate personality dwelling in another ethos that he could occasionally glimpse but never understand.
    â€œHow come you never talk to your mother about me?” he asked. “I’m your husband. I’m your mother’s son-in-law. How come you never mention me?”
    â€œIt’s not polite to eavesdrop,” said his wife primly. “Anyway, we do talk about you, so there. You just aren’t eavesdropping at the right times.”
    â€œYou’re always talking about a bunch of strangers.”
    â€œThat’s not true. They’re not either strangers. I’ve known Milly Norinski for years and years. What’s the matter with you? Can’t I talk about my friends with my own mother if I want to? Anyway, I don’t even like Milly Norinski. She’s nothing but an old bag and all she can talk about is money. You’d hate her, believe me. Count yourself lucky that I only talk about her to my mother. Listen, you want me to bore you? Ask me about Milly Norinski one of these times. Boy, would you ever be bored. I only keep up with her because I’ve known her since grade school. She never used to talk about money. People turn out funny sometimes. They surprise you.”
    Although over the years Lowell had heard his wife