Small Plates by Katherine Hall Page Page B

“short”—she was quick to correct anyone who made the mistake. She was quick to correct any mistakes, Mr. Carter discovered shortly, not petitely, after their marriage. She was quick to learn new things too. She’d had no trouble moving first from a manual to electric typewriter, then to a word processor. She tossed words like gigabyte and RAM around with aplomb. “It’s so simple, Charles. Children four and five years old, younger even, use computers all the time. I should think a man in his sixties would have no trouble.” He’d give it a shot and after a while hit a key plunging the screen into darkness or producing ominous messages with fused bomb icons.
    It was following one of these episodes, which took one of the younger agents in the office an hour to rectify, that retirement was strongly suggested. Forty years. No gold watch. No testimonial dinner. Squat. Mabel, who’d decided to retire at the same time over the protests of her boss, got a dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses and a cut glass Waterford vase. “Very tasteful,” she’d pronounced.
    Yes, she’d been a cute little thing, but as the years went by, only “little” remained. She had always been plagued with allergies, and as a consequence her nose was red, her face pinched, and her eyes watery. She kept tissues stuffed up her sleeves. It drove Mr. Carter crazy to see them sticking out from her cuffs, bits of white—wet with mucus. After Mabel stopped working, she stopped dressing up and replaced the suits and high heels she’d favored with sweats and athletic shoes. “Why not be comfortable?” she said and ridiculed the way he kept his closetful of suits brushed, his wing tips polished. He wore the khakis and plaid sports shirts previously reserved for weekends every day now, but each Sunday he put on one of his suits for church, rotating it to the end of the row when he took it off. Mabel had stopped going to church. “I can talk to God anywhere.” She used the time for her daily power walk. She was constantly urging him to join her and do something other than sit indoors and read. “If not walking, then go to a gym. Anything but vegetate. You don’t even have a hobby!”
    Mabel’s hobby was her garden. She grew flowers and more produce than they could ever eat, crowding the chest freezer in the basement—next to the pails of mushrooms she tended—with lima beans, stewed tomatoes, and other things Mr. Carter disliked eating.
    Mr. Carter didn’t feel the need of a gym. He weighed the same as he had the day he was married. And he did get out of the house. He walked to the library. And sometimes he took the bus and went to one of the museums in Boston. His hobbies were reading, he told Mabel, and art. She would snort at his answer. “You’re supposed to produce something with a hobby. Besides, reading doesn’t count. Anybody can read.”
    Maybe he wouldn’t hate her so much if they’d had children, but Mabel hadn’t been too keen on the idea, and then when she’d grudgingly given in, they couldn’t. “It wasn’t meant to be,” she told anyone bold enough to inquire. He supposed he could have divorced her, but he’d been busy at work and their nightly interactions had been brief, limited to a quick dinner before he settled in with his book and she with her seed catalogues. And what would have been the grounds? Drippy nose? Bossiness? Lima beans? More important, “divorced” was not as desirable as “widowed.” Divorced meant something had been wrong with your marriage, that maybe you had done something wrong. It wasn’t the image he wanted for himself. And it wasn’t true.
    Maybe he wouldn’t hate her so much if she’d kept working. It was her constant presence that was driving him mad. He’d suggested she think about taking a part-time job, not let her skills