Show and Tell
A Fictional Story by GretaLarkin.
It took four minutes. I opened the payroll file as I do every Monday, placed my cursor in the box next to my name, deleted “office help,” typed “Controller,” and hit save. Then I sat there a while with my hands in my lap.
Nobody said a word about it for several days. Then Roger came into my office with the quarterly, stood in the doorway holding it, and said, “You changed your title.”
“I did.”
“Okay,” he said.
That’s it. That’s the whole conversation. For thirty years, I didn’t have a real title, and it turned out the only thing standing between me and one was a few minutes and a save.
—
If you weren’t here for the first part of this, here’s what you need.
Last October my husband told me I looked ridiculous while I was on top of him, and I hit him in the balls with a closed fist, and instead of leaving me or calling the police, he asked me to do it again. We have been a different couple since. Not a nicer one exactly. A truer one.
Five months on, here’s where things sit.
I have a checking account at the credit union in the name of Monica Kolar, which is the name I had before I had his. There’s not much in it. That isn’t the point of it.
The dishwasher has not been reloaded behind my back since the twelfth of October.
He asks now. That’s the biggest one, and it took me a while to realize how big it is. Roger Vance, who spent three decades telling me what was going to happen, comes and finds me and asks. Sometimes it’s Sunday. Sometimes it’s a Tuesday for no reason at all. He’ll stand in the door of the kitchen with his hands in his pockets like a kid at a dance and wait for me to look up.
And I liked it. I want to be honest about the order things happened in, because what comes next is going to sound like I planned it. I didn’t plan any of it.
I liked it, and then I got bored with it.
Not bored with him and bored with the size of it. It was one of nine rooms in a house. Every good thing that had happened to me since October had happened between the two of us with the door shut, and I started to notice that I was living the most interesting part of my life in the only place nobody could see.
I’d catch myself at the office thinking about it. Sitting across from a woman from the bonding company with her folder open, and half of my head would be back in that bedroom, and the other half would be looking at this woman and thinking, you have no idea what I am.
I got tired of nobody having any idea what I am.
—
Roz Tedesco has done my hair since 1999.
She owns Salon Roxanne over in Lakewood. She’s been divorced twice, from Vinny and then from Doug, and if you sit in her chair for forty minutes you’ll hear about both of them, and you’ll enjoy it. She has been waiting years for me to admit my marriage was bad. She was never gentle about the waiting.
So she knew before I said anything. She had her hands in my hair, and she was looking at me in the mirror, and she stopped.
“Something’s different with you.”
“I got some sleep.”
“Monica.” She put the comb down. In twenty-seven years, I have never once seen Roz put the comb down. “You have been coming in here looking like a woman waiting on test results since the Bush administration. Don’t tell me you got some sleep.”
I looked at her in the mirror, and she looked at me, and I want you to understand that I had not made any decision at all up to that second.
Then I told her.
Not all of it. Enough. I told her about October and about the fist and about what happened to my husband’s body when I did it, and I watched her face in the mirror the entire time, because I was braced. I had thirty years of practice being braced.
She didn’t do any of the things I was braced for.
She pulled the other chair over with her foot, sat down in it, leaned in, and said, “Okay. Start again and go slower.”
I laughed so hard I got tears on the cape.
I was in that chair for two hours. She told a customer that the color needed to be processed, which was inaccurate. And at the end of it, Roz sat back, folded her arms, and said the thing that started everything else.
“Monica. Honey. You cannot tell me all that and then not let me see it.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why?”
I opened my mouth to give her the reason, and I did not have one. I had a feeling shaped like a reason, which is different, and I have learned to be suspicious of those. What I had was thirty years of a rule I’d never once said out loud: what happens in the house is nobody’s business, and a woman who lets people see is a woman who has lost control of her house.
That’s my mother’s rule. It’s not mine. It took me until fifty-three to notice whose voice it was in.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, which is what I say when I’ve already thought about it.
—
I should tell you about Thursday cards.
Every other Thursday, going on nine years, it’s me and Roz and Bernadette Fitch at somebody’s kitchen table playing cutthroat euchre, which is euchre for three and is a bad game that we all pretend is a good game because we don’t want to learn a new one.
Bernie is fifty-eight. She was a charge nurse in the emergency room at Fairview for 31 years. She retired in 2021 and has been mildly bored ever since. Her husband Denny died in 2019. Eleven weeks from the diagnosis to the funeral. She knits through everything, including this, including cards, including the parts of this story where you would not expect a person to be knitting.
Here’s what you need to know about Bernie, and it’s the only thing that matters about her.
Bernadette Fitch has seen somewhere north of four thousand naked men on the worst day of their lives. She has cut clothing off them, held things closed, and told them it would be fine when it wasn’t. There is no mystery left in it for her. Not a scrap. A man’s body is a thing she has an informed professional opinion about, the way a mechanic has an opinion about a transmission, and she will give you that opinion in the same voice she’d use to tell you it looks like rain.
It came up that Thursday. It came up the way it always does with her, sideways and in the middle of something else.
Roz was talking about a man she’d been seeing, a retired fireman from Rocky River, and she said something about how he was insecure about it, and Bernie put down a card and said:
“They almost all are. It’s the strangest thing about them.”
“You’d know,” Roz said.
“I would.” She picked up the trick and squared it. “I’ll tell you what nobody tells them. Almost every man alive is average. That’s what average means, there’s a great big pile of them right in the middle. And every single one of them walks around thinking average is a thing that happened to somebody else.”
She said it kindly. That’s the part I want you to hold on to. There was no meanness in it at all. She said it the way you’d say a man was five foot ten.
“Your lead, Monica,” she said.
And I sat there with my hand of cards and my heart going, and I looked across the table at Roz, and Roz was already looking at me.
—
I told Roger on a Sunday.
I did not ask him. I want to be exact about that, because the asking comes in a minute and the order matters. I told him.
He was at the sink. I said, “Thursday is cards at our house. Roz and Bernie are coming. I want you to be there.”
“I’m always here.”
“No,” I said. “I want you to be there.”
He turned around with a plate in his hand, and I watched my husband work it out, and I watched the exact second he got it. He put the plate down on the counter, not in the rack. Roger Vance has never in his life put a wet plate on a counter.
“No,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Monica, no. Absolutely not. Those are your friends. Roz is in this house at Christmas.”
“I know.”
“She’ll tell people.”
“She won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually,” I said. “But that isn’t the reason, and we both know it.”
He got very still. It’s a thing he does. For thirty years, I read it as him getting angry, and I know better now. He goes still when something is happening in him that he doesn’t have a name for.
“You can say no,” I said. “That’s the end of it. I mean that. Nobody’s going to mention it again, and I’ll deal one hand short.”
“I’m saying no.”
“Then it’s no.”
And I picked up the dish towel, dried the plate he’d set down, put it away, and we watched the second half of something, and I did not bring it up again. Not once. Not a look, not a joke, not a single one of those little pressures I have been on the receiving end of for thirty years and know how to apply better than he ever did.
That’s the whole trick, by the way, if you’re taking notes.
—
Tuesday night, going on eleven o’clock, I was reading in bed, and he came out of the bathroom and stood at the foot of it.
“What time on Thursday?”
I put the book down.
“Seven,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Roger.”
“What?”
“Come here and say it so I know you mean it.”
He came around to my side of the bed. My husband is six feet one, with hands like a catcher’s mitt, and he stood there in his undershirt at fifty-seven years old and could not get it out for a good ten seconds.
Then he said, “I want you to. In front of them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough.”
He looked at the wall over my head. “Because when it’s just us, I can still tell myself something about it,” he said. “And I don’t want to be able to tell myself anything about it.”
I have thought about that sentence more than any other sentence that man has ever said to me. It is the only completely honest thing I got out of him in three decades, and it cost him everything he had, and he said it standing in his socks.
“Seven o’clock,” I said. “Don’t eat much.”
—
They came at ten of seven, both of them, because they’d driven together, which meant they’d talked about it in the car. I’d told them on the phone. Roz screamed. Bernie said, “Well, all right,” in a woman’s voice, as if she’d been told the church picnic had been moved.
Roger was upstairs. That was the arrangement. I set the table the way I always set it for cards, the good deck, the score pad, and a bowl of the pretzels Roz likes, and I poured three glasses of wine and did not pour a fourth.
Roz couldn’t sit still. Bernie took out her knitting and did four rows.
“Are we playing,” Bernie said, “or are we going to sit here like it’s a wake?”
So we dealt.
And that’s the part I need you to understand about how the whole night went, because if you’re picturing something ceremonial, you’ve got it wrong. We played cards. That was the entire design, and I’d like credit for it, because I came up with it in the car at a red light on Detroit Road. It turned out to be the cruelest thing I have ever thought of, and I didn’t know that when I thought of it.
We were four hands in when I called up the stairs.
“Roger. Come down.”
—
He came down in his robe, and he stopped at the bottom of the stairs the way he did that first Tuesday morning, with his hands in the pockets, and nobody at that table looked up.
That was on purpose too. I’d said it to them in the kitchen while I was opening the wine. Don’t stop the game.
“Bernie, that’s your bid,” Roz said.
“I’m going alone.”
“You are not going alone with that.”
“Watch me.”
He stood there. I gave it a good long while, and then I said, without turning around, “Take the robe off, honey.”
I heard it come off. I heard it go over the back of the chair by the stairs, and I heard him breathe, and Roz played a card.
“Come stand at the end of the table.”
He came and stood at the end of the table. My husband, naked, at seven twenty on a Thursday night in the kitchen where we have eaten ten thousand dinners, with three women in cardigans playing euchre four feet away from him.
Nobody looked at him for a full thirty seconds.
I’d like to tell you I planned that part too. I didn’t. It just happened, because it was a real hand of cards and Bernie really was going alone. Roz was really mad about it, and by the time the trick was over, she threw her cards down and said, “Unbelievable.” Roger Vance had been standing naked in front of his wife’s friends for the length of a euchre hand, and not one of them had granted him so much as a glance.
Then Bernie put her cards face down, and turned in her chair, and looked at him.
—
I want to be careful here, because I could tell this part was cruel, and it would be a lie.
Bernie wasn’t cruel. Bernie has never been cruel in her life. What Bernie was interested in, and I have learned since that night, is that there is nothing on this earth worse for a man than a kind woman who is interested.
“Come here into the light a little,” she said. “I can’t see a thing at that end.”
He came into the light.
“Hm,” she said.
That was all. She said “hm” the way she’d say it at a mole, and she reached over and picked her wine up and had some, and my husband’s chest went red from the collarbone up.
“Can I ask you something?” she said to him.
He looked at me. Not at her. At me. And I understood right then what I actually had, and it went through me like a swallow of something hot: he was not going to answer one question in that room without checking with me first.
“You can answer her,” I said.
“Okay,” he said to Bernie.
“Are you a grower or a shower? I’m asking because you’re at about a five and a half right now, which is a hair under, and it matters for what I’m about to say.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Nobody’s ever asked me.”
“Well.” She set her glass down. “Somebody’s asking you now.”
Roz made a noise into her hand.
Bernie reached down beside her chair and got her bag, which is a canvas thing she carries her yarn in, and she went into it and came out with a cloth tape measure. And I want to tell you that the room did something when she did that. Roz stopped laughing. My own stomach dropped.
She did not have that tape measure for this. That’s the whole horror of it. Bernadette Fitch is a woman who has a tape measure in her bag on an ordinary Thursday because she is a woman who has a tape measure in her bag.
“Come here,” she said. “This is not a big deal, and I’d like you to stop looking like it’s a big deal.”
She measured him. Right there at my kitchen table, with her reading glasses down, holding it against him with two fingers the way she’d measure anything, and she read it out loud in a completely flat voice, and then she said the thing that took him apart.
“That’s average,” she said. “That is a perfectly good, completely ordinary, average size for a grown man, and I’d like you to hear me say that I mean it as a fact and not an insult.” She let the tape go slack. “The trouble with you people is that you hear the word average and you think it’s a grade. It isn’t a grade. It’s just the truth about most men, and most men are the ones running everything, so you’d think it would have occurred to somebody by now.”
And then she patted him on the hip, twice, like a woman patting a horse, and picked her cards back up.
“Your lead, Monica,” she said.
Roger made a sound. It wasn’t a word. It was the same sound he made in October when I hit him, and I looked up, and my husband was fully hard, standing at the end of the table, in front of a retired ER nurse who had just told him he was ordinary and meant it kindly.
—
“All right,” I said. “New rule.”
Both of them looked at me. He looked at me.
“I’m going to keep playing cards, because I’m winning and I intend to keep winning. Every hand that goes against me, he takes one.”
“Takes one what?” Roz said.
“Oh,” Bernie said, in a very small voice, because Bernie had already gotten there.
“Monica,” Roger said.
“You can say stop.”
Nothing. The clock over the stove.
“Deal,” he said.
—
I got euchred on the very next hand, which I want on the record as bad luck and not something I arranged.
I put my cards down, and I walked to the end of the table, and my husband put his hands behind his back before I told him to, and I hit him.
Not the fist. I haven’t used the fist since October, and I’m saving it. If you want to know what for, you can wait as long as he does. Back of the hand, right along the knuckles. Upward, not hard.
He came up on his toes, came back down, and didn’t make a sound.
“Feet apart,” Bernie said.
I looked at her.
“Not for him. For you.” She hadn’t put the knitting down. “He’s going to close up on you, and you’ll catch a hip bone and hurt your hand. Have him stand with a wider base.” She looked at my hand. “And not along the knuckles either. Flat, or the back of it. Knuckles are how you get a rupture, and a rupture is a surgery, and a surgery is a conversation with a resident at two in the morning about how exactly this happened.”
Nobody said anything at all.
“I’m being helpful,” Bernie said.
“You are,” I said.
“Feet apart,” she told him, and he moved his feet apart, and she went back to her row.
—
It went that way for six more hands.
I lost five of them, and there’s something in that I hadn’t expected either. I wanted to win. I have a competitive streak that thirty years of Roger buried in the yard, and it came straight up out of the ground at my own kitchen table, and I wanted every trick, and every time I didn’t get one my husband paid for it. Both of those were true at the same time and neither canceled the other out.
He was counting. Not out loud. I could see him doing it.
“Out loud,” I said.
“Six.”
“The whole thing.”
“That’s six,” he said. And then, because he understood what I wanted before I did, “Thank you.”
Roz set her wine down very carefully.
Around the eighth, Bernie said, “Hold on,” and got the tape measure back out.
“Sit down, Bernie.”
“One second.” She came around the table and measured him again, right there, with him breathing the way he was breathing, and she read the number and looked at him over the top of her glasses.
“Grower,” she said. “There you go. Now you know.”
And she sat back down and picked up her needles.
—
The cards kept it honest. That’s the part I’d want somebody to understand if they ever went and tried this. Every time it started to tip over into a show, there was a hand to play and a score to keep, and it would go straight back to being a Thursday.
Then Roz started in on him, and Roz is not Bernie.
“Turn around,” she said. “No, all the way. Slow.” And when he did it, she said something to me across the table about my husband’s backside that I am not going to repeat, and she said it to me, like he wasn’t there, and he stood facing the stove with his back to us and I watched his shoulders come up.
That was the discovery of the night, if you want the useful part. Bernie undid him by talking to him. Roz undid him by talking about him. He couldn’t tell which was worse, and neither can I.
And both of them, every single time, came to me first.
“Can I touch him?”
“No.”
“Can I ask him what he did to deserve this?”
“You can ask.”
“Can I have another one of these pretzels?”
“Roz.”
“I’m just checking, you’ve got rules.”
I had rules. I hadn’t written any of them down, and I hadn’t known I had them until somebody asked, and there they were, arriving in my mouth already finished, the way he always used to.
That’s what I got out of that night. Not the rest of it. Two women I’ve known for a quarter of a century asking me for permission about my own husband in my own kitchen, and me giving it or not giving it, and nobody once looking past me to check with him.
—
Around half past eight Roz asked for the one thing she actually wanted.
She’d been working up to it the better part of an hour. She asked the way she asks for anything, loud and all at once, like saying it fast would keep it from counting.
“Can I do one?”
“Ask him.”
That stopped her. It stopped everybody, me included, because I didn’t know I was going to say it until it was out of my mouth.
Roz turned around in her chair. “Can I do one?”
And my husband, naked, somewhere around his tenth, hands behind his back, a man who has been in charge of every room he ever walked into, said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Roz got up. She wiped her palms on her slacks, which I have never once seen that woman do. She stood in front of him, got herself set, brought her hand back, got about eight inches into it, and stopped.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I like you.”
“That’s all right,” Roger said.
“I’m going to sit down.”
“That’s all right.”
She sat down, put both hands over her face, and said “God almighty” through them.
And Bernadette Fitch, who had not gotten out of her chair, who had a glass of wine at her elbow, reached over sideways without looking up from her knitting and did it—clean, first try, with the back of her hand.
He went over the table.
“Sorry,” she said, knitting. “The window was open.”
—
At around nine, I stood up.
“Hands behind your back,” I said.
He put them behind his back.
“Both of you keep your seats,” I said. “Nobody touches him. Including me.”
Roz said, “Are you serious?” and Bernie said, “Shush.”
“You’re going to finish,” I said to him. “Nobody’s going to help you. And you’re going to look at them while you do it.”
He said, “I can’t.”
“You can’t, or you don’t want to.”
He was quiet.
“Say which one it is.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“Do you want me to stop this?”
And there it was again, the same door I opened for him in October, sitting wide open in my kitchen with two of my friends at the table. I meant it that night and I meant it this one. If he had walked through it, I’d have handed him his robe and dealt the next hand.
“No,” he said.
“Then look at them.”
I have never seen anything like the next four minutes, and I don’t expect to again.
He stood at the end of my kitchen table with his hands laced behind his back. His eyes went from Bernie to Roz and back like a man watching for traffic, and he was shaking in his legs, and he did not touch himself, and nobody touched him, and it took him a long, long time, and every second of it he was being looked at. Bernie had her chin on her hand, her cards face down, and she was watching him the way she’d watch a monitor. Roz had both hands over her mouth and her eyes enormous.
I stood beside him where he could see me if he turned his head, and I didn’t say one word.
When he got close, I could tell, because I had been married to him for thirty years.
“Stop.”
He stood there, shaking, his hands laced behind his back, and he did it. I let a full minute go by, and Bernie turned a card over, looked at it, and put it back down.
“Again.”
He got there faster the second time.
“Stop.”
The noise he made that time was not good, and I did not care at all.
The third time I let him come all the way to the edge of it. I knew because he was leaking from the tip. Then I walked around the end of the table and put my mouth next to his ear and said, “Twelve,” and I hit him.
When it happened, he made a noise like something coming apart, and he went forward at the waist and caught the back of a chair with both hands, which was the first time he’d moved them in half an hour, and it went on the floor of my kitchen and a little on the leg of the table.
Roz said, very quietly, “Oh, honey.”
And Bernie said, “Good. That’s good. Sit down before you go over,” and she got up and moved her chair back for him with her foot and then went to the sink and ran a dish towel under warm water and handed it to me, not to him, to me, because she knew whose it was to give.
—
They left a little after ten.
Roz hugged me at the door for a long time, which she never does, and said into my hair, “I want you to know I’ve been mad at that man since 2011 and I’m not anymore,” and I said, “That makes one of us,” and she laughed hard enough that Bernie shushed her from the driveway.
Then she stood on my porch with her coat half on, her keys already out, and she said it.
“You know what you should do.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m just saying. There’s a whole other thing you could do with this.”
“Goodnight, Roz.”
“I’m going. I’m going.” She went two steps down and turned around. “But you know.”
I did know. That’s the part I’m not going to pretend about. I had known for maybe three weeks, in the dishonest way you know something you haven’t let yourself finish thinking, and Roz Tedesco stood on my porch in the cold and finished it for me.
I shut the door, locked it, and put the chain on, which I never do.
—
I made the coffee Friday morning. He came down at twenty after and got himself a cup without asking, because that’s ours now, and he stood at the counter and drank it and looked out at the yard.
“Bernie’s not going to say anything to anybody,” I said.
“I know.”
“Are you all right?”
He thought about it. That’s new too. He used to answer that question before I finished asking it.
“I keep waiting to feel bad about it,” he said.
“And?”
“Nothing’s coming.”
He rinsed his cup and put it in the dishwasher, on the bottom, tines down, in the wrong row.
I looked at it. I looked at it for a good three seconds.
Then I shut the door, started it, and went to work.
The End.
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