The steadiness that gets an ISTJ man praised at work is the same steadiness that gets him read, at home, as a man who has quit choosing you. From inside the house that reading is the honest one. It is also short a category.
Harlan was regrouting the shower when I asked him whether he still loved me, which says something about my timing and more about the four years standing in front of it.
He didn’t stop. He drew the float across a section, pulled it back, and looked at the line he’d left.
“Yes.”
I stayed in the doorway of a bathroom nobody was going to be allowed to use until the next afternoon.
“Was that a question,” he said.
“It was a question.”
He set the float on the tub ledge, which in him is the same motion as sitting down. “I told you in October at your mother’s. If it changed I’d say.”
I want to be decent to the woman in that doorway, since she has cost me a good deal. She was thirty-one, with a two-year-old asleep down the hall and a nine o’clock in the chair the next morning, and she had asked a plain question and been handed a plain answer, and the answer was yes. What she wanted was for the answer to arrive as something happening. She wanted the float to go down because of her.
Harlan Rausch has run water for the Town of Ottley since he was twenty-four. Distribution: the pipe under the street, which in a town of five thousand means three men, one backhoe, and a phone that rings at whatever hour it likes. He backs into every parking space he has ever used. He will not buy the same tool twice, a sentence he says about tools and means about most things. He reads the council minutes the week they’re posted, including the ones about the mowing contract. When he doesn’t have an answer he says he’ll find out, and a day or two later he tells you, and what he tells you is right. He called his mother at four o’clock on Sundays for as long as I knew him, and she lived eleven minutes away.
The morning after the shower I did the whole scene for the shop. I had two in and one waiting and I gave them all of it: the float, the pause, if it changed I’d say, in his voice, which I can do. Pauline Deeter had to sit up out of the bowl. Bert put a hand on the back of the chair and laughed at the ceiling. That is where the sentence I lived inside for the next eleven years got built, and it got built because the room was good and I was good in it.
By that Christmas I had it down to a line. Somewhere around year four, I’d say, he finished loving me and started maintaining me.
It landed every time.
The four letters reached me in 2011, in my own chair, by way of Gwen Tabor, who was under the dryer with a magazine, working through one of the quizzes out loud to nobody. She did her husband first. Then she did Harlan, unasked, off about six facts she had from the counter, and read out the letters, and said, “ISTJ. Honey, there’s nothing personal in it.”
My phone was in my apron. It would have taken half a minute while she moved to the chair. I’ve told people since that it was a busy day, and it was a busy day. What’s true is that Gwen had handed me my own sentence with a serial number on it, and I did not want to learn that it came with instructions.
In November of 2016 Corene was twelve and home with a fever, at the table with the ginger ale I make a production of. Harlan called at four to say he’d be late again. I hung up and said something I don’t have to repeat here, because Corene gave the useful half of it back to me without looking up from her phone.
“Mom. He’s not going to change. That’s how he’s built.”
She had my cadence. She has my hands too, but the hands came free and the cadence I taught her, whatever I tell myself about it. I have tried since to work out how many times a girl hears a sentence before it stops being her mother’s and turns into hers. I don’t have a number. I have the sentence, and it’s in her now, and I put it there.
That night I asked him where he’d been. He said the west side. I asked doing what.
“Listening,” he said.
I didn’t ask what to.
The Grout Question
Ottley sits on limestone, and everybody here knows what that means about basements and almost nobody thinks about what it means about water. Under this town the rock is full of seams and rooms, a few of them big enough to stand up in, and it drinks. When a main lets go on flat ground in a clay county you get a fountain in the street, a hole, and a man from the paper. When one lets go here you generally get nothing whatsoever. The water goes down, finds a seam, and is gone, and the only sign of it anywhere on earth is the gap between two numbers on the town’s monthly sheet: what went into the system, and what came out of the meters. The difference is water we bought that nobody drank.
I’ve been behind a chair since I was twenty-one and in my own since 1999. The Marla Jean is two chairs, a bowl, a dryer, a front window on Front Street, and a bell somebody’s grandmother screwed to the door in 1961. Our water comes up out of that same limestone at around twenty grains, which in my trade is a fact about color. Hard water lays minerals into the cuticle, every shade you put over it goes brassy in five weeks, and the client blames the shade. I run a chelating wash on new heads before anything else, and I have had that argument with three distributors and won it twice.
The idea I had about my husband was not a stupid idea, and there are women inside it right now who did not get there by being fools. Here is how it ran.
Our tenth anniversary was 2012 and I wanted two nights in Brown County. He booked it in March. He had the exits written down, changed the oil the Wednesday before, filled the truck the night prior so we wouldn’t lose the morning, and found out which place up there does breakfast past nine, because I don’t eat before nine. We got as far as the Columbus exit and I started crying, and when he asked what was wrong I couldn’t say, because the honest answer was that the whole weekend had come at me like a work order and I could not find the man anywhere inside it.
The spring before, the town had the tower fight. Ottley’s tower is a 1958 spheroid on four legs with the name across the belly in letters a sign painter named Hoy Deeter did by hand in 1958 and did again in 1979 when he was seventy. The engineer’s recommendation in 2011 was a full blast and recoat, new lettering in the town typeface the clerk-treasurer had picked out of a book. Harlan went to the council meeting, which I believe he had done twice before in his life, and said the old letters ought to be traced off and put back in the same hand, and that he had photographed them from four sides so there’d be something to trace. He said maybe ninety words. He lost five to two. The tower got the new typeface and now looks like every tower between here and Evansville.
I remember being embarrassed for him. I remember thinking: it is a paint job, Harlan.
He kept the photographs in the truck for a while and then they weren’t in the truck. I went looking in 2019, because by then I had started looking for things. They were in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the tape.
Third Tuesdays
There’s a thing in a water system called exercising the valves. Every buried valve in town gets found, uncovered, and turned all the way closed and all the way open on a rotation, so that on the night you need to shut off two blocks in February, the valve turns. Ottley has around six hundred of them. Harlan and Buck Whitt did forty a month, third Tuesday, a rotation that took about fifteen months to get through and then started over at the beginning. Nothing happens when you exercise a valve. That’s the whole design. Nothing happens that night, and nothing happens for the next several years, and if you skip it, nothing happens then either. You find out in February.
Buck had been on the crew since 1981 and got his hair cut in my chair every third week for close to twenty years, so I knew about his knee before I knew what he and my husband did on Tuesdays. He put the knee off from 2009 to 2016 on the grounds that he had a pontoon boat in his brother-in-law’s barn that he was going to have in the water by Memorial Day, and every spring the boat needed one more thing, and every spring he told me about the thing while I did the back of his neck. He had the knee done in November of 2016. The boat has never been in the water. His sister has a dog that bit a meter reader in 2014 and Buck’s position is that the meter reader had it coming.
Opal Rausch got her diagnosis in the fall of 2013. She was seventy-four and she had been driving to the same church and the same grocery for fifty years, and she started arriving at both on the wrong days. Harlan went out Sunday at four the way he had gone out Sunday at four since he was nineteen, and then Wednesday too, and then Wednesday and Saturday. He did her gutters, her pills, her taxes, and the last hour of her afternoon, which she spent on a game show, getting the answers wrong on purpose so he would say them.
I read that as duty. I want to put it down that plainly. My mother-in-law was going under and my reading of my husband was that here is a man who honors an obligation.
The trap at the shop backed up twice in 2014 and both times he was there before six with the vac and the auger and had it running before Bert came in, and both times I thanked him the way you thank a man who came out on a Saturday.
I could have told you, in those years, the last time my husband surprised me. I kept the list without deciding to: Gatlinburg in 2004; the night in 2008 he came into the shop at closing with tickets to a thing at the college; the coat; the two months in 2010 when he taught himself my grandmother’s dumplings because I said once that I missed them. Four items, and the newest of them was seven years old. You can hear what kind of woman keeps a tally like that, and I’d rather you heard it from me than worked it out.
Corene asked him once, when she was nine or ten, what he did all day.
“I keep it so the water comes on.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Short Answers, Long Weather
A two-chair shop is where a town says out loud what it thinks about the people in it, and most of that thinking is about husbands.
I’ve been in that room close to thirty years and I can give you the rule without looking it up, because I helped write it. When a man goes quiet and steady, the room says he’s done: checked out, gone, serving his time. When a woman goes quiet and steady, the same room says she’s cold, or she’s running him, or she’s got the poor guy on a schedule. Same behavior, twice, in a room that already knows what it wants each version to mean. That the other reading has a whole different weather to it, and lands on a different woman, is its own piece and not mine. What I can testify to is that I sat in that chair and voted with the room both times, and got paid for it.
Harlan answers a question the way a meter answers a question. If he doesn’t have it, he says he’ll find out, and then he does, and what comes back has a number in it. If he has it, you get the thing and nothing on top. There’s no coat on it. I have watched people at a table wait for the rest and there is no rest, and then decide he’s being short with them, and he isn’t being anything with them.
In October of 2015 he got up on a Saturday, put on a collared shirt, drove to Terre Haute, and came back at six with nothing in his hands. He said it was something he’d had to do. I asked twice, once in the kitchen and once with the lights off, and both times he gave me the same eight words, and I have not asked since, and I do not know.
The utility does its Christmas at the fire barn, folding tables, a ham, the county’s worst punch. December of 2015 I did the bit. Buck was there and Brandt Coyle and his wife and the clerk-treasurer, and Harlan was four feet away with a paper plate in his hand.
“Thirteen years,” I said. “I’m on a maintenance schedule. Third Tuesday, whether I need it or not.”
Buck laughed, and then he did the thing where a man laughs and then finds the floor and stops. Brandt’s wife said oh my God with her hand up. Harlan didn’t say anything. He went and got a fork.
I did it again in February at Bert’s daughter’s shower, schedule and all, and it went over fine, and I want that on paper too.
He started going out at night in the spring of 2016. Not every night. Two or three a week, between eleven and four, and he’d come back in and put his boots on the mat and sit at the kitchen table for a while before he came up. I asked. He said he was out on the west side. He said there wasn’t anything to tell me yet. I decided he’d rather be out there, which as readings go had eleven years of support behind it and cost me nothing to hold.
That was the year the sheet started going wrong. The difference between what the town bought and what the town sold ran better than a fifth. It got read into the minutes in June and the paper picked it up in July with a headline about waste, and there was a letter the week after from a man on Doss Street who wanted to know what the water department did all day.
I read the number in the paper like everybody else.
Quarry and Doss
We had it out in February of 2017, in the kitchen, over nothing, the way you do.
I told him to either quit going out at night or tell me what he was doing out there.
“There’s nothing to tell you yet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s not,” he said, and got his coat.
On the twenty-first of March I came awake at three and the bed was empty and I got dressed and drove. It took four minutes to find him. The truck was at Quarry and Doss with the amber bar going and four cones out and no hole in the street.
Buck was on his knees at the curb box with a steel rod in his hand and his ear on the top of it. Harlan was ten feet up the street on the asphalt with a set of headphones on and a gray box on a strap, moving a disc the size of a hockey puck about eight inches at a time. Neither of them heard me get out.
“You can’t be out here in that coat,” Harlan said, when he turned around.
“Give me one true thing,” I said.
He looked at Buck. Buck found something that needed doing at the tailgate.
Then Harlan took the headphones off and held them out to me.
“Put these on.”
They were warm. He set the disc down on the asphalt in front of my shoes and put his hand flat on the pavement beside it, which I understood later was so I’d know where to listen and not then.
It was the sound of a shower running in a room three streets away with all the doors shut. Steady. It didn’t change when I moved my head. It had a floor under it, the way a note has a floor under it, and it went on and on and it had been going on and on the whole time I had been standing there getting cold and the whole time I had been asleep.
“How long has that been there.”
“Four years. Might be five.”
“You’ve known for four years.”
“I’ve known there was one somewhere for four years.” He took the headphones back and looped them over his forearm. “The sheet said so.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked off down Quarry at nothing, the way he does when he’s working out whether a thing is worth the words.
“Because I hadn’t found it,” he said.
Buck came back and said the mark was good and could he go home. Harlan said yes. Then he got the orange can out of the bed of the truck and put a line on the asphalt about the length of my arm, and stood up, and said the crew would be out at seven and it would be a two-day hole.
He put his coat over me in the truck and drove me home and went back.
Fifty Cents
The Ottley branch puts its discards on a cart by the door every April and lets them go at fifty cents. In May of 2017 I bought a paperback about the sixteen types because the cover was ugly and I was in a frame of mind to be told something. It was from 1994. Somebody had gone at chapter six with a highlighter and quit.
I read it in fifteen-minute pieces for three weeks, standing at the counter between a color and a rinse, which is a bad way to read a book and the only way I read anything.
What the book was good for, once you were past the parts promising me a career, was the ordered part. The letters stand in for a set of mental habits arranged in an order, from the one somebody runs on all day down to the one they barely have, and the whole stack, from the top of it to the bottom, is laid out in the piece about the type itself. For this one, the habit on top is a continuous comparison. The present moment, checked without pause against a stock of particulars from every other time something like this has happened. People hear that and think memory, the party kind, the kind that wins a bet at a reunion. It runs nearer to what my hands do when a head of hair is a quarter inch off where it was in March, which is register the difference before I’ve decided to look.
A man running on that does not re-decide the marriage on Thursdays. He set it. What he’s doing after that, all the time, without any of it coming to the surface, is holding the present up against how it has been, and moving when the two come apart. Which means that in the ordinary weather of such a marriage, nothing occurs.
The second habit takes all of that and puts it outside where other people can get at it. Schedules, rotations, the valve turned all the way closed and all the way open on the third Tuesday of the month. The town of Ottley has had the use of one man’s interior arranged into a public utility for close to thirty years now, and the town got a bargain.
Three things moved while I read that, on their own, in about a minute, at the counter, with somebody’s foils going.
October at my mother’s, first. He had said it in October and in the way he is put together October was still running. There’d been no change to report, so there was no report, and I had taken silence as a verdict when it was the absence of new business.
Then Brown County. The exits, the oil, the gas the night before, the place that does breakfast past nine. He had been assembling that weekend since March out of things he had noticed about me, and I sat in the truck at the Columbus exit and cried because none of it had happened at me.
Then Sunday at four, which had been Sunday at four since 1992 and did not change grade when his mother got sick. It went up in frequency and stayed the same in kind, and that is what I had been calling duty, because it never once arrived looking like a decision.
Here is what my list of four items was. It was a count of occurrences. That is a real instrument, it measures something true, and I would defend it in any room in this county. It has one hole in it, which is that an occurrence has to occur. I had no place to put fifteen years of nothing going wrong, so I called it nothing.
People come at this looking for a chart, which of the sixteen goes with which, and the chart is the wrong tool for what they’re actually frightened of. What decides it, as far as I can see from one house, is whether two people are measuring in the same unit, and when they aren’t, whether either one of them ever learns to read the other’s. A woman who counts occurrences and a man who runs on continuance can do very well. What makes it go is that somebody eventually asks the other one what they’ve been counting. No letter pair does that part for you.
I should say what the book was worth, since I’ve been quoting a fifty-cent paperback for seven years. A set of shared words for patterns people really do notice, with limits on it the book would not own up to. It did my husband in a paragraph and did me in a paragraph that fit me in the places I liked. A type description is written about a crowd, and I have never met the crowd.
Bert asked what I was reading. I told her. She said, “And?”
I said it was fifty cents.
The Winter After
I’d like to report that the book fixed it. What happened first is that I got angry, and the anger took about a year, and it wasn’t aimed anywhere useful.
Ten days after Quarry and Doss we were coming back from Bardwell with a load of shampoo in the bed and I started in on him in the cab. I said he could hear a pipe under a street through four feet of limestone and could not hear me across his own kitchen table, and that he ought to quit calling that a personality and call it what it was. He pulled into the lot at the station out on 50 and sat with his hands on the wheel and let me finish, which was worse, and then he said, “All right,” and pulled back out.
I went to bed before he came up for three weeks. I gave Bert a version of the truck in which I said one clean thing and he said nothing at all, and Bert said good for you, and I let her say it. In April I found out from Gwen Tabor that the hole at Quarry and Doss had taken four days instead of two because of what was under it, and that my husband had been in it, and I had not asked him one question about his work in a month.
And there’s the other thing, which is the one I would take back if they gave me one.
Opal had four years of that illness and I gave her the first two. There was no fight and no announcement. In the spring of 2014 I started having Saturdays at the shop, and then I had Saturdays at the shop for two years. The last time I went out before all of this she could still do the story about the dog and the flood of ’79, and she still put out the good glasses for me, four of them, for two people. I did not go back until July of 2017, and by then she had lost my name and kept his.
Harlan never asked me to come. He has never said one word about it, then or since, and I’ve decided that means he didn’t notice, because the other possibility is worse and I don’t have anywhere to put it.
I want to be careful in this part, because a piece like this can be used wrong. Some of what I’ve described was a bad reading of a good man. Some marriages that look like mine from the porch are not that at all. A person can be steady and can also have decided you don’t get a say, and no four letters make that acceptable or explain it into something else. The test I’d give, for whatever one woman’s test is worth, is what happens when you say plainly that a thing hurts. If it moves, even slowly, even in a shape you didn’t ask for, you have a translation problem and translation problems can be worked. If you say it for years at real cost and nothing anywhere moves, you have a different problem, and the framework has nothing to do with it and should not be allowed anywhere near it.
There’s one more and I’m not going to tidy it up. In 2009 he was offered the distribution job for an authority north of Indianapolis. More money, a real crew, a pension that meant something. He turned it down in eleven days without much discussion and told me the water here is his, and that was the whole of it. He has said a version of that four times in fifteen years. I have never believed it. I think he was afraid, and I think the water here is mine is what fear sounds like coming out of a man who wasn’t given the other words. The book has an answer for that. I read the answer twice and I still think what I think. That one is not cleared up and I do not expect it to be.
I started driving to Bardwell on Sundays in the summer of 2017. He didn’t say anything about that either. He just started leaving at ten of four, so I’d have time to get my coat.
The Saturday I Never Asked About
What he needs is not a list, and I have seen the lists. They all say the same thing, which is that he should be more like the person writing the list.
The one piece I can testify to is small. Once a month, usually on the first, I ask him what the difference was between the two numbers on the sheet. He tells me. It takes about forty seconds. Then, most times, he keeps going for a while, into what he thinks is under Ash Street and whether the meters on the east side are running slow, and that is the whole repair, and it took me fifteen years to find a question he could answer.
The letters do not cover him, and I want to be clear about that. There is a movie he cries at, which I am not going to name, and he has never cried at anything that happened to us. He has one temper in him and it is about people who cut through the cemetery. And the Saturday in Terre Haute is still a Saturday in Terre Haute. I’ve had the vocabulary for seven years now and it does not lay a finger on that one. Whatever he did, he did it in a collared shirt and came home at six with nothing in his hands, and I’ve made my peace with the shape of the hole without ever once finding out what fits in it.
Corene is twenty and works at a vet clinic in Bloomington. In March she told me, in the car, on 37, that I do to her what I did to him. That I decide what her quiet means and then have the conversation with the version I decided on.
I told her she was upset. She was upset. I have turned it over a good deal since and I still think she was upset, and I am putting it here anyway, because I have been wrong from that exact posture before and I would like there to be a witness this time.
Pauline Deeter has been in my chair the third Wednesday of the month since the shop opened. Twenty-five years of a color she has never once mentioned, and she thanks me every single time for the coffee.
The survey still runs on the quiet nights, November through March, because that’s when the town gets down under the noise and the ground carries. Last Tuesday I came down at ten of two. He had his boots on and was standing at the counter with the thermos already in his hand, waiting the way a man waits when he’s early, and he said the pressure was falling and the ground would be loud tonight.
I said stay in, then.
He said no, he’d go listen anyway.
The door does a thing when it’s cold. He pulled it to and I heard the latch catch, and then the truck, and then I stood in my kitchen a while with the light off.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.