Becoming a front-desk greeter at Republic of Health did for Patty’s spirits everything Walter had hoped a job would do. Everything and, alas, more. Her depression immediately seemed to lift, but this only showed how misleading the word “depression” was, because Walter was certain that her old unhappiness and anger and despair were all still present beneath her bright and brittle new way of being. She spent her mornings in her room, worked the p.m. shift at the gym, and didn’t get home until after ten. She began reading beauty and fitness magazines and noticeably using eye makeup. The sweatpants and baggy jeans that she’d been wearing in Washington, the sort of unconfining clothes that mental patients spend their days in, gave way to closer-fitting jeans that cost actual money.
“You look great,” Walter said one evening, trying to be nice.
“Well, now that I have an income,” she said, “I need something to spend it on, right?”
“You could always make charitable contributions to the Cerulean Mountain Trust instead.”
“Ha-ha-ha!”
“Our need is great.”
“I’m having fun, Walter. A tiny little bit of fun.”
But she didn’t really seem like she was having fun. She seemed like she was trying to hurt him, or spite him, or prove some kind of point. Walter began working out at Republic of Health himself, using a stack of free passes she’d given him, and he was unsettled by the intensity of the friendliness she directed at the members whose cards she scanned. She wore tiny-sleeved, provocatively sloganed Republic T-shirts (PUSH, SWEAT, LIFT) that highlighted her beautifully toned upper arms. Her eyes had a speed-freak glitter, and her laugh, which had always thrilled Walter, sounded false and ominous when he heard it echoing behind him in the Republic’s foyer. She was giving it to everybody now, giving it indiscriminately, meaninglessly, to every member who walked in off Wisconsin Avenue. And then one day he noticed a breast-augmentation brochure on her desk at home.
“Jesus,” he said, examining it. “This is obscene.”
“Actually, it’s a medical brochure.”
“It’s a
“Well, excuse me, I just thought it might be nice, for the short remainder of my comparative youth, to have a little bit of actual chest. To see what that might be like.”
“You already
“Well, that’s all very nice, dear, but in fact you don’t get to make the decision, because it’s not your body. It’s mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always said? You’re the feminist in this household.”
“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand what you’re doing with yourself.”
“Well, maybe you should just leave if you don’t like it. Have you considered that? It would solve the whole problem, like, instantly.”
“Well, that’s never going to happen, so—”
“I KNOW IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”
“So I might as well go ahead and buy myself some tits, to help make the years go by and give me something to save up my pennies for, is all I’m saying. I’m not talking about anything grotesquely large. You might even find you like ’em. Have you considered that?”
Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal. The polluted water was collected in big ponds of toxic sludge, and Walter had become so worried about having sludge impoundments in the middle of the Warbler Park that he’d tasked Lalitha with showing him how not to worry about it so much. This hadn’t been an easy task, since there was no way around the fact that when you dug up coal you also unearthed nasty chemicals like arsenic and cadmium that had been safely buried for millions of years. You could try dumping the poison back down into abandoned underground mines, but it had a way of seeping into the water table and ending up in drinking water. It really was a lot like the deep shit that got stirred up when a married couple fought: once certain things had been said, how could they ever be forgotten again? Lalitha was able to do enough research to reassure Walter that, if the sludge was carefully sequestered and properly contained, it eventually dried out enough that you could cover it with crushed rock and topsoil and pretend it wasn’t there. This story had become the sludge-pond gospel that he was determined to spread in West Virginia. He believed in it the same way he believed in ecological strongholds and science-based reclamation, because he had to believe in it, because of Patty. But now, as he lay and sought sleep on the hostile Days Inn mattress, between the scratchy Days Inn sheets, he wondered if any of it was true . . .
