A Loveless Match - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2001 by Aine Greaney

It's the small things you hate a man for. She could tell any of them this--the ones who phone in the radio or write to the Sunday papers with their tales of woe about wandering husbands. She's sure she wouldn't mind that--not that anyone in her right mind would have him. No, it's the small things, like his sweaty socks under the range, false teeth on the back kitchen window, and now this morning, a jam jar of his own, human dung in the fridge, ready and waiting to be brought to the doctor in the town.

From the press beside the range she reaches for her baking box. For years it's been this square, tin box, with the colored pictures of Christmas biscuits long faded. From the box she takes bread soda, baking powder, salt, the bags of brown and white flour with the tops folded down and held with a clothes peg. She takes a fistful of white flour, and thinks how even if she lost her eyesight, she could still find her way around and still make bread in this kitchen.

Of course, he'll leave the doctor until the very last minute. He'll come tattering in from the fields, still smelling of tractor diesel and musty hay, a quick look at the kitchen clock and then the car revving up and off with him like the hammers of hell--and all without a word to her. He can do nothing in time. The man'll be late for his own funeral.

As she swirls the brown into the white flour, she knows he'll say nothing, not even after he comes home from the town, or when the results of his tests come, as if a man keeps samples of his dung in the fridge every day of the week, and as if she needs tests to tell her anything. A woman has eyes in her head.

The big kitchen with its green painted walls and the blue-and-white floor files is too hot on this August day. He laid those files when she first came here. No cement floors, and no cheap linoleum, she'd declared as a young bride; hadn't she enough of that in her father's house? The devil's own job to keep clean. He'd have done anything to the house just to please her, anything to smooth the edges of her bustling, blunt ways. But everyone knew that theirs was no love match.

Love matches. That's all they talk about nowadays--on the radio, the telly, in the Sunday papers, as if the whole of Ireland were a bitch in heat.

On her shopping days in the town she sees them--these young teenagers with their school skirts up to their back sides, their faces lifted boldly to the sky, as if all the world and all the men were waiting for them. They shout things after her when she cycles past, an old, head-scarfed woman on a big, black bike laden down with messages. For who cycles anywhere in this country nowadays, except for daft fal-dals and sports? Tell those young girls you married to keep your father happy, for a house and forty-two acres of land, and they'd laugh their tinkling laughs and tell you to go on with your oul' yarns, sure that kind of thing only happens in India.

Not that they didn't have their times. Holding hands inside the all-night dances, her sister's dresses that had to be let out for her oversized, mannish body, her strong, wiry hair scooped up in rolls, shuffling through the hot, laughing crowds to Jack Powers and his big band. He was sensible but shy, no laughing white teeth or twinkle in his eye like her sister Bridie's man, who could charm the birds off the bushes. But really, what good was charm for an oversized girl with four sisters and no fortune? There was only the promise of his own, stolid self, his strong hands, and her own place.

And he'd been sweet on her, in his own way, following her and her sisters from dance to dance, waiting at the end of her father's road for her, and after the wedding breakfast, the train to Dublin for their honeymoon. She remembers the bed and breakfast off O'Connell Street, the woman and how she asked if they had enough of tea for themselves there now or would she make more? And she remembered how they only walked to the end of O'Connell Street, down past the GPO and then back again, like children afraid to stray too far. In the evenings, he treated her to buns and tea in a cafe. And the nights, she remembered those too, the grunting and fumbling, and their unspoken relief when it was all over, when they came back on the train to this house and the fields where every perch, every stone would become as familiar to her as her own hair.

During that first cold, raw winter, when he was up half the night with lambs dropping, he asked where was the sense in them both missing sleep? So, he'd moved into the small, back bedroom, and when he never returned to their own bedroom at the front of the house, nothing got said between them.

With the back of a floury hand she wipes her forehead and keeps kneading the lumps of dough, pushing and tucking it around and into itself, the familiar, sour-milk smell heavy in the hot kitchen. She shouldn't have lit the range today. It wasn't like he ate much anymore. But she can't think of that, can't think of the nights now--weeks? months?--when she's listened to the creak, creak, of him turning in his bed in the back room, like an old cow in a manger. Every night now she hears him shuffling down the corridor and then the sounds in the toilet, heaving, heaving, as if his thinning body would turn itself inside out altogether and empty down the hole to be flushed away. These things she could not dwell on, not in the light of day.