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eleanor no. 20 Eleanor woke suddenly in the night. The bedroom she shared with Harold was gloomy and gray. She sat up in bed, and looked over her shoulder, through the window that hovered a few inches above the headboard. (The bed beneath the window was her idea; Harold complained, not without reason, that it only made it colder on autumn and winter nights. He never seemed to mutter about it during the summer, when at night the house seemed to find itself in the middle of a long wind across the plains, and the breeze lessened the damp weight of the late evening heat.) Through the gap between the curtains she could scarcely make out the porch light of the house across the street; it wavered and seemed to pulse behind a nearly opaque sea of fog. For a moment, she was reminded of those wonderful monochromatic fall days back in Anchor Bend, when the sea grew a skin of fog and sloughed it off onto the shore. But this fog lacked the smell of salt and fish, and the absence of ribbons of low foghorns strung through it was conspicuous. All the same, she thought it was sort of beautiful, and she turned to wake Harold, but he was missing. The blankets on his side of the bed were peeled back and lay across the blankets on Eleanor’s, as if he’d thrown them back in a fit during the night and stormed off. Which probably wasn’t too far from the truth. She rose from bed and padded quietly down the short hallway between the bedroom and living room, passing along the way the small bathroom that they shared, and the kitchen that she almost exclusively occupied, and that he had rarely found occasion to use before she had moved in. She thought that she might find him at the front of the house, stretched out on the sofa, his feet hanging off of one end, and that’s exactly where he was, sleeping in a long tangle of limbs. Eleanor leaned against the door frame and watched him for a few minutes, the way his chest rose and fell so wildly that a girl could get seasick if she slept tucked up against him. She thought about waking him up, then spied the empty bottle on the end table and cancelled the idea. Harold was a one-beer fella, and a considerate drunk; he always disengaged himself from her presence, and always carefully put the bottles out of the way. Sometimes he managed even to take the bottle into the kitchen and rinse it with water so it wouldn’t smell, and then drop it into one of the trash bins beneath the sink. Sometimes he even put it into the right one. In any case, he wasn’t going to wake now, so Eleanor didn’t bother being quiet when she sliced across the living room and through the front door. She stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind her, and took up residence in the porch swing, which creaked comfortably beneath her. Sometimes she sat here for hours during the day, waving at the cars that passed because it seemed to be the expected thing to do. And more often, she came here at nightfall to watch the stars appear as the sky deepened. But tonight there were no stars, wasn’t even a sky. There was only this colorless soup, disturbed only by her neighbors’ yard lamps and porch lights like the glow of deep-sea divers’ headlamps. And not for the first time Eleanor wondered why she’d agreed to marry Harold, and why she’d let him talk her into moving in with him here, of all places, where the land was as flat and uninteresting as the people who inhabited it — most of all Harold himself. She turned her engagement ring absently around her finger — the stone was cubic zirconia, but Harold didn’t know she knew this; she’d seen the bill of sale, a folded yellow swatch of carbon tucked into the corner of his wallet, not that she really gave a shit about extravagances anyway — and wondered, also not for the first time, how she was going to get herself out of this mess.
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