The Apprentice

This can’t be living. I drink too much Old Milwaukee and wake up in the morning and it tastes like old bread crusts in my mouth. All my underwear’s dirty, I can’t find my insurance policy.

Here I was thinking we had a good normal marriage. She dirtied up my car and changed the TV channels for me, and I’d bring her Butter Pecan Crunch home from Kroger’s. I’d tell her to just leave the dishes until tomorrow, things like that. I didn’t even say anything when her dog pissed in my chair. For better and for worse and all that. I even nursed her in sickness once.

Judy wanted to be a writer. Writewritewritewritewrite. That’s all she studied. She was always writing something, and always wanting me to read it. Hell, I’d read it. Some of it. I’d tell her it was pretty good if it was. Only most of the time it wasn’t. I’d try to be honest. She wrote this story one time about a man whose wife was always speeding and getting tickets. This woman would get three or four tickets a week. She’d come home and tell her husband about the tickets, and he’d raise hell with her. This went on for a while. The tickets were piling up. They owed something like sixteen hundred dollars to City Hall. So finally the guy decided he’d do something about it. He killed his wife. Blew her head off with a shotgun, and then confessed to the whole thing. When the cops found him he was wiping up her blood with the old traffic tickets. Terrific story, right? I told her I didn’t think much of it, and she got pissed off. That was the thing of it. If I told her I liked one of her stories, she’d pin me down on the couch with the story in her hand and try to get me to point out every paragraph, every sentence, hell, every word I liked. And if I didn’t like it, she’d sulk around the house for three or four days. There just wasn’t any pleasing her.

She didn’t want to have children yet. There was plenty of time, she said. Wait till I sell my novel, she said. I even took this high-paying job, working inside a nuclear reactor, so she could quit the post office and write full-time. I didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind having to eat TV dinners by myself sometimes. I mean, if you love somebody, you put up with them. Hell, I told her to go for it, grab all the gusto she could. But even that wasn’t enough. When we first got married, we’d go to a movie every Friday night. Then on Saturday night, we’d go out somewhere with some of our friends and listen to a band, have a few drinks, do some dancing and just kick up our heels.