"Fishwife"

My husband has loved fishing forever.

Kathleen, his mother, laughs about how he, at three or four years old, would sit for long periods of time on a low, wooden stool, holding a stick with a string tied to the end and a safety pin tied to the string. About how his bait was a Cheerio slipped over the pin, dangling into an old, galvanized washtub filled with water. He was "pishing" he told everybody, and not to be disturbed.

"Eddie!" Kathleen would call him to lunch.

And he'd come running in with his face all squinched up, and spout,

"I not Eddie! My name Buckley! Call me Buckley, Mama!"

"Where in the world did Buckley come from?" I asked him.

"I have no idea," he said. "Somebody I wanted to be."

He is Buckley to this day. Buckley crouches inside him, tow-headed and big-eyed and excited as only a child can be. Buckley keeps a box of Cheerios on his side of the bed and another box in his Jeep and he washes them down with cold root beer. Buckley bought the insane alarm clock that will blast both our heads off shortly. And Buckley's leaving me to go pishing today, like he does every blessed chance he gets.

I cover my face with a pillow, but it's scant protection when Ed's alarm sounds, when the whirring click-drag teases him, and a frantic male voice entices him—"GET UP! GET UP! GOT A BITE! LET HIM TAKE IT!"—and then the reel screams like a baby banshee when the fish takes off and the man screams wildly, "FISH OONNNN!!!"

Ed turns the alarm off and I snuggle into his side. Our snuggle time will be brief this morning. Not like fishless mornings. On fishless mornings, he spoons me and buries his face in my neck and holds on to me like I'm a precious gem.

"Don't get up," he whispers on fishless mornings. "It's a crime against nature for you to get up."

But Mother Nature lures him this morning with a power more potent than mine.

"Hey, Buckley," I murmur. "When you leavin'?"

"Soon. In about an hour."

"What time you comin' back?"

"Late. After dark. I'll call you if it's later than eleven."

"Oh really?" I'm awake now, and I can hear the chilly turn my voice takes, and then we both can hear the loud, pregnant silence.

And we both can hear me squeaking out of bed and stomping to the kitchen to make some coffee, and then stomping down the stairs to the rec room where Ed's gathering his gear. He's wearing a red and white plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thermal underwear. I love the way the underwear shows under his shirt, at the neck and on his arms. I love how his hair, graying at the temples, curls on the back of his neck. I love his straight, elegant nose. And I rather hate his guts.

I'm not ruling Ed gently here. I'm not ruling him at all.

"Wanta tell me what you're stomping about?" he asks.

"I'm not stomping."

His bushy eyebrows arch. His eyes behind his glasses aren't happy.

"I told you," he says. "I told you this was a day trip."

"You did not. You said eleven—about eleven. I thought you meant eleven in the morning."

"Honey," he sighs, "I'm sure I told you. And you know you're always welcome to go."

"Right. Sure thing. Me and you and Matt and all the guys and that damn rain. No thanks." And then I do a fast one-eighty and stomp up the stars.

Turning on my heel at the top, I point down to the floormat in front of the door leading to the garage. A FISHERMAN AND A NORMAL PERSON LIVE HERE, it reads in blue and red letters under a big blue fish.

"Before you go," I snarl, "read that!"

He looks at me all sweet. "Honey."

Stomp.

I'm brushing my teeth when he kisses the back of my neck.

"You can talk to me," he says.

I brush my teeth harder and lean further into the sink. I hear Matt's truck. Staccato horn beeps summon. Fishing, the real royalty, has spoken.

"Bye," Ed says, real low. I hear his footsteps on the stairs, listen to the back door close.

At the bedroom window, I part the blinds, see Matt climbing out of his Blazer. He's wearing his favorite, snappy, blue cap—WOMEN WANT ME—FISH FEAR ME, it claims on the front in scrolled white letters. Matt is cute as pie. He looks like Ed, minus about twenty pounds, and with a hairline that starts about an inch further back. He's smart, too. Single and looking, he says. Heavy into the Internet scene. Cyber-love, almost, a few times. He's having a hard time letting any woman catch him, though. Bails out everytime.

I let the blinds snap shut. I know without watching that Ed's loading his gear till Matt's truck is stuffed to bursting. I hear the trunk click, then the garage door moan, and then it's terribly quiet.

My bedroom is a perfect length for pacing. And it's a perfect time for me to fume. Not at Ed, but at me. I ignored the "instant" again. That instant, even though the hurt has fueled the anger into a hot, impenetrable wall, when I somehow have a choice—to apologize or soften. It's as fleeting as a lightning bug's glow, but it's there.

"When your anger cracks, even for an instant," we tell our married clients, "you need to take advantage of it. You need to let some light in."

This morning, I poured concrete in the crack. And snarled. Like a nag. A witch. A—horror of horrors—Fishwife.

I remember women gathered around the tables—my mother's bridge tables, our kitchen table, the dining room table, where gossip gurgled thick, though not as sweet, as the Karo syrup in the ever-present, glossy-brown pecan pie wedges. "Why Darlin'," the women would arch their brows, foreheads creased with disapproval, "how does he stand her? Don't you know she sounds just like a Fishwife?"

I never knew what a Fishwife was. I could see her though. Dumpy. Dirty dress stained at the armpits. Stringy hair. Shaking a huge, floppy fish above her head and shrieking at a man who was always frantically fleeing, leaving her alone. Always, always alone.

After making our bed, I roam everywhere. His white ceramic mug with a red fish and a green clock with SO MANY FISH—SO LITTLE TIME in red and green letters. The picture of him at Pass Lake, flushed, grinning, sporting a seventeen-inch rainbow. The fly-tying vice I gave him for his birthday next to a pile of dainty, pointy tools and fuzzy, furry stuff in rainbow colors. The catalog open to the section with the huge, rubber tubes. One of the tubes, with a Mel Gibson look-alike stuck in the middle, is circled in red with a question mark over it, waiting patiently for Ed's decision and his money. The stack of fishing magazines on the coffee table, filled with men to whom he's assigned heroic proportion. Men, he's told me, who are the "real" fly fishers. Men who've been tying their own flies for years, and who know the Latin names for them—

"Callibaetis," he read me last week from one of the slick-covered mags. "Limbata." He rolled out the words with a hushed reverence, lush words, as mysterious to me as he is mysterious when he sits, spellbound, winding chenille and wire and thread.

"Infrequens," he read. How apropos. Describes how much I see his butt on weekends.

I straighten the magazines, drum my fingers on the table. It's quiet here, the quiet that accompanies heavy, unsettled aloneness. It's as different from peaceful, all-is-well aloneness as sludge is from silt. This aloneness is a deep, dark purple, like a bruise, and I wear it, breathe it, during my shower and my lunch and the movie I halfway see. It's a relief to meet my friend Shasta at Victor's for coffee and scones. Shasta's Southern, too, transplanted from Alabama. She's tall, black-haired, cream-skinned, and she has a lighted makeup mirror. Her husband Tommy just got bit by the fly-fishing bug.

"Shoot, they don't know any better," Shasta sniffs. "They just follow their noses, and all they can smell is fish."

"You go out fishing with Tommy much?" I ask.

"Oh Lord, I tried," eyes rolling like green marbles. "He took me out a few weeks ago, and I just sat there prayin' the whole damn time. Please don't let him catch anything. Please, please God, don't let him." She shudders. "I'm not goin' anymore. Gives me a stomach ache watchin' him trap those poor innocent fish."

"Well, don't you get lonesome?"

"Not too bad," she fingers her square, silver earrings, so big they look like buckles. "Shoot, I savor it sometimes. Gives me time to shop."

"Yeah," I tell her. "Ed savors it, too."

Ed does savor the solitude of fishing, when all he can hear is the lapping of the water and the whoosh of the wind and the whip of his line through air. When it's just he and the fish, a predator hunting a predator, both of them links in a chain. He carries those connections and that eco-system around with him, and it colors the way he deals with everything. He basks in the lovely, natural cycles of mayflies and caddis so far removed from the "have to" structures imposed on us by work and responsibility. It helps him, I think, tolerate a heavier caseload than I. He tempers the impact of the emotional pain that seeps like dark, hot lava from his patients into his psyche by drifting into a world where life is predictable and death makes sense and creatures don't harm themselves. During the good, silver-blue alone time, he feels all this, and more.

He chooses his fishing buddies like we choose all our friends. Witty and exciting and wonderful, but so are easy and quiet.

"They're really nappable," we say of dinner guests sometimes, meaning we could all fall asleep on the couch after dessert and consider the evening a raving success. "Being with you is like being by myself," Ed's old friend, John, told him, and they both knew what a very high compliment that was.

Today though, Ed's precious together-alone time is sullied. He might be "pishing," but he's also "pished"—I know he is—at me. My guilt feeds my imagination, and I can see the guys jeering at him right about now.

"Buckley has a Fishwife. Buckley has a Fishwife," I hear them chant. Especially Matt.

"Women do not a fishing trip make," Matt's told me at least five times. "If women go, the thing becomes an outdoor excursion with fishing rods hauled along for God knows why. It can be great fun, now, I grant you that. But it's not a fishing trip." Ed never totally agrees with Matt, but he always grins at that stuff.

Buckley has a Fishwife. The voices taunt me all evening, and I can't smother them with my pillow when I finally go to bed.

This must be the elusive part of this marriage. Where peace is not attainable, and neither is sleep, and fishwives toss in tangled sheets like fish in troubled waters.

Ed trudges in full of sunburned hands and dirty shoes and bloodshot eyes.

"Catch anything?" I ask, as he climbs silently into bed.

"A couple of little ones," he says. "One two-pounder. Released him, though."

"Did you have fun?" I ask.

"It was all right." And then he waits, and I wait, for this very small rift in this huge, lonely world to mend.

"It wasn't all right here," I say. "It wasn't all right at all."

"No," he says. "I know."

"I'm not a Fishwife!" I blurt. "You think I am, but I'm not."

"A what? What are you talking about?"

"Well, I'm not! And if I was, I won't ever be again."

I feel him get tickled, feel the bed shake a little. Then he scoots a little closer, lacing my fingers with his.

"Hey," I whisper. "I'm sorry."

Turning, he slides his arm over me and breathes into my neck. His hair is damp. He smells like Cheerios and root beer and fish. He smells like a child, like Buckley, but his hair glints grown-man gray in the dark.

"I know," he says, forgiving as a child now, too. Willing, like a child, to let it all go and start over. "It's all right," he whispers, "It's all right."

This must be how the light gets in.