My husband was depressed, he said, and needed to do something about the sadness, corral or detain it, launder and flush it, along with the other bleak feelings he’d been feeling. These feelings were so pervasive, so entrenched, that maybe I barely noticed them, he said, his solitudes, his suffering, maybe that’s why I took it all for granted—because he took it all for granted, too, he said, he wasn’t blaming anyone, he truly wasn’t, but that was why he was so desperate to do something, even something fiscally negligent, he admitted, and a little outlandish, to stoke his spirits and evacuate the malaise and alleviate the sheer sadness of his everyday life—

“Stop right there,” I said. “Our life.”

“Yes,” he said. “This concerns you, too.”

“Oh, thanks.”

“I bought a hot tub,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“It’s a hot tub,” he said. 

“I’ve heard of them.”

“I bought it online. It’s only lightly used.”

“Used? By other people? Mammals? Socialists?”

“The price was discounted. The listing said ‘like new’ or ‘new adjacent’ condition.”

“It can be returned,” I said. 

“No,” he said.

“Anything can be returned. You can be returned.”

“I need this,” he said. “Show a little pity.”

“How much?”

“How much pity? In metric terms or imperial—”

“The cost.”

“Six hundred,” he said. 

“Is that cheap?”

“It’s a fucking steal.”

“I bet they kill us on the shipping,” I said.

“The shipping is free. That was part of the deal. I just have to rent a truck and drive to Nebraska and load it up and haul it back and unload and install it myself, with you and the children offering grateful and quiet assistance.”

“You better be kidding.”

“I’m depressed,” he said. “Not stupid.”

“You can be stupid, too.”

“I didn’t want to bring this up. But I’ve been having thoughts. Ugly thoughts. The kind where a person does something terribly real to himself.”

I was kneeling in our garden, trying to infuse more lifespan into our dwindling root vegetables. Now, here was my husband, weeding his own bleakness, plucking it like a turnip. A turnip that believed itself to be suicidal. I didn’t know why he was allowed a monopoly on depression. Our kids called me Princess Prozac, for god’s sake. They corralled and detained my steak knives and hid them behind the couch. None of this was fair, I thought, but since when was fairness a precept in marriage? In adulthood? In anything?

All my husband could do was shrug.

“My pain is authentic pain,” he said, without much confidence. “And it’s not just for me. Maybe a hot tub will thaw that icy witch heart of yours.”

“Finally,” I smiled, “the sweet talk.”

I don’t care what the horticultural tabloids claim. The joy of gardening is not in nurturing primordial connections or planting slim tendrils of hope amid the daily crabgrass. It’s an excuse to get out of an unquiet house before you murder your loved ones with a rototiller. Which, for the record, we did not own. They’re too expensive. We had always been such frugal folk. But a hot tub? I guess we were getting one of those.

“Six hundred bucks,” I said. “Is it an inflatable piece of crap?”

He checked his wristwatch. “It should be here in a few hours.”

“That soon,” I said.

My husband folded his twitchy fingers into fists, pushed the fists into his armpits, and stood there, cross-armed and handless, a hero of leisure. “I put it on the credit card three weeks ago.”

“My love,” I said. “This is all going to look wonderful on the divorce papers.”

*

The conditions of our home life weren’t unhappy, just a little pitiless, and a lot perplexed. It was difficult to keep track of who at any given moment was dragging around the more debilitating raincloud. My husband claimed he was the saddest soul in the hemisphere because his sadness didn’t have an identifiable source. This deprived him of legitimacy, he said, and rendered his vast catalogue of muzzy sorrows even more malignant. I had no doubt my husband’s depression was the authentic article, just as I had no doubt that he used this depression irresponsibly, as leverage, a venal tactic, to flatter himself and defuse criticism and basically get every last fucking thing he wanted. I’m sorry to report he learned this nifty trick—where else?—in couples therapy, which we attended at the behest of—who else?—stupid idiot me. Last year, I was jostled by the harrowing decline of my mother, a former actress of some cultural prominence who kept getting crazier and crazier, thus making me sadder and sadder. I suppose my husband’s sadness struggled to keep apace. Now, his reckless hot-tub splurge made me so furious that I demanded we compound the problem by visiting an overpriced Italian eatery where our financial ineptitude could keep apace. What can I say? Folly is contagious. If he got to splurge, so should the rest of us. 

“It’s only three o’clock,” he said. “It’s too late for lunch, too early for dinner. This is the Luxembourg of dining hours.”

“Luxembourg the country?”

“It’s the tiny, despondent sliver of land that sits in the middle of larger geopolitical affairs. We’re not even hungry.” 

“Then we won’t have to order much food,” I said. “We won’t have to do much of anything, except stare at each other with blistering resentment and ignore our maniac children.”

Sarcasm: That is my venal tactic. 

My husband reached under the workbench, where we agreed months ago to stash our trusty credit card to discourage any habit of feckless spending. He was groping around down there, slapping at unfinished pine. Then he remembered. Bashfully, he pulled his wallet from his pants, split it open, and found the credit card slotted among antediluvian ATM receipts and horrific news clippings. He had this new fetish whereby he collected tales of public tragedy and reread them while he waited in line at the food co-op or when he sat in bed, too troubled to sleep or communicate with the woman who lay beside him, the mother of his children and his partner of fifteen years, whose own icy witch heartsickness and insomnia were far more grueling.

“All set,” he said.

“Maybe let’s not forget the kids this time.”

“Can’t we?” he said. 

Our girls were aged seven and fourteen. They were too old to take my husband or me seriously as mature humans, but they were a bit too young to survive as mewling urchins on the street. I admired, and perhaps envied, their boldness, their sass. They were petite ingrates who had taken all the moral deficiencies I loathed most in myself and transmogrified them into winsome virtues. I adored them. I adored them. I adored them. And they, in turn, drew a grubby Hitler moustache on my passport photo and disappeared my cutlery, which wasn’t even all that sharp.

We returned from our extortionate midday meal to find a delivery truck had mangled and rutted our backyard. The truck was gone. A plastic tarp was blowing loose across the vacant acreage that ensconced us. Someone had unburied our garden hose from our garage, patched it with duct tape, connected it to the exterior spigot, and now there was a slow-growing puddle at the bottom of the acrylic shell. Those were minor details, narrative filigree. The epicenter of the crime scene was our new hot tub, which had a shirtless man in garish pink swim trunks sitting inside it, sipping a can of seltzer.

“Are you the delivery guy?” my husband asked. 

“Randy was the deliverer.”

“So who are you?”

“I’m Jarrett.”

“Are you the seller?” 

“That was Randy’s dad.”

“So what’s the deal, Jarrett?”

“I’m Jarrett,” Jarrett said. “I come with the tub.”

“Like a package deal?”

“Nice to meet you,” Jarrett said. 

My husband had put down our stack of exorbitant leftovers and pulled out his phone to search for the confirmation email. The rest of us loafed around, trying not to grimace or whine as he thumb-scrolled to infinity. The screen’s glow molted. I finally leaned closer and realized he was deleting old junk mail. I swatted the phone out of his hands. The thing went airborne, then hit the patio brick. Even Jarrett winced. My husband hunched over the device, afraid to touch it. A rococo crack now cleaved the screen. 

“Unfortunate tidings,” Jarrett said. “But let’s not let it ruin the night.”

My husband continued to study the crack with a kind of sour mystification. It was the only expression he had, or chose to wear around me. He was more aggrieved about the riven phone than the stranger in the hot tub.

“I guess now we know why the thing was so cheap,” I said.

*

The hot tub didn’t look very new or new adjacent. It was more like a clunky relic from the early, experimental days of intrepid watersport R&D. Then again, our visibility wasn’t great. We’d been outside so long, we lost the sun. Technically, our patio had a floodlight, but the bulb burned out a year ago, and I’d been too lazy, and my husband too wracked with self-pity, to do anything productive about it. Maybe, also, we found some satisfaction in the perpetual dark. It ratified all our unfortunate tidings, and then some. But it wasn’t practical tonight. To ameliorate this, my husband had strapped on the dorky miner’s headlamp that he acquired for early-morning jogs in the park, back when he had grandiose dreams about early-morning jogs in the park. 

“This guy Jarrett,” he told us, leaning over the tub to illuminate whatever negligible feature he thought he was qualified to inspect. “He is the newness. He’s what’s adjacent. I think it’s still a good deal. There’s plenty of room. At least for the adults.”

“Does that include the divorce lawyers?” I said.

“I’m going to ask that you stop making that joke. The divorce joke. It diminishes me and my struggle. Your hostility comes from a place of fear. I already have enough of that.”

“Don’t be a ponce,” I said.

“Is the lady always this harsh?” Jarrett asked.

“Zip it, Jarrett.”

“I sent Randy’s dad an email,” my husband said. “But I’ll be honest. I don’t think they’re going to drive all the way back and reclaim him. I also think, now that I’m thinking about things, that hot tubs are kind of daunting for me. The water, the bubbles, the heat. It’s like being boiled alive. Like we’re seafood.”

“You get used to it,” Jarrett said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

I tried to touch my husband’s shoulder, maybe massage him or give his skull a compassionate noogie, but he had spun around, blazing the lamplight into my eyes so I could not read the remorse, or lack thereof, on his face. “I also think I maybe do recall some fine print in the online listing about the tub including a grown man.”

“Motherfucker,” I said. 

“Me or him?” my husband asked.

“Wrong conjunction. You and him.”

“Huh,” he said, chewing his tongue. “So that’s what a conjunction is.”

“Hey, folks,” Jarrett said. “I totally understand the fear thing. I myself have encountered a great many travails among the backyards of this republic. I walked through the wall of fire. I peeled the onion skin of death.” The water had risen a few inches. Jarrett was frogging his bare feet around in the drink. “Do you guys have anything tasty to eat?”

“Just our pride,” I said.

“She’s kidding,” my husband said. “We don’t have any pride left.”

He went into the kitchen and brought out the restaurant leftovers, which had been calmly spoiling on the countertop, next to my empty knife block. 

“I thought those were ours,” I said.

“Jarrett’s one of us now.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Jarrett said. “I appreciate being appreciated.”

He reached up, but my husband jerked the cartons back and glared his high beam into Jarrett’s pale, pinched face. 

“If you lay a finger on my wife or my daughters, I will burn you the fuck down,” my husband said.

Jarrett nodded, solemn and blinkless, like a frozen trout. “I’m just here for the hot tub, man.”

My husband awarded Jarrett the food, gave me a halfhearted shrug, then set about sorting the half-used pool supplies Randy and his dad had thrown in gratis, either because they were kind-hearted merchants with our best interests in mind or they recognized a golden opportunity to de-clutter their toolshed.

Jarrett spoke again: “Hey, guy? That thing you said about burning me the fuck down? I can respect that. I know the words came from a sincere place. It also sounded pretty badass.” Respectfully, he hoisted the carton of cold manicotti and took a tentative whiff. “Kudos.”

“Am I the only person who thinks this arrangement is bonkers?” I asked. 

My husband was distracted, trying to read the label on a chlorine test kit. 

“You get used to it,” he told me.

*

Obviously our marriage, like any popular blood sport, had occasional flukes of tenderness. Sardonic telepathies, gentle teasing, noontime snogs. But we had a tacit agreement, too, I think, that the tendernesses needed to be hard-won. Most endearments mean very little, after all, and are corrupted with glibness and condescension, unless they have a little meanness jutting out of them, like cactus quills. Or was that just what we told ourselves because we were petty, malicious people? By “we,” I mean me. And by “me,” I mean whatever monstrous nature I inherited from my mother.

I awoke in an empty bed. It wasn’t unusual for my husband, roused by my insomniatic thrashing, to slump off in the middle of the night and sleep on the downstairs couch. Perhaps this was also his way of rehearsing, like a war game or fire drill, the trial separation that neither of us was desperate or brave enough to initiate. In the morning, he would resurface with an odd limp, his coloring drained, as if he’d glimpsed that fantasy bachelor existence, weighed its freedoms, tabulated its arrears, and arrived at a dour consensus: The single life was just as lonely as the institution of marriage. Poor guy. He’d crawl back into bed and latch me, a nomad in mismatched pajamas, and we’d both pretend we had spent the whole night that way, parasitically clenched.

Alone in our room, I was restless. I decided to loot the fridge. Jarrett had claimed my manicotti, but I knew my daughters’ portions would be untouched, at least by my husband. Both girls had a tendency to dribble spit into their entrees while their bailiff-parents watched in livid horror. It would be hypocritical of me to judge them too harshly. I committed all manner of gruesome business when I was their age. Then I grew up, got married, made a family—the most gruesome business of all. A dollop of saliva? I could stomach it. 

As I passed through the living room, I expected to see my husband splayed out and drooling among the bolsters, but the couch was empty. Maybe he was enjoying a late-night broil? 

I went outside. Jarrett was alone in the tub.

“Isn’t it a drowning hazard, sleeping in that thing?”

“It’s not for everyone,” he said. 

“How about my husband?”

“I don’t need to be involved.” 

“Well, you sit in the tub, and the tub sits on our property, and possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

“Is that saying really true?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m not even sure it applies here.”

The water was up to Jarrett’s hips. He danced his fingers in the fizz and sprinkled a few droplets over his prematurely receding hairline. One more idle coronation in the land of subprime mortgages and spiritual drought.

“Is this the part where I’m supposed to provide my backstory?”

“You can skip it,” I said.

“Either way works for me.”

“The main thing is that you’re not on a federal watch list or sex-offender registry.”

“I’ve got references,” he said. “Available upon request.”

I bunched up the sleeve of my nightgown and dunked an arm. Not bad. Not great. The water was, I don’t know, pleasantly disconcerting? That was my credo, too.

“I keep going back and forth on something,” I said.

“I’m not much for advice. But I’m a decent listener.”

“Trout or a barnacle?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m looking at you, and I see a guy with no responsibilities, no anxieties, no apparent mortal terrors. You cling like a barnacle, but you float like a trout.”

“Taxonomy was never my strong suit,” he said. “But I can tell you that crustaceans and fishies certainly have mortal terrors. Everything does. Just look at their faces. The big open eyes. The big open mouths. They’re silently screaming at something. That something is probably us.”

“Is the water temperature okay? Your brain might be cooked.”

He smiled at this, but didn’t disagree. 

“It’s late,” he said.

“I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble staying awake. Being alive and sentient—that’s a hard one, too.”

“Is that why your nickname is Princess Prozac?”

“Only my loved ones who hate me get to call me that.” 

Jarrett fluttered his foot in the roils, which I interpreted as an act of acquiescence. Or an act of an act.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Trout, barnacle. Both pay rent.”

“Yeah, sorry. The rent thing isn’t happening for me.”

I kicked the hot tub. “We’re going to drain this fishpond.”

“All this talk of seafood. What are your feelings about lobster bisque?”

I sniffed the carton I was holding. Is that what my daughters ordered? Those guileless, wannabe aristocrats?

He reached behind the tub and pulled a duffel bag out of the bushes.

“Everywhere I go, I take a little something with me. You may think that sounds like theft. But it’s a tribute. I get permission. I try not to waste anything.”

“How many places has this tub been?” I asked.

“It would be uncouth of me to count them all. They’re not just notches on a bedpost.”

The duffel contained dozens of Tupperwared samples, each meticulously labeled with place and date and calorie counts. It also held a few extra pairs of pastel swim trunks, a bottle of suntan lotion, a chunky paperback novel, and, somewhat distressingly, a flare gun. What I didn’t see? Toilet paper or hand sanitizer or soap.

“Has my husband granted you bathroom privileges?”

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Jarrett said, rolling me the container of lobster bisque. “I worked out an arrangement with the Ramshinkles.”

He pointed to the lonesome bi-level several acres over. The home was almost identical to ours, right down to the shoddy landscaping and sun-beaten siding and the tired, mopey assholes who, like us, were hiding away indoors.

“They’re not so bad,” he said.

“Is this what you do? Show up, impart remedial life lessons, filch our snacks? Do you really think you’re going to improve us? I’ve seen this sitcom before. It’s dreadful.”

“Listen, I’m no oracle,” Jarrett said. “I’m just a guy in a hot tub. But it’s your hot tub. I want you to know I honor that. Someone has to keep the wall of fire at bay.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said.

I went inside and stuffed my daughters’ leftovers back in the fridge, then canvassed the rest of the house. Eventually, I found my husband in our seven-year-old’s room. He was sleeping on her top bunk, the one that our fourteen-year-old had occupied for most of her adolescence until puberty turned her into a shrill-rampaging lunatic who required the indulgence of her own dedicated landline and private bunker. Now she lived like a vanquished hunchback in the basement. The top bunk was available. Unfortunately, it was not built to accommodate paunchy middle-aged men with outsized feelings. In the tiny Luxembourgesque juncture between mattress and ceiling, my husband was mashed sideways, an arm and rangy leg dangling off. He had a plastic blood-pressure cuff on his bicep. A pair of suction cups had been taped to his forehead, which still wore the miner’s lamp. Below deck, our snoring seven-year-old was clutching her fake stethoscope and an old purse of mine that she liked to imagine was her medical satchel. They must’ve dozed off while playing electroconvulsive therapy again.

I ate my cold bisque in bed.

*

During the day, I sat in our kitchen with a headset and laptop, fielding frantic calls from pet lovers on behalf of a national network of veterinarians I had never seen, nor spoken with, nor believed mattered or even existed. I was just an answering service—me, someone who had so few answers to give—but I liked the routine. I wanted to be helpful. I also got a vicarious thrill listening to the unmitigated panic of people who, for once, were of no blood or legal relation to me. Meanwhile, my husband hunkered in his office, i.e., our largely empty garage, pretending to work as a communications consultant for several nonprofits in the higher-ed sector, when what he was really doing was trawling the internet to research the latest climate conspiracies, political assassinations, celebrity death hoaxes, the foreknowledge of the druids, and other apocalyptic harbingers. Our kids went to school, I guess, or maybe they were out shilling their father’s antidepressants to skeptical vagrants in the town park. This was our weekday household, and it hadn’t killed us yet. Jarrett remained newly adjacent to it all. He logged so many hours in the hot tub, absorbing so much nonchalance and solar radiation, and miraculously the guy did not disintegrate or shrivel out. True to his word, he never exposed himself or committed any licentious acts. Really, he just uttered baffling aphorisms and kept watch over the place, so we didn’t see the point in evicting anything yet. 

After a week, I admitted to my husband I didn’t hate the hot tub, I hated what it insinuated, that we were now Hot Tub People, an emblem of luxury and clichéd succor. However, to my credit, I wasn’t planning on towing the thing off to the wetlands and shooting it in the back of the skull, gangland-execution style. I’d accepted, I suppose, the humility of its existence. If only I could accept the humility of mine. 

“What’s your point?” he said.

“My point,” I said, “is you spent six hundred dollars on a big-ticket recreation item that’s been sitting in our yard for a week. You haven’t used the goddamn thing once.”

“I still don’t see your point.”

“You’re not looking hard enough.”

“I’m busy,” said my husband, sitting at a desk suspiciously devoid of work. His laptop was shut, his landline was unplugged. The collage of sticky notes featuring entrepreneurial adages of self-incrimination and midlife hysteria had been cleared from the wall. His head, freed of its lamplight, was angled towards the rafters. As he stared upwards at a cluster of cobwebs, he clacked his fingernails on the desktop, tap tap tap, blindly typing what I assumed was yet another garrulous email of woe to the online administrator of whatever crackpot news forum had most recently blocked him. 

“Has it cheered you at least?” I asked. “Sitting in your dark and empty office, gazing out your dinky porthole window at the freaky river-rat lounging in our yard?”

I was conveniently ignoring the fact that my husband had covered his dinky porthole with particleboard and duct tape, then covered the particleboard with curtains. The curtains were closed. They were duct taped shut, too

“I’m worried about him,” my husband said.

“You think the hot tub isn’t safe?”

“No. I’m afraid my sadness is contagious.”

“You mean our sadness,” I said.

“Huh?”

I sighed. “Never mind.” 

“He’s so vulnerable out there,” he said. “The Big Bad Sad never sleeps, you know.” 

“What does Jarrett say?”

“He says he’s doing fine. Absolutely fine.” He shook his head. “That’s usually the first sign of trouble.”

My husband then told me a long, meandering story about a dream he had in which the river-rat climbed out of the hot tub, crossed the county on foot, and found his way inside one of those sprawling home-improvement stores, the kind of warehouse-y franchises with mustachioed employees who wear colorful vests with helpful pockets. 

“What was he doing in the store?”

“What does anyone do in places like that?” my husband said, still incessantly finger-typing. “He was standing around, being lost, letting his cellular matter die off in batches and clumps while the rest of the world is reading the Kama Sutra and playing pinochle at dusk.”

I nodded. “Catastrophic.” 

“I think the Ramshinkles are concerned about him, too. They say they’re not. But they’re probably lying.”

“Since when do you communicate with the Ramshinkles?”

“I caught one of their kids trying to slash the tires of our car.”

“Again?”

“His technique is really improving.”

“I hope you beat him to death with a nine-iron. You know, the used golf clubs you bought on sale last year that you haven’t touched since? I hope you brained the brat.”

My husband exhaled slowly, starkly, not unlike the leak of a punctured tire, which we also probably couldn’t afford to replace. “I helped him finish the job.”

“Why in god’s name would you do that? 

He shrugged. “Children deserve encouragement. Those all-weather tires are quite tough.”

I patted him on the head, absentmindedly picking a small leaf that had somehow caught in his hair. Where did it come from? Why were his shoes dirty? Was that dried blood on his neck?

“Hey, babe?” my husband said.

He flipped up the laptop screen and showed me the field of open tabs, all of them summer-recreation wholesalers. That tapping noise? He wasn’t typing. He was holding our credit card. 

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’ve been doing some research,” he said, and gulped, “about in-ground pools.”

He set his face down on the desktop and, with a ragged noise in his throat, he began to weep.

*

Our forlorn corner of the state was a confounding mix of posh horse farms owned by the landed gentry and endless tracts of rural squalor. My husband and I had staked out our own parcel of limbo between the factions. Our loyalties were with the impoverished, I’d say, even if the impoverished’s dreams were of nouveau wealth. Wasn’t everyone impoverished in their own menial way? Our house was a rental, our car was a lease, our credit line was undernourished and overextended. Everyone knew crass consumerism was a lark, stuff was just stuff, and critiquing piddling middle-class pretensions was yesterday’s turkey shoot. We weren’t fools or masochists. We weren’t living beyond our means. The economic differentials had tilted, that’s all. Our family was sitting on a pile of debt so wide and steep it could be spotted by near-sighted astronauts polishing their bifocals in low orbit. Even our hot tub was not entirely ours.

Out here in the hinterlands, our family hadn’t many humans to rant at or commiserate with. We only had ourselves, and we were the worst company of all. Our so-called neighborhood was comprised of three modest starter homes spread across a pastoral hillside, prototypes for a rote subdivision that was abandoned after the real-estate market self-immolated. The houses were barely within eyeshot of each other, yet everyone treated this distant presence as a personal affront. Our families never socialized, never comingled, never spoke. We also never got arrested for manslaughter or arson, so clearly our martial strategies were working.

The only person I saw outside of my loved ones was my mother—the most loveless person I’ve ever known. Throughout my childhood, she’d been a charismatic stage actress of considerable acclaim who, surprise-surprise, became taciturn and morbid after the audiences filed out of the theater and she staggered home, clutching her ubiquitous flask and hollering Portuguese at the houseplants. When her drama career sputtered in her late fifties, she became a recluse and busied herself with a studious regimen of antagonism and paranoia, sitting at her kitchen window with birding binoculars and watching the soundless mise en scène of histrionic soap operas on her neighbor’s TV. Very slowly, then very quickly, she went crazy. She tried to burn down her apartment, she burgled a liquor store, she poisoned her landlord’s cherished malamute. By court order she was placed in a state institution, which curbed her septuagenarian felony streak but did little to slow the erosion of her brain. Strangest of all, the brain erosion? It sweetened her. My mother, the supersonic ballistic nightmare, became one of those kindly old ladies who attend to the tempests of daily life with exquisite patience, offering deep pathos as they hold your hand—my hand—softly and shakily, like a drunken nun. I couldn’t take it. All the incongruent feelings, the ancient conflicts and festering resentments, the reckonings deferred. I stopped visiting. I hauled my husband to therapy, and then I gave up on therapy and tried to pretend I didn’t care that he kept seeing the shrink without me, three times a week, as if his thirst for emotional carnage, like a zombie blood-drinker or telethon host, could not be slaked. The most perverse part? Therapy only succeeded in making him sadder, which only made me angrier, which only saddened him further, etc. He purchased a discounted hot tub that we didn’t need or want, with a ridiculous man living inside it. Yet somehow neither of us considered this course of events insurmountable. 

When I realized my husband was attempting to plunge us into fresh penury via in-ground pool, I opted for insanity, too, and drove four hours to visit my mother. I spent the afternoon sitting in the sanitarium parking lot, gnawing my nutrient-deficient fingernails and swallowing the rinds. Periodically, the security guard wandered over to check on me. People did this all the time, he said. They just can’t bring themselves to walk inside, slap a visitor sticker on their tit, smile stoically, and face the arduous thing they’ve actually already been facing their whole life.

“People are crazy,” I told him. 

“I like people,” he said. “You should try it sometime.”

“Anything else?”

“Your tires look a little low,” he said.

I motioned him to come closer. 

“Tell me,” I whispered. “Have you ever shot anyone for sitting in their car and being irritable? For treating themselves terribly and torturing their families?”

“The world doesn’t have enough bullets for that,” he said. 

“Thank you,” I said.

“But sit here long enough and I will have this clunker towed.”

He retreated to his fortified guard shack and flicked on a talk-radio program, the kind where real people invent imaginary problems just so they have something interesting to be interviewed about. People like me and mine, I suppose, although, historically speaking, an hour-plus of empathic chitchat never seemed to make the guilt or the deficits any easier to bear. 

I gave up, started the car, and drove towards the thruway. Near the onramp was a plaza with a home-goods store, not an especially attractive or high-end place, just quaint and bland, as if annexed from a softer, slower century. Inexplicably, I detoured and went inside. There weren’t many customers in the store. There wasn’t much to remark upon or ogle. Fixtures, appliances, floor coverings, furniture. The usuals, the essentials. I milled the open and uncrowded aisles, not really looking at anything. It was like a home, I told myself. A real home. The place didn’t have any Jacuzzis or pools, but I did find a selection of bathtubs. Not the fancy, artisanal claw-foot kind. Just basic ordinary bathtubs. I didn’t bother to remove my shoes. I climbed into the cleanest one, sat down, and told a young clerk in a blue smock that I would never be leaving.

“Until the last of my days,” I said, “I’m going to stay right here. Barnacle or trout, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You will have to shoot me in the head to get me out of this thing.”

The kid was a clean-shaven type, a debate club president, or almost as likely, a murderer and defiler of belligerent housewives. They all look so similar. He’d been stickering plumbing kits with a price gun. I thought he very well might lean over and pop a fresh tag onto my forehead. Already I was tempted to apologize for interrupting his day, but why resort to social niceties now? I climbed out of the tub and tried to browse some more, but I was too addled, too lost. I barely got out of the store before I crumpled in the parking lot. 

The kid came out, followed by his manager, his manager’s manager, and an elderly retiree who was either a random shopper, a plainclothes security flack, or the Angel of Death himself. The old codger felt so bad for me, he went to the deli next door and bought me a prepackaged Danish to ramp up my blood sugar levels. 

I thanked him extravagantly and cradled the snack against my bosom, rocking fore and aft, like a prom queen smother-strangling a beautiful, bristly bouquet. 

Then I fled.

*

That night, I prepared a disappointing dinner of homemade red sauce and pasta from a box. The penne was plasticized, the sauce was knotty, the parmesan clumped and stale, the garlic bread burnt. My husband and children often complimented my cooking, with variable degrees of sarcasm, the times they weren’t bloodlessly savaging it. Tonight’s verdict? Nobody offered praise, nobody complained, nobody requested arsenic in their milk. Opacity: I take it for the victory it is. After we cleaned up, I brought out a plate for Jarrett. 

He had company in the tub. Two men and two women, each in their own way attired for an unsatisfying day at the beach. Sunglasses, straw hats, greasy lotion, floaties. They even had a cooler and branded beverage cozies. I recognized the older couple as the Ramshinkles. The other pair was new to me.

“We’re the third house,” said the woman in the shabby bikini. “We decided it was time to meet the psychos with the hot tub.”

Everyone was drinking margaritas out of the tropical-themed goblets that my husband and I had given each other as gag gifts for our tenth anniversary, back in the years when we were willing to buy anything for a laugh. Maybe someday we would tally up what the laughter cost us.

I didn’t know what to say, so I told the Ramshinkles one of their snotty kids attacked our car tires and owed us for the damage.

Mrs. Ramshinkle attempted to speak, but first she had to detach the twisty straw that was stuck to her lush cranberry lipstick. She’d really shellacked herself. “Your batty husband drove that car across our yard and almost hit our kids’ swing set. Then he stumbled out and handed Bobby a box-cutter.”

“Bobby?”

“Our ten-year-old. Your husband showed him how to click up the blade and told him to do his ugly worst.” 

“It was probably a cry for help,” Jarrett said. 

“He’s been depressed,” I said.

“You people are trash,” Mrs. Ramshinkle said.

“Correct on all counts,” I said.

Jarrett was trying to nudge free a bit more room in the cramped tub. For me? My batty husband? Maybe there were more embittered neighbors trodding over the hillside with box-cutters and snorkels.

“I had a sister who was depressed,” Mr. Ramshinkle said. “I won’t tell you what she did to herself. I don’t believe in sharing that kind of information with people who won’t comprehend it, or who will use it against you.”

“Hey, Jimbo?” Jarrett said. “There’s more trust in this hot tub than you think.” 

“We have a pair of daughters here, somewhere,” I said. “Whenever I move between rooms, I can hear them scurrying away to the other side of the house. My own people don’t trust me, so you probably shouldn’t, either. I don’t want to feel sorry for myself. That would be admitting too much.”

“Jeez, Queen Zoloft really knows how to darken the mood,” the other male neighbor said.

“It’s Prozac, you tacky motherfuckers,” I said.

Mrs. Ramshinkle flopped a weirdly carbuncled arm around Jarrett. She must’ve had a skin affliction. What affliction did I have? What affliction didn’t I have? I could’ve queried a few professionals or conducted a national survey, maybe called one of my disembodied veterinarian employers, but it was probably too late to do anything about me. She was shaking Jarrett rather vigorously.

“You don’t deserve this sweet fella,” she said. “You can’t keep him forever.”

“Jarrett?” I said.

“Everybody be cool,” Jarrett said. “The wall of fire comes for us all.”

I wanted to argue, but I wasn’t sure who or what I was arguing with anymore. I dumped the food into the flowerbed that was now evidently a compost pile, and I returned indoors to gripe to my family. But for some strange reason, everyone and everything in my life was too terrified to slap a visitor sticker on its tit and talk to me.

*

The next morning, I remembered the free pastry. It was one of those decadent, mass-produced deals that can hold its flavor for millennia, thanks to the pagan science of unnatural preservatives. Maybe that’s what our family needed: more unnatural preservatives. I had brought the pastry home and stashed it in the fridge behind a jar of creepily shaped pickles that our acerbic fourteen-year-old referred to as “mother’s other abortion.” Now I had a hankering for breakfast food, and I went rummaging. The pastry, as I found it, had a substantial chunk bitten out. The culprit couldn’t have been a daughter. Those little barbarians preferred to lick off the sugary icing and leave the least appetizing parts intact. Slathered in spittle, yes, but thoughtfully intact.

I walked outside. Jarrett was gone. He’d taken the hot tub with him. Or maybe it was the other way around? In their place, the grass was crushed flat. Now our backyard resembled one of those mysterious crop circles that seem like such miracles of incredulity on the evening news. Then you find out the circle was created simply, idiotically, by a couple of yahoos with a plank and rope. The thing I would someday realize: Those yahoos had camaraderie and a plan. So who was the real chump? I looked to the hills, the other houses. I could still hear the hot tub’s motorized hum mixed with human noises of mild frivolity and vim. From a distance, the frivolity and vim sounded, at least to me, a lot like poorly suppressed despair. I decided we could share it. The wall of fire. But that didn’t mean I was able to think about any of this without screaming.

I went inside and hugged my husband and told him, sure, okay, an in-ground pool that bankrupts us would be lovely.