A Writer's Wonderland [PDF] - University of Portsmouth

Maddy Connolly
Second year Creative Writing and English Literature
student.
The Salesman’s Wife
Earl Ober was between jobs as a salesman but Doreen,
his wife, had gone to work nights as a waitress at a twenty-hour hour coffee shop at the edge of
town. She was bitter about this, Earl could tell. She never said anything but she sent him looks
that he was unwilling to receive. She would come home, and while Earl checked the local
newspapers she would snore softly in their cramped single bed. Her constant whining put his
teeth on edge and her small hints were like earthquakes rupturing their unstable marriage. If
Earl could have found a job he would have left, just to get out of the suffocating air that seemed
to leak into the flat. But there was nothing out there; nothing in the papers, nothing in the
windows of their small town’s high street shops.
One day however his luck changed. The newspaper offered him with a tip - a salesmen
job had come up for a big, successful company around the corner from the estate that held their
overpriced and under achieved accommodation. Earl leapt on it with joy and straight away
booked an interview for the very next day. Doreen sniggered at his attitude.
‘You haven’t got the job yet Earl, and by the looks of you you’ll have a hard time ever
getting it’. Once, Doreen had been supportive of his job. There had even been a time when she
had come with him to meet more people, to spend time with him. But the years of hard labour,
of juggling several jobs while scraping and saving money, had forced her thoughts and feelings
towards Earl and towards life into murky waters. Life was now a relentless routine. She spent
the day sleeping, cooking and cleaning in a building that would never be free of cockroaches,
damp or draughts, and then she went to work at a coffee shop where customers treated her like
she was the scum of the earth because she lived to serve them. She took their stringing words
because she had no choice, not while Earl sat all day at the kitchen table, staring mutely into his
coffee. Coffee. She refused to drink it after living with it all night.
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