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lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a
pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the
sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.
“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he
said?”
“No.”
“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some sleep.’”
She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long, sometimes only
seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his
hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash
himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.
Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for
at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed,
she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she
would have to do it again.
“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”
He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running
straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.
“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And
he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”
The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it
in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then
was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world?
It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation
will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any
day.’”
“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”
“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from
life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and
sleeping with a goddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never
talk about to anyone . . . because it was funny.”
I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and
outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine
Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.
“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”
“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a
woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they
found out. My dad has come around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he
doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to
change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”
In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the
matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “Clayton didn’t tell them you
were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”
“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just
shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell anyone.” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being
sarcastic, either. She understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things,
Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. She’s the one he should have married.” She laughed a