That Close to the Ceiling

I was eating strawberries in the tub when the doorbell rang. Throwing on my blue diamond robe, I dripped all the way to the front door where an old woman was waiting with a basket of apples. For a moment, I wondered if she was going to offer me a trade. My strawberries for her apples. She was wearing a large cloak, and her face was turned down. I realized that this must be the strega who had moved in next door. We hadn’t had a chance to meet, and there was a note on my fridge instructing me to bake croissants for her. The trouble was that croissants took three days to make, and that was assuming you did everything perfectly.

I rarely did anything perfectly.

“This afternoon,” the strega said, not bothering to introduce herself, “You will meet a terrible fate. You will not die or be harmed in any physical sense, but you will be changed in a way that is most displeasing to you. Also, the winning lottery numbers tonight are 7-8-2-1.”

With that, she turned and walked away. I found it rude of her to not offer me any apples, but perhaps they were poisoned. If one believes fairy tales, you should never accept fruit from a strega, but I don’t care for fairy tales, and I don’t heed warnings from strangers. I closed the door, dropped my robe immediately, and returned to my bath.

Several hours later, I awoke to what sounded like a man chopping off his fingers. The sound was so unpleasant, I covered my ears before I even got a chance to open my eyes. Those several seconds of darkness might have been what prevented me from noticing that I was no longer in my bathtub. Rather, I had floated out of my bathroom and into my kitchen. The floating was the result of some kind of flood. My entire home was under at least three feet of water, and I was gliding along on the surface of it. When I opened my eyes, I asked myself if I had turned on the faucet when I got back into the tub after the strega’s warnings, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what reason I would have for adding more water to what was already a very full bath.

One stroke of relief came in the form of that chopping noise I had tried to drown out. It was not a delusion, but my husband, George, chopping away at the cutting board in our kitchen while half-submerged in water. He wasn’t chopping off his fingers, but large stalks of celery. Always trying to find the whimsical in any dire situation, I thought about asking him if he was planning to make a giant stew using the water all around us.

Without so much as looking at me, he said “I’m leaving you, Gretchen.”

This seemed impossible to me. Not him leaving. Men leave their wives all the time. What seemed impossible was the thought of him leaving while I was floating past our kitchen table. Two of the chairs had floated into the living room, which meant we wouldn’t be able to have the Kruhlberg’s over later as we had originally intended. George finished chopping the celery, and moved onto some carrots. I didn’t believe the stove would work, but he may have been intending to make a cold dish. I asked him when he was going to abandon me.

“After dinner,” he said, “I’ll feed you, and then I’ll be on my way.”

“What are we having?”

“Gazpacho.”

“Since when do you put celery in your gazpacho,” I asked, since George’s gazpacho had always been rather lifeless due to his excess use of tarragon and total lack of celery or celery salt.

“I’m trying something new,” he replied, “I’m a new man. That’s why I have to leave you. I can’t be the new me with the old you. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

As he spoke, the water continued to rise. It was now nearly up to his chest, and finding it difficult to go on floating, I pulled myself onto a couch cushion, and reflected on what the strega had told me earlier that day. All around me were the leftover strawberries I had forgotten to eat before falling asleep. Could this all be a dream? Did husbands leave you in dreams? Did they chop celery? Did they make gazpacho?

George swam over to me, and kissed me on the forehead. He wasn’t a bad man, and something told me the guilt of leaving me would ultimately kill him. He ran over a squirrel the first year we were married, and I used to find him at night flagellating himself with a belt in our linen closet.

“That poor innocent creature,” he used to moan, while I carefully took the belt from him, and led him back to bed.

“You poor innocent creature,” he said to me now, stroking my cheek.

I began to shiver. The water was cold, and it only seemed to be getting colder. I noticed that the kitchen sink faucet was on, and I gathered that it was the source of this flood. Lightly pushing George away, I tried to steer myself over to the sink. I used my hands to paddle, but there appeared to be some kind of tide that wouldn’t allow me to gain any momentum. It kept washing me back towards George, which was ironic, considering he’d be leaving soon.

Deciding I was too tired to go on paddling, I let George lead me to the area where the kitchen table used to be. He finished up his gazpacho and handed me a bowl. We ate silently. He cried; I did not. When we had licked the last of the gazpacho off the blue bottom of the bowls, he asked me where his coat might be. I told him that, in light of the circumstances, his coat could be anywhere. The water had risen and risen. I could now touch our ceiling if I wanted to, but I had no such desire. He said it wasn’t that cold out anyway, and he made his way to the front door.

When he opened it, I expected all the water in the house to rush out, but it stayed put. George stepped down onto a dry welcome mat and quickly walked away. I sucked in a lungful of air recalling that the strega said I would not die, and so I didn’t panic.

It wasn’t that I believed her.

It was just that I don’t believe in worrying when you’re already that close to the ceiling.