The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016

It seemed he was already there, under her skin. She didn’t know when she’d wanted to kiss someone this much. “It’s okay if you don’t.”

“Oh, if I don’t?”

“Right.”

“Leave?”

“Yes.”

“You mean stay.”

“Stay.”

“Ah.”

“Come on, then.”

“I will. I will come on.”

It was a night of wonders. She was so attracted to him it was scary, and would require management. For the first time, she didn’t tell Albertine everything, or her mother. She kept it all to herself, a milestone of significance.

All along she basked in the big-picture assumptions he made, the lack of ambivalence over whether or not they’d proceed. In three months, they’d become nearly inseparable. His certainty relaxed her, gave her the room to reflect on her own hidden restlessness. When he said things like We’re made for each other. You’re perfect for me, she felt embraced like never before, at last taking the chance to examine the perplexing knot it all produced, without the added fear of losing him.

2 (#ulink_5fe357f4-81ff-59cb-93cf-8c0ef1ca3047)

SAUERKRAUT AND MACE (#ulink_5fe357f4-81ff-59cb-93cf-8c0ef1ca3047)

As it turned out, Paul had gone shopping for more than breakfast.

She watched from the window as he wrestled something from the trunk of his car. Under a clearing sky, a newly minted object threw its shadow onto the walkway, coffin-shaped, about two feet long.

“Oh my god, a trap?” she said, at the door.

“It’s my stated goal to keep pests out of our lives,” he announced, and she thought nervously of her mother.

“What if we don’t agree on what’s a pest?”

“Veb, I got no sleep last night. You should be glad I didn’t get the guillotine kind.”

The packaging boldly proclaimed:

Humanely TRAPS, not KILLS:

Squirrels

Chipmunks

Shrews

Voles

and other Nuisance Critters!

“I hate the word critters!” Veblen said, displacing her negative feelings onto an innocent noun.

He persisted, pointing to the fine print. “Look at this.”

Squirrels can cause extensive damage to attic insulation or walls and gnaw on electrical wires in homes and vehicles, creating a fire hazard.

“Paul, don’t you see, that’s propaganda to motivate you to buy the thing.”

“But it’s true.”

“This morning it came to the window—I think it wants to befriend me,” Veblen said, quite naturally.

“You can make other friends. This squirrel isn’t a character in a storybook. Real animals don’t wear shawls and top hats and write poetry. They rape each other and eat their own young.”

“Paul, that’s an excessively negative view of wildlife.”

Nevertheless, he seized the wooden chair from beside her desk, took it through the bathroom door, and dumped it in the bathtub, to stand on it and shove aside the square of white, enameled plywood covering the opening to the attic. She provided him with the flashlight from her bedside drawer. His thighs flexed like a warrior’s. A strange little riddle began in her head:

The man pops squirrels, the man pops mice—

(What man? Not Paul?)

With a riddle-me-ree he pops them twice;

(Twice? Isn’t once enough?)

He pops his rats with a riddle-me-ree

(Oh no, it is Paul!)

He popped my father and he might pop me.

(How terrible! Was Paul experimenting with squirrels?)

“Nesting materials in the corner,” he yelled. “God. Looks like fur on the beams!”

Was this the stuff married life would be made of, two people making way for the confounding spectacle of the other, bewildered and slightly afraid?

“Paul, did you know, the year Thoreau spent at Walden Pond, he spent a lot of time totally enchanted by squirrels?” If squirrels were good enough for Thoreau, after all, what was Paul’s problem?

“No, I didn’t.”

“Have I told you about the great squirrel migrations of the past?” She steadied the chair.

“You must have been saving it up.”