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The Couple

by Anna McDonald

She loved everyone. He loved only her. He was tall and had been called a pencil and a toothpick and a drink of water and a blade of grass. She was of medium height and had not been called anything.

Her mother lived at the edge of town—a weaver with six looms. His mother knew her mother. He loved his mother, but only before he met her. She loved her mother, but we know the extent of her love.

At parties, people thought he was OK. He often pulled out his pocket watch. She made irreverent toasts, like to the truth and its opposite. People bubbled with laughter. People asked her where she got her dress.

He knew several complicated crochet stitches. If he ever stepped out to the grocery and she was still sleeping, he would embroider an away note for her onto a white linen doily. Back in fifteen minutes, it would read. She would rarely wake in time to receive it, so he stuffed the unread notes into the sideboard. No matter what, he sewed the note each time anew.

They met in Dorset, but she would later say it had been Duxbury. She would never realize that she had got it wrong. He would realize and not say anything. He got to the point one winter where he would not even think anything. The truth has changed, he thought to himself.

One afternoon she had a baby. She loved the baby, who was a boy. But it was not much different from her love for quince paste. Except that she had never known that love could make one tired. She called her mother about this. In two weeks, a package came to the door. It was a scarf, long as a reed snake, wide as a horse.

He had a hard time loving his son, who came as a bit of a surprise. He was a simple man, they would say after his death. This had not been true. The boy grew up and moved far away, abruptly. Eventually she died. He bought a home embalming kit, soaked the scarf from her mother for two weeks in bergamot oil, and wrapped her up, tightly. Then he took all of the doilies that she never read and sewed them into a kind of flag, which he hung at half-mast forever.

Anna McDonald holds an MFA from New York University. She has poems in this season's Paris Review, and her essay “The Mayor,” first published in Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, will be reprinted this July in the anthology Lost and Found: Stories from New York.

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