Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

working to support us. He pleaded with me to remember my duty as a wife and as a mother. I blew smoke in his face. People around us were looking stern and gratified. When we got outside we laughed till we had to hold each other up, against the wall. We played in bed that I was Lady Chatterley and he was Mellors.
    “Where be that little rascal John Thomas?” he said thickly. “I canna find John Thomas!”
    “Frightfully sorry, I think I must have swallowed him,” I said, ladylike.

    There was a water pump in the basement. It made a steady, thumping noise. The house was on fairly low-lying ground not far from the Fraser River, and during the rainy weather the pump had to work most of the time to keep the basement from being flooded. We had a dark rainy January, as is usual in Vancouver, and this was followed by a dark rainy February. Hugo and I felt gloomy. I slept a lot of the time. Hugo couldn’t sleep. He claimed it was the pump that kept him awake. He couldn’t work because of it in the daytime and he couldn’t sleep because of it at night. The pump had replaced Dotty’s piano-playing as the thing that most enraged and depressed him in our house. Not only because of its noise, but because of the money it was costing us. Its entire cost went onto our electricity bill, though it was Dotty who lived in the basement and reaped the benefits of not being flooded. He said I should speak to Dotty and I said Dotty could not pay the expenses she already had. He said she could turn more tricks. I told him to shut up. As I became more pregnant, slower and heavier and more confined to the house, I got fonder of Dotty, used to her, less likely to store up and repeat what she said. I felt more at home with her than I did sometimes with Hugo and our friends.
    All right, Hugo said, I ought to phone the landlady. I said he ought. He said he had far too much to do. The truth was we both shrank from a confrontation with the landlady, knowing in advance how she would confuse and defeat us with shrill evasive prattle.
    In the middle of the night in the middle of a rainy week I woke up and wondered what had wakened me. It was the silence.
    “Hugo, wake up. The pump’s broken. I can’t hear the pump.”
    “I am awake,” Hugo said.
    “It’s still raining and the pump isn’t going. It must be broken.”
    “No, it isn’t. It’s shut off. I shut it off.”
    I sat up and turned on the light. He was lying on his back, squinting and trying to give me a hard look at the same time.
    “You didn’t turn it off.”
    “All right, I didn’t.”
    “You did.”
    “I could not stand the goddamn expense any more. I could not stand thinking about it. I could not stand the noise either. I haven’t had any sleep in a week.”
    “The basement will flood.”
    “I’ll turn it on in the morning. A few hours’ peace is all I want.”
    “That’ll be too late, it’s raining torrents.”
    “It is not.”
    “You go to the window.”
    “It’s raining. It’s not raining torrents.”
    I turned out the light and lay down and said in a calm stern voice, “Listen to me, Hugo, you have to go and turn it on, Dotty will be flooded out.”
    “In the morning.”
    “You have to go and turn it on now .”
    “Well I’m not.”
    “If you’re not, I am.”
    “No, you’re not.”
    “I am.”
    But I didn’t move.
    “Don’t be such an alarmist.”
    “Hugo.”
    “Don’t cry .”
    “Her stuff will be ruined.”
    “Best thing could happen to it. Anyway, it won’t.” He lay beside me stiff and wary, waiting, I suppose, for me to get out of bed, go down to the basement and figure out how to turn the pump on. Then what would he have done? He could not have hit me, I was too pregnant. He never did hit me, unless I hit him first. He could have gone and turned it off again, and I could have turned it on, and so on, how long could that last? He could have held me down, but if I struggled he would have been afraid of hurting me. He could have sworn at me and left the house, but we had no car, and it was raining too hard for him to stay out very long. He would probably just have raged and sulked, alternately, and I could have taken a blanket and gone to sleep on the living room couch for the rest of the night. I think that is what a woman of firm character would have done. I think that is what a woman who wanted that marriage to last would have done. But I did not do it. Instead, I said to myself that I did not know how the pump worked, I