Too Much Happiness

to use it.
    “I’m just getting up for glasses,” she said, but he said no. No glass, he said, you got any plastic?
    “No.”
    “Cups then. I can see you.”
    She set down the two cups and said, “Just a very little for me.”
    “And me,” he said, businesslike. “I gotta drive.” But he filled his cup to the brim. “I don’t want no cop stickin his head in to see how I am.”
    “Free radicals,” she said.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It’s something about red wine. It either destroys them because they’re bad or builds them up because they’re good, I can’t remember.”
    She drank a sip of the wine and it didn’t make her feel sick, as she had expected. He drank, still standing. She said, “Watch for those knives when you sit down.”
    “Don’t start kidding with me.”
    He gathered the knives and put them back in the drawer, and sat.
    “You think I’m dumb? You think I’m nervous?”
    She took a big chance. She said, “I just think you haven’t ever done anything like this before.”
    “Course I haven’t. You think I’m a murderer? Yeah, I killed them but I’m not a murderer.”
    “There’s a difference,” she said.
    “You bet.”
    “I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I have done the same thing you did.”
    “You never.” He pushed back his chair but did not stand.
    “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she said. “But I did it.”
    “Hell you did. How’d you do it then?”
    “Poison.”
    “What are you talkin about? You make them drink some of this fuckin tea or what?”
    “It wasn’t a them, it was a her. There’s nothing wrong with the tea. It’s supposed to prolong your life.”
    “Don’t want my life prolonged if it means drinkin junk like that. They can find out poison in a body when it’s dead anyway.”
    “I’m not sure that’s true of vegetable poisons. Anyway nobody would think to look. She was one of those girls who had rheumatic fever as a child and coasted along on it, can’t play sports or do anything much, always having to sit down and have a rest. Her dying would not be any big surprise.”
    “What she ever done to you?”
    “She was the girl my husband was in love with. He was going to leave me and marry her. He had told me. I had done everything for him. He and I were working on this house together, he was everything I had. We had not had any children because he didn’t want them. I learned carpentry and I was frightened to get up on ladders but I did it. He was my whole life. Then he was going to kick me out for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office. The whole life we’d worked for was to go to her. Was that fair?”
    “How would a person get poison?”
    “I didn’t have to get it. It was right in the back garden. Here. There was a rhubarb patch from years back. There’s a perfectly adequate poison in the veins of rhubarb leaves. Not the stalks. The stalks are what we eat. They’re fine. But the thin little red veins in the big rhubarb leaves, they’re poisonous. I knew about this, but I have to confess I didn’t know exactly what it would take to be effective so what I did was more in the nature of an experiment. Various things were lucky for me. First, my husband was away at a symposium in Minneapolis. He might have taken her along, of course, but it was summer holidays and she was the junior who had to keep the office going. Another thing, though, she might not have been absolutely on her own, there might have been another person around. And moreover, she might have been suspicious of me. I had to assume that she did not know I knew, and would still think of me as a friend. She had been entertained at my house, we were friendly. I had to count on my husband’s being the kind of person who delays everything and who would tell me to see how I took it but not yet tell her he had done so. So then you say, Why get rid of her? He might still have been thinking both ways?
    “No. He would have kept her on somehow. And even if he didn’t our life was poisoned by her. She poisoned my life so I had to poison hers.
    “I baked two tarts. One had the poison veins in it and one didn’t. Of course I marked the one that didn’t. I drove down to the university and got two cups of coffee and went to her office. Nobody there but her. I told her I’d had to come into town and as I was passing the university grounds I saw