Elaine Johanson

The Subtenants

They had reason enough to be annoyed, or so he said. First, by the rusted bicycle rubbing up against the dining room table, and the poster of Picasso’s sunflowers taped to the foyer wall. Then the granola bar wrapper stuffed behind the radiator, the cabinet handle that came off in his hand, the open bag of flour crusted with moth larvae casings. He catalogued his discoveries over dinner, how their home had been misused during their absence. He called them every word in the book, a new word for everything they did wrong, and banged around the house like an angry child.

Every day brought a new find: crushed graham crackers in the sofa, mud stains on the sheets given to them as a wedding gift, marbles rumbling back and forth in the kitchen drawer where they kept large utensils. She pulled out a wooden ladle one evening and a cat’s eye hit her in the tooth. He wanted to send them the dentist bill; he spent an evening researching lawyers. He threw out the muddied sheets, punching them as they billowed into the trash cans. She fished them out in the morning, ran them through the wash three times, and folded them into the linen closet for guests.

Then came the afternoon she needed the number of a hair salon. Out of the phone book pages slid flattened violets and red leaves. She gathered them up from the floor, spread them on the kitchen table, then searched the book for more. He was there when she vacuumed up glitter from between the floorboards. He helped her unravel a bleached ribbon from the front yard pine with a patience that stayed intact even when it started to rain, straight down.

He was watching the football game when she found the post-it in her make-up bag. In his tall, blue print, it said, ‘you don’t need it.’ She stood in the bathroom with the note stuck to her index finger, wondering if she should still put on make-up for their dinner out, or if she should go to him and show him the note and what kind of expression he’d meet her with. She put the note back, like a fortune cookie slip tucked into a pocket.

He was at work when she found the sapphire earrings in the hot cocoa mix. They were bigger than what she usually wore, and square. He smiled when he saw her wearing them, a night when they were meeting friends for a concert in the park.

“I thought you might try to eat them,” he said, and then came close to smell her ear, putting his hand on her back to keep her from moving away. “Did you wash them? I don’t smell the chocolate at all. No, there it is. No, maybe it’s just you.”

 

* * *

 

This is the story she told her friend, when asked why she stayed with her husband so long.

‘It was the sense that maybe I just wasn’t seeing what I should have been seeing all along. It was like waking up in a new world, like when it snows, or at Christmas. I knew everything was the same, but still, I couldn’t help myself. If I could make it Christmas every day, I could stay.’

• • •
I’ve lived in a lot of apartments since graduating from college, and have occasionally toyed with the idea of subletting my apartment out when I’m traveling. But my home has always felt like a private space, and allowing someone else to live there makes me anxious. Writing this story was my way of exploring that anxiety.

An earlier version of ‘The Subtenants’ appeared as a prose poem in my graduate thesis, but in that version, there was very little difference in the experience of the man and woman. It felt incomplete. I decided to turn it into a story, with the subtenants’ mess serving as a catalyst for a change in the couple’s relationship. When I submitted it to Press One, there was a long middle section that described a period in the woman’s childhood. Editor Beth Thorpe rightly pointed out that the middle section was actually just a distraction and that the story stood alone without it. I mourned that middle part for a short while, but with Beth’s encouragement, have started to turn it into its own story.

Elaine Johanson is a writer and teacher living in Philadelphia. She received a BA from Bowdoin College, and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.