Mutter, mutter

I came home from work and started to make dinner.  Wife was in the dining room with a big sewing project out, fiddling with one of her sewing machines.  And as she fiddled with the thread and the bobbin and such, she started muttering.  I couldn't tell if she was talking to herself, or if she was trying to talk to me while pretending to talk to herself so that I couldn't accuse her of anything overt, like complaining.  So I didn't pay a lot of attention, but as she went on it got more and more distinct.

This isn't threading right.... Now I just re-threaded the whole thing from scratch.... It's all because I have the wrong thread; if I had the right thread it would work the way it's supposed to. If I still had my shelf in the study I could just go get the thread I need. But of course I don't have the right thread because that bitch [this means D] put it all in storage and said I could get it out on a day's notice any time I wanted but of course now I can't. It figures that the thing her interference has prevented me from sewing is a project for my son.  [I have noticed that the boys never qualify as "our sons" in Wife's monologues, but always hers alone.] But of course she had to have her way and get rid of all my things. I hope she rots in the fires of Hell. It would serve her right for making my life a living Hell by putting my things where I can't get at them. And before she gets there I hope she has a long, lingering, painful death. I wish I could tear back her fingernails off of her fingers, and peel off her skin, and see how she likes that. Well at least there's one good thing: when she threw away all of my stuff she didn't make just one enemy -- she made three. The boys don't like her one little bit either. They'll never accept her as a stepmother. I'm sure as soon as you are rid of me... [This part must have been addressed to me -- right? Except she never looked up at me while saying it. So maybe it was addressed to me without her wanting to admit it, or maybe it was like those times when you are planning what you are going to say to someone and rehearsing it in your mind, while alone. Or maybe both at once. Sorry, let me go on.] ... as soon as you are rid of me you'll take right up with her again. But the boys will hate her and never accept her; and if you take up with her they'll reject you too. 

About this time dinner was ready, and I asked her if we could take the sewing project off the table long enough to eat.

Sure, I'll just go ahead and move it even though I have gotten nothing at all accomplished on it today. No problem. 

Whoa.  Hey babe, it's not that big a deal.  There's no law that says we have to eat dinner even, ... I mean, if you don't want to.

But no, she cleared away her project and we ate.  Conversation was desultory.  I tried to find innocuous and entertaining things to chat about, but I couldn't find many and Wife found ways to resent all of them for the troubles they caused her.  She did mutter some more -- not sure if it was to herself or to me -- about how little she had gotten done today.  I guess that means on this sewing project.  And as she described her day, that in turn seems to have been because she didn't actually sit down to work until very late in the day -- almost as if she didn't so much want to do the project as to get credit for doing it.  She has also talked about how she is going to clean the house from top to bottom before Son 2 comes home on his next break (this coming weekend), because the last time he was here for a mere 24 hours his allergies flared up and he says he has no allergic reactions at Durmstrang at all.  So maybe cleaning the place would help.  She asked me to pick up some super-duper carpet cleaning product over the weekend, which I did.  And I set it down in a prominent, highly-visible place.  But she hasn't done anything with it yet, and probably won't before Son 2 comes home. 

Then just before she went to bed she asked me, "How much of your decision to divorce me was based on your conversations with D?"

I oversimplified some and said, "None. Why?"

"Well I just figured with all that time you spent sitting up talking with her, she probably told you how much better off you'd be without me. And I know you've kept in touch with her since then."

"Yeah, well mostly when we've had something to talk about it has been something one or the other of us read and wanted to discuss. Haven't heard from her lately."

"Did she ever get the job in [a nearby big city]?"

"What job?"

"She talked about getting a job teaching teachers for such-and-such an organization."

Well no, in fact, she's not doing anything of the kind.  She's in a different state in fact.  But all I said was, "If she's doing that then I don't know anything about it."  Which is true at a literal level, I guess.

There was some more, though I don't remember quite what.  Wife repeated some of her earlier remarks about flaying D alive and peeling off her fingernails.  (Wife has a very vivid imagination when it is fueled by her hatreds.)  And then she went to bed.  But I couldn't help thinking that it's remarkable her anger hasn't dissipated even a little bit in nearly four years.  It's still there, still coursing around and around and around her head and heart.  It's sad, really.  Here she wants to condemn D to Hell, and she doesn't realize that by indulging and savoring and preserving her anger and resentment she has condemned herself to Hell here and now today.  What an awful way to live.

By now you must have gotten tired of my repeating the point, but listening to her repeat her mutterings compulsively over and over reminds me of nothing so much as reading the speeches of the damned in C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce....  It's a depressing thought.