Equity Division

Equity Division

Ahem.

      “- Oh I’m the mistake. Yes I’m the mistake you made. Yes how could I forget? You’re the one who has supported us all these-”

      “Ha! ‘Supported’ is that what you call it. Tonight was your idea, God damn it.”

     Ahem.

     “For Christ sakes, pay the driver,” she says before pulling herself from the back seat and staggering to the house, her heels punching holes in the lawn.

     He looks around as if waking from a stupor. He lifts his pelvis and gropes his pants for his wallet. He studies it in his hands as if deciding whether an old sandwich is still fine to eat. He extracts a bill like a pickle, tosses it at the driver, and waves away the change.

The door won’t budge but the lights are on inside. He knocks three times with the back of his hand. “Open up.” He leans with his hands on the frame, holds himself up. “Open this damn door,” He calls. Three more knocks.

     “Up here,” she teases.

     He steps back and looks up at her as she hangs out of the bedroom window with handfuls of clothes. She tosses down his business shirts then disappears and returns with shoes and pants littering the lawn and roof. “What the hell are you doing?”

     “Take it and go.”

     “Open this door.”

     “Go away or I will call the police.”

     “It’s my home.”

     “Oh, it’s yours is it? Not ours anymore,” she slurs. The thunder of feet coming down the stairs, then the honk of a chair sliding on the hard wood. Plates chinking. Drawers sliding.

     “Open up now. I swear to God I will kick it in.” He knocks with his hands hammer gripped. A steady continuous drumming.

     “Five – four – ”

     “Oh I’m so scared. What –three – are you going to do  – two – huh?”

     “One. I warned you,” he said staggers back from the door, gathers himself, hoisting his gut up to his chest, and rushes at the door.

     Thump.

     “What are you doing?” she screams.

     Thump.

     “Oh the judge is going to love this. Go on, break it, BREAK IT.”

     Tha-rack.

Still balancing on one foot, he watches the door swing ajar. He steps through the doorframe with satisfaction, regarding the exit wound where the bolt had dragged through the wood.

     “Are you insane?” A plate whooshes by his head, then another. The third he blocks with his forearm and it instantly throbs.

     Tears carry a spire of mascara down each of her glowing cheeks. On the dining room table, plates and cups are stacked. Books and her laptop. Car keys.

     “What are you doing?” he begins, pointing at the collection with his chin and rolling his fingers into fists.

     “I’m gathering my things, keep your Toyota and your television.”

     “What are you talking about?”

     “We have to start somewhere don’t we?”

     “Take your god damn pills.” Woosh. Another narrow miss. The ceramic pieces pile on the hard wood. He pivots, swaying gently. At last, he moves towards her. Past her into the kitchen. He pulls down a bottle of gin, pours a few fingers into a plastic cup – the only thing remaining in the cabinet.

      “You’re just going to sit there and keep drinking?” She marches into the kitchen, her arms swinging like flails. She takes the gin from the fridge top uncaps it and tilts it high over the sink. She looks at the full moon of bald scalp in his black hair.  It annoys her further that he doesn’t look.

      He listens to the din of liquor hitting the steel sink, glugging down the drain. It takes a few deep breaths and a mouthful of gin but he refuses to look. Suddenly he is aware of a mouth ulcer, the gin – he assumes – has caused a deep flinching ache. It began to smart almost a week earlier, though he had all but forgotten about it. Perhaps he has just grown numb to the faint constant throbbing like dulling a grinding stone over time. Is it still pain if you grow wholly accustomed to it?

     He rises and moves to the stack on the table. He picks out one crystal goblet. “This is mine.”

     She puts the empty gin bottle on the counter and sets her arms akimbo, her legs crumpled and nose creased.

      “That set,” she begins moving forward, “was a wedding gift from my boss.”

     He bounces it in his hand like a grocer contemplating the ripeness of an apple. Then pitches it, far across the dining room and through the corridor at the wall beside the stairs. Hailstones of crystal rain on the hard wood.

     “Don’t worry dear, that was just my half of the set.”

They circle the table like opposing magnets, one moves close to the collection while the other steps away.

     “And this DVD set, I bought this at Mr. Reeves garage sale.” He takes the set from the table and begins his own collection in the corridor.

     “I won this dart set at quiz night,” he continues.

     “We won it.”

      He opens the set, places one dart in her pile, one in his and pinches the third before his eyes. He launches it at the wedding photo, hung beside the dining table. They take turns placing items in their piles, explaining the origin of a waffle maker or the fire poker. Fishing line and a scented candle.

     “How dare you? That lamp has been in my family for years, you know I took it from my parents beach house on the forth of July weekend last year,” she says snatching the porcelain lamp from his pile to her chest. They walk about the house, the lounge, the bathroom.

     They move up stairs together. Dividing the bedding. The DVDs. Their own clothes.

     “You would take it, just to spite me,” he spits, handling a cigar cutter her father had given him at Christmas, “that’s right, if you want to play like that, we can play like that.”

      A shirt for a fundraiser is torn by the sleeves. “You’re a Large, this is a medium. This is my one, we both did the fundraiser,” she says, balling her hands in the cotton and the strain rises through her voice.

     “I was a medium in-” he checks the printed image on the shirt, “2003.”

      The television in the bedroom cracks and tumbles down the stairs after she gives him a firm push in the back and he drops it.

      She finds his flask. Opens it and sniffs. She takes a long swig and when she coughs, he looks up from the trunk that houses the shoes.

     “My flask,” he gasps, “Leave it.”

     She takes one more swig and he rushes across the room. She drops it and the rum inside glugs on to the carpet. He quickly scoops it up and sucks the last few ounces. He tosses the empty flask toward his pile.

      Adrenalin and contempt embellish the haze of that evening’s booze. Her hands tremble and her eyes still run. He walks with fists as hard as granite and his thick brow deeply creased.

      She jerks the mattress down the stairs onto her pile and flips the base onto his. The wedding photos stay up, but the vacation photos from Cancun and Tampa bay, Colorado and Hawaii are divided according to whom is featured and if the photo included neither of them a debate ensues as to who took the photo and eventually but on whose camera was the photo taken?

     “It’s my camera you bought it as Christmas gift.”

     “That’s right, I bought it not you.”

He walks out into the back yard and to the shed. She glances up when the light comes on outside and briskly follows him. They cross each other. She is on her way to the shed and he on his way back to his pile toting the leaf blower and chainsaw. When they pass in the yard the next time. She holds an old typewriter under her arm and a pair of water skis across her shoulders. The shed is quickly emptied and the lawnmower, the final item, ends up on his pile as it was he who had taken it from her parents and repaired it.

     Her blond fringe has tumbled over her brow and she stands sweating between the piles, she pushes her items away from his. It takes her a moment to confirm her yoga matt and her toaster are both still in her pile.

Most of the rooms are empty and they find each other back in the dining room, restacking their piles but it is no use as the piles continually collapse and combine in the middle. Their eyes narrow with distrust and they study each other’s piles for stolen items or items that haven’t been adequately disputed.

     “Oh yes, because you would have known Layla if it weren’t for me. She probably gave you the hair iron as a favour to me. Did you consider that?”

    The oak dining table still stands. As if reading it in his eyes she speaks.

     “It’s mine.”

     “I picked it out.”

     “I paid for it.”

     “You paid for it, what a joke, I make more money than you.”

     “In real estate? You didn’t make a dime your first two years, who was the bread winner then?”

     “Well we purchased the table when I was making the most money.”

     They both edge toward it. They take it in their grip and tug as the debate continues.

     “We will half it?” he slurs.

     “Half it?”

     “It comes apart.”

     “What good is a half?”

      An agreement is reached. They take their halves and lay them on their piles and things tumble towards the centre again.

      Promptly, she steps forward and pushes his pile back. She finds an old spray can at the foot of his pile and shakes it. She uncaps the spray paint and marks a straight line across the room.

     He watches on incredulously. He has rolled up his sleeves and opens the top few buttons. Loops of sweat darken his shirt around his armpits.

     She stands with one of her stiletto heels collapsed and her hair no longer gathered but fleeced and unspun.

     “Keep your things on that side. Anything that ends on this side is mine.”

     “Same goes.” She pushes her pile back toward the kitchen and he pushes his toward the corridor at the base of the stairs. The items are split infallibly. She looks up at the ceiling. He looks up at the ceiling and their eyes widen.

“When are you leaving?” she asks casually.

     “Leaving? You’re the one leaving.” He almost smiles, laughs at the idea of her keeping the home. He finds in his pile a bottle of gin, one that he had kept in the shed. She takes a bottle of wine from the fridge, and they drink. They don’t talk but they swig their bottles and consider the final item to be decided. “You can take it all, but the home is mine,” he says.

     “Why would you want it, we have barely cleared the interest on the mortgage, you will be paying it off for forty years yet,” she tries a tact but he forces a mocking laugh in response.

      “You can divide the land,” she says after taking in the last of the wine. She blinks a few times and adjusts her footing as if she is dosing off.

     He considers it. They had purchased the lot because it was big enough to subdivide and sell as two homes when they retired, that was the plan anyway. He eyes the line sprayed in the floor. He takes one of the bright coloured spray cans and she takes another.

 He walks out the front door and she out the back so as not to step on his side. They meet on the lawn and walk side by side drawing the line. The sun declares its intentions to rise soon in the pink of the horizon, though the stars are still out. They meet again in the backyard and match each other with a line all the way between the fruit trees and beneath the clothing line to and up the back fence.

      Silently they march back inside the house.

      “Your side is bigger,” he says, loosely crossing his arms and doing his best to stand still.

      She looks at him and considers how he once stood short, straight as an exclamation point and now his dewlaps poke out over his belt, and his shoulders slump over his chest.

      He watches her and considers how thick her makeup is becoming. How the gap in her cleavage has widened and the sickly hue taken on by the veins mapped in her arm.

They look at each other drunk and barely awake. The birds are beginning outside and the hum of a passing car sounds more and more frequently.

     “My side may be bigger. But you get the bedroom upstairs,” she says.

     “The spray paint will fade or it will be hidden under our piles.” He knows he is drunk by how difficult it has become to compile a sentence and even more so when it comes to delivering it.

     “We will put a wall up.”

     “A wall?”

     “A brick wall so I never have to see you again.”

     “No, you can take your half and sell it, piss off to another town for all I care.”

     “I’m not moving.”

     “Well I’m not leaving without my house.”

     “Without your house?” She laughs like a flighty bird chatting, a fake contemptuous laugh. “Where and how are you going to take your house, genius? That’s your problem, you’re talk. All mouth and no balls. Why do you think Mark happened?” She laughs again.

     A familiar pain starts in his chest. “I’ll do it.”

     “Do what?”

     He pushes the bed base of his pile aside. He burrows, rolling the golf set to the side and tossing his bowling ball with a thud. He finds it.

     She smiles and juts her head out. The chainsaw.

     It starts and suddenly drowns out the passing cars and the chatting birds. He looks up at her as he points to the polished hardwood with the tip.

     She nods. He presses it in.

     Wood peels away like bread crumbs. He follows the spray paint line up and when he hits the window the glass screams like an animal. It travels up chipping away in coin-sized disks leaving a crater to be replaced by another and another until the window is split. He lets it idle at the ceiling and pulls it from the wall. He begins up the other wall then through into the bathroom. The porcelain chips and the toilet collapses.

She continued to sit on her pile laughing and hugging herself. He managed to cut through all the walls of the lower level without stepping on her side. He stopped to refill the chainsaw just once.

     The broken toilet is flooding her half and when he has cut through the wall to the yard, something sparks with a crack and the lights go out but by now, the sun is flooding the dining room through the shattered window.

     The neighbours are gathering on their respective lawns. The gap to the basement is just an inch wide but the flooded toilet has moated her on her island and it’s rolling over the lip of the divide into the basement.

     By the time he has staggered out the bathroom window upstairs and onto the terracotta roof, the police have arrived. His hard eyes fix on the gently rolling tip of the chainsaw. The police officers cross the lawn and tap on the doorframe. They hear a loud guttural rumbling as though the house itself is lurching at their arrival. The two officers look at the woman sleeping on the stack of appliances, furniture, pots and pans, then they cut each other a concerned look. When she rolls over and resumes sleeping, they let their breath out but still wear the concern police officers wear better than anyone else. They look up as the grinding sound begins in the ceiling. Flakes of dry wall. The sickly trickle of water flooding into the basement. Stacks of loot on either side of the divide.

The chainsaw kicks up a haze of bronze dust that hangs in the morning glow and the tiles crack and split. Two cops call up to him from the bullhorn attached to the roof of their car, but they can’t break the trance.

    By the time he realises the police have arrived, the roof is completely divided. He peels away a few tiles on his side and drops through to the attic. He continues the division through the floor of the attic and his cut lines up with that of the ceiling inside. He cuts through the cloud of dry wall and pink wisps of insulation catch in the teeth of the chainsaw but the hindrance is of no great inconvenience as he continues along.

He finishes. The home has become two homes divided by an infallible line. The cops decide an arrest is to be made and when they find him in the attic he doesn’t resist, he knows that he will be held for a few hours at most, so he smiles. Because as the sun sits on a skid of cloud in the sky and the dressing gowned neighbours watch on with their arms around each other and coffee cups in their hands, he realises that at last, the marriage is over.