They came out of Stambaugh’s. He was pushing a panel cart and she was walking just behind him. He looked irritated. His brow was furrowed with a deep notch of anger, like a man who had been interrupted on a Saturday morning, when his wife thought it was better that they leave the house than to allow him to watch the New Yankee Workshop on TV. She had herded him into the Mercury earlier and directed him to the lumber yard, telling him each step along the way which way to go. He kept saying, “I know, I know,” with an ever-increasing ripple of disquiet marring the otherwise placid pond of his patience. Now they were approaching the same car with a single sheet of drywall on the panel cart. His eyebrows twitched nervously.
“Open the trunk,” he barked at her, with the same irascibility I had seen so often in my own father. She ran quickly and opened the trunk.
He lifted the sheet of drywall and brought it near the trunk. From where I stood, the sheet appeared to be too wide to fit into the trunk. He attempted to bring the sheet straight into the trunk. But it hit the side moldings of the trunk.
“Turn it on an angle,” she suggested. He stopped and looked at her, with the sheet of drywall drooping pathetically in his hands. He said nothing. He angled the sheet and took another stab at securing it in the trunk. But it didn’t fit that way either.
“Got any other bright ideas?”
“Maybe if you bent it slightly in the middle it would fit,” she said.
He dropped the sheet onto the lip of the trunk and glared at her, his hands on his hips. “What the hell good would it do to bend it in the middle?” he said, as he reached out and pressed on the drywall halfway down its long length.
“No, no, not there,” she said, “press on the short end here,” she said as she patted the sheet with her hand in the middle of the width.
He pressed there. But the sheet was still too wide by about one inch. He picked it up and angled it again, tilting the sheet to slope upwards to the left that time. The diagonal opening of the trunk was the same right-to-left, just as it was left-to-right, so the sheet didn’t fit no matter which way it was tilted. After he tried to stuff the sheet into the car that way, he realized just how muddled his thinking was that morning. When she began to gesture with her hands, he cut her off abruptly. “Don’t say another word!” he said, pointing at her. Again he rested the sheet on the trunk lip. He stood there with his arms folded across his chest, his eyebrows twitching rhythmically like the warning lights at a railroad crossing. He bit his lip.
Then suddenly his expression changed. A slight smile flashed across his face. He pulled the sheet down to the pavement, with one end resting on the bumper of the car and the other end on the ground, like an inclined ramp. He raised his foot and stomped on the middle of the sheet, breaking it in half. He picked up both pieces and inclined them on the bumper as before. He thrust his foot through those pieces, creating four pieces. He picked them up and threw them into the trunk: four ragged pieces of drywall, each about two feet by four feet. He slammed the trunk lid closed and turned toward his wife. “You wanted drywall,” he said, waving his hand toward the trunk, “well, there’s your drywall.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “I hope you’re happy now.”
She stood there silently for several seconds, lost in a blank, helpless stare. Then she said, “I don’t think it’s much good like that.”
He walked to the door on the driver’s side and looked back across the roof of the car.
“Just get in the damned car,” he snarled.
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