Desire overcame him in the last, and his hand reached out across the table for the rich colored jam. It was a fatal misstep. She raised her eyebrow at him with all the practiced coldness of her race; she came from a long line of masterful women who had perfected the art of ruling their headships, and this eyebrow of hers was something of a natural gift praised by both mother and grandmother as just the sort of thing. With a little training, she had learned how to raise it up an eighth inch in her youth, quickly gaining mastery over her father. With practice, she had, in the privacy of her boudoir, reached such exulted heights as a quarter inch. The amount of disapproval that had stared back at her from the mirror that day had so frightened her, that she quickly blubbered out a half formed apology before she realized what she was doing. After that incident, she had sworn, out of whatever love she had for the race of men, never to raise such dreadful heights of her eyebrows again.
She had been no fool either in her choice of husband, who came from a long line of cowed men. As the eyebrow raised, the hand made the strategically necessary withdrawal that, nevertheless, was a disastrous move on the part of his forces’ morale, a retreat that threatened to prove devastating to the foreseeable campaign. The cold, hard realization that that jam had not been placed at the table for eating, washed over him with the horrible clarity of hindsight. Her little aside about him gaining weight, the sigh she had made when she set the jam down, the perfect placing of it in a beam of sunlight so that its inviting red would glisten in his vision, the toast set at his elbow—he had been outmaneuvered. How long had she planned this little breakfast? The eyebrow had not yet descended, and he knew there was something more.
Something more was, having just finished his toilet, coming down the hall.
The man at the table waited, half-knowing but reluctant, and she waited, her uplifted eyebrow ready to hold its position come doomsday.
In came doomsday.
“Howdy Missus B!” a hearty voice boomed.
Mr. B’s guest, an old chum from college, waltzed in like the proverbial bull in a soon to be bankrupt teashop. He let out a laugh, the sort of wonderful, honest laugh you never hear in the city, and struck Mr. B’s back with a friendly if somewhat energetic pat.
“You sure keep a cold house,” he continued, grabbing up the jam. “My, it felt like our old camping days, what!”
Mrs. B was ready.
“If the accommodations are not to your liking—”
But that was all she was able to get through.
“Oh yes,” said Mr. B as his friend Havishire passed him the jam. The haphazard manner in which their guest had spread the confecture over his slice of toast, Mrs. B saw with annoyance, had dribbled the sticky substance over the lip of the container. The jam was running down the side of the bottle in an alarmingly free manner, and her stupid husband simply grabbed the container and got his palms covered in the stuff.
“Let’s get you outside your breakfast, m’lad, and then we’ll go shooting.”
Mr. B, in the innocence of his youth, had had his way about the house he and his bride first moved into. The house itself was of no real consequence to him, but the location; it offered no end of hunting and fishing and many other delights his wife had slowly strangled out of his life. It was a very tactful withdrawal on the part of Mrs. B to let him have his way, so tactful, in fact, that Mr. B had no idea it was a withdrawal. He had not then understood, as he even now had not yet fully articulated to himself, that he had married into a war.
Her withdrawal, her perfect martyrdom to his hobbies, had led to much hurt feelings on the part of Mrs. B, feelings that came up, not before they moved in or signed the deed, but long after. Now, whenever he went out to golf or shoot or merely to walk around in nature, he’d come home to her silent, wordless scolding. It was one of the best investments she had ever made.
She frowned as Mr. B ate his jam and toast, frowned as Havishire laughed and remembered olden days, frowned as the two old friends went out the door, and frowned and glared and stewed at the jar of jam, lidless—where had that terrible man put it?—hopelessly encased in its own overflowed delights, and, what stung all the more, enjoyed with real, honest pleasure. Slowly, in her heart of hearts, she knew—but she would not let herself go there, even in her imagination.
Still, it was there, unspoken in her darkness, the dawning realization that she would have to use the full strength of her eyebrow, that quarter inch she had sworn never to lift again. There didn’t seem to be any other choice, not if she wanted to be the master and no mistress, of her household.
Tale Told 