Coaxial Disconnection

Maya watched her husband chew spinach with mechanical precision, his jaw working like a metronome counting down the seconds of their marriage. The prenatal vitamin sat on her tongue, chalky and huge, a daily reminder of everything her body refused to do.

"The cable guy is coming between three and five," David said, not looking up from his salad. "That window again. Always the window."

"I have a meeting at four."

"I know."

He always knew. He knew her schedule, her cycle, her disappointments. He knew she'd stopped taking the vitamins three weeks ago, that she'd been throwing them in the trash can at work. He knew about the positive pregnancy test from six months ago—the one that turned out to be false—and he knew she'd kept the negative ones hidden in her jewelry box, a collection of tiny white plastic sticks that spelled out her failure in increasingly faint lines.

The coaxial cable had been loose for months. It hung from the wall like an accusation, its silver end exposed and gathering dust. Every time David turned on the television, the screen would flicker and static would hiss through their carefully curated silence. They'd learned to live with the imperfect picture, the way they'd learned to live with so much else: the guest room that was never used, the extra place setting at dinner, the conversations that circled the same exhausted topics.

Maya stood up, her chair scraping against the hardwood. "I'm going to walk to the store."

"We need oranges," David said. "Get oranges."

She walked through the neighborhood where everyone seemed younger than she was—women pushing strollers, couples holding hands, moving through lives that felt impossibly distant. The grocery store fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. She found the oranges, bright and heavy in her palm, and thought about how some things were supposed to be full of promise but just ended up being difficult to peel.

When she returned, David was still at the table, still chewing. The cable guy's truck was parked outside, and a man in a uniform was drilling into their wall, making new holes where there were already so many.

"Fixed it," the cable guy said, wiping grease on his pant leg. "You just needed a new connection all along."

He left, and David finally looked at her. "Better picture now."

Maya put the oranges in a bowl on the counter. Their skins were dimpled, imperfect, hiding everything inside. She wondered if marriages were like coaxial cables—something that could be repaired by someone with the right tools, or if they were more like vitamins: things you were supposed to take every day, things that were supposed to help, but that sometimes you just couldn't make yourself swallow.

"Maya?" David said, his voice suddenly uncertain.

"I don't want a better picture," she said, surprised by the clarity of it. "I want a different channel."