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    The Marriage Bed
    The Marriage Bed
    The Marriage Bed
    Ebook67 pages56 minutes

    The Marriage Bed

    By Elaine Ford

    ()

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    About this ebook

    View love and marriage from every angle except Happily Ever After in these five stories and two novel excerpts. Ford sympathetically captures the emptiness of faded love, the disappointment of affection misplaced, the humor of narrowly-escaped misalliance. Many err but none are mocked in this sparely-written, humane collection.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordrunner eChapbooks
    Release dateNov 14, 2015
    ISBN9781311421524
    The Marriage Bed
    Author

    Elaine Ford

    Elaine Ford has published five novels, including Missed Connections and Ivory Bright. Her story collection The American Wife won the 2007 Michigan Literary Fiction Award. New work appears in Chariton Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Your Genealogy Today, and Arkansas Review. A performance of her story “The Power Cord” can be heard at www.theflexiblepersona.com/#!i2-1/c1jma.Elaine’s work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. She is professor emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature. Her website is: www.ElaineFordAuthor.com.

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      Book preview

      The Marriage Bed - Elaine Ford

      The Marriage Bed

      Five Stories and

      Two Novella Excerpts

      By Elaine Ford

      Published by Wordrunner eChapbooks

      (an imprint of Wordrunner Press)

      Copyright 2015 Elaine Ford

      Cover photo by Carmen Silva

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      A Sense of Morality

      Wasps in a Bottle

      Rita Lafferty’s Lucky Summer

      Birthing

      Ship Street

      Nerve-Wrackin Christmas

      Original Brasses, Fine Patina

      About Elaine Ford

      About Wordrunner eChapbooks

      A Sense of Morality

      In November of 1969, the month 250,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators marched on Washington, Miles and I departed that city for good and moved into a beach cottage in a blue-collar town south of Boston. Mortgage-poor, unable to sell our Cleveland Park house for what it was worth, we were, to put it bluntly, broke. But for me the cottage was more than a cheap winter rental. I was desperate to get away from tear gas and slogan-shouting and head-bashing. The deserted seaside represented my private escape from the war.

      The first Saturday after the move, old friends from graduate school days drove down from Newton to inspect our uncharacteristically eccentric digs. We ate mussels for dinner and drank a great deal of jug wine, which Miles inevitably referred to as plonk, an expression he’d picked up in London the year he researched the Anti-Corn Law League. From behind an expanse of plate glass we looked out at the dark Atlantic. You’ve done a Good Thing, Ned Warner pronounced euphorically, as we contemplated the languorous progression of an oil tanker heading north, glittering like a parcel of urban property that had somehow become detached from the mainland. With a gratified smile Miles tipped more plonk into Ned’s glass.

      Around midnight the Warners left for home and Miles and I went upstairs to bed. An hour or so later I was awakened by a pair of indistinct shapes bumping softly into cartons, groping in piles of as yet unstowed possessions.

      Miles, I said, nudging him, there are people in the bedroom.

      It’s only the Warners, he muttered, from the depths of his wine-befogged sleep.

      It can’t be the Warners, I said. The Warners have gone back to Newton.

      Cutting the argument off right there, one of the shapes grabbed some part of Miles’s body and yanked him out of bed. Just give us the big bills, he said, putting to Miles’s throat what we later learned was our own boning knife. You can keep the change.

      Breathlessly I began to explain that we didn’t have any big bills; the Federal Home Loan Bank had it all. You can’t get blood out of a turnip, I said. At the same time Miles was chattering he didn’t know where his wallet might be but he’d do his best to find it and please for the love of God don’t kill him. I could tell from the wild croak in his voice that Miles was taking this turn of events harder that I. However, I didn’t have a boning knife nicking into my throat.

      Thug Number One frog-marched Miles downstairs in search of the wallet and I was left with Thug Number Two, who so far hadn’t said anything. Miles never knows where his wallet is, I confided, hoping to abort any suspicions that we were holding out on them. Or his keys. That’s one of the things about Miles.

      We could hear, downstairs, swear words out of Thug Number One as they stumbled around in the dark, and out of Miles a sort of unhinged keening. I found my husband’s lack of guts embarrassing. I jumped out of bed and switched on the light.

      Hey! Thug Number Two said, startled. But I began to hunt for the wallet among heaps of underwear, and he didn’t try to stop me. He was a slight man, twenty at most, with dull hair and a complexion that looked like it had been conditioned with a cheese grater. He held my bread knife, the serrated kind, and on his hands were two of my oven mitts. So we don’t leave fingerprints, he explained, with a wave of one mitt.

      Good thinking.

      My cousin thought it up, he said modestly. "We cut your

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