Three Women at the Water's Edge Read online

  As she was resting now.

  It was not a hard or difficult life. She did not dislike it. It made her happy because she had decided to let it make her happy for a while; it would not have suited her permanently, but temporarily it was fine. She was capable of doing it all with good humor and even grace, even though sometimes while she rested she cried with exhaustion. Each day the simple lovely pleasure of lifting Jenny, damp and clinging, from her crib, made Daisy’s shoulders and back ache and cramp, as if this simple act which she loved were for her dumb body a sort of torture.

  At three-fifteen, the other mother would drop Danny off; he would come running into the house to hand her a splotchy bright painting or some crafted item made from straws or dried beans. Sometimes, if necessary, Daisy took them then to get groceries, or new rain boots, or vacuum cleaner bags or dry cleaning, or a birthday card or gift; there was always an errand to do. Sometimes, once or twice a week, Daisy took them to a friend’s house, and she would sit with the other mother and drink coffee or diet soda and laugh, while the children played. Tuesdays she took them to Storytime at the library. Around four-thirty or five, she would come home and put the children in front of the television, and she would fix dinner, and give the children baths and read them stories and finally, with a heroic attempt to be nice about it all, she would put them to bed. Most nights she carried it off pleasantly enough, but some nights, when Jenny asked for more water, more water, and Danny whined, “But I’m not tired, I don’t want to go to bed yet, you don’t love me, why won’t you read me another story, scratch my back,” sometimes then she shouted at the children. The tears came easily. If Paul were home, he might come up and look at her in amazement, as if she had gone mad and were doing something insane in front of the children, and he would talk to Danny in an adult and calm and reasonable voice, the voice of a good parent. Then Daisy would slink off into the bathroom, to soak in a tub of bath water so hot that she came out with parched and reddened skin.

  Saturdays Danny did not have school, and she took the children with her to get the bulk of the week’s groceries. Perhaps there was a birthday party then, or an afternoon children’s movie, or a trip to the zoo or museum, or a visit to a friend. Sundays there was church, and Paul would be home so she did not clean house; then they tried to do something together as a family. Sundays were usually long and unsuccessful days.

  It was a good enough life for a while, especially if you could indulge yourself as Daisy did in chocolates with cherry or marshmallow centers, and novels with heroines who had no husbands, no children, usually not even a house that required dusting. There were other, sensual pleasures: holding and handling the children, even changing Jenny’s diaper, and bending down to bite her fat thigh; drinking coffee with a friend; lying down in a warm bed in a quiet room.

  It was not, however, a very romantic life. Daisy knew she had grown unappealing, especially to Paul. Her body had changed; even if she saw it as temporary, certainly it was a grotesque change. And her cheerful energetic morning self was something Paul rarely saw—he was usually gone then, and so saw her mostly in the dragging, ragged evenings when she cursed and whined with fatigue. She did not want Paul in bed with her much anymore; the more sensual pleasure was in not touching anyone, in lying perfectly still, tending to no one else’s needs—this was now more satisfying than the pleasure of stroking skin, fitting Paul’s body to hers. She saw what she was doing and could understand, finally, why Paul would want to have an affair, play around with someone else for a while. She was betraying him a bit, but it was for the children; it was, therefore, okay if he betrayed her a bit, for a sexy young girl.

  But to fall in love with the girl, to pine and weep over her, to want to leave his wife and children so that he could live with her, to make it seem that all of Daisy’s past and present life was without meaning—that was unforgivable, an inordinate betrayal. It was a violation of the flexible laws of their love. It was a wound, a tear, in the fabric of their lives. It was monumentally unfair.

  The best way Daisy could think to handle it was to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t there. For the past few weeks, she had simply gone on ignoring it, she had been living in a false world. She knew it was a false world, she knew she was purposefully avoiding unchangeable, unbearable facts. She thought of the story by Isak Dinesen in Winter’s Tales where Peter and Rosa, two young lovers, are swept away from the mainland into the sea on a great sheet of ice. That was what was happening to her, except that unlike faithful Peter, Paul had jumped off, had made it safely to shore, in fact had given the crucial push to the ice sheet that set it off on its way toward doom; and there she was, Daisy, stranded on a sheet of ice, unlike Rosa, without a lover; instead with her two small and completely dependent children. Dinesen’s tale had ended beautifully, in a bursting, a sinking, of true love and passion: the two lovers drowned in each other’s arms. The story ended, saying, “The current was strong; they were swept down, in each other’s arms, in a few seconds.” But Daisy had only the children to hold in her arms, and she certainly didn’t want all of them to be swept down into a cold lonely sea. Dear God, who could face a future like that? It didn’t bear thinking of. So, she did not think of it.

  She did not think of it, she would not talk of it. Paul paced, he stormed from the house, he did not make love to her or touch her, he sat in the bathroom and cried. She could see sometimes in his eyes that he wanted to kill her, or at least to shake her and shake her until she agreed to at least listen, and talk, and be reasonable, and say yes, all right, I’ll give you a divorce. Sometimes when she sat in a hot bathtub late at night, sipping tea from a blue plastic cup (so that if she dropped it in the tub it could not break into tiny shards of glass that could cut her or the children’s feet), sometimes she thought about it this way: What kind of man would leave a woman who has borne two of his children and is about to bear a third? What kind of man would leave his family? A bad man, that’s what kind. And Paul was basically a good man, and wanted to be a good man. So by denying his insane pleas, by refusing to even hear them, she was protecting him from changing from a good man to a bad one. Later he would even thank her.

  But even as she thought it, as she was pulling her weighty body out of the bathtub, she knew that she was wrong. Thoughts like that, which soothed her and made her feel secure, evaporated like the steam that clouded the bathroom mirror.

  And today, resting in bed, under her blue afghan with her mother’s letter lying partially unread on the carpet beside the bed, Daisy was frightened. Through the comfort came the fear. She could not lie still, she twisted this way and that in bed, and the covers pulled away, and she kept getting cold.

  Paul was taking her out to dinner tonight. He had arranged for the babysitter all by himself, something he had never done before. The dinner was entirely his idea. He had said, “Daisy, I’ve arranged for Barbara to come over tonight. I’m taking you out to dinner. Can you be ready at seven?” For one wild moment, Daisy had burned with hope. He was taking her out to dinner, he wanted to start all over again, he loved her after all!

  “Why, yes,” she said, smiling at him. “What a good idea!” She thought: her red maternity dress, she would wear that, it always made her look sexy because it had a plunging neckline that flattered her large breasts, and her tummy wouldn’t show at all: The sight of her in the dress, the red silky fabric against her white skin, flashed before her eyes. So she did not right away read the message in Paul’s eyes, in the taut lines of his face.

  “Okay, then,” he said, and went out the front door.

  It had been seven forty-five in the morning; Daisy had just gotten out of bed and was moving around slowly in her shapeless warm old robe. Her hair was mussed, of course, she had been sleeping; she had not washed her face yet or brushed her teeth, because she had been awakened by Jenny, who had soiled her diaper and needed changing. Daisy had slowly gone down the stairs, holding Jenny in her arms for the pleasure of it, smooching Jenny’s soft sleep-warmed skin. She stopped
at the bottom of the stairs and awkwardly bent to put Jenny down; it was just beginning to be difficult for her to bend gracefully at the waist. Straightening up, she saw Paul standing there, by the front door, hand on the doorknob, looking at her with realistic eyes. He looked wonderful: clean, fresh, shaven, well dressed, young, firm, proud. His expensive aftershave spangled the air between them. She was aware, too, of what she looked like: something the children were comfortable with, a warm, loving sloven of a woman, as lazy and plump as pillows.

  And he had said he was taking her out to dinner, and she had smiled, her body startled awake with hope, and he had looked at her, and left, and by the time he had gone out the door the vision of herself in her red maternity dress had vanished and she could tell by the way the door closed so firmly in Paul’s retreating hand that the end of the day was something she should fear.

  What could she do about it? She really did not know. Even if she got out of bed and got a sitter and went to a beauty shop and had her hair done and her face made up and her nails manicured, that still would not change things. It was possible that nothing could change things; it had all been going on too long. Paul had loved her six years ago when they were married, she was sure of that. And she had loved him.

  They had met in Chicago, where she was finishing her B.A. degree and wondering what on earth to do next with her life, and he was finishing his M.A. degree in business administration. It had been at a huge drunken party where they both had other dates that they first saw each other, and although they spoke to each other only briefly, the meeting had been so intense that the next day Paul had called her, and taken her out for pizza that night, and they had slept with each other immediately, knowing each other only twenty-four hours: it had been like that. Chemistry. Now when Daisy looked back at it all, she sometimes thought that it had all been evolutionary, that Danny and Jenny and this new evolving child were the cause of her passion for Paul, and his passion for her, rather than the effect. They had wanted to be born, these children, or nature had wanted them born, and so Daisy and Paul had come together, each of them a tiny helpless stick of steel jumping together at a magnet’s pull. How else could it be explained? They did not know each other very well, and had different values, but in the face of their sexual passion, that hardly mattered. And Paul had been impressed with Daisy because she was tall and had what he considered a “classy” look, and he had been even more impressed because her father was a physician, a wealthy, important burgher of a physician. Paul’s own family was poor and insignificant. Daisy had simply thought that what had happened was the way of the world, was fate. She had wondered what to do with her life, having no strong desires or goals of her own, and here was Paul, coming along almost predictably; she had known she would get married sometime.

  The party they had met at had been in the spring. By August they had married and rented an apartment; Paul had finished his master’s degree and had been given a very good executive job at a large manufacturing company in Milwaukee. Daisy’s parents gave them a large check, because Paul and Daisy had wanted money instead of a large, expensive wedding. They had not really had a honeymoon at all, but hadn’t minded. They felt that they were on their way somewhere, and would not have enjoyed a pause. Daisy found a good secretarial position, and on weekends learned how to make cassoulet, beef Wellington, crepes, Doboschtorte, strong highballs, and champagne punch; they had many successful parties that were a completely different sort of enterprise than the beer-and-wine parties at the university. Paul was looked upon with great favor by his company, and he should have been, because he worked so very hard, into the nights, on the weekends, on holidays. He loved it. They saved a lot of money. Paul wanted to be wealthy and stable; Daisy wanted whatever Paul wanted. Many nights during those first two years they had been simply too tired to make love, but when they did it was with their usual greedy and generous passion. And so of course, after a while, in spite of calendars and devices, Daisy got pregnant.

  She had thought that was a natural, inevitable part of their fate. Paul had disagreed. Their first real fights began.

  It was possible that their marriage had begun to end then, with Danny the size of a freckle inside Daisy, and Daisy sitting on their living-room sofa wearing lavender eye shadow and a see-through blouse, because she was making it an occasion to tell Paul, and Paul doing something Daisy had before seen only as a word in a book: blenching. He shrank away, he went white, he looked sick, he looked scared. Daisy’s beef Stroganoff sat unstirred in the kitchen, unnoticed, growing dry and cold.

  “I’m not ready for children yet,” Paul had said. “I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t want the expense.”

  Daisy had argued that if she had the baby now (while she was young and healthy), she could go back to work seriously, permanently, in only five years, when the child was in school, but if they put it off, it would interrupt whatever job or career she had for herself, so it would be more economical in the long run to have the baby now and get it over with. And, she argued, stressing this point, if they had a baby, Paul’s employers would feel that he was a more settled and respectable person, a family man, with real responsibilities; they would probably give him a raise, they would feel they could trust him. Being a father would make him look stable, solid. Besides, Daisy added, a baby would not cost all that much, would not change their lives all that much. She could probably even continue working part time. Daisy was secretly surprised at her ingenuity at coming up with so many reasons for protecting what was still only a gathering of molecules.

  After Danny was born, she could not remember how Paul had not wanted him; if asked, she would have said in all honesty that Paul had wanted the baby, too, right from the start. And she had been right about Paul’s employers; they were pleased by his fatherhood, they did advance his position, they did give him a raise. In the first two years of Danny’s life, Daisy was so wrapped up with the child that Paul had time and energy to work even harder, and so he was given better positions, more raises, he was a golden boy. When Daisy found out she was pregnant with Jenny—an act she had committed without really consulting Paul, but she felt sure Paul wouldn’t want Danny to be an only child—they had bought a house.

  The house was a large, aging Tudor full of drafts and gracious lines. Its best point was that it was “on the lake,” which Paul thought would impress people, and which Daisy thought would make her eternally happy. Going through the empty, echoing house together with the real estate agent, Daisy had looked past the weathered wooden windowsills out at the expansive sheen of blue lake. It seemed so large, so endless, more like an ocean; Lake Michigan was, after all, 80 miles across and 300 miles long. And the back of the land sloped gently down to a small sandy beach. It would be heaven, Daisy thought, for the children.

  They could not really afford the house. It cost too much money. But it was so imposing, with its steep slate roof and weighty oak front door, so solid, that Paul felt it suited him, and after that no other houses seemed appealing. They borrowed a little money from Daisy’s parents, and used up all their savings toward a down payment, and took out a large mortgage. They didn’t have a penny left over for repairs or decorating; they scarcely had enough to eat. So Daisy spent six months working on the house: stripping old, peeling paint off the woodwork, painting, hanging wallpaper, sewing curtains and drapes, even hammering loose doorframes back to security, screwing brass doorknobs on tightly. She did not work as a secretary anymore, she brought no money in, but she did work like crazy in the house. Whenever she wasn’t cooking or taking care of Danny, she was working on the house. She didn’t nap, she didn’t read books or magazines, she didn’t sit and chat with friends. If they wanted to see her, they had to come to the house, and sit on the floor with a scarf on their heads to keep sawdust or paint out of their hair, and talk to her as she worked.

  Daisy thought at the time, and it was probably true, that Paul did not appreciate the work she did. He would go off in the morning, and make money, and come ba
ck in the evening; and perhaps an entire double casement window, with its strips of wood separating the diamond-shaped panes, would have been perfectly, painstakingly painted. Because he never did any of the painting, he did not understand what an achievement that was. He usually said something appropriately complimentary, but he felt that of course Daisy was only doing her job as wife. He was doing his job, she was doing hers. When most of the work was done on the house, they threw a large party—Daisy wore her sexy red maternity dress—and invited all their friends and acquaintances from Paul’s company. The purpose of the party was not purely exhibitory. It really was a party, a fête, a celebration. Paul felt he had finally achieved stability, as represented by the house; stability, respectability, a kind of worthiness. It was symbolic, for him, the house; a goal, a milestone, a marker in his life. Of course, because it was that for him, a marker, he could pass it by once he had attained it, he could leave it behind. While for Daisy the house was not a symbol. For Daisy it was real, a home, a place to live in and keep and know; it was a shelter of large and graceful rooms which would be part of her and her children’s lives.

  After Daisy gave birth to Jenny, and Paul got another raise, and they were able to breathe a little easier, they could have babysitters in, go to movies, have dinner parties more often, because now they could afford suitable food. So when the house was finally finished, more or less, Paul wanted Daisy to go back to work. But Daisy didn’t want to. She wanted to stay home and take care of her beautiful new house, she wanted to stay home and take care of her beautiful new children. The idea of leaving the house and dropping Danny and Jenny off with some strange person while she sat in a gray office and typed seemed totally unappealing. So she argued: the cost of transportation and child care would take up the greater part of her salary. Again she was ingenious; she added that if she went out to work she would have to buy new, appropriate clothes; that, alone, would use up the first few months’ gain. Since Danny’s birth, she had stopped buying good clothes, which among other things required a good figure, and had gone about quite happily in jeans and large soft old shirts that had once been Paul’s. Paul, on the other hand, because he had to appear well dressed, spent a great deal of money on clothes, and had become almost vain. In any case, he certainly loved clothes, loved adorning himself; and it was even possible that he liked looking better than Daisy. He agreed with Daisy, finally: she should stay home and take care of the children, at least for a while longer. And he realized that the elegant dinners she prepared for his colleagues took up a great deal of time and planning and work. So Daisy did stay home, and she kept the house clean and attractive, and planted graceful flower gardens. She looked stunning at their parties (if a bit plump), and sloppy the rest of the time, with little bits of gnawed food stuck on the back of her shirts where Jenny had spit past the diaper or towel, and brown crusts which could have been dirt or mucus on her jeans, just at child height. In spite of her happiness, she was often tired, and grew to treasure the hours between eight and ten in the evening as her private time to relax, alone, to watch TV, or to soak in a hot tub with a good novel. And before long, she was accidentally pregnant again, and pleased about it.