Three Women at the Water's Edge Read online

  So they rode home in silence. Daisy’s head fell back against the headrest and she dozed as Paul drove. They walked into the house, said ordinary normal words to the babysitter—it really was curious how normal they could act in front of such an audience, a fourteen-year-old girl—and Paul drove the babysitter home. He was a very long time doing it; Daisy suspected in a dull way that he had stopped somewhere to call Monica, to tell her that the evening had been a success.

  When he returned, he came into the bedroom, took his pajamas from the drawer, and said, “I’ll sleep in the guest room tonight.”

  “Oh,” said Daisy, who had brushed her teeth and washed her face and was beginning to wake up. This announcement seemed to bother her greatly, in an obscure way. Paul went into the guest room and shut the door tightly.

  “Oh, well,” Daisy said to the door.

  She went to the bedroom—her bedroom now—and put two pillows in the very middle of the bed, and settled down against them. She sat and drank for a while, staring at the blue comforter and the walls, and feeling rather powerful, because she was the only person in the house who was awake, and also rather sovereign, which in her mind at that moment meant large and stately, and alone. She felt very important somehow, but couldn’t understand why; she supposed it was the shock of Paul’s news. Looking about the room, she saw her mother’s letter lying still largely unread on the bedside table. She picked it up, and began to read. She finished her hot chocolate before she finished the letter, and fell asleep sitting up, with the bedside light on, and the cocoa mug lying on its side on the blue comforter, and her mother’s letter loosely fallen from her hand.

  —

  Margaret Wallace had written: “Each morning I awaken to the dazzling bright splendor of sunlight on water, and I lie in bed watching the long, serious, slender freighters glide past, and I try to think of the proper names for all the different blues I see dancing in the water. (Robin’s egg, indigo, sapphire.) I stretch in my wide bed, on my cool blue sheets, and don’t want to rise, and then think, I don’t have to! And sometimes I cry for joy, for the beauty and luxuriousness of my life.

  “At night it is the same. I cannot bear to go to sleep, I sit up in my old blue chair (I found a cotton batik spread in a shop in Dundarave, a spread covered with wide wild stripes of rainbow, and threw it over the chair, so it does not look the same, it is new, as I am). And I stare and stare out the window at the water, at the dark. Sometimes the moon spreads itself across the water in uneven, uneasy strips; it is always shimmering, changing, curving into new forms, as if lying very lightly and restlessly on the surface of the water, which otherwise would absorb it, drink it, cause it to vanish, unlike the reliable certain earth which only refuses and reflects. Sometimes there is no moon, but still the show of dancing lights as the cars cross over and back on the Lion’s Gate Bridge, over and back, and then the lights of the houses and the city flash and tease, and even very late at night I can see lights somewhere. I do not feel alone, I feel sufficiently accompanied, and I wonder if across the harbor, on the eastern shore, another woman is sitting with a glass of brandy in her hand, staring at the water, smiling back at me. Pandora often comes into the room at night—she likes to go about then, you know—and she often comes into my bedroom and leaps up onto my bed, just out of touching distance, and our eyes meet for a moment. I do not need to speak to her; our eyes meet, that is enough, and then she sits and watches the night with me and is elegant and understanding enough to refuse to break our happy silence with a sound. A most companionable cat.

  “What is it I am in love with, I wonder sometimes: is it Vancouver, this blue and silver city, that glitters and shines and spangles, yet is real, or is it this house, my house, or is it my life, my wonderful brave new freedom, or is it me, what I have become? Everything gives me such enormous pleasure: looking at myself in the mirror, in my loose and gay new clothes; walking through the rooms of my house, which respond to me as flowers do, silently but generously, almost giving off perfumes; walking the streets of this city, seeing the wet streets glisten with rain. It’s as if I am living inside a rainbow, and everything is shimmering and iridescent and fine—Do you remember, the summer we all were in Paris, seeing the movie Peau d’Ane, with Catherine Deneuve? Do you remember that she asked for a gown the color of the sky, and magically, she was given that gown, a whole piece of fabric which she wore, which was the most pale and glorious of blues, with real clouds floating on it? Remember the horses the knights and soldiers rode in the movie, the horses that were really red, really blue? My life is like that now, my real life is like that, like a dress made from the sky, like a blue horse, like a princess’s hair so fine and bright it seems spun from gold.

  “This morning, for breakfast—actually, it was almost lunch, it was a little after eleven when I finally rose—this morning for breakfast, I had fresh strawberries and a glass of champagne. I ate the strawberries and drank the champagne from the platinum-rimmed crystal etched with leaves which my grandmother had given me, and which your father and I used only for our most formal and pompous dinners. I wiped my hands on a linen napkin of dove gray brightened by swooping dark-blue birds and huge pink flowers. You have not seen these napkins, they are new. I wrote in my journal, I dressed, I went out to the beach and walked, I pulled my skirts up like a peasant or a queen and stepped about in the waves. The water was very cold; fall is coming. I sat for a while leaning up against a driftwood log, letting sand fall through my fingers onto my bare toes, or rubbing a smooth rock between my third finger and thumb. People passed by—people are always strolling along the beach, poking about in the sand, walking just on the edge of the water—and some of them smiled at me and said hello, and one elderly woman said to me, ‘You look so perfect sitting there in that blue dress, you look as if you have just swum up from the sea, as if you are a mermaid who has just now come up to live on the land.’ She was probably just a dotty old lady, but I can’t remember when anyone has said anything that pleased me more. I think she knew about me, that old woman, like a witch knows, I think she sensed that I had been through a change as dramatic as that of a mermaid coming to live on the land. Although in my case, I feel more like a mermaid who finally found the sea, that is, I feel I have found my real element, found my home. I belong here. And how I love it, that the old woman spoke to me that way. Can you imagine anyone in Liberty, Iowa, saying such a thing? I can’t imagine them thinking it in the first place, let alone speaking so intimately to a stranger. Liberty, Iowa. My God. Now there is irony for you.

  “The only thing that can depress me now is the thought of how many years I lived there, mindlessly doing all the right things, the things that the wife of Harry Wallace, G.P., should do. Remember Arnold Baker, the minister the First Methodist Church had for just about a month before he went crazy and they took him away to the state mental asylum? He said to me, at the welcoming tea Gladys Fletcher had: ‘Harry Wallace, G.P., eh? I guess that means he’s a general practitioner. And that must mean you have to be Mrs. Harry Wallace, G.P., but in your case the G.P. has to stand for Good and Proper.’ I could only stand there with my mouth hanging open, feeling both vaguely insulted and terribly threatened—this was years ago, when you and Dale were small and I still thought that being good and proper in Liberty, Iowa, was the only way possible to live. I’ve often thought about Reverend Baker since then. I wonder if he is still in an asylum. I wonder whether he might have changed my life if he had stayed a few more weeks in Liberty, if he had kept chipping at me that way. Now I think he should not be in an asylum at all; on the contrary, he should be paid money to go around to small towns all across the United States to say unsettling things to good and proper housewives.

  “I fret sometimes because I am so old. Forty-eight years old. I don’t have that much time left, and I hate myself for having wasted it, living out all that time like a thoughtless automaton, in Liberty, Iowa. If only Arnold Baker had stayed around longer, been sharper with me, would I have come to my senses soone
r? Would I have left sooner? But then I think, no, you girls did have a good and happy childhood in Liberty, and that is important. It would not have suited either one of your personalities to be brought up away from your father. No, my time was not wasted, because it resulted in the serenity and completion of you two girls. And now I have made the change, when it can’t harm either of you, and I have made it on my own, without anyone haggling me into it, which is worth some kind of point on some kind of scale of values, and I am here.

  “I am here. I am here, an independent woman, a free woman, a woman who owes nothing to anyone, I am here in Vancouver, the most beautiful city in the world, in a small pure house that is mine and only mine. I have no plans. Perhaps I’ll start taking courses to finish my B.A. degree, you know I had only one year of college, and then I married your father and had my babies right away. We women did that sort of thing in my day, you know, and I suppose some women still do, but not as many, thank God, not as many. I don’t regret it. I won’t waste my time on regrets. Really it doesn’t even matter to me that I don’t have a degree, it’s just that everyone expects me to have one. I try to explain that I’m a reader, and always have been, that I have read not just the gothic romances that are written to help housewives make it through a bleak winter with sick children—although Lord knows I’ve read those, too, and love them still. I won’t be snobbish. There is something quite satisfying about a good gothic romance. Do you ever read them?

  “What was my point? Oh, that I’m a reader, that I read everything: fiction, biographies, history, philosophy, science, anthropology, and so on. I’ve read Plato, I’ve read Voltaire, I’ve read Walker Percy. Why should I go take courses at a university? Well, though, perhaps I would like it—next year—it might be a pleasant thing to do then. And there is a university here I love, it’s called Simon Fraser, after the explorer, and it’s a new university, new and liberal. It’s built at the summit of a mountain, and the architecture is stunning, quite modern and yet classical, so clean, so pure. I like going there very much. I often go out to use the library—Miriam is on the faculty there, you know, and she checks out books for me. And I like sitting in Miriam’s office, talking with her and looking out her wide glass window at the sky. Quite often it is all clouds, the sky, because the university is so very far up the mountain, and as one descends the road back down to Vancouver, one goes back down under the clouds. It is Olympian, Simon Fraser. Yes, I think I might take courses there next year. Next year. I don’t want to be rushed, there is no need to hurry. I’ll only be a year older next year, and Simon Fraser is the sort of place where I can feel comfortable, even if I am twenty years older than the other students.

  “Dear Daisy, what a long letter I’ve written you! I am sure that your two children have not let you read it all in one sitting. You must think I’ve rambled on and on, but this is the first letter I’ve written you since I divorced your father, and I feel like such a new person, I wanted to somehow introduce myself to you. Please use the check, please fly out and spend some time with me. There is so much I want to show you, so much I want to talk about! I hope you are not worrying about your father. Please don’t worry about him. Just think how it is for him: The minute I sat down on the plane all the women in Liberty showed up at his front door with chicken casseroles and chocolate cakes. He will be in heaven. He won’t spend an evening alone. And he is bound to marry again, very soon, I’m sure, he is so terribly eligible. Who wouldn’t want to be Mrs. Harry Wallace, G.P., wealthy and stable, the first citizeness of Liberty, Iowa? Mark my words, your father will be married again very soon. He is a man who likes being taken care of, and Liberty is full of women who like taking care.

  “But I will stop before I begin to sound snide or bitter. All I meant to do was to cheer you up, to free you from any worrisome thoughts. Your father is undoubtedly fine, and I am, as I said before, happier than I have ever been in my life. I am happy, and I am free, and I am new. Doesn’t this intrigue you? Wouldn’t you like to meet me, see my house, see me? I think you would be surprised. Please let me know. Please fly out soon. I would love to see you, Daisy, my flower. Give all my love to Paul and the children. I hope all is well with you—I know how you must be too busy to write, I remember those days very well.

  Love, love, love, Mother”

  Two

  Rocheport, Maine, is twenty miles south of Portland on the Atlantic Ocean. The town itself is set inland a few miles, away from the whims of the sea, but there is a long stretch of public beach that is officially part of the town. It took Dale Wallace fifteen minutes to get from the Rocheport high school, where she taught, to the edge of the Rocheport public beach. She parked her car—a dark-blue Volkswagen Beetle with a gray convertible top—with an abrupt screeching thump, and looked out the window at the beach, and laughed out loud. It was all right if she acted strange, laughed and talked to herself, for most of the houses that ran along the street, facing the ocean, were summer houses, and it was October now, and no one was around to see. It wouldn’t have mattered if people had been around, though, it wouldn’t have mattered at all. Dale laughed, and tore off her clogs and fuzzy green knee socks, and rolled up her Levi’s, and jumped out of the car barefoot.

  The tide was out. The white smooth sand of the beach stretched up and down the coast, far out into the ocean. Dale ran out onto the sand, yelping with shock as her bare feet touched down on the firm cold. She ran for the water, the tantalizing edge of ocean that frothed far out, and when she reached it, she turned and ran along the edge of the water, playing games with the little waves, seeing how close she could get, how long she could stay, before the water surprised her and surged up high, chilling her feet and ankles with an unconcerned painful cold.

  Dale ran and ran. The sun was low and the water was silver, the sand was silver, the sky was silver: the world was silver. It was a fluid jewel. And she was the fire at its heart. She ran and ran. She skipped, she laughed with her head thrown back, she splashed on the edge of the gentle surf till her jeans were wet. She could not stop running. She ran until she reached the rocks at the northern end of the beach, then she turned around and ran back the other way. The ocean reached for, then crested and exploded on, her slender ankles, on her firm smooth legs. Dale put her arms out straight and began spinning around in circles, around and around and around, until she was so dizzy and out of breath she had to stop, bent over, double, hands braced on her knees, laughing and gasping, catching her breath so she could run again. She ran, she ran. She was in love.

  The man she was in love with, Hank Kennedy, might have been surprised to know of Dale’s love. Dale and Hank had seen each other only twice in their lives. Yet Dale felt sure that at last it had happened: she was in love. She was twenty-four years old and had almost decided that it was never going to happen to her. Of course there had been high school boyfriends back in Iowa, and lovers—meaning men she had slept with—during college and her two-year sojourn in Europe. But she had never loved them, not one of them. She had never felt giddy at the sight of any of them, even though some of them had been quite good-looking. She had never felt that astonishing thump that happened inside her chest the first time she saw Hank, and again the second time, a thump so physically real that it was as if her heart had suddenly come alive, had jumped up with a delirious furious force, had thudded wildly about like a wild live creature inside her skin. The first time it had happened Dale had stood quite still, smiling inanely, happily amazed at the sensation. So this was what they were writing about, all those poets, all the songwriters, so this was what everyone had been trying to tell her about. My God, it was so sweet.

  It had happened in the cafeteria of the high school one Thursday evening last month, in September, when she and other teachers had come from all over the region to discuss what new programs to implement with the federal grant the region had just received. Dale was a new teacher in the area; it was her first year and she was full of energy and enthusiasm. She taught biology and French to juniors and senio
rs at the high school, but she had come to the meeting to ask for funds to start a good regional film series. There was no movie theater in Rocheport and the closest one was twenty minutes away in Portland, and she loved movies; she didn’t want to face a long cold winter without them. Of course she thought the series would benefit the students and community as well. She had entered the cafeteria just at six-thirty, the time the meeting was scheduled to begin, and looked about the large room for someone she knew to sit with, and her eyes had caught on the figure of a dark-haired man standing across the room, leaning with both arms on a long narrow table, talking earnestly to a group of teachers. Her eyes had caught on his figure; her heart had leaped. She had not been able to take her eyes off him, she had stood there, foolishly entranced, unable to stop smiling, lost in the ferocious workings of her heart. She had never been so happy in her life.

  “Oh, there you are,” Carol Mellon said to her, coming in laden with notebooks and papers. “Let’s go sit down. What’s the matter? You look strange. Are you sick?”

  “No, no,” Dale had said. “I’m fine, just fine. Where do you want to sit?” And so she had managed to follow Carol across the room, to settle at a table with amiable colleagues; she had managed to appear natural.

  But she couldn’t take her eyes off the man. He was about her age, she thought, probably a few years older, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He was perhaps only a few inches taller than she was: Dale was five seven, and guessed that he was around five ten or five eleven. Of course she couldn’t judge too accurately from so far away, but they would fit together quite nicely, she thought, and went warm throughout her body, and smiled, and could not get her breath.

  “Are you all right? Are you all right?” Carol kept saying to her, buzzing at her like a mosquito.