Three Women at the Water's Edge Page 6

  Tonight, she yearned to say, now. But instead she put it in his charge: “Well, almost any time is fine. When would be good for you?”

  “Well—perhaps tomorrow? After school? I could pick you up and we could go have dinner together. There are several nice restaurants around—”

  “That would be fine,” Dale said. “That would be really fine.”

  “I’ll pick you up in front of the high school tomorrow. What is a good time?”

  “Five,” she said. “Five would be good. I can get everything cleaned up and in order by then.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll see you then.”

  “Yes. See you then,” Dale said, and hung up. She turned to Carol and smiled. “That was Hank Kennedy,” she said calmly.

  “Well, good,” Carol said, smiling back at her. “And just think what we’ll save on the electric bill. All we’ll have to do is set our appliances next to you and they’ll run full speed.”

  “Carol,” Dale said in drawn-out syllables, pleadingly. She wanted every ounce of Carol’s attention and understanding and good warm humor, because it was true: Dale was radiant, she was electric. She was shaking. She could not imagine how she could sleep, and so she sat with Carol and talked about her years in Europe, and her college days, and her high school days, until Carol finally said, “I’m sorry, Dale, but I’ve got to get some sleep. And you should, too.”

  So Dale dutifully climbed into bed to sleep. But it seemed to her that she spent the entire night lying on her back, smiling up at the ceiling with anticipation and great delight, never closing her eyes.

  —

  They had dinner at a small seafood restaurant in Ogunquit. As the day had drawn on toward five o’clock, Dale had come to be more and more apprehensive, afraid that when she finally was close to Hank Kennedy, something would be wrong: he would have bad teeth, bad breath, or he would be dull or silly, or have some enormous imperfection that would ruin everything. So as the evening went on, she became more and more giddy with relief, because he was not imperfect, he was perfect: he was beautiful, and intelligent, and in control. Her heart thumped up when she first saw him, and for the rest of the evening she was in a frenzy, wanting to touch him, wanting to touch him. She wanted it all right away, she wanted to squeeze across the bench seat of the cab of his red pickup truck to press her thigh against his, she wanted to reach across the table at the restaurant to touch his hand. Yet his words were of vital interest to her, too.

  At the beginning of the evening they talked about the obvious things: his job, her job, what they thought of various administrators, Carol and her position in the community, the bleakness of the Maine coast in the winter, the beauty of the Maine coast the rest of the year. It seemed to Dale that she agreed with Hank about everything, that everything he said was just and true. Finally, when they had finished their excellent meal and were sitting over coffee and cognac, their talk became more personal.

  “You’re from Iowa?” Hank said. “How in the world did you end up here?”

  “Because of Carol,” Dale said. “We met at Williams, and became close friends. The summer of my freshman year, instead of going home, I came up to stay with Carol and her family. And of course I got hooked. I worked as a waitress at the Blue Barn Inn in Rocheport, and that left me every afternoon free—they served only breakfast and dinner. So I spent my whole summer on the beach, or poking about the town, and I fell in love with it. Well, then I went to Europe for two years, but last spring Carol wrote me that they needed a teacher here, someone who could handle both biology and French, and so I came. You can see it’s all because of Carol. She brought me here that summer, and then she found me the job. But she knew how much I loved the area, especially the ocean. It’s funny, you know, how at home I feel here. I think I should miss Iowa, the rolling hills, the countryside, the sky, but I don’t. Or I do, but it’s all right, because of the ocean. It’s very—I don’t know how to say how I feel about the ocean, the water. I spend a lot of time there.”

  “I know,” Hank said. “That’s partly why I’m here, too. My family lives in Arlington, right outside of Boston, and they would have liked me to stay there. We used to spend every summer up here when I was growing up—for fifteen years we had a summer house right on the ocean. In fact, we still own it, but since my brother and I are gone, my parents don’t spend as much time up here as they used to. So we still own it, but they usually rent it out for most of the summer. They thought I was crazy to want to live here permanently, and sometimes—in February, for example—I think they’re right.”

  “But you have a farm, don’t you?” Dale asked, and even as she spoke she sensed Hank drawing back into himself.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do. That’s another reason they think I’m crazy. But it’s what I wanted to do, and I’m satisfied. How did you end up majoring in biology and in French?”

  The sudden switch back from him to her as a topic of conversation startled Dale, and she felt discontented for a moment, somehow cheated. Why wouldn’t he talk to her about his farm? But he was leaning toward her again, and he looked interested in what she would say.

  “I only have a minor in French,” Dale said. “But I picked up a lot in Europe over the past two years. So it’s good enough for high school students. My major was biology. Actually, all my life I thought I would become a doctor. My father is a physician, a general practitioner in Iowa, and he’s sort of a god back there. Everyone loves him. And they should, he’s really tremendous, he’s devoted his entire life to the town. Well, I always thought my older sister Daisy would grow up to be my mother—a pretty, organized, generous wife and mother. And I thought I would grow up to be my father. A wise and beloved physician. Well”—Dale smiled at herself then; she had come to the point in her life where she could smile about it now, where it did not hurt to say it—”I tried taking premed my freshman year in college, and I did just horribly. I’m still not sure why, because I always got straight A’s in biology and physics and chemistry in high school. I can’t tell you what a surprise it was to me to find the courses so difficult and the competition so tough. And the ones who were doing well in the courses were real grinds, they had no other life except their studies. So I decided at the end of my freshman year to become a biology major. I was told I could get good jobs with it, jobs in labs and so on. But I can’t tell you how devastated I was at the end of my freshman year. I had gotten C’s in all my science courses, and I had slaved to get those. Oh, God, I still can scarcely bear to think of it. I felt like such a failure. That’s one of the reasons I was so glad to come to Rocheport that summer with Carol. I didn’t think I could bear to go back to Iowa, to face my father with my defeat. He had wanted me to be a physician, too, though he never pushed it. That was the worst year of my life—I think that might have been the worst thing that ever happened to me, realizing that I wasn’t going to make my childhood fantasy into a reality. I felt sort of dazed for the next few years, for the rest of my college career. I mean I made A’s in many courses, but I discounted that, it didn’t matter. I still felt like a failure. That’s partly why I went to Europe; I just couldn’t seem to get started in life. It wasn’t that I really wanted to be a doctor. It was more that I suddenly was faced with the fact that the rest of my life was not going to be as easy and perfect as my childhood had been.”

  Suddenly she wanted to be there, in her childhood, to take Hank by the hand and lead him around through her happy life in Iowa, as through some sort of far-off and fabulous land. She wanted to show him Liberty, a large and gentle village set among rolling hills, where it seemed all during her childhood that her father and mother were the king and queen, and she and her sister Daisy the princesses. It had been such a storybook town; all her days had been as easy as waking up in her pink-and-white-flowered room. The town’s population was only about 4, 500 and most of the people were farmers, or else they worked at the feed mill or sold trucks and tractors and farm equipment, or repaired trucks and tractors and farm equip
ment. And there were the teachers, of course, who taught in the consolidated public schools, and the keepers of the various necessary shops: the drugstore, which had a soda fountain and small coffee shop—everyone wandered in on Sunday mornings after church to get the Sunday papers and to gossip: the post office; the grocery store; the general store which sold everything from hard candy to women’s girdles; the hardware store.

  “My God,” Hank said, “it sounds like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

  Dale laughed. “It was,” she said. “It was.”

  She went on, she told him everything, it all flooded back through her and out toward him. Liberty was the county seat, and so the town was quite pretty, symmetrical, four blocks squared around a courtyard, with a graystone courthouse solidly standing on the north side, like a serious castle blocking the rest of the town from the worst winter winds. In the middle of the courtyard was a brass statue dedicated to the valiant dead of the two world wars; small boys climbed on the statue to sit on the cannons. And there was a small fountain, which children played in in the summer, and flower gardens, and sidewalks and a few trees—one towering evergreen which was always decorated for Christmas every December—and even a bandstand, with a striped octagonal roof and seven wide steps and railings. And the high school band gave concerts there on the Fourth of July. There were three churches: the Catholic, the Baptist, and the Methodist. Her parents had gone to the Methodist church, and for a long while Dale’s mother had been president of the ladies’ auxiliary. There was only one bar in town, in the American Legion building that stood on one corner. That was the only building in all of Liberty that Dale had never been in. Now, looking back at it as an adult, Dale could see that there was not much going on in Liberty: There was no movie theater, although there was a small library in a tiny yellow frame house, and in Dale’s teenage years they had begun to show old black-and-white children’s films on Saturday afternoons. But Dale had had a marvelously busy life as a child: There was Brownies, and then Girl Scouts; and Sunday school, and then Methodist Youth Fellowship; and band when she was smaller—she had played the flute for a while, but not all that well—and cheerleading and French Club and Student Council and high school plays when she was older.

  And their house—their wonderful, wonderful house. It was only a block back from the main square. It was enormous, post-Victorian, brick, with wooden porches and stained-glass windows and a large flat yard. Her mother grew vegetables in the backyard and flowers in the front. Dale and Daisy roller-skated to school together. Each of the girls had separate rooms—Daisy’s of course had been yellow and white, with daisies on the wallpaper; Dale’s had been pink and white, with roses. Dale could close her eyes and see the sun slanting in her window on a summer morning, striking the white bookcase where her books and figurines and stuffed animals sat, turning the white into an indescribable color; it was not a color, it was a light, a brilliance, at once calm and motionless and yet somehow vividly alive. And the kitchen, which smelled of hot chocolate or cherry pie or her mother’s homemade grape jam, and her father’s study, the forbidden room, where he kept his accounts and sometimes had private talks with distraught patients, and her parents’ bedroom, huge and mysterious, with her mother’s books piled everywhere, and the bathroom, with its white octagonal tiles.

  On Sunday afternoons, every Sunday afternoon of her life, it seemed, Dale’s father would walk with her and Daisy across the street and around the town square to the drugstore. In good weather they made the most of the walk, going around several blocks to look at the flowers in bloom in the spring or the colors of the maples in the fall; in the winter they hurried, bundled against the wind, eager for the refuge of the overheated store. Inside, Dr. Wallace would treat his daughters to cocoa or lemonade, and he would have a cup of Ovaltine, and they would all sit chatting with Mr. Pendergast, the druggist, and with whoever else came in. And then Dr. Wallace would buy his daughters a treat—paper dolls in the early years, and then comic books or Mad magazine in their early teens, and finally Seventeen as they grew older. That was his weekly treat for them. He liked to give them something pleasant to do on Sunday evenings when he and his wife went to the church socials or to dinner with friends. Every Sunday afternoon of their young lives, Dale and Daisy had been treated to this pleasure, the king taking his daughters for a stroll. They would still be wearing their best dresses, which they had worn to church. They would have eaten a large Sunday dinner after church, then helped their mother clean up the kitchen. Then they would go for the walk with their father, while their mother lay stretched out on her bed, reading, sucking white peppermint Life Savers from a blue wrapper. This was the day when Dale and Daisy were complimented; always some old lady who hadn’t seen them for a while would declare over how tall and pretty they had grown; or they would run into the Catholic priest, who would praise Dale for winning the local essay contest; or someone, someone they vaguely knew, but who knew—and who worshipped, this was the important point, who worshipped—their father, would say hello, tell them what nice dresses they were wearing, tell them what fine girls they were getting to be. Dr. Wallace would stand smiling casually at them, as if their achievements and all the praise were totally deserved, and had nothing to do with him.

  Dale hadn’t wanted to leave. She had wanted to go to the state university that was only a thirty-minute drive away. But her mother had been ferocious in her insistence that Dale go back East to college. “You’ve got to get out of here,” she had said over and over again to Dale, and when Dale asked her why, she would only say, “You’ve got to see more of life, you’ve got to get a wider view.” Her father had wanted her to attend the state university, but had acquiesced in the face of his wife’s vehement wishes. His wife usually did not oppose him, seldom asked for things to be her way.

  Dale often thought now that if she had gone to the state university she would have been able to make it into medical school, she would have been able to become a physician. She would have been able to go back to Liberty as a general practitioner, to work with her father. Sometimes the thought of her loss made her waste weeks in a hopeless bog of despair.

  “What did your sister do?” Hank asked.

  “Daisy? Well, she went to college at Northwestern,” Dale said. “She was four years older than I, and never made such good grades in school—I’m not saying she wasn’t as smart as I was, because she was, she just wasn’t as interested. She wasn’t planning all her life to be a doctor. Anyway, Mother made her get out of Liberty, too, but she didn’t make her go so far away. Actually, I don’t think Daisy got accepted anywhere back East. Well, she did what we all knew she’d do, what she’d always wanted to do, she married at twenty-two, and had a baby two years later, and a baby two years after that, and another baby is on the way now. She lives in Milwaukee. They have a house right on Lake Michigan. Daisy writes that it’s great, the house. I’ve never seen it. I really should visit them sometime…”

  “Are you close to your sister?” Hank asked.

  “Close? I don’t know. We were when we were little, of course, but we haven’t seen each other for three years now. And we lead such different lives. But we write each other about once a month. She has beautiful children. Enchanted children. I don’t know. I should go visit her, it would be fun.”

  “Do you ever go back to Liberty?”

  “Well, the last time I was back was just after I graduated from college. It looked good to me, Liberty. It looked pretty much the same. It’s a boring sort of place, I know, just a dumb little farm town, but I still love it. I wouldn’t mind living out my life there, or someplace like it. It has its charms. But then the ocean—this coast—this place—now I feel at home here, I feel that I would go berserk if I couldn’t get to the ocean every day. It’s become something I need. So I’ll probably end up settling here, if I can.” Dale went quiet then, thinking of her situation: the apartment she shared with Carol, which she would have to give up when Carol married; her job in the high school, which gave her
security for the three years of her contract, but no longer; would she get tenure? She couldn’t know yet.

  And now this man sitting across from her, listening to her intently. Where was he to fit in her life? All through the evening she had been talking rapidly, earnestly, her desire to touch him channeled into her words, her words, could she somehow touch him with her words? He was sitting there so calmly, watching her, listening: how did he feel now after she had revealed so much of herself to him? Did he like her? Did he want to touch her in return?

  An apologetic waitress came to say that it was closing time, and Dale and Hank left the warmth of the restaurant for the chill of Hank’s red pickup truck. Dale admired the way Hank took care of the bill; in Europe she had usually paid for her own meals, and quite often had paid for the man’s meal, too, since many of the men she had struck up relationships with had had less money than she. As she climbed into the truck, she began to say something pleasantly grateful to Hank about the meal; she almost said that she would like to have him to dinner at her apartment sometime. But she was afraid that that would make her seem too eager to see him again, and too coyly domestic. The very action of getting into the small enclosed space of the dark cab, where he could hear her slightest breath, made her feel self-conscious. It made her lose the easiness she had felt with him inside the warm, bright restaurant where other people walked and talked and ate; it made the lust she had held back all evening in that reasonable room come surging to the front of her thoughts and gestures. Hank got into the cab behind the steering wheel. His jacket was rough suede, his hand was large and hairy; she was aware of the solidity of his right thigh as he pushed on the accelerator. Her mouth went suddenly dry. The evening was almost over. She felt panicked. And he was saying nothing. She sat in silence, loosely hugging herself, leaning slightly against the door.

  “The heater will be warmed up in a minute,” Hank said.