Three Women at the Water's Edge Read online

  “Divorce?” Dale said. She could not breathe.

  “Yes,” Hank said. He had his back to her as he put more wood into the stove, but turned to look at her directly when he spoke. “I’m divorced.”

  “You mean you were married?” Dale asked. What did this mean to her, why did it hurt her so?

  He slammed the black cast-iron lid down onto the stove, and laughed. “Yes,” he said gently. “In order to get divorced, you have to be married.”

  “Oh,” Dale said, and went dumb. She had a thousand questions to ask, and yet was not sure of her right to ask even one.

  “I was married only about two years,” Hank said. He came back and sat down at the kitchen table with her. He talked into his coffee cup, suddenly weary, suddenly speaking as if by rote. “My ex-wife’s name was—is—Elaine, and she was—is—very pretty, very sweet, very nice. She came from the right family. My parents approved of her; she was the kind of girl they thought I should marry. She was tall and slim, and she went to Wellesley, and she liked cities and galleries and people and fashions. We had a large formal wedding; the whole marriage was really just a justification for the wedding. It was grand. The rest of the marriage was not so grand. And she was brought up to believe—as I was—that happiness is a rather vulgar goal, and moderation is admirable, and the way to live one’s life is to do what everyone else does, with a balance of flair to keep you interesting, and of restraint to keep you decorous. I don’t want to speak ill of her. I don’t hate her; I didn’t love her. I caused her a great deal of—pain is too strong a word. A great deal of bother. I caused her a great deal of bother by marrying her only as a form of experiment, as a test to see if I could go ahead and live the life my parents wanted me to live. It didn’t take me long to realize the whole package was disagreeable to me: law school; winter vacations at Elaine’s parents’ home in Sea Island; engraved stationery; propriety; moderate, continual success in work. Oh, God. Poor thing that she married me and never sensed the doubt, the traitor in me. Well, she’s married again, to a New York City banker, and she’s happy, and I’m glad. And I’m here, doing what I chose to do, and I’m happy, and I won’t impose my lifestyle on anyone else ever. I like teaching, I like this farm. I like a simple, private life. I don’t mind being alone.” He stopped then and looked up at Dale. “I’m sorry. I’ve talked too much.”

  “You haven’t,” she protested. “You haven’t at all! I’m just stunned.” She felt awkward, and wanted to let him know it was all okay—the marriage, the divorce, the farm, everything about him. “My parents just recently divorced,” she told him. “They were married thirty years. I still can’t believe they’re divorced. I’ve got to go visit them. I’m afraid my mother’s gone senile or crazy or something. She’s apparently had a complete character change.”

  “Thirty years,” Hank said. “God, that’s a long time to be married. Although my parents have been married at least that long—they must be going on forty years. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” He smiled.

  “Tell me more about your parents,” Dale said.

  “I will,” Hank replied. “But later. Now the sun has come out and I want to go out for a walk with you. I’ll tell you all about my parents later. Don’t get excited, though; it’s not a very fascinating tale. Come on.”

  He pulled her to her feet and led her out the back kitchen door. “This way,” he said, and outside he seemed different: freer, younger. “There’s a path through the woods over there, that leads to some enormous old gray rocks, with a cave in one of them. It’s not my property, but I know the owner—I have the option on his land—and he doesn’t care if I walk there. I want to show it to you; it’s great. Are you warm enough?”

  Dale laughed. Was she warm enough? She was on fire inside her sweater and leather jacket; she was incandescent with delight. He was going to show her rocks and caves; he was going to tell her about his parents. He had slept with her, he had fed her, he had talked to her, he was holding her hand. The late October day was crisp and cold and golden. Leaves crunched beneath their feet, birds called. As they climbed the side of a hill they could look down on the cattle standing in the far end of the pasture, dumb with the pleasure of warm sun on their backs. Dale felt expansive with a warming contentment; she thought she felt the pleasure of the cows, the satisfaction of the singing birds, the solid complacency of the earth beneath her feet. When she looked at Hank, she could not keep from smiling, and he smiled in the same way at her. Everyone in the world was surely allotted one day of joy, she thought, and that day had finally arrived for her. She relished it, she did not care what it cost, it was so sweet, so fine, it was worth anything. Occasionally Hank stopped walking, and took Dale in his arms and kissed her face, her breasts, her neck, and then stood awhile, simply holding her close to him, as if perhaps he too felt the miraculousness of the day, of what had been given to them. They walked through the woods, holding hands, or stood against a tree, embracing each other, wondering over and over again at what they felt: a total, complete, completing joy, as enormous and consuming and splendid as an ocean full of flames.

  Three

  The seventh day in November in Vancouver, the rain came down in sheets, as it had for three previous days. Rain dripped and drizzled down the masts of unused sailboats tossing in harbors, down and off branches and needles of pines and hawthorn trees, from holes in gutters into pools and rivulets in the grass. There was little light from the sky because the sun was hidden by such dense rain-laden clouds. Children developed runny noses and distraught mothers took them out anyway, to the Stanley Park aquarium to watch the turtles glide through enormous green, dimly lit tanks, or simply to the drugstores where they strolled up and down buying colored soap they didn’t need—anything that would allow them to stay awhile longer in a large busy bright place where they could ignore the rain. Businessmen were drenched crossing the parking lots from their cars to their offices, and the sodden cuffs of their trousers flapped forlornly against their ankles, and water dripped off their hats or ears and ran down their backs, ruining the feel of their freshly ironed shirts. Headlights shone on cars and lamps shone from houses during the day; people began to feel claustrophobic. Winter was setting in, day and night were becoming the same, the rain was monotonous, steady, insistent.

  Margaret Wallace lay in bed for most of the four rainy days. She got out of bed now and then and exercised to music, or wrote in her journal, or took long baths, or ate, but mostly she stayed in bed, reading. She read three books: a brittle, sharp, well-written feminist novel; a collection of essays on the nature of man; and a new rich romantic mystery. Occasionally she felt one pang of regret—that she had vowed to give up chocolates, because eating them made her fat and made her face look bloated. And she loved chocolates so, especially when she was reading mysteries. But she ate a stalk of celery instead, which she had cut up into many small, elegant, bite-sized pieces. And at the end of the four days, when she was dressing to go out, she stepped on the scale to find that she had not gained a pound in spite of her days of lying about. So it all balanced out: she had to give up chocolates, but she had gained a precise and keen beauty of features and body because of it.

  She did not mind the rain; she enjoyed it. She liked being cozy and self-sufficient and isolated inside her small house. She made fires; she made tea. She did not look out at the ocean often, because she could not see the ocean, though it was only one hundred yards from where she stood. She could see only gray sheets of rain. It didn’t bother her. She dozed off in the middle of the day, she read in the middle of the night; it was all the same to her. She almost begrudged the interruption of her days by the evening she had planned with her friend Miriam, and Miriam’s husband, Gordon. But she roused herself: the program was a good one, the orchestra would be doing Vivaldi, and Holst, and Brahms. And afterward she was going to a cocktail party with Miriam and Gordon, and there would be lots of people there she hadn’t met. It would be a good evening, and the next day she could sleep late and re
ad again all day in bed.

  Margaret put on slim black trousers that felt like silk, and a persimmon-colored blouse, very long and loose and flowing. She put on eye shadow, eye liner, rouge, lipstick, with a steady, subtle hand. Her dark-brown hair, still growing out, was an awkward length now, just below her ears. She swept one side of it back and held it with a black comb: there. She looked really quite good. Elegant, assured. She took up a warm dark-blue shawl for her wrap, and at the last moment grabbed up an umbrella before walking out the door to the car where Miriam and Gordon sat waiting for her with smiles. No one in Liberty, Iowa, would have recognized her, and she was completely, and deliciously, her true self.

  —

  The seventh day in November in Rocheport was a cool drab day, windy and bleak. Hank picked up Dale after school and drove her to his farm, as he had every night for the past two weeks. Tonight they had a lot to tell each other: the information Dale had received in the mail about the film series, and the trip Hank wanted to chaperone to Boston, and every detail of the day they had spent apart. As they talked, they rapidly chopped vegetables: tomatoes, lettuce, onions. And cheese. They were making tacos. While Dale stirred the meat and sauce, Hank made margaritas, and Dale’s mouth watered to see the drinks, the rims of the glasses cold and thick with salt. They sat across the wooden kitchen table from each other, eating hungrily, scooping up any extra filling off their plates with greedy fingers. Their fingers and mouths became greasy and stained. “God, this is good!” they kept saying to each other, and were too gluttonous to say much else.

  The first week they had come home and gone to bed immediately, then eaten. This second week they reversed the pattern and ate first. After they finished every scrap and chip of taco, they wiped their hands and mouths briefly, then hurried, laughing, carrying their margaritas with them into the chilly bedroom. They stripped off their clothes and crawled into bed, laughing and gasping in the cold sheets. After they made love they cleaned up the kitchen, and ate red raspberries, and listened to music, and read. Hank eventually drove Dale back to her apartment, for propriety’s sake, and she washed her hair and bathed and fell into bed exhausted, sated, feeling fat and full with food and love.

  —

  It did not rain in Milwaukee on the seventh day of November, but there was a dramatic change in the weather; a windstorm from the east. Daisy woke to the sound of waves thudding against the breaker rocks below their house. The sky was teal-blue, ominous, strangely darker than the lake, and the lake itself pitched and tossed dramatically. Daisy was distracted; she was fascinated by the windstorm on the lake and longed to stand and watch the whitecaps grow and explode against the rocks. But Jenny was fussy and clingy, and breakfast had to be made. And then Paul moved out of the house.

  He had told Daisy he would be leaving, that he was moving into Monica’s apartment to live until they could move to California. He had been going through the house for several days, gathering up books, record albums, papers, clothes, personal belongings, and sticking them into cardboard boxes he’d brought from the grocery store. On this day, he had satisfied himself that he had packed up everything that he wanted, and he began to carry it all out to his car, hurrying, anxious about it, afraid that it would begin to rain and ruin his possessions. Daisy kept out of Paul’s way—she did not like the way he looked at her, or avoided looking at her, when she was in the same room—and she alternated between tending to the children’s needs and staring out of the window at the lake. She couldn’t think: she was possessed by a demonic uneasiness, but she couldn’t think, she couldn’t get her mind to work. Her head kept filling up with absurd memories: of the first night she had spent with Paul, locked in his arms, her bare legs twisted with his, of their cozy smug meals together the first two years of their marriage when they would compare their working days and drink wine and talk about money, of the day she and Jenny came home from the hospital: she had sat in the backseat holding both her jealous two-year-old son and her tiny four-day-old daughter, and Paul had sat in the front seat, driving the car, and Daisy had been so perfectly content, thinking that now they were a family, rich and full, and Paul was at the front of their little group, steering their lives through the world, controlling them, protecting them, because they all belonged together. She had thought it would not end, that it would go on and on. She had assumed that her new life would be like her old life in Liberty; she had assumed that the life of this new family with her as the mother and Paul as the father would progress with the same gentle, orderly, harmonious, sensible unfolding that her life with her parents and Dale had done. She felt that they had become a unit, Daisy, Paul, Danny, Jenny, a real, interlocked, fused unit—as if they were a table, and each person were a leg. With Paul leaving, it was as if a leg of the table were being lopped off, and the rest of them all toppled over, smashed to the floor, and were suddenly without function or value. It hurt to think about it. It did not make sense. It did not seem real. She expected any moment that she would wake up from this unbelievable situation, or that Paul would laugh and say, “Oh, Daisy, I can’t leave you and the children!” She had not told her mother or her sister or any of her friends about the divorce, because she wanted to believe that Paul would suddenly announce that he had made a mistake, that he did not want to leave, and life would continue as it had before.

  But now Paul was really leaving. Yet she could not see this clearly; she could not somehow receive the full impact of Paul’s act. She was distraught, befuddled. She kept giving her head little shakes, as if to clear it, but it did not clear.

  She was up in Jenny’s bedroom, changing Jenny’s diaper, when she heard Paul call up the stairs, “Well, then, I guess that’s all. I’ll be going now. I’ll call you soon.”

  Jenny’s bottom was gleaming red—she had diarrhea, and was screaming with rage. “What?” Daisy had yelled over Jenny’s screams, wondering if Jenny was sick. “Just a minute, Paul.”

  But when she had finished smearing on the Vaseline and taping on a fresh paper diaper, when she had picked Jenny up in her arms and pressed her against her shoulder, soothing her, when she finally got out into the hall with Jenny whimpering against her, Paul had gone. The front door was shut.

  Daisy stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the closed front door. Automatically she continued to rub Jenny’s back. “This is all a mistake,” she said aloud. Then, more clearly, she said, “Paul? This is all wrong. This is all a mistake.”

  No one answered. Daisy hurried down the stairs and got to the front window in time to see Paul’s small red Mustang turn the corner and pass from view. Jenny dug her face into Daisy’s shoulder, streaking Daisy’s robe with tears and mucus. Daisy carried Jenny into the family room and set her on the sofa. It was just after ten o’clock in the morning. Danny had put a Walt Disney ABC record on his little yellow plastic record player, and shrill children were singing a song about numbers. Danny was building a spaceship out of Legos. Jenny slid off the sofa and headed for her dolls. Daisy sank onto the sofa and stared. Except for the children’s record—”nine-ten, you’re a big fat hen!”—the house seemed quiet and bare. Daisy looked at her hands. They were shaking. She sat watching her children play, and they played happily, ignoring her, and she sat shaking. She got up, hoping that movement would help. She went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. It all seemed so ordinary: the white teakettle with flowers on its side, the white flowered mug, the sight and sound of steam, the commonness of the dirty breakfast dishes and crumbs of toast on the counter. She was still herself, fat and pregnant, wearing her same old fuzzy green robe. But her life had changed completely, and there was nothing she could do to stop it, there was nothing she could do to improve things. She could only pour her tea and pick up the soggy striped dishcloth to wipe the counter clean of crumbs.

  She was afraid. Something enormous and drastic had happened to her, and she was afraid, and she did not know what to do. She was vividly aware of the presence of danger in her life, yet there was nothing s
pecific and available for her to do. Her mind raced with fears: How could she raise Danny without a man around? Would her children be psychologically damaged forever without a father in the house? Who would take care of them if she were to fall ill? Indeed, who would take care of them when the new baby was born? How could she possibly find any thread of meaning in life, when the pattern of her life had been so recklessly ripped apart? If she told her friends, what would they do? Would they pity her, yet see her as a woman who had suddenly lost her worth? How could she plan her life? She felt as an astronaut might if his lifeline to the space capsule were suddenly severed and he were falling helplessly through a void.

  All day the wind howled, and Daisy wandered the house, nursing her vague but powerful fears, not quite calling a friend, afraid that might unleash a torrent of emotions she was not yet ready to handle. She felt so alone. When Danny came home from preschool, Daisy could stand it no longer, she had to move, to get out of the house. She dressed the children in warm clothes and took them down to the lakeshore. The waves were crashing quite splendidly over the breaker rocks. She knelt with her children just a few yards back from the water, watching with glorious dread as each enormous wave rolled in toward the shore, gathering strength as it came, finally smashing against the rocks with such force that the rocks thudded under the impact. Great sprays of water from the thwarted waves burst up over the breaker rocks and showered down on Daisy and the children. They all shrieked. It was spectacular, intoxicating, it called up something wild in their blood to see the wave approach, approach—knowing there was no way they could stop it or dim its force—to see it approach, approach, swell, swell, and hit. It was as if the water were alive, an embodiment perhaps of an angry giant, that came battering and battering against the rocks, trying to reach the people, and each time was tricked and tripped, magically shattering into cold harmless rain. Each time a wave surged and smashed against the rocks, the children jumped up and down and clapped their hands and screamed for joy. Daisy let them scream; she could scarcely hear them above the noise of the wind and the water. She clapped her hands and screamed with them; and screamed again and again.