The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  To Maxim and Natasha

  A PRETTY FACE

  Alone in the evenings, when the light had drained from the slate roof of her small rural home, and when her husband was working late, Mary Gooch would perform a striptease for the stars at the open bedroom window: shifting out of rumpled bottoms, slipping off blousy top, liberating breasts, peeling panties, her creamy flesh spilling forth until she was completely, exquisitely nude. In the darkness, she’d beg her lover the wind to ravish her until she needed to grasp the sill for support. Then, inhaling the night like a post-coital cigarette, Mary would turn to face the mirror, who’d been watching all along.

  The mirror held the image Mary Gooch knew as herself, a forty-three-year-old brunette standing five and a half feet tall, so gilded with fat that hardly a bone from her skeleton could insinuate itself in her reflection. No hint of clavicle, no suggestion of scapula, no jag in her jaw, no scallop in her knee, no crest of ilium, no crook of knuckle, not a phalange in the smallest of her fingers. And no cords of muscle, either, as if she were enrobed by a subcutaneous duvet.

  Mary remembered, when she was nine years old, stepping off the scale in Dr. Ruttle’s office and hearing him whisper the word to her slight mother, Irma. It was an unfamiliar word, but one she understood in the context of the fairy-tale world. Obeast. There were witches and warlocks. So must there be ogres and obeasts. Little big Mary wasn’t confused by the diagnosis. It made sense to her child’s mind that her body had become an outward manifestation of the starving animal in her gut.

  Such a pretty face. That was what people always said. When she was a child they made the comment to her mother, with tsking pity or stern reproach, depending on their individual natures. As she grew, the pitying, reproving people made the comment directly to Mary. Such a pretty face. Implied was the disgrace of her voluminous body, the squander of her green eyes and bow lips, her aquiline nose and deep-cleft chin and her soft skin, like risen dough, with no worry lines to speak of, which was remarkable because, when she wasn’t eating, that’s what Mary Gooch did.

  She worried about what she would eat and what she would not eat. When and where she would or wouldn’t. She worried because she had too much or not nearly enough. She worried about hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, osteoarthritis. The contempt of strangers. The mouths of babes. Sudden death. Protracted death. She worried all the more because all the worry made her sleepless, and in her dreamless hours hosted more worries, about her husband, Gooch, and the approach of their silver anniversary, about her menial job at Raymond Russell Drugstore and about her list, which she imagined not as Things to do but Things left undone.

  Weight is only numbers on a scale, she told herself, and her mirror just another point of view. Squinting at her naked reflection when the moon was waxing and the angle just right, Mary Gooch saw beauty in the poetry of her contours, in the expressive, expansive, edible flesh, and understood why an artist sketching nudes might find appealing the mountainous gut, and favour the pocked shore of sloping thigh, and enjoy the depth and shadow of pendulous breasts and multiple chins. A shape ample and sensuous, like the huge round vase handed down on the Brody side of the family, in which she arranged her ditch lilies in the spring. Or like the dunes of virgin snow on the hills beyond her home outside small-town Leaford.

  Mary wished to be a rebel against the tyranny of beauty but was instead a devotee, coveting its currency, devouring images in glossy magazines and broadcast TV, especially the kind that chronicled the lives of the rich and famous. She lingered over the body shots, outlining with her fingertips, like an appreciative lover, the rock-hard abdominals and concrete glutes, sinewy arms and pumped deltoids—so daring on a woman—coltish legs, wasp waist, swan’s neck, lion’s mane, cat’s eyes. She accepted the supremacy of beauty, and could not deny complicity in the waste of her own.

  It was often an unbearable burden for Mary Gooch to carry both her significant weight and the responsibility for it, and she naturally sought to blame. The media was her target, just as it was another of her addictions. She would tear through the pages of her magazines, gratified by the celebrity cellulite, horrified by the gorgeous anorexics, noting the fall must-haves, sneering with the critics about fashion disasters, then realize she’d eaten a quart of premium ice cream, coerced by the advertisement beneath the picture of the TV cutie with poor taste in men. Mary knew it was all the media’s fault, but finger pointing was too much exercise, and she couldn’t sustain the blame for long. Especially since she was so often confronted by the stupid genius of just saying no.

  Jimmy Gooch, Mary’s husband of nearly twenty-five years, read Time and Newsweek and Scientific American and The Atlantic and National Geographic. He watched CNN, even when America was not on red alert, and cable talk shows with clever panelists who laughed when nothing was funny. With Gooch working late most evenings, and busy playing golf on the weekends, Mary reckoned they were down to spending only a handful of waking hours a week together and wished to relieve the silence between them, but didn’t share Gooch’s passion for politics. The couple sometimes found common ground in musing on the vagaries of human nature. “Read the essay at the back,” Gooch had said recently, tapping her on the head with the rolled-up magazine—a gesture she charged was aggressive, but he argued, playful.

  The article spoke of the ills of North American culture, the mistaking of acquisition for success, gluttony for fulfillment. Gooch clearly meant for Mary to draw a comparison to her gastronomical indulgence, and she did, but the piece was provocative in its own right, posing the question: Are people generally happier now, with instant access and quick fixes and thousands of channels and brands to choose from, than they were before the Industrial Revolution? Mary instantly decided no. In fact, she wondered if the opposite was true, that in the hardscrabble life of her pioneering ancestors, whose singularity of purpose was clear, there had been no time to ponder happiness. Chop wood. Carry water. It was impossible to imagine that the early Brodys, who’d cleared Leaford from the Burger King to the gas station, had ever endured a sleepless night.

  Having read enough magazines, and having spent hours lurking in the self-help section, Mary Gooch knew that she wasn’t alone in her morbid obesity or her abstract malaise. Symptoms of despair were everywhere, and formulas for success within her grasp. A person could get a good night’s sleep and wake refreshed, shed unwanted pounds without dieting, make dinners for six in twenty minutes or less, rekindle sexual passion, and achieve five personal goals by the end of the month. A person could. But in spite of the step-by-step instructions, Mary could not. The secret remained classified. She appeared to be missing some key ingredient, something simple and elusive, like honesty.

  Mary had been raised without religion but instinctively drew a separation between her spirit and body. Her spirit had no gravitational pull. Her body weighed three hundred and two of earth’s pounds—the two pounds significant because she’d once vowed that she’d kill herself if she got up beyond three hundred. Another promise broken. Further recrimination. The truth of what drove her hunger was as present and mysterious as anyone’s God.

  Certainly grief fed the beast, and with her encroaching middle age came more and greater opportunities for it. Every passage, but particularly the corporeal kind, further embellished Mary Gooch. Thirty pounds for her mother, accumulated over many months, years ago, although Irma was not actually deceased. The babies, so long ago, had added fifteen and twenty pounds respectively. Then it was the ten when her father died in the spring. And another ten with Mr. Barkley in the summer. She felt vaguely charitable assigning the poundage to her loved ones, in the same way that she was mildly comforted by calculating her load in UK stones, in the British style, rather than North American p
ounds.

  During her painful cycles of grief and gain, Mary thought it would be better to have any religion and lose it, than never to have one at all. She relied on dubious knowledge and remedial understanding to cobble together a system of beliefs that she was forever editing and amending, depending on the latest magazine article or persuasive celebrity endorsement. Except for the rule of three—an enduring belief, if unfounded by religious text. Terrible things happen in clusters of three. Death, serious accidents, financial ruin. One. Two. Three. What would end the trilogy after her father and Mr. Barkley, she wondered. Another death? Or just more deceptively endurable misfortune?

  Hauling her corpulence the few steps from her truck in the parking lot to the back door of Raymond Russell Drugstore, starved for breath, heart valves flushing and fluppering, Mary would think, It’s me. I will end the trilogy. Here comes my fatal heart attack. Drowning in regret, she’d see everything clearly, the way reckless adults do, too late. But like all things, the feeling would pass, and she would click on another worry, each one dense and nuanced enough to sustain her interest, with intriguing links to distract her from the larger picture. The ticking of time. The machinations of denial.

  Mary Gooch did not so much pray to God as wish to God, of whom she was sporadically unsure. She wished to God for an end to all wars. And that her manager would catch his scrotum in the cash register at work. She wished for her mother’s peaceful death. And that she had something nice to wear to her silver anniversary dinner party. And then there was the wish that preempted all other wishes, the one she wished hourly, eternally—that she could just lose the weight. This wish Mary would offer to her uncertain God in the smallest and most humble of voices. If I could just lose the weight, Gooch would love me again. Or sometimes it was, I could let Gooch love me again. The state of her body was inseparable from the state of her marriage, and the universe.

  If I could just lose the weight.

  For all her uncertainty about God, and in addition to the rule of three, Mary Gooch believed in miracles.

  THE NIGHT CLOCK

  The night clock never ticked for Mary. On this autumn night, the eve of her silver anniversary, the clock thumped, a downbeat rhythm in time with her heart, alternative jazz, restless, like a tapping toe or a wandering eye, awaiting the first notes of an uncommon melody.

  Adrift, mattress springing leaks in the dark, thoughts scurrying through portals, drawing conclusions, mixing metaphors, Mary felt beads of perspiration mingle in a stream down her temple. Slick and sealish in her faded grey nightgown, a triangle of sweat tickling her crotch, she was dizzy from the duelling sensations of heat and hunger. Heat from the furnace, which she’d tried to shut off earlier, was still blasting through the floor grates in the tiny country bungalow. Hunger, as always, shouted to be heard.

  Mary held her breath, listening to the sound of a vehicle in the distance. Her husband Gooch? No. Gooch would be coming from the east. She tossed her undulating flesh and rode the tidal waves until she was breathless on her back, humming a tune to distract the obeast within. She hummed more loudly, hearing faint assurances from a distant chorus that she was not alone. There was hope in the harmony, until hunger snickered from the kitchen.

  In the hallway, damp nightgown suctioned to her spread, eating from a foil bag she’d grabbed from the kitchen counter, Mary checked the temperature on the thermostat, licking her salty finger before she slid the lever from Off to On to Off again. The furnace purred, disregarding its directive. Huffing, she set her bag down and threw open the basement door. Scent molecules of must and mildew fled like trapped birds as she flipped on the light, struck by the sight of the rotten bottom stair she’d broken last winter. She hesitated, then closed the door, deciding the heat was to be endured until Gooch got home.

  She checked the clock, reminding herself that her husband was often late, and sometimes very late. Mary had kept such nightly vigils over the years, never questioning her husband’s whereabouts, never admitting her fear of the dark. She returned to her chip bag, kettle-fried shards piercing her palate, painful but soothing, like the blues. Enough, she told herself, then, Just one more. And one more. And just the one extra.

  Parched, she opened the old Kenmore refrigerator and, while gulping cola from a huge plastic bottle, saw through the window above the sink moon glow filtering through fast-moving clouds. Flipping her tail of chocolate hair, she sailed across the tile floor and pulled open the window, welcoming the breeze, stirred by the fall fragrance of ripened red apples and soft yellow pears, wet earth and decomposing leaves, a savoury decay that would soon fade away when winter came to embitter the car-exhausted air.

  The breeze kissed her soft skin and she shivered, thinking of Gooch. A feral cat yowled in the distance and Mary swivelled instinctively to check the silver bowls on the floor near the back door. Mr. Barkley’s food and water.

  Prick of pain. Gone. No Mr. Barkley. No more worry about Mr. Barkley’s food and water. Mr. Barkley’s worm infection. Mr. Barkley’s tooth decay. Mr. Barkley had been Mary’s boy, and no less loved by her than any human child by his mother. A decade ago she had rescued the kitten from a hole into which he’d fallen at the back of the garage, and named him after a basketball player in hopes of getting Gooch to bond. She nursed the mewling wretch from a turkey baster filled with infant formula from the drugstore, cradling him in a hand towel, grooming him with a little wet paintbrush to simulate a tongue. She referred to herself as “Mama” when Gooch wasn’t around. Mama creamed turkey for Mr. Barkley. Mama let Mr. Barkley sleep in the scooze of her cleavage. Like any mother, Mama didn’t love Mr. Barkley less for his meanness, even though the cat spent the best of his ten years hiding behind the living-room drapes, shedding orange hair on the green chair, and hissing when Mama was late with his dinner.

  On a heat-wave summer night in July Mary had skulked into the kitchen for a snack, surprised to find Mr. Barkley collapsed in the centre of the cool tile floor. She nudged him with her toe and panicked when he didn’t hiss and flee. “Mr. Barkley?”

  Unable to kneel down, she pulled a red vinyl kitchen chair to the sprawled cat and, using her feet as cranes, raised him high enough that she could grasp his front paws and drag his limp body up to the shelf of her bosom. Seeing that he was dying, she stroked his ginger head and whispered, “Mama’s got the Tuna Treats,” so his final thoughts would be hopeful. A brief spasm. Mr. Barkley present. Mr. Barkley past. And no idea why he died, except a guess that he had eaten a poisoned rodent. The vinyl chair mourned as Mary rocked from side to side, kissing Mr. Barkley’s snout, which she’d never done in life for fear he’d bite her nose.

  The lights were on and the air foul when Gooch returned very late that night to find the contents of the fridge weighting the table. Mary was tonguing rhubarb pie from the well of a large silver ladle and didn’t care that she’d been caught. When Gooch stared at his wife, not comprehending, she managed to choke out, “Mr. Barkley.”

  When Gooch still didn’t understand, she gestured to the refrigerator. “I didn’t want the bugs to get at him.”

  Thoroughly disturbed by the thought of the dead cat in his refrigerator, Gooch set his large comforting hands on her shoulders and assured her that he would dig a hole first thing in the morning. He kissed her cheek and said, “Near the big trees out back, Mare. We’ll plant some bulbs to mark the grave.”

  “Iris,” Mary agreed, chewing and swallowing. “Purple.”

  With birds rejoicing in the oaks and Gooch towering at her side, Mary sprinkled dirt on Mr. Barkley, whose stiff body she’d wrapped in two hundred feet of plastic food wrap, before Gooch set him down in the dark, moist hole.

  Now, gazing into the brooding night past the trees and beyond Mr. Barkley’s grave, Mary was sorry to see that there were no lights in the neighbours’ houses to either side. It made her feel less lonely when she could observe other people’s quietly desperate lives. The fighting Feragamos with their brood of teenaged boys lived in the ramshackle Vi
ctorian an acre to the west. Penny and Shawn, the young couple with the newborn who screamed at each other whenever the baby cried, were on the other side of the creek. The Merkels’ house beyond the breadth of cornfields was much too far to spy on without binoculars, though she doubted there’d be much to see. And the scrubby orange farmhouse where the Darlen twins (famous because the two girls had been born joined at the head) used to live was now the local history museum and kept only summer hours.

  The old willow at the end of the drive was suddenly assaulted by a hard-driven wind. Parked beneath the tree, the red Ford pickup truck with its custom-made sunroof gathered teardrop leaves. The sunroof had been jammed open since spring. It had been on Mary’s list of things not getting done for months: Sunroof repair.

  Come home, Gooch. Come home. Why are you so late? Where are you? Mary’s worry prompted a craving and she found the beef jerky stick she’d hidden from herself, tucked in the back of the cupboard behind the soup cans. Chewing, she remembered her list. Sunroof repair. Furnace repaired? Replaced? Cheques due at St. John’s Nursing Home. Work extra shift for Candace. Gooch’s suit from the cleaners. She opened the buttons of her nightgown and padded back to her room, farting indignantly, tired of the list, making promises to tomorrow. Tomorrow, self-confidence. Tomorrow, self-control. Balance. Restraint. Grace. Tomorrow.

  Whiffing the scent of self-pity as she found her lonesome bed, Mary Gooch thought, as she often did, about a boy she used to know.

  BONDS OF DISTINCTION

  As a girl, Mary Brody had been content spending her summers reading novels in her room or listening to loud music on the radio while her peers gathered in tube tops to smoke their mothers’ Peter Jacksons and share their true despair. There were girls down the street, Debbie and Joanne, who, like Mary, read books in their rooms, and with whom she believed she might have struck an alliance, but Mary preferred to be alone, with her hunger.