The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Even as she wallowed in her feasts, she worried about her mother’s keen eye for inventory, and made frequent trips to Klik’s corner store to replenish the stock, using money sent by distant Brodys for Christmas and birthdays. Irma had started working full-time as secretary at the tool-and-die shop when Mary was five years old, and had told Mary then that, if there was ever an emergency, she should go get help from Mr. or Mrs. Klik.

  The Kliks were a stern couple with six children, one of whom, Christopher, in Mary’s grade, had been diagnosed with a rare cancer the year he turned twelve. Mary, the fat girl, and Christopher, the sick boy, had some bond of distinction, though they rarely exchanged more than irritated glances.

  Occasionally, as Mary Brody left Klik’s dusty store, she’d find the boy parked at the bike rack near the trash bins, perched atop his one-of-a-kind moped, which Chatham Cycle Shop had donated because he was dying. Christopher’s photograph had been on the front page of the Leaford Mirror, his frail white fingers gripping handlebars, the shop owners, puffed with charity, holding his emaciated body steady on the seat. Mary hoped that Christopher hadn’t read the story below his picture, even as she envied the boy his prognosis. He seemed to be better loved for the fact of his imminent demise.

  Exiting Klik’s store one day when she was in seventh grade, carrying a loaf of bread and a jar of honey and a pound of mixed candy, Mary had cringed to find Christopher hunched beside his moped, holding his legs at his ankles. He looked to be in pain, though he didn’t appear to have fallen. She’d stopped without drawing near and asked, “Want me to get your mom?”

  The boy shot her a look. “No.”

  They turned their attention to a large black crow flapping around the trash can. The bird landed on a plastic bag and cocked his head to watch them. “I hate crows,” Mary said.

  “They hate you too.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Like my motorbike?”

  She raised a brow, pretending she’d just noticed.

  The small boy sat up, finding her pretty eyes. “Wanna ride it?” She thought the question rhetorical. “Nobody but me’s ever ridden it.”

  “I know.”

  “Everyone wants to.”

  “I know.”

  “You can.” Christopher glanced down the road to ensure that there were no approaching cars or strolling people. Then he drew his shirt up over his concave chest. “Do this,” he said, pinching the pink nipple on his right breast, “and you can ride it.”

  Mary had not ridden her own bicycle yet that summer, feeling the effort of peddling and balancing too great for her big, tired body, and she was electrified by the prospect of such vehicular freedom. Had Christopher been a well boy, she might have run to call Irma at work, but he was a sick boy, and Mary didn’t consider his request prurient, just odd.

  She stepped forward, reaching her stubby fingers toward the boy’s translucent skin. When he batted her hand away, she was shocked by his speed and strength. “Not to me, dumbkopf.”

  “You just said,” Mary said, screwing up her face.

  “To yourself,” Christopher wheezed.

  “Oh,” she breathed. “Sorry.”

  “Do it and you can ride my motorbike.”

  Fair trade. She lifted her ribbed tank top, allowing her pillowy breast to spill forward, and pinched her rose nipple lightly before pulling the fabric back down.

  Christopher grinned broadly. “Pervert.”

  “Can I ride it now, Chris-to-pher?”

  His regret seemed genuine. “I didn’t think you were really gonna. My dad’ll kill me if I let anybody.”

  She sat down on the curb beside him, scooping slimy jelly beans from her bag, chewing with vigour. Remembering her manners, she offered the bag to Christopher, who said, “I don’t like candy.”

  Mary was incredulous. “But you own the store! You could have all you want!”

  Christopher paused for effect. “I could.”

  They were quiet a moment. The fact of the child’s premature death stirred within their mutual sense of injustice.

  “No fair,” Mary said finally.

  Christopher curled his lip and sucked his snot succinctly. For the moment, no distance between them. “You’d be pretty if you weren’t so fat,” he said plainly.

  “Okay.” Mary shrugged, flattered. Studying him, she wondered, not for the first time, if he knew he was dying. She was astonished when he answered her thoughts.

  “I’m dying from what I got, so.”

  It was clear to Mary that Christopher Klik was magical, or mystical. “Weeks or months?” Her parents had wondered that at the dinner table.

  “What kinda question is that?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Besides, you’re dying too. Everyone is.”

  Struck by the realization that the magical boy was right, Mary watched his tiny whiteness, waiting for further enlightenment.

  “Show me that titty again,” he demanded.

  Meeting his gaze, she lifted her shirt and moved her hand hesitantly toward her breast, plucking at her nipple as he watched open-mouthed.

  When she finished, Christopher Klik grinned. “I’m telling everybody you did that.”

  Mary grinned back, because she knew he had no one to tell. She waited to meet his eyes before leaning in to whisper, “I’ll be your girlfriend till you die.”

  The boy didn’t pause to consider, but wagged his head back and forth and made a pained move to rise.

  Without turning to look, clutching her corner-store bag, Mary hurried off, terrified by the painful burning lump that had suddenly become lodged in her throat, convinced that the dying boy had infected her with his tragic disease. She opened the refrigerator door in her quiet, empty house, hoping that the choking feeling could be relieved by a gulp of juice. Then she thought some honey toast might help, Popsicles, peanut clusters from the freezer, the rest of the mixed candy, some leftover ham.

  Christopher did not ride his motorized bike after that day. His funeral was held three weeks later. The Kliks sold the corner store to the Quick Stop franchise, which replaced the candy with cigarettes and batteries. Irma would say, “You just think about poor Christopher Klik when you start feeling sorry for yourself, Mary Brody.”

  And she did.

  Thump went the clock beside Mary’s bed. The square bedroom window was open and the breeze had the sage curtains in a tizzy. Dazed and damp and done thinking of Christopher Klik, Mary scrolled through the TV channels, finding only the most profoundly false reality shows, and in between the blather, cruel commercials advertising deep delicious this, sweet ‘n’ gooey that. No celebrity gossip shows. Shopping channel static. She turned the TV off and tossed the remote control out of reach, wishing to God that Gooch would come home.

  The bookshelf near the bedroom window was listing from the tidy stacks of twice-or thrice-read magazines, the glossy images of beauty drooled over, the coveted home decor items already out of style, the celebrity wedding annulled weeks ago. Her hard-core pleasure, the tabloids, she kept hidden between the mattresses.

  Gooch and Mary had recently agreed on no more magazines for her, or sports channel for him, until the carpet guy got paid off. The new broadloom had been Gooch’s idea, and she knew it was because he could no longer bear to look at the rut she’d worn from her bed to the kitchen. The carpeting was their anniversary gift to each other, and she’d felt some small consolation in its colour being silver.

  She’d wanted to ask Gooch for a new wedding ring for their milestone anniversary, the original, a modest solitaire, having been unceremoniously cut off by the jeweller years ago when Mary’s plump finger had started to turn blue. But there was no money for a ring, and Gooch had pointed out that wedding rings were antiquated symbols anyway. Still, he never took off his own gold band, and she’d felt safe in its presence on his finger.

  With no television to watch and no magazine to look at, Mary’s eyes rested, as dreamless eyes do, on the smooth, shadowed ceiling a
bove her lumpy bed. She recalled the sense of being transported by a good book, wishing she had one now while she waited for Gooch to come home. She used to enjoy reading romance, mysteries when she was young, and then it was the women’s novels with gold book club stickers. Gooch had suggested she take a trip to the Leaford Library, reminding her that it was free, and she’d envisioned herself carrying home a pile of books with star reviews, but the effort of the trip and the walking down aisles and the looking at and lifting of books all seemed so great that she’d found excuses not to go. Lately it had been the distraction of planning the humble anniversary party.

  The details of the party had burdened Mary’s already long list of things to do. Worse, she had only herself to blame, since she’d announced the event months ago, the day she went shopping in nearby Chatham and found the too-tight green silk pantsuit, which a complete stranger had said makes your eyes pop. The outfit had been her incentive, but she had bought it before the loss and gain from Mr. Barkley, and the silk ensemble was now two more sizes too small. As usual, Mary had nothing to wear.

  The only guests were going to be three other couples—Erika and Dave, Kim and François, Pete and Wendy—whom they’d known, all except Erika, since high school, and the affair was to be a simple one. Dinner at the fish restaurant by the lake, and later a game of poker or bridge in the Gooches’ country kitchen. “We have exactly three hundred and twenty-four dollars left in the account, Mare,” Gooch had warned, and insisted they serve dessert back at the house.

  Mary had begged, “No gifts.” But Wendy was making a scrap-book for the Gooches in her crafting class, a photographic tribute to their years together, a thought that made Mary’s stomach roil.

  Darkness. The toss. The turn. The heat. The hunger. The wish. The worry. For one such as Mary Gooch to find comfort in her bed was not so simple a matter as shifting a body, but an effort of such sweaty magnitude as to move a mountain. Sunroof repair. Cheques to the nursing home. Pick up dessert for the anniversary dinner.

  Gooch had said, “Around ten or so. But don’t wait up.” His last delivery for Leaford Furniture and Appliance was in the Windsor area, near the border to Detroit. An hour or so away, but forty minutes the way Gooch drove. His partner was off work with the pink eye, but with his extraordinary size and strength her husband could easily handle the dishwasher on a dolly, and the seven-piece dinette set alone.

  There was a current in the air. And that smell. Wet. Sharp. Electric. Hard rain bullets sprayed through the open bedroom window as thunder dropped heavy bass notes in the distance. Mary searched the sky for lightning, remembering how as a child she’d stood in the square patch of grass behind the bungalow on Iroquois Drive holding the metal mop handle above her rain-soaked head. She hadn’t wanted to die, like Mr. Pline on the golf course, but to be enlightened, like the woman on TV who’d been struck by a thunderbolt and seen God.

  Wiping sweat from her brow with the pillowcase, Mary listened to the rumble of thunder, thinking of Gooch on the rain-slicked roads, trying to ignore a tiny voice warning her that something was wrong. She reached to turn on the light beside her, serrated pain stabbing her sternum. Breathless from the crushing weight of her breasts, heart galloping with the strain of rising in the bed, she shut her eyes. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe. Rule or no rule, she would not die alone in her bed, dressed in her sour nightgown, on the eve of her silver anniversary.

  Sitting up usually brought quick relief, but not tonight. She couldn’t shake the sense that there was something in the air beyond the rain, a dark foreboding stirred up by the storm. Gooch’s face before he left for work that morning played like a song she couldn’t get out of her head.

  After breakfast, while a lone crow cawed from the field behind the house, Gooch had stood at the door, furrows slicing his forehead, chapped lips slack at the edges, his round blue eyes searching hers. In his gaze Mary had seen the sum of their life together, and had felt inclined to apologize. What was that look? Pity? Contempt? Tender affection? None of it? All of it? She used to believe she could read his mind.

  With the noisy bird crowing in the background, Gooch had cleared his throat before asking, “Have you got something to wear for the thing tomorrow night, Mare?”

  Jimmy Gooch was like a vital organ whose function was mysterious but without which, she believed, she would perish. Gooch was her first love. Her mate. Her partner. The only family she had left. Time, for Mary, was measured in “before Gooch” and “after Gooch.”

  Acknowledging the partisanship of her memory, Mary knew she was making at least some of it up when she recalled the first day she had laid eyes on Jimmy Gooch. She played the scene in her mind the way she imagined modern people made memories, like directors filming their own life stories: wide-angle to convey body language, poignant two-shot profiles, tight close-ups on a long lens, scored with sexy Motown. In slow, heroic motion, wavy hair caught by the wind, Jimmy Gooch pushed through the double doors and into the halls of Leaford Collegiate, where the crowd of students parted like the sea. Sixteen-year-old Jimmy Gooch was a god of sorts. Backlit, star-eyed, straight-A student and distinguished athlete, he was the new starting centre for the Cougars, his arrival from Ottawa heralded, already being scouted by American colleges. Long ropy muscles dressing a stunning six-foot-five teenaged skeleton, welts of abdominals and obliques straining his cool rock band T-shirt.

  Mary Brody’s pretty eyes did not blink as Jimmy Gooch drew near the place where her poundage quivered in roomy stretch pants and over-large school jersey. She felt her uterus contract when he asked, “You know where Advanced Lit 3 is?” Those were the only words he spoke to her that entire year, despite having their lockers side by side and sharing four classes, but in that virgin moment, when the very tall man-boy looked ever so briefly into Mary Brody’s eyes, she glimpsed a kindred spirit, saw a flash of the future and the unlikely entanglement of their fates.

  Do all sleepless people play the events of their lives like a television rerun, Mary wondered, heart thudding, saliva gathering at the corners of her mouth, thinking of that morning again.

  “Have you got something to wear for the thing tomorrow night, Mare?” Gooch’s voice was erotica. He could arouse Mary with the merest stroke of tenor on her hot inner ear. She wondered why she’d never told him so, and felt sorry it no longer mattered.

  Frowning, she’d tugged at the waistband of her uniform—the largest of the ladies’ plus sizes, so she’d have to go into the large men’s sizes now, and Ray Russell Jr., the owner/manager of the drugstore, would have to place the order for her. The thought burned her cheeks, since she’d recently overheard Ray and Candace making unfunny comments about her ass—Candace suggesting they take up a collection for gastric bypass, and Ray remarking that it was so big it should have its own blog. Now she had to clear her throat or cough before entering the staff room.

  Mary had assured him, “I’ll find something.”

  “What about the green thing you bought?” Gooch had asked carefully.

  “The zipper was broken,” she lied.

  “Remember what happened the last time you had to improvise? Buy something if you don’t have anything, Mare. This is important. Find something nice.”

  Shrunk an inch over the years, standing at the door in his custom-made work shirt and brown corduroy coat and dusty blue jeans from the Big Man’s store, ball cap plunked down on his wavy grey head, complexion worn like a catcher’s mitt, Gooch looked handsome but weary. She wondered if he seemed more or less tired than any forty-four-year-old man in any small town. She cocked her head, asking, “Are you sorry we’re doing this dinner tomorrow, hon?”

  He paused, with that look on his face, and said, “Twenty-five years, Mrs. Gooch. That’s a hell of a thing. Right?”

  “It is,” she agreed. “When you gonna be home?”

  “Ten or so. But don’t wait up.” He said the last after the back door banged shut.

  It was a hell of a thing to have been married for twenty-fiv
e years, but no one ever asked Mary her secret to a long marriage. She might have said, “Don’t call your husband at work.”

  Of course, throughout the years, she would have called Gooch’s pager or cellphone if there’d been an emergency, but her life was fairly predictable and her tragedies rarely sudden. She’d nearly called Gooch at work when she’d gotten the news about her father’s passing, but had decided that, like everything except her raging hunger, it could wait. She started to dial his pager many years ago, when she was seizing with uterine cramps, but had hung up when she realized the ambulance would be there faster. She had left a note on the kitchen table. Gone to hospital with hemorrhage. She’d thought of calling him just recently, the night she tipped the scale over three hundred pounds, but had instead collected the pain medications from the bathroom cabinet, remembering her vow to kill herself. Even as she was shaking tablets from vials at the kitchen table, she had accepted her false intentions, and determined that the dosage was not potent enough for her extreme body weight anyway. The door had suddenly opened behind her and Gooch had tramped inside, filling the house with his truck oil scent and strong-man vigour, calling, “Hey. You’re still up.” Shrugging off his coat, pulling off his boots, he had been preoccupied and hadn’t noticed the pills and vials on the table, which Mary swept into a plastic bag and quickly tossed in the trash. At the time, she’d allowed herself to wonder if he had missed her suspicious behaviour because he was hiding something too.

  The night clock. Palpitations of the heart. Thud. Thud. Whoosh. Arteries saturated with globules of worry. She reached for the phone but stopped. A good wife trusted her husband and never checked up on him, or questioned his lateness, or looked through his dresser drawers. The truth she rarely confessed, even to herself, was that she didn’t call Gooch because she was afraid she’d discover that he was someplace he shouldn’t be, and she didn’t want the burden of his confession any more than she thought he wanted hers.