The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  WEIGHT OF GRIEF

  Fifteen pounds with her father. Orin Brody died in the spring of a blood clot, a cunning thrombosis that had slithered up from his leg to his lung sometime after Mary closed the door to his apartment overlooking the river in nearby Chatham. “See ya tomorrow, Murray,” he’d called out, using Mary’s pet name, as he always did. Her mother had called her dear.

  The blood clot came as a somewhat shocking end, given Orin’s history of heart disease and colitis. His post-mortem death weight, a number that had stung Mary and still buzzed her ear-hole in the dark—ninety-seven pounds. But Orin had lost his appetite completely in his final year, for televised sports, food, life, altogether, all the same. His cadaver was the exact poundage of Mary’s squat nine-year-old self when the doctor had whispered the obvious to her slight mother, Irma. Ninety-seven pounds. Obeast. Mary unduly expanded. Orin cruelly reduced. The pressing weight of grief made her hungry.

  On the morning of her father’s funeral, she had risen early after not a wink of sleep, and started for the bathroom to colour her hair. She’d found the hair dye box in the bag from the drugstore and opened it before noticing that she’d grabbed the wrong package—not Rich Chestnut but Rich Red. Resigned to her silver roots, she’d stepped out of the bathroom to find Gooch addressing the wakening erection in his large, callused hand. He looked caught, and sat up breathless. “I thought you were going to do your hair.”

  Not offended by Gooch’s habit but aroused, she considered briefly what it might be like to sit beside him on the bed and caress him there, and let him run his hand over the flesh of her back, to heal with strokes and whispers the way they once had. She craved that powerful love but felt too distinctly the message from her body, that it did not want to be touched. “I grabbed the wrong box,” she sighed. “It’s red.”

  Later, Gooch heard a sound in the bedroom and found her collapsed on the bed. It was not a fatal heart attack or even grief but her stiff black dress, which had been snug at the last funeral, lodged beneath her textured mounds. Seeing her stricken face, Gooch just squeezed his eyes and quietly left the room.

  Locked in the bathroom, naked on the toilet though she had no urge to relieve, Mary had scratched her hairless thighs without particular shame or horror. Her hunger was ever-present but her self-loathing came in waves. Clothes didn’t necessarily incite abhorrence for her form, but more often for the tight, scratchy, lumpy articles themselves. All garments except her grey nightgown were hateful to her skin. She had been delighted when the uniform policy was handed down at the drugstore—roomy navy pantsuits resembling hospital scrubs, which were supposed to make the front staff look more professional, and in which they all looked like hell.

  The women at the drugstore had griped about the uniforms—especially Candace, with her wee waist and cantilevered breasts—but no one had asked Mary her opinion. She had thought one sleepless night, without a ladle of self-pity, that she was, quite literally, the elephant in the room. Her body seemed more illusory for the secrecy surrounding it. Her real weight? Her true size? Only she knew. Hiding food. Eating in private. Feeding the hungry body to which she’d been assigned, abiding with the frantic energy of want and want more.

  Restless on the toilet, having shifted tense in what she supposed was the natural inclination of all people’s thoughts—a lobbing back and forth between past remembrances and current anxieties—she wondered what believable emergency might excuse a daughter from her own father’s funeral. There was a gentle knock on the door. “Mary …?”

  “I’m sorry, Gooch.”

  “I think this’ll work, Mare. Can I come in?” He opened the door.

  The image of big Jimmy Gooch in his slender tie and pleated pants lent her the courage to rise. He presented a pair of black slacks borrowed from their short, rotund neighbour, old Leo Feragamo, and a starched white shirt of his own, which she would have to wear open over her only clean white T-shirt. The roots of her hair sparkled like tinsel around her full-moon face. She propped a black wide-brimmed sunhat upon her head and did not look in the mirror again. Gooch flipped a thumb and announced that she looked funky, which caused Mary’s throat to constrict.

  As they drove in silence on the winding river road, Mary wondered if grief was ever a singular event, or if ghosts lurk in any passing. She felt a parade in the death of her father: the erosion of her mother’s mind; the splintering of her marriage; the slipping away of the babies she’d named but never known.

  The day of the funeral was an unseasonably warm day in spring. Mary felt the embrace of purple lilac on the path to St. John’s Nursing Home in Chatham, where her mother had been languishing in dementia for years. She stopped to pick a lilac bouquet for her mother’s bedside stand, knowing that Irma wouldn’t appreciate or understand the gesture and had no sense of the events of the day, but it cheered Mary to bring her mother flowers. The receptionist huffed, seeing the bouquet, and explained tightly that they’d run out of vases.

  Irma was parked in the common room, folded neatly into her wheelchair, silver strands teased to a height, looking more winter shrub than human being, gazing into the distance. Mary imagined Irma turning to smile as the other patients did when their kin came to call. She imagined herself enfolded by her mother’s cadaverous arms. The whisper of Mary. Dear Mary. She wished to be kissed by that gawping mouth, yearned to touch, to be touched, longed for a sliver of connection to the Irma who used to be, the mother who, while gently combing Mary’s locks one day, had confided, “My mother used to tear at my tangles. Just tear at them. She’d hit me with the brush if I so much as breathed. I still remember that. I would never hit you with the brush.” Or the Irma who’d remarked casually, “You have the nicest handwriting, dear.”

  Orin had loved Mary in the same somewhat grudging way, but she didn’t blame her parents for her present state nor fault them for their stingy affection. They weren’t rich with it, and gave what they could. “You get what you get and you don’t get upset,” Orin liked to say when Mary was sulky. When he wanted her to hush up he’d pretend to pass her a tiny key and warn, “Zip it. Lock it. Put it in your pocket.”

  Pop would have hated it here, she repeated to herself, wheeling her absent mother past her moribund fellows, grateful that St. John’s was so conveniently located across the road from Chatham’s largest funeral home. As she struggled across the walkway with her wheezy mother and her chafed thighs, she thought of how Irma had passed in fragments, starting in her fifties, little bits of her exiting like players off a field—long-term memory, short-term memory, recognition, reason. At least with Orin, Mary reminded herself, she’d had the chance to say goodbye. See ya tomorrow, Murray.

  Giant Jimmy Gooch and the hunched old men were gathered outside, sharing a tin flask of some homemade concoction that one of the relations still brewed in his garage. Gooch waved when he spied his wife pushing the remains of her mother up the ramp, and lifted his shoulders, smiling wanly—his way of saying, Ah, life. Mary nodded twice and tilted her head, her way of saying, I know.

  Ah, life. She was moved to think how often they’d exchanged those gestures in their years together, then annoyed that Gooch hadn’t rushed to take the chair from her swollen hands. Maybe he was too far away to see that she was drenched and breathless, and had failed to note, in the way the parent is never the first to notice the child’s growth spurt, how truly incapable she’d become.

  Longing to grieve with her mother, while grateful to be relieved of the burden, Mary’d returned the frail creature to St. John’s after the funeral parlour portion, before gathering at the cemetery, where Orin and Irma had joint plots in the vicinity of the other dead Brodys. Mary had spent many sleepless hours, long before the deaths of Orin or Mr. Barkley, wishing that her mother would die, complete a cluster or begin one, but Irma’s pulsing body was a wonder of biology, a life but not alive. Perhaps she didn’t count.

  Shortly before he’d passed, Mary’d confided to Orin her sense of feeling stuck and unbound all at
once, her failed attempts at optimism, her sense that she could only see the glass half empty, to which he’d responded impatiently, “Forget about the glass, Murray. Get a drink from the hose and push on.”

  Birdsong scored the graveside service. Hunger pangs tore at Mary’s gut as she reflected on the liberation of her father’s spirit by a minister who didn’t know him from a cherry pit. The man was appealing to God to receive Orin Brody’s soul, but Mary knew that old Orin would never venture such a distance, even if he did make the cut. She imagined him a vaporous cloud sparring with oxygen molecules in the airspace above his own headstone, content to be wherever he was, the way he’d clung to Baldoon County all his life. Orin and Irma never saw the point in travelling, and bred a mistrust of wanderlust in their daughter.

  As to religion, Orin had been raised Catholic, a faith to which he’d never truly held so hadn’t exactly abandoned when he married Irma, who’d been raised Christian but had ideas of her own. Irma had told Mary, when she’d inquired, that they didn’t go to her church because it gave her bad dreams, and they didn’t go to Catholic church because the priest was a drunk. Mary had once, as a child, watched some Christians scrubbing graffiti from the wall at the Kmart, struck by the dripping red words—Where is God when you need her?

  No, Mary thought, even Orin Brody’s vapour would never leave Leaford, but she threw up a prayer to heaven, just in case. She lifted her eyes when several black crows passed overhead, courting the mourners’ revulsion. One of the birds descended, settling atop the gleaming casket, strutting from head to foot and stopping to appraise Mary Gooch. She glared back with reciprocal loathing, and felt she’d won when the bird flew away.

  Finding Gooch’s eyes wet beneath their fringe of dark lash, Mary yearned to cry along with her husband. She’d felt the same way years ago, watching him reach for a tissue as the Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky announced that he was leaving the Edmonton Oilers for the L.A. Kings. And that Sunday afternoon when tears spilled from his eyes as the final scenes of How Green Was My Valley played out on the new TV. And the long-ago day his own father passed away, when he’d drunk a whole bottle of Southern Comfort and wept after they’d made love. She’d admired that her husband was man enough to cry, but wondered what that made her.

  She flapped her white shirt, the collar damp around her neck, and focused on her breath, or more accurately her odour, fromage—oddly pleasant to herself, but she’d need to swab and talc her valleys and crevasses the minute they got home from the cemetery.

  The food. Hunger. Details of the wake a blessing. Napkins and plastic glasses on the card table. Casseroles on low in the oven. Pete and Wendy were out of town but Erika and Dave and Kim and François would be there. The Rowlands, Loyers, Feragamos, Whiffens, Stielers, Nick Todino and his wife, Phil and Judy. Merkels wouldn’t come; they barely left the house. No one from the Gooch side.

  Gooch’s father had died after a car accident in their final year at Leaford Collegiate, and a scant year and a half later his mother, Eden, and her new husband, Jack Asquith—a chain-smoking American whom Gooch referred to as “Jack Asswipe,” moved to California, where Jack owned a pet supply company in a place called Golden Hills. Eden had promised they’d still see each other, but she’d stopped visiting at Christmas after the first few years. Mary had asked Gooch not to bother trying to contact his tragic older sister, Heather, of no fixed address.

  Gooch’s voice had grown distant. Not just on the drive home from her father’s funeral, but gradually over the days and months and years of their marriage. She thought she heard him say, “Scatter my ashes on the golf course, Mare. Eighteenth hole. That’s what I want.”

  The early trees had just leafed out, and the April rains had greened all that was grey. Impossible not to feel someone’s god in the pastoral landscape. The resurrection of the black earth fields. Glory in the sun’s diving rays. The promise of butter-drenched asparagus and field-warm strawberries. Mary watched the dappled light spray her husband’s profile, wondering if he was mourning his own long-departed father and his gone-away mother, his athletic scholarship. He must surely think about the babies, though their names, like curses, went unspoken.

  Gooch reached above his head to yank open the testy sunroof, which would never close again. He eased his hand off the wheel to touch her through the wool casing of Mr. Feragamo’s slacks. When his enormous fingers found the mulch of her thigh, she stiffened. “Easy on the booze tonight, right, hon? You’ve got that run to Wawa tomorrow.”

  “Come with me.” He said it so quickly that she made a pretense of not understanding, to give him a chance to retract. But he repeated, “Come to Wawa.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It’s a beautiful drive, Mare. Take your mind off …”

  “The lawyer’s appointment, though,” she countered. “And I can’t leave Mum.” She tried to catch his eye, adding, “Sorry.”

  Gooch hadn’t really expected her to say yes. He’d asked the same thing a hundred times before. Come with me to Montreal. Come with me to Burlington. Come with me. Come with me. Come with me. He hit the button on the radio, filling the truck with Sly & The Family Stone. “I’m gonna miss old Orin,” he said.

  Mary closed her eyes and let the music take her higher.

  FINGER OF BLAME

  Even with the breeze from the open bedroom window blowing against her damp nightgown, Mary felt no respite from the heat. And no release from her hunger. Sweet to follow salty. A biological imperative, surely. A powerful craving driving Gooch’s face from her thoughts, and the misery of her parents’ passing from her spirit, and the worry over the anniversary dinner from her foremind, and the discomfort of heat from her face. Why hadn’t she grabbed that bag of Halloween candy at the checkout? Accursed voice of restraint.

  She focused on her list. Details. The silver anniversary dinner. Confirm reservations at the lake. Pick up dessert from the Oakwood Bakery. Gooch? He would be too exhausted and miserable to go ahead with the dinner if he didn’t get home soon and get some sleep. He was already anxious about the cost, and worried that their guests would order appetizers and pricey entrees like surf and turf or prime rib. He’d pointed out that Kim and Wendy liked those fancy cocktails, and Pete his foreign beer. Gooch would dread the cheque. Mary had already spent weeks dreading Wendy’s scrapbook, the photographic evidence of who she’d briefly been and what she’d become.

  Mary’d dutifully sifted through boxes of old photographs at Wendy’s request, tortured by her glossy image, watching herself grow with the years until the only pictures she could find of herself were a turned-away cheek or a running rear. She’d tried to ignore Wendy’s impatience when she’d handed over a dozen photographs, none recent and most taken in a single year, the year she was slim. “Fine,” Wendy had said. “I’ll just have to use what I can find at home.”

  Rising from the bed, Mary felt the stricture of her heart as she thought of the photographs. She clutched at the wall in the narrow hallway, femur bones at odds with hinges as she made her way to the thermostat and tried once more, unsuccessfully, to shut the furnace off. She worked down the buttons of her nightgown, casting it off her shoulders and draping it over a kitchen chair as she moved toward the breeze from the window.

  In searching through her boxes for Wendy, Mary’d found one picture that she’d kept out and slipped into her bedside drawer—a snapshot of Mary Brody and her favourite teacher, Ms. Bolt, arm in arm on the steps of Leaford Collegiate. Mary isn’t slender in the photograph, dressed in sloppy sweatpants and a sweater that showcased her stomach rolls, but seeing the photo again after so many years, she thought her smile was as lovely as it had ever been.

  Ms. Bolt, in addition to teaching social studies and homeroom at Leaford Collegiate, had offered an elective course she called Progressive Thought. She was the darkest black woman Mary, with her tender years and limited travel, had ever seen in person. She appeared to float rather than walk, sweeping the floor with her silky caftans, a dozen gold
bangles chiming on each wrist, her breasts so enormous they preceded her into the room, while her rump so large seemed tardy.

  In the older woman’s eyes Mary saw her reflection. Not fat, sulking Mary Brody, but an eager student with a voice of her own and a very pretty face. She felt known by Ms. Bolt, who seemed not imprisoned within her abundance but liberated by it, her every breath a celebration. Ms. Bolt was not a rebel against beauty but a particular kind of disciple. Her wildness polished. Her casual studied. As Mary beheld her, the teacher was radiant.

  She’d attempted to describe Ms. Bolt to Irma, when prodded at the dinner table about the new teacher. “Her name is Ms. Bolt,” she’d said, articulating roundly so there was no misunderstanding her heroine’s politics. “She’s black.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Irma had said.

  “And she’s beautiful.” She said it like a challenge. “She’s big. Ms. Bolt is big.”

  “Like Mrs. Rouseau?”

  “Bigger.”

  “Bigger than Mrs. Rouseau?”

  Mary rolled her eyes—which, apart from overeating, was her single defiant gesture. “She accepts herself. It’s part of what she’s teaching us. Self-acceptance.”

  “If Miss Bolt is bigger than Mrs. Rouseau, she’s morbidly obese, dear.”

  “So?” Mary rolled her eyes once more. “Self-acceptance is a good thing, Mum.”

  “If doctors all over the world call a condition morbid, could that be a good thing to accept? Honestly.”

  Only five students had signed up for the elective class. No girls from the cheerleading squad, but one boy from the basketball team—Jimmy Gooch, having registered for the class on a dare from his teammates. Mary felt the rush of air as Gooch breezed past her toward the back of the room, but she didn’t turn to look. She’d learned to avoid people’s eyes, convinced that her gaze held some unintended menace.