The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  In the way Mary Brody had been engrossed by food and then obsessed with her parasites, she became, after that night, consumed by Jimmy Gooch.

  At Leaford Collegiate’s parent night that winter, Mary overheard the guidance counsellor, Miss Lafleur, whisper to anxious Irma in her charming French-Canadian accent, “She goes from being Mary to being Mary.” Sylvie Lafleur was gamine and fair, with strawberry hair in a braid down her elegant back. She cared deeply about her students, and had been encouraging to Mary during the course of her transformation. “She’s meeting her new body. Okay she’s distracted from her schoolwork. This too shall pass,” Miss Lafleur assured.

  Mary was struck by the fact that all things did pass, and added the phrase to her personal theology, below the rule of three and her enduring belief in miracles.

  A distant relative of the famous Canadian hockey player, Miss Lafleur lived alone in a small apartment in a building overlooking the river in Chatham—the same building, in fact just down the hall, where Mary’s father had died with his thrombosis. Sylvie had been a godsend, bringing groceries to Orin when Mary couldn’t. Stopping by for a chat because she knew he was old and lonely.

  The guidance counsellor was a woman who knew things, but Mary mistrusted Gooch’s reliance on her advice. During his final year he met with Miss Lafleur weekly, receiving tutoring for the time he’d missed because of the accident, and discussing his academic options. Mary worried that the woman would persuade her boyfriend to choose some faraway university, or counsel Gooch that Mary Brody was clearly not the right girl for him.

  Miss Lafleur must have known that it was not Mary’s own body she was distracted by, but Jimmy Gooch’s. His smooth, tanned complexion, yeasty at his hairline, buttery at his neck. The berry texture of his tongue, the firmness of his cheek, the ripple of his core, the substance of his swell. The talc-soft skin from there to there, and his creamy voice when he asked her to touch it. A sensual rhapsody. More necessary than food. More vital than air. In the months after Gooch’s father passed, and when it was clear that he would not play sports competitively again, the two clung to each other, humming with endorphins. Desperate love, dense as gold.

  In the early years of their marriage, Gooch and Mary spent Saturday nights (and most weekday mornings) rutting to anthem rock, lost in a guitar riff of scent and motion, pace and pressure, retention and release. Say something, she’d beg, while he stroked. Gooch thought she wanted dirty talk, but it was really just the sound of his voice.

  By the middle years of their marriage, Saturdays were spent playing cards on a rotating schedule at their friends’ modest homes. Pete and Wendy’s duplex for euchre. Bridge at Kim and François’s backsplit. Poker at Dave and Patti’s old manse, before Patti left Dave for Larry Hooper. Gooch liked to gamble and was sullen when he lost, even though the largest pots rarely exceeded twenty dollars, and even if he was reminded a dozen times that it was supposed to be for fun. “I come from a long line of sore losers,” he’d joke.

  One windswept autumn evening they were at Kim and François’s place, over the bridge, on the other side of the river. By then Mary had recovered all of her lost weight, clinging to, as the grief-stricken clutch mementos, the pounds she’d added over the course of her two failed pregnancies. She chose flattering clothes and wore coral lip gloss to complement her green eyes, and dyed her prematurely grey roots rich chestnut every five weeks. She had good taste in footwear. She still had her uterus. As a couple, the Gooches were damaged but hopeful.

  The ill wind that night drove branches against the sliding glass door, and Mary moved chairs twice, stalked by the draft. Wendy announced her pregnancy—twins, yay. Kim’s middle one had just started kindie, and she’d brought a stack of pictures of the new baby in his adorable doggie jammies. School raffle ticket time again. Mary ate a bowl of dill dip. Gooch won eighteen dollars and drank nine Black Labels.

  Heading to the truck at the end of the evening, Gooch squeezed his wife’s thick waist, then, remembering how she hated that, leaned down to bite her ear. “You smell like a pickle,” he said, which meant she should brush her teeth because he wanted sex.

  On the short drive home, as they were discussing the naivety of Dave’s young girlfriend, a splendid brown buck leapt from the dense bush into the path of their pickup. But this was no deer caught in headlights. This was a kamikaze bomber slamming the grille, bouncing onto the hood, flipping up to the windshield, then launched back to the pavement when Gooch jammed the brake.

  The bright truck lights caught crisp orange leaves stealing from the scene. Furious gusts peeled down tufts at the animal’s heaving breast. Gooch peered through the shattered windshield at the buck thrashing on the pavement. Wordlessly he climbed out of the truck, approaching the fallen creature, whose leg was clearly broken. He must have heard Mary shout, “What do we do, Gooch?” But he just stood there, a minor actor in the wings in the thrall of the great star’s death scene. Mary waited for her husband to take action. An eternity passed. Howling wind. Horrible tap-shoe hoofs. Gasping clouds of condensed breath. Gooch? Gooch?

  Mary shifted the gear, pressed her foot on the pedal, and drove at the creature. Thud. Stop. Reverse. The only thing to do. Shift. Thunk. Stop. Reverse. Shift, swallow hard. Dead. Undeniably. Stop. The wind pushed pebbles of glass onto her lap. She dusted the fragments off absently, heart thumping, watching Gooch climb into the passenger seat, not daring to glance his way. The wind would have blown Mary numb, were she not already so.

  After silently appraising the damage to the vehicle—apart from the windshield, a dented front grille and hood—the couple headed for the house. Mary locked herself in the bathroom with a loaf of Sarah Lee, licking the cords of biting-sweet icing from the top of the cardboard package when she’d finished gulping the spongy yellow cake. Afterwards she brushed her teeth, even though she was certain Gooch would no longer want sex. She could hear the television on in the living room, where he was watching the nightly news.

  The clock thumped on the bedside like a voice commanding, Do it, do it, and Mary held her hand over her galloping heart. It was time. As good a time as any to make a long-held confession to Gooch, one she’d resolved to make a thousand times then lost her nerve before she spoke, or had not been availed of the words. Waiting for him to come to bed, she saw that she’d been presented with the perfect opportunity to disclose. The deer in the road. He would understand completely. It was another situation in which no one was at fault.

  When finally she heard the bedroom door creak open, and felt Gooch heft his freight into the bed, she reached tentatively for his body and set her heavy hand upon his broad chest. “We need to talk, Gooch.”

  “No,” he replied, and then, more tenderly, “Not tonight, Mare. Okay?”

  “I need to tell you something,” she insisted. He surprised her then, by kissing her on the mouth. “Gooch,” she whispered as he buried his face in her neck. She felt him stiff beneath his briefs. “Gooch?” He moved against her, gently at first, faster, harder, bouncing, grunting as the headboard flogged the wall, until he’d been seized and arrested, and fell back against the bed. Before passing out he squeezed Mary’s arm, but she couldn’t tell if the gesture was one of gratitude or apology.

  At six a.m., the clock alarmed them both. They rose and began their respective morning routines, Gooch heading out to get the newspaper, Mary cracking eggs. They would never speak of the deer on the road, already firmly entrenched in their habit, which was not to discuss things painful or obvious.

  The anchor of Mary’s secret floated down to the silty bottom until another storm stirred it up again, but like the food she hid from herself, Mary always knew its precise location.

  HER BODY ELECTRIC

  A train rattled by in the distance. The rain tapped against the windowsill. The night clock on the table beside Mary’s bed told her it was past three o’clock. The Kenmore sang a love song from the kitchen. Mary eyed the telephone beside the clock, foreboding, like a smell brought in with t
he wind. She reached for her grey nightgown but remembered she’d left it in the kitchen.

  Moving naked through the hall, she felt like a barge sailing toward a cool, distant land. Just come home already, Gooch. The furnace. The anniversary. I’m worried. And I’m starving. She looked at the phone but stopped herself from reaching for it.

  Squinting from the refrigerator’s sharp light, she found a jar of olives. Could he have hit a deer? No. Even the country roads were well enough travelled that an hour wouldn’t go by without someone finding him. She leaned against the counter, suddenly aware that she was not alone but one of millions of humans standing on tile floors before their humming refrigerators, hungering for food, cigarettes, booze, sex. Love. She wondered if this was the chorus she sometimes heard above the thumping of her heart. Or was the sound, as she hoped, a beckoning God? Not the vengeful white man from the old movies or the wise black one from the new movies, but a large, round, female God who might enfold Mary in her motherly arms and show her the path to grace? Ms. Bolt?

  Long ago, it was Irma who planted the idea in Mary’s mind, driving past the red graffiti on the side of the Kmart, Where is God when you need her? “God could be a woman, I suppose,” Irma’d said. “The God I grew up with was so angry. I always liked the look of that smiling Buddha.”

  “You can think of God any way you want to?” Mary asked, astonished.

  “Of course, dear. As long as you don’t have religion.”

  Mary stood watching the night through her kitchen window, as the wind cast the rake from its comfortable lean and set Merkel’s dog to barking in the field behind. Suddenly remembering something, Mary hurried to look out the dirty glass of the back-door window. “Snap,” she breathed. On the double laundry line near the overgrown vegetable patch, three of Gooch’s costly custom-made work shirts flailed like the drowning in the swells of the wind. She was as angry at herself as she was with the storm, because she’d put the shirts on the line a full three days before. Only sloth would explain their loss to Gooch.

  Forgetting her nightgown in her haste, Mary pushed open the back door, the wind, her lover, stroking her puckered skin and teasing her hair wild. Not now. Not now. Her heart began its ceremonial thud. She fought the driving current as the first shirt was kicked high by an updraft and torn by the stiff maple near Mr. Barkley’s grave. Then the wind took hold of the taupe shirt, ripped it from the line and flung it toward Feragamos’. Gone, like Mr. Barkley, before her very eyes.

  Mary’s cold, bare feet urged her legs to take one step, then another and another, determined to conquer the distance through the wet grass to rescue the remaining shirt. The wind battered her as she stretched to reach the sleeve. A clothespin popped, striking her in the forehead. Startled, she lost her grip on the shirt, and as she stepped back to watch the flying fabric she tripped on the laundry basket and fell hard to the earth.

  The wind left Mary Gooch like a hit-and-run victim, sprawled naked in the wet leaves on that stormy October night. Labouring from the weight of herself, chanting the accidental mantra Gooch Gooch Gooch, she found a rhythm in her breath and set her thoughts adrift.

  Perhaps it was nudity that gave Mary some fresh perspective. Lying there beneath the tempest, sharing her load with the sweet damp earth, she felt together the peculiar sense of utter freedom and deep connection. Freedom from what, she couldn’t say. Connection to whom, she didn’t know. Or, more important, it didn’t matter. Suspecting that oxygen deprivation might be involved in her awakening, she struggled to breathe more deeply, which heightened rather than diminished her awareness that a switch of some kind had been turned on. An electrical current, a hum in every cell that connected sublimely to the pulse of all things, so that she was the earth that cradled her body, and the ant on the twig near her ear. She was the roots of the wind-ravaged willow, and the air that fed her lungs. She was the newborn crying in the distant house, and Mr. Feragamo in his bed. She was each drop of rain; Mrs. Merkel’s dog; the compost of her cat. She was all of herself, and nothing but the breeze that coaxed her higher, until she could see her huge babyish figure, peaceful and pretty, undressed by the wind. Her current position too enlightened for regret, she regarded the body she was heir to, and err to, without worry or wish or shame.

  The wind blew cold and the rain stung her thighs. A cricket raked its legs together near a branch by her toe. She imagined she heard an orange kitten crying behind the garage. Mr. Barkley? Is that you? She had the heart-stopping realization that Gooch could be home any minute; certain that she would rather be dead than seen, she reached for the laundry basket as leverage to crane herself to standing. She started for the back door, her body waves in motion, damning wrathful nature. In answer to her silent hatred, or maybe to teach her a lesson about respect, the wind blasted through the open bedroom window and sent a gust through the house that slammed the back door shut.

  The back door locked automatically when it shut but Mary tried the knob anyway, hoping for a miracle. Drawing upon her terror of being discovered naked in her yard in the middle of a storm, she dragged herself toward the garage and heaved open the door, her porcine nudity cruelly splashed by motion-sensor light. Ha ha, she wanted to shout to whoever was behind this. Laugh it up.

  Gooch’s tools were laid out neatly at his work table. There were boxes and crates of who knows what, the outdoor broom, the lawn mower, the weed wacker, Gooch’s bike. A sound familiar to the sleepless, of a vehicle in the night, set her flesh to quiver. She reached for the shovel and looked out to the road, noting the distant headlights. Each thundering step a testament of will, she waded through the leaves to the locked back door, lifted the shovel’s handle and ran it at the glass. She reached in to turn the lock, panicked, as the headlights approached.

  The shard met Mary’s bare heel the moment she stepped in the door, with a stab of freezing cold followed by a hot shot of pain. She blamed the glass from here to eternity as she hobbled over the kitchen floor to find support at the counter, as the vehicle passed outside.

  She craned her neck. She lifted her leg. She bent at the side. It didn’t matter from which angle she tried to examine her foot, she could not see past her extensive body. Tossing a dishtowel to the floor to catch the pooling blood, she put her foot down, realizing too late that the shard was still lodged there. She dragged herself to one of the red vinyl chairs, blood spilling off the towel and seeping into the pores of the dirty grout.

  Sweating, grunting, Mary attempted to lift her injured foot to her opposite knee so that she could pull out the glass. She tried hoisting with her hands and scooping with her arms, but neither her knee joint nor her hip joint nor the encroachment of fat around the patella would allow the transfer. She strained, barely reaching the slippery, maddening shard, nicking her fingers. There was an alarming amount of blood stemming from the wound. She set her injured heel back on the blood-soaked towel, which released the glass from her foot.

  Breathing deeply, calmer than she ought to have been, Mary found her grey nightgown on the chair and pulled it on, not noticing or caring about the bloodstains from her fingers. Regarding her reflection in the window, thinking of that other Mary Gooch she’d met so briefly, hovering in the storm, not defined by this or that but this and that and all of it, she reached for a recipe card on which emergency numbers were written, picked up the telephone and dialed Gooch’s cellphone number. The stranger’s recorded voice on Gooch’s message service apologized, This subscriber is not available. Please leave your name, the time, and the purpose of your call.

  “This is a message for Jimmy Gooch,” she said. “Will you please ask him to call his wife?”

  Feeling the wind rush in through the broken window, Mary thought of how Gooch would say, “You’re letting out the heat,” when she kept the door open, and “You’re letting out the cold,” when her nose was in the Kenmore. It struck her that there must be some other door left open through which she’d let out Gooch.

  A DISTANT RELATION

  The g
reen drapes danced as cold stormed the wide-open window. Mary woke as she did every morning, with a start, shocked to have fallen asleep at all. But it was a further shock to see the umber blood on her linens where her nicked hands had bled, and, when she heaved herself up to look, pooled on the bedspread beneath her foot.

  Crows mocked from the fields behind the house, insisting she turn to look, but Mary already knew she was alone. She reached for the telephone beside the bed and found the card with emergency numbers. She dialed Gooch’s cellphone. When the prerecorded message answered the call, she managed to sputter, “I’m sorry. It’s Mary Gooch again. Jimmy Gooch’s wife. If you could have him call me please. It’s seven o’clock. In the morning.”

  Creep of dread. Spiral of fear. Gooch was not home. He was not answering his phone. But then, her phone was also silent. No police calling to say he was in jail. No one banging on the door to say there’d been an accident. It occurred to her that the evening had simply been one of high drama, as happened when people ventured out in the dark. As she had. As Gooch sometimes did. His absence would be explained soon enough, plausibly and with genuine regret for her worry, and then forgotten by them both, or at least never spoken of again. And no real turning point at all, as she’d been so convinced by her brief tryst with the night earth.

  Mary turned the alarm off before it sounded, struck by the putridity of her breath, recalling how Gooch liked to pronounce that people had their heads up their asses. She was one of them, of course, though he’d never been so direct with her. Except maybe last year, when she’d won the Caribbean cruise in a raffle and cancelled at the last minute, even though they’d gone to the trouble of getting passports. She had insisted that with her motion sickness (and she did have motion sickness) she couldn’t endure an ocean voyage. What she could not have endured were the orgies of cruise food she’d heard two women discussing at the hair salon when she went for her biyearly trim. The other problem, and it was always a problem, was that she had nothing to wear.