The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  “Okay.”

  “And a little lipstick never hurt a girl.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Mary muttered.

  “And they all have a particular habit. A nasty habit.”

  “A nasty habit?”

  “They all do it. All of them. You won’t change that. And when you catch him at it, just pretend you didn’t see. Don’t take it personally. That was the best piece of advice my mother gave me.”

  “I really don’t feel well.”

  Irma settled onto the bed. “That’s a good sign. I was sick with you the whole time. I didn’t have a second of nausea with my other pregnancies. That’s how I knew I wouldn’t lose you.”

  Mary stroked her womb, feeling the rise of bile. “Doesn’t feel good, though.”

  “Lots of things don’t feel good, dear.”

  She drew her legs to her stomach, finding some relief, wishing Irma would stay with her on the bed talking like this for the remainder of the night. But just as she wished it, like a candle blown out, her mother was rising and, without meaning to sound harsh, saying, “Now get some sleep.”

  In her childhood bed in the little room in the blue bungalow where she had been raised, Mary watched the moonlight fall on the wedding dress hanging on the back of the closet door. The dress had cost three hundred and seventy-four dollars. And the three separate alterations to let it out, another ninety-two. Shoes, one fifty-nine. So much bread. And most of the fries with gravy that Kim had ordered for the table. And two slices of the cake. Mary would need to spend her entire wedding day inhaling, holding in her pregnant stomach, which she’d planned to do anyway, even though she knew there wasn’t a single guest who didn’t already know, or hadn’t guessed at, her condition.

  Patti, Kim and Wendy swam around her in a dizzying water ballet. Expressions of genuine concern. Sisterly advice. Sexual frankness. The kind of friendship ritual Mary had longed for, but whose genuineness she didn’t trust. Frightening bullets of remembered conversation—I’d rather be dead than fat.

  Some hours after she heard the scraping of kitchen chairs and the settling of Irma and Orin’s teacups in the sink, Mary was still wide awake. She was sweating beneath her covers and shivering at the same time. She was hungry. Starving. She crept down the hall toward the kitchen. But she was drawn by the night light in the bathroom, and paused to ponder her pale, pretty face.

  The pain was sudden and tore at her gut. Gas. She belched. She caught her breath but couldn’t leave her reflection. Mary Gooch. Mrs. James Gooch. She did not want to change her name, but had not expressed that to anyone. Irma would have rolled her eyes. Gooch’s mother would have protested. And Gooch? She’d been afraid to hurt his feelings. How could she become Mary Gooch when she barely knew Mary Brody?

  Mary had educated herself, at the back table in the Leaford Library, with a variety of books about pregnancy, one of which showed a weight gain table. She was already off the chart. The same book had explained the issue of incontinence, which sometimes happened during the third trimester or after the birth, with the stretching and slackening of uterine muscles. She knew, though, when she felt the hot trickle between her legs, that she was not peeing. Blood. She sank down to the toilet.

  Although she thought it a grave dishonour to the memory of James or Liza to recall with too much detail the demise and disappearance of that blameless soul, the memory often came unbidden to her mind. When she rose for her inspection, she could not connect the flotsam she saw in the toilet water to the chubby dark-haired baby she’d envisioned at her breast. The baby she’d named and was besotted with, with whom she’d already shared a lifetime of wisdom. The little boy they’d joked would be the mini-bar to Gooch’s fridge. Or the little girl whose soft hair she would brush the way Irma had hers. Grief would visit later, in the days and weeks ahead, but in that awful moment Mary’s instinct was to undo the undone.

  She watched the swirl of red, terrified by the swiftness of her action, realizing, too late, that she hadn’t even said goodbye. I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. The plumbing made glugging sounds and then, as if to complete her horror, the water rose slowly back up, spilling over the porcelain, dripping pink acid onto the tiles below. She reached for the towels, falling to her knees to stop the tide from leaking out under the door. It was some small mercy that the plunger was nearby.

  Scrubbing blood from the grout on the eve of her wedding, she saw that she could tell no one what had happened without explaining what she’d done. She would convince herself that she had been in shock, that judgment could not be expected from, or imposed upon, a person in shock. Still, the facts remained, as she imagined them presented, that she had unintentionally suffocated her baby with her visceral weight, manslaughter, and disposed of the body, for that’s what it must have been, in a most gruesome fashion, gross indignity to a corpse.

  The wedding dress on the closet door, the binder of receipts under the lingerie beside her luggage for the honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Bloodstained towels hidden at the bottom of the trash. A cost to everything. Mary shifted under her blankets, enduring her first fully sleepless night. She had no fever and the blood between her legs had slowed to a manageable trickle, but she couldn’t stop shaking.

  On that morning of her wedding, as on this morning twenty-five years later, she awoke to a world whose essential rotation had shifted. She ravenously ate the blueberry waffles Irma set before her, and agreed with Orin that the bees might be a problem even if it was warm enough to eat outdoors. No matter how much she wanted to confess what had happened, no matter that she understood her loss could not be hidden indefinitely, she could not find the words.

  She shivered into her wedding gown. Having lost a good deal of fluid in the dark night hours, the buttons fastened easily at her waist. Irma smoothed her skirt, saying, “Don’t be a stranger here, now.”

  “You and Pop’ll come out to our house sometimes too,” she returned.

  Dressed and done, her dark hair piled elegantly on top of her head, Mary avoided her reflection as she bustled out of the room. She’d eaten too much. And lost the baby because of it. But how to tell Gooch? A cost. To everything.

  When he saw her moving down the short hall, Orin let out a long, low whistle, but she could see he was blinking back tears. He was losing his baby. She had lost hers. It was the saddest day of their lives. The hot metal smell from the bloody pad between her legs rose up from the lace and tulle. Irma clapped her hands and said, “Let’s go get this day over with.”

  As he escorted his plush, blushing daughter up the church aisle, Orin whispered, “You look like a deer caught in the headlights, Murray. Smile for Chrissake.” She nearly stopped then and ran back out the door, but she walked on instead, entranced by Gooch’s smiling face until she found his hand at the altar.

  She floated through the hours, a guest at her own wedding, fearful that her lie had stained her gown and that everyone, including Gooch, was pointing at her behind her back. She would not remember the ceremony. The kiss. The pictures. The dinner. The cake. None of it—only the sound of Heather Gooch’s tearful voice as she read the insipid love poem she’d written herself, and the look of pain on Gooch’s face when he dipped her on the dance floor and she saw that he’d reinjured his leg.

  Just before midnight, in the black Lincoln Continental borrowed from The Greek, Mary suggested that Gooch pull over in London, where her hemorrhage was addressed in the emergency room and the doctor informed Gooch, “The baby’s been lost.” Lost. Like a mitten or a set of car keys. The doctor turned to Mary and patted her soft hand and never told the young groom that his bride had miscarried the baby on the night before their wedding.

  Gooch entered the drab room limping badly on the morning she was to be released from the hospital. Mary felt responsible for his pain since he’d hurt his leg dancing, even if the dance had been at his mother’s insistence and not hers. Gooch was recovering from his third knee surgery in the year since the accident, but Eden had warned that people wou
ld get the wrong idea if he didn’t take to the floor with his new bride. And she wouldn’t have people walking around with the wrong idea. Not any more.

  Eden was a hard woman to ignore, with her sharp blue eyes and short black bob, her manicured nails and high-heeled shoes—a chic beauty, conspicuous in Leaford. In the months after her husband’s tragic death she’d found Jack Asquith and Jesus and sobriety, in that order, and even the ounce of dignity her daughter, Heather, had insisted she did not possess.

  Gooch could not stomach his mother’s affection for the chain-smoking American, and liked to bait Jack over dinner, mocking his interpretations of God’s intentions. God thinks. God thinks. “What does God think about you fornicating with my mother, Jack?”

  Forgetting her own pain momentarily, seeing the strain on Gooch’s face in the hospital that morning and aware that his knee was killing him, Mary said, “You can have one more pill every four hours, but no more than that. Okay?”

  He signalled his relief. “I’ve got enough till Friday. You’ll be back to work by then.”

  Dr. Ruttle had been alarmed when Gooch finished his first narcotics prescription early, and had refused to write a prescription for any more painkillers. “Sometimes, the best thing to do with pain is endure it,” the doctor had said. The vials are under lock and key now, but back then the excess stock was stored on the high shelf over Ray Senior’s desk at the receiving door. Mary had stolen the pills with impunity, but a different brand and potency, so that her theft, should it ever be detected, would not be traced to Gooch.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered as Gooch approached, smoothing back the sheets on the hospital bed.

  “It’s not your fault, Mare.”

  “I know,” she lied. She had intended in that moment, as she would intend in moments to come, to tell him the truth about losing the baby, but the aching loss, which she could embrace now that Gooch knew too, and the deep mourning for her very motherhood, which Gooch would never understand, stole her impulse back.

  He settled beside her on the thin bed, wrapping her in his big arms, his voice sounding for the first time more boy than man. “It’s for the best, right?” The affront to her baby in the doctor’s suggestion that the fetus had been less than perfect, and so the miscarriage for the best, had been great, yet Gooch seemed comforted by it, while Mary felt enraged.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He pulled down the fabric of her hospital gown and laid his cheek on her bosom. She read his mind: We only got married because of the baby.

  “We only got married because of the baby,” she echoed. “We wouldn’t have, if I wasn’t …”

  “But we did.”

  “Gooch …”

  “Mary,” he said. “Drinks are drunk. Music is played. Cash is counted. We’re married.”

  “Your mother’d be relieved if we got annulled,” she said, noticing the small diamond solitaire on her ring finger, unable to recall the moment Gooch had slipped it on.

  “You know how much that wedding cost your old man?”

  “Yes,” she answered. To the penny.

  They looked out the hospital window at the raw autumn sky. Gooch’s voice massaged her shoulders. “When we had our lockers side by side that year …”

  She sank into his embrace. “When we had our lockers side by side.”

  “I found one of those notes. The polka-dot ones. I never gave it to you.”

  Mary stiffened. The polka-dot notes had come sporadically until her transformation in senior year—seven in all, eight counting the one Gooch had intercepted, written in curlicued cursive with hilarious illustrations in the margins, addressing Mary Brody’s body odour on account of her not showering after the torture of gym class.

  “Why are you telling me this? Now?”

  “I thought you were brave, Mare.”

  “I didn’t shower because I was afraid they’d make fun of me, Gooch.”

  “They made fun of you anyway.”

  She sighed, looking out the window, wondering if all men had such poor timing.

  “You came back to school. That was brave,” Gooch said.

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  Mary argued the point to herself.

  “You used to sit on that swing in your yard and read novels. We could see you from Pete’s window. We spied on you when we were bored. I read A Clockwork Orange because of the look on your face.”

  Mary giggled, then turned serious. “The Droogs.”

  “I watched you from the window of the car when I was waiting for my old man to get a prescription one time. You were working behind the cosmetics counter helping this little old lady buy some lipstick and you were making her laugh like crazy, and I thought, ‘What is she saying to make that old bird laugh like that?’”

  “I’ve always been good with old people,” Mary allowed.

  “And there was another time, days after we moved here in the summer. I was riding my bike to school to shoot hoops and I saw you walking down your street. I was watching you, the way you walk, and I had this déjà vu. I felt like I knew you. It was something about your walk. I felt like I’d walked with you someplace before.”

  “Did you make jokes about me? You and Pete? When you were bored?”

  “What? No.”

  “But you thought I was fat.”

  “I thought you were pretty.”

  “The way they say lost, Gooch. You’ve lost the baby. The baby is lost.”

  “I know.”

  “Seems like, when you lose something, you should be able to find it again.”

  They spoke simultaneously, Mary saying, “We should get annulled, Gooch, and you should go to Montreal,” and Gooch saying, “We’ll work a little while and save some money, and we’ll think about college. And another baby.”

  Gooch kissed his bride’s cheek and held her chin, waiting until she lifted her face. “You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I thought so the first time I saw you standing by the lockers. You turned to look at me and I thought to myself, ‘That girl is so pretty.’”

  She bit her lip. “And what a shame?”

  “And what an ass.” He grinned.

  She slapped him playfully. “Gooch …”

  “Now you’re my pretty wife. And this might sound corny but it’s true, I just can’t think of any place I’d rather be than here with you.”

  “Are those lyrics?”

  “They might be.”

  “You took that Percodan, didn’t you?”

  He squeezed her hand. Moments passed with the sound of the clock and the shuffle of feet in the corridor, and the notion of a whisper beyond the cracked ivory door. When no one had said a word for the length of a commercial break, and neither had risen to go, it was understood they would stay together.

  They never made it to Niagara Falls.

  STEADFAST TOMORROW

  Assuming that denial is a conscious state, Mary Gooch was aware that she had only herself to fool in rejecting the possibility that Gooch might not come home at all. But choosing this day their silver anniversary struck her as much too dramatic a gesture. Gooch avoided drama, having suffered his share in his formative years, with demons of his own. His inebriated mother setting fire to the bed when she found out James was cheating with the secretary. Dumping suitcases full of her husband’s clothes into the Rideau Canal when she discovered that he was cheating with the babysitter. Throwing a bottle of Southern Comfort through the plate-glass window when he announced he’d taken a job in small-town Leaford.

  His sister, Heather, more chronic than demonic, had been in and out of jail the way Mary was on and off diets. As a teenager she’d been brought home by the police twice, run off with a man twice her age after graduation, returned pregnant and drug-addicted when her father died, banished again after a hair-pulling fight with her mother and some years later arrested for prostitution in Toronto. When beautiful tragi-thin Heather wasn’t jonesi
ng for a smoke she was following some other destructive path, which embittered Mary because, without even trying, Heather had it all. The last time Gooch spoke to Heather, she was living in Buffalo with the paramedic who’d resuscitated her after her last accidental overdose.

  The stained silver broadloom. The broken glass. The bloody dishtowel on the floor. Nothing as it was, nothing as it should be. Mary denied her fear, scrambling what was left in the egg carton, six perfect eggs, telling herself that the extra portion was in case Gooch arrived hungry. At the kitchen table she sat in his chair rather than her own, so as not to face his empty seat, and so that she could see the door.

  Many years ago, she’d suggested Orin do the same after they’d placed her mother at St. John’s, and he confessed he’d lost his appetite. She understood that the habit of eating together must be as difficult to break as the habit of eating alone. As she shifted the last of the eggs from the skillet to her plate worry stung her throat, and she wondered briefly if she might cry. She swallowed instead, another habit too difficult to break.

  A good cry. Appropriate under the circumstances. Tears, snot, choke, gulp, whimper, whine. But not for Mary. Crying, like travelling, a pointless journey to an uncertain place where she couldn’t speak the language and wouldn’t like the food. Even after her hysterectomy and the hysteria suggested therein, Mary had not cried for the babies that would never be. She’d endured a premature and instant transit to menopause, aching and paining, flashing with heat, sweating in bed, but not weeping. Grief stuck like a lump in her throat.

  Digging into the junk drawer, she found the little white box with the little gold bow that Gooch had given her on her birthday last March. A cellular phone. She’d been annoyed by the gift, considering he knew she didn’t want a mobile phone. Instead of thank you she’d said, “You know I won’t use this, hon. I won’t remember to put it in my purse. Besides, who do I need to call?”

  Opening the box now, she was surprised to find a card addressed to her. Inside the card Gooch had written carefully, Welcome to the new world, Mary Gooch. I have written cellphone instructions for connect-o-phobes along with your own personal telephone number on a card you can keep in your wallet. You have to plug it in to charge it, Mare. And you have to keep it in your purse so you’ll have it when you need it. Happy Birthday from your favourite husband.