The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  She paused a moment to glance at the faces of the passengers across the aisle. An Asian woman with her teenaged son, and a glamorous bone-thin blonde Mary took for an aspiring actress or model bound for Hollywood, all of them staring ahead dreamily with plugs in their ears. Together. Alone. They had already left.

  When the craft reached cruising altitude and a silver beverage cart was pushed down the aisle by two comely stewards, the exotic woman tapped Mary on the shoulder and pointed at the restrooms behind them. She gestured to the pillow in her lap, which she appeared to be asking Mary to hold while she was gone. Mary reached out her hands, wondering why the woman didn’t just leave her pretty pillow on the seat, then felt the weight of the bundle and the heat of it and saw a tiny brown baby, hardly bigger than a rump roast, sleeping soundly within the satiny folds.

  As the woman hurried to the restroom, Mary lifted the infant to the hill of her stomach, trembling. She’d never held a baby—white, brown, squirming, sleeping, wailing or calm. She had demurred, as with the boxes of damaged chocolates at Raymond Russell’s, when babies were passed her way, waving them off with a smile. I couldn’t. Wendy, Patti and Kim had all offered up their drooling progeny, but even Wendy hadn’t pressed too hard. They had assumed Mary’s pain and had understood her envy. Gooch knew the truth, though—that she was terrified of such fragile creatures. He’d promised, “You won’t be afraid when it’s your own.”

  The preponderance of stories in magazines about overweight women who gave birth without ever knowing they were pregnant had once inspired Mary Gooch. After the two early miscarriages, and in spite of the couple’s frequent copulation, there’d been no swollen breasts, no morning nausea. Nothing but the trips to Dr. Ruttle’s office, and to the specialist in London who couldn’t find anything wrong except the problem of her accumulating pounds. Her menstrual cycle was irregular, a fact blamed on her weight, so missed periods were no true indicator, and when in her mid-thirties she first felt the cramping pain in her pelvis and counted that it had been seven months since her last period, she wondered if she was to be one of those fabled fat women just walking down the street or trying on shoes at the Kmart one day, who suddenly collapsed and birthed a perfectly good, if unexpected, baby. She imagined her picture on the front of the Leaford Mirror. A dubious distinction, but she wouldn’t have cared.

  A knotty collection of fibroid tumours, not a fetus, had caused the cramping. They were benign but troublesome, and after some observation it was clear they had to go. Along with her faint hope. Gone to the hospital with hemorrhage. The loss of the works, as the specialist had explained to Gooch when he thought she was asleep, was as painful as the loss of her children. Mary had been consoled by the Kenmore. And Gooch, because he had no words and was quietly mourning himself, brought eclairs from the Oakwood and chicken from the Colonel and suggested cheeseburgers three nights in a row because he thought it might make her smile.

  Pulling back the lavender fabric, Mary found the infant’s tiny hand and stroked the soft palm, shivering when the boneless fingers curled around her thumb. Dark matted hair, thick spreading lashes, puffy eyes, squashed nose, blistered lips. She watched the perfect brown baby rise and fall with her laboured breath, encircling him, encircled by him. She remembered the photograph Heather had shown her. James.

  Under the fabric the baby’s lean legs stiffened, and soon he was squirming vigorously. She watched him open his eyes, not in the half-cracked way that waking adults do but suddenly, wide. She stared into the black liquid pupils, unaware that she was smiling until the infant smiled back.

  After a lengthy absence during which the child had become fussy, the brown woman returned, sporting wet circular patches on her blouse which she tried to cover with an uncooperative shawl, holding a small bottle for the baby filled with the breast milk she’d pumped in the bathroom. She smiled her thanks and put out her arms to take the child back.

  But Mary could no more release that tiny brown baby than she could let go of her husband of twenty-five years, and she gestured to the woman for a few minutes more. The mother seemed relieved and nodded, offering the warm bottle. Mary was unsure how to fit so large a nipple into so tiny a mouth, and laughed when the rubber tip touched his nose and the infant drew his lips open wide as a carp, prompting the mother to say in her uneasy English, “Hunger.”

  Hunger. Food. Sustenance. Simple and perfect, and perfectly simple to recognize while holding the warm bottle to the infant’s gulping lips. Water to flora. Sun to earth. Breath to lungs. Gooch to Mary. God to soul. She imagined Irma holding such a bottle (she knew it had not been a breast) to her own tiny mouth, and wondered when food had lost its divinely simple purpose, for her or for anyone like her, including the blonde anorexic in the row beside. At what point had food ceased to nourish and sought to torture?

  The baby closed his eyes, still drinking from the bottle as he rode the wave of Mary’s gut. She thought of Wendy’s and Kim’s and Patti’s children, how they’d sit together at birthday parties cramming cake into their faces and shovelling hot dogs down their throats. Their respective parents did not seem ashamed of their glorious gluttony, but rather proud. They boasted about this one or that one being a good eater, and despaired of the children who ate just enough. “I swear that boy lives on air,” Wendy had said of her youngest.

  Living on air, flying through air, watching the baby’s tiny eyelids drift together and his sucking mouth surrender, Mary put the bottle aside, prying the lavender satin from his soft, warm skin, and marvelled at the body the child was heir to. Perfectly functioning. Eat. Sleep. Love.

  She glanced sideways to find the child’s mother asleep and the young man at the window with his eyes closed too. Across the aisle the blonde anorexic was flipping through a magazine that Mary’d noticed on the shelf at the airport, whose cover crowed, Reduce Belly Fat Today. The woman had no fat, belly or otherwise. She might have stood in for the skeleton at an anatomy class. There the cervical vertebrae. The radius. The ulna. The floating ribs. The woman nibbled her thumbnail. Hungry.

  So what of this matter of self-acceptance? The thin wished to be thinner, the old to be young. The plain to be beautiful. Was self-acceptance attainable only by the truly enlightened, like Ms. Bolt, or the purely self-deceptive, like Heather who’d once told her concerned brother, with a shrug, “I need to get high, Jimmy. That’s just who I am.”

  Mary recalled a truncated conversation with Gooch some fifty pounds ago, when he cautiously informed her that The Greek had eaten cabbage soup for ten weeks and lost twenty pounds on his doctor’s orders. Gooch wrote out the recipe, which he passed to her, sheepishly suggesting that they both give it a try, and falsely claiming that he’d put on a few himself.

  “I’m sick of dieting. I’m done,” she announced, defeated, throwing the carefully written recipe into the trash. “I’m a big girl. Maybe it’s time I just accepted that.”

  Gooch took her by the shoulders, embracing her so that she couldn’t see his impatience, saying, “I just want you to be …”

  She pulled away. “Thin?”

  “No.”

  “Healthy? Because people can be fat and fit, Gooch.”

  “I know that, Mary.”

  “You just want me to be something I’m not.”

  “Yes.”

  “See?”

  “I want you to be happy.” He went on to insist that her weight was restricting her life, and that her condition was therefore something not to accept but to reject. Like the drug addict. The smoker. The gambler.

  “But it’s who I am,” she insisted.

  “But you’re miserable.”

  “But that’s because of society, because of the way other people look at me. Because of the way you look at me, Gooch.”

  “You’re breathless from a flight of stairs. You’re tired all the time. You can never find clothes. Your joints ache.”

  “I love food,” she offered weakly.

  “You hate food.”

  In the pa
use that followed, Gooch unfolded his newspaper and sat down to read. Mary wondered if he was right. She retrieved the cabbage soup recipe from the trash, dusting off the coffee grounds, venturing, “Gooch?”

  Lost in the sports pages, he barely looked up. “Do whatever you want.”

  “I’m not saying I’m giving up,” she said. “Are you giving up? Gooch?”

  He nodded and she knew he wasn’t listening. Even though she was aware that Gooch wasn’t pushing her toward some scrawny notion of perfection—that if she’d been merely fat, chubby, plump, round, not morbidly obese, he’d never have pushed at all—she felt abandoned at his silence. He’d stopped pushing, in all ways, after that.

  Shortly after their rare and briefly honest conversation, Mary and Gooch had stopped having sexual relations, the days of abstinence accumulating gradually. Unlike his peers, Gooch had not inherited a wandering eye from his father, at least not when he was with his wife, though she knew he looked at other women—slender, naked women with titanic tits and groomed jinnies—in the pages of the magazines he hid on the high shelf under the towels in the bathroom. Early in their marriage, having found the magazines between the mattresses of their bed, she’d said, “I hate those magazines. The way they objectify women.”

  “Men objectify women. Women objectify men. Women and men objectify themselves. There’s some natural order in it, Mary. You shouldn’t take it personally.” Her mother had advised the same about a husband’s habit of masturbation.

  Mary looked out the window as the plane explored the range of night. She recalled Sylvie Lafleur’s admission about her seduction of Gooch, “I was afraid it might never happen for me again.” Mary wondered if it ever had happened again for Sylvie. Or if it ever would for her.

  To pass the time, she projected forward. In a few hours’ time she would arrive in California. It would be late, too late to show up at Eden’s mansion in Golden Hills, which she knew was in the suburbs of Los Angeles, beyond the Santa Monica Mountains. And it would take some time to find transportation to the place, which Eden had once said was an hour from the airport. She would have to get a motel, get some sleep and freshen up before arriving at her final destination. Gooch would be there. Or he would not.

  She watched the baby breathe in her lap. The beginning of a life. Days and years stretched out before him, a path to follow or to forge, concessions to statistics and likelihoods, hope for enduring love. Perhaps this child was extraordinary and would make some mark on the world. Mary thought of her own path from birth to present. Her life was not half over, and thus far had been half-lived.

  The baby stirred, shuddering and yawning, before resuming his tender repose. Pondering his unwritten life, Mary realized that the rest of her own story was no more determined than his. She had already left her deep, rutty path; this new road had taken her on the sharpest of turns. She found hope in the miracle of second chances, and in the heat of the slumbering infant, and in the rhythm of her heart, which was not thumping or thudding but beating quietly and purposefully. She could not say whose God it was, so decided it didn’t matter, and felt as sure as she’d ever felt anything that in that moment she was not alone.

  She did not shut her eyes, for fear she’d fall asleep and drop the baby, so sat still between the two sleeping strangers, considering her life as a wife, until the wheels bounced on the tarmac on the other side of the continent. She’d left not only her home and city and country and life but the weight of her old worry, having divined her singular purpose—to find Gooch. Not the husband who’d left but the man who, she could see now, was lost.

  The brown woman woke flustered, grasping at her empty lap, relieved to find her baby safe in the arms of the fat woman beside her. Another wait as the pilot announced that there was no gate available for the late-arriving craft, but the passengers were too tired to groan, and too busy drawing out cellphones and sending messages to loved ones.

  Food. Sustenance. Mary ate the apple from her purse, wondering why it had no taste.

  CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

  More than just looking up, Mary found herself looking on the bright side, grateful not to have to wait for luggage like her weary flightmates, and no external baggage to heft as she made her way out of the airport in Los Angeles. She also had hundreds of dollars in her purse, and thousands in her bank account. There was comfort in currency.

  Making her way out of the baggage area, she noticed a diminutive bald man, wearing a suit and suffering a badly sunburned scalp, watching her pass with suspicion. When he called out after her, she assumed that he had mistaken her for someone else—or, worse, that he was shouting an insult—and did not turn around. The bald man followed her, startling her with a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder, looking into her eyes and mouthing as though she were deaf, “Miracle?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Miracle?”

  He seemed panicked, holding a sign out for her to read, and she realized it bore a name. “Missus …?”

  She could not have pronounced the name. “Me?” Mary said. “No.”

  His face fell. Without a parting word he shuffled away, extracting a cellphone, mumbling tones of contrition in an unfamiliar tongue.

  Mary strode through the arrivals hall, detecting, like a rattle in the dash, a shift in the rhythm of her step, an alteration in the orchestration of her flesh. The earth’s pull seemed less, and although she didn’t care to guess at the pounds she’d lost in the previous days, for the number seemed irrelevant, she felt herself smaller.

  Long ago, when she was being whittled by her parasites, Mary hadn’t celebrated her reduction; now, again, she was more focused on the reason for her diminishment. The larger absence. Hunger? She did not hunger for anything but Gooch.

  Miracles—yes, she still believed in miracles. What were they but random occurrences that caused wonder instead of random occurrences that brought grief? And the rule of three? Gooch had called it ridiculous, saying, “You can group your tragedies in threes or thirties, Mare. If there are people there is tragedy. It doesn’t mean that, just because your gramma and Aunt Peg died, our baby’s gonna die too.”

  Even with the rising sun peering over the parking structure, the air was cooler than she’d expected and she shivered from the chill. As she walked, she found that the pain in her heel had lessened. It’s Tomorrow, she thought, and she greeted the dawn like an old friend who’d recently waived a large debt.

  Outside of the building, Mary followed the signs for ground transportation but decided she must have taken a wrong turn, since she saw no waiting vehicles, no taxi or bus that might take her to Golden Hills and no stray people around to ask for help. As her body was undernourished and she had not slept on the plane, she found a bench upon which to rest while she considered her next course of action. She remembered her cellphone, and decided to dial directory assistance and ask for a number for a taxi. She opened the phone, pressed the three numbers for assistance and held the phone to her ear. Nothing—no dial tone—and anyway she was unsure which buttons to press to connect.

  Her passport, which she’d meant to keep in a zippered compartment, was loose in her big vinyl purse, and she took it out to look at the photograph she’d never seen before. Gooch had grabbed the photo before she had a chance to look—the bad lighting, grey roots, full moon face—and laughed good-naturedly. “You look like a convict.” His own passport image was typically handsome, but she’d said, “You do too.” He had chuckled in agreement. His excitement over the impending Caribbean cruise was not infectious to her, but torturous, for she knew, even as they discussed travel needs and planned day excursions, that they would not be sipping pina coladas on the Lido deck or enjoying a fun-filled day shopping the straw markets of Negril.

  When a black stretch limousine pulled up to the curb, Mary naturally wondered, given her location, which of a thousand celebrities sat concealed behind the darkened windows. She waited for the door to open, hoping whoever it was would be a sports star or musician
, news to share with Gooch, but the limousine door didn’t open and the car sat idling quietly. She suddenly realized that the occupants were not leaving the vehicle because of her, because of the way she was staring. The window rolled down and the driver peered at her from beneath his cap. It seemed he was waiting for her to leave, as she was the only human in the vicinity who might interrupt the privacy of the rich and famous within his car, or snap an unflattering picture with a cellphone. She laughed out loud at the thought.

  “Hello,” the driver called. She decided to object if he asked her to leave. “Hello,” he called again, to which she responded in kind. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  She thought he’d said, When are you going?, and planted her feet. “I’m not going.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she shot back. “I’m sitting right here until I figure out how to call a taxi to get me to Golden Hills.”

  The man climbed out of the limo, approaching Mary on the bench. Seeing the sunburn on his bald head when he tilted his cap, she recognized him as the man with the accent who’d asked about the miracle. He opened the rear door of the car. The deep, leather-upholstered seats were vacant.

  “My passenger doesn’t make the flight,” he explained. “Come. I take you to Golden Hills.” When Mary did not immediately rise, he added, “Charge is just for regular car service. Come.”

  The back seat of the limousine, which faced an identical back seat, was more spacious and luxurious than any couch Mary’d ever played potato to. There were small tables with chilled bottles of water, and a crystal glass full of individually wrapped breath mints, and a mini refrigerator, not a Kenmore, with a glass front showcasing a selection of alcoholic beverages.

  As he pulled away from the curb, the driver checked his rearview mirror. “What is your name?”