The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  He shook his head, his eyes expressing regret that he could not understand, or maybe that he had stopped at all.

  Recalling that beside the bank there was a fast-food restaurant, she ventured, “The crazy chicken? The Pollo?”

  “Pollo?” he asked. “El Pollo Loco?” He nodded and put the car into gear. When she could not reach her purse on the floor, Mary shoved her wad of cash into the pocket of her paisley ensemble.

  She could not communicate with the driver, so watched the passing homes as they climbed and then descended the hill and the dirty red truck made its way to the main road. Stopped at a light, she noticed writing on the back window of a Chevy Suburban in front of them. She first took it for an advertising slogan, and was surprised to read: Trent Bishop 1972 to 2002. Always in our hearts. She’d never seen a memorial emblazoned on a vehicle, and was struck by the poignancy of the indefatigable mourning it represented—the older brunette woman at the wheel reminding the world, with every trip to the grocery store and commute to work, that she had lost a son named Trent but would carry him with her like a picture in a locket, that he would never be forgotten.

  Thinking of the big Ford truck with the taped-over sunroof that she’d abandoned in Toronto, she wondered if she might feel compelled to commemorate her marriage in such a way. Paint it on the back window. James and Mary Gooch 1982-?

  When she stepped out of the vehicle, Mary was glad that the Mexican man did not try to return the money she’d given him. Instead he sped away, afraid she might change her clearly loco mind.

  The instant cash machine was in view, but there was a drugstore the same distance away and Mary felt its call. A different pitch than the Kenmore’s or the fast-food restaurants’, more a reminder bell than a luring siren. Food. Heading toward the drugstore, she felt each step like a barefoot walk on hot coals, the sun daring her to stop, her spirit willing her exhausted body forward. She had taken more steps since Gooch’s leaving than she had in the entire last year, not treading the same frictionless path but finding each step a new one, uphill, over rock, and bearing the weight of not just herself but her heavy vinyl purse, and the denser weight of her growing enlightenment.

  The pharmacy, whose faint scent was as familiar as home, was busy with groups of mothers, and children who must have recently flooded out of schools and into waiting cars, for she’d seen few of them on the short drive over. There were a couple of men in suits with takeout coffees in their hands and telephones in their ears, and elderly women shuffling toward the back counter to pick up their prescriptions. Mary kept her eyes up, aware that she wouldn’t find Gooch here—but then again, maybe she would.

  Unlike the corn-fed people of Leaford or the mosaic of colours and shapes she’d seen on the streets of Toronto, the population of Golden Hills appeared largely Caucasian, toned and primed for athletics, lifted and enhanced, sucked and implanted. And so tall. Even though Mary had lived with one of the biggest men in Baldoon County for twenty-five years, she was still struck by the height of these Golden Hillians, who seemed to aspire to the palms.

  Finding the bank of refrigerators, she heaved open a door and took out four large bottles of water. Along with the weight of her purse, they were too much for her torn muscles to handle. She found a shopping cart where she set the water and her purse, and her plastic bag with her navy scrubs, and to which she added a dozen health bars whose packaging boasted energy, nutrients and protein. Feeling the pain between her eyes, she found the pain remedy aisle and a bottle of maximum-strength relief. Passing through the seasonal needs department, she added several large tubes of sunscreen to her cart.

  After waiting in line at the cash register, she remembered the dollars in her pocket and peeled out the wad to pay. The cashier shook her head, smiling politely. “We don’t take Canadian money,” she said. Mary wanted to shout, “But I worked in a drugstore and we always took American money, and paid out the overage when the Yankee dollar was higher.” She returned the bills to her pocket and withdrew her credit card from her purse.

  The cashier passed the plastic bags to Mary, who heaved them into her shopping cart and started for the door. Her muscles challenged beyond their limits, she was grateful to lean upon the cart and let it carry her parcels the distance across the parking lot to the landscaped borders of the bank. From there she’d have to haul her sacks over the sidewalk, but she was relieved to see a shaded bench that would offer a brief repose to eat and drink before she continued, to solve the mystery of how much money was still in the account. With each step, each exhalation, she felt the calories out.

  Before the Gooches had suffered the expense of the new silver broadloom, when Mary was still buying armfuls of magazines, she’d read with mounting outrage an article by a nutritional expert (which Gooch had left open on the table on her side of the bed) that outlined, with daring simplicity, the reasons why, even as the Third World was starving, the First World was becoming alarmingly fat. With the equation calories in versus calories out anchoring the piece, the woman condensed the obvious:

  We’re served too many restaurant meals in double the portions we need. Calories in. We let machines do our daily chores. Calories out. Restaurants don’t always list fat and nutritional information, denying consumers the opportunity to make better choices. Calories in. We drive when we could peddle or walk. Calories out. We communicate through computers. We watch too much TV. We put off until tomorrow what we could do today.

  There were so many affronts in the article that Mary’d hardly known where to begin when she sat down to write a letter to the editor. The first offence was Gooch’s, leaving the article for her—as if she hadn’t read a thousand like it, and a million testimonials from women describing their various inspirations for weight loss—but she didn’t mention that in her letter.

  The second offence, as Mary saw it, lay in the author’s simplistic and aggressively unsympathetic approach to the epidemic. In the way unfeeling people said of lung cancer, Shouldn’t have smoked, and of HIV, Should have used a condom, the writer seemed to be admonishing Mary’s ilk, Just eat less and get off your fat ass. But the implications of morbid obesity, like anorexia (Eat more and you won’t starve to death, dimwit), were vastly more complicated. Nowhere in the article had the author mentioned heartbreak. At no time had she conceded that food was a panacea for loss. There was not a single mention of the pain of loneliness.

  In a colour-blocked addendum to the article, beneath the caption Getting Started, the woman had suggested that the extremely large might begin exercising in the weightlessness of water, where muscles could gain tone for the challenge of more strenuous earthly pursuits. As if everyone had a swimming pool. As if the extremely overweight were just itching to squeeze into a bathing suit to show their wares in a public place. Mary’d chortled but had turned the page to finish the piece, so she could tell Gooch that she’d read it if he asked what she thought.

  And there it was, the final insult—a photograph of the writer, nutritional expert and author of the soon-to-be released Mama Cocoa—Why Chicks Love Chocolate. The woman, who appeared to be in her early forties, was a tall, willowy blonde in snug jeans and cowboy boots, pert breasts straining a fresh white T-shirt, and a grin that was not so much winning as boasting that she’d won. Not beautiful the way Heather was but pretty, wife of a cardiologist, mother of two teenagers, living in a converted church in Vermont where she enjoyed baking pies with the fruits of their orchards and whence she dispatched a popular weekly blog. Livin’ the dream.

  Mary scoured the biographical information but there was no mention of the writer’s former obesity, no indication that she had ever been more than the skinny bitch staring back at Mary from the white picket fence on which she was perched. The author might bake pies, but didn’t eat them. How dare she?

  The letter to the editor began with a reproach to the writer, Mary reminding her that there were varied and complex explanations for weight gain, and many medical reasons that could make weight difficult to lose. But
she could not compose the second part, scratching and editing as she wrote, for in each vitriolic line her loathing for the author’s form, those languid legs, those sculpted arms, diluted her rationale. It was not so much that she disagreed with the contents of the article, which was hardly original and staggeringly uncontroversial, but that she felt the author, given her lack of personal experience, had not the right to write it at all. The woman had clearly never met the obeast.

  Head up, target clear. Plan in place. Check balance at bank. Go to motel. Recharge phone. Wait for call—from Heather, from Eden, from Gooch, from Joyce. Wait, like those Mexican men on the side of the road. Wait. And sleep. This she thought with no degree of anxiety or uncertainty, for she knew that, with a plan instead of a list, sleep would come and free her.

  Daydreams had been, for her, mostly nightmares—imaginings about her food, visions of her secret stash, fear of getting caught. But she found herself striding the length of the parking lot in the blazing sun, pushing her shopping cart like a stroller, lost in a fantasy of Gooch. She imagined her husband’s massive body bent over the instant teller machine, thought of wrapping her arms around his thick torso and whispering into his back, I’m here, Gooch. I’m right here. Of him turning and uttering, Mare. Oh Mare.

  She stopped at the edge of the parking lot, dragging the plastic bags from the cart, and nearly fell backwards over a tow-headed preschooler who appeared behind her. The child looked into her startled eyes and howled as if she’d struck him with a backhand.

  “Oh,” she breathed, looking around for a frantic mother.

  The child howled louder and Mary smiled. “No, no, honey. That’s okay. We’ll find Mommy.” She set down her plastic bags and offered a hand, somewhat disturbed that the child took it so readily. She walked out from behind the parked cars and saw the mother, tall and blonde and reed-thin, with two more towheads in hand, steaming forward, shrieking, “Joshua!”

  The little boy held onto Mary’s plump hand even as his mother and brothers approached, and tighter when the mother stuck out her own arm, threatening, “You don’t run away! You do not run away from Mommy!”

  Mary felt flustered and guilty, like the time she had left the grocery store with a tray of brownies which she’d hidden from the eyes of other shoppers on the bottom of the cart, then neglected to put on the conveyor belt when she paid for the rest. “I just turned around and he was here,” she explained.

  The woman did not look at her, so focused was she on the penalty to her offspring. “You just talked yourself out of a Happy Meal, mister,” she said through clenched teeth.

  The small boy shouted, “You said!”

  “I said if you were good,” she corrected him, severing his grip on Mary and yanking him along without another word.

  Mary returned to the parcels she’d left on the ground and collected them with some effort, realizing that, although she didn’t have to bend all the way down to find the plastic handles, she’d lowered herself considerably, and more than she had in recent memory.

  She stopped, as she had promised herself she would, on the bench in the shade outside the bank, and found one of the health bars in the bag. She tore at the wrapping and ate the bar slowly, draining half a large bottle of water and resting awhile longer in the gentle breeze as the sun shifted over the landscape, until she felt strong enough to rise again. She hefted her bags and made her way to the instant teller on the other side of the building, but when she reached for the bank card in the wallet, she suddenly realized that she had the plastic shopping bags with her navy scrubs, and the ones with the water and health bars, and the one with the sunscreen and Aspirin, but she did not have the purse. The big brown vinyl purse. It was still in the shopping cart, the last thing she’d been about to remove when the child had torn her attention away.

  Charged with adrenalin, she made her way back around the building to the parking lot where she’d left the cart. The cart was still there. The purse was not.

  Back to the drugstore. Perspiring in paisley, she opened the door with a whoosh, her frantic energy attracting attention even before she called out over the customers, “My purse. I left it in a shopping cart. Has anyone returned it?”

  The cashier shook her head and shrugged. A few customers looked at her pityingly, the men because she was pitiful and the women because they knew what it was to lose a purse. Everything was in that purse. Travel needs. Unread novels. The bank card. The passport. Identity as defined by identification. Her driver’s licence, her credit card, her health card. Her phone.

  Hobbling out the door after the cashier had consulted with a few other shrugging employees, Mary made her way back to the parking lot, to the place she was certain she’d left her purse. There. The cart. There. No purse. And no saviour squeezing through the parked cars holding it by the hand, as she had the missing child, looking for its frantic owner.

  Lost purse. Vanished husband. Displaced wife. Mary stood motionless in the parking lot, letting the sun beat down on her head.

  A HARD NAME TO FORGET

  Mary had little experience with banks, as Gooch had been the one to do their personal accounting, and it was only occasionally, when he’d forgotten to withdraw sufficient grocery money, that she would enter the Leaford bank to fill out a withdrawal slip with an amount she unfailingly disclosed to Gooch with a lie. “I got a little extra out today,” she would explain, “for Candace’s birthday gift,” or “for that charity thing Ray’s doing.” When really it was to pay for the cut of prime rib she’d eaten herself, or the special order of Laura Secord chocolate.

  Opening the bank door, she was relieved not only at the sharp, conditioned air but at the sight of the empty teller queues. There were a mere five employees visible in the entire open-design bank—two men on high stools clacking away at their respective computers behind the tellers’ desks, and the other three confounded by a computer screen at the manager’s desk toward the back. All eyes turned to Mary as she swooned inside. Except for briefly appraising the newcomer and making their respective mental notes—Large lady walks into bank—the managers returned to whatever numerical mystery they’d been assigned.

  Mary started for the tellers, each of whom looked up from his screen blinking strangely, as if she were an apparition and they were waiting for her to fade.

  In the seconds it took to pass the chrome and leather coffee area where no customers lounged, Mary’s brain rose to the challenge of deciding which of the tellers to approach, and also noted the striking physical beauty of the two men, for they looked like models or actors or star athletes, groomed above their collars and toned beneath their dark, tailored suits.

  The man on the right, whose name tag read Cooper Ross, was the lighter version. Sandy hair falling over his tanned forehead, square jaw, white teeth. The man on the left, Emery Carr, wore his black hair gelled back, his complexion pleasantly pallid. She saw herself in his eyes and distinctly read his thoughts: Go to Cooper. Not me! Go to Cooper!

  Her shuddering legs had ideas of their own, or were divinely guided, and drove her directly to the black-haired man, where she set down the plastic bags and began, “I’ve just lost my purse. Over there,” she added, pointing through the window. “My purse. Big brown vinyl. In a shopping cart. Did anyone turn it in here?”

  Emery Carr shook his head, distracted when the computer beeped beside him. Cooper Ross, overhearing, offered, “Are you a customer? We can access your account with—”

  “I’m Canadian,” she said, stopping him. “I’m from Ontario. I’m here alone. Everything was in my purse.” She stopped, waiting to see her reflection again in the eyes of Emery Carr, as if to remind herself that she was standing in the bank, and not lost somewhere in the sum of the contents of her big vinyl purse. He looked up at her when she repeated, “Everything.”

  “We could call your bank in Canada. Are you east coast or west?” Cooper Ross asked, reaching for the phone.

  “Ontario,” she reminded him, remembering that she was in a d
ifferent time zone. “Closed. It’ll be closed,” she said.

  “Maybe your purse has been turned in to the sheriff,” Cooper Ross suggested.

  “Oh.” Mary was relieved that someone had said anything remotely encouraging, and struck by how American the word sheriff sounded. Cooper Ross found a number and dialed—waited—then, after introducing the situation, handed the phone to Mary, who explained, “Big brown vinyl. My passport. My wallet … That’s right … You can’t contact me. I don’t have a phone.”

  The tellers returned to their chores, Emery Carr adroitly signing off his computer and standing to organize his work station while Cooper Ross’s long fingers tickled the squares of his keyboard.

  “Mary Gooch,” she began again, after a pause, “Rural Route 5. Leaford, Ontario. Canada.” She paused. “I don’t know where I’ll be staying.” She thought briefly of Eden and Jack Asquith. Tears rising in her throat, she reached into her paisley skirt pocket but remembered that it was the pocket of her navy scrubs into which she’d shoved the tissues given her by the limousine driver. It felt like a miracle, albeit a small one, to find the wad of Canadian money, left over from what she’d given the driver of the little red truck, instead. She pulled out the colourful bills and set the pile on the counter as she finished with the voice on the other end of the phone. “The Pleasant Inn,” she said. “If my purse turns up, you can reach me there.”

  Big Avi had said that Golden Hills was one of the top safest cities in America, and as he had relied on the kindness of strangers in his immigration from another world, so did Mary. After she changed her Canadian money to American and found herself with more than five hundred dollars, Cooper Ross said, “Let’s get your credit cards cancelled, at the very least,” and went on to help her with the necessary calls.