The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  In the roomy dressing room with its slenderizing three-way mirror, she felt annoyed with herself, wondering what had compelled her into the store, and why she hadn’t objected when the woman showed her a selection of holiday gowns. She tried on a few sets of casual slacks and tops, then reluctantly slid into the flowing black stretch jersey dress the girl had insisted she try. She watched her reflection in the mirror, unblinking. The shorn silver hair. The Lydia Lee jewellery. Her ample proportions adored by the slinky midnight fabric.

  One of the salesgirls announced, “You could model.”

  Another enthused, “That dress was made for you.”

  Mary protested, “I really just needed some new bras and panties.”

  Another girl flew to the lingerie section and returned with a stunning selection of lacy bras and underpants. Mary tried on the lingerie, disbelieving her reflection until she finally could not deny that she looked, and felt, sexy.

  Blushing, she dumped the clothes and lingerie onto the counter. “I’ll take it all.” Wading out into the mall with her heavy bags, she fought her guilt, trying to reconcile her delight in the pretty clothes with her suspicion that she did not deserve them. Her third eye ached. She stopped, setting down her bags near a gushing water fountain, and sat on a bench feeling dizzy. You need to eat something, she told herself, but the thought of chewing made her nauseated, and she couldn’t swallow for the lump in her throat.

  She’d found a blender in Eden’s cupboard and tried blending fruit and yogurt, but had had trouble keeping the thick beverage down. Lately she’d been managing only sips of orange juice several times a day, and even Ronni had noticed that her energy was flagging.

  In the big Dodge Ram on the way home, travelling the road she’d travelled with Jesús, she let her eyes drift toward the stars. She wondered about the essence of Jesús García’s strength and magnetism. “See you next week,” he’d said. She hoped he would have time to linger again, to drink a glass of water, tell her more about her third eye. Then she reminded herself that longing for one man was enough—uncertain, now, whether that man was Jimmy Gooch or Jesús García.

  Later, swimming nude in the pool, Mary stopped in the shallow end, feeling the familiar fluppering of her heart. Not now, she begged. Not yet. Not when she felt so close. So close to what, she couldn’t say, but she felt another change on the wind, smelled it like an approaching storm. Maybe it was Gooch. She promised herself to attempt to drink another fruit smoothie. If Gooch was coming back, she was going to need her strength.

  It was the drink that spurred the memory of the events of one evening a decade into their marriage. Mary’d been bedridden for a week, crippled by a flu virus she’d picked up at the drugstore. Gooch had taken time off work to care for her when he saw that she was so weak she couldn’t make it to the toilet by herself. He’d worried over her like a mother, bringing steaming soup on a tray and blending clumpy fruit smoothies with a potato masher and whisk. At the end of her convalescence, she found her appetite and heard the Kenmore’s call. Thinking Gooch was out, since the house was so still and quiet, she was shocked to find him glassy-eyed at the kitchen table, scribbling in a notebook. He looked up, guilty. Caught. “You’re up!” he shouted inanely.

  “What’s that? What are you writing?”

  “Nothing.” He closed the notebook.

  “Gooch.”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “If it’s nothing, then let me see.”

  “It’s private, Mare.”

  “Private?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s a story.”

  “A story?”

  “I’m writing a short story,” he said wearily. “It’s stupid. I … the Leaford Mirror’s having a short story contest and I … it’s stupid.”

  She attempted to hide her surprise. “Let me read it.”

  She expected him to decline, and had never seen his eyes so vulnerable as when he handed her the book. “It’s just a first draft. It’s not very good.”

  Taking the notebook back to her bed along with a tin of peanuts, Mary settled down, feeling hot fear mingling with her low-grade fever. She wasn’t afraid that the story would be awful and she’d have to lie. She was afraid the story would be good and she’d have to admit to Gooch, and to herself, that he’d missed his calling and that it was all her fault. Or worse, that it would be so good that he would submit it and win the contest and realize that he’d never meant to be what he’d become, and leave her for a charmed life as a famous author.

  Mary sank with the first line. The story was about a furniture delivery man who fell in love with a young widow while his own wife lay dying from a disease that sounded suspiciously like abstract malaise. The main character had delivered a faulty oven to the other woman and found excuses to return daily to check on its performance, eating tray after tray of burned baking while his wife languished in her bed. The prose was sturdy and spare, poignant and humorous. In the end the man did not consummate the relationship, but returned to his wife out of a sense of obligation and duty. Mary finished the last line, hot with outrage, but did not call for Gooch to come to their room.

  An hour passed. She heard the television snap on in the living room. She waited, seething, sure the story was autobiographical, certain he was about to confess. Finally, it was her hunger that drove her from her bed. Gooch shut the television off when he heard her plod down the hallway. He stood at the doorway watching her root through the fridge for cheese and salami. “Well?” he said.

  Mary chewed thoughtfully and sighed. “I didn’t understand it,” she announced, plopping down at the kitchen table.

  “It’s just a first draft,” he reminded her.

  “But his wife is dying,” she said, throwing up her hands.

  “That’s the point.”

  “That is the point,” she huffed. “How could he do that when his wife is dying?”

  “It’s not about you, Mare,” he said tightly.

  “I know.” She paused. “But you’re a furniture delivery man. People will think it’s about you.”

  “It’s a world I know. That’s all. It’s not about you. It’s not about us.”

  “Well, he’s not very sympathetic,” she said. In spite of herself, Mary had felt sympathy for the yearning husband and the lonely widow. “He could be a different kind of delivery man.”

  “I guess.”

  “He doesn’t have to be married.”

  “But that’s the conflict.”

  “Okay.”

  “What about the writing?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Some of the words are a little …” She rolled her eyes.

  He took the notebook from her greasy hands. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Gooch,” she protested, “I’m just saying that if you use words people have to look up in the dictionary, it makes them feel dumb.”

  He nodded and returned to the living room to sit in the quiet. She finished her snack and made her way back down the hall. She pretended to be asleep when Gooch shifted his weight into the bed, wondering how even the greatest of writers could have rendered the accuracy of such longing without direct and intimate knowledge.

  Mary assumed that Gooch had not submitted his story to the contest. She was certain he would have won.

  She climbed out of the swimming pool, nude, and rested a moment under the thick shroud of night. The door buzzer rang. She slipped into an old robe of Jack’s she’d taken from the closet and moved through the house to answer, for once not dreaming that it was her wayward husband. Even if her third eye had conjured the picture, she would still have been mistrustful of her future sight, and too weary for hope.

  There were Christmas carolers at the door—ten children dressed in Dickensian costumes, led by a woman from a church group who explained that they were raising money to support a beleaguered school in east Los Angeles. Mary stood at the door, damp and shivering in her robe
. She heard not the children’s voices but the collective hum in the night air. When they finished, she took several hundred dollars from her purse and gave them to the stunned and grateful woman.

  The Ethan Allen called her to come and have a rest but the refrigerator chimed in, reminding her that she needed to eat something. She pushed herself toward the kitchen, opening the fridge and finding a fresh, cold apple. She sat at the counter drawing the apple to her mouth. A voice begged, You have to eat something. She was for a moment transported into the body of a dying anorexic she’d watched in a documentary several years earlier, and she set the apple back down on the table.

  Peeling off her robe, Mary returned to the backyard and the cold water of the pool, kicking slowly toward the deep end before she realized she was too tired to swim laps. Arms outstretched, legs kicking, weightless but heavy, she fought the metaphor—all this time waiting for Gooch, was she really just treading water?

  Later, she woke to the ringing of the telephone and reached for the receiver beside the bed. “Joyce?” she asked, groggy.

  “Mary? Mary? Are you okay?”

  “Is it my mother?”

  “Mary? It’s Ronni. What’s going on? I’ve been worried. I was just about to put the boys in the car to drive down there.”

  Mary sat up, surprised to find the room filled with sunlight. She looked at the clock. It was past noon. “I slept. I overslept. I’m sorry. I’ll be right there.”

  “No, Mary. It’s okay. I’m taking the boys to the mall. We have to do some shopping. I’ve decided to go back east for Christmas. We’re leaving next week.”

  Mary could not respond. Leaving?

  “Are you there?” Ronni called through the line.

  “I’m here.”

  “The boys and I want to celebrate Christmas with you early. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Mary?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Your mother-in-law will be back, right? I mean, you’re not going to be alone.”

  “She’ll be back,” Mary lied. Eden had telephoned her the day before to say she’d decided to spend the holiday in Santa Barbara. She was keeping company with an old friend of Jack’s, and Mary had sensed a burgeoning relationship in her tone. Her mother-in-law had started to see Jack only weeks after James had died from the car crash, so Mary wasn’t surprised, but she wondered what granted Eden such strength and resilience.

  Dragging herself out of bed, she dressed in one of her new outfits and walked to the end of the driveway to collect the newspaper. She settled down to read but couldn’t focus. She went to the kitchen, glancing at the refrigerator apologetically. She decided to drive to the bank.

  Outside the bank, she checked her balance record. Gooch had withdrawn more money. She fumbled with her access card, shoving it back into the machine, demanding the maximum amount. I will take it all out, Gooch, she heard herself think. That money is rightfully mine. She thought of Ronni Reeves’s rage, which had dimmed over the passage of days, and felt the rise of her own. Left me without a word. Coward. Taking money that belongs to me. Bastard.

  She was stuffing twenty-dollar bills into her wallet when she nearly collided with a man exiting the bank. “Emery Carr,” she said. With her shorn silver hair and substantial loss of poundage, he did not recognize her. “Mary Gooch. You gave me a ride when I couldn’t find my purse.”

  “Wow,” Emery Carr said, remembering and recognizing her. “You look different.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you’d be back in Canada by now. Lucy told me you got everything sorted out. This is a long vacation.”

  “It’s not really a vacation,” she said, walking alongside him.

  “You look like a completely different person. Were you down here for one of those makeover shows? I love What Not to Wear.”

  Mary laughed. “Sort of.”

  “Well, I love what they did.”

  She blushed, realizing that they’d walked toward the nearby deli and he was holding the door for her to enter. “I’m going for a late lunch too. Will you join me?”

  Inside the restaurant Mary fought her nausea, ordering coffee and scrambled eggs and toast. Emery Carr squinted when he saw that she was not eating. “You want to send it back?”

  “I just can’t eat,” she confessed.

  “Well, you have to eat,” he insisted. “I can see you’re on a diet, but …”

  “I’m not on a diet. I just … can’t. I can’t seem to swallow.”

  Emery patted her hand. “You’ve lost an awful lot of weight. I mean, from the time I first met you.”

  “I know.”

  “Good for you. It’s just … you have to eat something.”

  She nodded, pretending to nibble at her toast. The black coffee gave her some false energy but it was his company that revived her. They talked about the political climate. “It’s like there are two Americas,” he said. “We think differently. We interpret the Constitution differently. We’re divided straight down party lines. Is it like that in Canada?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. My husband said liberal and conservative mean different things there. Plus we have more parties. We have the NDP and the Greens.” She was proud of herself for remembering, but could not have explained any of the parties’ platforms. She wondered if she should buy a computer so she could look such questions up.

  “You Canadians are more progressive.”

  “Because we have national health care?”

  “Socialism is scary.”

  “Because of our gun control laws?”

  “Don’t get me started.”

  “Gay marriage?”

  “Gay marriage. I don’t believe in marriage anyway—straight, gay. It’s unnatural. But not to allow it? That’s discrimination.”

  “My husband said people don’t want to see gay marriages because they’re afraid you’re going to start recruiting.”

  “What about your husband?” Emery Carr asked. “Has he seen the new you?”

  Mary looked up from her coffee cup, took a deep breath and, in her exhalation, told the handsome teller the story of her life as a wife.

  Outside the restaurant, he surprised Mary by giving her a gentle hug. “You looked like you needed that.”

  “I did.”

  “You’re not gonna die, you know. You’re gonna pick yourself up and dust yourself off. You are woman. Hear you roar.”

  She laughed and nodded.

  Later that night, she sat on the edge of Jack’s bed, staring at her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. You’re not gonna die, Emery Carr had said.

  EXISTENCE

  In the advertising pages of the newspapers Mary’d been confronted by invitations to dozens of local New Year’s Eve events. She hated New Year’s Eve the way she hated Christmas. So many sleepless nights she’d tossed in her bed making promises to Tomorrow, and those promises to the New Year, the resolutions, seemed even more contractual. Next year will be different. Next year, self-control. Next year I will talk to Gooch. Listen to Gooch. Go with Gooch when he asks. She had been aware of the statistics on holiday depression long before she started reading the newspapers. The spiral was familiar.

  Where, in the previous weeks, she hadn’t considered that Gooch might not have returned by Christmas, she felt certain now that he would not be back by New Year’s and perhaps not by her birthday in March. As she had dropped out of her old life, so had Gooch, and he had less reason to return than she did. She’d even stopped thinking of the dwindling balance in the bank account as a barometer for his homecoming. Gooch was resourceful. Whatever money he had, wherever he was, he would survive.

  Swimming in the morning, she thought of Eden, and Jesús García—left, bereft, they sallied forth. She felt her chest constrict when she rose from the water, remembering the little house in Leaford with the broken glass in the door and the bloodstains on the walls. She thought of Irma with her gawping mouth and sunken, distant eyes. The wide Thames Ri
ver, where she’d skated as a child. She had forgotten Leaford’s face but heard her call, wintry and severe.

  Arriving at the Reeves house for her Christmas celebration with the boys, Mary forged a smile. When they gathered around the huge faux evergreen in the formal living room, she accepted the triplets’ hugs and kisses and was choked to receive their gifts—photographs of the boys in frames decorated by each with glitter and heart shapes. She led them in singing Christmas songs, and choked down a few bites of the lumpy potatoes the boys had mashed and the salad they’d helped make especially for her. Ronni was as drained as Mary by the end of dinner, and still had to pack for her trip back east.

  Embracing her friend, Ronni promised that the week would go quickly. “At least you only have one relative to deal with, Mary. I’ve got twenty-four, and every one of them will have something to say about Tom and me. I’m sick just thinking of it.”

  “It’ll be good for the boys to be with family.”

  “I hate to think of you alone with your mother-in-law.”

  Back in the truck, Mary started toward the house but made an impulsive U-turn in the road, deciding to head to the ocean to look at the stars. At the intersection she glanced at the lot, and was shocked to see Jesús García standing alone at the utility pole. She pulled in when the light changed. He grinned broadly when he recognized the Dodge Ram, shouting out with surprise and confusion, “Mary!” He strode toward the vehicle, pausing when he saw her shorn silver hair.

  Her hand flew to her scalp. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “It suits you.”

  “I was just heading down to the ocean. Let me drive you home first.”

  “You got nothing better to do?”

  “No.” She laughed.

  He climbed into the truck. “I’ll come with you, then.”

  “To the ocean?”

  He paused, uncertain. “If you don’t mind the company.”

  Blood rushed to her cheeks as she pulled out of the dusty corner lot and set course down the long, hilly road.

  “Maybe you’ll see another shooting star,” he said, flashing that blinding smile.