Three Women at the Water's Edge

by Nancy Thayer

  Christmas had provided bitter news for her: When mutual acquaintances had holiday parties, it was Paul and Monica they invited, rather than Daisy. Of course her closest friends stood by her, and invited her to parties, but the greater social world which Daisy had been part of when she was living with Paul now ignored her. It made a kind of sense; she could understand it: of course the people who worked in Paul’s firm would invite him and Monica rather than Daisy; and most of their social acquaintances had been first of all business acquaintances. Then, too, Daisy realized, Monica, sleek and chic, a reporter for a local newspaper, would quite simply be more fun, more interesting to have at a party. Daisy thought that if she were the hostess, she would rather invite Monica than a tired pregnant mother. There was no avoiding the cold hard fact that walking into a party now—no matter how well she had combed her hair and dressed—brought about a much different reaction than it had when she was twenty-three and slim.

  She was glad when Christmas was over. Her father had come to stay with them over the holidays, but that had had its own difficulties, and she was simply relieved when January rolled around and things settled down, when no one else was going to parties much, either. But January brought yet another cruel surprise: the worst winter in that region’s recorded history. There were three blizzards in a row and snow had piled up like barriers, like hostile walls, and for three weeks the temperature had not risen up to 20 degrees. Children could not play outside for more than a few minutes; in fact, they spent more time getting into and out of all their snow clothes than they did playing outside. Grocery stores had trouble stocking fresh items such as milk and eggs, and everyone else had trouble getting to the stores because the roads were so congested with the piles and piles of snow. Twenty-seven inches, and then more. Milwaukee was declared a national disaster area, and snowplows and dump trucks whirred and hummed day and night, but still getting around the city was almost impossible. And the walls of snow which had been pushed back by the plows rose up six or ten feet along the side of the road, blocking the sight of the houses and street, making everyone feel claustrophobic and trapped. Daisy had taken to getting the groceries at a small local store, because it was so frightening to try to drive on the snow-ruined streets; cars were always sliding off and getting stuck, and everywhere she went she saw terrible accidents. So she got out a large flat orange plastic sled and pulled the children on it to the small grocery store that was about five blocks away. Then she put the groceries on the sled and made the children walk as she pulled it all back home. It was immensely difficult, with the fierce cold making their eyes sting and water, and the wind ripping off the lake at their clothes, and little Jenny and Danny only barely able to force their way through the piles and drifts and heaps of snow. At first the children started off cheerfully enough, using up their energy to leap and scream and plop in the snow, making designs with their bodies, giddy with the sight and feel of the world gone so cold and white. But after a block or so they grew tired, the snow pulled and sucked at them like quicksand, and it made them angry and frustrated because they were so small and it was so strong. They would begin to whine and grouse and cry, and Daisy, who was only barely making it herself, with seven months of baby sticking out in front of her and the sled heavy with groceries jerking along behind, tugging at her wrists, would have to summon up all her courage in order not to simply sink down into the snow and bawl. It ended up that Jenny got to ride in the sled because she was the littlest and because she really did get stuck in the snow, she really did not have the size or power to make it through some of the drifts. So Jenny would finally get to ride in the sled with the groceries, and Daisy would have to walk even more slowly, panting with the exertion of pulling the weight of the groceries and Jenny’s little body, and Danny would trail along behind, weeping and complaining because he couldn’t ride, Jenny always got to ride, Jenny always got her own way, why did Jenny always get to ride, why couldn’t he ride, too, why couldn’t he ride just once, Daisy loved Jenny more than she loved him. And sometimes as they were crossing a street a sack of groceries would topple over and something would fall out, an orange would roll dismally off on the hard gray ice, or the eggs would break, and then Daisy would think that she might just as well go ahead and die right there because she couldn’t go on with this life. But of course she did go on with it. She would see a car approaching, and she would grab up Danny and hurl him onto the side of the road and yank the sled with Jenny out of the way of the slithering car and wait till it had passed, then pick up the orange or the egg carton, and continue to make their way back to the house.

  It was a hard winter for everyone, but an especially hard one for mothers and children. Daisy felt that if she hadn’t had a television set she would have gone mad, they all would have gone mad. For she felt so isolated—she was so isolated, for so many days when there was no preschool because of the weather, the “snow days” as they were called, when school was canceled because it was not possible to get there—she felt isolated, and the outside world looked so desperately empty and colorless, that she began to love the television set almost as if it were a person. It brought life and laughter and color into her house. It brought people into her house. It entertained her children when she could no longer bear to play another game of Candy Land with them, or read them another story, or pretend to be a witch or a bear one more time. And now that Paul was gone and there were often stretches of days when Daisy went without setting eyes on another grown human being, another real adult, she yearned toward the evenings when the children were asleep and she could settle down on the sofa and watch grown-up people doing grown-up things—fighting, kissing, walking about, talking on talk shows. The world did exist out there, it really did, and it was such a good and fascinating world that it was worth it, Daisy could survive, she would make it through all this, because she knew that was all still there.

  What was also saving Daisy’s life was that she had built up a network of women friends who had many of the same problems and who supported her through telephone calls and inexpensive humorous gifts and through get-togethers such as the one in Daisy’s home this evening. Or, quite often, at night when the children were asleep, Daisy would sit in her bed sipping a cup of hot tea and talking with a friend on the phone for hours. She and her friends discussed everything: They analyzed Paul’s personality ruthlessly and concluded that Daisy was better off without him, then went on to discuss men and their flaws in general, and then went on to discuss the lovelier side of men, and all the men with whom they had once had happy relationships. They talked about raising children and decorating houses; they talked about books and movies and politics and religion; they talked about how many calories were in apples and pears; they talked about the boys they had had crushes on in the ninth grade. They laughed a lot. And Daisy felt nourished and enriched. How wealthy life was, Daisy thought, she hadn’t realized this before; and she felt almost grateful to Paul for leaving her because it enabled her to discover all this other life. All these other women, going about their lives, with such complexity and valiance and good humor. Before Paul left, she never would have taken the time away from a husband to share with a friend. She would never have been so readily available. With Paul gone, she felt free; she even in some ways felt young again.

  Occasionally, about once a week, she managed to get out to a friend’s house, or to have a friend in. Then everyone, children and adults alike, was almost manic with laughter, with the sight of other people, with hysteria. It was such a difficult winter. And this evening a sudden party had fallen into place: Karen, Daisy’s closest friend, had planned to have Daisy over for dinner, but then Jane, another friend of Daisy’s, had called in tears of desperation because her husband was out of town and had called to say that he wouldn’t be home tonight after all, and she felt she would end up murdering someone if she didn’t get out of the house. So Daisy had told Jane to come over, and she told Karen to come over, and at the last moment Jane had brought a friend of hers, a young pregn
ant woman named Martha, and some had brought seltzer and some brought wine, and there they were. Each woman had two children: that made eight children running about. The women had fed the children first; Daisy had cooked hamburgers and Jane had poured milk and Karen had doled out the potato chips and catsup and Martha had peeled and sliced cucumbers and celery sticks and it had all gone wonderfully well, with the children giggling at the table, and all the spilled milk something the women shared, something they could only laugh at.

  “My God, just think,” Jane had said, “women used to have eight children. Why, some women still have eight children! Eight children. Think of feeding eight children every night, every morning, just think of it!”

  And they had all thought of it, and had been astounded, and then felt weak with relief at having only two children apiece; they had felt silly with good luck. They gave the children apple slices and Oreo cookies for dessert, and leaned against the stove or kitchen counter smoking and eating and supervising the fruit intake of their offspring until they were satisfied. They wiped the children’s hands and let them run off into the other room then, and were left with a kitchen table thick with unappetizing items: partially chewed apple skin that a child had gagged on and spit out, broken chocolate halves of Oreo cookies of which another child had eaten only the cream filling, hardening bits of hamburger which had fallen off the plate and onto the table or floor, thousands and thousands of potato chip crumbs, green strings of celery.

  “Let’s just burn it all,” Jane suggested.

  “We could eat in the dining room,” Daisy said. “It’s dusty in there, but fairly clean. I haven’t eaten in there for ages.”

  But the women didn’t want to eat in the dining room, because the kitchen had gotten warm and bright and friendly with life, with their life, it had become a comfortable and glowing place. So they finished off their drinks and whirled into the task: Daisy stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, and the other women brought her the plates and scraped stuff into the garbage and wiped off the table and swept under the table and in a few moments the mess had been fairly well tidied up. Then Daisy brought out their dinner which they had kept warm in the oven: a pizza which Jane and Martha had brought with them from a pizza shop, an enormous thick pizza rich with cheese and onions and greasy pepperoni and sharp green peppers. The women sat at the table gobbling the pizza with a greed as keen as their children’s. After they had finished, Daisy set apples and oranges on the table and told her friends to help themselves, and she asked if anyone wanted tea, but no one did. In fact it was really time for them to take the children home to bed, but no one wanted to. It was a Friday night, there was no school the next day, so they all decided the hell with schedules, they would stay until the children got cranky. But the children were having as much fun as their mothers, they hadn’t seen other children for days because of the weather, because of school cancellations, and they were loving the feeling of running with a herd. Jane’s daugher Greta was the oldest child there, a tall eight-year-old with braids, and she easily became the leader and the arbiter of the group, so that the children didn’t even need to run to their mothers. What they did do was to strip Danny and Jenny’s beds of blankets and sheets and spreads and each child had one as his house and they all rolled around on the floor, bumping into each other, snorting and giggling, pretending to be trolls or snails or some really as yet unthought-of creature, a small quick creature in a blanket shell that did somersaults and backrolls on the floor. If Daisy had seen what was going on, it would have occurred to her to worry about the sheets or blankets getting torn, but as it was she was in the kitchen eating and enjoying her friends, and she didn’t really want to know what was going on, and as it happened nothing did get torn. So it was a totally successful evening. Daisy and Jane and Martha and Karen sat in the kitchen and talked.

  They had a lot to talk about. There was Daisy’s house: They knew that Daisy could neither unpack nor pack up completely and move out, and they knew how she wanted to keep the house, but wished that if she had to leave she could do so now, while the lake was frozen and white. But her friends could offer little help or solace on this particular point, so they talked about having babies instead. Daisy was nervous about having the new baby. She had not yet been able to arrange for any long-term help, although Karen and Jane were each going to keep Danny and Jenny for a week while Daisy had the baby and was in the hospital and then newly at home. Still Daisy worried about how she would cope in the winter, and it helped her when her friends assured her that she could.

  They had their most lively conversations when they talked about Daisy’s divorce. Everyone had counseled Daisy to get a certain divorce lawyer known for his competent nastiness, and finally, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, Daisy had gone to see him. She had disliked Milton White intensely, but realized that he would probably do the best for her, do what she could not do for herself: He would manage to force Paul to support his family. Still it made her sick, literally sick, to think of all the things she had to say, all the forms she had to fill out, all the intimate details of her life which she had to reveal to this stranger, in order to get help and protection from him. How very weird the world had become for her, that she had to hire the services of a stranger, an older, unpleasant man, to protect her from Paul, the man she had loved and slept with and had babies with and lived with for years, the man to whom she had once entrusted her life. It was bizarre. Sometimes Daisy awoke from her nap and felt disoriented and dizzy and she would think that the whole divorce was a dream, a nightmare, and it would make her nearly retch to face the truth of it, the fact that it really was happening to her.

  Knowing other women helped. Daisy had been amazed at the helpfulness of other women, how other women offered their own lives up to her as bits of comfort, how they revealed their own problems to her in order to sustain her, to make her realize that she was not alone. Daisy was beginning to see that she had lived on the surface of her life for too long; that what she had thought of as being real life was only the glossy superficial surface of things, and that underneath it all there were emotions and actions as turbulent and unquiet as the depths of the sea. She had been looking at life as if it were the sheen and shine of sun on water; now she knew that underneath that, even on the best of days, fears and hates and loves and desires rampaged and plunged and sometimes surfaced with the relentlessness of sharks. All lives were full of this, she now saw, full of wet, shining, swiftly moving sea creatures sliding pitilessly through half-lit depths; all lives were full of eeriness and beauty, unspeakable fronds of weed and flower waving and tugging inside, down under the surface, past the reach of words, past the reach of normalcy and the constrainable order of everyday life. It was frightening, it was wonderful, it was good to know.

  Jane had been divorced once before; her daughter Greta was the child of a man named Tom who was now married to someone else. Jane had married again, and had another child with her new husband, and now she was thirty-three and fighting the knowledge that perhaps she didn’t even like being married, that perhaps if she really could have her own way, she would live alone and have occasional lovers, but live alone. Daisy had listened with fascination to Jane’s description of how she would live her life if she could; it was so different from what Daisy wanted. Yet Daisy could see the charm of it, the sense of it, and Jane’s longing to live her own life unhampered by the desires and limitations set off by a husband made Daisy value her own new husbandless life a little more.

  Martha, whom Daisy knew only slightly, was pregnant with her third child, and was living the life Daisy had once thought of as the perfect life: She and her husband got along well, and lived according to a sort of plan that included family vacations in northern Wisconsin, camping out, carrying the baby in a backpack, cooking hot dogs on branches over a fire ringed with stones. If Daisy could have, she would have chosen Martha’s life; it was so sane and ordinary. And yet Martha, who looked bland and blunt but spoke with a surprisingly sharp tongue, who said
things in quick short sentences, seemed to think she had sold out somehow, that she had lost out, that what she had was all right, but boring. Not enough. Somehow not enough. She felt she was turning acid with a vague dissatisfaction she could not rid herself of. She sighed, and said she assumed she would be better after the baby was born, she was just always so tired and grumpy when she was pregnant.

  It was Karen who surprised Daisy the most, who introduced an element of what seemed almost insanity into Daisy’s thoughts: Karen had a lover! Good solid predictable Karen, who drove her children and Danny to preschool each day; Karen who made her own bread and grew chives in a bowl on her kitchen windowsill; Karen who grunched on the phone for hours about the leaky toilet or the price of snow tires; Karen, who was not even that pretty, who had fat hips and small breasts and hair that looked stringy if she didn’t wash it every day—Karen had a lover! She had had a lover for two years. For two years she had secretly been meeting a man who was also married. It was simply a man she had met at a party, and they didn’t even have that much in common except sex, and Karen said she went through every hour of her life desiring him and longing for him and wishing she could be with him and knowing that the entire thing was hopeless and impossible. She had come to the point of realizing that this affair, this love affair, this sex affair, made her more miserable than it made her happy; she spent more time yearning after him than seeing him; more time wanting more than remembering what she had just had; more time crying about the unfairness of life than being grateful. But she could not get through the day without hearing his voice, she could not get through the week without seeing him, and she did not think she could get through her life without him somehow in it, even if his presence made her miserable. She had tried to break it off a hundred times, and so had he. She had purposely gotten pregnant by him six months ago; then had an abortion. Her life was ravaged; she had seen a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist told her to give up her lover, and so she had given up the psychiatrist. She was developing an ulcer. But she would not trade her life for anyone’s. She spoke of holding her children on her lap, reading them a fairy tale, and at the same time envisioning the arch of her lover’s eyebrows, the smug smile on his lips when he held her.