Three Women at the Water's Edge

by Nancy Thayer

  She sipped her tea. She was content. And yet underneath it all ran the tension that came from knowing that even as she arranged and rearranged her chosen life, Fate was working its devious ways to unsettle her. That is, she had come to realize how brief life could be; she was aware of her own mortality.

  After Dale’s visit in late January, Margaret had spent hours sitting at her desk, pondering, poring over her checkbook and savings account, thinking about her life. The question was how to best help Daisy without totally removing from her own life all financial comforts. There was so much that Margaret wanted to do. She wanted to take trips: short vacations to Hawaii when the rains hit Vancouver, and longer trips to Europe or the Orient. She wanted to feel she could attend the ballet and concerts and theater, to give gifts to her friends, to continue to buy pretty clothes and books, to live her life well. Then, too, there was the darker side of it, which Miriam’s problem had all too sharply brought home these past few weeks: There was the possibility of illness in her future, and at least the certainty of old age, and she wanted to be able to take care of herself during those times. All that took money. And if she planned on all that, then there was not enough money to go around, not enough money so that she could give Daisy what she needed.

  The only solution was for Margaret to sell her house by the sea. It was a terribly costly house because it was on the oceanfront, and the taxes were so high. Why, Margaret suddenly asked herself, why did she have to live by the ocean after all? She had enjoyed it, but as often as she found it lovely, she also now ignored it, or found it tiresome. Once she had sat gazing out her window at the harbor, watching a massive steel Norwegian freighter slowly make its way from Point Grey to the Second Narrows, and she was strangely exasperated by the sight of that ship carrying the goods of the world and the men who handled those goods. That afternoon she had driven around West Vancouver with a realtor, looking at houses farther up the mountain, and had found one house—this house she was now moving into—which provided her with an antidote to that early oceanside dissatisfaction. It was small, rather cottage-like in appearance, with a lovely little garden behind. The garden was totally private, walled on all sides with high cedar boards and shrubs and trees, and on seeing it, even in its rather dismal February state, Margaret had thought: oh, this would be perfect, this is what I want. So she had sold her waterfront home, and bought the little cottage with the private garden, and the difference in the price of the two properties was so great that she was able to send Daisy the money to keep her house and to have some left over to add to Margaret’s own savings. It had all worked out well. Margaret felt she had dispensed with her obligations: Harry had married Trudy, Dale would never need her in the way that Daisy did, and Daisy would now be forever supported, each and every day, by Margaret, because she would be living in the house which Margaret had helped make possible for Daisy to have. Oh, Dale and Daisy were young, and undoubtedly during the course of their lives they would come to Margaret with troubles again; but the important thing was that Margaret now felt that she had done all she could for her daughters. She had done enough. She could feel free.

  She had set herself free of Anthony, too, but that had not been done as well. It could not be done by sending a piece of paper in the mail; it was not a task so distantly dispatched. Yet when Margaret had told Anthony she would not ever marry him, she would not ever marry anyone, he had carried it off with the ease and insouciance she expected of him, and they were still friends. In fact, they still saw each other, still slept with each other, though not as often. She knew from Miriam that Anthony had begun to see another woman regularly, and she knew instinctively that before long Anthony would probably marry that other woman, and that made her slightly sad. But not sad enough to do anything about it. She would miss Anthony’s elegance and charm, but there were other men. There were enough other men to dine and sleep with, and if there weren’t any particular men around, then there were her women friends, and she had herself, her own solitary desires and pleasures, which she preferred above all. And she could talk to her women friends and her daughters.

  She had discovered, gradually, with a growing sense of delight, that she had a mind. She knew this was not the same thing as having a talent or a career, but still it satisfied her immensely. It was a real surprise and pleasure to realize that she had a mind, that her mind had a life, that it wanted to expand itself and grow, and that it could do that, within the solitary confines of her own head, just as life expanded and grew amid the jumbled complexity of people and things.

  She had decided to put herself to the study of three things: religion, the music of Beethoven, and botany. She wanted to come to understand before she died the structure and systems of plants and flowers and trees, especially those which were self-regenerating. She wanted to comprehend the mysteries of scales and movements and measures of music. And she wanted to compare and examine the anatomies of all religions, not just the western ones, because although they were man-made, as music was, still they reached past the human in ways that were awesomely complex while still rigorously bound. There were whole realms of experience and knowledge which Margaret had never really been aware of, and now she wanted to enter into those realms as one might enter new and gracious rooms, she wanted to wander about, exploring at her own pace. She saw how she could live quite happily among the complicated edifices of religion, music, botany; she was eager to fill her life and her mind with words such as morphology and genus, transfiguration and Nirvana, cadenza and clef. Obbligato, oblanceolate, oblation: Margaret chanted these words to herself through the months of February, March, and April, as if they could work a sort of charm. There were so many ways to live a life.

  To live a life: for that was it, that was the key, that was everything. For a time just before and after Dale’s visit, Margaret had been—she now realized—indulging herself with the seductive charms of a sense of belatedness. She had felt old; she had felt sorry for herself, for the way she had lived out her life. She had pitied herself for her sagging flesh and her lack of marketable talents. She had envied her daughters, who were young and pretty, with all of life and its physical enjoyments ahead of them. She had become almost obsessed with thoughts of her past, with profound and despairing regrets for the way she had lived her past. She found herself sobbing as she read certain strongly feminist books, and once she had had to run from a drugstore because the simple, cheerful, brightly printed words on the cover of a women’s magazine brought home to her just how successfully younger women were managing to combine a family life with the life of the self. Bitterness and remorse began to taint her days so completely that she found herself turning away from even Miriam, her closest friend; she could not keep herself from thinking jealously just how much more of a life Miriam had led.

  Then one day in early April Miriam had insisted that Margaret come to her house for lunch. Margaret had been so turned in upon herself that she expected that Miriam would lecture or chastise her for her recent growing gloom; she had been taken aback to find Miriam vague and preoccupied as they ate: they both just picked at the lovely crab salad Miriam had made. They took their coffee out to the sunporch of Miriam’s house and settled into the gay striped cushions of the wicker chairs, and Margaret thought: now she’s going to say it, now she’s going to comment on just how unpleasant I’ve become.

  Instead Miriam said to Margaret: “There’s something I have to tell you. I’m going into the hospital next week. I may have to have a mastectomy.”

  “Oh, no,” Margaret had said. “Oh, no.”

  As she went through the next few weeks with her friend, she had tried to express to Miriam not only her sympathy but also her sense of gratitude and irony: that it had taken this sudden terrible turn in Miriam’s life to bring to Margaret an awareness of the importance of the present, of the life that Margaret had left. In fact Margaret had felt guilty, as if her own spiritual malaise had brought about her dearest friend’s physical illness.

  “But that’s abs
urd!” Miriam had laughed. She then had been sitting cross-legged on the hospital bed, wearing a white nightgown and a plastic bracelet with her name on it: the operation was to be the next day. Still she had laughed. “Don’t be so egotistical, Margaret,” Miriam had said. “You’re not responsible for my illness, or for anyone else’s. The only thing you’re responsible for now is your own happiness—and while I’ll be sorry if you continue to make yourself miserable, you’ll be the only one who will really suffer. You’ve always been responsible for yourself. You’ve just never realized that until recently. And it’s natural that you should feel a certain amount of real regret at what you’ve lost. But it would be foolish to lose what you have now, and what you can have in the future, by endearing those regrets so strongly to yourself. Oh, Margaret, we all have regrets. Look: I’m forty-nine years old, and I’ve been reasonably happy all my life. And this surgery does not really upset me all that much, except that now, for the first time ever, I regret that I never had any children, that I never had a baby nurse from my breast. I suppose it is the possibility of losing the breast that makes me feel this; though I’ve never felt it before, and I’m long past the age when I could have a baby or nurse a child. Yet it’s only a small sorrow, and God knows everyone has her share of small sorrows. I’ve really had so much from life, Margaret—and so have you. It’s true, you know. So have you.”

  Margaret had left the hospital when visiting hours were over and returned to her oceanfront house in an almost trancelike state. Above all she felt the tension of Miriam’s operation, she felt that she could not eat or sleep or feel until she knew just how serious Miriam’s illness was. Toward evening she debated with herself whether or not to have the comfort of a fire: would her temporary discomfort somehow balance out some scale so that Miriam’s cancer would be small and insignificant? But she remembered Miriam’s words, and knew at last that her most seriously superstitious acts would in the end affect only herself. She could hear how Miriam would laugh: “Oh, Margaret, how dumb of you to sit in the cold. If you are thinking of me, for heaven’s sake, sit by a fire. If you’re thinking of me, think of the happiness of life: sit and be warmed, let your evening be warm and bright.”

  Margaret gathered up the kindling and wood from her back porch, and knelt at the hearth to build up an imperfect pyramid of sticks and logs. She rolled up newspapers into cylinders and placed them under the grate and struck a match. Then, seeing the fire successfully started, she went into the kitchen to fix herself some herb tea. She would not eat: she was not hungry, she could not eat, no matter what Miriam might say. But she sank onto her sofa by the fire with a steaming cup of tea warming her hands, and sat there a long time, simply watching the dancing flames. And this, too, she decided, was a superstitious act. Although she had never thought of it before in this way, she now realized that being happy, giving joy to oneself, could be as much a superstitious act as being miserable and deprived. For it was happiness and optimistic endeavor and a life well lived that sustained others, after all; joy and contentment could circle out into the world just as surely as gloom, and just as Miriam’s laughter in the hospital room had lifted Margaret’s spirits, so it was the knowledge of the happiness of others that made people go on to strive for happiness for themselves. Otherwise everyone would simply end up in despair. Margaret sensed that for the first time in her life she had been verging on real sin—one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of accidie, of sloth, of the refusal to movement and joy.

  She rose when the fire burned low and put more logs on, large heavy chunks of wood that sent out billows of glowing warmth. She took her teacup into the kitchen and poured herself a snifter of good brandy. Then she settled back down on the sofa, and noticed with satisfaction that both Pandora and Ulysses had come into the living room to join her by the fire, and gave herself over to such thoughts as the brandy and the fire and her love of Miriam could cause.

  Miriam. Miriam, who had not had children, who had traveled and taught, had listened to Margaret talk and talk about her past, her present, her desires, and never once had she disparaged the life that Margaret had led. In fact, she had told Margaret that she thought that had been a good and valuable life; then she went on quietly to point out the possibilities ahead. She had had an uncanny power and wisdom: She had lent Margaret enough strength to help her cross that particular great chasm in her life, but not so much that Margaret became dependent or obligated. She needed nothing from Margaret’s life to satisfy her own; she would have been equally approving if Margaret had married Anthony or gone back to Harry. It was Margaret she loved, no matter what Margaret might do, and Miriam knew that Margaret loved her with the same steadfast elegance.

  Oh, it was really something to be thankful for, Margaret thought as she sat in the light of the fire, this friendship with Miriam, this lasting and complex connection. Margaret slid down on the sofa, stretched out comfortably, and covered herself with a beige afghan which had been folded over the back of the sofa. And she thought how this night, this eve of Miriam’s fearful operation, had two sides to it, two textures, like the pillow she was resting her cheek against; she could really choose whether to feel the rough or the smooth. For the sorrow and fear had to be dealt with, it could not be denied. Ever since Miriam had told Margaret of the probable need for a mastectomy, Margaret had been more and more aware of the brevity of her own life as well as that of her friend’s. The statistics were awesome: each year 106,000 women had breast cancer, and although many recovered from it, the threat of its return, the awful threat of death, was always there. For weeks Margaret had been having nightmares, and worse, had lain awake in the night with vivid visions that were too cruel to go by the softer name of dreams. She had had what Dale had once called “the death willies.” She had imagined herself dead and cold and shut away in a hard box, away from the warming company of people; she imagined her body losing its cover of flesh, her rings lying against bone. These visions had made her stomach cramp, and for once she had wished that someone were in the bed with her so that she could touch them and say, “Please hold me.” Instead she had risen at three or four or five in the morning, and made tea and tried to read; once she had even dressed and gone out to drive around the darkened rainy city, listening to the insipid conversation of a disc jockey who played rock music to night workers and other insomniacs such as herself, until the sun had come out and she was able to go back to her house, to fall asleep.

  “Don’t you ever worry about death?” Margaret had finally asked Miriam, hating to bring up such a terrible subject, yet needing to know just how Miriam felt. “Don’t you ever wake up in the night and worry, or find it difficult to go to sleep?”

  “Not really,” Miriam had said, then seeing the expression on Margaret’s face, had laughed. “When I feel like that, I take a Valium. Gordon does, too.”

  “Oh, Miriam,” Margaret had said, and gently touched her friend’s arm. But later she had called her own physician and explained the situation and gotten a prescription for the same calming drug.

  But the night before Miriam’s operation, when it all seemed to hang in the balance, Margaret did not feel she should trick her mind and body of its honest emotions. She could not take a Valium; somehow that would betray Miriam and their friendship and in fact the whole significance of what was hanging in balance: life, the life of a friend. Margaret rose from the sofa to throw more wood on the fire, then snuggled back under the afghan, with a large glass ashtray resting on her stomach. She smoked—knowing it was stupid to have a friend in the hospital with cancer, and still to fill her lungs with smoke—and looked at the fire, and talked with Pandora when she came to settle warmly on top of Margaret’s feet. No, she would not take a Valium, she would not cheat herself of the fear and awesome worry which still made her stomach cramp. But then, she knew, there was still the other side of it all: she could not dishonor Miriam’s friendship or the value of her life by indulging in the bleak stringy luxury of grief. Miriam’s friendship had brought Margaret joy
and pleasure and comfort—and Miriam was still alive, the operation was not until the next day—and the only decent way to honor the life of her friend was with thoughts of comfort and pleasure and joy.

  Margaret really didn’t take a drug of any sort that night, and the amount of brandy she drank was insignificant, yet later when she looked back on that night, she realized that if someone had looked in the window and seen her there, lounging on the sofa, smoking cigarettes, sipping brandy and then negligently setting the snifter somewhere back down on the carpet so that she always had to search for it when she wanted it again, the observant person would have thought she was either high on drugs or crazy. She had been talking aloud. At first she had addressed the cats; their presence did provide some sort of audience. But as the night had deepened, Margaret had grown strangely exhilarated, so lifted up and high with memories that she almost seemed to leave the earth and enter a drifting sphere of reverie where Dale as an infant and Daisy as a clumsy adolescent floated past each other like giddy grinning fish in a psychedelic sea. The joys, the pleasures, the comforts of her life—for in remembering Miriam, in honoring her friendship with this one particular individual, Margaret had to admit to the importance of all the joys she had had in life. She nearly babbled with excitement at her memories; she held out her hands as if she could literally touch those objects which had once given her such pleasure. The skin of her children. Almost above all, the complex clarity of a Black Watch plaid cotton she had sewn into a dress for Daisy and trimmed with black ribbon; remembering that material filled her with a real sensual satisfaction, for the sight of it, so complicated yet so neat, had been as palpably pleasant as the taste of food. Food itself—so much food, so varied, prepared with care over all those years, ritualized food: the first hot homemade chili of the fall, the pies and turkeys at Christmas, the elaborately decorated birthday cakes, celebratory feasts for friends with anniversaries, served in the dining room with all the lace and crystal and candles in the tall old silver candlesticks. Oh, she had taken pleasure from all the objects in her life. How long ago it was when she and Harry first bought the house and began to furnish it. She had always taken pleasure in the solid and well-wrought objects in her home. Coloring Easter eggs with the girls: those pastels, so pure; and then Dale and Daisy in white robes, singing down the aisles of the church with the youth choir, waving palm branches: Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna in the highest; the secure cordiality of her friends at a large ladies’ auxiliary meeting, sipping coffee, eating coffee cake, discussing just which way to raise money for some particular charity; rubbing the frail freckled flesh of strangers in their white hospital beds, chatting with those people, bringing them the ordinary news of the world outside, the weather, the local town events, and the gratitude those poor ill people gave her: “Oh, thank you, my dear, that felt so good. You are so kind.” She had been glad to be kind, and in the warmth and light of her private fire and her long memories, she saw that she did not have to completely disavow her past in order to have the future.