Three Women at the Water's Edge

by Nancy Thayer

  Now she saw that she could think of Harry with affection and even gratitude. He had been a good husband, a good father, a good provider; there had been years when she had gone through each day simply and unthinkingly happy to be his wife. He had kept her warm and secure for many years, and he was, she had to admit to herself, not an evil man. He had not meant to enclose her in a life she did not care for, and the truth of it was that for years she had cared for her life. That she had changed, that she now wanted something different and new—that she had changed, and he had not changed and had not wanted to recognize or approve of her changes—was not a bad thing, but then it was wrong in the light of her future to look with a bitter eye at her past. With a bit of sappy wisdom that came from the fire and the strong brandy, Margaret realized that in the past year she had been going through the sort of crisis an adolescent goes through when she leaves home: She had had to negate and furiously criticize the past in order to strike out on her own. But now she was here, really here in her own new life, and that time of ferocious, almost desperate movement was over. She was safe in a new place. And now she felt she could look at her past in a clearer, more generous, and undoubtedly more honest light. She felt she could now place her past in her mind as if it were the mist from a genie’s bottle which she could summon up at will, or leave at rest. It would threaten her no longer. In fact, it was valuable to her, again and at last.

  So she arranged her past; and in the next few days after her nostalgic night by the fire she continued to arrange her future. She went out in search of a job, and found three available to her, one that pleased her immensely. She could have been a saleswoman in a gift shop, but she found that the objects for sale bored her; she also did not take a job as a receptionist at a plush advertising agency in downtown Vancouver because there was something about the garrulity of the other people who worked there that put her off. The job she took seemed so perfect that at first she could not believe her luck: It was a position as an assistant in a bookstore in West Vancouver. Margaret sold books, stocked books on the shelves, returned books, sent out notices telling people that books they had ordered had arrived, kept records. After only a few days there, Margaret knew that this was a job she would want to do for years and years. For she knew that she would always like people, she would always be interested in them, she would always want to know how they worked through their joys and troubles, how they went through their lives. And with books she would be able to do this, but at a distance. She could read a book, and put it down when she chose, she could watch the lives of other people, she could be part of the world, and yet have no responsibility for it. And her contact with the real people who frequented the shop was a limited and cordial one; when she closed the door of the shop at the end of the day, she carried no one’s problems home with her. She was dispensable. She again served a purpose in the world, but it was a rather nonchalant one. How different it was, for example, from being a mother and wife, from feeling responsible for the happiness and health of a family. How different it was even from the volunteer work she had done at the hospital, when she came home daily driven with a need to do more for those poor people who lay stricken in their beds with various life-and-death problems. Books were such a nonessential commodity; or if they were a product that some people at times in their lives felt they really needed, as Margaret always needed books, still they were never needed with the urgency that food or medication was, and the customers who entered the store seldom did so with desperation. Books nourished the mind and soul, but in the sense of absolute survival those were luxuries; Margaret felt that her job was luxurious. She could spend time chatting with the customers about books, but she was able to keep busy, for there was always something needing to be done around the shop. Andrea, the energetic young woman who ran the shop, had told Margaret that she was a real plum, and Margaret had been pleased by this. In fact, she could envision the day when Andrea would grow bored with such a rather plodding enterprise as the bookstore and would move on to something bigger and more challenging. Then perhaps Margaret could buy the bookstore from her, and hire someone to do the work she was now doing. She could envision working in the shop for years and years. She liked it so much: the size of it, so small and cozy, and the tiny cluttered back room full of cardboard boxes and papers and the electric burner for heating water for coffee or tea. She liked having a key to the shop, and being able to open the glass door with the ringing silver bells on the inside handle in the morning, or to close it at night. The keys made her responsible. Yet nothing really horrible would happen even if she failed at her responsibility; only books or money could be lost, not lives.

  For the knowledge of the vulnerability of people would always be with her; it was an issue she would never resolve—who could resolve it? There was no solution. She felt such great pity for people, such compassion. And she had to admit such a large defeat. Miriam had lost her breast completely, and would have to take unpleasant chemotherapy treatments for the next year, and there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it. Still Miriam managed to laugh and talk, to dress beautifully, and attend concerts, to cook meals for herself and Gordon, to read her students’ papers with concern, to teach them as if the knowledge of the theme of a river in a book by Mark Twain really mattered. If Miriam could do that, then Margaret knew she was bound to live her own life cheerfully and well. If she had one duty left, one obligation left with which to attend to the rest of her life, it was that of living her own life with all the good humor and good will she could summon up. If it in the end came down simply to the fact that the only person she could really affect in this life was herself, then she determined to do that as well as she could: she would live her life well.

  And it was not that difficult a task, perhaps, or so she thought as she sat alone in the sun on the back steps of her new home. The rich waxy reds and yellows of the tulips were as real and amazing a gift as always; the fluffy unconcerned cats entertaining her vision were real, too; the dark loam feeding the flowers and bushes and trees surrounding her new home was real. She moved off the porch to sit by a bed of irises which were just beginning to bud. The flowers were still curled together in a tight cone as complicated and intriguing as a shell; the pale sheath about the bud hinted of the brilliant color hidden inside. Margaret felt a surge of affection for this glorious, ordinary flower, which had bloomed in her grandmother’s gardens, and in the gardens of her Liberty home, and which now had come up of its own bulbous volition in this new garden of hers, in this her very own and private garden. She remembered a quote from a gardening book which had always pleased her: “Bearded irises are just plain durable.” Casually, almost aimlessly, Margaret began to pull out the green weeds that sprouted at the base of the flowers. It crossed her mind that she felt much more content here in this garden, surrounded by the sturdy walls of green trees and shrubs, than she ever had by the ocean: all that spread of turbulent water had somehow made her troubled. She preferred this, after all: the steadfast earth, the restful protective greens, the hopeful variety of perennial plants. She shook the earth off the roots of a cluster of weeds and watched the brown soil fall like an infinitely small, satisfying rain, back to the ground. She told herself that in a few more minutes she would go back into her house to finish the unpacking. She would set up her stereo and put on some Beethoven. But for a while more, she let herself sit in the sun, enjoying the warmth of this spring day, feeling somehow protected by all the green spears of stems and trunks which so fragilely, so optimistically, enclosed her in her new and private world.

  —

  It was early May, and Rocheport was burgeoning with the fragile optimism of spring. Inside her apartment, Dale leaned against the window; she could have seen the spring sun lingering into the evening, shining onto the trees and houses with a pastel warmth. She could have seen all this, but she didn’t; her eyes were glazed over and she was so nervous and tense and furious that she couldn’t see farther than her own nose. Nevertheless she spoke calmly: “A
ll right, love, have a good time. Goodbye.” And she calmly put the receiver into place and stood with her hands together on top of it, as if forcibly holding it down.

  “Are you okay?” Carol asked, coming to stand beside her.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Dale said. Then she burst into tears. “No, I’m not. I’m not fine at all. Oh, Carol, I’m so jealous and angry and frightened I could just die. I’d like to yank this phone from the wall and throw it through the window!”

  “Yeah, well, that’d really show him,” Carol said. She took Dale by her shoulders and pushed her toward a chair. “Sit down. I’ll make you a drink. And for heaven’s sake, don’t be so upset. It’s just dinner.”

  “It’s just dinner in a hotel with an old girlfriend,” Dale wailed.

  She sat down in the chair, then jumped up again, jammed her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and began to pace about the apartment. “Leland,” she said aloud, more to herself than to Carol. “Jesus Christ, what a name. You know what she looks like—Leland—she’s another one of those tall cool Boston blondes that his parents love. Her family is close to his family. They’ll be so cozy. Of course it will be more than dinner; he’ll kiss her, you know he’ll kiss her. And then dinner with her bedroom so conveniently just up the stairs. Oh, it’s too much, it’s too much. I feel like driving down there and standing outside the window and watching them.”

  “That would be real cute,” Carol said. “Clever. Sophisticated.”

  “But I’m not clever or sophisticated. I’m anxious and jealous and miserable. I don’t want Hank to have dinner with an old girlfriend. I don’t want him to have any old girlfriends. Oh, this isn’t fair. All my old boyfriends are either in Massachusetts or Europe. God, God, he knows that while he’s all dressed up, looking good, sharing an intimate evening with an old love, I’m stuck at home in my jeans with you.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Carol said, handing Dale her scotch. “Drink this before you spill it all over yourself. Look, nothing is going to happen. Hank loves you. You know he loves you. Besides, you’re both still free agents—that’s what you want, isn’t it? You’ve got to accept things like this. Now look, I’ve got work to do, and I know you’ve got papers to grade. Be a big girl and sit down with your drink and get into your work. That’s the only cure.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Dale said. She sat down on the sofa and grabbed up a pile of tests from the coffee table and plopped them onto her lap. But the tests might have been written in Swahili for all the sense she could make of them. “Carol,” she said, throwing the tests back on the table and springing to her feet, “I’m going to call Lloyd Peterson. He’s been wanting to take me out for weeks. I’ll call him, go have a drink with him, dammit.”

  “But you don’t even like the man,” Carol said. “Oh, Dale, don’t be so ridiculous. Think how awful it would be for you. Think how rotten you’d feel in the morning. And you don’t know that Hank’s going to like Leland. And if you do even go have a drink with Lloyd, you’ll have him calling you constantly—he’s a nice man, too, and you really shouldn’t just use him. Oh, Dale, be sensible. Hank loves you. Why can’t you trust him?”

  “I don’t know,” Dale said. “I don’t know! Why can’t I trust him? Why do I feel so insanely jealous? Carol, I can’t stand it. Oh, God, I just want to break things.” Dale looked wildly about the apartment.

  “I think you should go out for a walk,” Carol said. “I mean it. It’s a nice evening. Go out for a walk. Go out for a run. Run it off.”

  “All right,” Dale said. “I will. I’ll go run until I drop. But if Hank does sleep with her—then I’ll, well, I will sleep with Lloyd and with any other man in Maine.” She grabbed her sweater from the chair, slammed out the door, and clattered down the stairs.

  Outside it was cool and bright, a fresh breezy early-May evening. Trees were greening up, and all the world about her held that particularly hopeful prettiness that spring brings. Daffodils. Tulips. Tender grass. Bikes and trikes and roller skates were scattered on driveways and porches. Birds twittered in trees; mothers called children in to bed. Dale stalked down the sidewalk, looking at it all with a jaundiced, nasty eye. Her breasts were too big, she thought, and her hair needed a good shaping, and her turtleneck was too warm and shabby. She felt just so goddamned furious that she wanted to kick a blossoming apple tree until the petals flew off and the tree fell over. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” she muttered to herself, and kept on walking. Down the street, around the corner, over to the church, down toward the center of town.

  So here it was again, the other side of love, the dark side: the pain, the doubt, the fear, the anger, the incredible and absolutely maddening vulnerability. Last week, when they had been eating comfortably together in Hank’s kitchen, he had said, ever so casually, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you. An old friend called today, Leland Hunter. She’s coming up to Cotsworth-by-the-Sea next week for a three-day conference for art teachers. I’m going to go down next Thursday to have dinner with her.”

  “Oh, how nice,” Dale had said. What else could she say? And truly then, even though jealousy was stinging at her heart like a wasp, she had said to herself, be calm, you can handle this. But of course Hank had been sitting there with her then, he had been with her, not with his old girlfriend. It had taken all of her self-control not to ask, “Just how close an old friend is she? Is she prettier than I am? Have you slept with her? Will you sleep with her?”

  Oh, she could not understand it, she could not. She was a reasonable person: Why did she feel that she wouldn’t be satisfied until she had Hank locked away forever in some room in her house where no one else could touch him? Why did she feel so possessive? And how would she ever manage to be satisfied? She had been in love with Hank for almost eight months now, and the force of it continued to grow rather than diminish or even stabilize. Dale slowed in her walking and began to study the houses she passed by, thinking: had all the men and women now living such apparently placid lives in these attractive houses at one time been as insane with love as she? She stopped at a corner and leaned against a tree and looked up and down the blocks around her. All those houses, full of families: now she knew why marriage was such an enormously popular institution. It was the only alternative to unbearable madness. Undoubtedly some of the married people inside those houses were awfully bored by now—but how glad Dale would be, how delighted, to be sitting watching some TV show with Hank, bored and casual in his presence. Boredom seemed suddenly such an enviable state. Oh, how hard life was. She wasn’t sure she could really believe in God, Dale thought, but she could easily believe in Love: personified, Love would be as artlessly attractive as Don Hepplewhite, the lanky blond senior who played quarterback at the high school; he would look just as sweet and innocent and adorable—and he would play the same mischievous, hurtful, unnecessary tricks.

  Dale looked at her watch: Forty minutes had passed since Hank’s call. He would be with Leland now. Had they embraced? Had his heart jumped to see her? Whenever Dale saw Hank, as he entered her apartment and said a pleasant hello to Carol, or came walking up the sidewalk to the school, Dale always felt that someone had just slugged her behind her knees with a baseball bat; she nearly fell over with love every time. Would he feel that way on seeing Leland? My God, what if he did? And what if Leland felt that way, too? And what if she invited him up to her room for an intimate drink before dinner?

  Dale started walking again. Hank had not said that he would call her when he got back from the dinner, and she had had too much pride to ask him. Every night for months now they had talked with each other on the phone the last thing before going to sleep. If they didn’t talk tonight, it would break some kind of spell, some kind of chain—oh, if he slept with Leland, Dale would just die. She would hit him if he slept with Leland, she would grab a skillet from the rack and whack him on the head with it, then shove him from her apartment and tell him never to bother her again. And then she’d sleep around and sleep around, just to show Hank—to s
how him what? For she did not want to sleep with any other man. She did not want to shove Hank from her life. But how could he be so insensitive? How could he not know how terribly he was hurting her? But what could she have done? She had too much pride to say: Please don’t go see her. Please don’t sleep with her. Please at least promise me you won’t sleep with her. How goddamned nonchalant he was. Was it possible that he did not realize that she would be jealous if he had dinner with an old girlfriend? Was it possible that he would not be jealous if she had dinner with an old boyfriend?