by Jane Rule
“That is never to happen again,” he said, a thought-out new confidence in his voice. “Nor are you ever going to go out in the evening more than one night a week. I have been a patient man, a far too patient man, and I’ve been taken advantage of.”
“I want a divorce,” Gillian said in a calm tone that masked hysteria.
“Don’t be silly,” he said, as if she’d suggested something like a drink before breakfast.
“I’m not being silly. I’ve come to my senses,” Gillian said, first wondering what on earth that phrase meant, then frightened that she knew.
“If you call flinging yourself out of the house in the middle of the night…”
“Ten o’clock.”
“…sensible…”
“This is a discussion that is now finally over,” Gillian said. “Our lawyers can deal with the details.”
“Gillian, we have been married for nineteen years. We have two still dependent children. What are you talking about? What’s happened to you?”
“Because of the girls, I think you’d better be the one to move out,” Gillian said in a practical tone.
“This is my house!”
“It’s our house, according to the law.”
“I will not tolerate this, Gillian!”
“I suggest you talk it over with your lawyer. That’s what I’m going to do,” she said and turned to leave the room.
“Gillian!”
Half way up the stairs, she heard the front door slam, and she sank right there, suddenly too weak to take another step. Though she had entertained the idea of leaving him for years, she had never considered the means of doing so. His lawyer was hers in so far as she had one. Legally, she didn’t know what “marriage breakdown” was. She did know that humanly hers had, and whatever irrationality and self-destructiveness had led her into this circumstance, there was now no going back.
Slowly Gillian got up and went to the phone in their bedroom. The first call she made was to a locksmith, ordering the locks on all the doors to be changed by four o’clock.
At six o’clock that evening, Gillian and her daughters sat at the dinner table, listening to a pounding fist on the front door, then on the back, not speaking to each other until they heard the slamming of the car door and the starting up of an engine.
“Are you afraid of him, Mother?” her youngest daughter asked timidly.
“I never have been,” Gillian said.
“Is it legal?” her older daughter asked.
“It will be,” Gillian said. “This evening you can play any music you want as loudly as you want, and you can invite your friends over.”
But that evening the house was quieter than it would have been if the master of gloom had been home, his forced absence even more palpable than his presence.
Gillian overheard her younger daughter say, “I don’t really like Daddy, but I’m used to him.”
“He’s our father,” the older replied, but casually.
Ugly days stretched into ugly weeks in which Gillian often felt a prisoner in her own fortress. She had given up all her committees since her real interest in them had never been strong. They had been little more than a screen behind which she could lead her personal life. Now she had neither a personal life nor a husband to deceive, for he was now nothing but an enemy into whose hands she was determined not to fall. She saw none of the women who had been her intimates for so many years. Any hint of impropriety now would irreparably damage her case in court, leave her not only without a fair financial settlement but even without her daughters.
In the end, her husband behaved as Gillian had counted on him to, not generously but with scrupulous fairness. She could live in the house until the girls left home, at which time it would be sold, the proceeds divided between them. There was generous child support until the girls either reached twenty-one or finished college. For her own support, Gillian was responsible. The money her husband had never known she had made looking for a job less urgent than it should have been for Gillian’s state of mind.
“Mother,” her oldest daughter finally said to her, “even when Daddy was around, you used to have fun.”
“You’re right,” Gillian admitted.
“Well, it’s time you started having fun again.”
It wasn’t that simple. Gillian was more than ever at risk, the custody of her daughters the price she could pay for any visibility in the bars. The cohesiveness of her old friends, which she had once prized, excluded her as long as she could not behave as she’d expected others to behave, resigned to loss and open to new adventures of the heart. Gillian simply could not forgive Lynn Number Two her betrayal. There was something else, too. As long as she had been married, the limitations of any other relationship were clear. Now, when she tired of someone—supposing that woman were not as untrustworthy as Lynn Number Two—Gillian could see no way out, no ironclad and moral excuse for waning interest. Could there be a woman so remarkable as to hold Gillian’s interest for the rest of her life? She had never thought of a woman in those terms.
Gillian’s husband enjoyed his perfect solitude no more than Gillian enjoyed her freedom. After his outrage had worn itself out, erupting only occasionally at some convenience or familiar object lost to him, he suffered from simple loneliness, which he had no social skills to combat. Even his sporting trips, which he had made sure he could still afford, were not the escapes from domestic irritation which they had once been and lost their savor.
His daughters dutifully lunched with him, but he knew he bored them with his complaints, which would be repeated to their mother in a tone not sympathetic to him. He was not even sure what kind of sympathy he was asking for. He had been too deeply humiliated by Gillian’s treatment of him to imagine that he wanted her back even on his own terms, which she would never agree to. He wanted back what he could not have, the illusion of Gillian as his wife.
And Gillian also wanted back what she could not have, not her husband, but the illusion of freedom he had given her.
THE REAL WORLD
“THERE’S NO REASON, JUST because she’s eighty, that she shouldn’t live in the real world,” Tess complained, flinging a long trousered leg over the arm of her father’s chair which she had appropriated even before he died for reasons which had been obvious to her mother and obscure to herself until very recently.
“You don’t think she should join you in cross country skiing,” Margaret said mildly, “or go to a rock concert or try pot…”
“Might help her arthritis,” Tess said.
“The point is that her world is just as real as yours, and, if you love her, you should want her to live comfortably in it.”
“Even if I have to turn into a hypocrite and a liar, Mother? Even if I have to deny the most important thing in my life?”
“In your private life,” Margaret said.
“What private life?” Tess demanded. “If Gram knew, then maybe I could have a private life.”
“There will be time enough for that when you can afford your own place.”
“But Annie has a whole year to go in school, and the way things are now, who knows when she’ll get a job? I could pay for her board here.”
“No,” Margaret said, getting up. “When you’re ready to live your own life, you have to have your own space for it.”
“Wait a minute,” Tess said. “Don’t just walk off…”
“I have to get dinner. You need to clean up and bring your grandmother downstairs.”
“Mother, all sorts of people live together now. Nobody my age can afford to do anything else.”
“Then move in with other people your own age,” Margaret said.
“You want to cope with Gram on your own? Who’d cut the grass? Who’d fix the furnace? You don’t even know how to use a screwdriver.”
“I hope Annie knows how to cook and do the laundry and clean house.”
“Oh, Mother, those aren’t hard things to learn. You said yourself anyone who can read can cook.”<
br />
“Well, I’ll just get on with my simple task,” Margaret said.
As she fixed the salad, weighed out the noodles, and tasted the stew for its final seasoning, Margaret let Lou admonish her from his by-now-accustomed grave. Surely, if Annie had been Andrew and they wanted to begin their married life in this house, Margaret would not have objected. In ways, it would be easier to welcome another daughter rather than an unaccustomed son into the house. Lou had anticipated this turn of events by the time Tess was twelve, had read and read to Margaret everything he could find to shed positive light on their daughter’s masculine tastes and behavior.
“Couldn’t this become a self-fulfilling prophecy?” Margaret had asked. “It’s one thing to accept an accomplished fact, quite another to encourage a tendency. Why can’t I teach her to cook and to sew?”
“Because she doesn’t want to learn,” Lou pointed out reasonably. “And she does want to learn about tools and fixing the car.”
“Why does that have to mean she’ll be a lesbian?”
“It doesn’t,” Lou said. “It only means we have to be open to that possibility.”
He had kept his foot in the door of Margaret’s conscience even for the five years since he’d died: “Let her be who she is.”
But that was before Margaret’s mother had moved in, and surely her mother had some right to be who she was as well, though Margaret admitted to herself that her mother’s views were often both alien and offensive to Margaret.
Only this morning her mother had said, “This letter from my sister took three weeks from Toronto. It’s all those coloreds at the post office, that’s what it is.”
“How so?” Tess asked, amiably enough.
“They can’t read English,” her grandmother replied.
“The ones I know can,” Tess said.
“Well, you just must know a better class of them than I do.”
Tess had grinned, hugged her grandmother, and gone cheerfully off to work. It was Margaret who flinched at her mother’s bigotry, who was shamed by it.
How on earth Tess then could expect her grandmother, church-going, snobbish and sheltered, to accept something entirely outside her own experience, not to mention her moral universe? Even now, she told people that Tess worked for Toyota but would never allow Margaret to say to anyone that her daughter was an auto mechanic. Fortunately Tess cleaned up and changed at work and was miraculously grease-free. She said being greasy was just an unnecessary macho trip.
Lou, rational, kind, impractical Lou, would probably have settled down to educating his mother-in-law if he’d lived long enough to know that it was necessary. Margaret simply couldn’t do that. She even allowed her mother to think that she’d stayed away from church all her married life out of respect for Lou’s atheism and now had happily returned to the fold. Since Margaret had to take her there and fetch her, it was easier to go to the service than to make a point of not going.
Margaret heard the voices of her mother and daughter in the dining room, drained the noodles, tossed the salad, and carried them both to the table.
“Will you get the stew, Tess?”
“Sure thing,” Tess answered, and Margaret was pleased, as she was every evening, to see her daughter in a skirt.
“How about a game of Scrabble tonight after supper?” Margaret’s mother suggested.
“All right,” Margaret said, though she knew she’d have to call the game short in order to get the last of her bookkeeping done.
“Sorry, Gram, I’ve got a date,” Tess said.
“Why don’t we ever see any of these dates of yours at the house?”
Tess threw a glance at her mother and said, “Wouldn’t be considered proper, Gram.”
“Well, in my day it wasn’t considered proper unless they came to the house. Is everything just turned upside down in your generation?”
“We don’t stand on our heads after all,” Tess said in a tone that always managed to make her grandmother indulgent rather than cross, which gave Tess the illusion that her grandmother was indulgent.
Once Tess had gone up to her room to change again into jeans and then take the stairs two or three at a time in her rush to be with Annie, Margaret’s mother registered her complaints.
“She’s too old to behave like that and dress like that. What kind of a man has a date with a girl in blue jeans, dashing around like a basketball player?”
“Nearly everyone her age dresses like that,” Margaret would answer, over and over again, to reassure rather than contradict her mother, for, though she was critical of Tess, it was more out of puzzlement than lack of affection.
“Well, maybe one of these days she’ll fall in love and turn into a young lady.”
“Let’s enjoy her the way she is while we can,” Margaret said.
“This house would be a tomb, wouldn’t it, without her?”
Margaret felt the coldness around her heart which was the climate she had lived in since Lou died and knew that without Tess the house would, indeed, be as cheerless as the grave.
“Still, I’d like to see her married before I go. Might even hang on for a great-grandchild.”
Margaret spelled “child” on the Scrabble board, but it was her own she was imagining, her mind flipping back through twenty-one years as if she had a photograph album before her: Tess as bold as brass from the time she could crawl, up in trees, on skates, on skis. The level blue gaze that looked up at her from her breast had never faltered. They were Lou’s eyes, and Margaret was glad he could be looked at as he looked at the world though she had thought both child and man daft in their persistent rationality which imposed so much irrational hope on the world around them.
“What will the world do to her?” Margaret had asked Lou.
“Let her be strong,” Lou answered. “Let her trust herself.”
“But how will she trust other people?”
“She can start with us. That’s a good beginning.”
“It’s your turn again,” Margaret’s mother said.
“Sorry. This better be the last game. I still have work to do.”
Margaret was doing the books for a local dress shop, one of a couple of dozen accounts she had gradually taken on after Lou died, work that paid reasonably well and kept her at home for her mother and daughter. If her mother hadn’t been able to contribute quite generously to the household, Margaret would have had to sell the house and go out to work. Now that Tess also insisted on making her own contribution as well as buying her own clothes and paying her own car installments, Margaret had a sense of near affluence, but she put money aside rather than getting used to spending it. When Tess did decide to move out, she might need a bit of help for a while.
She heard Tess come in and waited for her to tilt her fine mane of tan hair around the office door on her way to the fridg for a beer or a glass of milk.
“Want anything?” Tess asked.
“Piece of cheese and an apple.”
Tess brought her in a plate, knife and napkin to go with her order, signs of shy but growing domesticity which touched Margaret unreasonably now that they were obviously not belated signs of heterosexuality but simply indication of Annie’s good influence.
“How’s Annie?”
“Depressed,” Tess said. “She thinks her parents are beginning to suspect and will kill her. Why are some people so awful?”
“They’re ignorant, that’s all,” Margaret said.
“What she needs is to move out of there.”
Margaret sighed.
“You do like Annie, don’t you?”
“Of course I do, darling. It’s just that you both are young enough to think that every problem has to have an immediate solution. Annie needs her parents until she finishes school. Time enough then to think about what you’ll do.”
“You think I don’t want to leave home because I can’t take care of myself,” Tess said.
“Well, you are a bit of a domestic retard, you know.”
“I ca
n fix the washer and dryer.”
“And it probably wouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes to figure out how to use them.”
“Yeah,” Tess said, “But don’t you have to know all sorts of stuff like which pile what ought to go into and what can’t go in at all? Remember the year we all had red underwear because Dad decided to help you out?”
Margaret laughed. Tess couldn’t have been more than thirteen, but her underwear had been a mortification to her and probably still would be.
“Maybe some people just don’t have the knack,” Tess said.
“Shall I give you some of your father’s bad advice? Don’t learn to do anything you don’t want to do because you’ll probably be stuck with doing it all your life.”
“You don’t much like bookkeeping, do you?” Tess asked.
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s not very exciting, but it’s nice to do something you know can come out right.”
“You’d better teach me to do the laundry, and maybe I ought to know how to cook, just a little bit anyway. Just don’t tell anybody, all right?”
“Not even Gram?”
“Especially not Gram!”
It was convenient for both Tess and Margaret that her mother needed help negotiating the stairs and rarely left her room before dinner unless a special outing had been proposed. In three weeks, Tess was as comfortable with the washing cycle as she was with the motor of the washing machine, and it became her habit to spend an hour with Margaret a couple of times a week in the kitchen.
Margaret, an intuitive and inventive cook, quickly learned that, if Tess was going to develop beyond boiling an egg, grilling a steak and making salad, Margaret would have to give up words like “dollop,” “bloop,” and “pinch,” directions like “season to taste” or “stir until it thickens.” Tess needed standard measurements as well as some reassuring notion that stirring would take three or five minutes since, for all she knew, cream sauce might need three hours of her attention. She had an absolute aversion to tasting anything out of a pot, afraid of burning her mouth. Unlike most new cooks, she grasped the idea of getting things done at the same time very quickly and was more particular about that than Margaret had ever been. Tess was quick, too, to veto any menu that took nervous rushing at the end.
