by Sue Miller
It was all so familiar, and yet different. In the past the children had taken time off from school to be part of the campaigns. They'd enlisted their friends. Often there were three or four kids as well as the younger aides sleeping in every bed in the house, on the couch, on the floor on air mattresses. They had run the campaign from home as well as from local offices all around the state, and a hum of activity enveloped you every time you walked in the door. Posters and flyers were stacked up everywhere, mail was arranged in piles on the dining room table waiting to be answered, the phone rang continually. Delia had big picnic coolers set up in the kitchen, and she kept them stocked with Coke and beer. The coffeepot was always on.
She had loved all of that, the sense of their whole lives, and the children's too, being given over to this.
This time neither she nor Tom had mentioned the children's absence, but for her it stood for everything that was lost. She thought of Brad's carefully worded letter to her, saying that no matter what they decided, they would both still be his parents. She thought of Nancy, lashing out however she could in her grief, sometimes seeming to blame Delia for the loss of her father. She thought of Evan when she'd talked to him only this past weekend, of how angry he'd been at what she was about to do.
Before Tom left for the airport, he came upstairs to say good night to Delia. She was still awake, with the door open and the light from the hallway falling into the room. Tom sat on the edge of the bed. He was happy, she could tell. She didn't speak to him of the reporter's questions, of how exposed she'd felt. She let him think that her quiet was because she was exhausted, maybe even still a little jet-lagged. After he kissed her, after he'd gotten up to go, he stood in the doorway a moment, looking back. She couldn't see his face, but his voice was full of tenderness, of gladness, when he said, “This is fun, isn't it?” He tapped the door frame lightly and she heard the clunk of his wedding band on the wood. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Meri, December 1993
YOU'RE PREGNANT,” Delia said as soon as Meri started to take off her coat.
“I am?” Meri said. Her mouth and eyes opened wide in mock surprise and she looked down at herself, at her abdomen's rounding curve under Nathan's stretchy wool sweater.
“Aren't you?” Delia's smile faltered. “Oh! I'm so sorry! I thought—”
“No, no, of course I am, Delia. I was just kidding.”
“But I am sorry. How rude of me.”
“Delia. Come on. I'm virtually a tank.” She gestured around the rise of her belly with both hands.
“Oh, you look wonderful, dear.”
Meri snorted and rolled her eyes.
“No, truly. And of course, congratulations! This is thrilling.”
“Well, thank you. Thanks.” Meri laid her coat on the little striped couch in Delia's hall. Its sole function seemed to be this, the receiving of outerwear.
“I'd bought some wine for us, but maybe you'd like cider? Or tea?” Delia looked tired, her eyes pouchy. She was just back from her two months in Paris—she'd arrived home sometime late in the afternoon the previous day. The phone message with her invitation had been waiting for Meri when she got back from work. She wanted to have Meri and Nathan over for a drink the next day—today—to thank them for “minding the house,” as she put it.
Meri had come over at the appointed time alone, crossing the porch in a slushy rain. Nathan was late, still on campus. He was often late, by a wider and wider margin as the semester progressed.
She had been nervous all day about this, about seeing Delia again. The moment after she pushed the button on the blinking machine and heard Delia's voice, she was aware of a sense of shame, a feeling of being caught out. She knew that Delia couldn't know what she had done in her absence—it was likely that she would have been incapable, actually, even of imagining the possibility; and Meri had always been careful to put things back exactly as they were. Even so she felt, almost superstitiously, that she would be unable not to betray herself, that it would show somehow—in her face, in how she behaved.
But nearly the instant she saw Delia, she knew that she was safe. Delia was herself, and Meri had the same comforting sense she always did of being swept along by her, of being nearly absorbed, as she felt it, by Delia's buoyancy, her energy. In her gratitude that this was the case, she was feeling an instant deep affection toward the old woman.
“Yeah, I'd better have some cider,” she said. “Otherwise the pregnancy police will get after me.”
“Oh yes, I know how ubiquitous they are nowadays. And so strict.” Delia started back to the kitchen, and Meri followed. She looked around. The house felt different now with Delia in it. It was hers once again, a private realm.
“I drank through all three of my pregnancies,” Delia was saying. “Probably a drink or two nearly every day, actually. And it was hard liquor at that. We'd practically never heard of wine then. I count it as a great retroactive blessing to have been so ignorant.”
The lamp was on over the wooden kitchen table, the light pooling on its surface. The plants still sat clustered on their tarp. The baskets of mail, though, were gone.
Delia looked up at Meri, smiling. “I smoked too,” Delia said. “We knew nothing.” She'd gotten Meri's cider out of the refrigerator and was pouring it into a wineglass. Her own glass of wine, half full, sat on the table next to a tray with crackers and cheese on it.
“And there were no pregnancy police in those days either, praise the Lord.” She set the glasses next to the crackers on the tray, picked it up, and started back out into the hall. Meri trailed her. “When are you due?” Delia asked.
“May.”
“Oh, a heavenly time of year,” Delia said. “Perfect for having a little baby around. Winter is so hard, you're all cooped up. And summer is just too sweaty to be pregnant.” Delia had a fire going in the living room, and the shutters were closed against the dark and wet. They sat down, Delia in the rocking chair by the fireplace. She passed Meri's glass over to her.
“Are you jet-lagged?” Meri asked Delia. She had a sip of the cold cider.
“I don't know what I am.” Delia had rocked forward. She bent over the tray and began to spread the crackers with cheese. “I feel oddly peppy right now, but I'm sure I'll just collapse quite suddenly sometime this evening.”
Meri was looking around the room. She said, “This house is so lovely, Delia. Every time I came in while you were away, I admired it.” She blushed, unexpectedly, thinking of being alone in here. She said quickly, “We still haven't done anything with ours.”
This was true, and of course, Meri did feel crummy about it; but when Delia said, “Well, you're busy. It'll come. You can't expect to get it done overnight,” she felt comforted, and realized she had wanted this comfort. She'd been asking for it.
She said, “Yes, but we've been here more than three months.”
“And you have a job, and you've gotten pregnant. That must have taken some time.” She widened her eyes in mischief, and then barreled on. “And you've taken care of my house, for which I'm forever in your debt.” She lifted the plate with the four or five crackers spread with cheese, and passed it to Meri. “And the job?” she said after a moment. “It's going well?”
Meri laughed. “I love it,” she said. “It's just the most varied, the most various job, I guess you'd say, that I've ever had. Completely different, from day to day.” She had a bite of cracker, of rich cheese. “For instance, I did this one at the end of October on Halloween, on how commercialized it's getting.”
“Oh yes, I've been aware of that—all those hideous store-bought costumes.”
“Well, that's true too, but in this case my focus was dogs.”
“Dogs! What have they to do with Halloween?” She had gotten up with a poker in her hand to tend the fire, but she turned to Meri now.
“You'd be surprised. Turns out costumes for dogs are a big market. I went to a dog parade in town, and it was amazing. There was a dog dressed as a f
irefighter, there was one who was supposed to be a Frenchman, with a beret and a striped shirt. He had a rubber baguette tied to his back.” It had looked like an enormous dildo to Meri, but she didn't mention this to Delia.
Delia laughed. She turned back to the fire and poked at it, and the logs rearranged themselves with an explosion of white sparks.
“Maybe it's because I've been out of the country, but I find this completely ridiculous,” Delia said. She sat back down and picked up her glass, sipped at the wine. She said, “Still, it's wonderful to have a job that's silly sometimes. Hardly any jobs are, are they?”
“None that I've had,” Meri said.
They talked for ten or fifteen minutes about the last few months—Delia's time in Paris, the weather in Williston—and then the doorbell rang, and Delia went to answer it.
“But you're soaked!” Delia's voice said.
“Yeah, it's really pouring now,” Nathan said. “I ran the last bit.”
Meri came out into the hall just as Nathan was taking his coat off at the foot of the stairs. He draped it on the newel post, and they kissed. It was perfunctory—Nathan didn't like kissing in public.
Delia started back to the kitchen, to get him some scotch, she said. “Just the thing to warm your innards.” And then she called back, “Go in and sit in that chair right by the fire. You need it more than I.”
Meri and Nathan sat down together in the living room, Nathan in the rocker. He rubbed his hands together, looking at the fire for a moment, and they talked about their respective days, how they'd gone.
Delia came back in and handed Nathan his drink.
“Thank you,” he said. He sipped and set his glass down. “You're back,” he said to her. “How was it?”
Delia sat down next to Meri on the couch and started again to talk about Paris, about the weather there, the darkness, the politics, the pattern of her days. She still took French lessons, “at a very high level, I want you to know,” so that absorbed a good deal of her energy. And she was actually more sociable there than here, she told them, though it was more a matter of meeting people in cafés and wine bars and restaurants. “I think that's why I love having people over when I'm home,” she said. “It's so familiar and sweetly American, don't you think?”
They talked for a while about the college, which was conducting a search for a new president. Delia asked Nathan about how his semester had gone, and got his story. When he was done, she seemed to pause for a moment, and then she said, “My husband will be here briefly sometime over the holidays. I want to be sure to have you both over then, especially as you've heard of him—always a selling point with our Tom. He'll like you.”
Meri watched as Nathan's face opened in pleasure. She smiled too, she echoed him—it would be great to meet Tom at last. But the mention of Tom's name made her think again of the letters she'd read, made her think of all that she knew about Delia's life, about Tom and Delia's life, that she had no right to know. As the other two talked together—Delia so animated, Nathan so quickly responsive to her—there was a part of Meri that sensed her secret as something she had done to each of them. To both of them. She looked from one of them to the other, from Delia's lined face, her liveliness fighting off what must have been fatigue; to Nathan, his hair ringleted and dark from the rain, and she felt an unbridgeable distance from them both that made her sad. But she had done this. She had done this to herself.
What if she just blurted it out now? what she'd done, what she'd read, what she knew.
Nathan laughed at something Delia had said, and her blue eyes widened in pleasure. Of course it wasn't possible. And it wasn't ever going to be possible. She would never be able to cross back over to where they were, to where she'd been before.
· · ·
CLASSES WERE ALMOST OVER at the college. Suddenly everyone was having a Christmas party. The invitations arrived, by phone, by mail. They were supposed to go to a potluck at the home of one of Nathan's colleagues—they'd been assigned a salad for twelve. Jane was having an open house the day after Christmas. There was a departmental carol sing. The dean sent a stiff, printed card announcing her holiday reception. It said that dress was informal.
Informal or not, Meri had nothing to wear to any of these events. She'd managed so far buying only two items of maternity clothing, both pants with ugly little aprons of stretch fabric stitched in over where the belly bulge was. One was a pair of corduroys, for when she was being fancy, and the other a pair of blue jeans for everything else. If she hadn't been married to Nathan, this wouldn't have worked, but he'd let her borrow any of his sweaters or shirts she liked. She'd been rotating a group of the loosest, the bulkiest of these over one or the other of her pants.
Her only other concession to her altered state was brassieres, something she hardly ever wore normally. Now suddenly she had breasts, actually fairly large breasts, and she'd purchased what Nathan called “industrial-strength” brassieres to accompany them. To keep them out of her way, was how she thought of it.
She'd bought the pants at an outlet shop in one of the malls that lay in all directions on the outskirts of town, but there was a small, much fancier maternity shop in Williston itself, and she'd looked in its window from time to time, walking or cycling past.
On the way home from work the second Friday in December, she walked almost the length of Main Street in a light rain, the sidewalks glistening. Many of the store windows were decorated with strings of little white lights. All the lampposts along the sidewalks had wreaths. The town was gearing up for the holidays.
As she got close to the maternity store, she became aware that she was hearing the sound of a child, a child wailing in some epic sorrow. She came to the cross street, and saw that a little boy of perhaps three or so was coming toward her, trailing his mother down the sidewalk, sobbing and calling out as he came, “I can't, I can't walk anymore. Please. Please carry me. I'm too tired. Why won't you carry me? I can't walk. I am trying. I'm trying, but I can't.”
The mother was lugging a heavy-looking grocery bag, and she looked grim. When she turned around and spoke to the boy in a low voice, it changed nothing. He was not to be corrected, or consoled. Meri had stopped on the corner to watch, pretending to wait for the light to change. The noise the little boy was making diminished only as he and his mother slowly moved away, down Main Street.
How does she stand it? Meri thought. Why doesn't she just slap him?
And then Meri remembered her mother's voice: “What you're asking for, missy, is a good slap.” “When your father gets home, you're gonna get a good slap.” She remembered hating that term—a good slap. It seemed mean in a way she couldn't have explained then. And she remembered being a child waiting for that slap—how that had felt. She turned away and crossed the street.
The maternity shop was called MaDonna. Meri stopped in front of it. In the window, there was a mannequin wearing a little black dress and very high do-me heels, with smoky black stockings. She was virtually anorexic. The only sign that she might have been a few minutes pregnant was the slightest curve to her belly. The fantasy of glamorous maternity, Meri thought. And the woman with the boy the hard reality thereof.
She would save this for Nathan—the accident of this contrast. It was funny. It was sad.
The bell on the shop door jingled as Meri entered. A small woman in her early fifties, Meri guessed, emerged from the back. She was wearing a loose wool dress, gray, austere. Her hair was pulled back cleanly into a bun, the kind of bun ballet dancers wore, and she had that toes-out, rolling dancer's smoothness to her walk. She was thin. She didn't look as if she'd ever been pregnant. She greeted Meri warmly.
“I'm just going to look for a bit,” Meri said.
“Lovely,” the woman said. “Let me know if I can help.” She went to sit behind the counter. As soon as Meri began to take things out of the racks, though, she was there, offering to put them in the dressing room.
She was so gracious Meri actually got into it. She picked o
ut four possible dresses and several blouses, plus a pair of black velvet slacks with the familiar unattractive panel in front. She followed the dancer to the back of the store, where the dressings rooms, two of them, were. The woman had hung Meri's choices on a hook, and now she slid an ample curtain across the open doorway. “Let me know if you need any more help,” her drifting-away voice said.
Meri was alone with her brightly lighted reflection.
She and Nathan had no full-length mirrors at home. The closest Meri had come to seeing how her whole body actually looked in this new incarnation—pregnant woman—was in the wall of kitchen windows, clothed, as she made supper or cleaned up, usually moving around in front of her reflection with Nathan as they shared these chores.
But this was appalling, she thought, as she stood in front of the mirror in her underwear. Industrial strength, indeed. She was huge. Not so much the belly, which, yes, was large, but not ridiculously so. It was everything else. Her hips, which up to now had always been narrow and well muscled. Her upper arms. These gigantic breasts, smashed together in the bra. She had cleavage, something she'd never remotely wanted, and which she saw now only as a place for sweat and crumbs to collect.
Feeling hopeless, she started to try on one of the dresses she'd picked out. She could barely get it on over her head—it was too tight around the back and the arms. Standing there in her socks with the fabric of the skirt stuck around her chin and chest, Meri realized that there probably was such a thing as maternity panty hose, a thing she would have to buy if she was going to wear this or any other dress. No.
No. She took the dress off and returned it to its hanger.
The pants fit. They were fine. The black blouse she'd brought in to wear with them was too small, though. She sent it out, and the dancer came back with a larger size in fuchsia, the only other color choice. Meri could hardly stand to look at herself, but it was better, much better than the dress at any rate. You could see that she had long legs, which was really all there was to recommend her body at this point.
