The Senator's Wife

by Sue Miller

  DELIA WAS HOME. Meri heard her one evening in the kitchen—the pipes thumping and a distant clatter. The next morning the phone rang. It was she, wondering if this was a good time to come over “for a viewing,” she called it.

  Meri was wearing Nathan's jeans and a T-shirt with milk stains where her breasts had leaked through it. She was standing in bare, dirty feet in the kitchen. She had just buttered some toast to have for breakfast. Asa was upstairs, beginning to stir, to make the little scratchy noises that signaled the onset of waking, of hunger.

  Nathan had cleaned the kitchen carefully before he left for work, so things didn't look too bad, but Meri was not ready, she felt, for Delia. It wasn't just that she needed to clean up, to wash her hair, to change clothes. It was also that she needed to change herself somehow to meet Delia, with her lively presence. With the way in which that presence demanded your energy in return.

  “I'm just about to go through the cycle with the baby,” she said. “You know, changing, feeding, changing, et cetera. So it's not so good right now. Could you come this afternoon? About two or so?”

  “Two is perfect,” Delia said.

  And at two promptly she rang the bell. Meri opened the door, and Delia stepped in. Meri was holding Asa curled up against her shoulder and neck. He smelled of Pampers and baby talc. She smelled clean too—her hair, her body. She'd put on an old sundress that was still snug, but not as bad as it had been last week. As usual, she had a towel slung over one shoulder.

  “Here you are,” Delia said, her arm sweeping the air grandly in Meri's direction. “The one, miraculously become two.”

  “Some miracle,” Meri said.

  “Oh, I know!” Delia said in instant sympathy. “No one has ever truly conveyed the scope of it. Labor is finally such an . . . inadequate word.”

  She was holding a basket again—she must have a closetful of empties, Meri thought. It was full of things tied with gold ribbon. They sat down in the living room, and Delia asked to hold Asa. “We'll trade,” she said, and held up the basket. Meri passed him over to the old woman, as an afterthought passing the towel from her shoulder too. And then it occurred to her: “But don't you want some coffee, Delia? Or water?” She realized abruptly how little there was in the kitchen to offer. “A beer?”

  “I don't want a thing, dear. Just to gape at this darling boy. What have you named him?”

  Meri told her.

  “Asa,” she repeated. “How lovely he is.” Delia laid him on her lap, his head in her hands at her knees, her arms resting on her legs along his sides. His face was looking up at her, he was frowning. “Hello, beautiful boy,” she said, smiling down. “Hello, beautiful boy.” She lifted him gently, up and down, rocking her whole body. “What are you like, you lovely new person?” She looked up at Meri. “Is he what they call ‘a good baby’?”

  Meri shrugged. “I wouldn't know. He's sort of . . . not there yet, as far as I can tell.”

  Delia's gaze sharpened. “Ah, you're having a hard time with it all.”

  “Yes. Well, no. I'm doing okay. I'm just . . .” Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes. “It's okay, really. It's just that I guess I'm not by nature very maternal.”

  “You will be. You will be fine.”

  “Well,” she nodded, “thanks for your vote.”

  “It's very hard, I think, caring for someone so . . . utterly dependent, especially when you haven't before. But it will ease, very soon, really, and you will be easier, and at some point you'll realize that you've passed through this, that everything is just as it should be.” Delia's voice was warm and gentle. Her body was still moving slightly as she rocked the baby, but her attention seemed to be focused entirely on Meri, and Meri felt it as another kind of gift. Maybe this was what she had wanted from Delia all along. She was afraid she might cry.

  “Open those presents, dear,” Delia said abruptly.

  Meri looked down and took the first of the presents out. None of them was wrapped, just tied with the ribbon. There was a striped T-shirt and matching shorts for Asa, and a book, The Shipping News.

  “To read while you're nursing,” Delia said. “It's supposed to be quite good.”

  There were several pacifiers in different shapes, one with a straight short nipple, one with a longer one, one whose nipple was wide and curled. “Apparently there's some disagreement about the way a baby's mouth is formed,” Delia said. “But if you don't believe in pacifiers, you can just chuck them all.”

  “Do I believe in pacifiers?” Meri asked. “This is not something I know about myself, I'm afraid.”

  Delia smiled and said, “You'll make lots of discoveries about what you believe in and what you don't as this one grows up. Children: if nothing else they force you to take a stand. On practically everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for now, pacifiers or not. Then there's the question of breast-feeding versus bottles. Later it will get even more complicated. Later come sex and booze, and maybe drugs. ‘Are any of these okay for my darling child? And if they're okay, how much? at what age?’ And on and on and on.” She smiled and shook her head. “It's endless, really.”

  Meri reached into the basket again. There was a rattle, a simple picture book, and a short nightgown for Meri. Black. Sexy.

  Meri held it up. “It's gorgeous, Delia.” Delia had the baby against her shoulder now. “And maybe in a year or two, I'll find a use for it.”

  “Nonsense. That will come back too, sooner than you think.”

  “It seems unlikely. I just feel so exhausted. So mired.”

  “We're both mired, dear. Perhaps we can help each other out.”

  “You're mired?”

  “With Tom. He's to come home in a few weeks.”

  “Home. To you? Here? To the house?”

  “Yes. He's in a rehabilitation place in Putnam for a bit, but then I'll have him, until he can manage on his own. Assuming he'll be able to. We'll see. But I think it's going to work just fine.”

  “But I thought he was going to stay in Washington.”

  “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “That was never the plan.”

  “But when I spoke to Nancy . . . to your daughter . . .”

  Delia smiled, a worn smile. “Nancy would have chosen that, but it wasn't her choice to make, you see.”

  “But, isn't he . . . ? She said he was, pretty . . .”

  “Damaged. Yes. He is, that's true. But he's already made progress. Good progress. And they think there's a chance for a reasonable recovery. And he's himself, which is what's important to me.”

  “So, he can talk?”

  “Well, some.” Delia smiled. “You might not call it talking. But he can . . . communicate. He knows me, he has wishes and wants that he signals me. Like our little friend here.” She patted Asa. His head was tucked under her chin.

  Meri was surprised, surprised and then impressed with Delia, that she'd won, that she could be so stubborn, so powerful. Meri would have bet on Nancy.

  “And more,” Delia said now, her face lifting. “He's funny, sometimes. He's happy every now and then. He's there, you can see it in his eyes. Behind his eyes.” Delia shrugged. “It makes it all seem eminently doable.”

  “But, by yourself, Delia?” she said.

  “Oh, I'll have help. Tom, in case you hadn't noticed, is loaded.” She raised her eyebrows significantly. “And I have access to that. That part will be the easy part.”

  “And the hard part?”

  “This,” Delia said, holding the baby out a little, looking at him. His head lolled. “This dependence. This helplessness.” She smiled at Meri. “Only instead of sustaining myself, as you must do, by dreaming of who he'll become, your fine boy, I'll dream of who Tom was, once upon a time.”

  They talked a while more. Delia said she was still working at the Apthorp house, that she was going to continue to work. Meri told her a little of the labor and birth, and about Elizabeth's visit. Delia offered to babysit too, and insisted that they set a
time. Meri said she'd check with Nathan. Maybe they could have a quick dinner out somewhere in a couple of weeks.

  “Or not so quick,” Delia said. “Think about that.”

  It wasn't until Delia was gone, until the house was suddenly silent but for Asa's little rooting noises against her shoulder, that she thought about what Delia had said about Asa and Tom, that she realized, almost startling herself with it, that she hadn't once dreamed of Asa as becoming anyone other than who he was. She hadn't imagined a life, a future for him beyond this, beyond here, where she was stuck, with him.

  MERI HAD READ that when babies were troubled sleepers, riding in the car could be helpful. They'd been given a car seat by one of Nathan's colleagues, and Nathan had installed it, but it hadn't occurred to Meri until now to do anything other than errands with Asa; and in truth, Nathan had been the main shopper, the errand runner, since Asa was born.

  One day, though, when Asa seemed inconsolably tired and yet couldn't stop crying long enough to drop off, she took him to the car, strapped him into his seat in the back, and drove to the highway at the edge of town. He was asleep before she got there.

  Once she pulled into the rushing traffic, though, she was frightened by its speed, and also by her inability to turn and monitor Asa at all. She took the second exit she came to, to Route 43 North and Correy. It seemed to her she'd heard of it. Someone she'd met in the past year must live there.

  She got on a two-lane road, winding through fields and little villages where she had to slow down to twenty-five. As she came into Correy, she remembered: it was a colleague of Nathan's who lived here. She and Nathan had gone to her house in the winter sometime, driving here through the dark one evening. The whole night seemed years ago.

  The hills, which looked blue and distant from Williston, were closer here. They loomed over the town. The fields she passed through were small, prettier than the vast squared acreage of the Midwest—wedged in odd, organic shapes, their boundaries ending at streams, hills, the edges of towns, tree lines. She passed several men out on large, rusty red tractors, mowing hay. Asa, tilted awkwardly in his car seat, seemed happily silent.

  And then he'd been silent for so long that she leaned back to look at his face, and saw that he was awake, that he was staring out the window above him. At what? She leaned forward and looked up out the windshield as she drove. The shapes of the trees and the clouds, she supposed. Or more likely, the way the darkness of the trees alternated with the blue light of the open sky.

  He didn't fuss for almost two hours. By then they were in a village almost at the state line. Meri pulled off in a turnout overlooking what was called a scenic vista, and nursed him. He was so hungry that he sucked for almost twenty minutes on each breast.

  She was hungry too, she realized. When he was finished, when she'd burped him and changed him, she turned the car around, back the way she'd come. She stopped in the first village they passed through and went into the country store. Asa was on her shoulder. She picked out two candy bars, ones she had liked in her youth, a Butterfinger and an Almond Joy. There was a young girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen at the cash register, apparently manning the store alone. She was a pale redhead, with freckles and white eyebrows and lashes. As Meri was paying for the candy, she asked, “How old's your baby?”

  “Almost a month,” Meri said. And then realized. “A little over a month, actually.”

  “He's so cute,” the girl said, leaning over to smile at Asa. She had braces on her teeth, and Meri felt a tug of sympathy for her, for her homeliness.

  “Thank you,” Meri answered.

  As she bent over Asa putting him back in his car seat, she looked closely at him, trying to be objective. Was he cute?

  He was better than he'd been at first. He'd fattened and filled out. The patchy dark hair was mostly gone and thin, paler hair glinted blond on his scalp. His slate-blue eyes staring up at her seemed to be taking something in, or trying to. His limbs had the beginning of real flesh, rounded flesh, on them. “Asa,” she said, and he frowned and opened his mouth.

  SO NOW SHE drove almost every day, unless it was raining or she had things she had to get done in the house. She liked to go slowly, to look around her at the lazy town greens, at the sudden, shocking abject poverty that presented itself—rusted cars and appliances in a yard, clothes hung to dry on a porch slowly listing sideways away from a house with almost no paint left. Cars piled up behind her, and she pulled over when she could to let them pass. Then she started out again, looking, trying to imagine the lives, the way they might play out in places like the ones she saw.

  Asa rode silently, sleeping or looking, his eyes perhaps trying to make sense of all this. She saw them moving, saw his hands and feet lift and move in what must have been his version of excitement—or interest, anyway. She felt a sense of companionship with him in those moments: he'd been feeling trapped too. She'd been able at last to offer him something he liked.

  Sometimes Meri brought food with her. Sometimes she stopped in a store and bought something—fruit, if she was feeling virtuous and they had it. More often chips or a candy bar or a can of cashew nuts. Occasionally she stopped at a little coffee shop or an inn for a sandwich and something to drink.

  She was at such a shop one afternoon, a rectangular box of a room with a few booths along one long wall and a counter along the other and three square tables pushed up next to the plate-glass window at the front. She was sitting at one of these. She'd ordered some tea and half a tuna sandwich, which came with a pickle and potato chips. Asa had been asleep when she came in, and he slept long enough to let her eat part of the sandwich. But then his nickering complaint in the Snugli began. Quickly, so he wouldn't start shrieking, she slipped him out of the little pack, laid him back across her left arm, and with her right hand, lifted up her shirt by his head.

  He turned to her and immediately found her nipple—he was getting better at this, at least some of the time. Meri turned her body away from the window. She was able to reach over Asa with her free hand and have a sip of tea, grab a chip from time to time. But mostly she held him, watching him intently as she often did, as though she could somehow discover who he was and how to love him by looking at the way he performed his small repertoire of behaviors.

  She had just had the thought—which made her smile, a little sadly—that to an observer she would be a picture of maternal devotion, nursing as she was, turned to watch her tiny child, when the door opened and an elderly couple entered. They were overdressed for the hot day, for the shop. They paused just inside the door. Tourists, Meri thought. They had the air of surveying the narrow room, likely making a decision about where to sit, something a local wouldn't have had to do. They murmured to each other, and started toward one of the two other little tables by the window.

  Meri was still watching them, so she saw the quick recoil on the old woman's part, how her fat placid face was made suddenly ugly when she realized what Meri was doing, when she took in the bit of exposed flesh of Meri's breast, the way the baby's face was pushed into her. Meri saw how she turned, how her husband bumped into her from behind, how they awkwardly moved back from the tables, their bodies almost tangling—the woman's voice lowered, trying to urge him away, far enough away so that she could explain to him the impossibility of sitting where they'd planned to sit.

  It would have been comical, Meri thought, if . . . if what?

  If it weren't also shocking to her that she, that she and Asa, could be the cause of such revulsion. She felt a sudden sense, the first sense she'd had, of being somehow in it together. Asa included in the old lady's disgust. Asa, wronged.

  Asa, asleep now, his full lips open, her body's milk a watery white in his mouth.

  That night at about ten, she was nursing Asa again, in bed. She'd waked him up to do this, actually, in hopes that she would only have to get up once more before his day started at five or so. But this meant that he kept falling away from her breast, nodding off. She picked him up and burped him vi
gorously against her shoulder, in part to wake him again. Then she cradled him. “Come on, baby,” she said. “Let's do a little work here.”

  At one of the moments when his head had fallen heavily back once more from her wet nipple, she looked up and saw Nathan watching them. Something in his face made her think of the old woman earlier, in the coffee shop. The idea frightened her.

  She set Asa down in the little bassinet by the bedside and crawled back over to Nathan. She curled against him. He put his arm around her in what felt like a comradely, comforting way, nothing more. His book lay facedown across his lap. They hadn't made love since well before Asa's birth, though the doctor had told Meri several weeks ago that it would be all right now. Suddenly it seemed urgent to Meri that they should, that Nathan should want her.

  She opened her nightgown, she began to stroke her breasts, her body. “Nathan,” she whispered.

  But he didn't respond. Or rather, he responded by setting his free hand over her moving ones, stilling them. They sat there for a moment, and then Meri turned away. She sat up straight.

  “Meri,” he said.

  She looked at him. Let him, she thought. Let him explain this.

  “I want you. I do,” he said. “It's just that it's so . . . Your whole body is so much, for the baby now. So . . . functional. And I'm just feeling it might be easier for me to wait. Just for a while. Just to wait for a while.”

  She began to cry, silently at first, and then sobbing loudly. She knew what her face looked like, doing this, and she simply didn't care. There was nothing left, nothing to think of as connected to what had once made her pleased with herself physically, to what had made her feel she owned herself, was in charge of herself, could use herself as she wished. To what had made her feel safe, with Nathan. Why not weep if that's what she felt like? Nathan was right—she lived for the baby now, a baby she couldn't know, in spite of her best efforts, and who couldn't know her, except as she failed him.