Wives and Lovers

by Margaret Millar

  You had to watch these Mexicans very carefully. They were sly. They put on a great show of innocence and stupidity but Ruth saw through that clearly enough. She had had several of them in her fifth-grade class before she lost her job, and one of them in particular was very sly. He had curly black hair and brown eyes like an angel’s, but Ruth knew that the instant she turned her back the Mexi­can boy did something. What this something was or how he did it, she never knew, but she knew it was done. The boy terrified her and she reported him to the principal at least once a week. “He does something, Mr. Jamieson, I swear it, I feeI it!” “I think you need a rest, Miss Kane.”

  That had been two years ago, but she still thought of the Mexican boy, she thought of his smooth innocent forehead and the dark angel’s eyes. In the middle of the night she tried and tried to figure out what he had done, until desperation seized her and she had to cram her fist into her mouth to keep from screaming and waking Hazel. The boy had become a symbol of fascinating, exciting, evil things she dared not name.

  You need a rest, Miss Kane.

  To: The Superintendent of Schools, Ernest Col­fax, A.M.

  From: Percy Hoag, M.D.

  I advise an immediate medical leave of absence for Miss Ruth Kane, such leave to extend for an indefinite period of time.

  She was only thirty-six, but her hair was white and her skin and eyes were pale as if she had been bleeding internally for years.

  Josephine called from the bedroom, “Ruth.”

  “Coming.”

  She went through the dining room, drying her hands on her apron, and opened the door of Josephine’s bedroom.

  “Oh dear,” Josephine said. “I woke up—what time is it?”

  “Nine.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t moved yet.” She hadn’t moved at all during the night. She’d gone to sleep on her back with her head propped on two pillows, and now she was awake in the same position, and not a strand of her long brown hair was out of place. Nearly every night Josephine slept like this, quietly and without dreams, and when she woke up she lay without moving for a long time, remote and self-contained. During the day she brooded or wept, she had placid daydreams or she quarreled, she had head­aches and spells of overwhelming fear. But at night she entered another world, and emerging from it in the morning she was rejuvenated. Her face was untroubled, her eyes clear and lustrous, and her skin seemed to glow. It was as if she drew nourishment, during sleep, from a part of her mind or body that she didn’t know existed.

  “Something woke me,” Josephine said. “A noise. There, you hear it?”

  They listened and heard just outside the window the spasmodic sounds of Escobar’s shovel. The faint shriek as it cut the ground, and the smack as Escobar spanked each clod of earth to free the roots of the weeds.

  “That’s the Mexican,” Ruth said.

  “So early.”

  “Do you want a graham cracker before you get out of bed?”

  “No, no, I think—” Josephine moved her head ex­perimentally. “No. Is Harold—? Of course. Oh dear. I guess I’ll get up. It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harold’s off this afternoon. It’s nice having Harold around. The days—” She helped herself up with her el­bows—“awfully long sometimes. The waiting—hand me my corset, will you?—four months yet, oh dear.”

  She stood up and began lacing up the maternity corset, not too tight, just tight enough to give her some support. She was small-boned and slender, and her condition was becoming much too noticeable.

  “I wish I was taller,” she said. “If you’re tall you can carry things off. Like clothes.”

  Ruth was making the bed. When Josephine paused between sentences Ruth could hear the gentle shriek, smack, shriek, smack, of Escobar’s shovel. He’s working. Well, he’d better be. I’ll keep an eye on him. I’ll see Hazel doesn’t get cheated.

  She went to the window and peered out through layers of mauve net curtains. He was only two feet away from her. He had rolled up the sleeves of his plaid shirt and opened the collar. He wore a yellow undershirt. Sweat glistened on his forehead and in the crooks of his elbows, and his hair was a cap of wet black silk. He was breathing through his mouth. She could see part of his lower front teeth, and they were very white, almost as if he’d cleaned them.

  He looked up suddenly and his eyes pierced the mauve net curtains like needles. She stepped back with a shock, feeling the needles in her breasts and her stomach. Her insides curled up and then expanded, disintegrated, dis­solved into fluid. I feel quite faint. It’s the heat. It’s going to be a hot day.

  “It’s going to be quite a hot day,” she said.

  “Oh, I hope not,” Josephine said. “I feel the heat so. Remember?—I never used to mind the heat— Remember?—I never even sweated. And now—it’s the extra weight, don’t you think? Harold says I should sweat if I’m hot. Otherwise the poison stays in my system.”

  Josephine said the same things nearly every morning. Her mind revolved in ever-decreasing circles as her body became larger. I feel, how do I feel? Have I a headache? I wish I was taller. The heat bothers me. Harold says. Harold, Harold.

  Always she referred to Harold. No matter how small the circle got, Harold was right there in the middle of it, sometimes sliding along smoothly and sometimes getting bounced and jostled and bruised beyond all recognition.

  Harold was Josephine’s second husband. Her first had been a silent irascible man, a veterinary doctor named Bener. Though he kept no pets of his own, Bener had a great deal of patience with the animals he boarded and treated. He had none at all with Josephine, and it was rather a relief to both of them when he died quietly one night, of coronary thrombosis, leaving all his money to his mother and his brother Jack. Josephine later received some of it under the Community Property Law. She spent it on clothes and then she married Harold.

  She married Harold partly because he was handsome and partly because he was the exact opposite of Bener. In their three years together Harold had never spoken to her sharply, and even lately, when she wept or abused him and all men, including God, Harold remained tender and took the abuse as being well deserved.

  Harold was no ball of fire, but he was a good deal sharper than most people thought. He showed up badly in front of Hazel (his older sister) and Ruth (his conscience). In their presence he was always making inconsequential remarks, holding his hand up to his mouth as he spoke, as if in apology. Alone with Josephine he was different and talked quite freely about the government and the Team­sters Union, which had nice new headquarters downtown with a neon sign, and the atom bomb, which something would have to be done about, no matter if the baby turned out to be a boy or a girl.

  The others might underestimate Harold, mistaking his good nature for laziness, and his dreaminess for impracticality, but Josephine knew better. Make no mis­take, Harold thought great thoughts as he drove his truck.

  Josephine took her toothbrush and tube of toothpaste from her bureau drawer and carried them into the bath­room. She squeezed a quarter of an inch of paste onto her brush and thought, by the time this tube is finished, I’ll know. I’ll be dead or the baby will be dead or we’ll both be alive and all right and Harold will be a father. By the time—

  She had an impulse to press the tube and squeeze out the future inch by inch, an inch for each day, squeeze out the time, a long white fragile ribbon of toothpaste.

  She replaced the cap, soberly. It was a brand-new tube, giant size, eighty-nine cents, and it would last a long, long time.

  “—for breakfast?” Ruth’s voice floated into the turning pool of her thoughts.

  “Oh. Anything. I’m not very hungry. Shredded wheat, maybe.”

  “Hot or cold?”

  “Co
ld. It’s going to be a hot day.” She was sweating already. The poison was seeping out of her system through her pores, underneath the maternity corset and the wrap­around skirt and flowered smock. “No, I think I’ll take it hot, don’t you think so, Ruth?”

  “I don’t know, it depends on how you feel.”

  “Oh, cold then. It doesn’t matter. Anything.”

  She followed Ruth into the kitchen like a sheep, and sat down heavily at the table.

  “It’s such a nice day,” she said. “We should all do something, go down to the beach.”

  “We can’t,” Ruth said sharply. “Not with the Mexican here. He’d probably go to sleep if he thought no one was watching him.”

  Josephine smiled pensively. “Mexican babies are cute.”

  “The very small ones.”

  “And Chinese babies. I saw a Chinese baby in a buggy outside the Safeway yesterday. The way it looked at me! So knowing. It seems a shame—to grow up, I mean. Ruth, I know what we could do this afternoon. We could all go down to the harbor and see George. Maybe he’d lend us his sailboat, Harold’s crazy about boats.”

  “I don’t know that it’d be good for you, all that up and down motion.”

  “I don’t think it would hurt.”

  “Anyway, you know my feelings on the subject of George.” Ruth let her feelings about George show on her face. They pulled down the muscles around her mouth and shriveled her eyes. “It’s my opinion that when you divorce a man you ought to stay divorced from him and not go phoning him and asking him over all the time the way Hazel does.”

  “She feels sorry for him. He gets lonesome.”

  “Even so. It’s a matter of taste. I have nothing against George, and I have nothing against Hazel, but if they want to see each other they should never have gotten divorced. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Oh well. It doesn’t matter.” Josephine sighed imperceptibly. It was hard to talk to Ruth without coming eventually on something which was a matter of principle or good taste. Divorce, George, drunkenness, Mexicans, horse racing, leaving dirty dishes overnight, teenaged girls who giggled, motor scooters, two-piece bathing suits, dyed hair, chewing gum, not airing blankets every week and the School Board.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult for Josephine to excuse Ruth, but each time she did it anyway.

  “I bet the ocean looks nice today,” she said.

  “The rest of you can go down if you want to. There’s nothing to stop you.”

  “There’s nothing to stop you either.”

  “I want to take the curtains down and wash them. Besides—” She left the word hanging in the air, radiating implications. Besides, there was the Mexican, he couldn’t be left alone to be lazy. And besides, she didn’t like the sea. Its soft inexorable voice spoke of violence and eternity. When she went out onto the pier where George worked, she felt the water beneath her and the water on each side of her and she always had the wild idea that the sky itself was part of the ocean and ready to drop down on her and slowly and gently drown her. Watching the sea gave her a feeling of expansion and disintegration inside her.

  “Besides,” she said after a time, “there’s too much to be done around the house.”

  She rose briskly, unable to resist her own bait. Some­thing would have to be done about something, and every­thing about everything, and right now. Like a profes­sional soldier ready to take up arms against anyone, for any reason, she marched out into the back yard on the offensive.

  Escobar was on his knees digging out a root of wild morning glory with a knife. He looked up at her, squint­ing.

  “Those are flowers,” Ruth said. “What are you digging them up for?”

  “The lady of the house said on the phone to plant gardenias on this side,”

  “Gardenias.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Gardenias. You’d think she was made of money. How much—how much do they cost?”

  “For the one-gallon size, maybe about five dollars.”

  “How many did she tell you to plant?”

  “Six. She likes the smell, she said, ma’am.”

  “Six, That’s thirty dollars. She must be out of her mind.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You mustn’t do it, until I get a chance to talk to her . . . Geraniums are plenty good enough. Some people get ideas beyond their pocketbooks. Some people think money grows on trees.” She let out a sudden harsh laugh. “For you it does. That’s funny. For you money grows on trees.”

  A spot of bright pink appeared in the center of her throat, as if someone had, with malicious accuracy, aimed a spoonful of paint at her. Knowing the spot was there, she covered it with her hand while Escobar wiped off his knife on his brand-new levis. His wife had told him to wear his old ones and he was sorry now that he hadn’t; it was a dirty job.

  At noon, sitting with his back propped against the wall of the house, he ate his sandwiches and drank the warm Pepsi-Cola. Then he washed his face with the hose and dried it with his bandana.

  A pile of weeds burned slowly in the yard. There was no open flame but the pile was diminishing, eaten away at the core, and the smoke rose thin and straight into the windless sky.

  When Hazel came home after doing the weekend shopping she noticed with satisfaction that the eugenia hedge had been clipped, the yard raked, and the orange tree pruned, but Escobar was nowhere in sight.

  She opened the screen door and went inside.

  “Ruth,” she called. “Hey, Ruth! Where’s the Mexican gone?”

  A gentle moan slid through the house. It seemed to come from nowhere and to mean nothing, except that somewhere, in any of the six rooms, something was still half-alive.

  “Ruth, where are you?”

  A second sound, louder and more definite than the first. Hazel tracked it down to the locked door of the bathroom.

  “Anything the matter, Ruth?”

  “No.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “What on earth are you crying about?”

  “No, no—”

  On the other side of the locked door, Ruth leaned her head against the medicine chest over the wash basin. The tap was turned on, and the tears slid down her cheeks and dripped off her chin to mingle with the tap water.

  Ruth opened her eyes. She saw Hazel’s toothbrush and her own, blurred and magnified by tears, and the blotches of tooth powder on the mirror, and the smudge of fingers around the catch of the medicine chest. I really must wipe things off, I must wipe—

  “Ruth, are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought—”

  “I’m all right.”

  And she was. She was not crying. From some inner reservoir filled to capacity the overflow dribbled out. She did not weep passionately and convulsively as Josephine had been doing lately. Ruth’s tears were without cause, without meaning.

  I am not crying. It’s my eyes, they get so dry some­times. They feel so small and shriveled, they need moisture. This is desert country, Harold, and don’t you forget it. The sun pours down, day after day. My eyes get dry and dusty.

  “I bought a couple of pounds of ground round,” Hazel said. “We can have meat loaf. Then if there’s any left over we can make some sandwiches tonight in case Mr. Cooke drops in.”

  “All right.”

  Meat loaf. The oven would be on. The hot dry air would seep out of its cracks and the hot dry air would pour in the windows from outside. Her eyeballs would feel crisp and hard, like little dried peas.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Ruth said. “I’m bathing my eyes, they felt gritty.”

  Everything in the house was gritty, though she dusted every day. There was a school playground across the street, and t
he faintest breeze swept up the dust and wafted it into the neighboring houses. The children didn’t seem to mind the dust. Ruth watched them often from the windows of the living room. Some of the younger ones flung themselves boisterously into the dirt as if it were clean white snow. They sat in it, they threw it at each other, they scooped it up in their hands, they ate it mixed with ice cream, bubble gum, lollipops and peanut butter sandwiches.

  It was August now and the children were not in classes, but they arrived at the playground early in the morning to play. The school, built to resist earthquakes, was a one-story L-shaped structure with all the classrooms opening on to an outside corridor. This corridor was asphalt, ideal for roller skating, and the long summer days echoed with the steady whirr of roller skates punctuated by sharp rhythmic clacking as the wheels slid over the cracks in the pavement. The playground was to Ruth, at first, an interminable chaos of noise which tore at her ears in a merciless, meaningless way. But she had gradually learned to distinguish the sounds and finally to identify them and speculate about them. The teeter-totter squeaked and banged, and Ruth could tell, from listening to the rhythm of the bang-squeak-bang, whether the children on the teeter-totter were the same size or not. If the rhythm was uneven Ruth wondered whether she should go over to the playground and tell the heavier child to sit further toward the center of the teeter-totter, but she never went.

  The teeter banged, the swings creaked, the basketballs plopped, wide of the net, the flying rings gave off a brassy clang, and the children communicated naturally with each other by shouts and screams. A hundred times a day the derisive chant of I’m-the-king-of-the-castle filled the air. The tune was always the same, no matter how the words varied: Can’t catch a flea . . . Billy’s got a girlfriend . . . Brown Brown went to town, with his britches up­side down . . . Red red wet the bed wipe it up with gingerbread . . . Lewis is a stinker . . . Helen is a tattletale . . . Rita is a garlic face . . .

  Every time the chant rose, Ruth’s heart cringed and she thought, cruel, children are cruel, I must not let it bother me. I must ignore everything.