by Joan Barfoot
“And you don’t get mad?”
“Heavens, no. Why should I?”
Why indeed.
Anyway, we made a bargain: I would not make demands, and he would give. But what was he giving? Never mind. Twenty years down the road was no time to tell him I was waiting.
Oh, wasn’t I the perfect, understanding wife though?
Once, Harry brought home a man from work for a drink. They sat in the living room talking, while I tried to keep dinner from being ruined. I imagine the man’s wife was trying to do the same in their home. After a couple of hours the man stood and sighed and said, “Well, I better be getting home to the old ball and chain.”
What an ugly thing to say, a terrible way to feel. “It’s just an expression,” Harry told me later. But expressions don’t come from nowhere, and that man said that so easily, casually, about his wife. Not Harry. Not ever Harry.
“So what you’re saying is that you’re quite happy and contented and everything is tickety-boo, is that right?” A cynicism, bitterness, in the tone; so odd. And how do you answer?
“I suppose. If you want to put it that way. Harry, please let’s just drop it. I’m perfectly satisfied with my life.”
He flung up his hands. “Okay, okay. If you’re sure. I just wanted to be sure.”
I guess he really wasn’t asking about me at all that night. I guess he was really checking for permission to be free.
At home we just got in the door and he said, “I’m beat, I’m going to bed. Happy birthday, Edna.” I’d thought we might sit up for another glass of wine; and cool down from the evening and whatever was hot (and not warm) between us. But he did look weary.
I was restless still and stayed downstairs for a while, looking around. Just wandering through the rooms, staring at shining surfaces. Like my clothes: would my furniture suit my age? I approved the starkness of Rosenthal vases in the dining room and the cool beige woven couch in the living room, the simple silver frame on a mildly modern print of something not quite like what it was. I liked the smooth surfaces and the textured ones. So cool and light, my rooms.
But were they for a forty-year-old woman? Or did that matter, as long as they were tasteful? Magazines instructed in taste, and in changing tastes, changing just as the rules seemed to. I had no need for new rules, though, having embraced my own. And no need to alter simplicity for old flowery cake plates and painted vases, rough wooden tables instead of glass and chrome, heavy patterned furniture instead of light and plain. These new things were old, would have more nearly suited my parents’ home than mine. Things—tastes and rules—seemed to be going backward and forward simultaneously. Very confusing.
Probably having learned simplicity so well, I should stick to it. At forty, surely one has a right to say, “This is it.” Even if along with the satisfaction of saying that comes just a hint of death.
The daisy kitchen clock moved on past midnight, and I was into my forty-first year.
Harry was sound asleep when I went upstairs. I looked at him and wondered, “What were all those questions for? Why did he want to stir things up?” But what had he stirred up? I tossed for a while before I got to sleep.
But was up early the next morning, the morning of the first day of my forty-first year, and couldn’t quite recall the day before. It seemed an aberration. What had seemed so hard, or bad? Too many questions; and with too many questions a faltering of purpose, a betrayal. A relief to settle back on my own track.
It seemed important to demonstrate to Harry that I was fine. He needn’t worry, or even think about me. Things were as they should be, and he could go unburdened to his office. Certainly I did not want him to look at me again in quite the way he had the night before, or talk to me that way again.
Pancakes were usually for weekends when there was lots of time and lots to do; but I made pancakes that morning anyway, for proof.
“Very nice,” he said, and ate four. No questions this morning, no signs of the night before. “I’ve got to run if I want to beat the rush. See you later. I think I should be home for dinner, I’ll let you know.”
I waved good-bye and started my work. I would not think of twenty, forty years, enough to take each day.
I forgot how sad the closed-eyed music had seemed the day before, and put on an album in the afternoon, watched myself whirl on a stage, and smiled.
Later, he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it for dinner after all, but should be home by nine. “Listen, Edna,” and he laughed, “don’t ever make pancakes again on a weekday.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a gut you wouldn’t believe. Weighs a ton. I can hardly move. All I want to do is sleep.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that.”
“Shit, I was kidding.” So easily he twisted on me in recent years; and again I didn’t really notice. “They were great, it’s just when you sit on your ass all day, it’s hard to work them off. If I was home mowing the lawn, they’d be gone by now. Listen, I’ve got to get to a meeting. See you later, okay?”
So. Dinner for one. An omelette and a small salad in front of the television set; another meal without Harry, another meal at which I could watch my weight. I watched Walter Cronkite while I ate. Who was Walter Cronkite anyway? Did he have secrets, tell lies? It didn’t seem so, but the faces, it seems, are just masks for other faces.
Was I like that as well? Or was my flaw maybe just transparency?
26
The phone call from that woman; Dottie Franklin. Why would she do such a thing? One assumes malice. Maybe I deserved malice.
I knew her, of course. We’d had dinners, the four of us, she and Jack, Harry and I, and we also met at parties. The first time, years ago, before I met them Harry told me a little about them. He always tried to do that, give me details about people we were seeing, so I’d feel more a part of it, I suppose, or not say something wrong, or so they wouldn’t seem quite like strangers.
“Don’t, for God’s sake, talk about marriage,” he told me. Why ever would I have raised such an intimate subject anyway? But he was warning, “It’s a bad topic, especially if they have a few drinks.” Everyone always had a few drinks.
“Why?”
“Because theirs is weird and if you get them started, it’ll all turn into a brawl.”
“But what’s the matter?”
“Who knows?” He raised his eyebrows, spread his palms towards me, shrugged. “Probably a lot of things. The obvious one is that Jack’s a bit of a chaser, and every year or so he takes up with somebody for a while until he does something stupid, I don’t know, goes home with blonde hairs on his jacket maybe, and Dottie finds out. Then they have a hell of a row and heave things around and then they make up, sort of, until the next time.”
“But that’s terrible. Why do they stay together if it’s so awful?” Astonished that people might yell and throw dishes and live in the midst of betrayal.
“Probably because they like it that way. It’s never one person’s fault, you know.” No, I don’t suppose it is. “Jack’s not such a bad guy, it’s just the way he is. And in their way, they get along. Maybe they like fighting, maybe they get off on it.”
And when we met them, it did seem they got along. Jack wasn’t sharp and bright, not like Harry, but he did have an easy sort of charm, I could see his type. He might be attractive, if one were inclined to casualness.
And he and Dottie had little married jokes, small verbal nudges, and grinned at each other, and if there was a hard sort of undercurrent, maybe I only heard it because I knew to listen for it.
“We were lucky,” Harry said afterward. “They weren’t too bad tonight.”
I remember looking at her, though, and feeling sorry for her. And I must confess a straightening of my spine, a pride that Harry and I were different.
If she phoned out of malice, that’s understandable.
But unforgivable if it was done with pity. If it was true that she thought it only “fair” to t
ell me. If, as she lifted the receiver, dialled, she thought, “Poor Edna.”
“It was just by accident Jack saw them,” she told me. “He happened to glance out the car window as he was going past her apartment building and there they were in the parking lot. Kissing.
“And after all, at eight o’clock in the morning, what other explanation could there be?
“I thought you ought to know. I thought it would be only fair.”
One thing I thought during my twelve long hours of thinking, fixed on that wall of gold-flecked white wallpaper: that the unique, flamboyant, clever, driving Harry, who hadn’t made it home last night, could have committed such an ordinary, clichéd, banal little sin. That he could have been trapped in one of my magazine articles, that is how ordinary he turned out to be, and that was a betrayal, too.
If he were going to do such a thing, which I wouldn’t have dreamed, but if I had dreamed, it would have been with someone more exotic, unreachable, someone more a challenge. Not just the person closest to hand.
Harry’s hands were on her. Every pore of my skin ached, seeing that.
When Harry hired her he said, “I can’t believe how she’s just moved in and taken over. She’s very young to be so confident.”
“She makes your work easier then?”
“You bet. It’s only been a week and she knows where everything is and who to put off and who to get back to right away and she’s not a pain in the ass about it, she doesn’t have to keep coming to me with questions.” He laughed. “In another couple of weeks I won’t have to go in at all, she’ll be taking care of everything. You have no idea how rare it is to find somebody you can depend on.”
Well, I thought I had some idea.
“Of course,” he said, “she’s been in the company for a year so she understands how the operation works. But still, it’s not often you find somebody who just does her job and does it right and isn’t bugging you all the time.”
When we were first introduced one day when I went to the office to meet Harry after work, there was nothing about her that made me notice her particularly. Nothing that said she was efficient or remarkable or anything at all. She was pretty enough, but not beautiful, but I hadn’t expected her to be beautiful. When Harry spoke of her skills, I assumed she did not have beauty. He would have mentioned that.
The day we met, her blonde hair was pulled back and not glamorous, although later I sometimes saw her with it down, curling around her shoulders. The only make-up she wore that I could see was a slash of lipstick. She was wearing a white blouse tucked not very carefully into a tailored grey skirt, a grey suit jacket slung over the back of her chair. Proper office wear, I suppose, although not something I would have chosen. Too stark. Blue eyes, but set a little too far apart, and a nose just a shade too flat. Wide mouth, and a plump chin that would likely double some day, if she weren’t careful.
If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can hear the sounds of my heartbeat and my pulse. I can almost hear the blood in the veins and arteries. There are shifting patterns of lights and shapes against my eyelids, and I can almost begin to feel how it all works, the internal intricacies. Could I trace the dangling, disconnected pieces?
Admirable, how the body goes on, performing its own routines, whatever is going on outside. It may speed or slow in a mild response, but basically it keeps functioning. Blood winds to the smallest places, food and drink are pulverized and acidized and moved, shifted, absorbed, the nerves send impulses, knowledge and memory leap in the brain, it all goes on. Hair and toenails grow and are clipped and then grow again.
I wish I could live as blindly and dumbly as the hair and toenails, I wish I could restore my ignorance. I would like to be a drop of blood, or a heartbeat.
When I called him at the office, she always said, “Oh hello, Mrs. Cormick, I’ll just ring through and make sure he’s not in a meeting.” If he was on another line and I had to wait, she’d come back on and say, “He’ll just be a minute. How are you? We haven’t seen you for a while,” and I could say to her, “I’m just fine, how are things going there?”
It didn’t mean a thing, but that’s just it: she was cheerful, friendly, and ordinary, and didn’t mean a thing.
Really, I knew nothing about her except what Harry said: that she was quick and efficient and the best secretary he had ever had. Dear God, I expect that was true. I could even feel sorry for her. That she was in her middle twenties and worked at what must be really a dreary sort of job, you would think: typing, taking dictation and orders. “Does she have a boyfriend? Is she engaged?” I asked Harry. “No, she says she isn’t interested in settling down.” It was not a matter of settling down, as far as I could see. It was a matter of being safe and purposeful, not drifting.
Apparently she cared neither for her own safety nor for mine. Much less Harry’s. I cannot imagine such a woman. Even Dottie Franklin is more comprehensible, her cruelty more human.
How did she feel, talking to me on the phone, seeing me occasionally in the office, seeing Harry hold my elbows and kiss my cheek? How did that feel to her? Did she not care when we went out of the office together, going to dinner, just the two of us? Did she know things, did he tell her things, that made it unimportant? How was she able to speak cheerfully and normally to me on the telephone? Was she feeling sorry for me? Laughing? I may, of course, be wrong, because I have been wrong about a number of things, but I didn’t feel or hear pity or laughter in her voice. She must have been cruel, though. Only a cruel person could play with other people’s lives, and if she was, as Harry said, not interested in permanence, she must have been just playing.
She may understand that even games have consequences. I wonder if she is a bit afraid to live now?
But if she was cruel, what was Harry? He came home every night (almost every night) to me. He touched my body and ate the meals I cooked and wore the shirts I washed and ironed and walked over the rugs I vacuumed and put on the suits I picked up from the cleaners, and all the time he knew.
Did he, with me, think of her?
He let me lie beside him in the dark and say “I love you,” and he said it back, and all the time he knew.
Who can imagine so much cruelty? A Hitler of the spirit, my loving Harry.
I can’t see what it was. I picture her and all the times I saw her and all the times we spoke, and I can’t imagine at all what it was that let her skim so carelessly over me and through my life.
Was it just that she was convenient and young? Was it only years that made the difference?
Here I have not exercised for months. There’s no possibility of watching my diet, I eat what I am given. I have no use for make-up, no one to impress or from whom to hide lines. There is no reason to wear scarves around my throat, or darker shades of stockings to make my legs look slimmer than they are. I don’t need, in the late afternoons, to change my clothes for something more attractive. I do not even need to be sure that slacks and blouses match.
There is no reason to look into a mirror. Except to notice changes.
I am, perhaps, coming to look my age. I am sure I must look more than forty, and I may look forty-three. As I suspected, it happens quickly, when it happens.
I can’t quite make out the whole effect. The woman who comes around each week to wash and set my hair (and all the others’, too) twists it back with flying hands until it’s all pinned down and set there. “Very chic and smart it makes you look, dear,” she tells me, standing back and looking at her work. I don’t know. I see only dark and greying hairs pulled back.
I can see, though, that for all the stuffy food and lack of exercise, there does appear to be some drawing in of skin around the bones. The skin itself is almost translucent, a kind of glowing paleness that might nearly shine in the dark, one would think. There is a caving in of sorts. I find my clothes hang oddly, loosely; like my mother stumping around in her oversized boots, going out to hang the wash. My eyes, blue in the midst of brownish-grey skin around them, peer. And
in return, I sometimes notice people, visitors, staring at me.
What are they looking at? What do they see? Something odd, off balance? Some mark of what I did?
I try to count my grey hairs to see if there are more, but I keep losing track. It’s so frustrating, not to be able to do what should be such a simple thing.
Sometimes I do get angry, having to start again and again.
27
Very soon now, it’s going to be spring. This will be the third season since the event, which seems to have moved back so far in time, and also to be rolling up ahead again. I am a different person. Like being born in a late July night. An ugly birth that is, my life from his, a terrible thing. I should feel guilt and grief. I feel a little badly that I can’t feel those things. The newborn Edna seems somewhat deformed.
It is difficult to remember that other one. Who spent years thoughtlessly and randomly, for all their order. At the time, it wasn’t so hard. It’s seeing that’s hard, not blindness. I had my books and magazines and work and Harry, and the music, and it gets easier, not harder, to take for granted and not think. You don’t even notice.
Now here I am, reduced to me, this pen, and this notebook, which appears to be less but may be more. And a great problem approaches: that this place, which looked so large and limitless when I began, is now becoming tight and dull. I don’t quite know where to go from here.
I have examined enamel in sinks, complexions of people, myself minutely. I have kept up with imperfections. I have written precisely, if too often off the track. My notebooks are stacked neatly in the drawers of my half of the bureau. I have considered leaves and roses and the doctor. I have taken apart a pen to see how it works. I have peered until new lines have sprung up around my eyes. I have noted paint chipped from the corridors and the black numbers on the doorway to this room. I have kept my posture straight, my ankles neatly crossed. I have walked and run and noted the muscles pulling in each move. I have eaten hundreds of meals, I have eaten every kind of meal they have here, and the textures, colours, the variations are so minute now that despite myself I begin to wonder.
