No moment between us should be as conflicted as so many of ours have been, and continue to be.
I take comfort in what we know to be true, holding it fast in these growing hours of separation; it is not the separation, but the resolution of what could no longer be sustained, that matters now.
And that is an acknowledgment of the depth of what we have shared. And an expression of hope that ours will in some time be a time without such conflict.
She won’t write you back, of course; at this point you don’t expect it. But you will keep writing her. Just as Marilyn insists that you should keep writing Penny, keep tapping on that closed door. If you stop writing, then it truly is over. She truly is lost to you. Time will erase her, these years, just as time has begun to erase Jack’s years. And you. Time might be starting to erase you. That last one could be a mercy.
Kerr’s trying to soothe Bess. He assures her the day will end soon; he promises her a warm blanket and sweet hay back home at Odd Fellows’. He adores the old mare, you see this now.
—And there will be apples, he tells her.—The crispest red apples you ever did set your eyes upon.
Fire swept over this corner of the cemetery some years back. It charred the wooden markers. A lucky few have stones. One of the massive Chinese burial grounds lies ahead. To your left, rain has washed loose earth downhill, has stripped so much sandy soil from the graves that in one place you glimpse what might be exposed bone. You look away. Someone has scattered coffin handles and the fragments of an altar along the path. You’ll have to be careful not to let Bess step on them.
—This still the right way? Kerr’s voice is fading.
—I’m not sure, you say, and you keep going.
That might be the story of your life: Is this the right way? Not sure; keep going.
1:30 p.m.
Lucy
THAT LETTER YOU WROTE BACK in February asking Henry to stay away was the only true letter you’ve mailed him. You dropped it in the post the day after Blue’s eighth birthday.
You wrote that it was over. You asked him to let go and not look back.
In the last paragraph, you added:
You have been so many things to me. I think you have been more things to me than I was to you. I hope the ways we tried to care for each other will form a catch basin that holds what we have known. Thank you, whatever comes.
You’ve tried composing additional letters since then. They never amount to much. Your sentences falter, just like your footing falters now as you steer Blue away from the cottage, shepherd her around the standing water. Pray your daughter doesn’t spot any more living things that need rescuing. Pray you don’t either.
You never finish the letters you start to Henry. You never vault past the first line. The words don’t land right. Then there’s the never-ending matter of where you’d mail them.
The salutation is the first culprit. It does you in every time. Dear Henry. The phrase sounds wrong. Dear H. Better, but still. How about just H.
What to write after that? How does anyone write—or say—anything?
I’m going to die for loneliness of you. After that, what is there?
I love you, I miss you, I cannot have you; I release you.
I love you, I miss you, I cannot have you; please release me.
I need you to let go, I can’t bear for you to leave me. Or Blue. What about Blue, Henry?
You never mail any of those thoughts to him, that circuitous madness. You set the attempts aside.
Blue darts ahead. You’ve left the estate to hike east on Point Lobos Avenue toward the turnoff for the cemetery. She barrels forward, costume intact, sheriff on the move. You’ll allow her to speed forward; you’ll permit her the distance, so long as she maintains her pace.
—I don’t look back, you told Henry, explaining your philosophy, your worldview, your wishful thinking, when he asked once if you regretted the decision to be with him. You weren’t sure deciding was even what you’d done. You’d stepped toward him, and then you’d taken another step, and then another. And then one day you looked up and ten years were gone.
—You don’t look back? Not ever? he said.
—No. Looking back is a poor proposition.
Blue swivels around and extends her hand.
—Mama. Hurry.
Take her hand; let her think she’s leading. She might be.
Henry’s letters have continued to arrive. His handwriting tells you more about how he’s doing than his sentences. When the penmanship resists deciphering, he’s closing in on despair. When the words are pressed hard into the paper, he’s angry but trying not to show it. Long looping p’s and y’s mean he misses you; he would give five years of his life for a single night with you in his bed. Or with him in your bed. These arrangements can grow confusing. You have saved the letters because what else can you do? Toss them? Someday, if you live long enough to be old (you feel old now), you will pull that memento box out from its hiding place. For what purpose are you saving his jottings? You’ve become a taxidermist of words, tagging and dating your collection, manipulating his letters into lifelikeness, the facsimile of a legitimate union. Then you shove everything under the bed and try to forget it.
That juvenile owl you stuffed, that first animal, a lifetime ago, after you finished with it, Mr. Claude applauded and said:
—You gave it a new soul.
You can’t tolerate the sight of yourself from those years, from 1887, or ’88, or ’89, or ’90. All those years with and without Henry. They are adding up: 1891, ’92, ’93, ’94, ’95, ’96. You don’t want to remember yourself young, don’t want to remember the day those photographs were taken at the Pacific Ocean Beach Gallery. The smell of lacquer inside the gallery, which catered to tourists, made your eyes tear. You wanted to leave; you did not want to be documented with him; you were skittish, afraid someone would recognize him and wonder who you were.
—It’s all right, Henry said.—We’ll have the photographer take two pictures. One of you and one of me. We don’t have to pose together. But I can’t survive without a picture of you.
You relented; you allowed it; then, when the tintypes were ready, when Henry handed them back to you—because he realized he could not risk taking your likeness home, because he could not risk taking his own likeness home either, lest it spark questions—when he handed them over, preserved in their cheap paper sleeves, two discrete portraits, separate for all time, you wept.
—This is how it will be for us, you said to him.
Why would you want to remember that?
Why recall any of it? How you could not stop touching him, how your body sprang from its cage toward him, how you walked him up and down Ocean Beach under a shared umbrella after leaving the gallery near Forty-Ninth and B Streets under rain so fine it floated. Flecks of sea dust ornamented his hair.
—I should leave, he said, halfway down the beach, the flags of the Cliff House snapping behind him.—I should leave and not come back.
—No, you said; you begged.—No, don’t. Don’t leave me, Henry. Not yet.
Why would you want to remember so much happiness? Was it happiness? Yes. In that moment, it was. Did you recognize it as such? No. You stood on the outside. You still stand there. Having once crossed, a woman cannot go back over. And how will you look back at yourself? You can’t do it now, ten years on. How much harder will it be when you are forty, fifty, sixty if you live that long? One minute you’re twenty-one and fleeing Omaha; the next you’re thirty-two, assistant to a taxidermist, no husband, no money, no family beyond your mother save a dead cousin and a living daughter, your beloved, true and tried, your Blue, to whom you have lied by omission and who’s about to learn the truth about her parents, whatever that means, whatever that requires her to shoulder.
She charges through sand. She tromps in those dreadful boy’s boots, tips her cowboy hat back so she can see in front of her. She’s lean and slight. Tall for her age. She’ll have her father’s height. She’ll have
his height, his legs, his knees, his intelligence masquerading as quiet.
—Ma? What about Mr. Stone? she asks, out of nowhere.
—What about him? you say, too curtly.
She falls silent, forgets you, forgets him, scampers forward. Ten minutes to the cemetery.
J. B. Stone is an idea. Nothing more. The idea of a man who would belong to you, and you to him. Someone to claim you. Someone you could call your own. If J. B. Stone stood before you right now, he would link arms with you and with Blue; he’d talk quietly, in a plainspoken way, eyes alive with interest. He would laugh out loud.
But Henry used to laugh sometimes too.
What would you say to J. B. Stone if he wanted to see more of you? How would you explain yourself, who you are, where you have spent your heart’s blood? I’m extricating myself. Yes. You could say that. But if this is extrication, what does entanglement look like?
It was always and only Henry. Even now that it’s not, it still is.
Marilyn
WOODEN STAKES PIERCE THE DUNES. The way north presents an obstacle course of leaning fences, fallen crosses, thistles and thorns.
Find Henry.
Catch your husband putting in the plants this year. He won’t want to be caught. It will serve as the equivalent of him stumbling upon you doing something highly personal, like what happened last week.
He barged in while you were examining an itching mole on your left shoulder. You had unbuttoned your dress and pulled your arms out of the muttonchop sleeves. After yanking the material past your corset, nearly to the waist, you positioned yourself so you could study the worrisome spot in the mirror. Henry breezed in looking for his reading glasses. He took one look at your bare breasts in the mirror and walked out, closing the door behind him.
—I’ll come back, he said.—Sorry.
—Wait, you said to the shutting door. You felt a whisper of cold air across your breasts. You almost said it twice. Wait. Wait. But pride shushed you. Henry feigned not hearing. Either that, or he really didn’t hear. His footsteps faded as he retreated to the parlor. His eyeglasses stayed on the shelf.
You tried to return to inspecting the mole. You could hear him opening and shutting desk drawers, hunting for stationery, tapping the lid of his inkwell. He was unsettled. You looked at your breasts in the mirror. Used to be, they were quite something.
Ida has chewed her bottom lip raw.
—You ought to stop doing that, you tell her.—You’ll tear the skin.
—I’m sorry.
—No need to say you’re sorry. Do you think you can make it to the mariners?
—Yes, ma’am. Who are they?
Beneath the Maria Kip uniform, Ida’s own breasts have started to develop. You notice such things out here in the middle of nowhere, notice them without wanting to notice, without trying, out here where no life exists except what a person brings in, what she carries. The girl’s slim frame is regal and steady. Despite her physical challenges, she enjoys flawless posture. You could balance all of Luther’s dogmatics on top of this girl’s head and she wouldn’t drop them; she wouldn’t lose a page.
—The mariners are buried at the northern end of the cemetery. It’s still a little ways away, you say.
—I can do it, she vows.
How? On her leg that doesn’t work right? On stubbornness? On youthfulness? Yes.
You reach out a hand to steady her.
—I’m fine, she bleats, flinging out an arm to keep you away.
She’s frustrated now; she caught that from you. And she’s tough, tougher than Mrs. Wood knew. She’ll leave that orphanage one day. She’ll make it out, to work in a factory, most likely. A sewing shop. She has the hands. Look at them: long fingers. She won’t marry. She’ll slide into spinsterhood sewing pockets into trousers and seams into shirtwaists. She’ll return to her boarding house each night to a cat and a cup of soup as outside her window, downtown streetlamps flicker on at sunset. That might not be the end of the world. It might not be bad at all.
She’ll stay awake. She won’t fall asleep to her life.
Two days ago you accidentally found a letter Henry had left in the far corner of the third drawer of his desk. You thought it was one of his updates to Penny, so you picked it up. You kept reading even after you realized he didn’t intend it for your sister.
Dear One:
Let me try this again. What I try to say gets lost because we have an obligatory dance that I hope one day will disappear. Anything that gets said is a potential for misunderstanding because both of us are on edge. But perhaps time helps.
I recall your acknowledgment that you miss me, and my confirmation of that for myself about you. Somewhere I hope we will begin to relax to the point of just talking, and possibly even hearing each other. How I miss the conversation, the movement of you as you walk across the room, the warmth of your touch. You reprise the role of the one who is always alone, even as I sit saying that that is not really necessarily so. And so it winds up being a lot for a single conversation.
Did you tell him you missed him? You must have. You can’t remember when, but you must have said it, or he wouldn’t have written it down. Also, by saying wait during your self-inspection of that mole on your shoulder, you were admitting you missed him. Weren’t you? Though not in so many words. By calling out to that closing door, you were saying, Come back.
Then again, he hasn’t actually given you the letter. Maybe he’s saving it for the right moment. Is he shy? No. Romantic? No. Reserved, preoccupied, occasionally pedantic? Yes. Did he write the letter for you? Or for someone else?
You looked up from the page.
You sat in silence. You studied your hands.
There were those petty-cash withdrawals. Those Wednesdays working late. But the lateness was regular. It never varied. For ten years. Like a metronome. Who has relations at the exact same time once a week for ten years? That’s not an affair. That’s a marriage.
Besides, only you understand this back-and-forth your husband’s epistle described, this push-pull, this alone-and-not. Only you grasp how he can be both present and absent, how he stores up great paragraphs of fealty and ferocity only to shove those sentiments back in the desk drawer, unfinished.
The last part of his letter took your breath away.
If I forgot to say how stunning your hair was, or your eyes, or the way you walked across the room the last time I saw you, it was a simple sign of my paralysis in the face of your presence. Of course, that is what I would have said, had I been able to speak.
Fourteen years have passed since you made love to Henry. Fourteen years ago today, if you don’t count the three attempts that landed you at the hypnotist’s doorstep. You hardly think of him as a man anymore. He’s more of a dining-room table: functional, load-bearing, requiring sporadic cleaning, occasional upkeep. He’s like Richard, needing to be let out, needing affection (yes, you give Henry affection; no, he doesn’t recognize it as such), needing food, water, time outdoors. But you no longer touch him.
That day of the white curtains was the last. Jack lay sleeping in the nursery next door.
Henry kissed you under a canopy of bedding. His eyes held curiosity, surprise, lust. You touched him, took him in hand; your fingers felt as if they belonged to some other woman. He clutched your arms, slid on top of you, rolled on top before you could think, before you could utter a word. It was a relief. Him entering you was a relief.
When he spent himself, it was like bands of rain pounding a harbor in a storm. The outer bands arrived light and inconsequential, but the squall at the center engulfed you both, like so much rain, you could not see your hand in front of your face, like so much rain, you were sightless. When it was over you heard a lonesome sound like water dripping off the eaves, only it was not rain you heard but Henry. Rarely does he weep. He covered his face with his hands.
You curled up against him, pressed your palms again his chest, dragging the sheet with you.
—Hush, you whisper
ed, listening to his galloping heart.—Don’t cry.
—I love you, he said.—I just love you.
—Will you look in on Jack?
—Yes, he said.—Yes. Absolutely.
And you both plummeted to sleep. Bliss knocked you both out.
Fifteen minutes later, light pouring through the window, burnishing the bedposts, you awoke and you knew. What had opened was closed. And there is punishment.
You sprang from the bed as if the sheets were boiling.
—No, you cried, swallowing your awareness. You gagged, fought the urge to regurgitate. The awareness fought back. You aspirated it. Awareness flooded your lungs, your chest cavity. You flew to the door, naked, abject, still gagging, sunshine grabbing your breasts, your legs, buttocks. Henry, startled awake, sat up, feverish, blinking.
—What? he said.—What? What happened? What’s wrong?
He saw you; he apprehended the nightmare through you; he saw its silhouette. You moved by instinct. A mother knows. Something was wrong. The house was too still. You tugged at the door to the nursery. Henry leaped to join. The handle is old and it sticks. You pulled again, hair unbound, brushing the base of your spine, your nakedness exposed, breasts swaying, the wooden floor inert under your feet, the floor unearthly; you could not feel your toes.
—Move, Henry shouted, pushing you out of the way, taking on the door himself; he yanked at the handle; nothing. He attacked it again; still nothing.
—Goddamn it. He blew, stepped back, and threw his shoulder into it, trying to shock the hinges loose. He hurled himself into the wood. His shoulder would wear a bruise. The hinges squealed; the bedroom door sang open. He rocked back. You heard sounds coming from your mother’s mouth. Wait, they were not coming from your mother’s mouth, they were coming from your mouth—you and your mother had fused. Henry, recovering, staggered forward. By now you both knew. Before you saw the cradle, you grasped the truth. God must have told you. God riding His mule.
The Half Wives Page 23
