Three Women at the Water's Edge (15 page)

“Am I walking too fast for you, Daisy?” Margaret said, turning and waiting for Daisy to catch up. “I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to rush ahead.” And she took Daisy’s arm and hugged her to her. But Daisy responded warily; she had decided that her feelings were hurt. This wasn’t fair! In fact she was jealous of her mother for the moment, because her mother looked so good and had had such a smile from that handsome man—and he had certainly been closer to Daisy’s age than to Margaret’s. As they walked through the parking lot, Margaret chatted about the people she wanted Daisy to meet, and Daisy thought how complicated this week was going to be. What she wanted was her mother’s wholehearted concentration and assistance; and it was beginning to look as though it would be a task just to get Margaret’s attention.

The car, sitting docilely on the flat cement of the parking lot, was another surprise. It was a small bright-blue Mercedes 280S convertible.

“Wow,” Daisy said. “Mother, how much did this thing cost?”

“Not all that much more than those enormous station wagons I used to drive,” Margaret said, expertly stashing the luggage behind the front seats and sliding into the car. “Besides, you know we’ve always had money, we just never felt wicked enough to spend it on luxuries. Furthermore,” she added, grinning mischievously, “I bought it secondhand, from a friend, so it didn’t cost what you might think.”

Daisy settled her girth into the car and stared frankly at her mother as she maneuvered the car out of the lot, and down into the traffic of the highway. “This area is called Delta,” Margaret was saying. “If you look carefully to your left, you can barely see the outline of the Coast Mountains in the distance. It will take about an hour to get into the heart of Vancouver, so you won’t see anything spectacular for a while. There’s mostly farmland around here, and peat bogs and such.”

“Mother,” Daisy interrupted her, “why did you change? How did you change so much? I just can’t believe this is you.”

Margaret was quiet for a while, then said, softly, “Oh, well, let’s do go ahead and talk about it. Then when we get into Vancouver we’ll be able to concentrate on the scenery. All right.” She went quiet and Daisy could see her face tensing as she gathered her thoughts. “I want to share my new life with you, but I don’t like discussing any of the past; it makes me so irritable, thinking about the past. It’s—it’s just very hard. Nevertheless, you probably do deserve some sort of explanation. I must seem very different to you—I
am
different. The last time we were together for any length of time was when I came to help you when Jenny was born and Danny was just two. Then I was still a fat old matron. The perfect grandmother. Two years ago—well, it doesn’t bear dwelling on, the past, the time I’ve wasted. There I was, old and fat and respectable, and I can tell you the exact moment my life changed. Do you remember Dee-Dee Lubbock, whose father was the minister at the Baptist church? Dee-Dee was just about Dale’s age, in fact I think she was in Dale’s class at school. I never got along with Dee-Dee’s mother Wanda; I never could forgive her for naming a child Dee-Dee; also, I always thought Wanda was sententious. Or do I mean tendentious? Probably both. Oh, you remember Wanda, she was so mawkish. And I always had to serve on the same committees for bazaars with her; it nearly drove me mad. Anyway, Dee-Dee had come over to the house one day just after Christmas two years ago and sat about awkwardly, and then started whining and weeping and puling about the fact that she was in love with Roger Mills, and he wanted to marry her but he was a Catholic, and her parents would kill her before they’d let her marry a Catholic, and could I please offer her some advice, could I please help her out in some way. So I gave her some cookies and milk, and told her I’d talk to her parents about it—I mean for heaven’s sake, Dee-Dee was already twenty-two, and a hulk of a girl, none too bright, and I thought her parents would jump for joy to have any man take her off their hands. So I sat there, listening to her go on and on, bored out of my mind—Dee-Dee was relishing her little drama, but I was not, I wanted to go back upstairs to the mystery I’d been reading. So finally I got Dee-Dee headed toward the door, and suddenly she turned to me and hugged me a big hot hug, and she said—she said, oh, God, it hurts every time I say it. She told me that she just adored me, she just idolized me, that she was so glad I lived in that town. She said she always thought of me as Mrs. Santa Claus.
Mrs. Santa Claus
. Good God. Well, I thanked her for her compliments, and shoved her out the door and went upstairs to my room, and instead of getting back into bed and reading, I stood there and took a good look at myself in the mirror. And I
did
look like Mrs. Santa Claus: round, old, gray-haired, fat, jolly, repugnantly good. And I knew right then that I couldn’t stand it any longer. I couldn’t be Mrs. Santa Claus to the Dee-Dees of the world another minute of my life. I grabbed my purse and got in the station wagon and drove all the way to Iowa City and went right to the Elaine Powers Figure Salon.”

“Mother!” Daisy gasped. “You
didn’t
!”

“Yes,” Margaret said, and she was beginning to smile a bit now. “I did. I thought I would die when those skinny young women came at me with the tape measure, but I wrote them a check for a twelve-week course, I gave them the full amount, just to keep myself from backing out. Then I went out and bought a leotard and tights, and I went to the library and checked out books on health and nutrition and beauty and diet and exercise, and I signed up at the university for the Monday night art-film series they were offering. And then, then—I just kept changing. Poor Harry. He came home that night and sat there eating his roast beef and mashed potatoes and peas and white rolls and butter, and I sat there eating celery, and he couldn’t stand it. ‘I can’t enjoy my food if you aren’t eating the same thing,’ he told me. I told him that was silly. I told him I had decided I had to lose weight for the sake of my health. I told him that as a physician he should know how dangerous excess fat was. But he
hated
it that I was dieting, and every time I lost a pound, he hated it more. He hated it when I drove into Iowa City every day to the exercise salon, and he hated it when I went to the film course on Monday nights. I argued that I wasn’t gone any more from the house than I usually was, except that now I was doing something for myself instead of attending school or church meetings, but he said that when I was at the church or school meetings I was still with him somehow, because I was with the community we lived in.

“We went on that way for about a year. I kept losing weight, slowly and steadily; I joined the YWCA in Iowa City and went in twice a week to swim. God, Daisy, do you realize I hadn’t been swimming for about fifteen years? Well, I kept swimming and exercising and dieting, and one day I looked at myself and saw that I’d lost about thirty pounds and was beginning to look—diffe
rent. And Sonja, the manager of the beauty salon, had gotten to like me. I mean I was a big help to her business, you can imagine, she told everyone how I’d looked before; she put my charts up on the wall to encourage everyone. She was really proud of me. In a year I lost thirty pounds and about thirty inches—ten off my waist, five off my bust, five off my hips, two off each thigh and arm. Well, Sonja suggested that I do something with my hair. That I have it set differently, that I
dye
it. I was shocked at first, but then I grew to like the idea, so I got the name of a good beautician from Sonja, and went to her. She suggested that I let my hair grow out, and she dyed it this color—this is the color it was originally, when I was younger—and she cut it this way, so that it would just fall loosely about my head, instead of standing up in those militant little gray springs I had worn all my life. And I sat there in the beauty shop, staring at this new woman in the mirror, and I began to cry. I was frightened, I’ll admit it. That was my greatest feeling—fear. Mrs. Santa Claus had been a boring role to play, but it certainly had been safe! But with my new brown hair and my almost slender body, I saw that I didn’t have to play Mrs. Santa Claus anymore, that I could start being myself, whoever that was.

“Oh, well, then I went home, and Harry was there, and he was so upset when he saw my hair that he almost had a heart attack. I’m not being frivolous when I say that. He went purple in the face and had to lie down. I ran upstairs and got a scarf and wrapped it around my head. For a long while he had been trying to convince himself that I was just going through a menopausal fit of weirdness, but that I would eventually return to normal. When he saw my hair, he knew I had really made some kind of definite change. And when I saw his reaction, I realized that I would have to make an even greater change in my life. I would have to leave Harry, leave Liberty. And the thought made me absolutely giddy, drunk with relief, discovery, hope—Oh, what a crazy night that was! Harry couldn’t stop yelling and arguing, and I couldn’t stop smiling to myself. I can’t explain it, Daisy,” Margaret said, and took her eyes off the road for one long moment to stare at her daughter. “You know I have always loved your father. But suddenly I knew I couldn’t live with him a minute longer. I couldn’t stand the way my life was for one more minute, and I knew that Harry wouldn’t want to change,
couldn’t
change if he wanted to. He was so completely happy in his life. So I told him I wanted to take a little vacation out to Vancouver to visit Miriam—she was my closest friend all through high school, and had married and moved out here, and I don’t know why I decided to come see her, it just came over me. Perhaps it was the only place I had to go. Harry hoped that the trip would do me good, would make me come to my senses. Well, you know the rest. I flew out here, stayed for two months, made a down payment on the house, flew back to talk things over with Harry and to gather up what few belongings I wanted to keep from my former life, and left.”

“Poor Daddy,” Daisy said. “He must have felt as though a tornado had struck.”

“Yes,” Margaret said. “He was very bitter. And toward the end I unfortunately became rather bitter in return. I was not very nice, I’ll admit it. I said many things that possibly should have gone unsaid. But I was fighting for my life. I think that if there had been a snowstorm that day that Dee-Dee Lubbock called me Mrs. Santa Claus, or if the car had had a flat tire, or if something had stopped me from getting out of Liberty and into that exercise salon in Iowa City, I would have gotten your father’s old army revolver down from the closet and put a bullet through my head.”

“Oh, Mother,” Daisy whispered, appalled. “Was your life really so bad?”

Margaret looked over at her daughter with unsympathetic eyes. “Daisy,” she said, “
please
don’t start crying. I cannot tell you how tired I am of having people cry around me. No wonder I was so fat and bloated, I was always absorbing all that extra moisture from the air. What you’re asking me is not was my life really so bad, but was it so bad when you were home, when you and Dale were growing up, being my little girls. No, my life was not bad then. I was happy. I felt wanted and needed and secure, and you girls both gave me great joy. But you’ve been gone for over ten years, Daisy, and Dale’s been gone for six. So don’t feel sorry for yourself, don’t try to make yourself into some kind of unloved child. I won’t put up with that. I loved you, I loved you both, I loved being your mother. But I’ve changed, and although that doesn’t affect the love I felt for you when you were little, it does affect our relationship now. I feel that for the first time in my life I’m living according to
my
principles,
my
values; and I’d like to show you what they are. It’s too late for me to instill them in you, you’re no longer an impressionable child. So you’ll have to get to know me as an adult. I’d like to stop being your mother. I’d like to start being your friend.”

“Well,” Daisy said. “Damn.”

“Damn?” Margaret asked. “Why damn?”

“Because if I ever needed a mother instead of a friend, it’s now. Paul’s left me. We’re getting a divorce. He’s fallen in love with another woman and he’s moving to California with her.” Daisy stared straight ahead at the road as she spoke, and she felt tense all over as she waited for her mother’s reply.

“Oh, dear,” Margaret said, and took her eyes off the road for one minute to study Daisy. “Why didn’t you tell me before now? My goodness. Divorce. Well, Daisy, how do you feel about all that?”

Daisy could only laugh. “How do I
feel
about it? Well, I feel
terrible,
of course. I’m sad and I’m angry and I’m scared to death. I’m almost thirty years old and I’m overweight and I’m going to have three little children to take care of all by myself. And Paul wants me to sell the house so he can have half the equity, and I don’t have anywhere to live, and I’ve got no one to take care of me—and I’m terrified. I’m absolutely terrified. I wanted my life to have meaning, to be all of a piece, I wanted to be part of a family—and now everything’s just in a mess. I’m miserable.”

“Well, now,” Margaret said, “I’m not sure that’s the right attitude to take—”