Three Women at the Water's Edge (22 page)

Dale knelt next to her sister, staring, frightened, wanting Daisy to open her eyes and wake up and be happy again. She gently touched Daisy’s shoulder. But Daisy was drifting into sleep. Well, if there was nothing else she could do, Dale thought, she could at least keep her sister from being cold; and she crossed to the bed and took the blankets and the afghan off and covered Daisy with them, head to toe. She covered her sister who, like an enormous swollen child, lay naked and vulnerable on the floor, now completely asleep. Dale tucked a blanket about Daisy’s feet and ankles so that the covers wouldn’t come off in the night, so that she would keep warm all over. Then she went through the house quietly, turning off lights, putting the screen in front of the dying fire, checking the children, and finally falling on top of the guest bed, pulling part of the bedspread about her for warmth.

In the morning both sisters were cross with exhaustion. Dale sat in the kitchen in her robe, drinking instant coffee and feeling mucky and thinking that Daisy was, after all, disgusting. Daisy did look a fright, all lumpy in her sagging old robe, her hair going this way and that, her face swollen. But what repelled Dale most about Daisy were the bits of hard dried Play-Doh that littered the kitchen floor. All the bright cheerful colors—pink, yellow, blue—had been mixed together by the children into repulsive feculent tones of brown, green-gray, and puce. Daisy had managed to put most of the Play-Doh back into its little cardboard cartons, but much of it still stuck to the sides of the kitchen table or lay hideously about on the floor, with bits of cat hair stuck into it. It seemed much more than anyone should have to bear on awakening. Daisy didn’t notice the Play-Doh: she thumped around between sink and stove and refrigerator, heating little precooked sausages for the children and making them waffles from the toaster, and then eating some of the stuff herself—frozen waffles, toasted, slathered with imitation maple syrup and butter. Dale politely refused any of it, it made her stomach turn, she thought—all those
chemicals
, all that junk food. She sipped snobbishly at her instant coffee.

“Oh, God,” Daisy said, sinking into a chair at the table, “I’m so tired. I’ve got such a headache, and I feel like I’ve been eating onions all night. But we’ve got to talk, you know.”

“I know,” Dale said. She had to fly back to Maine that day, in the late afternoon, for her Thanksgiving vacation was over and she had to teach again tomorrow morning. Hank, Maine, the clean school, brisk Carol, her whole real life, all seemed hopelessly far away.

“Well, let’s talk a bit, and then perhaps you can help me pack,” Daisy said. “There’s so much to do I feel overwhelmed sometimes, sometimes I just don’t think I can face it. And Paul wants me to keep the house looking
presentable
for prospective buyers, but I can’t do that and pack at the same time. Not to mention the children. Anyway, they’re watching
Captain Kangaroo
now, and that should keep them occupied for an hour, then we’ll have to pay them some attention. So let’s talk now while we’ve got the chance. Tell me about Dad.”

Dale looked at Daisy; Daisy looked almost exactly like Margaret except for her mouth, her large well-spaced teeth, which were like her father’s. “I don’t know how to begin,” Dale said. “Oh, God, I am
so
tired. How late did we drink stay up last night? Maybe I’d better have a piece of toast—oh, hell, give me one of those waffles. Anyway—well, I don’t suppose we really have to
worry
about him, I mean he’s keeping his practice up and is still very busy with that. So that’s one good sign, I mean he isn’t completely falling apart. But he’s lost so much weight, and his skin looks absolutely
gray,
and he looks tired, and he looks sad. He seems defeated. He seems defeated by the smallest things: every morning when he made breakfast for me he burned the eggs and ruined the coffee and spilled the juice. I tried to fix breakfast for him, but he got irritable and said, ‘No, no, I can do it myself, I have to do it for myself all the time, you know.’ I tried to talk him into getting a maid, even a live-in lady to do his cooking and cleaning—the house is filthy, you wouldn’t believe it. But he said he was too private a person to have someone strange in the house; he said he couldn’t trust anyone. He insisted that he could take care of himself just fine. And he doesn’t go anywhere anymore, he always stays at home, watching TV or sleeping, and when I told him he should get out more often, he said, ‘Oh, I hate seeing people. I know they’re either feeling sorry for me, thinking I’m a pathetic old fool, or else they’re secretly wondering just what kind of monster I am to have driven Margaret off.’ So he’s all alone there, and the house is getting dirtier and dirtier, and there’s nothing in the refrigerator. He seems to subsist on TV dinners. Sometimes he doesn’t even go to bed at night, I mean in the bedroom, he says he hates it there all alone. He sleeps on the living room sofa, with an afghan over him. God, it’s pathetic. I told him he should sell the house and get himself something smaller, easier to keep, that that might help him psychologi
cally, but he said, ‘Oh, who do you think you are, young lady, talking that way, throwing those words around. Everyone in town knows that this is Dr. Wallace’s house, and when I bought it I intended to live in it until I died, and I still do. I’ve lost everything else, don’t ask me to give up my house.’ I’ve asked him if some of the other women—mother’s old friends—hadn’t been helpful, hadn’t wanted him to come to dinner or something, but he said that they were all such a bunch of gossipy old snoops, and he didn’t want to have a thing to do with them. Oh, Daisy, it’s so awful. He’s so pathetic. Are you sure you want to know it all?”

Daisy said yes, emphatically, and sat silent, cradling her coffee cup in her hands, listening.

Their father had cried. Four nights in a row, their father had sat in the living room and put his head in his hands and sobbed shamelessly, out of control. The first night Dale had quickly crossed the room and put her arms around her father and said, “Daddy, don’t cry, don’t cry, come on.” But that hadn’t helped, hadn’t stopped her father, and then she thought that perhaps he needed to cry. Perhaps he had not been able to cry before, perhaps he needed her, someone he could trust, there to witness his grief. But, dear Lord, it had been painful for Dale, it had made her nearly sick. To see her father, who had been like a king, a sort of god, a strong and powerful man, wise, indomitabl
e—why, he had shaped her entire life, and she had spent her grown-up years wondering if she would ever be able to meet a man her own age who was half as fine as her father—to see her father sobbing, out of control, shameless, pathetic, grief-stricken, afraid: it was perhaps not right for any daughter to see her father in such a way. A daughter can’t do what a wife does.

Dale had watched her father sobbing, his back heaving, his nose running, and at first she had been filled with a helpless pity. She had put her arms around him, soothed him; she had babbled frivolously about other, happier things, trying to turn his attention away from himself. But the next night, as they sat down together in the living room, with the large television screen flashing uselessly nearby, her father had cried again, the same way. He had cried and said that he missed Margaret, that he couldn’t bear to live without her, that he didn’t know what he was going to do. Dale’s ministrations were failures, and her grief quickly changed to impatience; her father seemed grotesque. My God, she thought, he is an adult, and it has been several months, he’s supposed to be
wise
—he’s been handing out advice and wisdom all these years as regularly as he handed out prescriptions and pills—and here he couldn’t begin to handle himself. Was he a fraud? Had he always been a fraud? And what in the world did he want of Dale? She couldn’t change things for him, bring his wife back to him—
my God
. What did he want of her? She fixed him a strong scotch and water, which he only sipped. She bent over him, saying, “Daddy, Daddy, please. Don’t do this.” At first she had wanted to console him, to comfort him, but soon enough she wanted only to shake him, to strike him hard across his shaking hands, to shout, “Stop it! You are my
father
! Just stop it right now!” He seemed ludicrous; and Dale could not bear it, she could not stand the sight of her father so shattered, shameless, broken. In the daytime he dressed decently to go out to his office, but at night he changed into a pair of comfortable and shapeless, sagging pants, and an old cotton shirt, and a baggy old sweater which Margaret had knitted for him once long ago. Dale kept sitting on the arm of her father’s chair, awkwardly attempting some sort of cheering embrace, and the feel of her father’s shoulders and back beneath the loose old sweater repelled her. It was possible, it was almost certain, that she had never held her father before in just such a way. As a daughter she had always sat on his lap, or held his hand as they walked together, and then as she grew older, most of their physical contact stopped, was limited to brief hugs and embarrassed pecks of kisses. She had never in her life had her arms around his shoulders—
which were large and loose and soft, not flabby, but not stern and valiant, not invulnerable, as Hank’s were, as she thought a man’s shoulders should be. She had never in her life been in this physically superior arrangement with her father, perched on the arm of the chair above her father, her head and arms higher than his, the great bald spot at the back of his head exposed, the ridge of wrinkles on the back of his neck exposed, his shoulders bent and drooping, his whole body sinking helplessly into the chair, nothing triumphant left about him at all. Dale felt that it was disastrously wrong,
wrong
for her to be sitting here like that with her father, above him, helplessly patting his shuddering back. And she saw what she had not come to see, what she did not ever want to see: that her father, her daddy, was growing old, was growing close to the edge of death. Her father was vulnerable. Her father could die. As he sat there, crying into his hands, he was dying in front of her, before her eyes, changing shape like a tired and wicked sorcerer who is playing a nasty trick on a gullible child. It seemed the worst sort of treachery. And she did not know if she could forgive him. She felt she despised him and of course despised herself for the thought.

She did not think her father sensed any of her distaste. Finally he would stop crying, and he would blow his nose and pat her hand and say, “Oh, Dale, it’s so good to have you here. I’ve been so lonely.” Then Dale would go into the kitchen and cut a piece of Sara Lee cheesecake or a bakery pie and bring it in to her father with a cup of Ovaltine, and they would sit watching television for a while, anything that was on, as if they were normal people. After a decent interval, Dale would excuse herself to go up to bed, and when she came down in the morning, she would find her father curled on the large sofa like some bizarre child, wrapped in an afghan. The television would still be on; some perky woman with fluffy hair would be reading the news. The worst was over: Dale would awaken her father, and he would go up to shower and dress and come down looking and acting like his old, real self. And they spent the four days of her stay pleasantly enough, walking about Liberty, visiting old friends, eating dinner and lunch with old friends; or Dale visited alone while her father was at his office. Only the evenings were bad, but they were bad enough to change the shape of her entire visit.