Three Women at the Water's Edge (26 page)

Oh, that was not always so, of course; she often got tired of handling food. There were days when she threw TV dinners in the oven for her children, there were days when she halfheartedly chopped away at whatever vegetable was around and threw it into a pot of boiling water and didn’t give it a thought. Just as there were days when she walked through her house without appreciating its beauty. Just as there were days when she felt her children were driving her mad. But on the whole, she liked what she did and she did not want to stop doing it, at least not for a while. Her life gave her pleasure; and Daisy thought that that was after all what life was about. So she dug yet another Snickers out of her purse—she kept stashes of chocolate around close at hand always, as other women might keep alcohol or cigarettes or Valium—and began to eat that. The chocolate was so sweet, and her friend Karen had invited her and the children to dinner that night, so there would be laughter and gossip and comfort, the comfort of a good friend. The chocolate was so sweet; and it was all right, Daisy could get through it, could get through walking into the real estate office to talk about the selling of her house.

On the plane Dale had no chocolates and wouldn’t have eaten one if she had. She did order a drink, but it didn’t help. The plane to Boston was crowded, and she had to sit in a middle seat, between two big men whose elbows kept protruding over the armrest and into her small private space. Dale hated the men and their elbows, and wished she could magically change, like the people on the cartoons that Danny and Jenny watched, into an animal—a dog; then she could bite those pushy elbows and snarl and make the men back away. She was in a foul mood. She told herself that it was just the crowdedness of the plane, the insensitiv
eness with which the stewardess had slopped the plastic glass of soda and the little bottle of scotch down on Dale’s shaky tray, the elbows of the men and the way they kept clearing their throats and rattling their newspapers. She told herself that she was tired; she had not had very much sleep the night before. But of course that was not all of it, that was not it really, and she wasn’t even angry, and she knew it: She was sad. She was almost heartbroken. Daisy’s words, Daisy’s life, rang in her ears and filled her mind with melancholy images. Youth—love
—children—
loss. In the car on the way to the airport Dale had felt in some vague but guilty way, relieved; as if she were leaving a hospital or a prison, as if she were escaping the presence of someone inescapably less fortunate. Even as Daisy had raised her fist to strike the radio, Dale had felt the power of the love song being sung there. It was a corny song, as bad as sweetened cereal, and Dale knew that—still the words seemed to fit her life so well. The song was about the relentless need of lovers to be with one another; it was about separation; it was about holding one’s lover again. It was a song full of clichés, yet Dale knew that the strength of a cliché is in the knot of truth at its core.

Dale had missed Hank so much. She had missed him so much that she had honestly been afraid she would die of it. The thousand miles between them had suddenly been too far, threateningly far, and she had panicked, thinking she could never get back, and her heart had gone wild inside her, thrashing about; she had felt wild, nearly insane, with longing and the need just to
see
him. To hear his laugh.
To touch him
. She had been sick with the need to touch him.

She had almost phoned him, but he was at his parents’ home in Boston for the Thanksgiving holiday—they had agreed to go home for Thanksgiving, in hopes that this would lessen their parents’ dismay when they did not come home for Christmas—and she did not know the number. Of course she could have gotten the telephone number, but she did not really want to call him there, she did not know if he had told his parents about her, and she did not want to embarrass him. What could he have said to her with a roomful of relatives standing around listening? But she almost called anyway, just to hear the sound of his voice. He was to meet her at the airport in Boston this afternoon, and they would drive back to Maine together. So she knew she would be seeing him again very soon—and it was only five days, after all, that they had been apart. But it seemed the very worst time in her life. She had felt physically sick without him, and not just with lust, although there was that, too, but more with a simple strong need just to be in his presence. For the world had become divided for her: into now and before, into with and without, into joy and misery, into life and death.

But now it had all been tainted. Dale could not shake it off: could not shake off the knowledge of her father’s grief, her sister’s devastation. She could not forget how Daisy had struck the radio and called love a lie. She could not keep from before her eyes the sight of her father’s shoulders as he sagged and sobbed in his old armchair, and the sight of Daisy’s constantly tear-streaked and fear-contorted face. Dale felt as though she were a person whom Fate had suddenly, freakishly, awarded future sight. “Look,” Fate was saying to her, “this is life. Let’s say that there is a tunnel, one which you are about to enter, one which almost everyone else in the world enters, because it is so alluring. But—and this is the secret only you get to share—it is a tricky tunnel, a curving one, and what lies ahead is so far out of sight that you don’t even think of it when you enter. But I will show you: Look, you will move through days of love, and then through days of complacency and settledness, and then implacably, through days of loss and despair and devastation and anguish as deep as hell. There is no way out, there is no way back; everyone moves through these days, only the pace differs. Now I’ve shown you—and you are lucky, you have a chance not to enter, you are standing only at the opening, you can turn and refuse to enter if you choose. What will you choose?”

What would she choose? Dale nearly cried aloud. She twisted wretchedly in her seat. For she felt that she did not want to live without Hank; the world would have no meaning without him by her side. Yet that feeling was trite:
trite!
Everyone felt it, and everyone was wrong. Love led either to boredom or, worse, to suffering and the fragmenting of bonds which held not just a marriage, but each separate person, into a healthy whole. Look at Daisy! Look at their father! And Daisy said that their mother had gone cold and heartless, which had to be a kind of suicide on her mother’s part. Look what happened after giving oneself over to love! Dear God, she did not want such devastation to come to her. And even more she did not ever want to cause such a thing to happen to Hank. She
loved
Hank, she could not imagine not loving him, and yet it seemed that her loving him could only end with her hurting him, or with his hurting her. Oh, why was the world this way, why was it all this way? She would rather that everyone died at thirty of diseases and plagues, as people used to, than to die this way, through the death of love.

Dale was twenty-four, and it seemed to her now that she had spent all the grown years of her life resisting this, or thinking in some back hidden part of her mind that it would not happen to her, this thing of falling in love. And now it had happened, and she was overwhelmed by the power of it all, and she was filled with dread. She was afraid. She was so terribly, terribly afraid. She felt that if she were to experience a grief as profound and enormous as the joy she felt with Hank she would die from it, she would purely shatter apart and die. It seemed to her that to give oneself over to love, to enter into love, was to give oneself over to a kind of death. And so as the plane began to descend toward Boston, she felt herself moving backward, backing out, backing away; and closing herself off from any of the tempting sensations which threatened to lure her back in. She felt herself closing off, closing up, turning cold. The plane plummeted through the skies down toward the spot where her lover waited, and she sat rigid in her seat, gripping her arms tightly, feeling all tears sink back down into her depths, back into some cold dark dry place where no one could find them, and the tears left her, the moisture left her, and she went hard and dry. So when she rose to leave the plane, she felt solid and invulnerable, as if she had turned to stone.

It was the end of January, and children were roaming Daisy’s house like elephants in a jungle. Down in the kitchen, where Daisy and the other three mothers sat, they could hear the thumps and thuds through the ceiling, through the walls, the jarring noises of lots of little children jumping off beds, bumping into each other, careening through the house with shrieks of mad childish glee. Everyone was nuts, the children were simply nuts, they hadn’t been outside for a hundred years because of the weather, and Daisy’s huge house seemed like an indoor playground to them, a vast jungle of space in which to roam and run. And Daisy and her friends were just giddy enough to still be in charge of the children but not to mind their noise. They were having their own party, they were having their own fun, and the gaiety of their children only reinforced their own.

Oh, God, it was so good to sit and laugh with someone else while the children rumbled about in some other room. The other mothers loved Daisy’s house because it was so large that one could get away from the children. Daisy still had packed away in tissues and cardboard boxes all of the breakable, valuable, unnecessary things, and so she didn’t worry much about the children’s wildness because there was really nothing sitting out for them to break. Even the kitchen had been stripped of nonessential items, of wineglasses and crystal candy dishes, of heavy ironstone mixing bowls and casseroles. Daisy had kept out a cookie sheet for heating up frozen french fries, and a skillet or two, and the everyday plastic Heller plates and cups, but almost everything glass and breakable had been packed away. And she found that she quite enjoyed the limitations this set on her cooking. She didn’t have to worry about making cakes or bread or elaborate dishes. She fed the children hamburgers and raw carrots, or soup and toasted cheese sandwiches, or made a rich beef stew in a large pot and fed everyone off it for days and days—it was amazing how easy the cooking had become with Paul gone. It was amazing how easy life had become. It was amazing how happy she was.

Although that was not always true; she was not always happy. She worried about money, the future, then money again, almost constantly. The house had not sold after all. Daisy had reluctantly abandoned her idea of fixing up the attic to rent and had gone to the trouble of packing almost everything, and had spent hours with real estate agents looking for a smaller house. Then it had developed that the buyers had been unable to get financing. Another couple had made an offer, but it was far less than Paul thought they should get for the house. Then winter had struck in earnest, and no one was interested in being on the lake. Prospective buyers worried about the price of oil; they worried that it would be colder near the lake, that the damp cold air would seep through the house. Daisy knew that the house was tight and firm, that the damp did not seep in, but she didn’t bother to tell anyone, knowing they probably wouldn’t believe her. So she could only wait, now really stuck in the house, unable to move out or settle in.

After Christmas she had written a long and carefully rational letter to her mother, asking outright for a loan. She had tried her best to sound mature, but she knew that what she was doing was what she had sometimes done as a child: ruthlessly trying to play her parents against each other in a desperate attempt to get what she wanted. When her father had come to spend Christmas with her, Daisy had explained her situation to him, and he, in his new quiet and burdened manner, had told her not to worry about the money she owed him. The twenty thousand could just be a gift to her, he told her, or a long-term loan with no interest, payable whenever she had the money, which as far as he was concerned could be never. But he could not give her the other ten thousand so that she could pay off Paul. He was getting old, he said, and needed to keep his money; it wouldn’t be so long before he would be too old to work. Daisy had had to hide her annoyance at his easy misery behind the real gratitude she felt. She wrote to Margaret: Daddy had more or less given her twenty thousand dollars so she could keep the house. Couldn’t Margaret “loan” her ten thousand? But two weeks had gone by, and Margaret had not answered. Daisy was hurt. She was too proud to call her mother and beg. So she tried to stay calm and hopeful. She waited. She began dreaming seriously again of renting out the attic. She waited to see what would be done about her house; would her mother come through with the money before another buyer was found? She waited while her new baby grew in her tummy. She felt suspended in time.

She was trying to be grown-up and optimistic and capable, but it was very hard. She could not seem to get her hands on the reins of her life. After Dale’s visit, when Daisy had at last been able to grieve, Daisy had realized that that was a fine and necessary thing to do—to grieve, to complain, to cry—but it was really of little lasting help. The next day the same problems were there. She was eager to rent out the attic so that she could actually be doing something positive in her life, but at the moment that seemed impossible. She was trying to diet and exercise in order to be more attractive, but that just seemed rather silly. She was seven months pregnant now, and the only men she saw were the pharmacist, the mailman, the gynecologist, and the husbands of her good friends.

Christmas had provided bitter news for her: When mutual acquaintances had holiday parties, it was Paul and Monica they invited, rather than Daisy. Of course her closest friends stood by her, and invited her to parties, but the greater social world which Daisy had been part of when she was living with Paul now ignored her. It made a kind of sense; she could understand it: of course the people who worked in Paul’s firm would invite him and Monica rather than Daisy; and most of their social acquaintances had been first of all business acquaintances. Then, too, Daisy realized, Monica, sleek and chic, a reporter for a local newspaper, would quite simply be more fun, more interesting to have at a party. Daisy thought that if
she
were the hostess, she would rather invite Monica than a tired pregnant mother. There was no avoiding the cold hard fact that walking into a party now—no matter how well she had combed her hair and dressed—br
ought about a much different reaction than it had when she was twenty-three and slim.

She was glad when Christmas was over. Her father had come to stay with them over the holidays, but that had had its own difficulties, and she was simply relieved when January rolled around and things settled down, when no one else was going to parties much, either. But January brought yet another cruel surprise: the worst winter in that region’s recorded history. There were three blizzards in a row and snow had piled up like barriers, like hostile walls, and for three weeks the temperature had not risen up to 20 degrees. Children could not play outside for more than a few minutes; in fact, they spent more time getting into and out of all their snow clothes than they did playing outside. Grocery stores had trouble stocking fresh items such as milk and eggs, and everyone else had trouble getting to the stores because the roads were so congested with the piles and piles of snow. Twenty-seven inches, and then more. Milwaukee was declared a national disaster area, and snowplows and dump trucks whirred and hummed day and night, but still getting around the city was almost impossible. And the walls of snow which had been pushed back by the plows rose up six or ten feet along the side of the road, blocking the sight of the houses and street, making everyone feel claustrophobic and trapped. Daisy had taken to getting the groceries at a small local store, because it was so frightening to try to drive on the snow-ruined streets; cars were always sliding off and getting stuck, and everywhere she went she saw terrible accidents. So she got out a large flat orange plastic sled and pulled the children on it to the small grocery store that was about five blocks away. Then she put the groceries on the sled and made the children walk as she pulled it all back home. It was immensely difficult, with the fierce cold making their eyes sting and water, and the wind ripping off the lake at their clothes, and little Jenny and Danny only barely able to force their way through the piles and drifts and heaps of snow. At first the children started off cheerfully enough, using up their energy to leap and scream and plop in the snow, making designs with their bodies, giddy with the sight and feel of the world gone so cold and white. But after a block or so they grew tired, the snow pulled and sucked at them like quicksand, and it made them angry and frustrated because they were so small and it was so strong. They would begin to whine and grouse and cry, and Daisy, who was only barely making it herself, with seven months of baby sticking out in front of her and the sled heavy with groceries jerking along behind, tugging at her wrists, would have to summon up all her courage in order not to simply sink down into the snow and bawl. It ended up that Jenny got to ride in the sled because she was the littlest and because she really did get stuck in the snow, she really did not have the size or power to make it through some of the drifts. So Jenny would finally get to ride in the sled with the groceries, and Daisy would have to walk even more slowly, panting with the exertion of pulling the weight of the groceries and Jenny’s little body, and Danny would trail along behind, weeping and complaining because he couldn’t ride, Jenny always got to ride, Jenny always got her own way, why did Jenny always get to ride, why couldn’t he ride, too, why couldn’t he ride just once, Daisy loved Jenny more than she loved him. And sometimes as they were crossing a street a sack of groceries would topple over and something would fall out, an orange would roll dismally off on the hard gray ice, or the eggs would break, and then Daisy would think that she might just as well go ahead and die right there because she couldn’t go on with this life. But of course she did go on with it. She would see a car approaching, and she would grab up Danny and hurl him onto the side of the road and yank the sled with Jenny out of the way of the slithering car and wait till it had passed, then pick up the orange or the egg carton, and continue to make their way back to the house.

It was a hard winter for everyone, but an especially hard one for mothers and children. Daisy felt that if she hadn’t had a television set she would have gone mad, they all would have gone mad. For she felt so isolated—she
was
so isolated, for so many days when there was no preschool because of the weather, the “snow days” as they were called, when school was canceled because it was not possible to get there—she felt isolated, and the outside world looked so desperately empty and colorless, that she began to love the television set almost as if it were a person. It brought life and laughter and color into her house. It brought people into her house. It entertained her children when she could no longer bear to play another game of Candy Land with them, or read them another story, or pretend to be a witch or a bear one more time. And now that Paul was gone and there were often stretches of days when Daisy went without setting eyes on another grown human being, another real adult, she yearned toward the evenings when the children were asleep and she could settle down on the sofa and watch grown-up people doing grown-up things—fig
hting, kissing, walking about, talking on talk shows. The world did exist out there, it really did, and it was such a good and fascinating world that it was worth it, Daisy could survive, she would make it through all this, because she knew that was all still there.

What was also saving Daisy’s life was that she had built up a network of women friends who had many of the same problems and who supported her through telephone calls and inexpensive humorous gifts and through get-togethers such as the one in Daisy’s home this evening. Or, quite often, at night when the children were asleep, Daisy would sit in her bed sipping a cup of hot tea and talking with a friend on the phone for hours. She and her friends discussed
everything:
They analyzed Paul’s personality ruthlessly and concluded that Daisy was better off without him, then went on to discuss men and their flaws in general, and then went on to discuss the lovelier side of men, and all the men with whom they had once had happy relationships. They talked about raising children and decorating houses; they talked about books and movies and politics and religion; they talked about how many calories were in apples and pears; they talked about the boys they had had crushes on in the ninth grade. They laughed a lot. And Daisy felt nourished and enriched. How wealthy life was, Daisy thought, she hadn’t realized this before; and she felt almost grateful to Paul for leaving her because it enabled her to discover all this other life. All these other women, going about their lives, with such complexity and valiance and good humor. Before Paul left, she never would have taken the time away from a husband to share with a friend. She would never have been so readily available. With Paul gone, she felt free; she even in some ways felt young again.