Three Women at the Water's Edge (28 page)

Christmas day they had spent pleasantly with the children and Christmas dinner and an early-evening church service. The day after Christmas had been cold, but windless enough so that Daisy wanted to take her father for a walk along the lake. She had bundled Danny and Jenny into their layers of sweaters and snowsuits and mittens and boots and mufflers, and wrapped herself up, and dragged her father down to the shore. He had not much wanted to go. He seemed to have lost much of his old energy and vitality; he seemed to spend too much time watching television, and far too much time talking about how he missed Margaret. He had grudgingly gone down to the lake with Daisy and the children and had walked along the shoreline with his shoulders hunched up miserably against the cold.

“It’s really quite gorgeous in the spring and summer and fall, Daddy,” Daisy had told him. “And even now, you have to admit it’s interesting. The way the waves have frozen in great chunks, like triangles, like small icebergs, and the pale aquamarine blue that you can see under the snow—even now, even frozen, I think the lake is fascinating.”

But Harry had not thought it was fascinating. He had not liked it at all, not at all. “I’m too cold down here,” he had said. “I guess I’m just getting too old to put up with such cold.” And he had turned and gone back up to the house.

Daisy had almost stamped her foot with impatience, had almost cried out, “
Daddy!
Would you get with it!” But she had turned away from the sight of his hunched and doleful back and watched her children stepping cautiously on the rim of the lake, and then more bravely walking right out on the ice.

“Look, Mom, we’re walking on the lake!” they had cried, startled at their own courage and at the wonder of doing it, of walking on the lake. Daisy had watched them carefully and then in spite of her own common sense, had joined them. It was too fascinating, to be able to walk about on the lake, right out where they had seen ducks swim and toy boats float in the summer. The ice was hard, it held firm. It was so thick it did not crack under their weight. It was as hard as if it were eternal, and uneven and jagged and grotesque, fantastic, a landscape of frozen incongruities. Finally everyone had gotten cold and Daisy had worried about frostbite and taken the children in. She had made them hot chocolate and meant to let them watch television, but her father had already seated himself in front of it, watching a football game, so she had spent some time playing with the children, helping them learn how to play with their new toys.

The next day they had all gone to the Performing Arts Center to see
The Nutcracker,
and even little Jenny had been good, had enjoyed the ballet and laughed and clapped her hands. And her father had taken them all out to a nice restaurant for dinner, so that day had been okay. Really, the entire visit had been
okay
—but Daisy had wanted more. Her father was
her father;
she had wanted him to comfort her now at this time when Paul was leaving her. But he would not, he did not seem to even notice her need. He listened to her talk, and gave advice offhandedly: get a good lawyer, get all the money you can now, if you need a therapist I’ll pay for it, don’t worry about money, I’ll help you out if you need it. But he was not really there for her, as her mother had not been. He was not able to break away from his obsessive misery enough to care much about the problems Daisy was having. He clung to his grief almost as if it nurtured him, or shielded him. He was not really concerned about Daisy; and though she was truly grateful to him for the money, she wanted more from him than that. She wanted the comfort and wisdom handed from a parent to a child, and especially now she wanted the grand masculine protection which had always been part of her father’s love for his daughters. But it was not there. She could get nothing from his spirit. He was behaving selfishly, he was grudging with his spirit, as if he truly enjoyed his sorrow and would not let go of it, would not make space in his heart for other emotions.

As the days passed by, Daisy came to a terrible realization: Her father bored her; after a while he really irritated her. You’ve got to have pride in your own self, she wanted to shout at him. You can’t go moping around like a damned oversized Raggedy Andy doll, all limp and flopping just because Mother is no longer around to prop you up. Where’s your self-respect? Why don’t you get yourself in control? Life cannot hang on the love of one other person; you have got to hang your life on yourself. There were many things she wanted to say to him, but in the end she said nothing at all. He was not really seeing her or talking to her; she was not dumb enough to think that if she spoke he would really hear.

So she was relieved when he left. When she returned from the airport she spent the rest of the day just lying about the house, eating peanut butter on crackers or leftover turkey and pie, and letting Danny and Jenny roam the house at large. She didn’t even take them outside to play that day, although it was, for late December, fairly mild. She felt absolutely enervated by her father’s visit; she felt drained; she just wanted to sleep and sleep.

After that the days began to move of their own accord. There seemed to be so many things she had to work through. And she did not want to lean on anyone else, she did not want to be a drag, she did not want to be dependent, to
bother
anyone; but still the more time she spent with Karen or Jane or one of her other friends, the happier she found herself, the more she was able to come awake. Her friends became curatives for her; they became like healing air. She could go out among them and breathe them in, and become almost immediately better, and each day a little stronger, and yet the best part of it was that this did not diminish them, this did not take from them. They were still there, also like air, they were still there, her friends, being themselves, and her going out and standing among them, breathing them into her life, curing herself by their presence, all this did not bother them, did not alter them, they existed still as freely and constantly as the air of the earth.

And now here they all were in her kitchen, gossiping and rocking in their chairs with laughter. They were talking about men, about sex, and Martha had just stated that she would never be able to have sex with any man except her husband because her body had gotten so bad after the birth of her children. Her stomach was puckered and striped. She wouldn’t be able to bear having any other man see her. Daisy laughed at Martha’s harshly humorous description of her body, but her ears perked up, perked up, because she felt this way about her body, too, and was glad to know she was not alone.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Karen said impatiently. “Don’t worry about your stomach, or anything for that matter. What do you think men are, what kind of a lover do you think you’d have? Men aren’t children, you know—even if they think it, they aren’t going to say, ‘Oh, gross, look at your stomach! Yuck!’ Lovers are wonderful, and if nothing else, they’re tactful. You’ve just been around children too long and children think everything is gross and yucky. Men aren’t that way—and remember, men aren’t perfect, either. They have stretch marks, too, or fat stomachs, or funny chests. We get too used to the perfect smooth bodies of our kids, but no adult is that way. Men are just as vulnerable as women, they’re just as imperfect, and they can be awfully nice.”

“I did a mean thing once,” Jane announced with a slur in her voice. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” she said, remembering, and laughed. “But he certainly deserved it.”

“Well, tell us about it!” Daisy said.

“It was with one of the men I dated after I was divorced from Tom and before I married Phil. I was at some party, and I met this man named Karl. He was a dentist. He seemed nice enough, and to make a long story short, we dated for a while and finally ended up in bed. And the poor man—well, he had the smallest little penis I’ve ever seen! It was hardly there. I never said anything about it to him, of course, because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. In fact, I tried my best to make him feel good—I told him how much I liked the hair on his chest and stuff like that. Now you would think that having a—problem, let’s call it—like his would teach him compassion for other people, but it didn’t. I kept on dating him, but the more I saw of him, the less I liked him, and not because of his penis. He was always making cutting remarks, or little innuendos which showed just how little he thought of other people. Do you know what he gave me for Christmas? A pair of wool slacks two sizes too big for me! As he handed me the box, he said, ‘These might be too small for you, but you can always exchange them.’ There he was, sometimes telling me he
loved
me, and at the same time giving me slacks two sizes too large, indirectly telling me he thought I was big and fat! I decided he wasn’t very good for my ego, and I started dating someone else, and I tried to phase Karl out of my life. But he wouldn’t take a hint. He kept pestering me. He started showing up at my house without notice, pressuring me to be with him—I couldn’t seem to get rid of him. So one night I agreed to go out for a drink with him, and there we sat at a little table in a nice bar, and I was being as tactful and kind as I could, trying to explain to him that I was in love with someone else. But he wasn’t getting the message. He kept rubbing my knee with his knee under the table and stroking my arm and leering at me and I panicked: I thought, ‘I’m never going to get rid of this guy!’ Then the waiter brought over a breadbasket, and inside were these little breadstick
s—about the size of a little candle or a finger. So I just picked up a little breadstick, and looked at it and looked at Karl and said, ‘Remind you of anything?’ ” Jane had to stop talking while everyone laughed.

“But that’s
terrible,
Jane,” Daisy cried out, still laughing. “That’s cruel. How could you do it? What did he do?”

“Oh, he just looked confused for a minute, and then stricken, and then he took his knee away from mine and we finished our drinks and he took me home. Poor man, but I really had tried other ways of getting rid of him. This was the only thing that even got his attention. But that was the meanest thing I’ve ever done. Still, you’ll come to that, Daisy, once you’ve had your baby and your divorce. You’ll arrive at the point where you’ll sleep with different men, and some you may even love, but they won’t love you, and some will love you frantically, but you won’t love them. If you’re lucky you’ll find a good lover, but you might not get lucky for a while. The point is, don’t worry about yourself, or what you look like. The nicest feeling in the world is to accept yourself, all the sags and flab and warts and all, and if someone wants to love you, that’s fine, but if someone doesn’t love you, then that’s okay, too.”

“Oh, dear.” Daisy sighed. “I don’t even
want
a lover. What are we talking about! I want to have this baby. Martha wants the lover. No, she doesn’t want a lover, she wants a flat stomach. Who wants the lover? Who started all this talk?”

“I
have
a lover,” Karen said. “And I recommend lovers highly. Every woman should have one: a husband, a house, some children, and a lover. There’s just nothing like a lover to make you feel good.”

“But shouldn’t your husband be your lover?” Daisy asked. “I mean it starts out that way. Why can’t it end that way? Can it end that way for anyone? Does it ever end up, after three children and ten years, that your husband is your lover? Does it? Can it?”

But no one answered. They all fell silent, Jane and Karen and Martha, they all looked down at the table, and went silent with their own thoughts. They were almost glad when the shrieks from upstairs indicated that the children were getting tired and fussy and that it was time to take them home. They rose, all the women, and went up the stairs to sort their children out one from the other, to stuff them into their parkas and mittens and mufflers and to cajole and carry them out to the cars.

Daisy turned off the porch light and turned back to her own children. They were manic and silly from all the activity, and Daisy smiled at their happiness. In spite of the divorce, her children were happy, she thought, they were normal. She marshaled them up the stairs and made them pick up the toys that had been scattered around their rooms while she put the sheets and blankets back on the beds. She only halfheartedly scolded them about the mess: they had had such a good time, and Daisy had managed to have a full evening with her friends. She always felt more courageous after such an evening.

She went through the nightly routine of supervising the children while they washed and brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas. When she tucked Jenny into bed, Jenny fell asleep almost instantly, thumb in her mouth. Daisy kissed her daughter, then stood, eager for her own soft bed. But when she went into Danny’s room to kiss him good night, Danny wanted to talk. Daisy smoothed the sheet and blankets about her little boy, then sat down next to him, her hand on his.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I hate Megan,” Danny said. Megan was Karen’s four-year-old daughter. “I really hate her.”

“Why do you hate her, honey?” Daisy asked. “I think Megan is a nice girl.”