Three Women at the Water's Edge (29 page)

“She wouldn’t play with me all evening,” Danny said. “She wouldn’t play with me because Eric was here, and he’s six and she likes Eric better than me. She went into the bathroom with Eric tonight and showed him her bum. She wouldn’t show me her bum.”

Daisy looked at her sweet son, whose face was tense with earnest anger and innocent despair. Oh,
God,
Daisy thought, this is how it goes, all up and down the line; trouble about sex, about love, all up and down the line. Her father and her mother, herself and her own husband, and now, at four years of age, Danny and Megan. Love, sex, betrayal, all up and down the line. What could she say? What could she tell her little boy? She could tell him it would get better, and of course now and then it would. Someday some little girl, some very cute little girl, would show Danny her bum. Maybe that was the important thing for him to know right now. Maybe that was what he needed to hold on to: not the whole entire confusing convoluted truth of the constant turnings of love and sex, but just one simple part of it. The good side of it, that was all he needed to know for now, so that he could get a good night’s sleep.

“Megan will show you her bum someday,” Daisy said. “She was just impressed with Eric because he’s so much older than she is. But she won’t be able to see Eric as often as she sees you, and I know she loves you best; she told Karen she wants to marry you. Anyway, if she doesn’t show you her bum, I’m sure some other pretty girl will. The world is a big place. Lots of girls will love you.”

Danny grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Like Jessica.” Then he giggled and dug his head into his pillow.

Daisy kissed him and tucked in the blankets and turned off the lights. She wandered from the room stunned. Who was Jessica? She must be the new girl at the preschool. The way Danny had grinned, she must have already shown him her bum, or something!

Daisy continued to think about Danny as she got ready for bed and crawled gratefully beneath the warm covers. She hoped she had said the right thing; she hoped she had helped him. For unwittingly, he had helped her. He had handed her all his ready faith and optimism as easily as if handing her a childish present; he had believed what she had told him. She fell asleep accompanied by his hopefulness, and it was as if that hopefulness existed tangibly in the room with her then, like a stuffed bear or a red balloon. So she drifted off to sleep with the same sort of thought that Danny had gone to sleep with, the very same thought advanced by a few years: In the turnings of love there was the good side, the bright side, someone would love her again.

Dale had a cold. She sat in her empty classroom in the gray late afternoon, grading the French exams she had just given that day. Everyone else had gone home. It was five-thirty, and the school building was empty and still. Dale felt stuffy and achy and miserable. She felt chilled. She was wearing long underwear and heavy wool slacks and a cotton plaid shirt and a thick wool sweater and fur-lined boots and her parka, and the school building was of course heated. But still she felt cold. She felt nasty and irritated because so many of her students had made the same mistake in translations, had written
“Je suis fini,”
instead of
“J’ai fini,”
when the context was that of sitting at a dinner table, being finished with the meal. It hurt to hold the red marking pen in her fingers; it hurt to breathe. She longed for some Vaseline to put on her chapped reddened nose, but that was at home and she didn’t want to carry all these papers home with her tonight. She wanted to finish them now. She wanted to finish everything now. She wanted to get into bed and go to sleep and never wake up.

“Terrible weather, isn’t it?” Mr. Jersey said. Mr. Jersey was the school janitor and a nice old man, though he tended to talk too much. Now he was entering Dale’s classroom, pushing his long-handled enormous dustmop before him, pulling his trash cart behind him, a large metal circle of keys clanking at his belt. “I said to my wife only this morning—”

“Oh, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said, “could you please wait and do my room last? I’ve got a rotten cold and I just have to grade these tests now, and I’d appreciate it so much if you could wait and do my room last.”

Mr. Jersey stopped in his tracks, amazed. Usually Dale was the friendliest of teachers, always ready to engage in a little conversation. But looking at her he saw that she truly did have a cold, she really did look puny and pale and awful.

“You poor thing,” he said. “You should be home in bed. Sure, I’ll go on down the hall and hit your room last. But if I looked the way you look, I sure would be home in bed with a hot toddy. Do you know how to make a good hot toddy? It would be the best thing in the world for you. My wife makes them all the time and they get me through my colds real fast. You mix up hot water with lemon juice and honey and salt. It sounds strange, but it works wonders. If you want me to, I could call my wife and get the exact measurements for you. I—”

“That’s all right, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said. “Don’t go to the trouble, I’ve got lots of medicine at home. I’ll just finish these papers and go home and take the medicine and go to bed.”

“Well, now, your new expensive store-bought medicines aren’t always as good as you think,” Mr. Jersey said. The inferiority of the new, the plastic, the scientific, as opposed to the superiority of the homey and old-time, was one of his pet topics of conversation. “I was just telling my wife—”

“Mr. Jersey,” Dale snapped. “I really need to grade these papers. I really need to get back to work.” And she glared at him.

“Yes, yes, you go on right ahead, I won’t keep you,” Mr. Jersey said, and went out the door, pushing and pulling at his dustmop and his cart with a sudden shrunken, forlorn dignity. She had hurt his feelings.

Dale sat staring at the doorway. Mr. Jersey had not thought to close the classroom door behind him, and she could hear him clanking and shuffling and sweeping down the hall, and the very space of the doorway where he had stood seemed to be alive with reproach. Dale got up in a sudden snit of energy and crossed the room and pulled the door shut against the janitor and his wounded pride and his noise. Then she went back and sat down and tried to concentrate on the tests. She only wanted to put her head down on the desk and sleep. She was so tired. She was so sick. She was so miserable.

It was late January, and this cold had been building up and coming on for at least two weeks now. Dale felt as though her body was doing it on purpose, was making her feel weak and sick on purpose, to get back at her for what she had done to it. That is, she had tried, she was trying, to disengage herself from Hank, from her love for Hank; she had told Hank she didn’t want to see him so often, that she needed to get back in control of herself, that she needed to have more time and space just for herself. But that wasn’t really what she needed at all. What she really needed, what she really wanted, at least what her
body
wanted, was to be with Hank every possible second of the day.

For Dale it had come to this, it was as simple as this: it was a matter of pain ending and peace reigning. It was as complete and simple as that. When she was with Hank, then she was content within her body, within herself. When she was not with him, she was in real constant physical pain. She twisted and longed. Sometimes she would leave her classroom and go into the faculty washroom and shut herself inside a toilet cubicle and simply lean up against the door. She would press her entire body against the door, the hard cold surface of the door, and press herself, and yearn. She was obsessed. She was in love. It was so powerful. And she wanted to fight it off. She thought of Daisy, she thought of her parents, she worked through it all with her mind, and now her mind, her reason, was fighting with her body and her desires. And she was sick and weak with the battle. Her mind feared the consequences, the future; but her body craved and craved the joy, the present joy.

At Christmas they had spent ten days at a ski resort in Vermont, and in the hot rush of pleasure of those days Dale had forgotten her Thanksgiving resolution to escape the lures of love. It had been too overwhelming, too sweet, she had completely given herself over to the pleasure. It had been such a luxury to fall asleep in the same bed with Hank and to wake up in the same bed with him. The first three days they hadn’t even left the room to ski or eat. Time had fallen away. It had been almost frightening, how time had really fallen away. They had not had to worry about time, they had not had to measure out their lives by the clocks. There were no class bells, no alarm clocks, there was no reason to leave in the middle of the night in order to have the car parked respectably in front of one’s own house that morning. They had been able to stay awake late into the night, watching wonderful old black-and-white movies on the motel room television, not worrying about waking up for classes or responsibi
lities, sleeping on into the day, waking up in the afternoon, and even then not getting out of bed. They had been able to touch and touch and touch each other. They had lost themselves in each other’s flesh. The sheets and bed had become sticky and moist and aromatic, as if an extension of their desire; they hadn’t let the maid in the room for three days. The very motel room, with its piny walls and prints of deer and mountains, seemed to become an extension of them, seemed to become beautiful and sexy and warm. They had hated leaving the room; on the fourth day they had gotten up and showered and dressed, intending to go out and ski because the sun through the window did promise a world outside, and they had gone down to the resort’s dining room and eaten a huge hot breakfast, but they had missed their room so much, and its hot familiar indulgent walls, that they had gone back up to the room after breakfast. They had not always made love; sometimes they had just lain together, holding each other, talking or not talking, nestling. The fourth day they had gotten up and gone out and skied, but Dale had been weak from laziness and love and had taken many spills. Hank had had to stop and stop to help her up and kiss her and laugh. Then for the fifth through the eighth days of their stay they had gone out a lot, skiing or just walking about in the day, down to the bar to dance and drink at night. They had loved dancing together, they had just been delighted with dancing together.

The last two days of their stay, though, they had again not left the room. They had been aware that the end of their time together was near. And so they had gone back into the room, back into the bed, and made love and clung to each other, as if they felt they were on a ship that would sink in two days, as if in two days they would die.

Finally they had had to leave, to drive back to Rocheport. Dale had to grade papers and make lesson plans. Hank had to prepare for his classes, too, and to go around the farm to be sure that the young boy he had hired to do the chores for him had not neglected anything. The night before the first new day of classes, Hank and Dale had eaten at Hank’s farm, and made love, and then he had had to drive her home. And they had sat in the warm cab of the red pickup truck together, holding each other, and saying over and over again, “Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you.” It had been a real tearing for Dale to leave the truck to go up to her apartment. She had gone up, and bathed and gotten ready for bed, but as she moved she had been in pain because she missed him so much. He had called her to say good night, and then she had gotten into bed. She had been exhausted and happy with the memories of his touch, but she had missed his presence, his body next to hers, and so she had lain there, feeling riddled with pain. In the next few days there had been reasons that she could not be with Hank after school: he had meetings, she had meetings, he had extra work on his farm. She had been miserable. And she had hated herself for the misery, and feared it.

Finally she had tried to talk to Carol about it. But Carol had been almost appalled. Here Carol was, engaged, and she had spent a loving holiday with her fiancé, too, but now she was not in pain. She was just going ahead with her life. She listened to Dale talk and then told Dale that it didn’t seem right to her. She thought Dale’s love bordered on the pathological.

“I would resent it very much indeed if Bob took up so much of my attention and energy and emotional space,” Carol had said. “In fact, I think it’s almost sick to be so obsessed. You’ve really got to get yourself in control. It’s super to be in love, but it’s crazy to be in love this way.”

“I know,” Dale said. “I know. I do have to get myself in control.”

But she loved it, even as she feared it. She loved the marvelous druggedness of it. She loved the pleasurable bodily sensations, the way her body remembered those sensations; the way she would feel a rush, a hot wave of desire pass through her body, making her weak, as she was just driving the car down the street to the school. She loved the high of it, the exhilaration of it; she loved the joy of her body. For although she was in pain when she was not with Hank, she was in such luxurious rich delight when she was with him that it seemed to make it all worthwhile.

And then she would have to leave him, and she would be in the apartment alone, or at school, and she would be gripped by fear. She would be afraid that she would never see him again. Or that when she did, he would have changed. For they had reached a point in their relationship where they took each other for granted and talked to each other every day and made casual plans fitted around their own schedules. So there were days when Dale would enter the school in the morning, facing a day of teaching biology and French to adolescents, and she would not be sure whether she would be seeing Hank that night or not—he had mentioned that he might have a conference with parents, or an animal might be sick—and she would feel the day stretch long and drab in front of her because she was not sure she would be seeing him that night. And she had come to hate the days when she did not see him; and she had come to scorn herself for hating those days, for she thought surely each day must be welcomed for itself, days should not be hated simply because one other person did not enter them.