Three Women at the Water's Edge (45 page)

“I know, Daisy, I know,” Paul said. “But it’s too late. It really is. I just don’t like children. I don’t like living with them, I don’t like having to focus my life around their needs. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I know I’m being selfish, I’m horribly selfish, but I had so little chance when I was growing up to do what
I
wanted, and I want to be in control of my own life now. I have to have my life. I want to enjoy my pleasures.”

At his words Daisy took her hand away and started to move off, but to her surprise Paul grasped her hand in both of his and sat staring up at her.

“But I’ll always love you, Daisy,” he said. “
You
. In my own way. I’ll always be sorry that it worked out this way, that you needed to have children, that you weren’t satisfied with just me, and that I’m not capable of having children in my life. I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a long time—that I’ll always love you. In my way. I—Well, I’ve brought you a present. You mustn’t laugh. It’s a sort of goodbye present. I got it on impulse yesterday. I was driving the car and I heard this song on the radio, and it seemed to say just what I feel. So I stopped at the first record store I came to and bought it for you. It’s in the sack with the presents for the children. It only cost about two dollars, it’s not much, but—I just wanted you to have it.”

“What does it say? How does it go?”

“I can’t remember it all. You’ll have to hear it yourself. But the refrain is—oh, God, I’m sorry to be so corny—the refrain is—” And Paul rose awkwardly and stood just a small distance from Daisy, looking shy and endearingly embarrassed. “It’s just something about someone always loving someone.”

“
Paul
—” Daisy said, and tears of real anguish came into her eyes. She longed to go to Paul, to embrace him, and damn it, damn it, not to let him go.

“Hi, Daddy!”

“DADDY! DADDY DADDY DADDY!”

And Danny and Jenny were suddenly there, stampeding down the back stairs and into the kitchen with all their childish wild energy unleashed. They rushed at Paul, meaning to attack him in their love, and Jenny fell over a chair leg and began to cry, angry at falling down, angry at not being able to reach her father as Danny had.

Paul and Daisy looked at each other; they exchanged the last strong look they would ever share, a look full of love and regret and—inesca
pably—of irony. “See?” Paul seemed to say. “See?” Then he and Daisy released each other from this shared gaze and Paul bent to pick up his son.

“Come here, Jenny, don’t cry, sit on Daddy’s lap and let me kiss your knee where you hurt it,” he said.

Daisy turned away and walked into the other room for a moment. She simply leaned against the wall, struggling to regain her breath and her sense of composure. When she went back to the kitchen, Paul was standing.

“I have to go now, kids,” he said. “But I’ve brought you a present. I left it in the front hall.”

Like some kind of roiling mob, Paul and Danny and Jenny and Daisy made their way back through the house to the front door where Paul had left a plastic sack sitting on the floor. He took out two presents: a fat baby doll for Jenny and a circus train set for Danny. The children squealed at their presents and immediately thumped down on the floor to inspect them.

“And this is for you, Daisy,” Paul said, and handed her one thin 45-rpm record in its paper jacket. Then he kissed her lightly on her cheek and put on the coat he had flung across a hall chair and went hurriedly out the door.

Daisy stared at the closed door for a moment—the last, the final door which Paul would close against her—then said absentmindedly to the children, “What wonderful presents Daddy brought you,” and walked past them to the living room to put the record on the stereo. The music swelled out at her, melodramatic and sweeping, and Daisy stood next to the stereo and cried and cried and cried, until Susan’s fierce wails called her away from her own misery and made her go tend to her child. She picked up her baby and laid her on the kitchen table and put a clean diaper on her and put the soiled one in the diaper pail. She got a can of beer out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass, speaking to Susan in a lulling voice all the while, “There, there, I’ll feed you in a moment.” She went into the family room and sank onto the sofa and began to nurse the baby. After a while Danny and Jenny came into the family room, complaining: Jenny wanted to see Danny’s new train set, but Danny didn’t want to share it right now, he had just gotten it, he didn’t have a chance to even look at it himself, Jenny was selfish and greedy, she had a new doll and he didn’t want to see her doll, and so on, and so on, until Daisy found herself nearly screaming:

“Jenny, you can look at the train set later. Leave Danny alone now and play with your doll. It’s a lovely new doll. And be quiet, you’re scaring the baby with your noise.”

“Dumb old baby,” Jenny said, and shot Susan a resentful glare. She took her new doll off to hide behind a big stuffed chair, and Daisy could hear her crying quietly to herself. If it hadn’t been for the nursing baby, Daisy would have gone over and taken her elder daughter in her arms, but Susan was really engaged now in the business of getting her food, and would have been enraged to be disturbed. So Daisy had to sit and listen to Jenny sniffling behind the chair, and to Danny making his new toy clack and whistle, and she worried that once again she wasn’t doing the perfect thing. It was so hard to keep three children happy at the same time. And Daisy was actually worried about Jenny. Danny was okay, he was not going to have the same problem with jealousy, but then of course he had the preschool. He was able to leave the house every day, to leave the baby’s presence, and to enter a world of his own where people had never even seen the baby, where people knew and loved and played with him. He had all of that to sustain him. But Jenny was just two, too young yet for preschool, and used to being the baby. Now here was this new baby, this baby
girl
who always seemed to have the dominant spot in the household. That morning, while fixing breakfast, before Paul arrived, Daisy had turned just in time to stop Jenny from dropping a heavy skillet in the playpen on top of the baby.

“JENNY!” she had screamed, and rushed toward her daughter and yanked the skillet away. “Shame on you! You must never do anything like that again! Why, you could kill your little sister, or hurt her very badly!”

Jenny had glared at her mother for one long moment, her eyes full of anger and frustration, then she had run from the kitchen into the family room, where she collapsed in tears.

Daisy’s scream had startled Susan, who burst into her piercing cry, and the eggs were sizzling in their pan, needing turning, and the toast was drying in the toaster, and the phone rang.

“Oh, my God,” Daisy said, not knowing which way to turn first. Then she grabbed up baby Susan and tried to comfort her against her body with one hand, while with the other she attempted to turn the eggs, which was almost impossible because the skillet kept wobbling around on the burner. The phone rang and rang.

“The phone’s ringing, Mommy,” Danny said.

“Well, it will just have to ring!” Daisy had said frantically. She took the burned toast out of the toaster and threw it in the sink and stuck two more slices of bread in, and cuddled the baby, saying rapidly, “There, there, there, there, you’re okay now.” Then she put the baby back in the playpen and hurried back to the stove to finish the eggs. The phone stopped ringing. Daisy buttered the toast, fixed everyone’s plate, and hurried into the family room. She knelt down beside her daughter, nearly falling over in her awkwardness, and tried to gather Jenny into her arms. Jenny’s face was tear-streaked and blotchy, a sign that she was truly upset.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Jenny,” she said. “Please don’t cry anymore. Oh, Jenny, let Mommy cuddle you a moment. I love you so much, I love you as much as I love the baby, and she will grow up to be a wonderful little friend for you, you just have to give her some time. Come on, don’t let your breakfast get cold. I’ll let you put honey on your toast from the honey bear.”

But Jenny resisted Daisy’s advances; she pulled away and shrugged up into herself.

“Jenny, please,” Daisy said. She heard the phone begin to ring again. Who could be calling? she wondered, everyone knew better than to call at this time of day. “Jenny, come on,” she said in a firmer voice. “Your breakfast is ready, and if you don’t eat it you’ll be cranky all morning, and I’m not going to fix you anything else to eat. Come on, sweetie, come on with Mommy.”

“The baby’s choking!” Danny yelled.

“Oh,
shit,
” Daisy said, and left her surly daughter to sulk alone behind the chair. She pushed her weary body back up off the floor and rushed into the kitchen to pick up Susan who was trying to cry with the pacifier in her mouth. “There, there, damn it,” Daisy said, picking the baby up once again. She took the pacifier out of Susan’s mouth and cuddled her against her, and Susan peed through her diaper and pajamas right down the front of Daisy’s robe, soaking through the thick material into her nightgown and onto her skin. How could one small baby have so much urine inside her? Then she smelled the horrid smell and realized it was not just urine; she looked down at her robe and the baby’s pajamas and her hands, and saw everything stained with a mustardy-brown goo.

“I’m thirsty, Mommy, where’s my juice?” Danny asked. He had already seated himself at the table and had finished his breakfast.

“You’ll just have to
wait,
” Daisy told him. “I’ve got to go change everything, this baby just pooped all over me.”

Danny thought that that was hysterically funny, and Daisy trudged out of the kitchen and through the hall and up the stairs to the sounds of his silly laughter, and Jenny’s persistent sobbing, and the shrill ringing of the telephone, and over it all, the baby’s angry yells. She changed Susan and deposited her in her crib, then went into her bedroom to strip off her murky clothes. When she got back downstairs, she found Jenny still crying, her own breakfast turned cold and congealed on the plate, and Danny standing in a puddle of orange juice because he had tried unsuccessfully to pour himself his own drink. His pajamas were soaked with orange juice and he was crying. And it was only eight o’clock in the morning.

That very afternoon, there Daisy was again, listening to Jenny cry as she hid behind the chair. Paul’s presence had been only a momentary fluke in the pattern of the day; he had not changed a thing. Daisy took Susan off her right breast and held her over her shoulder to burp her, and the baby expelled such a quantity of milk that Daisy felt her blouse totally soaked; she had forgotten to put a diaper on her shoulder. She glanced behind her to find that some of the fluid had hit the sofa, too, and was sinking in fast. Oh, the mess of it all, the
mess
, she thought. She had forgotten the mess of it all. Each morning she awoke with aching breasts and her nursing bra and nightgown and sheets dried to a starchy stiffness from the milk she had leaked in her sleep. “I should wear paper clothes and sleep in the bathtub,” she said to no one in particular. Susan started to fuss again, so Daisy fastened her onto her left breast and just sat there, letting the milk dry on her blouse and on the sofa, listening to her other daughter cry.

Now Daisy stood in the laundry room with a diaper in her hand, remembering yesterday, which with the exception of Paul’s visit seemed like all the other days, which were scrambled together in one jumbled blur. And she thought that Paul was a fink, that he had cheated, that he had encroached on her emotions with a cheap and maudlin trick by bringing her that tacky sentimental record, by telling her he loved her. If he loved her, he could show it with actions instead of words. She had let him get away with a trashy trick, she had let him go off with a soothed conscience, and here she was left in the ruins. Daisy had tried to comfort herself since Paul’s visit, had tried to support herself by thinking that in some way Paul still loved her. But he did not, not in any way. He did not make one minute of her life any easier. He was not in any real way there. And what she needed from life at that moment was not that particular lie. Daisy dropped the diaper on top of the dryer and went into the living room. She picked the record up off the stereo, carried it into the kitchen, and swiftly snapped it in half, then dropped it in the trash. For some reason that deed gave her immense satisfaction.

Movement out the window caught her eye, and she saw that all four upstairs girls were settling themselves on the back lawn in different poses of hedonism. They had brought out blankets and towels and were lying on the ground, letting their bodies soak up the new spring sun. They had a portable radio, and cheerfully chatted above the sound of the music; they had glasses of Coke and a tray of cheese and crackers and apples nearby. Oh, it looked so nice, it looked so pleasurable. But Daisy turned away with resentment: it was
her
lawn, and yet she would have to stay away from it today; it wouldn’t be fair to spoil the girls’ day off by bursting into their luxurious afternoon with three noisy rambunctious children. The girls were really such nice girls, and she was so glad to have their company—and their rent money—that she didn’t want to strain their relationship in any way. She decided to put Susan in the carriage and take all the children for a walk. But first she really did have to finish folding the laundry so that she could put the clothes from the washer into the dryer. She still had a pile of wet smelly sheets to launder: Danny had started wetting the bed at night, and in addition to the extra work this caused, having to carry the soggy sheets and mattress pad down the stairs and back up again, she had the burden of worry: perhaps Danny was in his own way jealous of the baby, too, and this was his way of expressing it. She turned back wearily to the diapers. After a while Danny and Jenny clamored into the laundry room, screeching at her about a toy they were fighting over, and Daisy really could not get too angry with them, for they had played very nicely together all morning while she did the necessary housework.