Bitter Sweet (53 page)
Among the sumac scrub on the rim of the adjacent wood a green, whiskered fly-catcher repeated his hurry fee-be, fee-’be. Beside the nearest headstone the phlox flowers nodded against the granite, while spiders and beetles hurried through the grasses and tiny green worms dropped on webs that shone like glass threads in the failing, final rays of the day. Life and growth flourished everywhere, even in a graveyard that marked the end of life and growth, even within the woman whose heavy heart amid all this summer splendour, seemed misplaced.
She studied the man she loved- the bowed back, the rigid arm, the sagging head.
How disconsolate he looked, lifted to the heights one minute, then mired in despair upon being forced to consider their dilemma.
She moved behind him and laid her palms upon his ribs.
‘Conceiving it was an act of love,’ she told him quietly, ‘and I still love you, and I’ll love it, too. But bringing it into the world outside of marriage is less than it deserves. That’s what I’m unhappy about.
Because I’m reasonably sure
Nancy
will give you enough resistance to keep us unmarried until long after this baby is born.’
He lifted his head and said m the tree, ‘I’ll talk to her this weekend, and tell her that a reconciliation is out of the question. I’ll talk to my lawyer and give orders to get this thing going.’ He turned to face Maggie, held from touching her by some new and unwanted constraint. He realized how prosaic their situation was, how classic his response appeared on the surface: a married man stringing his mistress along while keeping her pacified with promises of divorce. Yet she’d never accused him of lagging, never insisted, or demanded.
‘I’m sorry, Maggie, I should have done it before.’
‘Yes... well, how could we know this would happen?’
His expression turned thoughtful. ‘How did it, Maggie? I’m just curious.’
‘I thought I was safe. I’d had certain signs of’menopause for over a year. But the doctor explained that even when regular periods stop, there are still times when a woman can be fertile. When he told me I was pregnant I felt...’ She glanced at her hands self-consciously. ‘I felt so stupid! Coming up unexpectedly pregnant at my age after I taught Family Life, for heaven’s sake!’
She turned away, chagrined.
He studied her back, the way she hugged herself, the way her pale-green dress pulled taut across her shoulder blades.
The dark, uncompromising truth settled upon him. Sadly, quietly, he asked, ‘You really don’t want it, do you, Maggie?’
She seesawed her head - more of a shudder than an answer. ‘Oh, Eric, if only we were thirty and married, it would be so different.’
It was different for her, he realized; she’d had a family.
She couldn’t begin to comprehend the impress of this child upon his life versus the relative unimportance of his age or hers. Once again disappointment deluged him.
‘Here.’ She turned and handed him the screwdriver.
‘Thank you.”
The reserve remained between them, distancing them for some reason he could not fully fathom.
‘I promise I’ll talk to Nancy.’
‘Please don’t tell her about the baby, though. I’d rather she didn’t know yet.’
‘No, I won’t, but I need to tell somebody. Would it be okay if I told Mike? He’s no blabbermouth.’
“Of course, tell Mike. I may find myself telling Brookie, too, very soon.’
He smiled uncertainly, longing to reach for her, but they remained apart. This was silly. She was carrying his baby, for God’s sake, and they loved each other so much.
‘Maggie, could I hold you? Both of you?’
With a tiny cry that caught in her throat she flew to him and released them from their agony as she went up on tiptoe and clasped her arms across his neck. He held her hard and felt his heart begin beating again.
‘Oh, Eric, I’m so scared,’ she admitted.
‘Don’t be. We’re going to be a family. We will, you’ll see,’ he vowed. He closed his eyes tightly and ran his hands over her pregnant body- her back, buttocks and breasts. He dropped to one knee and, cupping her stomach, pressed his face against it.
‘Hello, little one,’ he said, muffled against her soft, green dress. ‘I’m going to love you so much.’
Through her clothing his breath warmed her skin.
Through her sadness his words warmed her heart. But as he stood and closed her gently in his arms, she knew it wasn’t enough. Enough was nothing less than becoming his wife.
There were times, Nancy Macaffee had to admit, when
How could Eric have liked the decrepit little cracker box. When he’d moved her into it - nothing else was available - he’d promised it was temporary. Was it her fault she wanted something better? Returning to it when he was there, it had been almost tolerable. Now that he was gone, she found it disgusting, but her lawyer had advised her to stay in it for legal reasons, and to do an’thing else would have meant a disruption in her life which she didn’t need at this time.
Returning home on Friday night she cursed, trying to open the damned garage door. Inside, the kitchen smelled stuffy. The same stack of junk mail lay where she’d left it on the kitchen cabinet last Monday. Nobody had washed the rug by the kitchen sink where she’d dropped a spot of mayonnaise. No game hens or chilli were cooking. Nobody offered to carry her suitcase upstairs.
But on the kitchen table was a note from Eric:
Nancy
I need to talk to you. I’ll call you Saturday.
She smiled and flew upstairs. All right, so he hadn’t bought her a gleaming condo in Lake Point Towers with a view of the Gold Coast and all of Chicago at her feet, but she missed him, damn it! She wanted him back. She wanted someone to open the garage door, and to have supper cooking, and to take care of servicing her car and mowing the lawn and having the coffee perked on Saturday mornings. And when she slipped into bed, someone to reaffirm that she was a desirable woman.
Upstairs she threw her suitcase on the bed and stripped off a champagne-pink linen suit. Though sunset flooded the room, she snapped on the lights around her makeup mirror and leaned close, examining her pores, touching her face here, there, flicking a piece of fallen mascara from her cheek, testing her throat for tautness. She found a tiny brush and fluffed her eyebrows straight up. She traded that brush for another, removed her barrette and dropped it among the clutter on the dressing table, brushed her hair vigorously, bending sharply at the waist so its feathery tips whisked her shoulders.
Discarding the brush, she watched herself in the mirror, stripping off a peach—coloured petticoat, bra and panties, letting them drop at her feet like petals at the feet of a Madonna.
She ran her hands over her flat belly, down her thighs, up her ribs catching her cone-shaped breasts and lifting them high, pointing the nipples straight at the mirror.
Oh, how she missed the sex. They’d been so good at it.
But the thought of distorting her body with pregnancy remained repugnant. Some women were made for it and some weren’t. Why couldn’t he have accepted that?
In the cramped, ugly bathroom she drew a bath, laced it with bubbles and immersed herself with a sigh. Eyes closed, she thought of Eric and smiled. Tomorrow was too long to wait. She’d put on her new Bill Blass jumpsuit, and a spray of Passion - which he liked best - and she’d go out there to find out if he’d changed his mind.
Waiting for someone to answer her knock,
Nancy
glanced around in distaste. If there was one place she hated worse than her own house it was this stroking place. Fish -Jesus, she detested the very word. She could hardly eat a fillet of mahimahi since she’d been subjected to the smells around here. How anybody could work in such a stench was beyond her. The whole damned woods stunk!
Anna answered her knock, looking as tacky as ever in a horrible T-shirt emblazoned with the words Grandma’s
Marathon
‘88.
‘Hello,
Nancy
.’
‘Hello, Anna.’
Nancy
perfunctorily rested her cheek on Anna’s. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, you know . . . the boys keep me busy. Fishing’s been real good. How about you?’
‘Busy, .too. Lonely.’
‘Yeah . . . well . . . sometimes we have to go through that. I imagine you came to see Eric. Hc’s down at the fish cleaning shed shutting down for the night.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Be careful in the dark in those high heels!’ Anna called after her.
Nancy
crossed the gravelled area leadin to the dock and outbuildings. It was
Beneath the trees all was dark, but near the fish-cleaning shed a single bulb beamed under a cymbal-shaped reflector. Inside the crude building another bulb oozed weak light onto the concrete floor and the rough board walls. Approaching it,
Nancy
covered her nose with her wrist and breathed the scent of Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion.
Down near the lake a bullfrog belched relentlessly.
Crickets whined everywhere. Insects buzzed and beat at the lights. Something hit
Nancy
’s hair and she cringed and thrashed it away frantically. From inside the cleaning shack two men’s voices could be heard while hose water smacked the concrete floor covering the sound of Nancy’s approach on the gravel.
She stopped within feet of the door and listened.
‘Well, she’s not exactly ecstatic.’ That was Eric.
‘You mean she doesn’t want it?’ - and Mike.
‘She doesn’t want the interruption in her life.’
‘Well, you can tell her from me that we, didn’t want it either, but now that we’ve got Anna we wouldn’t trade her for the world.’
‘It’s a little different for Maggie, Mike. She doesn’t think she can run an inn with a baby waking up and crying in the middle of the night, and she’s probably right.’
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Besides, she thinks we’re too old to have a baby.’
‘But shit, man - doesn’t she know you’ve wanted one your whole life?’
‘She knows, and she says she’ll love it. It’s just the shock.’
‘When it is due?’
‘Four and a half months.’
Nancy
had heard enough. She felt scalded. In the dark her cheeks flushed and her heart bumped crazily. The water still splattered as she turned and retreated, leaving their voices behind. Beneath the shadows of the maple trees she slipped back to her car, closed the door stealthily and sat gripping the wheel with her eyes stinging.
He’d made another woman pregnant.
Devastated, she dropped her forehead on her knuckles and felt the blood rush to her extremities. Fear, shock and anger coursed through her. Fear of the unknown turmoil ahead, the uprooting of their home and their finances and their life pattern, which she’d wanted changed-yes-but by choice not by duress. , Fear of losing a man she had captured in her twenties and of being unable to catch another in her forties.
Shock because it had truly happened, when she had been so sure she could somehow get him back, that her beauty, sexuality, intelligence, ambition and her position as incumbent wife would be enough to pull him back to her after he’d come to his senses.
Anger because he’d turned his back on all that and made a laughingstock out of her with a woman everyone recognized as his old sweetheart.
How dare you do this to me! I’m still your wife! The tears came, burning tears of mortification for what she’d suffer when people found out.
Damn you, Severson, I hope your stinking boat sinks and leaves her with your bastard!
She wept. She thumped the steering wheel. The spurned woman. The one who’d let herself be dragged back to this loathsome place against her will. The one who’d given up life in the city she loved so he could come here and play Captain Ahab. The one who went out on the road five days a week while he stayed behind to screw another woman! If she lived in
Chicago
nobody would know the difference, but here everyone would know - his family, the postmaster, the whole damned fishing fleet!
When her tears slowed, she sat staring at the bleak light of the shack doorway as the men’s shadows crossed and recrossed it. She could give him what he wanted, but she’d be damned if she would. Why should she make it that easy for him? Her pride was annihilated and he was going to pay for it!
She dried her eyes carefully, blew her nose, and flicked on the dome light and checked her reflection in the mirror, in her purse she found an eyeliner wand and did a quick repair job, then snapped out the light.
