Duet for Three (22 page)

“I wish you wouldn't do that.”

“Why not? It's just a tap. You've got a nice bottom.”

It wasn't that they actually quarrelled, though.

Sometimes there were three weeks between his visits home. She came to think of them more or less as visits, since the house was her own so much. Sometimes, too, he left Sunday night instead of waiting for Monday morning, explaining, “I can get a head start on the week if I'm already where I'm going.”

“Jesus Christ,” he cried, coming home and throwing open the drapes. “Why is this place so goddamned dark?”

“The furniture. It fades.” Silly of her to have supposed he would have no more need to swear, once they were married.

“This stuff? How's it going to fade?”

She had chosen from his catalogue, so that they could get it wholesale through his firm, a living-room suite of dark blue, in some tough and nubbly fake material that turned out to show dirt rather badly. He was probably right, though, that it would be hard to make it fade.

“But I'm alone so much. I don't like the drapes open when I'm alone.”

“Well, you're not alone now.”

True.

But there were times, maybe when they were walking together over to Aggie's for an evening, when she admired him. They didn't walk holding hands any more, or with his arm slung across her shoulder, and when they crossed the street he no longer held her elbow as if she were fragile, but still, being with him on the street was pleasing.

She was, after all, old enough to be realistic about these things: give a little here and get a little there. A bargain, this for that. She was no foolish little girl with outlandish expectations, but a grown woman sensibly accepting, for the most part, what was real.

In church, the minister spoke of those who are specially tested, and she wondered if she might be one of those. It put a new light on sacrifice: crucifixions in various forms, say, for instance, nailed down on a mattress beneath her husband's body. The concept offered distance and dispassion, and that in turn made events less painful, which had, she realized, the somewhat absurd effect of making her sacrifice less potent.

She prayed, with increasing impatience, for a child. If one were to be martyred on a mattress, some resurrection of life ought to follow.

A child would make resolution possible. If she were expecting, she could no longer teach, for one thing. The money helped, of course, because Herb's cheques were variable, and whatever he said about being a good salesman, there were times that were flat and that was all there was to it. But there was no pleasure in teaching itself. She began to suspect it would have been that way for her father, too, except that he appreciated the respect it brought.

Anyway, with the war over, women were going back home to raise babies as the men returned to work, and she was out of step once more.

She longed to be one of those young mothers she saw wheeling prams along the sidewalks, leaning down to adjust blankets and fix brakes, and going into stores to shop. It looked a leisurely sort of life, luxurious, to spend days strolling with a baby.

Babies demanded order and sense, put people in their proper places. Herb would have to get a regular job, and they would be a normal family, the three, then maybe four or five, of them. She couldn't picture these imaginary children, and had no clear idea of numbers. One seemed enough for her purposes.

Then, too, his rights would be altered. With a child to protect inside her, she would be the one with rights. And, once it was born, their attention would have to be on it: he to support it, she to nourish it, and both of them to protect it. Also, she would show Aggie how a real mother behaved. She would bring her child up with care. Her child would not be reared in any slapdash, irregular way.

Eventually the doctor said, “It took long enough, but as far as I can tell everything's fine. April, I'd say, right about the middle of the month. Herb'll be pleased, won't he?”

He was. He looked, when she told him, the way she remembered him before they married: light and glittering. How much he must have changed, without her noticing. He even called her Junie again. “Oh, Junie, that's great! A baby! Jesus, my very own kid!”

Not the way she would have put it.

“You know,” she said, “I'll have to quit teaching. You can't teach when you're expecting.”

“Yeah, I guess. But we'll manage. It's good it didn't happen right away, so we had a chance to salt away some money. I'll just have to sell twice as hard, that's all.”

“But I thought you'd want a proper job now.”

“Jesus Christ,” red-faced, “I wish you'd get it through your head, I have a proper job.” Then, more calmly, “Anyway, where do you think I could get one here? There's nothing going now the war's over. And honest to God, June, it's nice to have a home and it'll be great to have a kid, but I couldn't stand being in one place all the time, the same old people day after day.”

Her among them?

So soon the vision of her new and ordinary life was being altered. Why could she never have what she saw? Why was it always up to somebody else and what they wanted how her life was spent?

Aggie took up knitting, and brought over bootees and sweaters. “A grandchild!” she'd said when June told her. “Oh, isn't that nice. I'll like being a grandmother, grandmothers get to play with babies and spoil them.” Who'd have thought she meant it literally, to spoil?

In bed, Herb said, “It's not going to hurt the kid, you know,” but she said quite firmly and finally with some righteousness on her side, “No, I don't want to take a chance.”

There were other things she could do, though. She could work all day wallpapering the second bedroom with dancing bears. She could hem lengths of cotton into diapers, and hook a little rug for the nursery floor, small flowers on a pale-blue backing.

Heavens it was hard, though, getting so big and unwieldy. It hurt, the weight pulling at her all the time, no getting away from it. Almost it seemed to outweigh her, carrying her wearily through the day instead of the reverse; as if she were its burden, not it hers. The pasty, purple-streaked ugliness stretched so tightly — surely she was going to burst? Her face altered, too; she could see it getting puffy, a resemblance to her mother now. Herb said, “Boy, expecting doesn't seem to agree with you, does it?” and didn't mean that it made her ill, because it didn't. Just that it made her look like someone she never would have recognized as herself. “You must keep your feet up as much as you can,” the doctor warned. “Your blood pressure's a bit up, and there's too much fluid.” He patted her shoulder. “Not that it's dangerous, really, but you have to be careful. You're pretty narrow, too.” She supposed he tried to be delicate, but it really wasn't nice, being exposed in his examining room. Quite a trick for him to be both impersonal and kind.

They knocked her out and opened her up and left a garish scar. “It was going on too long,” the doctor told her when she woke up. “But your baby's perfectly healthy. A big thumper of a girl.”

Even with pain and a scar, she could see she had accomplished something here. Herb came to her hospital room with flowers, kissed her lightly on the forehead, said, “She's beautiful. Are you all right?” She was amazed herself at the feeling of a miracle — that something had been created out of nothing.

Home, he stared at his daughter with something that looked like fear. June thought it a little sweet, how worried he looked holding her, as if afraid she would break.

“You don't mind if we call her Frances, do you?” she asked. “It's a name in my father's family, and my middle name. I'd like to carry it on.”

“Frances,” he tried. “Fran. Frannie. Yeah, well okay. I'm not wild about it, but it's okay.”

“Christ,” he grumbled in the middle of the night when she woke them crying, “what's the matter with her?”

It was just that she was so hungry. She was rosy and plump and had a skitter of dark hair. Watching her voracious child, June was reminded of her mother.

There were only the two of them when Herb was on the road. Frances seemed to take his comings and goings with unconcern, not knowing, June supposed, that it might be different in other households. He arrived excited to see her, exclaiming over changes, since everything about her changed so rapidly.

June herself hadn't quite expected that someone so small could consume so much time. There was nothing she could plan that might not have to be cancelled. She could hardly go shopping with a screaming baby, but if she planned to stay home and clean, Frances might sleep on and on until June had to shake her awake. Perhaps it was an illusion that the baby did precisely what was not convenient for her, but why couldn't she sleep quietly in her buggy when June wanted to go downtown and see herself reflected in the glass windows of stores, pushing the pram and smiling gently?

Aggie made a proper fool of herself when she came to babysit, lumbering happily along the five blocks of sidewalk between their houses. She didn't exactly talk baby-talk, but her voice rose. June, watching in amazement and something else that she didn't identify but that wasn't quite nice, saw her mother actually cuddling this child.

“Never mind if she's crying,” Aggie said, waving her hand as if it didn't matter. “She'll stop, you go on to church. I'll just change her and we'll sit here and rock and sing for a while.”

June went, but uneasily. Who knew if something might really be wrong this time? Or, if not, who knew what Aggie was up to in her absence? She came home to find her mother cradling her laughing daughter and waltzing across the kitchen floor, looking foolish and quite unlike any Aggie she could remember.

“Come on, June, take a break, let's go to a movie,” Herb suggested. “Your mother'll babysit, she likes to.”

“Oh no, I don't think so. I don't like to leave Frances, she's been upset today.”

“Well, then, I'm going to Larry's. There's a poker game.”

He did this more and more often. It seemed she hardly saw him, but then, she hardly noticed. When he was home, she left Frances with him while she went to church. She had no idea what happened during those two hours, but, after all, he was the child's father and should be able to do that much.

“You've changed,” he said sadly. “You used to like going out.”

Did she? She could barely remember how things were before Frances, much less before she married. Herb was a phantom. He rarely even reached for her in the night any more, which was fine, she supposed. Except that while she didn't like being reached for, she did not want to be unwanted.

She said, “You don't know how much work it is, you don't understand.”

“One kid! How hard can it be, looking after one kid?” But when she came home from church, he handed Frances over fast enough.

When he came home, he brought Frances small gifts picked up on his travels; the way a guest would, or a Santa Claus.

It was harder when Frances began to crawl, and stand, and then walk. She had to be watched closely so she didn't hurt herself. He brought home a tricycle when she was still quite little, and June cried, “Oh, but she's too young, she'll get hurt.”

“Of course she'll get hurt,” he snapped, steering Frances along the walk. “Everybody does.”

Did he not care about his own child's pain?

No point, speaking of pain, in even thinking about him. Insignificant, really, except for Frances, the result. And it doesn't do to dwell.

FIFTEEN

It may have been women who came to the bakeshop to buy and to trade tales, but it was a man who became Aggie's friend.

It was the year June was at teachers' college, and while that made no difference at all to the rhythms of Aggie's days (and not much to June's, either, as far as Aggie could see), she felt restless. Not dissatisfied, exactly, but ready to look around for more. June would, presumably, be moving on to something or other one of these days. The bakery was doing well and Aggie had even built up some savings. Reading, of course, remained fascinating. She thought the restlessness might be because things outside of books were now too comfortable, too well known.

She wondered if other people found their lives sometimes hanging a little too neatly, like a picture. There was not, she realized, anyone she could ask. Stories might be told in her bakeshop, and illnesses and tragedies and plans for weddings and holidays discussed, but not questions, not feelings. Those she had to imagine, placing herself in others' skins. She would have liked a sister handy then, to sit in her kitchen sometimes and drink tea with, chatting comfortably.

The man who had been coming to the door every morning for years and years, bringing eggs and milk and cheese from the dairy, was a burly, dark, sullen fellow who might nearly be mute for all he said to her. She told him each morning what she'd be needing that day and he would grunt and shrug and fetch it from the wagon in which he toured the streets. His horse, at least, she thought, might be grateful for her orders, since they took longer to deliver than those at other more ordinary households, and it had longer to rest, standing droop-headed and dispirited in the street. She suspected the man didn't feed it properly, and demanded too much from it. She imagined it just lying down in the street someday, giving up.

She took no particular notice when, that year June was at teachers' college, the man who delivered for the dairy was replaced. This new one was not sullen, but otherwise seemed unremarkable. She continued to give him her day's order and he, like his predecessor, carted the supplies into her kitchen. He smiled sometimes, though, and she smiled back, absent-mindedly. It occurred to her, however, meeting him at the door one day and glancing toward the street, that the horse was looking better: more fleshed and alert. “Is that the same animal?” she asked, pointing.

“Well, yes and then again no. Same horse, but he's been having a sort of change of heart.” The man grinned. “That other bugger wasn't taking care of him. Poor old thing never had oats in his life. I give him a handful of oats at the start of the day and the end, so he's got something to look forward to, and I figure he'll last a few years yet. Plus, if I have to look at the back end of a horse all day, I'd just as soon it was a happy back end.”

“Would you like a cup of tea? I've just made some for myself. And biscuits just out of the oven.”

“My morning oats?”

They laughed, and Barney Holtom became her friend.

“You know about horses, then,” she said.

“Brought up on a farm.”

“Oh, so was I!”

He was a couple of years younger than Aggie, balding, with a fringe of greying hair. Also, he had a small pot-belly, although nothing like her bulk.

They traded information: that she was a widow with a daughter, and had been married to a teacher; that he was married, with three sons, and had formerly been a shoe salesman. “I spent
years
selling damn shoes, inside all the time, women coming in trying on twenty pair and buying the first. It sounds like a joke, I know, but it isn't. And smiling all the time, no matter what. People buying shoes and wearing them to whatever they bought them for, a wedding or whatever, and then trying to return them. I tell you, I damn near cracked my face smiling.”

But that still seemed his most frequent expression: a smile, a grin, a laugh. She thought that this must be what beaming meant: light shining out of a good nature. She wondered how it was she hadn't particularly noticed before, and that it took the horse to draw him to her attention.

“Jesus, I better get going, I'm getting behind on my route,” he exclaimed, checking his watch.

But the next morning, and the next, he paused for a cup of tea and a biscuit or a muffin. Every morning then, except for weekends — so easily it became a custom, to be depended on.

June frowned unhappily, coming down to breakfast and finding him there. Whatever did she think was going on while she was still asleep? Lusty tumbles on the kitchen floor while bread loaves rose? But what Aggie appreciated about him was not his passion, but his dispassion. The cool ear with which he listened, his remoteness from a sense of judgment, his capacity to listen seriously as well as talk, and to see the absurd and funny side of certain events.

What did they talk about? More or less everything, she thought, although she could not really tell, from his point of view, if it went that far. There was a gradual loosening in her kitchen for them both, a putting up of feet. Sometimes literally. They would sit on chairs pulled into the kitchen from the dining room, their feet hoisted with considerable difficulty onto the cash-register counter, companionable once the effort was accomplished. “Never mind, June,” Aggie told her disapproving daughter, “it gets the blood moving to the brain. So we can be as clever as we think we are.” She and Barney grinned at each other, and June sighed her way off to school.

Like her, Barney spent time reading, although without her keenness, more for entertainment. He liked English novels best, he said: found their quality of dry wit appealing.

“I was in awful trouble when I quit the shoe store. Boy, my wife was mad.” He sounded, however, proud.

“Well, she would be, wouldn't she, with children to support. I'd have been pretty unhappy, too, if my husband came home and said he'd upped and quit teaching. What would I have done?”

“Started a bakery. Just what you did.”

“Not likely. He wouldn't have allowed it. He'd have said it was demeaning or some such.”

“Alice didn't think that, but she was sure as hell mad.” It was obvious from the way his face softened, however, that his marriage was based on fondness. His body drew energy, it seemed, from mentioning his wife.

“The shoe store was bad enough all by itself, but it was being inside all the time, too. I missed being outdoors more. And at least this job has that, and a connection with farming, selling things that come from a farm. Anyway,” he laughed, “I get to meet so many women.”

“I bet.” But Aggie knew that he did not stop elsewhere on his route.

She also understood that they were friends, which was a new and interesting experience, and not at all the same as a husband, even the one she might have imagined.

Barney talked about his courtship, and getting married, and it sounded much like Aggie and the teacher, except of course for the outcome. “We were both farm kids,” he said. “Gosh, she was pretty. I could never think why she'd agree to marry me, but she did. And then she didn't say a word except yes when I said let's move to town. I wasn't much interested in farming, and anyway I had two older brothers and there wasn't going to be much left for me there, so I thought, okay, we'll have a whole new life, try something different. And she always went along, except for being so mad when I quit the store.”

“Do you miss the farm? I do, sometimes.”

“Sure, I always have. But I notice neither of us has missed it enough to go back, have we?”

She could, she thought, tell him just about anything: even the teacher, although she stumbled a little, trying to find words to describe his distaste for her body. “And you know,” she said, “I didn't look like this then. There was nothing wrong with me. I think I was even attractive, maybe.”

“He sounds nuts to me.” Scrutinizing her features, dwarfed now by surrounding flesh, he said, “I bet you were pretty. Actually, you know, you're pretty anyway. You have a nice face. You'd be a knockout if you lost weight.”

Now, why could she take that from Barney without a flicker, but lash out at June for a similar suggestion? Because, she supposed, June seemed to have a selfish stake in her appearance, while Barney's interest was detached: a mere assessment that didn't signify much, one way or another.

So she could say, without any undercurrent or hidden meaning, “I don't trust any more. Things didn't turn out to be what they seemed. So I could never have married again, even if there'd been some prospect of it, which is none too likely anyway.”

“Why isn't it likely?”

“For one thing, who'd want all this?” patting herself. “And then, I'm a bit prickly with it. Anyway, I never meet any men.”

“Thanks very much,” but it was a joke.

She did wonder, though, if something had been disconnected in her body by the teacher, killing desire. She could look at Barney and feel no attraction of that sort at all, no warmings or stirrings except toward his presence, his gesturing hands, and the sound of his voice.

But no, she could feel her body away inside now, still wanting, and could imagine a man who might draw her that way. It just wasn't Barney. And those small desires weren't urgent at all. She was quite used to unresolved wanting, it wasn't important any more.

She could even talk to him about that: the lack of desire for him. “I know,” he said, “it's interesting, isn't it? I'm the same. But there's still something different about talking to you than to a fellow. It's easier with you, in a way, and we talk about more things. It's sharper, you know what I mean?”

She thought that, yes, there was more spice in this friendship with a man than there might have been with a woman. Maybe because so much was unknown. Talking with the women in the shop later in the day, there was a kind of code, an underline of shared knowledge, even if experiences might be different. There was a common language that left a great many things assumed but unsaid.

She and Barney, though, had to spell things out for each other, which required care and concentration. The detail needed, the effort at recollection, had a clarifying effect. During his morning visits, which lengthened to an hour some days, she stepped with severe attention through what she knew of her life so far. The most difficult subject was June. It was hard, admitting a failure of maternity. “She's a lot like her father,” she said, hoping that would explain a great deal.

But it didn't, apparently. “How?” he asked, so she showed him photographs and tried to express the character of thin dryness she felt her husband and her daughter shared.

He showed her pictures of his three big sons and of his plump and beaming wife. “That's Ben, the oldest, then John and young Bob.” The boys surrounded and towered over Barney's wife. She looked like a happy hen, protected by these unlikely large chicks she had managed to raise.

“Oh, how nice,” Aggie said. “What a nice family you have,” and it never occurred to her to resent this, or to be envious.

“They are nice,” he agreed. “Good kids. But they're boys, you know, they're trouble all the time, one thing or another. Just scrapes, thank God, never anything serious. It's more mischief and awkwardness, not badness.”

“Just be glad,” Aggie grinned, “that you don't have to live with goodness.”

“She does seem to be pretty straight and narrow, your girl. Sure doesn't like seeing me here, anyway.”

Well, yes, no doubt; but Aggie was surprised by a twinge of irritation. One thing for her to criticize her daughter, another for him. A friend was one thing, but when it came down to it, there were only she and June, and he was an outsider in that, after all.

The day she turned forty-two, he arrived with a birthday cake. “Coals to Newcastle, I know,” he said, “but I didn't want you making your own. Happy birthday.” It became a custom, then, each year. For his birthdays, she baked him something special, although not necessarily a cake, since he'd have that later with his family. Sometimes a candle stuck in an oatmeal cookie or a muffin.

He always caught her at a good time of day, when she was winding up the first round of labors, the bread-kneading and batter-mixing and popping things into the oven, and not ready yet for the next round, when the shop would open. Sometimes they'd get talking and he'd say, “Damn, I hate to leave already but I have to. Remember, so we can pick it up tomorrow.” But, to be honest, it was a good thing he couldn't hang around, had to leave and get on with his job. Otherwise they might have gone on too long, and he might have gotten in her way. Sometimes that happened with women who weren't in any particular hurry, and they'd stay on and on, keeping her from her work, or a book she was trying to finish.

Another good thing was that their lives, hers and Barney's, did not overlap. His wife did not shop at Aggie's bakery, and Aggie was not invited to his home. All they had was an hour every morning, like a jewel in a glass box. Within that transparent case they sustained attachment; a fondness that, she thought, was sturdier than any romance.

When Herb arrived on the scene, she discussed him with Barney, and her surprise that the eye of such a man would light on her daughter. “Do you think she's pretty? It's so hard for a mother to tell.”