A Garden of Earthly Delights (28 page)

Lowry was always at the center of her thoughts. Like the sun, you needn't even glance up to see it, let alone feel it. You could even forget it, in a way. So Clara concentrated upon what surrounded her—working at Woolworth's, going out in the evening with whoever was around, gazing dreamily out her second-floor windows, sleeping alone and touching herself gently, in love, as her lover had touched her, though not always gently.
Clara. Beautiful Clara.

Sometimes Lowry's voice was so clear, she woke from a dream of overwhelming happiness.
Clara: I don't want to hurt you.

She wasn't sure what that meant. An apology ahead of time.

A warning?

“ ‘Beautiful Clara.' ” It was so: she'd changed. Customers in the store regarded her closely, and smiled. Even the women lingered, friendlier than she remembered. And on the street. In that way that people smile at a good-looking girl or woman, with no thought for why, what logic.

Now it seemed to Clara that Tintern had grown mysteriously less beautiful. Stricken with the hot-humid air of August, that made you sweat inside your clothes though you'd just had a bath, and had talcum-powdered your body with care. Clara walked on Main Street, and on River Street, and on Bridge Street, and sometimes on the gaunt old nightmare bridge, gripping the railing when vehicles passed, and the structure shuddered. In her old life—she'd come to think of her life before Lowry had made love to her as old, bypassed—she'd have been scared as hell, but now the sensation thrilled her. As if Lowry were close beside her. She knew herself radiant and buoyed by happiness. If men or boys approached her, she laughed and told them that she was engaged, her fiancé was out of town.

That word:
fiancé.
Speaking it, with a smile.

Drifting into a dream open-eyed. Her mind was a thousand miles away, in that seaside town on the Atlantic Ocean.

Atlantic seaboard
Pearl had murmured solemnly.

“Then it's decided. He has decided.” So Clara had thought on the first day, and on the second day of lying in the sun with him and observing other people live out their lives—parents, children— who were staying at the shore as she and Lowry were doing, though probably for longer. “It must be all decided, he doesn't even need to think about it.” Lowry would lie for a while on his stomach, and if she leaned over to gaze at his face she saw how vulnerable it was, his skin that was a man's skin, coarse, pitlike scars at his hairline from some accident long ago, or fight. At the beach, Lowry soon became restless. He read, or tried to read: paperback books, newspapers, magazines. Sometimes turning the pages so swiftly, Clara supposed he wasn't really reading. If she leaned against his arm, and began to read aloud, haltingly, as a child might, Lowry laughed and caressed the nape of her neck, “Go on, good. Don't stop.” But Clara invariably stumbled over a word, and shoved the book from her.

At other times, after making love, Clara sat beneath Lowry's gaze and brushed her hair that fell now to nearly her hips, staring out at the ocean. That slow dreamy time Clara wanted to last forever but knew would not. Lowry became gigantic to her: a presence more than the sun, that could cut the sun off from her. He'd grown to fill her mind most of the day, and at night he was a presence she slept curled against and would have clung to if he'd allowed it. “He must not be thinking of it, even,” she told herself, waiting to ask him what plans he had and whether he was keeping in mind that note she'd left for the dime-store manager about Thursday. Would that day come, and Clara would be back in the damned store? She could not believe it.

Yet a part of her mind must have accepted it, because she felt no great surprise, only a faint, wan disappointment, when she was back in Tintern on Thursday, just as Lowry had said.

The days at the shore were a flashing, blurred interruption of the summer, and all that Clara retained of it, to hold in her hand, were two snapshots: Lowry and Clara snuggling together like teenaged lovers in an automatic photo stand, smiling into the camera's blank eye. Clara had been sunburnt, her hair windblown and tangled, and Lowry hadn't shaved for a day or more, grinning with
mean-looking wires pushing from his jaws. The edges of both photographs were clouded. One of the snapshots was for Clara, and one was for Lowry, but Clara discovered both snapshots among her things.

And she had also this tanned sensuous body, and certain memories, and Lowry's promise of returning again in two Sundays—it was the earliest he could make it, and he kissed her goodbye with genuine regret—and a vague suspicion that her awkwardness about
taking care of herself
in the way that Lowry wanted might have consequences.

Still, Clara had no way of knowing yet.

And even if her period came late, that might not mean anything. For her period sometimes came late, and sometimes early. Clara was so stricken with self-consciousness, she could not bear to speak of such things to another person, let alone a man. When Lowry had said, “You sure as hell don't want to get pregnant, Clara,” she'd heard the word clearly, but turned aside, blushing. She knew: Lowry did what a man did, sometimes: slid things onto himself, thin-rubber ugly things that she, Clara, did not acknowledge, could not bring herself to acknowledge except in repugnance, afterward.
Pregnant
was not so uneasy a word, or an idea; you heard
pregnant
often, though not as often as
going to have a baby
, which was somehow easier to utter. Clara had a vague idea—hadn't Rosalie said so?— poor Rosalie, who'd gotten pregnant, so young!—that you couldn't get pregnant so fast. Or maybe it was Sonya who said so. Based upon her sister who'd tried so damn hard to get pregnant, and it had taken years. Sonya's attitude caught on with Clara, who could imagine her lumbering sardonic friend sneering at other people's advice. (Sonya was involved with a married man, a gypsum mine worker twelve years older than she was.) Trouble was, Sonya seemed always angry these days, and Clara avoided her afraid she might hear something she didn't want to hear. The serenity of Clara's face might annoy Sonya, for with Sonya love made things jagged and troublesome and brought out blemishes on her face. Clara had softened. If her face looked empty it was because her mind was occupied, sorting out and arranging memories. In four days there had been less of them than she would have thought, because moments
blended into one another and were almost the same moment. But she had certain images to love: Lowry doing this, Lowry looking at her in such a way. One day a man had said something over his shoulder to Clara, and Lowry had grabbed him and pulled him around, and the man had jerked away and told Lowry to let him alone, and Lowry had waited a second and then gone after him again, pushing him along with one hand and showing by the stiffness of his bare back that he was furious. When he came back to Clara she had been ashamed, not because he had been so angry on her account but because he had been angry just for something to do. That was one of her memories. And all the times when she had said aloud to him, “I love you,” the words tortured out of her by a force that was like a devil squirming inside her, lashing out in his frenzy. Sunlight in at the window—they stayed in a boardinghouse that was clean but a little noisy—and certain water marks on the ceiling, and the eating stands and taverns, one after another, and Lowry squeezing her shoulders or swimming in loose circles around her: she had these things to think about.

As the days passed she began to think more and more of Lowry's baby. Her mind broke through to the surface of the day, shattered by the sunlight, and she was positive that she was pregnant—she knew it must be. But she waited. She fell into the habit of dreaming about Lowry and the baby together, as if the two of them were somehow one, and what had begun as a thought that frightened her turned into a daydream she looked forward to. If she had a baby it would be his and it would be something only he had given her, something he had left her with. After the first several times he had never again said to her, “Are you taking care of yourself, Clara?” because it embarrassed her. Sometimes they would fall asleep and he must have known she was doing nothing, but forgetfulness came down upon them like the lazy heat of the beach and told them that all was well. Clara thought that all was well forever and that the future would stretch out before them the way the ocean and the beach did, stretching out of sight but always the same, monotonous and predictable. She supposed it would be that way with Lowry once he settled down. She supposed that in his mind everything had been decided—that he was going to keep her with him from
now on—but, back in Tintern a while later, she had had to give up that idea and start working on this new one.

On the surface of her mind was this worry, was she going to have a baby? Or could it be that her body was thrown off by Lowry? It was only on the surface of her mind, however. What she really felt came out when she said to Sonya one day, “It would be nice to have a baby,” and then stopped to think what she had said. Sonya made a contemptuous noise that was like something ugly kicked out before you, for a joke. This did not bother Clara. She felt like a plant of some kind, like a flower on a stalk that only looked slender but was really tough, tough as steel, like the flowers in fields that could be blown down flat by the wind but yet rose again slowly, coming back to life. Her first thought was, “Lowry will be mad at me for not taking care of myself ”; then she thought, “It's his more than mine because he's older,” and remembered the many times he had been gentle with her, drawing her close with a casual gesture that meant more to her than anything else. They came together at moments like that. On the beach his dreaminess had been a dreaminess that drifted out for miles, while hers was a dreaminess of motion content to remain still for a lifetime; but still they had come together at certain moments.

Ginny's children, especially the baby, drew out Clara's love. On Sunday she went to a charity picnic with them, just to have something to do while waiting for Lowry to come (he had said not before eight), and she kept asking to hold the baby even when Ginny said she didn't mind carrying it herself. Ginny was pregnant again. Her husband Bob had not found work yet and he and Ginny were living with her mother.

They walked slowly about together, a little group. Clara thought that everyone at the picnic looked different, special. The old women wore hats, round black straw hats with bunches of artificial flowers, usually violets. Many of the men wore suits, though they looked awkward and hot in them. Ginny wore a filmy long-sleeved dress that was already stained with the baby's milk, an accident they had in the car, but her face was freshened by the music and the excitement of the picnic and she did not seem to mind the way Bob walked a few steps ahead of them. Clara returned looks she got
with a slow, dreamy smile, not surprised that people should think her worth staring at but rewarding them for it. She saw Sonya and her boyfriend standing at the Volunteer Firemen's Beer Tent, the biggest tent of all, but she did not go over to say hello. Ginny nudged Clara and said, “Don't they have a nerve?” but Clara just shrugged her shoulders. She was in a warm, pleasant daze, trying to balance the secret she was now certain of about herself with the color and noise of the picnic, dazed by what she knew that no one else, not even Ginny, could know.

They stopped at the bingo tent and the two girls played a few games, while the baby whined and tugged at Clara's skirt and the boy tried to swallow the dried-up corn kernels they pushed around on the dirty old bingo cards. A fat lady, the wife of the man who owned the drugstore, stood by them and chattered at the baby. She wore an apron with special pockets sewn in it to hold change. “Too bad you don't have better luck, you two,” she said to Clara and Ginny. On the last game Clara had no luck either, and sat toying with the kernels of corn and staring down at the card with a small fixed smile, her mind already fallen beyond the noisy tent of bingo players and the shaking of the numbered balls and the recorded music to those days by the ocean with Lowry. But those days seemed already far away.… Then someone yelled “Bingo!” and, as always, she wasn't ready just yet to hear it. Ginny said, “Crap,” and pushed her card away. Clara swung herself around on the bench and let her legs fall hard. She thought, “Six or seven months and I won't be able to do that.” This thought, which came out of nowhere to her, was more real than all the memories she had been reliving.

They found Bob at the beer tent, which was naturally where he would be, and stood around talking with people. There was just a slight wind and it picked up dust—the land was dry in August— and Clara sometimes reached down to keep her skirt by her knees. She wore yellow high-heeled shoes and no stockings, which was a mistake because a blister had begun on one heel, and a pale blue dress that reminded her of Lowry's eyes, though her own were about the same color. That morning, and every morning since Thursday, she had washed her face with cream in a blue jar she
bought at the drugstore (it cost fifty-nine cents) and stood dreamily massaging her skin in small circles, looking beyond her own eyes in the mirror. After she finished with the cream she washed it off her face carefully and then leaned close to the mirror and plucked at her eyebrows, until they were shaped in thin rising lines and made her look a way she had never looked before—delicate and surprised. She had always had the look of a girl standing flat-footed, but now she looked like someone else—it might have been the girl in that dime photograph she was imitating. Herself, but a better self. Whenever men glanced at her and their eyes slowed, Clara turned her head a little to loosen her hair just to give them something more to look at; being with Lowry had done that for her. She thought that all men were like Lowry in some way, or trying to be like him. At the beer tent Bob joked around and jostled her and then, when Ginny had drifted a short distance away, talking to someone else, he had taken hold of her upper arm and squeezed it. Clara looked at him as if she did not know who he was, doing such a thing. She had listened for months to Ginny's weeping over him, and she knew that Ginny was right, but now this hard, sullen young man confronted her with a look of trouble that was all his own and she could not really identify him. It crossed her mind that he too could have done what Lowry did to her, and the baby she might be going to have could be his baby, that it could be any man's at all—and the idea was astonishing. Except for Lowry, everyone was common.