Nine Women (6 page)

They drove to work together and parted in the elevator with a kiss. In a few years they’d buy a house and later she’d take leave for a child or two and maybe even give up full-time work. For now they had a two-room apartment that was all yellow and white and green with heavy curtains to pull tight across the windows at night. She vacuumed twice a week and polished the furniture so often that the rooms always smelled of wax. She even washed the windows once a month. It was a way of quieting the restlessness that surged up in her now and then.

On Saturdays she and Edward shopped and went to a late afternoon movie, had supper at a fast-food place, and came home to bed. On Sundays in summer they went to the beach, though they didn’t swim. In winter they drove out into the country where the snow was white and untouched. They never skied or skated. They were content to look at the immense shivering whiteness. And once every couple of months they got up in time to go to mass. Neither of them liked the English service, so they looked for a church where mass was still in Latin, but they found only a small group of Charismatics, and after that they’d stopped looking.

Five years.

Then two months ago, on a Thursday, Edward went home early, saying he had a headache.

She thought nothing of it. He’d looked a bit tired that morning, and there was absolutely no sense trying to work if you weren’t able to do a good job.

When she got home, he was sitting in the living room. There were no lights, no lights at all, and evening dark filled the room, obscuring the leaf patterns on the chairs, dulling the white walls.

“Are you all right?” With the first jolt of alarm, she switched on one lamp. “Are you sick?”

“No,” he said, “I wanted to think.”

She hung up her coat, brushed it quickly, put it away neatly.

“About what?”

His dark brown eyes were flecked with yellow, they glittered like fancy marbles. Huge eyes with dark circles under them. “The way it is with us, I’ve been thinking, is that all there is?”

She stared at him, not answering.

“You’ve been feeling it too, Mary Margaret. I know that.”

Carefully, levelly, without a shade of anger or fear—words to meet his words, thoughts to be born of them. No midwife here, take care. “Maybe I do wonder. Sometimes. And I don’t know why.”

He sat down, then got right up again. “It’s hard to talk about it sensibly, you know. People go to psychiatrists for this, to find out how to put feelings into words.”

“I don’t think—it’s nothing to do with you, Edward. And not with me either.”

“You know, the books you read, they say it’s sex.”

So he’d been reading books; she hadn’t known. Maybe he read them at lunchtime, and kept them locked in his office desk.

“This one book by a New York psychiatrist, he says that if the sex adjustment is all right, everything else in the marriage will be fine.”

“There’s nothing wrong with sex,” she said, “not for me.”

“Not me either.”

They were both silent for a moment, remembering. She felt the familiar flood of blood and heat—only a ghost now, faint and barely recognizable.

“It’s something else,” she said.

Because his eyes were glittering as bright as if there were Christmas tree lights behind them, she reached out and touched his cheek, bristly and blue-shadowed. He was sweating heavily, the stubble was slippery with moisture. He smelled sweaty too, heavy and musky.

They made love there on the couch, quick and uncomfortable. Then in bed, comfortable and insatiable. They both overslept and were late for work in the morning.

But the words remained. They hung in the living room air; they hung, muted, over the bed. The words had been heard, had danced through ears and rattled in heads: More than this?

Mary Margaret shook herself back to the present, turned off the TV. To say something, anything, she asked: “Pa, isn’t that a new road sign out front? The curve sign?”

“No,” her father said.

“Looks new to me.”

“No,” her father said. “They put that sign there three, four years ago.”

“You ready for dinner?” her mother said.

That meant the casserole was already on the table.

“Wait a minute, Ma. I’ve got to tell you something, something important. Edward and I are going to get a divorce.”

They stared at her blankly.

“It’s not that there’s anything wrong between us.” (How could she explain when she was so uncertain herself?) “We just thought it would be better this way.” (But maybe it wouldn’t.) “Edward got a big promotion and a transfer to the Houston office. He’ll leave in a couple of weeks, they want him right away. And I’m not going with him.”

Not seeming to hear, her father walked out the front door, slowly, putting his feet down in the manner of very heavy men. He crossed the lawn to check the date stenciled on the sign, then came back to the house. “Seventy-eight.” The climb had left him puffing slightly. “Like I said, 8-22-78, three years ago. Clear as can be.”

The sound of the closing front door, muted by thick weather stripping, set echoes bouncing in Mary Margaret’s head:
More than this. There must be more than this.

“Did you listen, Pa? Did you hear what I said?”

“He’s got to do one thing at a time,” her mother said. “You asked him about the sign.”

Always on his side, Mary Margaret thought. You’re alike as twins.

“Edward and I are still friends, but we want a divorce and that’s what we’re going to get.”

“Catholic people don’t get divorced,” her mother said.

Her father said, “The Slob walked out on you.”

I have honored these people, she thought, I have honored them for all my twenty-nine years, and I am not about to stop now.

“His name is Edward, and he didn’t leave me. We agreed to separate, both of us.”

“You want to eat dinner?” her mother said to her father.

They heaved themselves out of their chairs and went to the table.

The words were still echoing. Hers? Or Edward’s?
More than this.

Her parents ate steadily, she only pushed the noodles across her plate, separating the bits of tuna, the peas.

“You don’t want to eat?” her mother said. “You got to eat to keep your strength up.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Her father said, “You’re not going to keep that apartment?”

“Just for a couple of weeks,” she said.

“You got to think of where to live.”

Mary Margaret pushed a red fleck of pimiento to the rim of her plate. “Yes.”

Her mother folded her hands. With her heavy sloping shoulders and small head topped by a cone of black hair she was a perfect pyramid. “Her room’s still here.”

“How would it look,” her father said. “Her living here, married and without a husband and divorced.”

“How it looks?” her mother repeated hesitantly.

“Who’d care,” Mary Margaret said. “Who’d know. Who ever comes here?”

Only their blood, their cousins, on special holidays and saint’s days and Communion days, when white-dressed children went from house to house, bringing with them innocence and spiritual grace. And good luck. Her father said he always brought in his longest shots on Communion days.

Now they were telling her she wasn’t welcome back. That her parents’ house was closed.… Except for Wednesday supper and perpetual novena.

I must tell Edward that, she thought, as soon as I get home. He’ll love that and we’ll have a good laugh.

He’d be waiting for her—she was certain. Sex was now a hunger for them, demanding, painful, then satisfied and comfortable. They were so happy together, they were friends. In two weeks they would separate, with a kiss.

Maybe, she thought, that’s all there is.

Her mother was saying with unusual emphasis, “She can come back here, Al. I want her to come back here.” She wiped the perspiration from her fat cheeks with her paper napkin. “I don’t care what you or anybody says.”

Well, Mary Margaret thought wryly, scratch one, but the old mare came through.… And aloud she said, “I didn’t know you thought so much about appearances, Pa.”

“It’s her room.” Her mother was shivering—anger or nervousness—her pudgy shoulders shook and a sharp smell of old woman’s sweat came from her.

“Wait, Ma,” Mary Margaret said, “you didn’t let me finish. I’m changing jobs too and I’m moving. To Oklahoma City.”

Slowly her father got up and took the paperbound
Texaco Atlas of the United States
from the corner bookshelf. (They’d gotten it years before, when they drove to Florida. It was their first and only vacation, they hated every minute.) He unfolded the largest map and put it on the table.

Mary Margaret pointed. “There. Right there.”

Everything had happened at once. The evening they decided on divorce, the very same evening Edward told her he’d be moving to Houston, they went out to dinner. It was an Italian restaurant—checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles and the heavy greasy pasta they both liked. They finished a bottle of wine and became giggly and secretive, heads together, holding hands and touching knees.

We must look like lovers, she thought, and we are. In a way.

“Look.” Edward was playing with her hand, twirling the silver and amethyst ring he’d given her for Christmas. “Are you really going to stay here? Won’t it be a little rough for you, I mean?”

“I’ve got my parents,” she said.

They both smiled warmly at the joke.

He insisted: “My boss, you know him, Hank Cavendish, he’s being transferred, it’s a big step up for him. He wanted his secretary to go with him, but she won’t leave. I bet anything he’d jump at the chance to hire you if you’d relocate right away.”

“Why not?” she said, giggling, the wine still singing in her ears. “Why not. Where?”

“Oklahoma City.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I do know it’ll be a good move for you. They’re expecting that office to grow pretty fast. Wherever it is.”

She told her parents: “I get a twenty per cent raise, plus medical and dental coverage, plus they are paying my moving expenses.”

They nodded. Figures were something they had no difficulty understanding.

“Will you be coming next Wednesday?” her mother said.

“Next Wednesday. But not the one after that.”

Her mother nodded, the twisted knot of gray and black hair moved up and down slowly.

Don’t you want to ask when I will be back? If I will come back? If I’ll be here at Christmas? If I’ll come back for your funerals? Do you never worry about anything?

“Time to go.” Her father pushed himself up from the table. The atlas lay open, one page soaking in the vinegar of his salad plate.

Go? Where would they go, who never went anywhere? The novena. The Wednesday perpetual novena.

Her mother smoothed back her hair in the sideboard mirror, her father went to put on his leather shoes.

If I stay any longer, I am going to break every dish on the table, or I am going to throw a chair through that window, or I am going to scream and keep on screaming. I am going to dishonor my father and my mother. If I don’t get out of here.

Her chair, pushed too hard, slid back into the wall. The picture of her mother’s first husband shivered and slipped sidewise.

“I’m not going,” she said. Then louder, for her father who was still in the bedroom: “I’m not going to the novena.”

“You always go,” her mother said.

Her father came to the doorway, one shoe still in his hand.

Four eyes, surprised, accusing, puzzled, shocked.

Don’t look at me. You are my parents but don’t look at me that way. You’ve had all you can have from me. One novena more is too much.

“I’ll go next week,” she said. “For the last time, next week.”

They both nodded to her, pyramids of flesh with tiny heads perched on top, like kindergarten drawings.

She hurried through the living room, snatching her coat and purse as she went. Running with fear from something she didn’t know, something that might not have been there, something that might even have loved her.

She drove off, tires squealing, leaving the thing that had chased her growling emptily at the end of the driveway.

By the time she got to the crowded highway, she felt better, the soft singing of the engine comforted her. She opened the window and familiar exhaust-laden air curled across her face and shoulders.

It was a very warm night, she thought. As her mother had said, she hadn’t really needed to bring her coat.

M
YRA
R
OWLAND STOPPED HER
bright red jeep at the entrance to the beach club. Over the iron gates decorative bunting hung dusty and limp, shivering uncertainly in the small currents of midday air. It was the first day of the new summer season.

“Morning, Frank,” she called to the uniformed guard. “It’s nice to see you back again.”

“Hot morning, Mrs. Rowland.” He pushed open the gate. “Is that a new jeep?”

“I liked the color.”

“It sure is bright.” He leaned against the car door and nodded to the empty seat beside her. “Mr. Rowland didn’t come with you?”

“We lost him,” she said softly. “This winter. In January.”

He hesitated, slow to understand. Then he pulled his hand away as if the door were burning hot. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

She said, “One learns to live with it. Like any other fact.”

She drove through the gates, thinking: Why did I say anything so silly? Why did I say I had lost Hugh? I haven’t lost him at all. I know exactly where he is and the headstone says
HUGH DUDLEY ROWLAND 1905-1984
.

The neat narrow blacktopped road stretched ahead of her; she drove precisely down the very middle. Thinking: Hugh and I came here every good sunny day for thirty summers. We were one of the families who bought this land, built the first clubhouse. Not more than a shed in the jack pines. When the 1961 hurricane destroyed it, Hugh said: Good riddance. This time I’ll lend the club money for a proper building.

That building still stood (its loan long repaid), quite small and lost in all the subsequent remodelings and expansions. But there. It was Hugh who had gone.