The Amateur Marriage (38 page)

“We parted ways thirteen years ago,” Pauline said.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Dun told her.

“Don’t be sorry! I’m over it!” She took a bite of her crab cake. Her words seemed to hang in the air a moment; she heard a ring of bravado that she hadn’t intended. “It was all very friendly and civilized,” she said, softening her voice. “No long-drawn-out court battles or anything like that.”

“Well, still,” Dun said, “I can guess it must have been painful. I don’t know what I’d have done if Mattie’d asked me for a divorce! Would you believe she and I never had a serious quarrel? I don’t mean we didn’t disagree—she’d want the thermostat higher and I’d be sweating; she’d want to go to some shindig and I’d prefer to sit home. But we never what you’d call fought; we never regretted we were married to each other. I consider myself lucky that way. I feel I’ve been very fortunate.”

“Yes,” Pauline said, “you
are
lucky. Yes, not many can say that.”

She was overcome, suddenly, by a sense of boredom so heavy that she envisioned it as a vast gray fog seeping soundlessly through the room.

So when the crash came—a heart-stopping
wham!
and a clatter and a series of tinkles—she welcomed the diversion. She straightened in her seat and glanced hopefully over Dun’s shoulder. In the open, tiled space just in front of the hostess’s podium, their waitress slapped her own cheeks and stared down at a mangle of crockery. “Mercy sakes!” Dun said, but Pauline said, “Don’t look!”

“Pardon?”

“That’s what my daughter tells me—Karen. She once took a hostess job to help with her law-school expenses and to this day, if we’re in a restaurant and someone drops something, she tells me, ‘Don’t look, whatever you do! Pretend you haven’t noticed.’ That poor waitress; she must be mortified.”

“I thought there’d been an explosion,” Dun said, returning obediently to his steak. He cut himself another piece while behind him, the waitress tucked her skirt up and knelt to gather half-moons of plates and cups missing their handles.
Chink-chink,
they landed on her tray. The other diners watched with interest, but Pauline gazed tactfully to her left where, she suddenly noticed, a white coffee cup sat all by itself in the center of the aisle. Dun was saying, “You have a daughter who’s a lawyer?”

“Yes, she works for this advocacy group that helps people who are on welfare,” Pauline told him. The cup stood right side up, a single flash of white in the gloom, and as far as she could see it wasn’t even chipped. This made it appear to have been set there for some purpose. Should she point the cup out to the waitress? Or would that be interfering? She forced herself to look again at Dun, who was saying, “I’ll bet you’re proud of her.”

“Proud?”

“Having a lawyer in the family.”

“Well, yes, though you’d never
know
she was family, because she’s changed her name to Antonczyk.”

Dun stopped chewing and asked, “Why would she do that?”

“Isn’t it the limit?” she said. All right, she would gather the energy to try one more time. She laughed and shook her head. “That was my husband’s last name two or three generations ago. They changed it to Anton, I don’t know when, and now here she is, Antonczyk, back to her roots and so forth. We all said, ‘Who?’ We said, ‘What?’ But that’s Karen—a mind of her own.”

“One of Matties nephews did the exact same thing,” Dun said.

“He did?”

“Only he changed his first name. He changed it from Peter to Rock.”

Pauline thought this over.

“He said it meant the same thing and it had a more snazzy sound, but I don’t know; the family was pretty upset. Mattie told him that someday he would want to change it back. He mentioned that to me at her funeral. He said, ‘Already I’m
starting
to want to. Aunt Mattie was right.’ He thought the world of her; all of them did. She never forgot a birthday. She sent them cards for every occasion, Christmas and Easter and Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving and Labor Day, even.”

Over Dun’s left shoulder, Pauline saw a very old couple entering the restaurant. They paused at the hostess’s podium, but the hostess was nowhere in sight. They looked at each other. The man advanced a few steps and glanced back at his wife. She seemed doubtful. The man had a felt hat in his hands and he turned it nervously by the brim as he advanced yet another step and another, while behind him, his wife ventured a step or two herself. The man gathered speed; he seemed focused on a certain table somewhere to Pauline’s rear, and he kept his eyes fixed on it as he walked smack into the white cup.
Ching!
It rang against the tiles and took off, spinning like a top, with a circular, metallic sound that brought the hostess rushing up out of nowhere. The couple froze and then pivoted in unison and stumbled toward the door. The expression on the husband’s face in the instant before he turned—pure bewilderment; how in heaven’s name to explain such a strange faux pas?—struck Pauline’s funny bone and she got the giggles. She tried to keep quiet, of course. She tucked her chin down, shielding her mouth with one hand. But she was laughing so helplessly that she made a kind of honking sound, and tears began running down her cheeks. Dun, who had started slightly at the first
ching
but (perhaps recalling her instructions) remained facing forward, seemed not to notice her behavior. Or maybe he was being diplomatic. At any rate, he went on talking. “Even May Day; remember May Day? Most people don’t. I can’t figure what happened to May Day. Folks used to hang baskets of flowers on people’s doorknobs and Mattie still did, the prettiest little baskets she bought in bulk at the crafts supply and trimmed with ribbon. I’ll be so broken up when May Day comes this year. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Pauline collected herself, finally. “Yes,” she said, “it’s going to be hard. I’m so sorry she won’t be here.” And other things, other consoling, murmuring, commiserating things. But her mind was a mischievous animal cavorting elsewhere as she wiped her eyes and tucked her hankie away and started slogging through her crab cake and her coleslaw and green beans.

In spite of everything, she asked him in when he brought her home. She just hated to walk alone into an empty house. She hated the abruptness of it, the sudden contrast. So she said, “Won’t you come in? I’ve got cocoa”—sensing that cocoa would be his beverage of choice.

“Cocoa!” he said. “From scratch?”

“Naturally from scratch.”

It was Nestlé’s Quik, but he would never know.

She settled him on the living-room couch and she made him take off his sport coat, and when she brought him his mug of cocoa she sat on the couch also, even though she had no interest in him and would, in fact, have felt repelled if he’d moved any closer. (Not that there was the remotest chance of that.) His cragginess struck her now as dried-upness; his midwestern accent seemed priggish. But she said, “This has been so much fun! I don’t know when I’ve had such a nice evening.” And when he handed back his mug and said he couldn’t believe he had stayed this late, she said, “It’s just like that song, isn’t it? Like ‘Two Sleepy People.’ I used to think of that song when my husband and I were courting. We’d come in from a date and we’d both be falling on our faces with tiredness but you know how it is; there was still so much to talk about, so much we wanted to tell each other . . . and it always made me think of that song about the couple who couldn’t bear to say good night. Do you remember that?”

“Oh, yes,” Dun said. “I remember it well.” But he was reaching for his sport coat as he spoke.

She phoned Pagan at his dorm. It was only nine o’clock—the shank of the evening, for him. Some other boy answered and then shouted for him raucously. “Anton! Pay Anton?” he bellowed. But finally he said, “Sorry. Guess he must be out.”

“Well,” Pauline said, “tell him that his grandma called, please. No special reason; just wanted to gab.” She didn’t suppose Pagan would ever get the message, though. He lived in a way she couldn’t imagine, boys and girls tumbling all over each other and dreadful music blaring down the halls, although he seemed to be thriving.

She phoned Katie on the pretext of thanking her for lunch. But Katie said, “Oh, you didn’t have to—what, sweetheart? It’s Pauline,” so Pauline knew enough to say a quick goodbye. Katie didn’t even ask how her date had gone; that was how eager she was to get back to her husband.

She phoned Wanda. They could talk about Marilyn. How was Marilyn
really
doing? Why was she still feeling sick? Shouldn’t she be over that now? But Wanda’s telephone rang ten times without an answer. She must be at one of her daughters’. Wanda was very close to her daughters.

Years ago, so long ago that Michael had still been doing the leg lifts prescribed by the physical therapist, he had told Pauline that if he ever got a terminal illness, a part of him would rejoice because at least then he could stop exercising. Pauline had been scandalized. “What a thought!” she’d said, but he had gone on to add, “And cocktail parties, and dinner parties, and visiting back and forth and talking with meaningless people about politics and the weather—I could give it all up. I could shut myself away and give up, and no one would blame me.”

“I can’t imagine,” Pauline had told him. “Me, I’d be doing the opposite. I’d be trying to cram as much as I could into the time I had left. I’d be dancing till dawn! I’d be
greedy
for people!”

Well, there you had the difference between them. It seemed unjust that she should be the one who was living on her own now, while he was happily ensconced in another household.

(“You should see the two of them,” Karen had once reported, in the amused and rueful tone she often used for Michael. “Sitting at their kitchen table drawing up their household budget, recording their gas expense and their mileage, sorting coupons for free car washes and carpet-cleaning discounts. Like two peas in a pod.”)

Pauline walked through the house turning off lights. In the bedroom, she adjusted the blinds and changed into her nightgown. The water in the bathroom sink ran plenty hot, she was glad to find. She ought to apply her new Nighttime Renutritive Cream, but it seemed like too much trouble.

She slid under the covers and reached for the magazine she had been reading the night before. An article on . . . what? On how to organize her time. It had put her to sleep, and no wonder. How to
fill
her time was the problem. She turned the page. She flipped past ads for colognes, for ladies’ razors, for tummy-slimming pantyhose. Her eyelids felt like heavy velvet draperies. A man in a tuxedo fastened a string of pearls around a beautiful woman’s bare neck. A noted nutritionist wrote about the hidden calories in our diet. Calories hidden in salad dressings, in so-called healthful granolas . . . so-called healthful granolas . . .

She woke with a start, and look! It was morning! No, that was just the lamplight. She sighed and flicked the switch off. Then she slid flat in her bed, but wouldn’t you know, now she couldn’t get back to sleep. She was like one of those dolls whose eyes close when they’re laid down, except she’d got it backwards. Lie down and she sprang instantly awake. In the past she had tried sleeping pills, but they had made her so groggy that she had felt helpless and frightened. Better just to struggle toward sleep on her own. Turn onto her side. Turn onto her back. Search for a cooler spot on the pillow.

It was thinking that made her nights so long. All the bad old thoughts came crowding to the front of her mind. She had lived her life wrong; she’d made a big mess of it. She had married the wrong man just because that was the track she’d been traveling on and she hadn’t known how to get off; so she’d gone ahead with it and behaved forever after like someone she wasn’t, someone shrewish and difficult. She had let the people she loved slip through her fingers—even Michael, whom she did love, it had turned out, wrong man or not: his patience and his steadiness and his endearingly earnest nature. How could it be possible that Michael really had left her?

And Lindy. Sometimes it seemed to her that Lindy was the one she’d loved most, although of course a mother loves all her children the same. Sometimes when the car radio played one of those old songs (“Are You Going to San Francisco?” was the saddest, so lost and faraway-sounding), she had to blink the tears back in order to see the road. Yet she had failed to keep Lindy from harm. She hadn’t protected her, hadn’t held fast to her, hadn’t even waited up for her when Lindy went out in the evenings. She had felt powerless, was why. She’d had no idea how to deal with it all. Her own girlhood had been so innocent and safe.

Still, other parents had managed. Other parents’ children hadn’t disappeared.

And she should have helped her father more during her mother’s illness. She should have had him to dinner more after her mother died. What could she have imagined to be more pressing than that?

She thought of her mother-in-law, aged and tremulous, whom she’d railed at for her ditheriness and her packrat ways. “Don’t
badger
me so; I’ll have a stroke,” Mother Anton had told her, and Pauline had snapped, “Fine. Let’s say you’ve already had one and you’re lying on the floor; just tell me from there which of these magazines I can throw out.” This long-ago exchange came back now word for word, and Pauline winced and covered her eyes with one hand.

Now she remembered that it wasn’t Michael, after all, who had stayed up late with her talking. Was it? No, it was someone else, some earlier boy whose name she couldn’t recall. She couldn’t picture his face, even, and she certainly couldn’t say what they had been discussing. All she knew for sure was, the two of them had talked and talked, and Pauline had not been alone.

9. Longtime Child

One cold, gray morning in February of 1990—cold enough to have frosted overnight—George was scraping his windshield when he heard the sound of an engine starting up nearby. He glanced down his block of stately Colonial houses, each with its two or three vehicles parked out front, but the car spitting puffs of smoke belonged to no one he knew. It was a white Ford Falcon, ancient, dulled, rusted, dented, chattering as it idled in place. George turned away and finished scraping his windshield. Then he tossed the scraper onto his rear seat, settled behind the wheel, and started his own engine, which barely whispered as he slid away from the curb. He drove a Cadillac Eldorado—the last of the good
decentsized
cars, in his opinion.