The Wife's Tale (8 page)

The sad tale of Larry Merkel was a Leaford legend, like the story of the conjoined twin girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen, who’d
been born attached at the head. Mary had rarely spoken to, but had watched the unusual girls from her distant bedroom window
at the farm after she and Gooch were wed. She had wondered what they talked about as they huddled on the rickety footbridge
over the creek between the fields. Like Larry Merkel’s tiny ghost, which Mary imagined she glimpsed darting through the high
corn, the Darlen sisters haunted the landscape. Mary’s own babies were ghosts too, but silent, watchful types, like Mr. Barkley,
who never went outdoors.

Poor Christopher Klik, Mary’s first barometer for self-pity, was replaced, after the Darlen twins were born, by Rose and Ruby.
“Joined at the
head
. Just imagine that,” Irma would say when they chanced to see the pair. But Mary didn’t feel especially sorry for them. From
what she could see, the girls seemed content in their peculiar shape. Although she would have felt foolish admitting it, and
had no one to share such a confession with anyway, she’d envied the girls their inextricable bond.

The girls had written their autobiographies in the months before their deaths, which all of Baldoon County had read, and to
which everyone had taken some kind of exception. There were those who protested the geography in parts; others objected to
the use of real names; some disagreed with the characterizations; and at least a few refuted the events, some of which must
have been fictional, for what Rose Darlen wrote about a glimpsed sexual act between her Uncle Stash and Catherine Merkel could
not have been true.

Mary had consumed the book in one sitting, fretting the while that she would find herself on the next page, described in pitiful
terms by one girl or the other as the large, childless woman in the house behind, who watched life from the frame of a window.
When she was not even mentioned, by either girl, she wondered how such a large woman as herself could be so incidental.

Remembering Rose and Ruby served as an excellent distraction, until replaced by another random force. The furnace began to
roar, and after throwing a series of short tantrums, died in a snit. Mary felt vindicated, and hoped it had suffered. Encouraged
by the symbolism, she closed the bedroom window and started toward the hall, straining to stay off her wounded heel.

Dawn lit the hallway like a morning-after murder scene, walls smeared with blood from the cuts on her hand, exclamatory stains
on the new silver broadloom. It was shocking, but there was precision in the imagery. Something
had
died there in the night.

Finally reaching the kitchen, relieved to see that the wound on her foot didn’t appear to be bleeding, or at least not badly,
she opened the freezer and snatched a package of corn, cramming a fistful of niblets into her mouth, sucking them to defrost,
surrendering to her hunger and the dark disgust that she could even think of eating at a time like this. She wondered if she
would be betraying Gooch or rescuing him in making a call to The Greek.

Gooch had been trucking and delivering for Theo Fotopolis, whom everyone called The Greek the way everyone called Jimmy Gooch
Gooch
, for nearly as long as Mary’d worked at Raymond Russell’s. The Greek had hired Gooch to work in the sales office after high
school, and then underwritten the cost of his trucking license when his injured leg had healed.

The clock on the wall read seven a.m. The question of whether to call The Greek or not call The Greek depended on which truth
Mary was prepared to confront, that Gooch’s absence was not accidental, or that it was. There was also the pressing matter
of the Laura Secord chocolate order due at the drugstore. Mary had ordered a carton of her favorites, nut clusters and milk
chocolate almond bark, minis, assorted soft centers, assorted hard centers, which the supplier gave her on a deep discount.
If she was not there to receive the order, Ray would discover her transgression. At best he would be annoyed. At worst he’d
find it so hilarious he’d have to tell the whole staff. Besides, there was always a box or two of silky chocolate damaged
in transit, or intentionally, to open and share among the staff. Mary took erotic pleasure in the ecstatic mastication of
her colleagues, though she demurred when the damaged boxes were passed her way.

Gooch had his own relationship with damaged goods. Their small home in rural Leaford was furnished with pieces from the store
that had been broken in transit. A coffee table with a hairline fracture. The burnt umber Kenmore refrigerator whose tone
had not precisely matched its stove mate. A sleeper sofa with broken gears. The first of the damaged pieces had been, in that
first difficult year of their marriage, the red vinyl chairs with the thick aluminum legs.

Mary had settled into one of their hand-me-down wooden chairs one morning and popped a rickety joint. Gooch didn’t fret aloud
that his young wife, expanding rapidly in the first trimester of her second pregnancy, might break a chair altogether and
fall with some tragic consequence. But he thought it. That evening the four red chairs appeared, one of them with a noticeable
tear at the seam, and the old ones sent to the garage. Mary did not ask her young husband if he’d torn the seam on purpose.

Gooch sat in one of the stiff red chairs, lifting Mary’s dress so she could straddle his lap. “Did you ask the doctor?” he
whispered into her engorged décolletage.

“He says we shouldn’t,” Mary lied. Halting and ashamed, she’d asked Dr. Ruttle if she and her husband could continue having
intercourse during the remaining six months of her pregnancy, and had been quietly shocked by his candid response. “Of course
you can. Right up until delivery, if it’s still comfortable for you both.”

Surely that couldn’t be right. Or at least not in her situation, given that she’d lost her first baby (James or Liza), and
what with Gooch being Gooch. She decided, leaving Ruttle’s office, that the good doctor had forgotten her first miscarriage,
and her husband’s unusual size. Mary wished she could call Wendy or Patti to solicit their opinions, but she didn’t discuss
her marital intimacy with anyone. Like eating, it was an intensely private matter.

On a cool October night on the eve of her wedding, the four girlfriends, recent graduates of Leaford Collegiate—Wendy enrolled
in the nursing program, Kim off to teachers’ college in London, Patti working reception at her mother’s realty office and
Mary—had gathered for salads and sparkling wine at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham. Mary’s acceptance into their sorority
was still fresh; like a foreign exchange student, she found she could observe their customs but, without understanding the
nuances of their language, not effectively participate.

She’d opened their wedding shower gifts under the table, sweating beneath her smock, wilting when one girl or another cried,
“Hold it up!” A red teddy with matching underwear. A sheer black gown with ruffles at the neck. “You wear it with nothing
else,” Kim instructed. “So sexy.” A blue corset with snaps at the back and cone-shaped breasts. Each of the sets in the size
Mary had been briefly, and never would be again.

The girls—all except Mary, who had a low tolerance for alcohol—drank too much wine and talked about sex. Patti put thumb and
forefinger together, peering through the tiny space between, and slurred, “Dave’s a grow-er. Not a show-er.” Kim chimed in
about her older sister’s
horniness
in the third trimester of her first pregnancy, and how, after the baby was born, she’d let her husband suck her milk. Mary
found the image disturbing, and hated the word
horny
, which sounded bestial. Wendy confessed that she didn’t really enjoy
screwing
but that she could get Pete to do
anything
(that Supertramp concert?) if she just gave him a quick
youknowhat
. When Kim squealed, “Eeewww,” she instructed, “Give him a tissue!” “Or,” Wendy screamed, “swallow!”

The topic shifted to Mary’s pregnancy. “Aren’t you afraid of getting fat again?” Wendy asked bluntly. “I’m
terrified
. And I never
was
fat.”

“You’re supposed to get fat when you’re pregnant. Don’t listen to her, Mary. My sister’s baby weight just melted off after,”
Kim assured her. “Especially if you’re breast-feeding.”

“I’m just saying,” Wendy slurred, “I’d rather be dead than fat.”

Kim passed the menu. “Should we get one big fries with gravy to share?”

Wendy continued, sucking her wine, “Come
on
, you guys. It’s not like Mary didn’t know she was fat, right? Right?”

Mary felt Wendy’s eyes boring into her. “Yeah.”

“Jimmy Gooch didn’t
look
at Mary before she lost all that weight and, come on, I’m just saying.” Wendy faltered. “I’d just hate the thought of your
cheekbones gone and your cute shoes won’t fit.”

Gorgeous drunken Wendy from the cheerleading squad, who was in love with Jimmy Gooch herself, was just saying what they all
thought, Mary most obsessively—that she would grow fat with the pregnancy and be unable to lose the weight (as had been witnessed
countless times in everyone’s sphere), and that Gooch would leave her to raise their stinky brat alone.

Mary had stopped eating dirt sometime after she and Gooch became official. Gooch alone sustained her. But then, when that
first baby was no larger than a thumbnail, her giant gnawing hunger had returned, and like any compulsion, it began again,
not at the beginning, but where it had left off. Sneaking from the bed when she knew that fretful Irma and resigned Orin were
asleep, she would stand in the kitchen munching from foil bags, slurping cold noodles from the leftovers bowl and grinding
rows of chocolate cookies between her big back teeth.

“Is The Greek gonna give you guys a crib set?” Kim inquired, to fill the quiet.

If her fabric had not been woven with lengths of deception and secrecy, Mary might have been able to ask the other girls the
many questions she had about her body, about the sexual act, about her husband’s libido. Before Gooch, she’d never thought
to wonder much about male bodies, too intent on the care and feeding of her own. Her only experiences before Gooch had been
revealing her nipple to Christopher Klik at the bike rack, and the time Jerry, the wrinkled driver from the drugstore, had
offered to massage her shoulders in the empty staff room. Afraid to appear ungrateful, she’d allowed him to knead her for
a full ten minutes while bumping his crooked old-man erection against her firm teenage back. She didn’t tell anyone the indecent
thing the driver had done. She was naive enough to consider that she’d only imagined his intent. She was also, until Gooch,
in the habit of thinking herself too repulsive to be the object of even warped desire.

Gooch and Mary’s sexual energy had been powerful, and Gooch’s longing for her wasn’t dampened after they were married. Just
four months after failing with her first pregnancy, they had discovered that they were expecting again, and Mary’s confidence
had been diminished by the rapid accumulation of pounds.

Straddling her husband on the new red vinyl chair, she had concluded that Dr. Ruttle’s counsel was to be ignored. She was
much too afraid for the second baby (Thomas or Rachel) to satisfy Gooch in their usual way, and thinking of what Wendy had
said on the eve of her wedding, about the spell she could put Pete under, Mary’d pushed her husband’s wide shoulders back
against the red vinyl chair he’d brought home that day, and whispered into his ear, “Dr. Ruttle said we can’t do
that
. But we can do something
else
.”

After, as Gooch was zipping and rising from the red chair, she’d sensed, along with some deep appreciation for what she’d
just done—particularly as she did
not
pass him a tissue—an undercurrent of suspicion. Reaching for his huge hand so that he could help her from her knees, she
had felt compelled to whisper, “I’ve never done that before.” He’d arched a brow but not asked more, and Mary had slept that
night with her hand on her rising womb, reasoning that she must have done what she did very well. She was pleased to have
gone with her instinct, which was to imagine that his tumescence was edible.

A
gentle morning rain fell over the landscape. A cold breeze blew in through the broken back window as Mary moved to the telephone
and dialed her husband’s number. It was the machine again, with the unfamiliar voice, which Mary understood must belong to
a human receptionist who would pass the message along. “It’s Mary Gooch again. Eight forty-five. If Jimmy Gooch could please
call his wife at work. Thank you.”

Scooping peanut butter with her finger, the sensation of the long, plump digit pleasant in her mouth, Mary tried to recall
the last time she’d been touched lovingly by hands not her own.

Outside, the rain made a dreary pattern on the windowpane above the sink. The sunroof! The interior of the truck would be
soaked. She’d have to remember to bring towels to sit on, on the way to work. She wondered if she should call in sick, pretend
to be asleep when Gooch got home and act feverish and confused upon waking, as if she assumed he’d been there all night.

She focused on her list. Roof repair? Furnace guy? Something to wear to the dinner? The dinner. Cancel the dinner? Laura Secord
order.

The craving took her by the throat. Chocolate. Essential. A thing that could not wait. She felt some momentary kinship with
Gooch’s sister, Heather, who’d spent most of their last visit together rifling through her empty coat pockets. “I’m
jonesing
for a smoke. I gotta hit the 7-Eleven,” she’d said.

Before she left, Heather, with her long, bony limbs and sunken blue eyes, had taken hold of Mary’s plush upper arms and dug
her nails in deeper than she’d intended, saying, “You are so lucky to have my brother.”

The way she’d said it, like an ex-girlfriend, or a regretful first wife, had given Mary pause. Heather was an addict, and
beautiful, and Mary was naturally suspicious of her motives. It was assumed that Heather had got her cigarettes. She never
returned for the roast beef dinner.