Three Women at the Water's Edge (17 page)

Daisy shut the door in the small guest bedroom and dutifully unpacked, musing all the while about this new mother of hers, who enjoyed watching Greek sailors dance around broken glass. Then she lay down on the bed and stared at the walls. She wondered vaguely how Danny and Jenny were; Paul would be with them now. They would enjoy that, for they never had had much time alone with their father. And though he did not adore them, he would be kind. He was probably even taking them to McDonald’s for dinner as a treat. Well, she would not worry about them; her mother was right. It would be a waste of energy to worry about them this week while they were in someone else’s care. It was the rest of her life, the real life that she would go back to after this week, that she had to worry about.

On the wall opposite the bed hung a bright Chagall print. Chagall! Daisy thought; she had never known that her mother liked or even
knew
about Chagall. On the wall above the bed hung another print that must be one of the Emily Carrs her mother so admired. It was an almost surrealistic watercolor of one extremely tall, bare, and lonely tree stretching above mountains into a radiance of white. Daisy sat up to read the title:
Scorned of Timber, beloved of the sky
. She lay back down again, studying the print. The tree seemed queer and proud, so tall and lonely, with its small triangle of green peaking at the top of its long, thin trunk. It seemed self-sufficient, as if in love with the sky, or something in the sky which ordinary people could not see. It reminded Daisy of her mother, who had grown thin and strange and proud and self-sufficient, and in a flash Daisy remembered another tree, a tree in a book which she had read over and over again to her children,
The Giving Tree
. That tree loved a child so much that it sacrificed everything for him, gave him everything: shade, apples, branches, its trunk, and finally, at last, because there was nothing else it could give, its wretched stump as a seat of solace for the unhappy person it loved. Daisy felt a wave of self-pity begin to rise within her: she was going to try to be the giving tree to her own children; why did she have to be faced at this point in her life with a mother who was like that solitary monster of Emily Carr’s?

Then Margaret appeared at the door, first knocking, then entering, and she did not look like a solitary monster at all. She looked like a quite lovely and intelligent woman—an
interesting
woman, and one Daisy would like to know.

“It’s time to get ready,” she said. “Would you like a bath first? Let me look at the clothes you’ve brought; they aren’t very pretty, are they? Though I know it’s hard when you’re pregnant. Still, we’ll go to some boutiques in Gastown tomorrow and find some batik and Indian print dresses for you. They’re very comfortable, flowing soft cotton, in brilliant colors. Well, we’d better hurry, we should be there in half an hour.”

“Who are the friends who are joining us?” Daisy asked, pulling herself up to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Miriam and Gordon, of course,” Margaret said. “They’re dying to meet you; they’ve only seen pictures of you, but you know Miriam has been my friend since high school. And Anthony Brooks—he’s a new and”—Margaret paused to smile—”special friend of mine.”

Daisy understood by that smile that Anthony was Margaret’s lover. Her mother had a lover! “Mother!” she said. “Oh, Mother.” And she sat there on the bed for a moment, her hands on her large matronly belly, looking at her strange new mother, returning her smile.

At seven o’clock the next morning, while Daisy was still asleep, Margaret was sitting by the side of the indoor pool at the rec center. She was wearing a plain black maillot and had a black rubber swimming cap on her head and a large green towel draped over her shoulders. She was trying to work up the courage to enter the pool. Two other people were already swimming, doing slow sputtering backstrokes across the water. The lifeguard sat on a bench on the other side of the pool, yawning into his cardboard cup of coffee. There was open swimming now until eight-thirty, when women’s swimnastics would begin. Margaret stayed for the swimnastics sometimes, sometimes not, depending on her mood. She disliked the turquoise swimming pool, which was Olympic-size and overly chlorinated; she disliked the enormous high-ceilinged room that echoed and amplified each sound. She disliked the occasional clots of hairs that lay on the slick cold tiles, she disliked the diving boards, the clocks, the temperature gauge which assured her that it was 78 degrees in the room when she felt as though it were 30. She disliked the violence of forcing herself into the water, she disliked the reluctance, the laziness, the sluggishness of her limbs as she worked her way back and forth, back and forth across the pool.

But she loved the sensation of finally climbing out of the pool, her entire body vivid and tingling from exertion. She loved the long hot shower, the feeling of bright cleanliness she felt as she dried. She felt about swimming the way Dorothy Parker felt about writing; she hated swimming, but she loved having swum.

She had come to swimming too late in her life to think of it as more than necessary physical exercise, a disciplined attempt to keep her good health. As a child she had rarely gone swimming, because she had been raised on a farm in Iowa with her righteous grandparents and her mother and her retired missionary aunt, and they had not believed that young girls should swim. It actually hadn’t even been much of an issue though, because there was no pond or swimming pool near enough to tempt Margaret. Later, after she had married, she had come into contact with swimming pools, but by that time she had two small children, and the pools seemed a place for them, not for her. She had owned swimming suits and only worn them so that she could go into the water with one of her children, to hold them by the waist as they splashed about in the shallow end. And later, when the girls could swim by themselves, Margaret had acquired all that flesh, and felt ugly in a swimming suit, ugly and somehow obscene. She had sat in a flowered beach robe, wearing sunglasses, trying to read, constantly surveying the water to be sure her children had still not drowned. Their screeches of delight and frantic pleasure at jumping, diving, plunging into the water had always been a mystery to Margaret. The water had always seemed painfully cold to her. And the few times that she attempted swimming, it seemed that she had to summon up all her energy to fight against the water, to hit out at it, because it wanted to bury her with its remorseless weight, to close over her, to pull her down.

She still felt that way; she could not relax in the water. Floating took more energy from her, the energy of tension and resistance, than the breaststroke. And she could not get over the feeling that she was still ugly and ridiculous while swimming. She did not like the feeling of herself in a swimming suit, or the fact that others could see her that exposed. It was true that she had lost a great deal of weight, and in street clothes she looked quite trim and lovely. But in a swimming suit certain facts could not be hidden: she had been overweight for too long, and the skin around her upper arms and thighs was, in spite of exercise, hopelessly loose and wrinkled. She would never be firmly rounded, supple and resilient again. The sight of Daisy, almost as fat as Margaret had once been, had thrown Margaret into a silent rage: Daisy’s body had been
so beautiful,
so slim and graceful and voluptuously ripe. Margaret could close her eyes and envision her oldest daughter as she perched on the diving board during her teenage years; Daisy in a pink bikini with a flat belly and two dimples on her lower back, her smooth sleek buttocks peeking out enticingly from the suit bottom. No, Daisy, no! she had wanted to cry; don’t do this to yourself. Don’t pad yourself with extra flesh, you’ll regret it, you’ll regret it terribly! But Margaret did not want to give advice—and she knew Daisy would only be hurt. Besides, it would not be fair for her to be angry at Daisy’s fat; it was her own that she regretted, and no amount of dieting on Daisy’s part could bring Margaret’s body back to a perfect shape.

But the thought of it, the remorse for both herself and her daughter, made Margaret rise up off the bench, throw her towel off, and dive into the water. On different days she swam with different kinds of energy; hope, delight, exhilaration, or grief, regret, anger. Three times a week she came to the pool and forced herself to do thirty laps. She could still do only one lap across the length of the pool at a time; then she had to grab on to the side of the pool, and hang there, gasping for breath. It took her an hour to swim the thirty laps, and when she finally got out she was usually shuddering with exhaustion. But some days were different from others: some days the water streamed by her freely, as if it liked her, as if it were trying to make her work easy. Other days it fought her, pulled her down, and she lost her timing and swallowed water and choked. If she had been a man, she might have taken up boxing instead of swimming; it seemed a sport that she might have really liked. She might really have found pleasure in putting on heavy padded gloves and hitting repeatedly, with a relentless rhythm, a punching bag or some other hard inhuman object. As it was she could not box, and instead she hit out at the water, as if with each stroke she were knocking away a part of her life that threatened to drag her down: her weight, her past, her wasted years.

Thirty laps. One hour. The repetition of thrashing across the pool, grabbing the side, gasping until her breathing came more easily while her heart clamored in her chest, then pushing off with her feet and thrashing her way back to the other end. It hurt. She sometimes felt like a butterfly pushing her way out of endless cocoons, endless enclosing sacs; she pushed, she flailed, she kicked. There were some things you never got over, so the best you could do was to go through them again each day, and then force them away from you so that for a while you could go free. Guilt. She would endlessly swim through her guilt; would she ever swim free of it?

Daisy had been born ten months after Margaret’s marriage to Harry, when Harry was just beginning his residency at a small hospital in Des Moines. Two years later, Margaret had gone to the hospital to deliver her second child—and it had been a boy, and the little boy had died.
Placenta previa
was the medical term for the cause of the baby’s death; the placenta had planted itself too low in Margaret’s uterus, and had dug into the wall of the womb. The baby was premature; and in addition, there was massive hemorrhaging. The doctors had had to perform a C-section, and the baby had died anyway, and Margaret had almost died, too. Even now it made her stomach cramp with horror to remember it all, the pain and the sorrow; and then she remembered the clear clean lines of her husband, bending over her as she awakened, weak from loss of blood and from medication. “It’s all right, darling,” he had said. “It’s not your fault. Don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault.” Which of course had meant that he and everyone else thought that it
was
her fault, that it was her fault that the little boy had died. Oh, God, the grief, the pain, even now it made Margaret churn through the water to remember it.

Two years later she had gotten pregnant again. It seemed an irony to Margaret that Dale preferred her father to her mother, worshipped her father, was really her father’s child, when it had been Margaret who had fought for Dale’s life, who had really saved Dale’s life when Harry had been willing to kill her.

“You should not have another child,” he had said. “You might die. You should not go through another pregnancy.” By then he had many connections with physicians and hospitals and could have easily arranged a legal abortion for Margaret, even in Iowa in 1954, because of the danger to Margaret’s life. But Margaret had fought for the baby, had even threatened to divorce Harry if he did not let her have the child. And so she had had the baby, but again there was massive hemorrhaging, and although the baby was brought out alive this time, Margaret came very close to death. The doctors had decided, while she was unconscious, to perform a hysterectomy, and had done so then and there, after taking out the live baby. When Margaret was twenty-three years old, she had had a hysterectomy. Swim through that, beat at it, it would never change, it would never go away. She had wanted six children. At twenty-three she had carried a void inside her.

But she did have the two daughters, lovely healthy daughters, and so she would not let herself grieve—except occasionally, for the lost little boy. Daisy and Dale. When they had first moved to Liberty, Margaret had overheard a woman discussing the strange names Margaret had given her children: “Mrs. Wallace must be a bit queer,” the woman had said. “She’s got two fine daughters, and she’s given one the name of a cow and the other the name of a boy.” At first the remark had hurt Margaret, then infuriated her, then given her a goal: she would not let the women in Liberty mock her; she would be so good, so overwhelmingly correct that before long they would be naming their own daughters Molly and Frances, Bess and Lynn, Daisy and Dale. The naming had been a simple matter, actually; Daisy had been Margaret’s grandmother’s name, and Dale had been her grandfather’s name, and the grandparents had left Margaret a nice sum of money, and she wanted to do something in return, because she had loved them so.

Margaret was on the sixteenth lap. She had established a routine by now; this was the lap that she did on her back, with a lazy backstroking of her arms and a casual froglegging kick of her legs. She stared up at the round lights on the ceiling, at the cross beams that marked her progress; now she was halfway across the pool. She would backstroke for three or four laps before turning over and pushing herself through to the end.

And these laps, of course, were for Harry. Margaret felt no guilt over Daisy and Dale, no remorse; she had done for them all that she could. She had done all that she could for Harry, too, until the past two years, when she realized she could do nothing more. And so she had left him, but taken a large weight of guilt with her—and a larger portion of anger, because he stayed in Liberty, being righteous and sad, and not ever understanding that perhaps he ought to feel some guilt on Margaret’s account.