Three Women at the Water's Edge (27 page)

Occasionally, about once a week, she managed to get out to a friend’s house, or to have a friend in. Then everyone, children and adults alike, was almost manic with laughter, with the sight of other people, with hysteria. It was such a difficult winter. And this evening a sudden party had fallen into place: Karen, Daisy’s closest friend, had planned to have Daisy over for dinner, but then Jane, another friend of Daisy’s, had called in tears of desperation because her husband was out of town and had called to say that he wouldn’t be home tonight after all, and she felt she would end up murdering someone if she didn’t get out of the house. So Daisy had told Jane to come over, and she told Karen to come over, and at the last moment Jane had brought a friend of hers, a young pregnant woman named Martha, and some had brought seltzer and some brought wine, and there they were. Each woman had two children: that made eight children running about. The women had fed the children first; Daisy had cooked hamburgers and Jane had poured milk and Karen had doled out the potato chips and catsup and Martha had peeled and sliced cucumbers and celery sticks and it had all gone wonderfully well, with the children giggling at the table, and all the spilled milk something the women shared, something they could only laugh at.

“My God, just think,” Jane had said, “women used to have eight children. Why, some women
still
have eight children! Eight children. Think of feeding eight children every night, every morning, just think of it!”

And they had all thought of it, and had been astounded, and then felt weak with relief at having only two children apiece; they had felt silly with good luck. They gave the children apple slices and Oreo cookies for dessert, and leaned against the stove or kitchen counter smoking and eating and supervising the fruit intake of their offspring until they were satisfied. They wiped the children’s hands and let them run off into the other room then, and were left with a kitchen table thick with unappetizing items: partially chewed apple skin that a child had gagged on and spit out, broken chocolate halves of Oreo cookies of which another child had eaten only the cream filling, hardening bits of hamburger which had fallen off the plate and onto the table or floor, thousands and thousands of potato chip crumbs, green strings of celery.

“Let’s just burn it all,” Jane suggested.

“We could eat in the dining room,” Daisy said. “It’s dusty in there, but fairly clean. I haven’t eaten in there for ages.”

But the women didn’t want to eat in the dining room, because the kitchen had gotten warm and bright and friendly with life, with their life, it had become a comfortable and glowing place. So they finished off their drinks and whirled into the task: Daisy stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, and the other women brought her the plates and scraped stuff into the garbage and wiped off the table and swept under the table and in a few moments the mess had been fairly well tidied up. Then Daisy brought out their dinner which they had kept warm in the oven: a pizza which Jane and Martha had brought with them from a pizza shop, an enormous thick pizza rich with cheese and onions and greasy pepperoni and sharp green peppers. The women sat at the table gobbling the pizza with a greed as keen as their children’s. After they had finished, Daisy set apples and oranges on the table and told her friends to help themselves, and she asked if anyone wanted tea, but no one did. In fact it was really time for them to take the children home to bed, but no one wanted to. It was a Friday night, there was no school the next day, so they all decided the hell with schedules, they would stay until the children got cranky. But the children were having as much fun as their mothers, they hadn’t seen other children for days because of the weather, because of school cancellations, and they were loving the feeling of running with a herd. Jane’s daugher Greta was the oldest child there, a tall eight-year-old with braids, and she easily became the leader and the arbiter of the group, so that the children didn’t even need to run to their mothers. What they did do was to strip Danny and Jenny’s beds of blankets and sheets and spreads and each child had one as his house and they all rolled around on the floor, bumping into each other, snorting and giggling, pretending to be trolls or snails or some really as yet unthought-of creature, a small quick creature in a blanket shell that did somersaults and backrolls on the floor. If Daisy had seen what was going on, it would have occurred to her to worry about the sheets or blankets getting torn, but as it was she was in the kitchen eating and enjoying her friends, and she didn’t really want to know what was going on, and as it happened nothing did get torn. So it was a totally successful evening. Daisy and Jane and Martha and Karen sat in the kitchen and talked.

They had a lot to talk about. There was Daisy’s house: They knew that Daisy could neither unpack nor pack up completely and move out, and they knew how she wanted to keep the house, but wished that if she had to leave she could do so now, while the lake was frozen and white. But her friends could offer little help or solace on this particular point, so they talked about having babies instead. Daisy was nervous about having the new baby. She had not yet been able to arrange for any long-term help, although Karen and Jane were each going to keep Danny and Jenny for a week while Daisy had the baby and was in the hospital and then newly at home. Still Daisy worried about how she would cope in the winter, and it helped her when her friends assured her that she could.

They had their most lively conversations when they talked about Daisy’s divorce. Everyone had counseled Daisy to get a certain divorce lawyer known for his competent nastiness, and finally, with a sinking feeling in her stomach, Daisy had gone to see him. She had disliked Milton White intensely, but realized that he would probably do the best for her, do what she could not do for herself: He would manage to force Paul to support his family. Still it made her sick, literally sick, to think of all the things she had to say, all the forms she had to fill out, all the intimate details of her life which she had to reveal to this stranger, in order to get help and protection from him. How very weird the world had become for her, that she had to hire the services of a stranger, an older, unpleasant man, to protect her from Paul, the man she had loved and slept with and had babies with and lived with for years, the man to whom she had once entrusted her life. It was bizarre. Sometimes Daisy awoke from her nap and felt disoriented and dizzy and she would think that the whole divorce was a dream, a nightmare, and it would make her nearly retch to face the truth of it, the fact that it really was happening to her.

Knowing other women helped. Daisy had been amazed at the helpfulness of other women, how other women offered their own lives up to her as bits of comfort, how they revealed their own problems to her in order to sustain her, to make her realize that she was not alone. Daisy was beginning to see that she had lived on the surface of her life for too long; that what she had thought of as being real life was only the glossy superficial surface of things, and that underneath it all there were emotions and actions as turbulent and unquiet as the depths of the sea. She had been looking at life as if it were the sheen and shine of sun on water; now she knew that underneath that, even on the best of days, fears and hates and loves and desires rampaged and plunged and sometimes surfaced with the relentlessness of sharks. All lives were full of this, she now saw, full of wet, shining, swiftly moving sea creatures sliding pitilessly through half-lit depths; all lives were full of eeriness and beauty, unspeakable fronds of weed and flower waving and tugging inside, down under the surface, past the reach of words, past the reach of normalcy and the constrainable order of everyday life. It was frightening, it was wonderful, it was good to know.

Jane had been divorced once before; her daughter Greta was the child of a man named Tom who was now married to someone else. Jane had married again, and had another child with her new husband, and now she was thirty-three and fighting the knowledge that perhaps she didn’t even like being married, that perhaps if she really could have her own way, she would live alone and have occasional lovers, but live alone. Daisy had listened with fascination to Jane’s description of how she would live her life if she could; it was so different from what Daisy wanted. Yet Daisy could see the charm of it, the sense of it, and Jane’s longing to live her own life unhampered by the desires and limitations set off by a husband made Daisy value her own new husbandless life a little more.

Martha, whom Daisy knew only slightly, was pregnant with her third child, and was living the life Daisy had once thought of as the perfect life: She and her husband got along well, and lived according to a sort of plan that included family vacations in northern Wisconsin, camping out, carrying the baby in a backpack, cooking hot dogs on branches over a fire ringed with stones. If Daisy could have, she would have chosen Martha’s life; it was so sane and ordinary. And yet Martha, who looked bland and blunt but spoke with a surprisingly sharp tongue, who said things in quick short sentences, seemed to think she had sold out somehow, that she had lost out, that what she had was all right, but boring. Not enough. Somehow not enough. She felt she was turning acid with a vague dissatisfa
ction she could not rid herself of. She sighed, and said she assumed she would be better after the baby was born, she was just always so tired and grumpy when she was pregnant.

It was Karen who surprised Daisy the most, who introduced an element of what seemed almost insanity into Daisy’s thoughts: Karen had a lover! Good solid predictable Karen, who drove her children and Danny to preschool each day; Karen who made her own bread and grew chives in a bowl on her kitchen windowsill; Karen who grunched on the phone for hours about the leaky toilet or the price of snow tires; Karen, who was not even that pretty, who had fat hips and small breasts and hair that looked stringy if she didn’t wash it every day—Karen had a lover! She had had a lover for two years. For two years she had secretly been meeting a man who was also married. It was simply a man she had met at a party, and they didn’t even have that much in common except sex, and Karen said she went through every hour of her life desiring him and longing for him and wishing she could be with him and knowing that the entire thing was hopeless and impossible. She had come to the point of realizing that this affair, this love affair, this
sex
affair, made her more miserable than it made her happy; she spent more time yearning after him than seeing him; more time wanting more than remembering what she had just had; more time crying about the unfairness of life than being grateful. But she could not get through the day without hearing his voice, she could not get through the week without seeing him, and she did not think she could get through her life without him somehow in it, even if his presence made her miserable. She had tried to break it off a hundred times, and so had he. She had purposely gotten pregnant by him six months ago; then had an abortion. Her life was ravaged; she had seen a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist told her to give up her lover, and so she had given up the psychiatrist. She was developing an ulcer. But she would not trade her life for anyone’s. She spoke of holding her children on her lap, reading them a fairy tale, and at the same time envisioning the arch of her lover’s eyebrows, the smug smile on his lips when he held her.

Over the past few weeks Daisy felt she had almost shattered, perhaps really had shattered, under the impact of the knowledge of the lives of her friends. Life. It was so incredibly varied, so incredibly strange, it was never, ever, what it seemed. Everything was possible. And perhaps the only crime, the only sin, was to hide from it, to pretend that it could be only one thing, and nothing else. For what she saw in her friends, in the lives of her friends, did not dismay her. It astounded her, or made her slightly sad or uncomfortable; she had to admit that certain emotions were there, certain acts were taking place: Jane was not happy in her marriage; Karen had a lover; Martha was restless. But those things did not dismay her. It was what she had seen in her father when he stayed with her over Christmas that dismayed her. And perhaps that had been because what she saw in him reminded her so much of herself.

It had not been a totally bad visit. Her father had arrived three days before Christmas and had helped her choose and carry in and decorate the tree. He had loved his two grandchildren and had played with them with real fondness; there had been signs of joy on her father’s face when he had been with Danny and Jenny. Oh, he had tried, and she had tried, too, but Daisy had been so depressed, and Harry had been so depressed, that although they tried their best to hide it, they had really been pretty miserable together. Harry missed Margaret. He spoke of the pecan-and-mushroom stuffing she made for Christmas dinner, of her pumpkin and mincemeat pies. He spoke of his ex-wife as if she were some poor dead saint, and that had irritated Daisy beyond all reason. She longed to tell her father about Anthony, about her mother’s lover, for heaven’s sake, her mother’s
lover
, Margaret’s
lover
. But she had kept still. Oh, it had been nice to have him there, at least he was a grown-up and a man. And he had pulled himself up and out of his lethargy the day that Paul had come over to take the children out to his apartment to have his Christmas with them. Daisy had been proud of her father then, proud and grateful, because he had pulled himself up to his true arrogant self and had treated Paul with such cold disdainful disaffection that Daisy knew it had to have shriveled Paul’s soul a little. But then she hated herself for those thoughts, she could not go on that way, hating Paul and wishing him ill; that did her no good. She did not want to be like her father, lost in life because a spouse had left. His presence grated on her, but in the end had helped her, because it made her see how she must not be; she must not be despondent and hopeless; she must not give up her life.