Three Women at the Water's Edge (30 page)

One weekend Hank had not seen Dale at all because a neighboring farmer, an older man, had come down with influenza, and Hank had done all the chores on his vast farm as well as on his own. He had only been able to call Dale that weekend; he had been busy every minute of the day, and then exhausted. And Dale had hated herself because she had not had anything equally pressing to do, and she had hated Hank because he had not been driven to see her, because he had not said, “Oh, I can’t bear not to see you, I’ll come see you no matter how tired I am.” She felt that no matter what she had to do on any given day, if she had to push hundreds of boulders up a mountain all day long, still she would have found a way to see Hank, to hold him, just for a moment. Dale would chew on her lip as she drove home from school or bite into her yellow lead pencil as she sat marking papers:
damn it
, she would think,
oh, just damn it
. She was so frightened of her love for Hank. It was extreme. She felt that she did not want to live without Hank’s love, without Hank in her life, and she knew that was wrong, that was threatening. For he could leave her life at any time.

One especially cold gray evening, when Hank had had a meeting and had said he wouldn’t be able to see her that night, he would call her instead, Dale had driven her little VW out to the Rocheport beach and sat there, huddled in her coat, with the engine still running and the car filling with heat. She had sat in her tiny warm car looking out at the ocean. It had been so dangerous-looking, the water, so turbulent and relentless and cold. It did not care what it dragged down within it. It did not care that it overpowered. It did not care whether it gave life or took it; it did not care. Dale sat in the car, suddenly remembering an oil painting by Winslow Homer which hung in the Clark Art Museum in the town where she had gone to college. The painting was entitled
Undertow
. It showed two men bringing two women out of such a violent ocean that Dale, standing staring at the painting, had been able to feel the tug and pull of the waves. The four people were moving toward the sunlight, the shore, the bright froth of ocean, but directly behind them the water sank down—Dale could feel the powerful sucking of it—and then rose up in an ominous, dark, huge wave that was about to break down over the people, to pull them all under.

The two women had been perhaps drowned, or almost drowned, it was not clear. It was obvious that the men were rescuers, lifeguards, and one man’s shirt was torn, the other’s muscles were taut with exertion. One woman’s face was hidden as she lay clinging to the other woman’s body, limp with fatigue. What had always fascinated Dale so that she had stood staring and staring at
Undertow
was the expression on the face of the other rescued woman. That woman had seemed more than just exhausted by her near-death by drowning. She seemed disappointed, somehow resigned to the rescue from drowning at sea. Why, Dale had thought, staring at the picture, wondering, why does she look so disappointed, so resigned? Had she been trying to commit suicide? Had the other woman rushed out into the water to save her and been pulled down under, too? The woman’s expression was unfathomable. A few drops of water clung to the woman’s face, under her eye, against her cheek, and Dale had the certainty that those were tears, that the woman was crying, that it was not just the spray from the ocean. Why was the woman so sad to be rescued? What had she wanted from the drowning?

Later Dale had gone to the trouble to gain admittance to the museum’s well-guarded library, and she had spent almost an hour on the hushed fourth floor, looking through books about the paintings of Winslow Homer. But the books were of no help. In fact they irritated Dale by their technically artistic tone. Each different write-up described with stark unimaginative detail the action and color of the painting, which had been done in 1886. No one seemed to find any significance in it; they all seemed most impressed with the fact that Homer had used real female models for this work, and that he had made the models lie on the floor in bathing suits with water thrown over their bodies so that he could see exactly how wet skin looked. Dale had put the books away, depressed. The mystery had not been solved; the question had not been answered.

But then on the Rocheport beach, as she sat staring out at the dangerous movements of the relentless gray waves, she remembered
Undertow
as if it had been a message from a passing stranger which only now could be of use to her. She felt strongly the significance that particular painting had for her life; she understood why she had spent so much time in front of it, wondering at it, again and again during the four years she was in that town going to college. The painting had fascinated her; it had frightened her; yet it had drawn her to it, it had held her.
This is true,
she had thought. And what she had meant—she now understood—was that for her, going into love would be a kind of drowning, a surrender to a passion so violent that she would be completely pulled under, overpowered, overcome. And so she had avoided it; she had not fallen in love. Not until now. And now she felt like the exhausted swimmer in the painting, who must somehow find a way to resign herself to the tranquillity of life. For after that relentless pull and tug of passion, after the buffetings of love, after the violent gratifications of desire—gra
tifications so wild and fierce and powerful that at times they brought her as close to pain as to pleasure, that at times Dale thought she truly would die, so that she lost control of herself and felt her blood pound in her throat—after all that, the rest of life did not matter.

“But that’s absurd, that’s
wrong
!” Dale had shouted out suddenly to herself, her words startling the hot silent air of her gently reverberating car. The rest of life
had
to matter; life had to matter whether Hank was there or not. “Oh, you’re so stupid!” she had said to herself, and had put the car into gear and driven away from the ocean, driven home and forced herself into a frenzy of work. High school students had probably never had a teacher devote so much time and energy to their courses before—and they had probably never had a teacher who worked so hard at simply keeping her mind on them as she stood in front of them in the classroom, holding up a live and twitching frog, or writing verb conjugations on the board.

Now she sat at her gray metal desk, trying not to sneeze on her students’ papers, dismally making small red checks and totaling up scores. She would not see Hank tonight; she had told him that she felt too sick, that she would just go straight home and to bed. This would be the third night in a row, the third long day in a row, that she would have gone without seeing Hank. He did not seem disturbed by it, he did not seem upset. Yet Dale felt like a raving maniac. She wanted to run to find him, and shake him, and dig her teeth into his flesh. She felt angry with him: How could he be so calm? How could he say so casually, “Okay, I understand,” after she had given him her little speech about needing to stay apart from him a little, to get her own life back in control. He had seemed to think that what she was saying was normal and reasonable, and yet by his very reasonableness he seemed to imply that it would not touch him, it would not hurt him, it would not bother him all that much if she was with him less. Oh, love was so unbalanced, it was such a goddamned
seesaw
. She felt that she loved him more than he loved her, that he was still sensible, in control, while she hung helpless and vulnerable, suspended at his mercy.

She wanted to marry him.

She wanted to marry him so that she could live in the same house with him and be with him every day for the rest of her life. She wanted to travel with him. She wanted the security, the restful blessed security of marriage, of being really connected to him. But they had not even once discussed marriage. And she knew with the rational side of her being that marriage could be a farce: Look at her father and mother, look at her sister. She had never been so confused.

So she sat in her classroom, grading the papers, sneezing and aching, with her confusions and her desires running through her constantly like a current, like an undertow. So she did not hear Mr. Jersey’s shouts at first; or she heard them, but they did not register on her consciousness immediately. When she did realize that it was shouting that she heard, and that it was Mr. Jersey shouting, she thought that the old man must have somehow electrocuted himself, or caught himself in some sort of machine, so frantic and brutal were his words. She hurried from her desk and out and down the hall toward the noise. She found Mr. Jersey’s cart and dustmop just outside the door to the faculty and staff lounge, and Mr. Jersey just inside the door, waving his arms and yelling.

“Mr. Jersey?” she said. “Mr. Jersey? What’s wrong?”

Then she entered the lounge and saw what was wrong. Mr. Jersey had caught two high school students making love on the nubby orange lounge sofa. Dale recognized them both: The boy, Jeff Benton, was a senior who had done well in Dale’s French class the year before and was doing well in her biology class this year. The girl, Sally Martin, was also a senior, and in Dale’s second-year French class. Both students were
good
kids—respo
nsible, pleasant, intelligent, leaders in school activities. Both were well liked and attractive. Dale had actually never thought much about Sally, who had seemed just another nice pretty girl, but Jeff was good-looking enough to draw comments from some of the younger teachers. Now he stood red-faced and awkward in the presence of Mr. Jersey’s almost inarticulate wrath, his face clenched with embarrassment and fear. Yet Dale admired him; even as he stood there, he had placed himself in front of Sally, protectively, to ward Mr. Jersey’s words off of her, and to keep her from Mr. Jersey’s sight. Jeff had already managed to get his pants up, although his belt was undone and his fly was unzipped. But Sally, who still sat on the sofa behind him, was all disheveled, her jeans down around her knees and her blouse all undone; she was frantically attempting to button it, but she was shaking so hard that it was taking her a long time. She would not look up; her long hair hung down around her face, curtaining off her expression.

It took Dale a few moments to realize that Mr. Jersey, for all his truly honest shock and horror, was relishing the drama of the situation. In fact, he was stretching it for all it was worth.

“Now what do you think, Miss Wallace,” he said. “Just look at this. I came down the hall to clean up the lounge, and here it was locked, and I got my keys out and opened it, and look what I found! These two young people having sexual intercourse in the faculty lounge! Why, it’s outrageous! It’s indecent! They should be expelled. We’ve got to call their parents, we’ve got to call Mr. Hansen, we’ve got to
do
something about this! Why, it’s probably even
illegal,
we should probably call the police—”

“Mr. Jersey,” Dale began, speaking in what she hoped was a clear sensible tone, even though she had begun to shake with fear for the students, “Mr. Jersey, calm down. It’s all right.”

“What do you
mean
it’s all right?” Mr. Jersey yelled. “Students having sex in the faculty lounge in broad daylight is
all right
?”

“Well,” Dale said, and she grinned in spite of herself, “it certainly wasn’t very smart. But on the other hand, it didn’t hurt anybody.”

“Well, well, suppose someone walked in!” Mr. Jersey sputtered.

“Someone did,” Dale said.

“I mean suppose a young person walked in, an innocent young person—”

“The door was locked, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said. “An innocent young person couldn’t have walked in. Only you and Mr. Hansen could have walked in. You are the only people who have the key to the lounge. And both you and Mr. Hansen have had some experience with sexual intercourse, I’m sure; I mean it won’t hurt your emotional growth. Mr. Jersey, come out in the hall for a moment and let Sally get her clothes on. This is embarrassing her.”

“Well, she deserves to be embarrassed!” Mr. Jersey said.

“Mr. Jersey, please come out in the hall,” Dale said, and very reluctantly, the old man left the room. “Now look, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said, “I don’t want you to be so upset about this. I realize that I’m younger than you are, and you are much wiser about many things than I am, but you’ve got to stop a minute and think about those kids. They weren’t really doing anything
wrong;
they weren’t damaging the property—”