Three Women at the Water's Edge (38 page)

She felt lucky. In February she had received a check from her mother large enough to pay Paul most of his share of the equity; Margaret had promised another check soon, which would pay Paul the rest of his equity and reduce the monthly mortgage payments slightly. She felt so supported by her family, her mother, father, sister; she felt so supported by all her friends and now these new friendly upstairs girls. And Danny and Jenny were as happy as clams suddenly to have in the house strong, lithe bodies they could climb on or be swung by, sound healthy enthusiastic girls who would roll on the floor with them or bring them sticks of chewing gum or lollipops. Now from time to time she could afford to go out to dinner or a movie with her own grown-up friends, Karen or Martha or Jane, or to pay a babysitter so she could spend a snowy Saturday afternoon strolling through a warm bright mall without little children tugging on her arms, distracting her from the shop windows. The month of March had been happy for Daisy, and she felt inside her the pain of Paul’s leaving easing off a bit, fading away.

But by the end of March, when the baby still had not come, she began to feel more and more restless and irritable, and then, irrationally, bitter thoughts would start stirring in her mind. And when Jerry Reynolds called again, to tell her what time he would be arriving to pick her up, she realized that the very low, deep tenor of his voice startled her, even annoyed her a bit. She supposed she had been living too long among only women; and as the day for her date approached, she felt herself growing anxious. What did she have in common with this man, after all? What on earth would they talk about?

He arrived at her house on Saturday night at seven o’clock. Daisy opened the door and, with a casual cheerful manner which she had been planning toward all day, asked him in for a drink. At first she was put off by him, by his maleness. He was tall and a little stout, and so very different from the women and girls and children she had spent so much time with that he seemed instantly threatening. Yet as they moved through the house to the kitchen where Daisy poured wine for him and water for her, Daisy noticed how his hair was already receding, and how his ears stuck out in such a way that he would never grow into them, and somehow this endeared him to her. At any rate she felt less nervous. Even if her body was so cumbersome, her face was still pretty, she thought: she was as a woman prettier than he was handsome as a man. This comforted her, and by the time they reached the living room and settled into their chairs by the fire, she felt less and less like snapping at him, like telling him to just go away.

“This is a fabulous house,” Jerry said, looking about.

“Yes,” Daisy answered. “I love it.” She looked about it, too, at the bright yellow room she had so recently unpacked and put back together. She told him a bit of the history of the house, and about the work she had done on it, and said that sometime she would show him through it.

“I’m living in a two-room rented apartment in a new complex,” Jerry told her. It was apparent that he was trying to be jolly about it, but his tone was mournful. “It’s quite a change, after living in my own house for so many years, to have two small cardboard boxes to come home to. I even miss shoveling the snow. I miss standing in my own yard with a shovel in my hand, looking at my house and garage, thinking: this is
my
property,
my place
. I miss taking care of a home. I miss that feeling of satisfaction that comes from shoveling the snow. That feeling that I have just, through my own hard labor, made it possible for me and my wife to be safely connected to the rest of the world. I don’t think I’m explaining it very well. It must sound silly.”

“No, no, not at all!” Daisy reassured him. As he talked, she had been sneakily evaluating him, checking out her reactions to him, and she decided that he was not sexually attractive to her at all, even if she hadn’t been nine months pregnant. It was not just that he had accumulated a bit of a belly, and a sort of flabbiness about his jaw—she didn’t remember him as flabby, was it possible that he had put on this weight since his divorce, was it possible that like her he sometimes ate for the sake of consolation? But he was so obviously earnest and nervous and sad that she found him touching. “I can understand how hard it must be to give up a house. I was miserable when I thought I had to move from here. But fortunately my parents helped me out financially, otherwise I’d be living in an apartment, too.”

“Well, I’ll be able to get my own house again someday,” Jerry said. “Scotty—my wife, or ex-wife, or whatever she is now—I hate the word ‘estranged,’ it has a mad sound about it to me—Scotty is planning to get married again as soon as our divorce is final, and then of course she’ll have to sell the house she’s living in now, the house
we
lived in, and I’ll be able to get something for myself. But that’s a few months away. It’s like suddenly living on the moon. Our house wasn’t as big or magnificent as this by a long way, but it was cozy, and it was familiar. In the new apartment complex the walls are all white, and can’t be painted, and the rugs are all dark-brown nylon, and everything seems so thin and transient. I really hate going down to the basement to do my laundry in the coin-operated machines. There are these weird flickering fluorescent lights down there making the place seem spacy, and there’s always something like a man’s lost gray sock lying about, making the place look so lonely—Well, God, I didn’t come here to depress you. It’s not
that
bad. I’m usually out at work, anyway.” Jerry smiled. “I’ve taken to working at night in my office and I’m doing some personal tax work for people. At least I’m making a bit of extra money. My office seems more like home to me than my apartment now. But I miss the birds. I know this must sound strange, but one of the things I miss most of all, even more than my wife”—he interrupted himself to laugh—”is the birds. I mean I had built several feeders and put them out in the backyard, and I had built a large wooden tray right outside our kitchen windows, and we kept them full of birdseed, and every day there were so many birds around our house. I could eat breakfast and watch the cardinals or sparrows land on the tray and peck at the seed—they were so bright and fluffed out against the cold—” Jerry stopped and looked down at his drink, and Daisy could not tell from his expression whether he suddenly felt embarrassed or sad.

“You don’t have any children,” she said.

“No.” Jerry still did not look up from his drink. “I wanted to have children, but Scotty didn’t.”

“
You
wanted children?” Daisy asked, surprised. “And Scotty didn’t?” She had always thought that all women wanted children and that all men, like Paul, could either take them or leave them, according to their careers or moods or financial situations.

“Well,” Jerry said, “Scotty gets bored easily. And she likes nice things, nice clothes, winter vacations, and so on. And then her own family was a bit strange…”

Jerry went on talking, telling Daisy about Scotty and Scotty’s parents, about his marriage to Scotty, and Daisy sat and sipped her drink and listened only half attentively. She was busy thinking. She was busy thinking: Why is this strange man telling me all this? How can he so easily tell me these intimate details of his life? Part of it, she knew, had to be that he simply needed to talk, he had to talk about all of this to someone. But why to her? Why was he talking so openly to her? He was going on and on, telling her private details of his life which all touched her as sadly as his description of the birds fluffed out against the cold on the feeder he had built. Why was he telling her all this? Was it because he thought she was wise? Perhaps it was just that he felt sure she was kind. And she did feel kindly toward him, kindly and generous and even slightly affectionate, because by his very vulnerability he was opening up to her a new way of viewing men. There were men out there in the world, then, who would want a home with children, who would want the stable, ordinary, mundane pleasures, who might want Daisy with all the homey opulence of her body and her life. Jerry was not going to be the new man in her life, she could tell that. Or rather, he was not going to be the new love in her life. It was quite possible that he would become a friend, a good friend, just as much a friend to her as Karen or Jane or Martha or the upstairs girls. It would be nice to have a man for a friend, Daisy thought, and then with a flash thought how very nice it would have been to have had him as a friend a few days ago, when she had to hang the heavy gilt-framed mirror back in the hall.

Daisy had been in tears trying to hang it, she had stood in the hallway panting from her efforts to lift the mirror back onto the hook, she had complained to Jenny and Danny, who stood watching her with open mouths: “It doesn’t matter how independent, how self-sufficient I am, I just am not strong enough to lift this goddamned mirror back up there, and I never will be!” That afternoon she had been exhausted and aching and bitter, wishing the baby would hurry up and
come
, wishing life were not so physically difficult. Her body had felt wretched and pressured in its every part. It seemed that the new baby weighed at least fifteen pounds and was standing upright with the full force of its body pushing against her bladder, so that she had to run to the bathroom constantly; if she coughed or sneezed or laughed, she wet her pants. The baby’s head was lodged into her lungs so that it took real effort simply to breathe. And she had incredible stomach pains and indigestion, because the selfish baby had shoved and bulged all her intestines into the corners of her stomach. She couldn’t imagine how her digestive system was still managing to function. She was tired. A brown blotch had shown up between her eyebrows, giving her a heavily moronic sort of look. It was not fair, she had thought, that all Paul had to do, all a
man
had to do, was to expel a bit of viscous fluid from his body and then walk away, all his organs and substance completely unchanged by the growth of a new life, while she, the woman, was stuck with a bulging heavy physical growth that caused her legs to cramp with pain every time she stood.

“What lamebrain half-assed idiot thought up this system?” Daisy asked Danny and Jenny, who of course did not understand what she was talking about or why she was yelling at them.

Daisy had finally gotten a chair, and climbed up on it, and eased the mirror up to the chair and then finally into its place on the wall. It had seemed absolutely essential to have the house back in order before she returned to it with a new baby. When she lifted the mirror onto its hook, she had felt as though tissues just under her skin were ripping. She had climbed back down and collapsed onto the chair, rubbing her painfully stretched stomach with shaking hands.

“This baby is not going to come out through my legs like ordinary kids,” Daisy informed Danny and Jenny with clenched teeth. “It’s going to pop right out through my belly. And I’m going to end up looking just like your beanbag chair with stuffing spilling out all over.”

“Really?” Danny asked, fascinated, staring at her belly, obviously hoping the baby would burst out then and there.

But Jenny began to cry. “You took the beanbag chair to the dump,” she said. “Will they take you to the dump?”

“They should, it’s where I belong,” Daisy said. “Right out there with all the other overused, torn-up rubbish.” But then she begrudged herself her bitterness, and pulled Jenny against her leg and fondled her. “The baby is not going to come out that way,” she said truthfully, wearily. “I’m not going to break apart, and I’m not going to the dump. I’m just very tired and very grumpy, but I’ll be fine in a few days. Don’t worry, honey, don’t cry. Don’t worry. Come on and smile for me, honeypot. Let’s go in the kitchen and find something yummy to eat.”

“I’m not hungry,” Jenny sniffled, and Danny echoed her.

“Well, I am,” Daisy said, and hefted herself from the chair and lumbered into the kitchen to find something sweet. But even sweet food had not changed her sour disposition that day.

Paul had called early in the morning to say that something had come up—friends had given him and Monica tickets to a concert—and so he would not be taking the children to spend the night with him that night after all, but would take them the next day. Daisy had longed to say: “Well, you
have
to take them. I was planning to get into bed the minute they left and stay there till the minute you returned them; if I don’t get some rest I’ll go batty.” But she had been too weary to try to argue. Perhaps Sara or one of the other girls would take the children for a walk, she thought, then she could lie down and rest for a while. Still it chewed at her heart that Paul, who had helped create these children, could so easily slough off responsibility for them. She knew she could not rely on him for help; he would be moving to California in a matter of weeks, and she was aware that his connection with the children would quickly grow less and less strong. She realized that before long all she would receive from him would be the child-support checks he was legally bound to send. She hated Paul that day, purely and cleanly, she hated him. She thought perhaps she hated all men, all men with their inviolable bodies.

But she had not really wanted to hate men, and it was not in her character to nurture bitterness, and so tonight she was glad to have Jerry sitting across from her, distraught and vulnerable, as vulnerable as any other human being. And because she had had a nap that day, and was looking forward to a good dinner, she had flipped out to the other extreme of mood, where she found herself perched on her pregnancy like a bird at the top of a marvelous tree. If she had the burden and the weight, she also had the richness and the joy. She was more complex than the man sitting there before her, she thought, she was truly a more complicated being. All he had was his lone body, which could never change as dramatically as hers. While she could change shapes like a sorceress, she could sit looking perfectly still, and have extraordinary and elaborate magic bubbling away inside her.
She
could grow and carry secrets, the ultimate secret. And it occurred to her to wonder as she sat there what Jerry would think if she suddenly acted on impulse and interrupted his monologue to say, “Nyaa, nyaa, nyaa! You can’t do what I do, you can’t do what I do!”