The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Ms. Bolt joined her hands together, eyes twinkling, bracelets tinkling, floating down the rows as if the class held fifty, not five. “On your desk you will find a piece of paper and a pair of scissors. Please cut out the shape of a circle.” The group did so, Gooch signalling his boredom by sighing loudly from the back corner. “Now,” Ms. Bolt continued. “In black ink, on the circle you have cut, write the letters T-O-I-T.” She waited. “T-O-I-T.” The students finished.

  Ms. Bolt’s passion was infectious. She was like the preacher who could make you believe. “In your life, my beautiful young friends, you will have limitless choices. You come from a world of privilege and opportunity. You can do anything. And it is your duty to take advantage. It is your raison d’être. Don’t find yourself old and regretful, saying, I wanted to go to college but I never got around to it. I wanted to vote for my leaders but I never got around to it. I wanted to learn Spanish but I never got around to it. I wanted to travel—read the classics—scuba dive—climb Everest—join Greenpeace—but I never got around to it. Look at the circles you’ve just cut. Now you have no excuse.”

  The students looked at the circles for a long, quiet moment. Finally, it was Mary Brody, speaking in class for the first time, who held up her paper and said, “A round TO IT.”

  Ms. Bolt clapped her hands. “Thank you, Ms. Brody!”

  Ms. Bolt was, as everyone at Leaford Collegiate knew, a big lesbo, and whether it was her sexual preference or her too progressive thinking, or maybe one of her own limitless choices—whatever the cause—she did not return after that single glorious semester. And although Mary had wanted to uncover the roots of feminism and honour her sisters in suffrage, her passion vanished along with Ms. Bolt, the round TO IT crumpled and tossed in the trash. Mary was deeply wounded by the teacher’s departure, particularly as Ms. Bolt had told her once that she had a very old soul.

  Goodbye, goodbye. A final goodbye. For a short time, a long time, forever. Songs and plays and novels and films written about goodbye. Mary felt it as a theme. Closure—she disliked the modernity of the term describing so ancient a ritual. The acknowledgment of those who had left, those who remained. Gone. A final parting moment. And for Mary, so many farewells left unsung. She wondered if the accumulation of such abandonments should be held accountable for her hunger. The heavy finger of blame.

  There was movement in her periphery, and Mary spun around thinking, Gooch. It was a form, beautifully rendered, momentarily unrecognizable in the glass of the window at the door. Mary stood still as the form took shape and saw that it was a woman—a fat, naked woman. So that is me, she thought. She clocked the nightgown on the kitchen chair behind her. It had been years since Gooch had seen her naked. She shuddered to think of the last time. Though she loved to remember the first.

  SYMBIOSIS

  Not a soul in Leaford, particularly Mary Brody herself, could have predicted her weight loss that summer before she entered her senior high school year. Irma guessed she’d become interested in boys. Kim and Wendy from the cheerleading squad, who’d regarded her with alternating doses of pity or contempt since kindergarten, decided that she’d done the grapefruit diet from a magazine. Orin reckoned that his daughter had simply been late in losing her baby cheeks, considering that no one on either side of the family was big. The boys at Leaford Collegiate didn’t wonder about her secret, but shared their rock-hard relief that suddenly gorgeous Mary Brody hadn’t lost her B-3s, code for big bouncy breasts.

  The strawberries came early and, as was a Brody family tradition, the three, Orin, Irma and Mary, drove out to Kenny’s big “pick your own” farm near the lake beyond Rusholme to fill flats with juicy berries that they’d bake into mouth-watering tarts and pies, or boil with dangerous amounts of sugar to make jam for the winter. Stepping out of the car in the muddy parking lot, Irma took Mary’s face in her slender hands and instructed harshly, “Pick. Don’t eat.”

  Orin and Irma were skilled pickers, and set to work—bent at the waist, hands moving furiously, eyes scouring low leaves for ruby treasures. But as Mary could not bend over easily at the waist, she sat on her rear, inching forward like a crab to comb each bountiful plant. She was not expected to keep pace with her parents. And neither would glance back, not even once, to see if she was picking more than eating. Each fragrant berry was a world of senses. Sweet. Sour. Grainy. Musky. Juicy. Gritty. Silky. Silty. Smooth. That’s enough, she would tell herself—then, Just one more.

  Some days following, while stirring a pot of volcanic red sluice at the stove (remembering last year, when she’d tested the boiling jam and burnt her lips so badly that she’d had to get a prescription from Dr. Ruttle), Mary’d felt the sudden roiling of her stomach. Perspiring heavily, she’d dropped the ladle and rushed to the toilet, where she liberated an effluence so redolent of strawberries that she would be unable to eat a spoonful of jam that entire year. She had always been fascinated, as she thought all humans must be or should be, with her by-products, and routinely studied her release.

  She wondered why it floated, or why it sank like anchors. She marvelled at its tenacity. Admired its cohesion. Felt gratified when it did not fracture upon entry, and cheated when expulsive forces shot it beyond her field of vision. While ashamed of her revolting curiosity, she nonetheless appreciated its earthy autumn shades, and found great satisfaction in its variant aromas.

  On that day she glimpsed, when she rose to inspect, a thing she’d never seen before—a thing that did not cause her to turn away or scream for Irma, but beckoned her to lean forward, come closer, examine. Wriggling. Waving. Dancing. Greeting. Jubilant. Life. And as Mary Brody discovered the limbless invaders, she realized that, for the first time in memory, she couldn’t hear the obeast. In the field of her flora and fauna, a silent battle had been waged and won. Mary Brody was free.

  A trip to the Leaford Library confirmed it. Parasites. Worms. Not pinworms, though. And not roundworms. Something else. Thicker than thread, the colour of fat under chicken skin. She couldn’t find a picture of them. Parasites found in animal excrement, viable in dirt, likely contracted by eating unwashed fruits or vegetables—gardening without gloves.

  Home from the Leaford Library, after Irma’d announced it was time to get dinner over with, Orin noticed that she only picked at her roast, and slathered butter over her baked potato but didn’t eat it. Her mother put a hand to her daughter’s forehead, but Mary assured Irma that she felt fine. And she seemed fine. Better than fine. Her secret was a symbiotic, not parasitic, affair.

  Having lost her appetite completely, feeling no ill effects save the constant but, Mary would conclude, bearable itching of her anus, Mary only nibbled bits of each meal those first weeks of summer—enough, she hoped, to sustain her occupants. Each trip to the bathroom was agony, as she feared the disappearance of her saviours. She tallied their numbers, keeping mental charts, and by the time sweet corn was ready—noting a marked decrease in population, had panicked that her army might be deploying altogether. Mary surprised her mother by offering to help in the garden. She stopped washing her hands. She began making long, twice-daily treks to the park near the river, where, with a spoon from the cutlery drawer, she shovelled dirt and ate it, hopeful that in one mound hid a nugget that might colonize her anew.

  At first Mary didn’t notice her melting flesh, and didn’t celebrate her reduction the way Irma and Orin did. She accepted their pride in her achievement, though it was not strictly hers, with grunts and tight smiles. “Keep it up, Murray,” Orin remarked, watching her decline a coconut cupcake, “and none of the cousins’ll recognize you at the reunion this fall.” Mary thought that a funny thing to say, for she was certain the Brody cousins had never really looked at her before, and would have no context for comparison.

  On that day of the Brody family reunion, wearing her new Jordache jeans, Mary was several times mistaken for her cousin Quinn’s new girlfriend, who they’d all been told in strictest confidence was a stripper from Detroit! They laughed abou
t it, Irma and Orin and Mary, each for personal reasons, but their shared amusement was a major source of the day’s remembered pleasures.

  Finding her greatest satisfaction in freedom—no longer enslaved, her mind not occupied with the details of food—Mary felt expanded and dared to imagine her future. She pored over magazines that offered courses in fashion and design. She looked in the mirror frequently, obsessively, not admiring herself but struck by the simple truth in her eyes. She was not hungry. Still. Not. Hungry. She took her gift money and walked all the way to the Kmart to buy several coordinating outfits in her new size. She felt the muscles in her stride. The lengthening of her torso. The swing of her shiny dark hair. She continued to eat dirt. She decided to get a part-time job.

  Mary’s Aunt Peg, recently retired from the pharmacy department at Raymond Russell Drugstore, had heard that Ray Russell Sr. was looking for a girl to work front cash. The staff already knew Mary. In a town so small, with only one pharmacy, the staff knew the whole of Leaford with embarrassing intimacy. Mary had spent more than the average amount of time at the back desk, waiting for her parents’ prescriptions, and felt at home amidst the clove oil and Metamucil.

  It would have been impossible to consider such a position just months before, since Raymond Russell had the largest assortment of Laura Secord chocolate in Baldoon County; the proverbial kid in a candy store, Mary could not have trusted herself in the presence of such bonbons. But with no yearning for the almond bark and no desire for buttered toffee, she pulled on a sundress, borrowed Irma’s mules and arrived ten minutes early for her interview. She would work mornings, the shift no one else wanted, and Saturdays for the rest of the summer, and cut back to just Saturday when school began. Past Mary, present Mary, in-between Mary—like Gooch, the walls of Raymond Russell’s had borne witness to most of her life.

  Jimmy Gooch hobbled into the drugstore on tall, squeaky crutches one Saturday morning in November of their senior year, having been absent from school for two weeks, during which the Leaford Senior Cougars had lost four straight games. He’d been in a terrible car crash for which his father had been hospitalized, and no one had seen him since the accident. There were rumours at school that his leg was broken in four places. A stitched cut was healing on his forehead, and there was a faint yellow cast to his left cheek, where the worst of the bruising had been. He was wearing a stained sweatshirt and basketball shorts to accommodate the huge plaster cast on his left leg. Seventeen-year-old Gooch searched the store, pinching a square of white paper in his big, trembling fingers, a drowning man, until he spotted Mary Brody sailing toward him.

  The sign flickering in his expression read, I am saved. Perhaps he saw his own reflection deep within Mary’s eyes, and imagined that she already possessed him. Or maybe he recognized her as belonging to his new circle of damaged souls. Their whole lives felt decided in that moment.

  Gooch paused, watching her, then lifted his shoulders and smiled wanly as if to say, Ah, life. Mary Brody nodded twice and tilted her head as if to respond, I know. She gestured for him to follow her to the back, which he did, swinging his long frame on the complaining crutches. She took the prescription and passed it to Ray Russell Sr., quietly asking if he could fill it right away, for her friend. She turned to find Gooch waiting, eager, like a pup. She wordlessly showed him to a chair, feeling the heat rise from his body as he lowered his cast to the floor and himself to the seat.

  Mary breathed him: leather jacket, unwashed body, dusty scalp. His round blue eyes begged for affection, clarity. As if they had already been married twenty-five years, instead of never having had a conversation before, she frowned reflectively and asked, “What are the doctors saying about your dad?”

  Gooch’s father, James, a tower like his namesake, had driven the Dodge, in which Gooch was passenger, straight into the hundred-year-old oak tree at the sharpest bend in the river road, on the way home from the strip club at Mitchell’s Bay, where Gooch had been sent to retrieve him. James had insisted on driving and Gooch was, tragically, more afraid of his father’s drunken rage than he was of his drunken driving. He had buckled into the passenger side, trying to convince himself that his father did drive better juiced than sober, just as he professed. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from muttering, “Asshole,” to which his father responded with a crisp backhand. That was how his cheek got bruised, but no one except Mary would ever know that.

  Gooch looked at Mary directly. “Still feels like a dream.”

  “That could be your medication,” she said with authority.

  The article in the Leaford Mirror didn’t mention, under the photograph of the smashed Dodge, that James Gooch had been driving home from the strip club, but it did note his impairment, and describe the paralysis and brain swelling and the unlikelihood that he would wake from his coma. The article also reported that Jimmy Gooch had a leg injury and would not play out the rest of the high school season, further speculating that Gooch’s hopes of a basketball scholarship would be delayed, or dashed altogether.

  “My dad’s having a bad time with his colitis,” Mary said, as if to answer some unasked question.

  “Want a ride home?” Gooch offered.

  “Six-thirty,” she responded, “by the time I get done counting my cash.”

  That evening, when Mary’s shift was over, Gooch was waiting for her in the parking lot. She felt curiously calm striding out to the tan Plymouth Duster where he sat smiling shyly. She was intent on the evening air, the curious warmth of the late fall night. She had brushed her teeth in the staff bathroom but hardly glanced at her reflection in the mirror. She hadn’t fretted over what she might say. She hadn’t worried that she had never been kissed. She knew what was to come as if it were a memory, not a projection.

  Gooch and Mary were bound mystically, or so it seemed. Even if she would eventually understand that she was the only person in Gooch’s life, including himself, who did not hold him responsible for what had happened, or feel somehow betrayed by the consequence of his injury, she’d been right about Jimmy Gooch that first day she looked into his eyes. He was not the cocky star athlete to whom things came easily, but a big, battered boy who needed a safe place to hide.

  They drove to the lake in comfortable silence, to a clearing among the trees, a refuge to which Jimmy Gooch had plainly driven before. He knew just where to turn so the branches wouldn’t scratch his door. They climbed out of the Duster, Gooch on his crutches, and leaned against the warm grille, a breath apart, watching moonlight stroke the water, lifting their eyes to the stars. Mary tried to recall the constellations from eighth-grade astronomy. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Polaris—the North Star.

  Gooch turned to her after a long time and said, “No one but Pete’s even come by the house.”

  “I heard you didn’t want to see anyone.”

  “I don’t,” he shot, then laughed. “I didn’t. At least, I thought I didn’t. No one I know.”

  “You know me. We had our lockers side by side.”

  “We did?” Gooch asked, cocking his head.

  Mary’s cheeks burned. “Never mind.”

  “I’m kidding, Mary,” he said. “I remember you.”

  “I thought, because I look different now …”

  “Where are you going after this?”

  “Home?”

  “No, I mean after graduation. Where are you going?”

  “I thought I might work for a year and save some money. There’s this school of fashion and design in Toronto but that’s pretty far. My parents kind of need me right now. My dad’s having a hard time.”

  “Colitis.” Gooch nodded, watching the stars.

  “I heard you were going to Boston,” Mary said.

  He gestured to his leg. “Not now. Not to play.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Gooch shrugged. “I’m not. It’s a relief.” He sighed, loudly enough to scatter wildlife. “It’s all a big relief.” But he didn’t look relieved.

  Mary waited
as Gooch took another deep breath and, in his exhalation, told her the true story of his life: his alcoholic parents, his father’s violent rages, his mother’s penchant for scenes, the tragedy of his older sister’s drug addiction, his paralyzing fear that he could not measure up. People expected so much from a giant boy.

  Mary’s eyes never left his handsome face as he spoke, lingering over the asides: describing his passion for writing, his love affair with the U.S.A., his impatience with complainers, his preference for Chinese over Italian, his goal of reading the classics, his embarrassment that his clothes had to be custom-made. He paused, puzzling over her pretty face. She thought he might kiss her, and was unprepared when he said, “Your turn.”

  Although she might have told Gooch her own life story, confided about her sickly, disappointed parents, her intense loneliness, her hunger. And though she might have confessed her love affair with the parasites, and described her own incapacitating fear of not measuring down, Mary Brody did not reveal herself that way. Instead, she moved from the spot beside young Jimmy Gooch, imagining herself a fusion of every brazen starlet she’d ever watched seduce a man.

  She reached for the buttons of her blouse, then shifted out of her skirt, then unclasped her bra and pulled down her panties and peeled off her socks, until she was completely, exquisitely nude. She raised her arms, not as a flourish to her striptease but because she was standing naked in the serious moonlight on a warm night in November, and was certain never to do so again.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Gooch said, without moving forward.

  “You won’t,” she promised.

  Gooch rested his plaster-cast leg on a nearby stump and pulled Mary to him, stroking her hair when she shivered. He helped her up to the warm hood of the Duster and let his lips fall on the swell of cheek beneath her lashes. She held her breath as his mouth sampled the length of her neck, and brushed her soft shoulder, and found her rising breasts. She shivered as his fingers conducted currents from her nipple to her groin. Lips found pelvis. Tongue parted lips. A glimpse of the divine. From her thigh she heard him whisper huskily, “I love your smell.”