The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Eden shook her head. “Jack knew so many people. We couldn’t go to dinner without seeing someone. It got tedious. Anyway, that’s nice you have a vehicle. You did mention something about babysitting.”

  “I was thinking I might drive to the ocean.”

  “It’s late, Mary.”

  “But it’s not far, right? And I’m not tired. Will you come with me?”

  “I’m going back up to the hospital for a few more hours. I just came home to make some calls.” She paused before announcing, “The two from the Bay Area are driving down in the morning.”

  “Jack’s daughters?”

  “The other’s going to call when she’s booked a flight.” Eden rose, her black bob swinging over her sunken cheeks. “I dug out a few of Jack’s old polo shirts. He was big for a while. You’d never guess that to see him now. One of them might fit you, Mary.” She grabbed a sweater from a hook at the door. “That hospital is so cold.”

  After waving goodbye to Eden, Mary found several pastel polo shirts laid out on the bed and chose the largest, a mint green colour. After relieving herself of her navy blue smock, she pulled on the cotton shirt, pleased to see that it fit over the lump of her gut.

  Hoisting her body into the Ram, charged with anticipation, Mary thought of how she had never dreamed of seeing any ocean until Big Avi had pointed the way, but now felt it like a quest. The road to the coast was another roller coaster, but this one in the dark. Twists and turns and climbing up and racing down, past unseen landscape she could barely imagine. A turn in the road and she caught the distant glass of the Pacific in the thrall of a starry black night. She drove on, past the lit-up mansions nestled in the hills toward the coastline, opening the truck’s windows, letting the wind lash her face.

  She reached the coast and found a place to park on the side of the road. The beach was empty and dark but she couldn’t hear her fear over the call of the surf. She climbed out of the truck, judging the distance to the black water, then slipped off her sneakers and made her way through the cool sand.

  Her breath came in gasps as she soldiered on toward the surf, and she felt her soul shift within her body, as though straining for a better point of view, with only the ambient glow from the highway to light her way. She stopped at the shoreline, holding her hand to her heart, not because she felt that familiar pain but because she was stung by the night’s beauty, the black water rising before her, the nearness of the heavens and the feeling of being so small as to be a grain of sand beneath her feet, and so light that she might be swept up by the evening’s breeze. She paused to worship at the ocean’s feet, to concede the tininess and brevity of life, to pray for humanity in distant lands across the water and to give thanks because the world was a marvel.

  “Agua,” she said aloud.

  She lifted her pants and dipped her plump pink feet, shocked by the icy cold, picturing Gooch standing in the surf of the same ocean. What would he be thinking? Surely by now he’d have come to some conclusions about his life, his marriage. He’s already made up his mind.

  Finding a cool, dry place in the sand, she settled down. Checking to ensure that she was alone, she stretched out on the white grains, arms at her sides, like a child making a snow angel, reminded once again of the night in Leaford she’d lain naked beneath the storm. She found the Big Dipper, the Littler Dipper, the band of light Hay-su had pointed out as the Milky Way, and let her eyes roam, hoping to see another shooting star so she could make a wish. No matter that Jesús García claimed there was no magic in the cosmos; she understood, lying beneath the dazzling canopy, why people put their dead in the heavens. Why they imagined God in the sky. After a time she closed her eyes, searching her lids for clarity, hoping that God would throw in her two cents’.

  Orin had told her to get a drink from the hose and push on. Heather had said the same thing. But if pushing on meant returning to Canada without seeing Gooch, she could not. Each time she imagined leaving, a nagging voice warned that if she left she would be missing something vital. She decided that, at the very least, her waiting was not for naught. She felt valued by Eden. And by Ronni Reeves and her boys. She had a vehicle, and money in the bank. This pondering of her predicament did not feel familiar. No spiral of despair. Just a quiet consideration of her existence. That internal revolution.

  Without drawing conclusions or mixing metaphors, Mary left the wondering about her husband and turned to the curiosity of her lost appetite. She could name each morsel she’d ingested in the previous few weeks, less food than she’d eaten most days in her other incarnation. That demon hunger, her constant companion, had morphed into gatekeeper.

  But a thing lost could be found. Like her purse. Her husband. Or maybe it was gone forever, like her babies. Heather. Gooch? She never again wanted to hear the roar of the obeast, but knew she couldn’t sustain herself indefinitely with a vague nausea around the subject of food.

  She rose, pushed through the sand, fished for her truck key in the pants pocket of her damp navy scrubs, strangely comforted to be wearing Jack’s old polo shirt—as if she’d brought his essence along with it, to bid farewell to the sea.

  Driving back into Golden Hills, Mary stopped at the light where the twelve lanes met and cast her eyes toward the dark vacant lot where the memorial to the fallen man stood. The pain between her eyes, which she’d been managing with the tablets from the pharmacist, flared unexpectedly and she wondered if she might have to pull over. But it passed.

  Like all things. All things.

  THIRD EYE BLIND

  Waking the next morning, Mary expected to see dawn greeting the blanched hills behind the motel, and realized how quickly the unfamiliar had become the expected. Leaford had been her only home until a few days ago, and although she’d never wanted or intended to leave, she had quickly grown accustomed to the view from her Golden Hills window, and to the landscaped medians of the little town, and the brilliant blue sky, and the fiery, healing sun. She wondered how long it would take for Eden to become accustomed to Jack’s absence. Or her to Gooch’s. Who was missing Heather? Had her son been told?

  Jack’s room. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows where the curtain rod had fallen, the towering eucalyptus and murky rectangular pool in the backyard. Jack’s presence lingered like an odour in the room, his residual energy crackling and popping throughout the night, and Mary’d slept fitfully in the too-soft bed. Sometime in the night, overheated, she’d torn off the navy scrubs she was wearing as pyjamas, and tossed them onto the table with the photographs of Jack and Eden. She noticed that the strap on her worn grey bra was hanging by a thread.

  Watching the breeze tease the pearl-leafed bushes outside, she hugged her nearly naked body beneath the crisp white sheet, not considering her proportions one way or another but enjoying her vessel’s most recent accomplishments. The climbing of hills. The walking of miles. The lifting and twisting and hefting and shifting. Kissing little blonde heads. Standing at the ocean’s shore. She stroked her shrinking stomach like a sleeping cat.

  She was startled by the shadowy figure of a man darting behind the trees in the backyard. She sat up, squinting, heart racing. Gooch? Not tall enough. The man was wearing blue coveralls and a ball cap with long fabric flaps that protected his neck and face from the sun. He slipped into a shed near the rear of the green pool. Mary waited, heart thudding. When the shed door opened again, she saw that the man had relieved himself of the top half of his coveralls, tying the empty arms around his waist and exposing a broad, deeply tanned, toned torso. He carried a pool skimmer, and whistled while he worked.

  Straining to the left, she could see in the mirror the reflection of the company’s blue van in the driveway—he was from the pool cleaning service. Having no experience with pools, she could only guess that the legend of the sexy pool man was drawn from real life.

  With no curtains on the window of Jack’s bedroom, she was fully exposed to the backyard. She pulled the white sheets up over her worn grey brassiere, praying to be i
nvisible. She could not reach her navy scrubs on the dresser without rising from the bed, and couldn’t risk being seen. Seeing the pool man draw nearer, she shut her eyes lest he catch her looking.

  After a moment, bearing the suspense no longer, she peeked to judge his location, and could not tear her gaze from his body. She watched as he scooped leaves, the knotty muscles of his wide shoulders and back coiling with his efforts, thick ripples hardening beneath the curling hairs of his torso, nipples growing rigid within the brown areolae. Gooch had said there was natural order in the objectification of the body. Mary noted the dimples hovering above the man’s carved buttocks, and was startled by what she recognized as the blush of arousal.

  He set to work, scrubbing the sides of the pool and dousing the green water with tablets he handled with yellow gloves. Mary heard the woodpecker in the eucalyptus and once again felt the ticking of the clock, not thumping or thudding but speeding forward at face-bending velocity. It seemed no sooner had the man begun than he disappeared from the backyard and was standing on the front porch, ringing the buzzer.

  She hurried out of bed, pulling on the navy scrub bottoms and the old green polo shirt of Jack’s, remembering that she’d agreed to pay the pool company in cash and hoping to reach the door before Eden. But the white Prius was already gone from the driveway. Opening the door, she busied herself counting the cash in her hands. She could not bring herself to meet the pool man’s eyes, even though he’d tugged his overalls back on.

  He was involved in writing her invoice, and didn’t look up as he explained, “We’ve cleaned it and shocked the water. You’ll be swimming by the end of the week.”

  She knew his voice instantly. That weighty baritone. Behind the cap with flaps, the face of Jesús García. “Hay-su!”

  “Mary?”

  “Oh my God!” she said, laughing, handing him the money. “You work for the pool company?”

  “You were at the hotel.”

  “This is my mother-in-law’s house. I’m staying with her now.” Mary and Eden sharing the space of a small house, waiting for their men, one to leave, one to return. “Your friend Ernesto?” she remembered.

  Jesús García nodded. “Broken ribs. He won’t be back to work for a while.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. And you, Hay-Su? You’re well?”

  “Thank you. Yes.”

  “And your wife and sons? They must be getting excited about Christmas.”

  He cleared his throat but did not respond. He found that Mary had miscounted the money, and passed back twenty dollars.

  “Keep it,” she insisted. “A tip.”

  “No tips. Company policy.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re allowed to take water,” he said, arching a brow.

  Mary opened the door and drew Jesús García back to the kitchen, where she gave him a cold bottle of water from the fridge. Squinting from her headache, she found her pain tablets and, shaking too many into her palm, said, “I’ve had this pain. Right here between my eyes. It just doesn’t want to go away.”

  “Your third eye,” he said.

  “My third eye?”

  “In some Eastern religions, they believe we have a third eye in the middle of our seeing eyes where we can find higher consciousness. See the future.”

  “You really did spend a lot of time at the library.” He shrugged, looking away. She smiled. “Maybe my third eye has gone blind.” But reconsidering, she wondered if her third eye was not losing sight but birthing it, and if the pain she felt there was something like labour.

  “You could try boiling willow bark. You wouldn’t have to take the pills.”

  “Willow bark?”

  “It has salex, like salicylic acid in Aspirin.”

  “Random book at the library?”

  “My mother. We didn’t have Blue Cross. We had Back Yard. Yellow foxglove for my dad’s high blood pressure. Willow bark for pain and swelling. Yerba buena for nearly everything else. You have some growing back there.” He pointed in the direction of the innocent shrub that Eden had blamed with her broom.

  She walked with him toward the front door, and was struck by an urge as she passed her blue tote bag on a hook nearby. “Wait.” She opened her blue purse and grabbed a thick wad of bills. Pressing the money into his hand, she said, “Maybe you could buy the children a few extra things for Christmas.”

  Curling his fist against the cash, avoiding her eyes, he set his jaw. “No. Please.”

  She stuffed the bills into the pocket of her polo shirt, instantly regretting the gesture, which had clearly been misunderstood.

  “I should go,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean it as charity, Hay-su,” she said quickly, seeing she’d hurt his pride. “And the money, it’s not really mine anyway. Not exactly. My husband won it in the lottery.”

  He returned the flapped cap to his head. “I should go,” he repeated, and he was gone, swiftly, the way he’d stolen the shoes. Watching the blue van pull out of the driveway, she rested her eyes on the big white Dodge Ram. She grabbed the keys and started for the truck.

  Ronni Reeves seemed surprised to see Mary standing on the porch. “Hi Mary. Did you leave something last night?” The boys ran to the door, tumbling at her feet, singing her name. She felt her cheeks flush with confusion, then saw that their affection was genuine, their trust so quickly earned. She almost forgot why she’d come.

  “I came to return the car,” she said, when the boys had disappeared down the hall.

  “You can’t be here without a vehicle.”

  “But it’s your husband’s. It’s not right.”

  “I told you, Tom is out of town and won’t be back for a while. Besides, it gives me some satisfaction to think that his Ram is being used for good, not evil. Please. For me. It really is fair trade for watching the boys.”

  “All right,” Mary said reluctantly.

  “What’s the light-switch game?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The boys have been asking me to play the light-switch game.”

  “We had fun.” Mary took a breath, realizing that she hadn’t just come about the car. “I think I offended the pool man.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The pool man. I tried to give him extra money for the … his family. He wouldn’t take it.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about the pool man’s feelings,” Ronni said, sensing that Mary had more to say. “Maybe he doesn’t know English.”

  Mary paused. “Last night, I didn’t want you to have the wrong idea about my husband.”

  “The one who won the lottery and left you?”

  “See, that’s what I mean.”

  “Don’t mind me, Mary,” the woman said, softening. “I’m going through my angry phase. You’re still in denial.”

  “You don’t know Gooch.”

  “You want to come in for a coffee?”

  Mary suddenly knew that this was why she’d really come—for a coffee klatch between two left wives. Following Ronni to the kitchen, she tingled with nervous excitement, the feeling unfamiliar, as she’d never before reached out to make a friend.

  Over coffee at the kitchen table, while the boys played about their legs, the women shared their stories. Ronni told Mary about growing up with her family back east, her delirious courtship with Tom when they were both young law students, her joy at the birth of the triplets and the misery that her marriage became. Mary told Ronni about Orin’s colitis and Irma’s Alzheimer’s, and her own sordid affair with inertia.

  “I don’t think your husband deserves you,” Ronni said.

  “It’s not like that.”

  “I hope you don’t think you didn’t deserve him. I hate when women underestimate themselves.”

  “There were … misunderstandings.”

  Ronni nodded. “Their brains are in their balls.”

  “We didn’t communicate very well.”

  “Mars and Venus.”

  “We weren’t hone
st.”

  “He wasn’t honest. He was the one who wouldn’t talk. Right?”

  “Gooch talked and talked. We just never seemed to talk about the right things. We spent so much of our lives together.” Mary closed her eyes. “Hungry.”

  The women talked until Mary noticed how late it was. She waved at Ronni from the window of the big Dodge Ram, promising to come again. The sun had begun to set over that distant mountain range, and the roadways at once snarled with rush hour traffic. Mary did not surprise herself by turning right, in the direction of the highway, instead of left toward Eden’s house. She drove without self-deception, straight to the dusty corner, looking for Jesús García. In spite of what Ronni Reeves had said, she was worried about the pool man’s feelings. She didn’t know exactly what she’d say when she found him. He might need charity but he didn’t want it, and she felt inclined to further apology.

  At the stoplights where the dozen lanes met she saw him, just as she’d prayed she might, standing in a group of three other men with Thermoses. His appearance felt like a miracle. She pulled into the lot slowly, so as not to shower the workers with dust. The men, all but Jesús, hurried toward the Ram and scurried into the back of the pickup truck before Mary could stop them. She rolled down the window, calling, “Hay-su?”

  Startled to see her, he set off toward the truck carrying his duffel bag. “You need workers?” he asked, confused.

  She shook her head. “I came to see you.”

  “Me?”

  “I wanted to apologize. I didn’t mean to—”

  He interrupted, calling out in Spanish to the men who’d invaded the pickup. They groaned and jumped out of the truck.

  “Weren’t they going home?” she asked. “It’s nearly dark.”

  “If you have work, they’ll work.”

  “I wish I did. Anyway, I came to apologize.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I offended you, giving you money like that.”