Three Women at the Water's Edge

by Nancy Thayer

  On and on Dale went, on and on, so that she was babbling, turned sideways in the seat of the car toward her sister, talking earnestly, rapidly to Daisy, as if the sheer quantity of hopeful words could offset Daisy’s dismal ones. Dale continued to talk this way, on and on, until they got to the airport. Daisy had to be on time for the real estate appointment, and so could not go into the terminal with Dale, but dropped her off at the departure gate. The two sisters kissed clumsily in the car, and Daisy still cried, her eyes swollen and bleary and her face puffy and sad, and Dale stroked her sister’s cheek and wiped some tears away, and looked her sister in the eyes and said, “Oh, Daisy, it will be better, it will, it will. I’ll call you tonight, I promise. Don’t be so sad. I love you.”

  “Thank God you love me,” Daisy bawled shamelessly. “You’re the only adult who does.”

  “Oh, Daisy, what nonsense!” Dale laughed, and kissed her sister again, her lips tasting salt. “Now cheer up! I’ll call you when I get home.” And she crawled out of the car and went off into the airport, carrying her overnight bag and large suitcase and purse with the competent ease of an experienced traveler.

  Daisy watched her sister walk off, slim in her jeans, young and slim and carefree and capable; all the things Daisy was not. She wished for one brief moment that she were her sister; then thought of Danny and Jenny and the new child inside her and changed her mind, and was glad, no matter what, to be herself. But as she pulled away from the terminal, looking over her shoulder to check the traffic, she did wish in spite of herself that Dale weren’t quite so perfect, that she at least had fat thighs or perhaps less thick and shiny hair. She did not wish ruin on her sister, she was not truly jealous of Dale; and yet she knew that she would honestly be a little happier in her life if Dale had fat thighs instead of such long straight smooth ones. She blew her nose again and tried to compose herself so that she wouldn’t be a total mess at the real estate office. She dug a Snickers candy bar out of the bottom of her purse and began to eat it as she drove. She turned the radio to a news show; two men were droning on about the crisis in the Mideast, and this relaxed Daisy greatly. She was really rather glad to hear about crises elsewhere, because they did not seem to affect her, and yet they made her feel not quite so alone, not quite so picked on by God and the Fates. She liked thinking of the two newsmen, wearing pin-striped suits and vests and ties, mumbling away in some smoky room that had never seen the likes of any human under five feet of height. Their drama seemed so elegant and composed, so grown-up, so civilized, so theatrical, so clean compared to hers. Although as she continued to think about it, she knew that she preferred her drama, messy as it was, to theirs, because those men had only words to work with, and she had all the materials of life: flesh, fabrics, foods. There those men were, thought Daisy, juggling entire nations of people, and yet they touched no one, not with their hands: so what sort of satisfaction could they get? Those poor men, Daisy thought, they had to live in such a stilted world, such a distorted world: it was all words for them. While Daisy had words, too: the talk and laughter and confidences of her good women friends, the chatter of her children, the radio, television, magazines and newspapers. But she had so much more than that, she had what balanced it all out: substance. The bodies of her children which always filled her senses with a rich heady joy—she was always greedy to hug or see or smell her children, and sometimes at night she stood above their beds, looking down at them enraptured, as if filling up her soul with the knowledge of their existence before entering the dark night of sleep. And food, she liked food, liked handling it, and felt a personal, intimate response to each kind of food. Sometimes she would stand in her kitchen struck still with awe, with wonder, at the intricacy of the food she held in her hand.

  Oh, that was not always so, of course; she often got tired of handling food. There were days when she threw TV dinners in the oven for her children, there were days when she halfheartedly chopped away at whatever vegetable was around and threw it into a pot of boiling water and didn’t give it a thought. Just as there were days when she walked through her house without appreciating its beauty. Just as there were days when she felt her children were driving her mad. But on the whole, she liked what she did and she did not want to stop doing it, at least not for a while. Her life gave her pleasure; and Daisy thought that that was after all what life was about. So she dug yet another Snickers out of her purse—she kept stashes of chocolate around close at hand always, as other women might keep alcohol or cigarettes or Valium—and began to eat that. The chocolate was so sweet, and her friend Karen had invited her and the children to dinner that night, so there would be laughter and gossip and comfort, the comfort of a good friend. The chocolate was so sweet; and it was all right, Daisy could get through it, could get through walking into the real estate office to talk about the selling of her house.

  —

  On the plane Dale had no chocolates and wouldn’t have eaten one if she had. She did order a drink, but it didn’t help. The plane to Boston was crowded, and she had to sit in a middle seat, between two big men whose elbows kept protruding over the armrest and into her small private space. Dale hated the men and their elbows, and wished she could magically change, like the people on the cartoons that Danny and Jenny watched, into an animal—a dog; then she could bite those pushy elbows and snarl and make the men back away. She was in a foul mood. She told herself that it was just the crowdedness of the plane, the insensitiveness with which the stewardess had slopped the plastic glass of soda and the little bottle of scotch down on Dale’s shaky tray, the elbows of the men and the way they kept clearing their throats and rattling their newspapers. She told herself that she was tired; she had not had very much sleep the night before. But of course that was not all of it, that was not it really, and she wasn’t even angry, and she knew it: She was sad. She was almost heartbroken. Daisy’s words, Daisy’s life, rang in her ears and filled her mind with melancholy images. Youth—love—children—loss. In the car on the way to the airport Dale had felt in some vague but guilty way, relieved; as if she were leaving a hospital or a prison, as if she were escaping the presence of someone inescapably less fortunate. Even as Daisy had raised her fist to strike the radio, Dale had felt the power of the love song being sung there. It was a corny song, as bad as sweetened cereal, and Dale knew that—still the words seemed to fit her life so well. The song was about the relentless need of lovers to be with one another; it was about separation; it was about holding one’s lover again. It was a song full of clichés, yet Dale knew that the strength of a cliché is in the knot of truth at its core.

  Dale had missed Hank so much. She had missed him so much that she had honestly been afraid she would die of it. The thousand miles between them had suddenly been too far, threateningly far, and she had panicked, thinking she could never get back, and her heart had gone wild inside her, thrashing about; she had felt wild, nearly insane, with longing and the need just to see him. To hear his laugh. To touch him. She had been sick with the need to touch him.

  She had almost phoned him, but he was at his parents’ home in Boston for the Thanksgiving holiday—they had agreed to go home for Thanksgiving, in hopes that this would lessen their parents’ dismay when they did not come home for Christmas—and she did not know the number. Of course she could have gotten the telephone number, but she did not really want to call him there, she did not know if he had told his parents about her, and she did not want to embarrass him. What could he have said to her with a roomful of relatives standing around listening? But she almost called anyway, just to hear the sound of his voice. He was to meet her at the airport in Boston this afternoon, and they would drive back to Maine together. So she knew she would be seeing him again very soon—and it was only five days, after all, that they had been apart. But it seemed the very worst time in her life. She had felt physically sick without him, and not just with lust, although there was that, too, but more with a simple strong need just to be in his presence. For the world had become
divided for her: into now and before, into with and without, into joy and misery, into life and death.

  But now it had all been tainted. Dale could not shake it off: could not shake off the knowledge of her father’s grief, her sister’s devastation. She could not forget how Daisy had struck the radio and called love a lie. She could not keep from before her eyes the sight of her father’s shoulders as he sagged and sobbed in his old armchair, and the sight of Daisy’s constantly tear-streaked and fear-contorted face. Dale felt as though she were a person whom Fate had suddenly, freakishly, awarded future sight. “Look,” Fate was saying to her, “this is life. Let’s say that there is a tunnel, one which you are about to enter, one which almost everyone else in the world enters, because it is so alluring. But—and this is the secret only you get to share—it is a tricky tunnel, a curving one, and what lies ahead is so far out of sight that you don’t even think of it when you enter. But I will show you: Look, you will move through days of love, and then through days of complacency and settledness, and then implacably, through days of loss and despair and devastation and anguish as deep as hell. There is no way out, there is no way back; everyone moves through these days, only the pace differs. Now I’ve shown you—and you are lucky, you have a chance not to enter, you are standing only at the opening, you can turn and refuse to enter if you choose. What will you choose?”

  What would she choose? Dale nearly cried aloud. She twisted wretchedly in her seat. For she felt that she did not want to live without Hank; the world would have no meaning without him by her side. Yet that feeling was trite: trite! Everyone felt it, and everyone was wrong. Love led either to boredom or, worse, to suffering and the fragmenting of bonds which held not just a marriage, but each separate person, into a healthy whole. Look at Daisy! Look at their father! And Daisy said that their mother had gone cold and heartless, which had to be a kind of suicide on her mother’s part. Look what happened after giving oneself over to love! Dear God, she did not want such devastation to come to her. And even more she did not ever want to cause such a thing to happen to Hank. She loved Hank, she could not imagine not loving him, and yet it seemed that her loving him could only end with her hurting him, or with his hurting her. Oh, why was the world this way, why was it all this way? She would rather that everyone died at thirty of diseases and plagues, as people used to, than to die this way, through the death of love.

  Dale was twenty-four, and it seemed to her now that she had spent all the grown years of her life resisting this, or thinking in some back hidden part of her mind that it would not happen to her, this thing of falling in love. And now it had happened, and she was overwhelmed by the power of it all, and she was filled with dread. She was afraid. She was so terribly, terribly afraid. She felt that if she were to experience a grief as profound and enormous as the joy she felt with Hank she would die from it, she would purely shatter apart and die. It seemed to her that to give oneself over to love, to enter into love, was to give oneself over to a kind of death. And so as the plane began to descend toward Boston, she felt herself moving backward, backing out, backing away; and closing herself off from any of the tempting sensations which threatened to lure her back in. She felt herself closing off, closing up, turning cold. The plane plummeted through the skies down toward the spot where her lover waited, and she sat rigid in her seat, gripping her arms tightly, feeling all tears sink back down into her depths, back into some cold dark dry place where no one could find them, and the tears left her, the moisture left her, and she went hard and dry. So when she rose to leave the plane, she felt solid and invulnerable, as if she had turned to stone.

  Six

  It was the end of January, and children were roaming Daisy’s house like elephants in a jungle. Down in the kitchen, where Daisy and the other three mothers sat, they could hear the thumps and thuds through the ceiling, through the walls, the jarring noises of lots of little children jumping off beds, bumping into each other, careening through the house with shrieks of mad childish glee. Everyone was nuts, the children were simply nuts, they hadn’t been outside for a hundred years because of the weather, and Daisy’s huge house seemed like an indoor playground to them, a vast jungle of space in which to roam and run. And Daisy and her friends were just giddy enough to still be in charge of the children but not to mind their noise. They were having their own party, they were having their own fun, and the gaiety of their children only reinforced their own.

  Oh, God, it was so good to sit and laugh with someone else while the children rumbled about in some other room. The other mothers loved Daisy’s house because it was so large that one could get away from the children. Daisy still had packed away in tissues and cardboard boxes all of the breakable, valuable, unnecessary things, and so she didn’t worry much about the children’s wildness because there was really nothing sitting out for them to break. Even the kitchen had been stripped of nonessential items, of wineglasses and crystal candy dishes, of heavy ironstone mixing bowls and casseroles. Daisy had kept out a cookie sheet for heating up frozen french fries, and a skillet or two, and the everyday plastic Heller plates and cups, but almost everything glass and breakable had been packed away. And she found that she quite enjoyed the limitations this set on her cooking. She didn’t have to worry about making cakes or bread or elaborate dishes. She fed the children hamburgers and raw carrots, or soup and toasted cheese sandwiches, or made a rich beef stew in a large pot and fed everyone off it for days and days—it was amazing how easy the cooking had become with Paul gone. It was amazing how easy life had become. It was amazing how happy she was.

  Although that was not always true; she was not always happy. She worried about money, the future, then money again, almost constantly. The house had not sold after all. Daisy had reluctantly abandoned her idea of fixing up the attic to rent and had gone to the trouble of packing almost everything, and had spent hours with real estate agents looking for a smaller house. Then it had developed that the buyers had been unable to get financing. Another couple had made an offer, but it was far less than Paul thought they should get for the house. Then winter had struck in earnest, and no one was interested in being on the lake. Prospective buyers worried about the price of oil; they worried that it would be colder near the lake, that the damp cold air would seep through the house. Daisy knew that the house was tight and firm, that the damp did not seep in, but she didn’t bother to tell anyone, knowing they probably wouldn’t believe her. So she could only wait, now really stuck in the house, unable to move out or settle in.

  After Christmas she had written a long and carefully rational letter to her mother, asking outright for a loan. She had tried her best to sound mature, but she knew that what she was doing was what she had sometimes done as a child: ruthlessly trying to play her parents against each other in a desperate attempt to get what she wanted. When her father had come to spend Christmas with her, Daisy had explained her situation to him, and he, in his new quiet and burdened manner, had told her not to worry about the money she owed him. The twenty thousand could just be a gift to her, he told her, or a long-term loan with no interest, payable whenever she had the money, which as far as he was concerned could be never. But he could not give her the other ten thousand so that she could pay off Paul. He was getting old, he said, and needed to keep his money; it wouldn’t be so long before he would be too old to work. Daisy had had to hide her annoyance at his easy misery behind the real gratitude she felt. She wrote to Margaret: Daddy had more or less given her twenty thousand dollars so she could keep the house. Couldn’t Margaret “loan” her ten thousand? But two weeks had gone by, and Margaret had not answered. Daisy was hurt. She was too proud to call her mother and beg. So she tried to stay calm and hopeful. She waited. She began dreaming seriously again of renting out the attic. She waited to see what would be done about her house; would her mother come through with the money before another buyer was found? She waited while her new baby grew in her tummy. She felt suspended in time.

  She was trying to be gro
wn-up and optimistic and capable, but it was very hard. She could not seem to get her hands on the reins of her life. After Dale’s visit, when Daisy had at last been able to grieve, Daisy had realized that that was a fine and necessary thing to do—to grieve, to complain, to cry—but it was really of little lasting help. The next day the same problems were there. She was eager to rent out the attic so that she could actually be doing something positive in her life, but at the moment that seemed impossible. She was trying to diet and exercise in order to be more attractive, but that just seemed rather silly. She was seven months pregnant now, and the only men she saw were the pharmacist, the mailman, the gynecologist, and the husbands of her good friends.