Three Women at the Water's Edge

by Nancy Thayer

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  Dale had a cold. She sat in her empty classroom in the gray late afternoon, grading the French exams she had just given that day. Everyone else had gone home. It was five-thirty, and the school building was empty and still. Dale felt stuffy and achy and miserable. She felt chilled. She was wearing long underwear and heavy wool slacks and a cotton plaid shirt and a thick wool sweater and fur-lined boots and her parka, and the school building was of course heated. But still she felt cold. She felt nasty and irritated because so many of her students had made the same mistake in translations, had written “Je suis fini,” instead of “J’ai fini,” when the context was that of sitting at a dinner table, being finished with the meal. It hurt to hold the red marking pen in her fingers; it hurt to breathe. She longed for some Vaseline to put on her chapped reddened nose, but that was at home and she didn’t want to carry all these papers home with her tonight. She wanted to finish them now. She wanted to finish everything now. She wanted to get into bed and go to sleep and never wake up.

  “Terrible weather, isn’t it?” Mr. Jersey said. Mr. Jersey was the school janitor and a nice old man, though he tended to talk too much. Now he was entering Dale’s classroom, pushing his long-handled enormous dustmop before him, pulling his trash cart behind him, a large metal circle of keys clanking at his belt. “I said to my wife only this morning—”

  “Oh, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said, “could you please wait and do my room last? I’ve got a rotten cold and I just have to grade these tests now, and I’d appreciate it so much if you could wait and do my room last.”

  Mr. Jersey stopped in his tracks, amazed. Usually Dale was the friendliest of teachers, always ready to engage in a little conversation. But looking at her he saw that she truly did have a cold, she really did look puny and pale and awful.

  “You poor thing,” he said. “You should be home in bed. Sure, I’ll go on down the hall and hit your room last. But if I looked the way you look, I sure would be home in bed with a hot toddy. Do you know how to make a good hot toddy? It would be the best thing in the world for you. My wife makes them all the time and they get me through my colds real fast. You mix up hot water with lemon juice and honey and salt. It sounds strange, but it works wonders. If you want me to, I could call my wife and get the exact measurements for you. I—”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Jersey,” Dale said. “Don’t go to the trouble, I’ve got lots of medicine at home. I’ll just finish these papers and go home and take the medicine and go to bed.”

  “Well, now, your new expensive store-bought medicines aren’t always as good as you think,” Mr. Jersey said. The inferiority of the new, the plastic, the scientific, as opposed to the superiority of the homey and old-time, was one of his pet topics of conversation. “I was just telling my wife—”

  “Mr. Jersey,” Dale snapped. “I really need to grade these papers. I really need to get back to work.” And she glared at him.

  “Yes, yes, you go on right ahead, I won’t keep you,” Mr. Jersey said, and went out the door, pushing and pulling at his dustmop and his cart with a sudden shrunken, forlorn dignity. She had hurt his feelings.

  Dale sat staring at the doorway. Mr. Jersey had not thought to close the classroom door behind him, and she could hear him clanking and shuffling and sweeping down the hall, and the very space of the doorway where he had stood seemed to be alive with reproach. Dale got up in a sudden snit of energy and crossed the room and pulled the door shut against the janitor and his wounded pride and his noise. Then she went back and sat down and tried to concentrate on the tests. She only wanted to put her head down on the desk and sleep. She was so tired. She was so sick. She was so miserable.

  It was late January, and this cold had been building up and coming on for at least two weeks now. Dale felt as though her body was doing it on purpose, was making her feel weak and sick on purpose, to get back at her for what she had done to it. That is, she had tried, she was trying, to disengage herself from Hank, from her love for Hank; she had told Hank she didn’t want to see him so often, that she needed to get back in control of herself, that she needed to have more time and space just for herself. But that wasn’t really what she needed at all. What she really needed, what she really wanted, at least what her body wanted, was to be with Hank every possible second of the day.

  For Dale it had come to this, it was as simple as this: it was a matter of pain ending and peace reigning. It was as complete and simple as that. When she was with Hank, then she was content within her body, within herself. When she was not with him, she was in real constant physical pain. She twisted and longed. Sometimes she would leave her classroom and go into the faculty washroom and shut herself inside a toilet cubicle and simply lean up against the door. She would press her entire body against the door, the hard cold surface of the door, and press herself, and yearn. She was obsessed. She was in love. It was so powerful. And she wanted to fight it off. She thought of Daisy, she thought of her parents, she worked through it all with her mind, and now her mind, her reason, was fighting with her body and her desires. And she was sick and weak with the battle. Her mind feared the consequences, the future; but her body craved and craved the joy, the present joy.

  At Christmas they had spent ten days at a ski resort in Vermont, and in the hot rush of pleasure of those days Dale had forgotten her Thanksgiving resolution to escape the lures of love. It had been too overwhelming, too sweet, she had completely given herself over to the pleasure. It had been such a luxury to fall asleep in the same bed with Hank and to wake up in the same bed with him. The first three days they hadn’t even left the room to ski or eat. Time had fallen away. It had been almost frightening, how time had really fallen away. They had not had to worry about time, they had not had to measure out their lives by the clocks. There were no class bells, no alarm clocks, there was no reason to leave in the middle of the night in order to have the car parked respectably in front of one’s own house that morning. They had been able to stay awake late into the night, watching wonderful old black-and-white movies on the motel room television, not worrying about waking up for classes or responsibilities, sleeping on into the day, waking up in the afternoon, and even then not getting out of bed. They had been able to touch and touch and touch each other. They had lost themselves in each other’s flesh. The sheets and bed had become sticky and moist and aromatic, as if an extension of their desire; they hadn’t let the maid in the room for three days. The very motel room, with its piny walls and prints of deer and mountains, seemed to become an extension of them, seemed to become beautiful and sexy and warm. They had hated leaving the room; on the fourth day they had gotten up and showered and dressed, intending to go out and ski because the sun through the window did promise a world outside, and they had gone down to the resort’s dining room and eaten a huge hot breakfast, but they had missed their room so much, and its hot familiar indulgent walls, that they had gone back up to the room after breakfast. They had not always made love; sometimes they had just lain together, holding each other, talking or not talking, nestling. The fourth day they had gotten up and gone out and skied, but Dale had been weak from laziness and love and had taken many spills. Hank had had to stop and stop to help her up and kiss her and laugh. Then for the fifth through the eighth days of their stay they had gone out a lot, skiing or just walking about in the day, down to the bar to dance and drink at night. They had loved dancing together, they had just been delighted with dancing together.

  The last two days of their stay, though, they had again not left the room. They had been aware that the end of their time together was near. And so they had gone back into the room, back into the bed, and made love and clung to each other, as if they felt they were on a ship that would sink in two days, as if in two days they would die.

  Finally they had had to leave, to drive back to Rocheport. Dale had to grade papers and make lesson plans. Hank had to prepare for his classes, too, and to go around the farm to be sure that the young boy he had hired to do the
chores for him had not neglected anything. The night before the first new day of classes, Hank and Dale had eaten at Hank’s farm, and made love, and then he had had to drive her home. And they had sat in the warm cab of the red pickup truck together, holding each other, and saying over and over again, “Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you.” It had been a real tearing for Dale to leave the truck to go up to her apartment. She had gone up, and bathed and gotten ready for bed, but as she moved she had been in pain because she missed him so much. He had called her to say good night, and then she had gotten into bed. She had been exhausted and happy with the memories of his touch, but she had missed his presence, his body next to hers, and so she had lain there, feeling riddled with pain. In the next few days there had been reasons that she could not be with Hank after school: he had meetings, she had meetings, he had extra work on his farm. She had been miserable. And she had hated herself for the misery, and feared it.

  Finally she had tried to talk to Carol about it. But Carol had been almost appalled. Here Carol was, engaged, and she had spent a loving holiday with her fiancé, too, but now she was not in pain. She was just going ahead with her life. She listened to Dale talk and then told Dale that it didn’t seem right to her. She thought Dale’s love bordered on the pathological.

  “I would resent it very much indeed if Bob took up so much of my attention and energy and emotional space,” Carol had said. “In fact, I think it’s almost sick to be so obsessed. You’ve really got to get yourself in control. It’s super to be in love, but it’s crazy to be in love this way.”

  “I know,” Dale said. “I know. I do have to get myself in control.”

  But she loved it, even as she feared it. She loved the marvelous druggedness of it. She loved the pleasurable bodily sensations, the way her body remembered those sensations; the way she would feel a rush, a hot wave of desire pass through her body, making her weak, as she was just driving the car down the street to the school. She loved the high of it, the exhilaration of it; she loved the joy of her body. For although she was in pain when she was not with Hank, she was in such luxurious rich delight when she was with him that it seemed to make it all worthwhile.

  And then she would have to leave him, and she would be in the apartment alone, or at school, and she would be gripped by fear. She would be afraid that she would never see him again. Or that when she did, he would have changed. For they had reached a point in their relationship where they took each other for granted and talked to each other every day and made casual plans fitted around their own schedules. So there were days when Dale would enter the school in the morning, facing a day of teaching biology and French to adolescents, and she would not be sure whether she would be seeing Hank that night or not—he had mentioned that he might have a conference with parents, or an animal might be sick—and she would feel the day stretch long and drab in front of her because she was not sure she would be seeing him that night. And she had come to hate the days when she did not see him; and she had come to scorn herself for hating those days, for she thought surely each day must be welcomed for itself, days should not be hated simply because one other person did not enter them.

  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 sw
immer 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—gratifications 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.