“There’s nothing wrong with sex,” she said, “not for me.”
“Not me either.”
They were both silent for a moment, remembering. She felt the familiar flood of blood and heat—only a ghost now, faint and barely recognizable.
“It’s something else,” she said.
Because his eyes were glittering as bright as if there were Christmas tree lights behind them, she reached out and touched his cheek, bristly and blue-shadowed. He was sweating heavily, the stubble was slippery with moisture. He smelled sweaty too, heavy and musky.
They made love there on the couch, quick and uncomfortable. Then in bed, comfortable and insatiable. They both overslept and were late for work in the morning.
But the words remained. They hung in the living room air; they hung, muted, over the bed. The words had been heard, had danced through ears and rattled in heads: More than this?
Mary Margaret shook herself back to the present, turned off the TV. To say something, anything, she asked: “Pa, isn’t that a new road sign out front? The curve sign?”
“No,” her father said.
“Looks new to me.”
“No,” her father said. “They put that sign there three, four years ago.”
“You ready for dinner?” her mother said.
That meant the casserole was already on the table.
“Wait a minute, Ma. I’ve got to tell you something, something important. Edward and I are going to get a divorce.”
They stared at her blankly.
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong between us.” (How could she explain when she was so uncertain herself?) “We just thought it would be better this way.” (But maybe it wouldn’t.) “Edward got a big promotion and a transfer to the Houston office. He’ll leave in a couple of weeks, they want him right away. And I’m not going with him.”
Not seeming to hear, her father walked out the front door, slowly, putting his feet down in the manner of very heavy men. He crossed the lawn to check the date stenciled on the sign, then came back to the house. “Seventy-eight.” The climb had left him puffing slightly. “Like I said, 8-22-78, three years ago. Clear as can be.”
The sound of the closing front door, muted by thick weather stripping, set echoes bouncing in Mary Margaret’s head: More than this. There must be more than this.
“Did you listen, Pa? Did you hear what I said?”
“He’s got to do one thing at a time,” her mother said. “You asked him about the sign.”
Always on his side, Mary Margaret thought. You’re alike as twins.
“Edward and I are still friends, but we want a divorce and that’s what we’re going to get.”
“Catholic people don’t get divorced,” her mother said.
Her father said, “The Slob walked out on you.”
I have honored these people, she thought, I have honored them for all my twenty-nine years, and I am not about to stop now.
“His name is Edward, and he didn’t leave me. We agreed to separate, both of us.”
“You want to eat dinner?” her mother said to her father.
They heaved themselves out of their chairs and went to the table.
The words were still echoing. Hers? Or Edward’s? More than this.
Her parents ate steadily, she only pushed the noodles across her plate, separating the bits of tuna, the peas.
“You don’t want to eat?” her mother said. “You got to eat to keep your strength up.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Her father said, “You’re not going to keep that apartment?”
“Just for a couple of weeks,” she said.
“You got to think of where to live.”
Mary Margaret pushed a red fleck of pimiento to the rim of her plate. “Yes.”
Her mother folded her hands. With her heavy sloping shoulders and small head topped by a cone of black hair she was a perfect pyramid. “Her room’s still here.”
“How would it look,” her father said. “Her living here, married and without a husband and divorced.”
“How it looks?” her mother repeated hesitantly.
“Who’d care,” Mary Margaret said. “Who’d know. Who ever comes here?”
Only their blood, their cousins, on special holidays and saint’s days and Communion days, when white-dressed children went from house to house, bringing with them innocence and spiritual grace. And good luck. Her father said he always brought in his longest shots on Communion days.
Now they were telling her she wasn’t welcome back. That her parents’ house was closed.… Except for Wednesday supper and perpetual novena.
I must tell Edward that, she thought, as soon as I get home. He’ll love that and we’ll have a good laugh.
He’d be waiting for her—she was certain. Sex was now a hunger for them, demanding, painful, then satisfied and comfortable. They were so happy together, they were friends. In two weeks they would separate, with a kiss.
Maybe, she thought, that’s all there is.
Her mother was saying with unusual emphasis, “She can come back here, Al. I want her to come back here.” She wiped the perspiration from her fat cheeks with her paper napkin. “I don’t care what you or anybody says.”
Well, Mary Margaret thought wryly, scratch one, but the old mare came through.… And aloud she said, “I didn’t know you thought so much about appearances, Pa.”
“It’s her room.” Her mother was shivering—anger or nervousness—her pudgy shoulders shook and a sharp smell of old woman’s sweat came from her.
“Wait, Ma,” Mary Margaret said, “you didn’t let me finish. I’m changing jobs too and I’m moving. To Oklahoma City.”
Slowly her father got up and took the paperbound Texaco Atlas of the United States from the corner bookshelf. (They’d gotten it years before, when they drove to Florida. It was their first and only vacation, they hated every minute.) He unfolded the largest map and put it on the table.
Mary Margaret pointed. “There. Right there.”
Everything had happened at once. The evening they decided on divorce, the very same evening Edward told her he’d be moving to Houston, they went out to dinner. It was an Italian restaurant—checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles and the heavy greasy pasta they both liked. They finished a bottle of wine and became giggly and secretive, heads together, holding hands and touching knees.
We must look like lovers, she thought, and we are. In a way.
“Look.” Edward was playing with her hand, twirling the silver and amethyst ring he’d given her for Christmas. “Are you really going to stay here? Won’t it be a little rough for you, I mean?”
“I’ve got my parents,” she said.
They both smiled warmly at the joke.
He insisted: “My boss, you know him, Hank Cavendish, he’s being transferred, it’s a big step up for him. He wanted his secretary to go with him, but she won’t leave. I bet anything he’d jump at the chance to hire you if you’d relocate right away.”
“Why not?” she said, giggling, the wine still singing in her ears. “Why not. Where?”
“Oklahoma City.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I do know it’ll be a good move for you. They’re expecting that office to grow pretty fast. Wherever it is.”
She told her parents: “I get a twenty per cent raise, plus medical and dental coverage, plus they are paying my moving expenses.”
They nodded. Figures were something they had no difficulty understanding.
“Will you be coming next Wednesday?” her mother said.
“Next Wednesday. But not the one after that.”
Her mother nodded, the twisted knot of gray and black hair moved up and down slowly.
Don’t you want to ask when I will be back? If I will come back? If I’ll be here at Christmas? If I’ll come back for your funerals? Do you never worry about anything?
“Time to go.” Her father pushed
himself up from the table. The atlas lay open, one page soaking in the vinegar of his salad plate.
Go? Where would they go, who never went anywhere? The novena. The Wednesday perpetual novena.
Her mother smoothed back her hair in the sideboard mirror, her father went to put on his leather shoes.
If I stay any longer, I am going to break every dish on the table, or I am going to throw a chair through that window, or I am going to scream and keep on screaming. I am going to dishonor my father and my mother. If I don’t get out of here.
Her chair, pushed too hard, slid back into the wall. The picture of her mother’s first husband shivered and slipped sidewise.
“I’m not going,” she said. Then louder, for her father who was still in the bedroom: “I’m not going to the novena.”
“You always go,” her mother said.
Her father came to the doorway, one shoe still in his hand.
Four eyes, surprised, accusing, puzzled, shocked.
Don’t look at me. You are my parents but don’t look at me that way. You’ve had all you can have from me. One novena more is too much.
“I’ll go next week,” she said. “For the last time, next week.”
They both nodded to her, pyramids of flesh with tiny heads perched on top, like kindergarten drawings.
She hurried through the living room, snatching her coat and purse as she went. Running with fear from something she didn’t know, something that might not have been there, something that might even have loved her.
She drove off, tires squealing, leaving the thing that had chased her growling emptily at the end of the driveway.
By the time she got to the crowded highway, she felt better, the soft singing of the engine comforted her. She opened the window and familiar exhaust-laden air curled across her face and shoulders.
It was a very warm night, she thought. As her mother had said, she hadn’t really needed to bring her coat.
WIDOW’SWALK
MYRA ROWLAND STOPPED HER bright red jeep at the entrance to the beach club. Over the iron gates decorative bunting hung dusty and limp, shivering uncertainly in the small currents of midday air. It was the first day of the new summer season.
“Morning, Frank,” she called to the uniformed guard. “It’s nice to see you back again.”
“Hot morning, Mrs. Rowland.” He pushed open the gate. “Is that a new jeep?”
“I liked the color.”
“It sure is bright.” He leaned against the car door and nodded to the empty seat beside her. “Mr. Rowland didn’t come with you?”
“We lost him,” she said softly. “This winter. In January.”
He hesitated, slow to understand. Then he pulled his hand away as if the door were burning hot. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
She said, “One learns to live with it. Like any other fact.”
She drove through the gates, thinking: Why did I say anything so silly? Why did I say I had lost Hugh? I haven’t lost him at all. I know exactly where he is and the headstone says HUGH DUDLEY ROWLAND 1905-1984.
The neat narrow blacktopped road stretched ahead of her; she drove precisely down the very middle. Thinking: Hugh and I came here every good sunny day for thirty summers. We were one of the families who bought this land, built the first clubhouse. Not more than a shed in the jack pines. When the 1961 hurricane destroyed it, Hugh said: Good riddance. This time I’ll lend the club money for a proper building.
That building still stood (its loan long repaid), quite small and lost in all the subsequent remodelings and expansions. But there. It was Hugh who had gone.
She had never felt the presence of his ghost, never seen faint images or slight motions in the air. She never felt that he lingered behind, fading slightly perhaps, following her into this summer.
A decisive man, he had left her completely. A quiet man, he had slipped away quietly.
After the funeral, surfeited with kisses and tears, staggering under the burden of organ chords, she’d returned to their house alone. She’d insisted on that. Not the housekeeper, not her son, not the dogs. She closed the door firmly behind her. The metallic click of the latch fell like a marble and rolled through the silent empty rooms. After a pause, leaning against the door, drawing strength from the firm unmoving wood, she climbed the stairs. Deliberately, being careful of her balance, of her breathing, a high-wire walker moving between two points. In the bedroom she sat, spine stretched alertly, hands on knees, palms up, like boats stranded by the tide. As she waited, her eyes moved slowly, meticulously covering every inch of the room. Up and down the walls, applying her surveillance like a methodical painter, slipping beneath the pictures, passing across the surfaces of the furniture. Across the floor, like a careful housekeeper, board by board, diving under rugs to survey them from beneath. And finally reaching the bed, where Hugh had died three days past, where her eyes now traced every flower on its quilted neutral emptiness.
Later, sometime during the night, she stood up, cramped and chill, and walked through the house. She went into every single room, looked into every closet, opening and closing curtains, turning lamps on and off and on again, then returning to change the pattern of light and shadow she had just made. Picking up vases and boxes and ashtrays and figures and paperweights, taking books from their shelves, turning them over once, twice, putting them back. Pressing her palms on the polished surfaces of tables and desks and chairs, then wiping away the sweaty imprints with her scarf or the edge of her skirt. Repeating, over and over.
When the late winter sun rose, yellow and thin, she was dazzled by the radiance, bending her head before its glory, hands over eyes.
In the blazing white sun of July, Myra Rowland drove her jeep along the twin strips of black asphalt that led to the beach. The road was a large semicircle through wind-shaped olives and rhododendrons (with a few late flowers in the deep cool places), through small salt-twisted pin oaks, through leathery rugosa roses covered with flat pink and white flowers. The stretches of shiny-leaved poison ivy were beginning to show blotches of yellow—the gardeners had been spraying weed killer. Nearest the shore, roots firmly planted in the dry thin ground, jack pines crowded the road, the shadows of their grove the blackish green of the ocean bottom.
The road lifted over a low hill. The red jeep popped, like a cork from a bottle, into the glare of the beach.
The ocean, blue in its distance and deep green inshore, was rumpled and creased by wind squalls. A fleet of small boats raced toward a distant orange marker, tacking back and forth, white sails bisecting the ruffled shadows. The beach itself was smooth and curved, backed by tall dunes spotted with tall sparse grasses. At the center was the clubhouse, gleaming with fresh white paint and newly washed windows, American flag and club ensign flying over the roof. On each side of the building, like outstretched wings, were dozens of brilliantly colored beach umbrellas. The breeze, onshore this time of day, was heavy with the sound of people: the hum of voices and the cries of children, high and thin like the calls of distant seabirds.
I do not want to go there, Myra thought, I do not want to go into that jumble of sound and color. I don’t want to enter the giant bubble of their breathing, these summer friends whom I have not seen for ten months.
Then she felt, as she sometimes did, a pressure in the small of her back, pushing her forward. And she heard a laugh—a cackle of profound derision—deep inside her skull.
She shifted the jeep into four-wheel drive, swung hard to the right, and accelerated directly across the dunes, dodging between signs that forbade such passage as ecologically damaging, bouncing at last into the parking lot, into the space neatly marked MRS. ROWLAND SR.(Hugh’s name had vanished even from there, she thought, even that small piece of wood had been corrected to reflect the new fact.)
She climbed out slowly, massaging an arthritic ache in her left hip. There was a tangle of wild beach pea vine caught in the car bumper—she snapped off four small pink flowers and tucked them into the band
of her large pink beach hat. She picked up a canvas bag filled with sun lotions and walked briskly down the sloping flower-lined path to the club.
Harry Marshall was sitting at his favorite table, the one in the far corner of the deck, the one with the best view of the entrance. He’d come early, as he always did, and settled down in the greenish reflected shade of the overhead umbrella. He liked to be the first to greet his friends on the opening day of the summer season.
“Well now,” he said. “Myra’s here.”
“Who?” Bill Landrieux, his brother-in-law and law partner in the days before they both retired, was admiring his tequila sunrise, turning it around slowly. “They weren’t this color last summer,” he said. “They taste the same but they aren’t the same color.”
“Myra’s here,” Harry Marshall repeated.
Slowly, reluctantly, Bill Landrieux put down his glass. “Myra Rowland?”
“She just arrived.”
Bill peered vaguely toward the path through the dunes. “Is that her in the bright pink dress?”
“Contacts not working, Bill?”
“You know I can’t wear contacts with the damn sand.”
“Get prescription sunglasses, you vain old goat.”
“These are prescription. I got to get a new doctor.” He pulled off the glasses and squinted into the glare. “I see better without the damn things. Sure, that’s Myra Rowland. Always wears pink. Hugh isn’t with her.”
“Hugh died last winter. I clipped the obituary and sent it to you.”
“You did? I guess Jane forgot to give it to me. You know, Harry, I think that woman must have Alzheimer’s. She can’t remember anything.”
“Jane always was that way.” Harry waved to Myra Rowland, who had stopped to admire the flowering begonias.
Bill popped back his sunglasses. “The glare gives me a headache without them.”
The combination of heat and alcohol was getting to him, Harry thought. Sweat gleamed through his thin blond hair. “Maybe you should go a little slower on the drinks, Bill. Can’t have you passing out.”
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