My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  “My system got all screwed up when I delivered Cynthia,” Daphne elaborated. “They told me I couldn’t leave the hospital until I had had a bowel movement, so I lied because I wanted to go home. I’ve only had three bowel movements in ten days and I’m in agony. But delivering Cynthia gave me hemorrhoids—”

  “Daphne. Just tell me what you need,” Joe interrupted.

  “—and it hurts so much to go to the bathroom, I don’t want to but I have to.”

  “Daphne,” Joe said. He was clenching the phone against his head so that none of Daphne’s words would escape into the room, into Hudson’s hearing.

  “Could you get me some Preparation H and some laxative suppositories? And bring them home right away?”

  “Yes, good, fine, good-bye,” Joe said.

  When he arrived home with Daphne’s medicine, Joe was furious, and he let Daphne know it. He had never been the sort of man comfortable with buying his wife sanitary napkins, and these items made him almost writhe.

  “You might like to know that you interrupted a conversation with Hudson Jennings!” Joe said through clenched teeth, each word sounding like a curse.

  “Well, Joe, I’m sorry, but I’m in pain,” Daphne said. She grabbed the brown paper sack and hurried into the bathroom.

  Joe left, slamming the door, to go back to the university.

  That night Daphne tried to talk with him about it all. In spite of the heat, she had put on the red velvet robe because it made her look lovely, and she drank a vodka tonic even though she knew some of the alcohol would get into her baby’s system when she nursed her, and she made an effort to be loving and attentive to Joe. Earlier in the day she had talked to several other new mothers from the Lamaze class about Joe’s strange new coldness, and they said that this often happened with men. The men were jealous of the new babies and of the affection their wives lavished on the babies, and the men grew surly in reaction.

  “Right when you don’t have the energy to do it is the time you have to vamp your husband, or your marriage goes down the drain,” one of the new mothers said.

  So Daphne tried that night, but Joe was oddly unvampable. He was irritable from the heat, and his writing was not going well, and he found it frustrating, he said, to have Daphne cuddling and kissing him when they couldn’t have intercourse for five more weeks.

  “We could do other things,” Daphne said. Joe looked at her, uncomprehending.

  Daphne was so tired, so tired from giving birth and staying up most of the night the past ten days with the new baby and from carrying the child, the weight, the lovely weight, causing her arms and shoulders to ache. She was so tired that the last thing in the world she wanted was to make love to her husband with her mouth, but she slid down to the floor, leaned against his legs, and began to unzip his pants.

  “Daphne, for God’s sake, stop it!” Joe yelled, and jumped up off the sofa.

  “Joe,” Daphne said. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re just being … repulsive,” Joe said.

  “I am? How? It’s not like we’ve never done this before.”

  “That was different. We were being lovers. Now it’s like … like you’re doing me a favor. Taking care of me.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Daphne asked. “We all need to be taken care of sometimes, in all sorts of ways.”

  “Daphne, just don’t push it,” Joe said, sighing. He sank down into an armchair and leaned forward, hiding his face in his hands. His voice came out muffled. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not doing this fatherhood business very well. I don’t know. I just don’t feel comfortable with it. My nerves are all shot to hell … I don’t know when Cynthia’s going to start screaming. It’s like living in a tornado zone.”

  Daphne went over to kneel next to Joe. She put her head on his knee and wrapped her arms around his legs. He leaned back stiffly in the chair, not touching her. “We’ll go away,” she said. “We’ll get a babysitter and go to a motel for a night. Just the two of us.” It was not what she wanted to do at all.

  “Daphne,” Joe said, “give it a rest. I love you. You know I love you. We’re just in … a kind of phase right now. I mean, God, how can I say this without hurting you? I know it’s going to change, Daphne, but right now you just don’t … excite me sexually.”

  Daphne sat very still for a moment, frozen into that moment. The irony: their physical closeness now, as she knelt with her arms around her husband’s legs and her head on his knees, and yet they were so very far apart. (If only he would put his hand on her head or shoulder as a sign of affection, but he didn’t, as if afraid she would misinterpret.) Earlier in their marriage she would have jerked herself away from him, flung herself away from him, offended, would have shouted something clever and cutting at him, and gone into her bedroom, or the kitchen, and he would have followed, and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him and appeased her. Earlier in their marriage they had been more passionate in their fights and more eager to make up quickly.

  Now she could not fling herself away in one great dramatic scene. He would think she was being shrewish. He would not hold, appease her, he was not even now putting his hand on her arm. She was so tired with the baby, and he was so tired with his work; they did not have the energy for the scenes and reconciliations that they used to.

  And she knew that Joe was right: this was only a phase in their marriage. If love was like an exotic country—a tropical island paradise, Fiji, Tahiti—then marriage was like the whole wide world, with its oceans of turbulent passion and its lakes of calm and its busy cities and, too, its wasteland stretches of arid, vast, monotonous desert. In the middle of a desert it was difficult to believe that one could ever come to the margin, see mountains or freshwater streams again. One kept on moving on faith, one had to, in order to get through and out.

  So. Here they were, suddenly, when she least expected it, in the desert of their marriage. But the belief that they loved each other—the institution of marriage itself—was like a vehicle they were riding in together (trapped in together, if one wanted to be grim about it) that would carry them along until they reached the end of the desert and a change in the climate of their lives.

  How sensible she was, not a hysterical female at all, pretty good for a woman battling with postpartum depression, Daphne thought. Very gently she extricated herself from her embrace around her husband’s legs. Very calmly she said, “I think I’ll take a bath now. Cynthia shouldn’t wake.” Very rationally she walked across the living room and down the hall to the bath.

  The hot steamy water relaxed and refreshed her. Just lying down for a few minutes relaxed her. She almost fell asleep in the tub. When she rose and was toweling off, she looked at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t done this—looked at herself, full length, naked—since the birth of her baby.

  But now she stood naked, studying herself critically, ready to drip. There she was. All of her. So much of her. Dripping. What she noticed first of all, as who could not, was her stomach. Laura’s famous European salve had not worked, and now silver minnowy stretch marks swam across the gleaming bowl of her stomach, while, below, her pubic hair curled like seaweed. Actually, her stomach looked more like a giant plastic baggie full of fish than a bowl—the skin was loose and her intestines sagged untidily inside. If she moved a little, took a few dance steps—wow, what a dazzling array of directions her body went into, breasts jouncing this way, stomach jiggling that. Even her thighs were still swollen—even there, at the top of her thighs, between her legs, the fishy stretch marks swam.

  And her breasts. Well, men were supposed to like big breasts, weren’t they? Her breasts were huge, and in their fullness both beautiful and alarming, as if they had become articles of their own, great bulging attachments with the veins as bright as if they had been drawn on the outside of her skin with a blue felt pen and nipples straight out of National Geographic.

  There were brown circles under her eyes. Well, of course there were. She hadn’t slept for
more than three hours straight through in ten days. Above her mouth was a little brown mustache of pigment, which the doctor said often came with pregnancy and birth and would eventually go away. A similar brown blotch had appeared just between her two eyebrows, giving her a frowning, idiotic look.

  What a treat she was to look at. She didn’t hate her body—she was proud of it, look what it had just done! If only Laura were here to share the scrutiny, how they would laugh and shriek with pleasure, alarm, and glee at what Daphne had become. Perhaps if she joked about it with Joe? Perhaps he would join with her in a good laugh? Marriage was not only about sex.

  Daphne put on her nightgown and brushed her hair. Disguised in flowing cotton, she looked pretty. She would go be friends with Joe.

  When she got to the living room, she found that Cynthia had awakened during her bath, and Joe was holding her now, rocking her. She had to take the baby from him and nurse her. This was the way it was to be, then—why had she not known it, everyone had told her in advance, but she had not really understood: having a baby in the house, in one’s life, really altered the marriage, and everything within it.

  Cynthia was beautiful, but she was sickly. In the early months she had colic, that mysterious ailment that made her cry for three hours every night while Daphne rocked and walked the floor with the baby in her arms, sometimes crying herself from frustration at her inability to make her infant happy. There was then a period of peace for about three months, and then in the winter Cynthia began to get earaches and ear infections along with colds that caused her little pink nose to run constantly with the most unattractive green mucus.

  It was in late August, when Cynthia was not quite three months old and still crying every evening with colic, then waking in the middle of the night for a feeding, that Daphne had a phone call from Laura at five o’clock in the morning. Daphne had put Cynthia back to bed only an hour before. Drugged with sleep, she grabbed up the receiver to stop the ringing, but for a moment was too exhausted to do more. Next to her, also tired, Joe muttered, “Jesus Christ. Who is calling at this hour?”

  “Daphne,” Laura said. The air around her words crackled and hummed with distance. “Daphne, are you there?”

  “Laura? Are you all right?”

  “We are coming home today. You must meet me at the airport with a car. Can you do that?”

  Through her weariness, joy surged. “Oh, Laura, of course we’ll meet you,” Daphne said. “How are things?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you,” Laura said.

  Logan Airport in Boston was two and a half hours away. Daphne insisted that Joe drive. “Laura is your friend too,” she said.

  “And so is Otto,” Joe countered.

  “But Otto may be with Laura, for all we know. She said ‘we.’ ”

  “ ‘We’ may mean just Laura and Hanno. And I have work to do.”

  “You always have work to do. Now, look, I can’t drive through Boston with Cynthia in my arms. You don’t want to stay home and baby-sit Cynthia. And I want Laura to see Cynthia right away, I can’t wait to show her to her. Besides, Laura will be hurt if you don’t come. And if Otto’s there, and everything’s fine between them, all the better.”

  But at the airport it was not Otto who climbed down the ramp from the airplane with Laura and Hanno, but old Mrs. Kraft. Laura looked stunningly beautiful. She had gotten very thin and had had her hair cut like a boy’s, short and shaggy, with long bangs that fell down into her eyes. She wore a gray jumpsuit and high gray boots and lots of silver jewelry, and Daphne, in her navy-blue corduroy jumper and white blouse, both of which had been chosen because they unbuttoned at the bodice so she could nurse, felt dumpy and unsophisticated in comparison. Hanno, blond and rosy-cheeked, was wearing a sailor boy’s outfit with a wide white collar and a white hat with a blue ribbon. When he saw Daphne, he grinned shyly, looking up under the brim of the hat with great cornflower-blue eyes.

  Daphne put Cynthia in Joe’s arms and grabbed Laura and both women hugged and hugged each other, laughing and crying at once. Laura felt as tiny and fragile as a bird in Daphne’s arms, and when Daphne pulled back, she saw the dark circles under her friend’s eyes, the deep sadness there.

  “Daphne, Joe,” Laura said. “I want you to meet my mother-in-law, Mrs. Kraft. She is coming to stay with us for a while.” Laura shot Daphne a look that said quite clearly: Don’t say a thing. Don’t ask.

  So it wasn’t until much later, when both Hanno and old Mrs. Kraft were tucked away in bed, that Daphne learned what was going on in her friend’s life. She and Joe had brought champagne to celebrate Laura’s return, and Daphne had spent the morning airing out Laura’s house and stocking the refrigerator with milk and other necessities, so finally the three friends sat in the living room with champagne and cheese and crackers and baby Cynthia snoozing on a blanket on the carpeted floor near them.

  “Welcome home,” Daphne said, toasting her friend.

  “Yes. Welcome back,” Joe said.

  They all drank, then Laura said, “Well, here it is. Otto is wanting a divorce. He is coming back to teach, he will be here in a few days, but he is bringing Sonya with him. He has it all planned. By mail he has already rented an apartment for the two of them. By mail and phone he has already contacted a lawyer.”

  “Oh, Laura, no,” Daphne said.

  Laura reached into her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes—a new habit for her. She crossed her long sleek legs, tossed her head, lit up. “Mrs. Kraft is unhappy about this. An affair she would not mind, but divorce for her son is out of the question. She is on my side. She knows I have done nothing wrong. There is a chance, she thinks, that together she and I and little Hanno and perhaps the college community can exert enough influence to change Otto’s mind.”

  “What do you think?” Joe asked.

  “I think she is too optimistic!” Laura said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “Oh, well!” Daphne said, standing up and pacing the room in her agitation. “Well, you shouldn’t take him back anyway, even if he would come. Laura, where’s your pride? He’s going to bring that Sonya person back here to live with him? How does he think poor little Hanno will feel? Look, Laura, Otto’s being an incredible shit about all this.”

  “You never did like him,” Laura said.

  Daphne stopped. “No. I didn’t. I admit that.” She paced again, restless with energy, anger, plans. “I’ve always thought he wasn’t good enough for you. I’m very sorry you are being hurt and that it’s all happening this way, but maybe it’s all for the best. Now you can start a new life. Why, you can do anything, Laura! You could go back to school, you could get a degree, you could get a job, you—”

  “Oh, Daphne, don’t you know me any better than that?” Laura said, waving her cigarette around. “Don’t you know I’m irretrievably domestic? I am just a hausfrau.” Raising a hand to forestall Daphne’s objection, she went on. “This is not an insult! This is what I want to be! I like being a housewife, I like being in a home, that is what I want my life to be about, making a home cozy. Don’t look so scornful. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there, Joe?”

  Joe, caught between the two passionate women, shook his head morosely, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. “No, no, of course not,” he said.

  “Well, then, you will find someone else,” Daphne said. “Laura, you’re a beautiful woman, you’re bound to have lots of men fall in love with you.”

  “Oh, Daphne, you are so kind in your thoughts of me,” Laura said. “If the father of my child does not love me, how am I to believe another man will?” She leaned forward to stub out her cigarette, and when she sat up again, her face was silver with tears.

  “Oh, Laura, Laura,” Daphne said, going to her. She could not bear this, to see her friend in pain. She sank onto the sofa and wrapped her arms around Laura and hugged her. “It will be all right. I promise you.” This made Laura sob harder.

  “I have only wanted in my life a husba
nd, house, and children,” Laura said, pulling away, lighting another cigarette. “I have not wanted jewels or fame or excitement. I have only wanted what is usual. And I have been very good—you see this house, you have eaten my food! You see my child, he is a beautiful, healthy, happy child! I am a very nice woman! How can Otto leave me?”

  “He’s a fool, Laura, he’s just a fool,” Daphne said, crying.

  “You’re a man!” Laura said, crying, leaning toward Joe. “You tell me. What do men want? What have I not given Otto? What do you see are my failings?”

  Joe looked miserable enough to cry himself. He was not used to talking about such intimate things. He paused, reflecting, and Daphne would have bet money that at that moment he was frantically searching his mind for some appropriate quote from Shakespeare, Donne, Byron. Something about love and loss. “Love is for man a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence”? No, that wouldn’t do.

  “Otto and I are colleagues, but we have never confided in each other,” Joe said at last. “I couldn’t speak for him.”

  Daphne glared at Joe. What a namby-pamby answer, what a coldhearted answer!

  “You think it’s sex, don’t you?” Laura said to Joe. “Oh, I know you think that, that’s how men think. Well, I wish you could know how I am in bed. I am wonderful in bed. I am passionate and innovative and—”

  “Laura,” Daphne interrupted. Joe was turning beet-red at this talk and she didn’t want her husband to think her best friend was crude. “Laura, stop. It’s not you. You are wonderful in every way. We know that. It’s Otto. There is some sickness in him that is making him act this way. Now, you can’t change him. You just can’t change things. You have to move forward. Make plans. Look into the future.”

  In Daphne’s mind it was all so clear. She could have made a chart, a list, for Laura to follow, step by step, day by day, that would take her out of this slough of misery and into the bright clear light of a free life. But Laura kept wallowing in her despair. She kept not wanting to believe that Otto would really leave her. She kept trying to think of things that would make him stay. Daphne talked about the future; Laura responded by describing an episode from the past, when Otto loved her. Joe sat watching, saying little, turning gray.