Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

  I breaststroked out, pushing water away, then dove to the bottom and secured my hand around the submerged counselor’s chin. I ignored my need for air. Her golden hair floated downward as I pulled her up to the surface and quietly toward shore.

  Second whistle. Three more girls dove into the water. I sat cross-legged, my skin red and dripping. Someone several yards out began to thrash. We heard gulping sounds, gasps. One of the counselors emerged with an arm around Jennie, the shy girl in our class, and carried her in.

  The rest of us knelt a small distance away while Jennie shook in the sand. The head counselor told her that she was okay, that she had hyperventilated from nerves. “We’ll go on from here, girls,” she called back to us. “We’ve got a schedule to keep. Who’s up next? Let’s go!” She stood and clapped her hands. We ran to our places.

  Whistle. I knew I was swimming. The woman ahead of me was flailing her arms, kicking. I dove under and grabbed her legs. One hand over the other I climbed her body, planting hand on knee, hip, armpit, pulling her back against my chest until her whole side pressed against mine. She struggled to break free. I tightened my arms in a vice around her and held her mercilessly until my knees scraped sand. We stood up panting. I felt my strength rise up.

  “Do you want your lunch now, Liz?”

  The dietician standing at the doorway held her arm out waiting to pass me a tray.

  In the evening a man came in with the X-ray machine and heaved it toward Celine’s door. The sound of the electrocardiograph raced through the wall that divided our two rooms. A woman’s voice kept repeating the same words from a loudspeaker in the hallway. People crowded into the anteroom. I switched on the TV. Rose came and stood by my curtain. Celine’s heart had swollen to the size of a football, Rose would later say. When Roberts stepped out of Celine’s room, his shoulders folded in on themselves. Doctors I didn’t recognize walked in slow circles. Later, someone came and wheeled a sheet-covered body away.

  Over the weeks that followed, I stood at the door of my room and counted the boxes of needles and towels stacked against the far wall or spun the TV stations out of habit. I knitted a scarf for my brother and rolled the last paper days of the calendar into weightless balls.

  Shoreline

  In the morning I threw Jim’s pillow out the window. It flies like a white bird plummeting. The phone rings and rings, that’s all I can remember. Oh, yes. The clothes. Before I left, I kicked the bedroom closet door and took my clothes.

  I met my husband on a summer evening five years ago at a post-graduation party in Weston, Massachusetts. It was one of those parties you hear about from a friend who heard about it from another friend of another friend. I didn’t know the people who owned the big house and the bigger backyard where the party took place, in the neighborhood where the streets flowed up and down like ocean swells, and the trees along the streets were so old and mature they dwarfed the estate-sized houses beneath them. I drove to the party alone. I had my liberal arts degree rolled up in its cardboard tube in the car trunk, but I was one of those people who didn’t know what they wanted to do after college except get a job, make money, fall in love.

  So I got the job at a realty office, which promised big money if I worked hard enough. I got the one bedroom apartment in Brookline and, as for love, well, the party took place on a flagstone terrace behind the house. Bug repellant candles surrounded the pool and had been placed strategically in the darkest corners of the backyard. A tall, slender man with bright dark eyes came up to me. He had a job, too, in engineering. What was I planning to do with my life? he asked me.

  “I haven’t planned that far in advance.”

  “I want to make a lot of money,” he said. “Buy a big house, furnish it with English and French provincial furniture, and the best stereo equipment available. The best of everything,” he assured me. “Later on, have three kids.”

  “Three?”

  “Absolutely. Three.”

  “You’re very sure about everything,” I said. “I don’t know how many I want. I don’t know if I want any at all.”

  “You will,’ he said. “Everyone wants kids.”

  “No,” I said. “No, they don’t.”

  Sometime after midnight, he and I left the party and walked under those enormous trees. I wore a dress with spaghetti straps that slipped off my shoulder with every laughing breath. I had my black hair tied back in a clip. The next night he picked me up at my apartment and took me to dinner in the Italian North End. I ate in a restaurant with whitewashed plaster walls that made my dark hair look darker, my tanned skin tinted rose like the wine that I drank. On the way home, he undressed me in the bucket seat. I sank into the softest leather.

  At the wedding, seven months later, I wore a taffeta dress, strapless this time. Two hundred people came to the Cape Cod estate that had been restored for public celebrations. Jim’s family paid for half. After the wedding, a limo took us to the airport and we got our connecting flight to Hawaii. It seemed everything in Hawaii smelled sweet. Candle-white flowers bloomed everywhere. I mean everywhere.

  I moved right in to this rental cottage by the sea; have run every morning since.

  Soon after, Jim started an engineering company and I began selling houses in the suburbs of Boston. I worked late. He worked later. We bought a contractor’s spec house. Everything had a five-year warranty sticker: the washing machine, the dryer, the fridge, the kitchen cupboards guaranteed for life. Jim wired up an intercom and hi-fi system. I ordered furniture from catalogues. Every night we saw each other in the king-sized bed. Pillows and quilts smothered us. I wore long, diaphanous things. We swam across cotton flowered sheets.

  I do my warm up stretching first, surveying the two tiny rooms inside, hands splayed like starfish, bare toes curled on the warped wooden floor. My bras hang on the doorknobs; my camisoles cling to the kitchen cupboard handles. I twist my twenty-six-year-old body up and down, back and around, then push open the screen door and cross the dunes to the sandy beach below.

  Sometime during the second year of our marriage, in the fall, Jim opened another division and got home later and later until I didn’t know when he got into bed. I had already fallen asleep under the spell of our sweet smelling quilt, late night TV on, talking to me. The refrigerator stayed empty except for leftover Chinese food in cartons I took home after work. I was too tired to cook. I had a clientele following by then, couples whose worries grew tenfold times ten.

  “We got divorced after we built the dream house,” one woman with two children confided to me. “After twenty-five years.”

  I had run an ad for a rental house. The woman met me outside the front door. She was a small, grey-skinned woman who looked older than her age, bitten too many times, it seemed, by loneliness.

  “See,” she went on to explain in the eat-in kitchen I showed her, a center hall colonial with four bedrooms, three baths. “My ex and I spent so much time on the house. It took three years to build. We were trying to build a dream that didn’t exist between us. Once the house was finished, there was nothing left.”

  I thought the story unusual until I heard another one dangerously like it a few weeks later. This time my confessor had blond hair, looked my age, and talked out the window as I drove slowly around curving streets.

  “We renovated the entire house,” she told me. “Attic to basement, back porch to master bedroom suite—oh look at that,” she said, pointing to a brick house similar to the one she was leaving.

  “That’ll make a good price comparison,” I said. “We’ll look at it the next time.”

  “Well, anyway,” she said. “As soon as the last nail had been driven into the molding, he left me for another woman. I had absolutely no idea.”

  I shook my head. “Nightmare.”

  Later that day she sat at my desk, legs crossed.

  “Don’t ever finish building your dream house,” she said,
barely reading the listing agreement. “Look what happened to me.”

  “Would you like to study the terms and call me back tomorrow night?”

  “No. I’m ready to sign,” she said, scribbling her name away.

  It is cool these September mornings. Except for an elderly man and his dog, I am the only one out. The first day I ran on the beach I worried about the dog, a thick-necked German shepherd standing in my path. But the dog had tired of the chase and stood by his master’s side, nonplussed. The man lifted his head as I passed, said “morning,” and stooped lower to search for objects that others had left behind or forgotten. I huffed “lovely out,” and headed for the rocky cliff at the far end.

  In the spring of the third year of my married life, Jim suggested we take a day off and go somewhere.

  “Yes, let’s,” I said, passing him in the kitchen door on the way to a brokers’ opening.

  The next day he made club sandwiches and wrapped them twice to keep them fresh. He packed six cans of beer, toothpicks, silver forks and knives, and lemon juice to clean our sticky hands. He brought a transistor TV to watch his game. “Baseball is about life. It’s full of nuance and gesture,” he told me. “You should try to appreciate it, Laura.”

  But I hated sports and didn’t even try.

  Funny how I run every day now.

  Jim drove twenty miles north of Boston to a seaside resort. We stopped at a park near the water. He watched TV. I looked at seagulls picking through trash.

  “Jim, I’d like to walk around.”

  “Sure, after this inning.”

  “I thought we were spending the day together?”

  “We are. Shh, oh my sweet Moses, he did it!”

  “How much longer?” I started to gather our things. Anyway, the late April sky had clouded over and I could smell the ionized air. Two seagulls circled above.

  “It might rain,” I said.

  “It won’t rain.” He snapped off the TV and stood up. “See? Game’s over. Ready?”

  We walked in and out of gift shops. We nodded our way through several art galleries, looked at etchings marked down half price, passed a caricature painter on the sidewalk. At the end of the street, I spotted a tiny shop called “Three Stars” hidden in an alleyway. The crescent shaped sign shifted like a weathervane in the light breeze.

  “How quaint,” I said, pointing to the sign. I hurried toward it.

  The bookshop smelled of fresh pine. I didn’t see any cardboard witches on display. A plump woman draped in an afghan sat behind the counter, reading. Her light hair had been smoothed into a bun, smooth as her skin.

  “Can I help you with something?” she asked, unwrapping herself.

  Jim made a face and went over to the Philosophy section.

  “Yes, what are those?” I pointed to the glass case next to the register.

  “Which one? The amethyst? The citrine?”

  “Come on, Laura,” Jim whispered into my neck. “Let’s go.”

  “The purple one,” I said. I bent down for a closer look.

  The woman opened the glass case with a key and pulled out a purple rock the size of my fist.

  “Amethyst. You have nice taste.” She placed the rock in my hand.

  “Come on,” he whispered again and went over to the door. He stood with his hand on the knob. Disgust made the light in his dark eyes glitter then recede. I turned away.

  “What music is playing?” I asked the woman and handed her back the rock. The harmonies filled my head like incense.

  “Music of the seventh plane. We sell the tapes. They’re very popular.”

  The door banged shut and Jim was gone. In his absence I walked over to the section on “ROCKS” and pulled out a book on precious stones. I read about diamonds and citrines. Each stone had its own temperament, color and hue. I bought the book, thanked the woman for her help, and left.

  I stood on the curb and looked around for Jim. At the opposite end of the street I watched a man and woman stop in front of a bakery shop, then go inside. It had grown cool and grey. A paper bag flew against my legs. I hugged my arms. Still, no Jim. I headed back to the car.

  On the main avenue, others hurried past me. People whispered as if the approaching storm might hear them and follow them home. I heard a child shriek.

  The car was just as we had left it, empty and clean except for the picnic basket. Jim had the keys. All around me car doors slammed, muffled, wind-rushed sounds. I held my breath against the surrounding exhaust.

  “Laura!” Jim yelled fifteen yards off. He came toward me waving a small box in the air. “You’ve got to try this cake.” He opened the box and showed me a cleanly frosted white cake.

  “Would you open the door?” I said. “It’s cold and you have the keys.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Where were you? Where did you go?”

  “You left,” he said. “I went to the bakery, then I went back to the store but you weren’t there. What’s the big deal?”

  A fat raindrop hit the frosting on his cake.

  “I’m cold. Would you open the car, please?”

  “You didn’t wait long,” he said. He tossed the box at me so that I barely caught it. “That woman looked like a witch,” he added. “I see you bought something from her.”

  I got in. “It’s just a book. She was very nice.”

  “Scammers always are,” he said too quickly. “That’s how they draw you in. Then they take your money. Try the cake.”

  When we turned onto the highway, raindrops splattered across the windshield. I bit into the cake and thought: so this is love.

  “What do you see in that New Age stuff?” he began again. “It’s for loony people. It’s voodoo. You should know that. If you’re looking for answers, why don’t you go to church like normal people do? You’re an intelligent woman. I’ll go with you if you want.”

  “Turn the headlights on,” I said. “Besides, you don’t want to know.”

  “What are you, an old wise woman?” he asked, accelerating. “A Sage-ess?”

  “Miserable,” I said for the very first time.

  When we got home, he watched the sports roundup. I went upstairs and hid the book in my sweater drawer. A steady rain was no time to drive people around, so I called the office for messages.

  Every day the sweat breaks into a misty web across my breasts. Every day I cross this space, cross this sand, this problem between Jim and me. But the problem shifts without sound underneath, eludes me like the driftwood I see slowly twisting its way along the shoreline.

  During the winter of the fourth year of my marriage, my old college friend, David, invited us over to meet his new wife. He met Lydia in his research lab. They both worked together on the mutation of cells. The wedding had been small; things happened too quickly to plan something big, Dave told me over the phone. “Four ecstatic months,” he explained. “Wait until you meet Lydia.”

  “Well, well,” I laughed. “Glad to hear you’re in love.”

  The dinner party was in February, a night so cold the stars shriveled up like spiders in the sky. Thin ice caused me to slip on the steps to David’s house. I grabbed the railing just in time. Jim had already gone ahead to ring the bell.

  “Hello strangers!” David said when he opened the door.

  Lydia had delicate wrists and arms. She held out her hand and looked into my eyes when she said hello. I shook hands with Raymond and met Raymond’s date, a vogue-simulation of a woman named Suzanne. I disliked her from the start.

  Suzanne had legs longer than a back door shadow, blond white hair, a leather skirt that pinched her hips and waist. She wore pinecone earrings. Raymond, on the other hand, wore a flannel shirt torn in the shoulder seam. I had a feeling he would look good in anything. Jim wore a dark suit and tie, impeccably tailored. As for me, I wore a simpl
e, red silk dress.

  David showed us into the living room where chemistry books filled every bookcase. My realtor’s eye instinctively rearranged the cluttered room. The breakfront should have been up against another wall. The wing chair and love seat needed recovering.

  Jim strode over to an old-fashioned record player. “You ought to get yourself one with a laser instead of a needle, Dave,” he said. “They work great.”

  “Love to,” David answered. “With the few extra bucks I don’t have. How about a drink everyone?”

  Lydia came around with the cheese tray. Her earrings glistened when she moved. David bent over and kissed the back of her neck.

  “Bravo! Bravo!” Suzanne clapped in my ear.

  Bravo what? I turned away from her and looked over at Raymond sitting by himself on the love seat.

  He smiled. I smiled back. In the middle of the room Jim busily unscrewed the champagne cork. “Cheers!” he cried when it popped.

  “Ray’s looking for a house,” David said, handing me a glass. “Did he already mention it?”

  “Not yet,” Raymond said, coming over.

  “Good. You can talk about it over dinner. Everyone!” David announced. “Take your seats! Couples split up. I want you all to get acquainted.”

  I walked with Raymond into the dining room.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “A wife.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Anything’s possible.” Suzanne said. She readjusted her skirt and sat down next to Jim.