by Caryl Rivers
The enthusiasm drained from his face. She saw annoyance flicker. He erased it, with an effort. That was new.
“I know all about things that don’t work out, Mare.” It was his nickname for her. She said it was silly for anyone with a short name like Mary to have it shortened, but he said everyone was entitled to a nickname. “I said it wasn’t a hundred percent. It looks good, that’s all I said. Listen to me, Mare.”
She knew their old roles. He, the balloon, floating off into some blue ether where everything would be wonderful, she the ballast, straining against the fantasies. Too many battles had unsettled her. She pounced at shadows. She would have to draw back, trust him.
“I’m sorry, Harry. That was a dumb thing to say. It sounds good; it really does.”
“You were always doing that, you know. Not that I blame you. But it’s not like it was. I’m not like I was.”
There was something new that had crept into his voice during the past five months. She had never known strength had a sound. It came and went, and their future hung on it.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
They stood facing each other on the steps.
“Well,” he said, “I’d better go.”
He reached out to touch her shoulder, and the touch traveled through her. In the old days, she might have reached out and touched his shoulder; but she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, chastely, keeping her lips close together so the scent of the Scotch would not drift out. She smiled at him, hoping he would read regret in her smile.
He nodded. There was no trace of anger.
“Good night, Mare.”
She walked into the house and saw her mother, a woman with a round face and curly brown hair, a woman strikingly unlike her daughter. It was said around town that the widow Anderson was quite a handsome woman. In looks, Mary was her father’s daughter.
“Hard day, dear?”
“Not too bad. Long.”
“He’s working awfully hard, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is.”
“He told me he hasn’t had a drink in five months. I believe him.”
“So do I. It takes guts to cut it off the way he did. I never thought he could do it.”
Her mother sighed. “He’s complaining about his parents. But I don’t want to mix in. This is between the two of you.”
“Oh, God, his parents. They circle and peck, peck, peck. They drive him crazy.”
“He wants to move back in.”
“I know. But we agreed on a year. We’d better wait. I think I’m the problem now. I keep doing the things I used to do. Jumping on him.”
“It’s only natural. The laundry thing seems good. But the coaching job was a sure thing too, remember? So was the sales job. They were only sure things in his head.”
“No, this is different. I get on him, his parents get on him. I just have to stop.”
“You’ve been very patient, dear. You put up with a lot.”
“Mom, you don’t have to take my side all the time. I appreciate it, I really do, but I have to make some changes too. It can’t all be him.”
“Hi, Mommy. Can I have a glass of water?”
Mary turned around. Her daughter, her brown hair tumbling down into her eyes, the bottom half of her Doctor Dentons dangling precariously, stood in the hallway.
“Young lady, what are you doing up? It’s late.”
“The elephant is in my room again.”
“He is? Well, we’ll just have to tell that naughty old elephant to go away and let you sleep.”
“He wants to sleep in my bed. He said so.”
“Do you want him to”
“No. It’s my bed.”
“Shall I tell him that?”
“Yes, Mommy.”
She picked the little girl up and carried her back to the bedroom. “Now, elephant,” she said to the air, “you go home to your own bed, and let Karen sleep. No, no back talk. You go right home. That’s a good elephant.”
“He went home.”
“Of course he did. Mommy is very good with elephants.”
The little girl smiled and closed her eyes. Mary watched her, marveling at the sweet curve of her cheek against the pillow. We did one thing right, Harry. It’s a good start. She sat and watched her daughter sleep, as always awed by the tininess, the perfection of her. “Nobody will tell you what to do or be,” she said. “You can be anything you want. I promise you that.” Then she kissed the child and went back into the living room. Her mother was sitting on the couch reading a book, and Mary picked up a copy of Newsweek. But she found herself watching her mother instead. She remembered the sound of the voices drifting up the stairs, many years ago.
“All I’m asking is for us to be alone for a weekend. A lousy weekend. I’m tired of locking doors and being so damn quiet.”
“Don’t you raise your voice. She’ll hear you.”
“Let her hear me. You hover over her like she was some kind of invalid. Let the kid out of your sight, for Chrissake.”
“Don’t raise your voice.”
Her mother looked up and saw Mary watching her.
“Mom, what was the name of that salesman? The one who used to be around?”
“Fred? Fred Indressano?”
“Why didn’t you ever marry him?”
“You needed me. I had to be mother and father to you, after Bill died.”
“Did you love him?”
Her mother looked quizzical, as if she were trying to remember something vague and far away.
“I thought I did, I guess. But it wouldn’t have been good for you. You didn’t like him.”
“I would have gotten used to him. You know how kids are.”
“Well, maybe. If there had been a man who would have been good for you…” She shrugged and let the sentence drift off.
“But what about you?”
“I have a lovely daughter. I’m very proud of her.”
Mary smiled. “You always were my best cheerleader.”
“It’s what women are for, Mary,” she said. “Taking care of things.”
“Oh, Mom, you sound like the Ladies’ Home Journal.”
“It’s true, Mary. We make it possible for the world to go on. Men could never do the things they do without us.”
“But it’s you who really keeps the store going. Your partner Lloyd’s OK, but you’re the one who really has the head for business.”
“I didn’t have a choice, Mary. If your father had been alive, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“But you’re good at it. Why should women stand aside and let men do stuff they’re good at?”
Her mother smiled, tolerantly. They had been through this before. “You’re so much like your father. He was always impatient, wanting to get things done. You’ve turned into such a lovely young woman. He’d be so proud of you.”
“I hope so.”
Her mother laughed, remembered. “You were such a gawky teenager. You tripped over your own feet.”
“You thought I’d never get a date.”
“Oh no, I knew somebody would see how special you are.” Mary leaned back in her chair. “Am I special? I wonder. Am I good?”
“Mary, look at all you’ve accomplished. How can you say that?”
“Oh, I’m good here, in Belvedere. But out there, in the big world, would I be good enough?”
Mary saw the look of alarm in her mother’s eyes, the same one she used to see when she climbed to the top of the tallest tree in the yard.
“You won that award last year, from the press association, from the whole state.”
“But we weren’t competing with the Washington papers. The Post or the Star.”
“You’ve done so much. More than any girl in your class. Why do you want more?”
“I don’t know. I just do. I really feel, in here”— she put her hand on her heart —“that I’m really, really good. As good as any of them.”
Her mother looked down and pursed her lips. “There are times, my dear, that I wish you weren’t so smart. It’s hard for a smart woman to be happy.”
“Oh, Mom, that’s garbage. That’s just garbage. Where do you get this stuff?”
“I have lived a few years, young lady. You are book smart, but I have been around. Believe me, I know. Men can’t take it when a woman is smarter than they are.”
“Tough shit. They’re going to have to learn.”
“Mary!”
“Sorry, Mom. My language is getting awful. Hanging around the city room too much.”
Upstairs, in her bedroom, the one she had shared with Harry until eight months ago, Mary sat down wearily on the edge of the bed. The Ghost of Harry Past greeted her, staring out from the gold-framed picture on the dresser. He cocked his head at her and grinned. I’m something aren’t I? I’ve got the whole world by the balls, and this is how it’s going to be forever and ever.
Unexpectedly, Jay materialized in her mind, standing in the parking lot with his head thrown back, laughing. She was aware of the exact locus of organs buried inside her. “The pounding of my ovaries,” some French woman writer had called it — she read that in Time. That was biologically inexact, ovaries did not throb like kettledrums. She thought about sitting next to him as he drove, his long, slender hands on the wheel. She wondered what he would have done if she had leaned over and kissed his mouth, his warm, lovely mouth. He probably would have been so astonished he’d have run right off the road and into a tree, and they’d both have been in traction for months.
What did men like, anyhow? She had no idea. The only clues she had were the movies, and she’d tried being movie stars when she was in high school. Once, she pinned up her hair in a chignon and practiced being Grace Kelly. Grace liked ball gowns, so she wrapped the bedspread around her breasts, and she sucked in her lips in icy hauteur — which concealed, of course, a flaming passion. She stared at herself. With her lips sucked in, she looked like a flounder, not an ice princess. The bedspread was not exactly a ball gown. Pierre Balmain did not work in flowered chintz.
Marilyn Monroe was even harder. She put on a peasant blouse and hoop earrings, bent way over to show cleavage, and half-closed her eyes in a sultry come-hither look. The only person who would have come hither was a neurologist, certain she was suffering from some mysterious, wasting muscular disease.
Maybe Ava Gardner. She did, after all, look a tiny bit like Ava Gardner. Ava had a throaty, contemptuous laugh; she’d toss her head and do the Laugh, and men would fall instantly in love with her. Mary practiced her throaty, contemptuous laugh — “Ha ha!” — in the mirror. It wasn’t half bad. She tried it out on Pudgie Bird, her perennial date, hoping it wasn’t perfect, because having Pudgie in love with her would be a drag. It was bad enough when he was only interested in feeling her up. Pudgie in love would be a whirling dervish, his hands moving faster than the eye. But Pudgie had no imagination. He only asked her if she had a cough.
Ava Gardner liked bullfighters, and she imagined Ava and her lover — he dressed in his suit of lights — as he prepared to go off to the ring.
I go now to fight the bull, cara mia.
Ha-ha.
For you, my love, I will be brave.
Ha-ha.
I will cut the ears from the bull and lay them at your feet.
Ha-ha.
She wondered, when she and Jay were driving back from the White House, if she tried her Ava Gardner laugh and head toss on him, if he’d fall madly in love with her, or if he’d think she had a cough.
What if she were not a married woman, hypothetically, what would she do to attract him? She had noticed that he looked, discreetly, at her breasts now and then. She liked her breasts. They were full and gently sloping, larger than one would expect on such a slender frame. But she had never learned to use them the way Barbara Brownlee used hers, always putting them out there, so to speak. She was terrible at being obvious, worse at being subtle.
She was most comfortable with being direct, so hypothetically, maybe the best thing to do was just be direct. They’d be riding along, and she’d take them out and point them at him and say, “Well, here they are; they aren’t huge knockers, but they are kind of nice. So, do you like them or not?”
She sighed. This was all very peculiar for a woman who had long ago decided she was frigid.
It was no wonder, of course, that her honeymoon had been a disaster, since she was so terrified of not being knocked up, like she was supposed to be. But even afterwards, there was some pleasure in what went before doing it, but the main event was always unsatisfying. She went to the library one day and snuck some books off the shelves — she would have been mortified to walk up to the librarian with Sexuality in Females in her hand. What she read was very instructive. There were good kinds of orgasms and bad ones, and that surprised her. Except for the gossip about sluts and the horror stories in the locker room, girls at Belvedere High did not talk about the details of sex. Movies were not much help either. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly might get as far as an openmouthed kiss, but after that you got fireworks or two raindrops trickling down a window or a blazing hearth. In fact, the most specific conversation about sex she could recall was when she was eight; it had been with Evelyn Morell, who lived next door, who was eleven and very advanced.
Evelyn said to her one day, “When people get married, the man sticks his thing into the lady.”
“He does not!” Mary protested.
“Does too. That’s how babies come.”
“Babies come,” Mary said haughtily, “from seeds. The man grows seeds, and the mommy eats them, and that’s how babies get in her stomach.”
That was her version of what her mother had told her. It made sense. Men had gardens — like the victory gardens people planted to help the war effort — but instead of sprouting peas and lettuce, the men’s gardens grew plants with little seeds on them shaped like tiny boys and girls. When the mommy and daddy decided to have a baby, they went out and picked the right seed. She had imagined a tiny version of herself, hanging from a leaf, waiting patiently to get ingested.
But Evelyn was adamant. “No, he puts his thing in her and the baby is very, very, very little, and he crawls out of the man’s thing into the mommy’s tummy.”
“He doesn’t. What if the man pees? Then the baby would drown.”
A cloud passed over Evelyn’s face. She had not considered this snag in her theory. Then her face brightened again.
“Maybe the little, little babies, know how to swim,” she said.
Poring over the library book, reading about vaginal versus clitoral orgasms — the latter were “immature” the book said — Mary thought she would be happy with either one. Now and then, in bed with Harry, she’d think she was on the verge of something wonderful, but it never quite happened. She looked up frigidity in the library book, which said it had something to do with Oedipus, which was strange, because she remembered from Classics I that Oedipus was blind and married his mother. She was not blind and certainly had never considered marrying her mother.
She decided that frigidity was something that affected a certain percentage of the population, like color blindness, and she would have to live with it as her deep, dark secret. But she kept on reading the library book, and was more than a bit shocked at what it said, very clinically, that some people liked to do. There was bondage, rubber undies, and diapers, which had not been mentioned in the girls’ locker room. It was too bad, she thought with a tinge of regret, that she hadn’t read this book when she was in high school and come armed with this knowledge to the locker room. Mary Francis Conlan would not just have fainted, she would have died on the spot at the mention of rubber didies.
Bondage, however, sounded intriguing. For some reason, she thought of her old neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard, as the type who would be attracted to bondage. She pictured Mrs. Pritchard, still wearing her round wire glasses, ti
ed naked to a post in the Pritchards’ garage, next to the place where Mr. Pritchard kept the hoses and fertilizer, her considerable bulk obscuring most of the post. Mr. Pritchard, pale and skinny, would also be naked, and he’d be tickling Mrs. Pritchard with the whisk broom he kept in the glove compartment of his Plymouth. They seemed to be having a wonderful time.
But of course she’d never have the nerve to ask Harry to tie her up. Harry was very exact about what was proper and what was not. Once, when she had moved her lips down his body — the library book also said something about that — his voice had been cold and hard. “Don’t do that! That’s what whores do!” And she had been terribly ashamed and never tried anything unusual again. Most times she just lay quietly under him until the bucking stopped, and she’d give out a long, deep sigh of pseudocontentment. If he knew it was counterfeit, he never let on, and she assumed this was how it was with men and women — except for whores, of course, but they didn’t count.
But now, unbidden, Jay Broderick was there, calling forth newly familiar sensations. A voice in her head said, again, No, this is wrong, but what could be wrong with thoughts? No one would ever know; Charlie couldn’t really read minds. How could it hurt?
She climbed into bed, having decided to let her thoughts wander where they would, and there he was, in the black jersey and jeans. She undressed him, gently; the things she had never seen were graphic in her imaginations — the taut line of his belly, the mat of hair on his chest, his genitals. She was the aggressor. He watched as she kissed, rubbed, touched and delighted him. His maleness surrounded her, intoxicated her. A male body had never gripped her this way before, and she surrendered to the image. The memory of Jay was bright, and fresh and real; she felt his weight pressing down on her, flowing into her until he filled every part of her, and once again she seemed on the edge of something very wonderful, and she was trembling all over. This had to be wrong.
The room suddenly seemed unbearably warm, and she threw the covers off. She was tired but energized, and knew she would not sleep. She got out of bed, walked to the dresser and picked up Harry Past in the metal frame.
Somehow, she’d managed to get through the wedding and the honeymoon, and she and Harry had moved into a small house — this one — they had bought using the money his parents had given them as a down payment. Through his father, Harry got a job in Greenway’s Shoe Emporium. The pay was good, but he hated the work, squatting down and pulling off people’s shoes. Meanwhile Mary, living in a state of rising panic, gulped down Phillips’ milk of magnesia to calm her churning stomach. She read that tension could prevent conception, and that only made her more agitated. He kept asking if she shouldn’t be going to the doctor.