Duet for Three

by Joan Barfoot

  Should there not be a middle ground here between his way and hers? There must be techniques, or how did people live together? One needed patience, discretion and time, she supposed. It must be like dealing with stubborn children: one humored them, or tricked them. But there were no children here; only two grown-ups, both wilful and stubborn and possibly spoiled.

  The kitchen must be yellow, she decided, to make it seem like sunshine despite the shading trees out back.

  She worked nervously and swiftly. She needed, again, to have a great deal done by the time he got home. She wouldn’t say she was frightened — never frightened — but she was tense, anticipating battle. “It will not be all his fault,” she thought. She was definitely goading him.

  It was a matter of power, that’s what it came down to. Marriage, surely, should not be reduced to that? His power was that she would dress up for teas with the parents of his pupils, and would smile graciously and probably make cupcakes and those fancy sandwiches with the crusts cut off. She would do his washing and his ironing, and prepare his meals and keep the house tidy and clean, and allow his thin body with its peculiar spasms to enter her room and her body at night. Her power was that none of this would touch her, if she didn’t want it to.

  She was raised, after all, to be a wife, and knew the job down pat. Also, she had a certain pride, that she could darn the heel of a sock so that it wasn’t lumpy, or make the perfect banana bread. She had skills that were called for here and a job to perform. But that was only her part of the bargain, in exchange for which she received a roof and a name. Naturally, beyond that there ought to be love, at least fondness, perhaps passion, and maybe joy, but none of that, she supposed, was essential to the bargain. At least defiance was passion of sorts, and whatever his response was, it would likely be passionate also.

  The kitchen was difficult to paint — all edges and interruptions, a stove and an ice-box to work around and shift, and doorways and a window. She was far from finished when she heard him come through the door into the hallway. She heard the clump of his briefcase being set down, and the rustling as he took off his suit jacket, the clinking of a hanger. She was proud to see that her hand did not waver as she crouched, meticulously edging along a baseboard.

  She heard a sniff, and steps, and an indrawn breath, but after all, what could he do?

  Brown shoes appeared, a hand flashing to her wrist, grabbing so that the paintbrush, spraying yellow splashes, flew across the floor. He hauled at her arm until she was facing him, and there they were, face to face, toe to toe. What did they recognize in that moment? Nothing they’d known before about each other.

  His free hand twisted back, whipped forward, snapped into her face open-handed, knocking her sideways so that she might have fallen if he hadn’t been holding her wrist so tightly.

  No time at all, it seemed, went by, and certainly no thought, but her own free hand hauled back and cracked across his face, sending him stumbling a step sideways so that he did let go. She watched with a vague sort of interest as the marks of her fingers rose on his cheek, and he watched as, presumably, the same happened on her face. They were frozen, a pair of crystal figures, quite still and clear. It was nice, she thought, being so clear.

  Finally, however, he dropped his eyes. His body sagged, and his shoulders slumped. He regained ordinary proportions. Now, maybe, he was ashamed that, underneath the teacher, the Englishman, or even just the man, under the thin layer of learning and the habits of civility, there was this savage. He was also perhaps ashamed that for an instant they had been entirely intimate. If they had shared loving bodies they would not have known so much.

  He turned and went upstairs. She turned and saw splashes of yellow paint here and there, where they did not belong. They came off easily with a rag and turpentine. She watched her steady hand as she finished the delicate job of painting along the baseboard. She found she was quite hungry, and made a heap of ham and tomato sandwiches. The food tasted a little of paint. Still hungry, she baked bran muffins and ate three.

  Later she washed herself. Standing naked in her room, she regarded herself in the wavering glass of the mirror and was surprised to find that really her body was quite appealing. In that moment in the kitchen, she had felt enormous, huge and powerful. What she had in fact was a compact and sturdy body, with marks of fingers still standing out red on her face, and a bruise forming on her wrist. That might fade, but she would not.

  Sixty years later, she has a body to match that moment in the kitchen. And now June wants to move her, has put her name on a waiting list?

  Oh, the investment she has in this house — how could she leave it? Her blood is in its walls, her victories in its air, her pain and bruises in its floors. Her innocence is curled up, maybe in the basement. Also, her freedom and experience are here, likely downstairs in the kitchen.

  Some of the blood that is in these walls was even spilled for June. Because after quite a long period of chilly, distant days, and nights separated by the wall between their rooms, he resumed his periodic swift appearances, which led finally to some result.

  “I hear you’re expecting,” women said, meeting her in stores and later dropping in for tea and trading stories. Oh yes, indeed she was expecting.

  Love, she was expecting love again, although of a different sort. She was expecting someone to whom she could give love, and who would return it. A tiny body at her breasts, and then small arms around her neck. A little voice. Thumps and falls and footsteps, scabs on little knees.

  “Are you hoping for a boy or a girl?” the women asked. It didn’t matter. Just someone whole. She was expecting someone of her own.

  It was not as if he expressed much interest. She saw him staring at her sometimes, or at her growing belly rather, and occasionally he asked, “How are you feeling?” but the question did not seem more intimate than his “Good morning.” Once more he stopped coming to her room at night.

  She, now, talked throughout the day. Hearing her own voice was strange at first. She hadn’t realized how mute she had become. Now she carried a companion with her at every moment, and wasn’t a bit lonely any more. A perfect intimacy, two people in this one body, and now that she’d discovered the secret, she might do this again and again, for years and years, filling up all the spaces with plump and dark-haired babies.

  “Hello, honey,” she’d say first thing in the morning, surveying her body, wondering at what it contained. “Let’s see now,” pulling back the curtains and looking out the window, “it’s sunny today. After he leaves we’ll make a cake and then maybe go out and do some gardening.” She did not think of identifying him as Neil, or the teacher, or your father; didn’t mention him at all except to point out his schedule and what they, she and the child, might accomplish in his absence.

  Oh, she told the child everything: about her family and the farm, the work there and how loud and warm it had been, the people here in town and what they would do together, once the child was born. “I’ll read you stories, and we’ll sing and tell riddles and jokes.” She spoke of the preparations she was making. “I’m knitting you a yellow hat. It’ll have a little white puff on the top, I think.” Or hemming diapers, sewing little outfits. She offered a commentary on all the day’s activities. “I’m measuring bran for muffins now, and then I’ll chop the dates.”

  In the absence of the child itself, she regarded her body, containing it, with love. She stroked her palms across her belly. She was proud of what felt like her own accomplishment, and would have enjoyed pointing out the changes in her shape and size to people on the street. But “I think,” he told her, “you should start staying in from now on. It’s not exactly proper, how you look. Anything that’s needed, surely you can order in?” Yes, she supposed she could. And learned that when it reached a certain obviousness, pregnancy was like madness: something to be locked away, like a crazy aunt in an attic, out of embarrassment, for fear of causing offence.


  Actually, she was relieved to be spared the chore of shopping, and no longer went to church. Also, since she was unable to go out, women came to her, bringing small baby gifts, tales of birth, advice. Together in their privacy, they let their hair down, with an unpinning and falling of words. “The pain!” they told her. “But when it’s over you forget it.” Although, she thought, obviously they had not.

  All this seemed like an initiation into a secret society, her badge of membership in her distended belly.

  She could see how it would continue afterward. “This is my daughter,” she would say to people, these women, or “This is my son.” The child would be laughing, pink and healthy. People would stop on the street and smile. It would break things and spatter food, cry and giggle and get its clothes dirty, climb trees, skip rope or stones, and throw rubber balls at the side of the house and catch them. They would go for walks together, she and the child, and she would point things out and give them names. They would bake cookies, and sit down together to eat them. In the middle of the night, she would leap out of bed at a cry and offer comfort. Or would go silently into the sleeping child’s room, just to look.

  When it leaped and kicked inside her, she held her hands over it, to feel. “You’re blooming,” the women told her. “Some people don’t take to expecting, but you certainly have.” She looked in the mirror and approved. Her cheeks were rosy, just like the old days. She must have gotten pale as well as mute during the unexpectant months of marriage.

  She grew impatient for the event, developed a longing to touch and be touched by what she had already created. She walked upstairs at night imagining small arms around her neck, and a soft and sleepy head resting on her shoulder. It was like a Christmas card, the picture: all tenderness and sentiment.

  She ate and ate; eating, as the women said, for two. She imagined how healthy this child would be, already so well fed.

  Her pictures were only of the two of them. Where would he be? Around, of course. Here and there. Off in a corner, likely, working away at the dining-room table, wafting quietly about his chores, insignificant.

  She would eat and grow and he would hover about, shrinking. She would be so large he wouldn’t be able to reach her at all. If he tried to climb her body, he would slip off.

  The women were right that there was a lot of pain, and it went on for quite a while. They were also right that afterward she could not precisely recreate it in her memory.

  “It’s a girl,” the doctor said, leaning over her at last. “You have a healthy little daughter.”

  He went away for a few minutes, and when he returned, he was carrying a flannelette-wrapped bundle, and Aggie watched him float across the floor as if in slow motion, and say, drawing back the blanket, “Well, here she is, all cleaned up. Her father thinks she’s wonderful.”

  Tiny, tiny little thing. All bandy-legged and everything closed, her fists and curled feet, pursed mouth, and wrinkled eyelids. Her hair was blonde. Aggie’s brother, the one who died in the war, was born blond. Her mother said his hair was almost white then, and stayed fair until he was five or six years old, when it abruptly began to darken.

  “Early to tell,” said the doctor, “but I’d say she’s the spitting image of her father. Same bone structure, you can see that.” He was smiling down at the two of them; a sentimental man, entranced by mother and child and the miracle of his work.

  She was a little puzzled that this small creature didn’t much resemble the child in whom she’d been confiding. She’d thought of someone larger, darker, more fully formed. More complete somehow, although there was nothing actually missing from this baby that she could see, all its fingers and toes accounted for. And, after all, it was ridiculous that a newborn would open her eyes and her mouth and say, “I haven’t been able to tell you till now, but I want to thank you for all your attention. Telling me so much. I feel we’re very close.” Or anything like that. Really, she had to laugh at herself, although laughter hurt.

  “Now,” the doctor was saying, “you have plenty of milk, and all you have to do is put her here, like this,” and he shifted the baby to Aggie’s breast, “and she’ll do the rest. It’s quite wonderful, you know, that they know right away what to do.” And it was wonderful that the little lips immediately closed around her nipple, earnest intention pulsing away behind the tiny closed eyes.

  “And don’t worry, all new mothers are a bit nervous at first, but you’ll find it comes as naturally to you as it does to her. Mother’s instinct, I’ve never seen it fail.”

  Was it odd to have become so heavy and cumbersome, and then to have produced such a light result? Certainly it was peculiar to feel that the real child was still to come. Not that this baby was not hers, or that she wasn’t pleased, or that there was anything wrong or unpleasant about her, or unlovable; of course Aggie loved her. But where was the other one?

  She fell asleep, and was only vaguely aware of someone taking the child away.

  When she wakened, the baby was sleeping in the cradle beside her bed, and Neil was standing in the doorway. She felt much better now. Really, the child was a lovely little thing, and anyway, transformations were always possible.

  But considering transformations: look at him. His eyes, fixed on the sleeping child, were wet. Aggie, astonished, saw a tear break out and roll down his face. Why would that be? He was — entranced, that’s what. She had never dreamed that while she was expecting, he also might have been. The expression was so naked she could see that he’d had no adjustment to make here, that there was no discrepancy between whatever he’d expected and what was.

  How had he been looking at her, then, these past months? As a vessel, she supposed; a mere container.

  Later, when the baby cried, he came and held her tenderly for a moment before passing her to Aggie. He watched briefly, but if he was looking at her breasts at all, it was with an eye to their capacity, not their beauty.

  The next morning he said, “I’ve sent off the birth certificate. I thought we’d call her June Frances, if you have no objections.”

  She certainly did have objections, although not especially to the names. “You don’t mean to say you’ve mailed it without consulting me?”

  “I didn’t think you’d care. You never mentioned you had any names in mind.”

  “You didn’t either. Why ever June Frances?”

  He was, after all, a little sheepish. “I thought June for the month and Frances for my mother. It’s a name that goes back in my family. I thought she ought to have it too.”

  “And if I had other ideas?”

  “I suppose we could change the June part, but it’d be an awful rigmarole, now that it’s been mailed.”

  She’d thought maybe Anne, for her mother, or Edith for her sister, or Edith Anne.

  On the other hand, this baby with, as the doctor said, his bones might be more a June Frances. And her Edith Anne would be someone else, some other time. Anyway, she didn’t care enough at the moment, except about the principle, not being asked.

  What was important, and astonishing, was that he had some capacity for love. A bit of a blow, really, that the child was the end of his desires.

  Now a bit of a blow that the end of Aggie’s desires is in the hands of that child, grown up. Somehow, right from the start, Aggie’s love must have fallen short, or been disregarded, and this is what it’s come to.

  TEN

  Love, Aggie wanted to discuss? “It wasn’t just your father, you know,” she said at breakfast with something, a certain wistfulness, in her voice. Or maybe only doubt. Maybe even she did not believe what she was saying. It’s odd, though, what is remembered and how much must have been forgotten. And the older June gets, the less, it seems, she remembers. As if it were other Junes entirely who lived different parts of her life.

  She recalls moments here and there: running to meet him at the door when he came home fro
m school; how he picked her up and threw her into the air and caught her, until she got too big, and then he’d take her hands and whirl her around, feet off the floor, until they both were dizzy. “So what did my bunny do today?” he’d ask.

  He took her to church on Sundays. Aggie wouldn’t go. “You should, you know,” he said, but she refused. “I’ve gone enough in my time. I have other things to do.” What did she do?

  Most often June went downstairs to the Sunday school in the basement, but sometimes he let her stay with him, in the high-ceilinged, dark-pewed cool and quiet church part. She loved the hymns, and their own two reedy voices singing. It was hard to sit still during the sermons, though.

  When he left for school in the mornings, until she was old enough to go with him, she stood at the door waving goodbye. Sometimes she cried, and her mother held her back, shaking her, saying crossly, “For goodness’ sake, he’ll be back, he always comes back.” Aggie so often sounded angry. That and her rushing around: that’s what June remembers. And being slapped once (although only once) when she got in the way as Aggie carried a load of wash out to the clothesline. Aggie tripped and the clean clothes spilled and got dirty and had to be washed again, and June got slapped.

  Also, it’s confusing, but she has an impression of her mother tightening over time, a drawing in of her lips, a thin tension, and that’s funny because in fact she was getting bigger and bigger.

  He told June his stories, from books and about his home. Aggie claims to have hugged June and read to her and sung songs, also, but June has no recollection of that. If her mother did those things, surely June would have some memory? Or if she did, maybe her heart wasn’t in it, so it made no impression.