Duet for Three

by Joan Barfoot

  Obviously, Aggie had the right idea. She simply asked him about people he met on the road and what they were like and if he went to their homes and how the towns looked and what he might have seen at the movies. He grew quite animated. “Mind the car springs,” he laughed as he left to drive Aggie home. “I can’t afford new ones.” Amazing, making jokes about her weight.

  “That was nice,” he said later. “I like your mother.”

  Obviously.

  “It’s funny you don’t take after her. I mean,” he added quickly, “in looks. You’d never take you for her daughter.”

  “I told you, I’m like my father.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I’ve seen pictures. They must have made a pretty strange-looking couple.”

  “They did.”

  The two of them were a pretty strange couple, too, although not so dissimilar in looks. The more he reached for her, the more she moved away. Casual touches were startling, knowing now where they might lead. She grew more accustomed to his absences, and more fond of them, as well.

  People she’d never before noticed particularly now stopped to speak to her on the street: his acquaintances. “How’s old Herb? Back in town this weekend, is he?” Instead of being herself, out from Aggie’s thumb, she found she was now his wife.

  “It’s my business to be friendly,” he told her, and invited men over on Saturday nights when he was home to play poker, while she made sandwiches for them all.

  “No signs of a little one yet?” women asked, stopping to chat on the street, nudging her.

  “Not yet,” smiling bravely. The question was like having these people watching when Herb came home. It was bad enough knowing God could see, and possibly even her father, although she tried to avoid the thought of that since it was paralysing, and her paralysis enraged Herb. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, and sometimes just gave up.

  Oh, but she did want to be desired. She dreamed of being desired, when he was away. Just not in a bed with flesh; more from a distance, maybe.

  At some point he stopped calling her Junie when it was just the two of them; although when the men came to play cards he might turn and slap her lightly on the rear and say, “Hey, Junie, we got any more of those sandwiches?” As if, she thought, she were a horse he owned, thumping its rump, showing it off.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? It’s just a tap. You’ve got a nice bottom.”

  It wasn’t that they actually quarrelled, though.

  Sometimes there were three weeks between his visits home. She came to think of them more or less as visits, since the house was her own so much. Sometimes, too, he left Sunday night instead of waiting for Monday morning, explaining, “I can get a head start on the week if I’m already where I’m going.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he cried, coming home and throwing open the drapes. “Why is this place so goddamned dark?”

  “The furniture. It fades.” Silly of her to have supposed he would have no more need to swear, once they were married.

  “This stuff? How’s it going to fade?”

  She had chosen from his catalogue, so that they could get it wholesale through his firm, a living-room suite of dark blue, in some tough and nubbly fake material that turned out to show dirt rather badly. He was probably right, though, that it would be hard to make it fade.

  “But I’m alone so much. I don’t like the drapes open when I’m alone.”

  “Well, you’re not alone now.”

  True.

  But there were times, maybe when they were walking together over to Aggie’s for an evening, when she admired him. They didn’t walk holding hands any more, or with his arm slung across her shoulder, and when they crossed the street he no longer held her elbow as if she were fragile, but still, being with him on the street was pleasing.

  She was, after all, old enough to be realistic about these things: give a little here and get a little there. A bargain, this for that. She was no foolish little girl with outlandish expectations, but a grown woman sensibly accepting, for the most part, what was real.

  In church, the minister spoke of those who are specially tested, and she wondered if she might be one of those. It put a new light on sacrifice: crucifixions in various forms, say, for instance, nailed down on a mattress beneath her husband’s body. The concept offered distance and dispassion, and that in turn made events less painful, which had, she realized, the somewhat absurd effect of making her sacrifice less potent.

  She prayed, with increasing impatience, for a child. If one were to be martyred on a mattress, some resurrection of life ought to follow.

  A child would make resolution possible. If she were expecting, she could no longer teach, for one thing. The money helped, of course, because Herb’s cheques were variable, and whatever he said about being a good salesman, there were times that were flat and that was all there was to it. But there was no pleasure in teaching itself. She began to suspect it would have been that way for her father, too, except that he appreciated the respect it brought.

  Anyway, with the war over, women were going back home to raise babies as the men returned to work, and she was out of step once more.

  She longed to be one of those young mothers she saw wheeling prams along the sidewalks, leaning down to adjust blankets and fix brakes, and going into stores to shop. It looked a leisurely sort of life, luxurious, to spend days strolling with a baby.

  Babies demanded order and sense, put people in their proper places. Herb would have to get a regular job, and they would be a normal family, the three, then maybe four or five, of them. She couldn’t picture these imaginary children, and had no clear idea of numbers. One seemed enough for her purposes.

  Then, too, his rights would be altered. With a child to protect inside her, she would be the one with rights. And, once it was born, their attention would have to be on it: he to support it, she to nourish it, and both of them to protect it. Also, she would show Aggie how a real mother behaved. She would bring her child up with care. Her child would not be reared in any slapdash, irregular way.

  Eventually the doctor said, “It took long enough, but as far as I can tell everything’s fine. April, I’d say, right about the middle of the month. Herb’ll be pleased, won’t he?”

  He was. He looked, when she told him, the way she remembered him before they married: light and glittering. How much he must have changed, without her noticing. He even called her Junie again. “Oh, Junie, that’s great! A baby! Jesus, my very own kid!”

  Not the way she would have put it.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ll have to quit teaching. You can’t teach when you’re expecting.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But we’ll manage. It’s good it didn’t happen right away, so we had a chance to salt away some money. I’ll just have to sell twice as hard, that’s all.”

  “But I thought you’d want a proper job now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” red-faced, “I wish you’d get it through your head, I have a proper job.” Then, more calmly, “Anyway, where do you think I could get one here? There’s nothing going now the war’s over. And honest to God, June, it’s nice to have a home and it’ll be great to have a kid, but I couldn’t stand being in one place all the time, the same old people day after day.”

  Her among them?

  So soon the vision of her new and ordinary life was being altered. Why could she never have what she saw? Why was it always up to somebody else and what they wanted how her life was spent?

  Aggie took up knitting, and brought over bootees and sweaters. “A grandchild!” she’d said when June told her. “Oh, isn’t that nice. I’ll like being a grandmother, grandmothers get to play with babies and spoil them.” Who’d have thought she meant it literally, to spoil?

  In bed, Herb said, “It’s not going to hurt the kid, you know,” but she said quite firmly and finally
with some righteousness on her side, “No, I don’t want to take a chance.”

  There were other things she could do, though. She could work all day wallpapering the second bedroom with dancing bears. She could hem lengths of cotton into diapers, and hook a little rug for the nursery floor, small flowers on a pale-blue backing.

  Heavens it was hard, though, getting so big and unwieldy. It hurt, the weight pulling at her all the time, no getting away from it. Almost it seemed to outweigh her, carrying her wearily through the day instead of the reverse; as if she were its burden, not it hers. The pasty, purple-streaked ugliness stretched so tightly — surely she was going to burst? Her face altered, too; she could see it getting puffy, a resemblance to her mother now. Herb said, “Boy, expecting doesn’t seem to agree with you, does it?” and didn’t mean that it made her ill, because it didn’t. Just that it made her look like someone she never would have recognized as herself. “You must keep your feet up as much as you can,” the doctor warned. “Your blood pressure’s a bit up, and there’s too much fluid.” He patted her shoulder. “Not that it’s dangerous, really, but you have to be careful. You’re pretty narrow, too.” She supposed he tried to be delicate, but it really wasn’t nice, being exposed in his examining room. Quite a trick for him to be both impersonal and kind.

  They knocked her out and opened her up and left a garish scar. “It was going on too long,” the doctor told her when she woke up. “But your baby’s perfectly healthy. A big thumper of a girl.”

  Even with pain and a scar, she could see she had accomplished something here. Herb came to her hospital room with flowers, kissed her lightly on the forehead, said, “She’s beautiful. Are you all right?” She was amazed herself at the feeling of a miracle — that something had been created out of nothing.

  Home, he stared at his daughter with something that looked like fear. June thought it a little sweet, how worried he looked holding her, as if afraid she would break.

  “You don’t mind if we call her Frances, do you?” she asked. “It’s a name in my father’s family, and my middle name. I’d like to carry it on.”

  “Frances,” he tried. “Fran. Frannie. Yeah, well okay. I’m not wild about it, but it’s okay.”

  “Christ,” he grumbled in the middle of the night when she woke them crying, “what’s the matter with her?”

  It was just that she was so hungry. She was rosy and plump and had a skitter of dark hair. Watching her voracious child, June was reminded of her mother.

  There were only the two of them when Herb was on the road. Frances seemed to take his comings and goings with unconcern, not knowing, June supposed, that it might be different in other households. He arrived excited to see her, exclaiming over changes, since everything about her changed so rapidly.

  June herself hadn’t quite expected that someone so small could consume so much time. There was nothing she could plan that might not have to be cancelled. She could hardly go shopping with a screaming baby, but if she planned to stay home and clean, Frances might sleep on and on until June had to shake her awake. Perhaps it was an illusion that the baby did precisely what was not convenient for her, but why couldn’t she sleep quietly in her buggy when June wanted to go downtown and see herself reflected in the glass windows of stores, pushing the pram and smiling gently?

  Aggie made a proper fool of herself when she came to babysit, lumbering happily along the five blocks of sidewalk between their houses. She didn’t exactly talk baby-talk, but her voice rose. June, watching in amazement and something else that she didn’t identify but that wasn’t quite nice, saw her mother actually cuddling this child.

  “Never mind if she’s crying,” Aggie said, waving her hand as if it didn’t matter. “She’ll stop, you go on to church. I’ll just change her and we’ll sit here and rock and sing for a while.”

  June went, but uneasily. Who knew if something might really be wrong this time? Or, if not, who knew what Aggie was up to in her absence? She came home to find her mother cradling her laughing daughter and waltzing across the kitchen floor, looking foolish and quite unlike any Aggie she could remember.

  “Come on, June, take a break, let’s go to a movie,” Herb suggested. “Your mother’ll babysit, she likes to.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. I don’t like to leave Frances, she’s been upset today.”

  “Well, then, I’m going to Larry’s. There’s a poker game.”

  He did this more and more often. It seemed she hardly saw him, but then, she hardly noticed. When he was home, she left Frances with him while she went to church. She had no idea what happened during those two hours, but, after all, he was the child’s father and should be able to do that much.

  “You’ve changed,” he said sadly. “You used to like going out.”

  Did she? She could barely remember how things were before Frances, much less before she married. Herb was a phantom. He rarely even reached for her in the night any more, which was fine, she supposed. Except that while she didn’t like being reached for, she did not want to be unwanted.

  She said, “You don’t know how much work it is, you don’t understand.”

  “One kid! How hard can it be, looking after one kid?” But when she came home from church, he handed Frances over fast enough.

  When he came home, he brought Frances small gifts picked up on his travels; the way a guest would, or a Santa Claus.

  It was harder when Frances began to crawl, and stand, and then walk. She had to be watched closely so she didn’t hurt herself. He brought home a tricycle when she was still quite little, and June cried, “Oh, but she’s too young, she’ll get hurt.”

  “Of course she’ll get hurt,” he snapped, steering Frances along the walk. “Everybody does.”

  Did he not care about his own child’s pain?

  No point, speaking of pain, in even thinking about him. Insignificant, really, except for Frances, the result. And it doesn’t do to dwell.

  FIFTEEN

  It may have been women who came to the bakeshop to buy and to trade tales, but it was a man who became Aggie’s friend.

  It was the year June was at teachers’ college, and while that made no difference at all to the rhythms of Aggie’s days (and not much to June’s, either, as far as Aggie could see), she felt restless. Not dissatisfied, exactly, but ready to look around for more. June would, presumably, be moving on to something or other one of these days. The bakery was doing well and Aggie had even built up some savings. Reading, of course, remained fascinating. She thought the restlessness might be because things outside of books were now too comfortable, too well known.

  She wondered if other people found their lives sometimes hanging a little too neatly, like a picture. There was not, she realized, anyone she could ask. Stories might be told in her bakeshop, and illnesses and tragedies and plans for weddings and holidays discussed, but not questions, not feelings. Those she had to imagine, placing herself in others’ skins. She would have liked a sister handy then, to sit in her kitchen sometimes and drink tea with, chatting comfortably.

  The man who had been coming to the door every morning for years and years, bringing eggs and milk and cheese from the dairy, was a burly, dark, sullen fellow who might nearly be mute for all he said to her. She told him each morning what she’d be needing that day and he would grunt and shrug and fetch it from the wagon in which he toured the streets. His horse, at least, she thought, might be grateful for her orders, since they took longer to deliver than those at other more ordinary households, and it had longer to rest, standing droop-headed and dispirited in the street. She suspected the man didn’t feed it properly, and demanded too much from it. She imagined it just lying down in the street someday, giving up.

  She took no particular notice when, that year June was at teachers’ college, the man who delivered for the dairy was replaced. This new one was not sullen, but otherwise seemed unremarkable. She c
ontinued to give him her day’s order and he, like his predecessor, carted the supplies into her kitchen. He smiled sometimes, though, and she smiled back, absent-mindedly. It occurred to her, however, meeting him at the door one day and glancing toward the street, that the horse was looking better: more fleshed and alert. “Is that the same animal?” she asked, pointing.

  “Well, yes and then again no. Same horse, but he’s been having a sort of change of heart.” The man grinned. “That other bugger wasn’t taking care of him. Poor old thing never had oats in his life. I give him a handful of oats at the start of the day and the end, so he’s got something to look forward to, and I figure he’ll last a few years yet. Plus, if I have to look at the back end of a horse all day, I’d just as soon it was a happy back end.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve just made some for myself. And biscuits just out of the oven.”

  “My morning oats?”

  They laughed, and Barney Holtom became her friend.

  “You know about horses, then,” she said.

  “Brought up on a farm.”

  “Oh, so was I!”

  He was a couple of years younger than Aggie, balding, with a fringe of greying hair. Also, he had a small pot-belly, although nothing like her bulk.

  They traded information: that she was a widow with a daughter, and had been married to a teacher; that he was married, with three sons, and had formerly been a shoe salesman. “I spent years selling damn shoes, inside all the time, women coming in trying on twenty pair and buying the first. It sounds like a joke, I know, but it isn’t. And smiling all the time, no matter what. People buying shoes and wearing them to whatever they bought them for, a wedding or whatever, and then trying to return them. I tell you, I damn near cracked my face smiling.”

  But that still seemed his most frequent expression: a smile, a grin, a laugh. She thought that this must be what beaming meant: light shining out of a good nature. She wondered how it was she hadn’t particularly noticed before, and that it took the horse to draw him to her attention.