The Wife's Tale Read online

  Gooch had been angry, ranting that there was a whole wide world outside of Leaford, and if she wanted to keep her head up her ass she could but he was going on that cruise. They’d given the tickets to Pete and Wendy. Why Gooch hadn’t gone alone, she’d never understood. Where was that chorus? That tremolo of hope? Where the hell was Gooch?

  Peering out the window, she searched the driveway for the Leaford Furniture and Appliance truck, which Gooch always parked beside the pickup with the jammed-open sunroof. As with the anticipation of her own reflection, she knew before she looked that she wouldn’t like what she saw. So severely had her world shifted that she could not find her centre of gravity, and had to grasp the sill for support. It occurred to her that she had never felt so heavy, a thought chased by the certainty that she’d never been so heavy. It had come to this. She’d finally grown so large that she’d displaced her husband altogether. Like water splashing over the sides of the tub.

  There was a distant mechanical sound, and Mary lifted her eyes to see Mr. Merkel in his field hunched behind the wheel of his tractor, a big brown dog loping alongside, sprinting off occasionally to chase the plundering crows. Other people’s desperate lives. “You can always look around,” Irma liked to say, “and find someone else much worse off.” It was true, and Mary found comfort in the misery of the Merkels, an older couple who had lost their only child, a four-year-old son, during a tornado in the early seventies. The furious wind had stolen little Larry from his own driveway and spirited him to some secret place, never to be seen again. Mary did not set eyes on Mr. or Mrs. Merkel without thinking of Larry, but she hadn’t seen much of them lately. No one had.

  The sad tale of Larry Merkel was a Leaford legend, like the story of the conjoined twin girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen, who’d been born attached at the head. Mary had rarely spoken to, but had watched the unusual girls from her distant bedroom window at the farm after she and Gooch were wed. She had wondered what they talked about as they huddled on the rickety footbridge over the creek between the fields. Like Larry Merkel’s tiny ghost, which Mary imagined she glimpsed darting through the high corn, the Darlen sisters haunted the landscape. Mary’s own babies were ghosts too, but silent, watchful types, like Mr. Barkley, who never went outdoors.

  Poor Christopher Klik, Mary’s first barometer for self-pity, was replaced, after the Darlen twins were born, by Rose and Ruby. “Joined at the head. Just imagine that,” Irma would say when they chanced to see the pair. But Mary didn’t feel especially sorry for them. From what she could see, the girls seemed content in their peculiar shape. Although she would have felt foolish admitting it, and had no one to share such a confession with anyway, she’d envied the girls their inextricable bond.

  The girls had written their autobiographies in the months before their deaths, which all of Baldoon County had read, and to which everyone had taken some kind of exception. There were those who protested the geography in parts; others objected to the use of real names; some disagreed with the characterizations; and at least a few refuted the events, some of which must have been fictional, for what Rose Darlen wrote about a glimpsed sexual act between her Uncle Stash and Catherine Merkel could not have been true.

  Mary had consumed the book in one sitting, fretting the while that she would find herself on the next page, described in pitiful terms by one girl or the other as the large, childless woman in the house behind, who watched life from the frame of a window. When she was not even mentioned, by either girl, she wondered how such a large woman as herself could be so incidental.

  Remembering Rose and Ruby served as an excellent distraction, until replaced by another random force. The furnace began to roar, and after throwing a series of short tantrums, died in a snit. Mary felt vindicated, and hoped it had suffered. Encouraged by the symbolism, she closed the bedroom window and started toward the hall, straining to stay off her wounded heel.

  Dawn lit the hallway like a morning-after murder scene, walls smeared with blood from the cuts on her hand, exclamatory stains on the new silver broadloom. It was shocking, but there was precision in the imagery. Something had died there in the night.

  Finally reaching the kitchen, relieved to see that the wound on her foot didn’t appear to be bleeding, or at least not badly, she opened the freezer and snatched a package of corn, cramming a fistful of niblets into her mouth, sucking them to defrost, surrendering to her hunger and the dark disgust that she could even think of eating at a time like this. She wondered if she would be betraying Gooch or rescuing him in making a call to The Greek.

  Gooch had been trucking and delivering for Theo Fotopolis, whom everyone called The Greek the way everyone called Jimmy Gooch Gooch, for nearly as long as Mary’d worked at Raymond Russell’s. The Greek had hired Gooch to work in the sales office after high school, and then underwritten the cost of his trucking licence when his injured leg had healed.

  The clock on the wall read seven a.m. The question of whether to call The Greek or not call The Greek depended on which truth Mary was prepared to confront, that Gooch’s absence was not accidental, or that it was. There was also the pressing matter of the Laura Secord chocolate order due at the drugstore. Mary had ordered a carton of her favourites, nut clusters and milk chocolate almond bark, minis, assorted soft centres, assorted hard centres, which the supplier gave her on a deep discount. If she was not there to receive the order, Ray would discover her transgression. At best he would be annoyed. At worst he’d find it so hilarious he’d have to tell the whole staff. Besides, there was always a box or two of silky chocolate damaged in transit, or intentionally, to open and share among the staff. Mary took erotic pleasure in the ecstatic mastication of her colleagues, though she demurred when the damaged boxes were passed her way.

  Gooch had his own relationship with damaged goods. Their small home in rural Leaford was furnished with pieces from the store that had been broken in transit. A coffee table with a hairline fracture. The burnt umber Kenmore refrigerator whose tone had not precisely matched its stove mate. A sleeper sofa with broken gears. The first of the damaged pieces had been, in that first difficult year of their marriage, the red vinyl chairs with the thick aluminum legs.

  Mary had settled into one of their hand-me-down wooden chairs one morning and popped a rickety joint. Gooch didn’t fret aloud that his young wife, expanding rapidly in the first trimester of her second pregnancy, might break a chair altogether and fall with some tragic consequence. But he thought it. That evening the four red chairs appeared, one of them with a noticeable tear at the seam, and the old ones sent to the garage. Mary did not ask her young husband if he’d torn the seam on purpose.

  Gooch sat in one of the stiff red chairs, lifting Mary’s dress so she could straddle his lap. “Did you ask the doctor?” he whispered into her engorged décolletage.

  “He says we shouldn’t,” Mary lied. Halting and ashamed, she’d asked Dr. Ruttle if she and her husband could continue having intercourse during the remaining six months of her pregnancy, and had been quietly shocked by his candid response. “Of course you can. Right up until delivery, if it’s still comfortable for you both.”

  Surely that couldn’t be right. Or at least not in her situation, given that she’d lost her first baby (James or Liza), and what with Gooch being Gooch. She decided, leaving Ruttle’s office, that the good doctor had forgotten her first miscarriage, and her husband’s unusual size. Mary wished she could call Wendy or Patti to solicit their opinions, but she didn’t discuss her marital intimacy with anyone. Like eating, it was an intensely private matter.

  On a cool October night on the eve of her wedding, the four girlfriends, recent graduates of Leaford Collegiate—Wendy enrolled in the nursing program, Kim off to teachers’ college in London, Patti working reception at her mother’s realty office and Mary—had gathered for salads and sparkling wine at the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham. Mary’s acceptance into their sorority was still fresh; like a foreign exchange student, she found she could observe their cust
oms but, without understanding the nuances of their language, not effectively participate.

  She’d opened their wedding shower gifts under the table, sweating beneath her smock, wilting when one girl or another cried, “Hold it up!” A red teddy with matching underwear. A sheer black gown with ruffles at the neck. “You wear it with nothing else,” Kim instructed. “So sexy.” A blue corset with snaps at the back and cone-shaped breasts. Each of the sets in the size Mary had been briefly, and never would be again.

  The girls—all except Mary, who had a low tolerance for alcohol—drank too much wine and talked about sex. Patti put thumb and forefinger together, peering through the tiny space between, and slurred, “Dave’s a grow-er. Not a show-er.” Kim chimed in about her older sister’s horniness in the third trimester of her first pregnancy, and how, after the baby was born, she’d let her husband suck her milk. Mary found the image disturbing, and hated the word horny, which sounded bestial. Wendy confessed that she didn’t really enjoy screwing but that she could get Pete to do anything (that Supertramp concert?) if she just gave him a quick youknowhat. When Kim squealed, “Eeewww,” she instructed, “Give him a tissue!” “Or,” Wendy screamed, “swallow!”

  The topic shifted to Mary’s pregnancy. “Aren’t you afraid of getting fat again?” Wendy asked bluntly. “I’m terrified. And I never was fat.”

  “You’re supposed to get fat when you’re pregnant. Don’t listen to her, Mary. My sister’s baby weight just melted off after,” Kim assured her. “Especially if you’re breast-feeding.”

  “I’m just saying,” Wendy slurred, “I’d rather be dead than fat.”

  Kim passed the menu. “Should we get one big fries with gravy to share?”

  Wendy continued, sucking her wine, “Come on, you guys. It’s not like Mary didn’t know she was fat, right? Right?”

  Mary felt Wendy’s eyes boring into her. “Yeah.”

  “Jimmy Gooch didn’t look at Mary before she lost all that weight and, come on, I’m just saying.” Wendy faltered. “I’d just hate the thought of your cheekbones gone and your cute shoes won’t fit.”

  Gorgeous drunken Wendy from the cheerleading squad, who was in love with Jimmy Gooch herself, was just saying what they all thought, Mary most obsessively—that she would grow fat with the pregnancy and be unable to lose the weight (as had been witnessed countless times in everyone’s sphere), and that Gooch would leave her to raise their stinky brat alone.

  Mary had stopped eating dirt sometime after she and Gooch became official. Gooch alone sustained her. But then, when that first baby was no larger than a thumbnail, her giant gnawing hunger had returned, and like any compulsion, it began again, not at the beginning, but where it had left off. Sneaking from the bed when she knew that fretful Irma and resigned Orin were asleep, she would stand in the kitchen munching from foil bags, slurping cold noodles from the leftovers bowl and grinding rows of chocolate cookies between her big back teeth.

  “Is The Greek gonna give you guys a crib set?” Kim inquired, to fill the quiet.

  If her fabric had not been woven with lengths of deception and secrecy, Mary might have been able to ask the other girls the many questions she had about her body, about the sexual act, about her husband’s libido. Before Gooch, she’d never thought to wonder much about male bodies, too intent on the care and feeding of her own. Her only experiences before Gooch had been revealing her nipple to Christopher Klik at the bike rack, and the time Jerry, the wrinkled driver from the drugstore, had offered to massage her shoulders in the empty staff room. Afraid to appear ungrateful, she’d allowed him to knead her for a full ten minutes while bumping his crooked old-man erection against her firm teenage back. She didn’t tell anyone the indecent thing the driver had done. She was naive enough to consider that she’d only imagined his intent. She was also, until Gooch, in the habit of thinking herself too repulsive to be the object of even warped desire.

  Gooch and Mary’s sexual energy had been powerful, and Gooch’s longing for her wasn’t dampened after they were married. Just four months after failing with her first pregnancy, they had discovered that they were expecting again, and Mary’s confidence had been diminished by the rapid accumulation of pounds.

  Straddling her husband on the new red vinyl chair, she had concluded that Dr. Ruttle’s counsel was to be ignored. She was much too afraid for the second baby (Thomas or Rachel) to satisfy Gooch in their usual way, and thinking of what Wendy had said on the eve of her wedding, about the spell she put could Pete under, Mary’d pushed her husband’s wide shoulders back against the red vinyl chair he’d brought home that day, and whispered into his ear, “Dr. Ruttle said we can’t do that. But we can do something else.”

  After, as Gooch was zipping and rising from the red chair, she’d sensed, along with some deep appreciation for what she’d just done—particularly as she did not pass him a tissue—an undercurrent of suspicion. Reaching for his huge hand so that he could help her from her knees, she had felt compelled to whisper, “I’ve never done that before.” He’d arched a brow but not asked more, and Mary had slept that night with her hand on her rising womb, reasoning that she must have done what she did very well. She was pleased to have gone with her instinct, which was to imagine that his tumescence was edible.

  EXPRESSIONS OF GENUINE CONCERN

  A gentle morning rain fell over the landscape. A cold breeze blew in through the broken back window as Mary moved to the telephone and dialed her husband’s number. It was the machine again, with the unfamiliar voice, which Mary understood must belong to a human receptionist who would pass the message along. “It’s Mary Gooch again. Eight forty-five. If Jimmy Gooch could please call his wife at work. Thank you.”

  Scooping peanut butter with her finger, the sensation of the long, plump digit pleasant in her mouth, Mary tried to recall the last time she’d been touched lovingly by hands not her own.

  Outside, the rain made a dreary pattern on the windowpane above the sink. The sunroof! The interior of the truck would be soaked. She’d have to remember to bring towels to sit on, on the way to work. She wondered if she should call in sick, pretend to be asleep when Gooch got home and act feverish and confused upon waking, as if she assumed he’d been there all night.

  She focused on her list. Roof repair? Furnace guy? Something to wear to the dinner? The dinner. Cancel the dinner? Laura Secord order.

  The craving took her by the throat. Chocolate. Essential. A thing that could not wait. She felt some momentary kinship with Gooch’s sister, Heather, who’d spent most of their last visit together rifling through her empty coat pockets. “I’m jonesing for a smoke. I gotta hit the 7-Eleven,” she’d said.

  Before she left, Heather, with her long, bony limbs and sunken blue eyes, had taken hold of Mary’s plush upper arms and dug her nails in deeper than she’d intended, saying, “You are so lucky to have my brother.”

  The way she’d said it, like an ex-girlfriend, or a regretful first wife, had given Mary pause. Heather was an addict, and beautiful, and Mary was naturally suspicious of her motives. It was assumed that Heather had got her cigarettes. She never returned for the roast beef dinner.

  Mary searched the cupboard below the microwave as if she didn’t already know there was no chocolate hidden there with the recipe books. Jonesing for chocolate. Nothing. No sliver. No square. No rouge M&M. Just the wedding binder—not the photographs, but a collection of receipts for every dime Orin and Irma spent on Mary Elizabeth Brody’s marriage to James Michael Gooch twenty-five years ago. They’d presented the binder to her in the week before her wedding, detailing each receipt and invoice until they reached the final tally, which Irma had written in thick black ink. “We’re not asking you to pay us back, dear,” Irma’d said solemnly. “Just, you need to know, there’s a cost. To everything.”

  The night before the wedding, Irma had come to Mary’s room, reluctant slippers shuffling toward the bed. Standing, she’d regarded the lump of her daughter under the thick chenille spread
, noting that Mary had gained much too much weight for the newness of her pregnancy. She had glanced at the creamy dress hanging on the back of the closet and asked, “Have you tried it on since last week?”

  “Today,” Mary said, not mentioning that the gown was dangerously snug and that she was afraid for the buttons at her waist.

  Irma furrowed her brow and said quietly, “Well, dear, it’s too late to talk about relations, which is what you’re supposed to talk to your daughter about on the night before her wedding.”

  A blush crept to Mary’s cheek. She winced, but not from her mother’s words. Too much bread with the girls at the Satellite Restaurant. She felt hot and strangely ill.

  “You’re too young to be getting married.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s the only thing to do, so.”

  “Yeah.”

  Irma cleared her throat. “Your father and I …”

  “Me too,” Mary whispered, when it was clear that her mother would not or could not go on.

  “But you’ve made your bed.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve got to lie in it.”

  The way she said lie. “I will.”

  “And it’s going to be up to you, dear. It’s not the man who works on the marriage. I can promise you that much.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t let yourself go.”

  “Go where?” Mary asked blankly, then “Oh.”

  “You put fresh clothes on before he gets home for dinner and you have a hot breakfast, not cereal, on the table each morning, no matter if you’ve been up with the baby all night.”