The Wife's Tale (10 page)

She sank into his embrace. “When we had our lockers side by side.”

“I found one of those notes. The polka-dot ones. I never gave it to you.”

Mary stiffened. The polka-dot notes had come sporadically until her transformation in senior year—seven in all, eight counting
the one Gooch had intercepted, written in curlicued cursive with hilarious illustrations in the margins, addressing Mary Brody’s
body odor on account of her not showering after the torture of gym class.

“Why are you telling me this? Now?”

“I thought you were brave, Mare.”

“I didn’t shower because I was afraid they’d make fun of me, Gooch.”

“They made fun of you anyway.”

She sighed, looking out the window, wondering if all men had such poor timing.

“You came back to school. That was brave,” Gooch said.

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

Mary argued the point to herself.

“You used to sit on that swing in your yard and read novels. We could see you from Pete’s window. We spied on you when we
were bored. I read
A Clockwork Orange
because of the look on your face.”

Mary giggled, then turned serious. “The Droogs.”

“I watched you from the window of the car when I was waiting for my old man to get a prescription one time. You were working
behind the cosmetic counter helping this little old lady buy some lipstick and you were making her laugh like crazy, and I
thought, ‘What is she saying to make that old bird laugh like that?’ ”

“I’ve always been good with old people,” Mary allowed.

“And there was another time, days after we moved here in the summer. I was riding my bike to school to shoot hoops and I saw
you walking down your street. I was watching you, the way you walk, and I had this déjà vu. I felt like I knew you. It was
something about your walk. I felt like I’d walked with you someplace before.”

“Did you make jokes about me? You and Pete? When you were bored?”

“What? No.”

“But you thought I was fat.”

“I thought you were pretty.”

“The way they say
lost
, Gooch. You’ve
lost
the baby. The baby is
lost
.”

“I know.”

“Seems like, when you lose something, you should be able to find it again.”

They spoke simultaneously, Mary saying, “We should get annulled, Gooch, and you should go to Montreal,” and Gooch saying,
“We’ll work a little while and save some money, and we’ll think about college. And another baby.”

Gooch kissed his bride’s cheek and held her chin, waiting until she lifted her face. “You have the prettiest eyes I’ve ever
seen,” he said. “And I thought so the first time I saw you standing by the lockers. You turned to look at me and I thought
to myself, ‘That girl is so pretty.’ ”

She bit her lip. “And what a shame?”

“And what an ass.” He grinned.

She slapped him playfully. “Gooch…”

“Now you’re my pretty wife. And this might sound corny but it’s true, I just can’t think of any place I’d rather be than here
with you.”

“Are those lyrics?”

“They might be.”

“You took that Percodan, didn’t you?”

He squeezed her hand. Moments passed with the sound of the clock and the shuffle of feet in the corridor, and the notion of
a whisper beyond the cracked ivory door. When no one had said a word for the length of a commercial break, and neither had
risen to go, it was understood they would stay together.

They never made it to Niagara Falls.

A
ssuming that denial is a conscious state, Mary Gooch was aware that she had only herself to fool in rejecting the possibility
that Gooch might not come home at all. But choosing this day, their silver anniversary, struck her as much too dramatic a
gesture. Gooch avoided drama, having suffered his share in his formative years, with demons of his own. His inebriated mother
setting fire to the bed when she found out James was cheating with the secretary. Dumping suitcases full of her husband’s
clothes into the Rideau Canal when she discovered that he was cheating with the babysitter. Throwing a bottle of Southern
Comfort through the plate-glass window when he announced he’d taken a job in small-town Leaford.

His sister, Heather, more chronic than demonic, had been in and out of jail the way Mary was on and off diets. As a teenager
she’d been brought home by the police twice, run off with a man twice her age after graduation, returned pregnant and drug-addicted
when her father died, banished again after a hair-pulling fight with her mother and some years later arrested for prostitution
in Toronto. When beautiful tragi-thin Heather wasn’t jonesing for a smoke she was following some other destructive path, which
embittered Mary because, without even trying, Heather had it all. The last time Gooch spoke to Heather, she was living in
Buffalo with the paramedic who’d resuscitated her after her last accidental overdose.

The stained silver broadloom. The broken glass. The bloody dishtowel on the floor. Nothing as it was, nothing as it should
be. Mary denied her fear, scrambling what was left in the egg carton, six perfect eggs, telling herself that the extra portion
was in case Gooch arrived hungry. At the kitchen table she sat in his chair rather than her own, so as not to face his empty
seat, and so that she could see the door.

Many years ago, she’d suggested Orin do the same after they’d placed her mother at St. John’s, and he confessed he’d lost
his appetite. She understood that the habit of eating together must be as difficult to break as the habit of eating alone.
As she shifted the last of the eggs from the skillet to her plate, worry stung her throat, and she wondered briefly if she
might cry. She swallowed instead, another habit too difficult to break.

A
good
cry. Appropriate under the circumstances. Tears, snot, choke, gulp, whimper, whine. But not for Mary. Crying, like traveling,
a pointless journey to an uncertain place where she couldn’t speak the language and wouldn’t like the food. Even after her
hysterectomy and the hysteria suggested therein, Mary had not cried for the babies that would never be. She’d endured a premature
and instant transit to menopause, aching and paining, flashing with heat, sweating in bed, but not weeping. Grief stuck like
a lump in her throat.

Digging into the junk drawer, she found the little white box with the little gold bow that Gooch had given her on her birthday
last March. A cellular phone. She’d been annoyed by the gift, considering he knew she didn’t
want
a mobile phone. Instead of thank you she’d said, “You know I won’t use this, hon. I won’t remember to put it in my purse.
Besides, who do I need to call?”

Opening the box now, she was surprised to find a card addressed to her. Inside the card Gooch had written carefully,
Welcome to the new world, Mary Gooch. I have written cellphone instructions for connect-o-phobes along with your own personal
telephone number on a card you can keep in your wallet. You have to plug it in to charge it, Mare. And you have to keep it
in your purse so you’ll have it when you need it. Happy Birthday from your favorite husband.

Reading Gooch’s instructions, she discovered that the phone needed to be plugged into an adaptable charger and the battery
energized for the better part of a day. She plugged the phone in, delighted when it proclaimed,
Charging
. Gooch would be proud, she thought, and suddenly felt the weight of his disappointment, which she hadn’t noticed at the time.
How could she have been so ungrateful? She envied the French singer who regretted nothing. She regretted all.

The willow shivered a greeting as Mary limped out the seldom-used front door, dressed for work in her rumpled uniform, her
hair gathered into a pony tangle, a stack of old towels in the crook of her arm for the wet seat in the truck. She started
for the truck but her attention was caught by a flag of fabric flapping on a high tree branch. Gooch’s shirt. Wearing her
old winter boots to accommodate the sanitary napkin she’d taped to her bleeding heel, she turned to scan the distant road.

Inhaling the cold air, Mary wished idly, the way children do, that she could blink and Gooch would be on that road. The wind
whipped her face, blowing damp leaves against her legs. She had the sense that she was moving uphill when she was certainly
staggering down. She climbed into the pickup truck, a tight, crushing feeling in her chest, blood rushing to her cheeks. She
squinted, peering through her vascular tunnels. No lights at the other end. The massive coronary? The timing would be perfect.
The triangle could close. Orin. Mr. Barkley. Mary Gooch.

She wondered if Gooch, wherever he had gone, would return for her funeral. Then she realized, with familiar panic, that she
did not have a thing to wear. There was nothing to do but laugh out loud, which she did. Nothing to wear but her navy blue
scrubs. An image of a large woman in an oversized casket, hands crossed over her Raymond Russell Drugstore uniform, those
hideous silver roots. She hit the button on the radio, and cranked up the volume, encouraged by Aretha Franklin demanding
R-E-S-P-E-C-T as she urged the truck into gear and rolled out on the rain-slicked gravel.

She had underestimated the dampness of the truck’s upholstery, and realized too late that she hadn’t brought enough towels.
She planned to make some joke about her wet ass in the staff room, before Ray said something behind her thick, hunched back.
Acceptance. Denial. Anger. She couldn’t remember the order of emotions and so felt them all at once. She wondered if people
would be able to tell, just by looking, that her husband had not come home.

In the beginning, Mary’d thought often of the end. She envisioned stepping into the house one evening after work to find a
note written in Gooch’s scrawl saying he’d never meant to hurt her, reminding her they’d been too young to get married and
should have ended it a long time ago. His clothes would be gone from the closet. His tools from the garage. (She always imagined
he’d take his tools with him.) He would have given some thought to how they would divide their debt, and mentioned it in the
note. She had worried that Gooch would leave after the second miscarriage, then after the hysterectomy. She was certain he
would leave after their only vicious quarrel, when he stood firm in his opposition to adoption, arguing that his crazy, drug-addicted
sister had given three babies up, as if that were enough said.

She had shouted at him, in the only dramatic gesture she could honestly recall,
But I want to be a mother!
He’d turned on his heel and left, but returned three hours later, catching her with her nose in the Kenmore, tearing the
leftover roast beef out of her fingers, kissing her hard on the mouth and guiding her to their bed, where he held her gaze
and whispered, before his final thrust, “I love you.”

Anniversary after anniversary Gooch stayed. After a while she stopped expecting the note. She assumed that, like Orin, Gooch
was content to be where he was. Or maybe—like her with her food, Gooch’s father with the booze, Heather with her drugs—the
habit of their union had become, over time, an impossible one to break.

The phrase “neither here nor there” came to mind when Mary considered her present state. She wondered if she might find Irma
somewhere in this altered universe as she drove the path to work—the one of least resistance, a shortcut back through the
county instead of along the serene river road.

The maple trees shook their red and yellow leaves over Main Street Leaford. Hooper’s Hardware Store. Sprague’s Sporting Goods.
The upscale ladies’ clothing shop owned by the Lavals. Raymond Russell’s Drugstore, whose soda counter had been transformed
years ago into a more lucrative cosmetics department. In the parking lot behind the drugstore, watching Ray pull up beside
her in his shiny Nissan, Mary remembered a time when no one in Baldoon County drove anything but North American. Ray honked
the horn impatiently, rolled down the window and barked, “Not there! Go in your regular spot!”

She cranked down her own window, calling back, “But the Laura Secord’s coming in today!”

Ray shouted through the wind, “They changed the schedule. It came in last night. When you were off.”

Threatening sky overhead and the wind bearing down on her from the open sunroof, Mary climbed out of the truck. Laughing richly,
she turned to present her wide, soggy behind. “My seat was wet,” she explained. “From the rain.”

Ray, scowling, barely glanced her way. “Good. How’s Gooch?”

She paused. “He’s got the pink eye.”

“And what have
you
got, Mary?” He pulled open the back door and snapped the toggles on the master switch, igniting the fluorescent tubes above
their heads.

“Watch yourself,” he warned as she followed him inside. Blocking the aisle was a large carton of assorted chocolates on which
the supplier had scribbled in thick black marker,
For Mary Gooch
. Mary shuddered from a pain in her gut. “Will you do something with that before somebody kills themselves?” he demanded.

Mary bent to pick up the box but they both knew it was only a pretense. Ray sniffed his contempt and lifted it himself, dropping
the cartons into Mary’s arms without gallantry.

“Sorry,” Mary said, thinking that if she were Candace, Ray would carry the box the full distance to her car, balanced on his
squat little erection.

The back door to the pharmacy banged shut from the gusting wind as Mary toted the chocolates out to the parking lot. She lifted
it into the passenger seat, wincing from the gas in her gut which she tried to, but could not, release. She turned when she
heard a car. A sleek gold Cadillac, Gooch’s boss, Theo Fotopolis, at the wheel. She squeezed her buttocks together, afraid
to foul the air as he parked in the spot beside her.

Theo Fotopolis removed his swarthy frame from the car and strode toward Mary in her navy scrubs. “I called the house,” he
said, smiling warmly. “Nobody answered so I drove out.”