The Wife's Tale (18 page)

As she limped toward the gate to wait for her flight Mary was overcome by dizziness, and stopped at a shop to purchase a granola
bar, which she would eat directly, and an apple to save for the plane. There was a wall of magazines—sports mags, home decor,
celebrity news, health and fitness—which she glanced at briefly, deciding that she didn’t really need to know who had the
best or worst beach body, and no longer cared if that beautiful couple adopted another refugee child. She moved toward the
book section, basing her choice of three novels on cover art and rhapsodic reviews.

Having already endured a lengthy wait, she did not groan like the other passengers when the announcement over the loudspeaker
apologized that the flight would be delayed another hour. What did it matter? An hour. Two hours. A day. Mary wasn’t expected.
Neither did she have expectations. What was it to journey to an uncertain place if not an adventure? She’d never had an adventure
before. It was high time. That was what her sister-in-law had meant.

Mary rolled down the passageway to the plane and squeezed down the aisle toward her seat at the back. She could see what the
other travelers were thinking; people were being charged for excess baggage, and she was getting away with something. Worse,
they were already hours late leaving and the fat nurse was making them later.
Yes,
she thought, repelling their stares,
I am late. I am fat. There but for the grace of God go you.

When she reached her row, she found that her seat was in the middle, the space far too small for a woman of her girth. She
would be spilling out of it, claiming breathing room from the sullen young man at the window, and the exotic woman with the
smooth brown skin and the diamond in her nostril. The young man drew his trim body toward the molded wall when she crammed
herself into the spot, and quickly plugged his ears with the white buttons from his music player. There was much ado over
the fastening of her seat belt, as she was sitting on one end of it and couldn’t see around herself to find the other. The
brown woman, who’d risen to allow her passage, shifted the ball of lavender satin she held and found Mary’s belt, but it was
impossible to buckle, since the previous occupant had not been morbidly obese. Mary panicked, trying to connect the too-short
belts.

Careful not to spill the contents of her lap, the brown woman reached over Mary, extending the belt as far as it would go,
with just barely enough of the strapping to join over her expanse. When the buckle clicked, the woman flashed a set of blinding
white teeth. Mary smiled back and whispered confidentially, “This is my first flight.” The woman nodded in a way that made
it clear she didn’t understand English.

The captain welcomed the passengers aboard the flight, which Mary found charming until they were informed that there would
be another delay, whose cause she could not hear over the cusses and groans. The brown woman stared serenely ahead, resting
her arms on her lavender pillow. The young man beside her found a small electronic device in his coat pocket—one of those
BlackBerrys, Mary guessed, or iPhones—and began working his thumbs furiously over the keys.

Mary reached into her vinyl purse and extracted one of the novels, each of whose covers had promised laughter and tears. She
began to read and, finding a masterful storyteller behind its pages, was instantly and gratefully transported to another place.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there—she’d been somewhere else altogether, with a fictional family on a journey
to experience the redemptive power of love—when finally the aircraft started to move.

As the airplane taxied to the runway, Mary found it peculiar that she didn’t find it peculiar to be squished into a tiny airplane
seat preparing to be transported to a whole separate world that was
not
fictional, and set down her book as the plane found speed, then rose off the ground. She felt her stomach drop as it climbed
into the still black yonder, thrilled by the banking loop it took toward the wide glass lake. She’d never ridden a roller
coaster, but imagined the gut-churning excitement was not dissimilar to what she felt watching the city fall away, with the
itch to scream
No!
and
Yes!
at once. Mary Gooch was leaving, not just leaving Leaford, but her country, for the first time in her life.
Goodbye Canada,
she heard herself think, and was struck numb by a fear that she might never return.

My home and native land.
She’d never thought to ask herself what Canada meant to her, the sovereign nation whose proximity to the U.S.A. (at least
according to Gooch) infected a portion of the country, like an envious little brother or a disaffected sidekick, with an oft-debated
inferiority complex.

Hockey. Gun control. The French. Back bacon. Beer. National health care. A lingering fondness for the British monarchy. She
ran over the long list of sports heroes and celebrities who hailed from the Great White North, though many had admittedly
found their fame and fortune outside her friendly borders. Gooch would have named a thousand other characteristics that helped
define the country, and she realized with some sense of shame that, with her lack of political curiosity, she had as little
grasp of the world she was leaving as of the one she was about to enter. She’d taken Canada for granted, like the steadfastness
of Tomorrow.

She paused a moment to glance at the faces of the passengers across the aisle. An Asian woman with her teenage son, and a
glamorous bone-thin blonde Mary took for an aspiring actress or model bound for Hollywood, all of them staring ahead dreamily
with plugs in their ears. Together. Alone. They had already left.

When the craft reached cruising altitude and a silver beverage cart was pushed down the aisle by two comely stewards, the
exotic woman tapped Mary on the shoulder and pointed at the restrooms behind them. She gestured to the pillow in her lap,
which she appeared to be asking Mary to hold while she was gone. Mary reached out her hands, wondering why the woman didn’t
just leave her pretty pillow on the seat, then felt the weight of the bundle and the heat of it and saw a tiny brown baby,
hardly bigger than a rump roast, sleeping soundly within the satiny folds.

As the woman hurried to the restroom, Mary lifted the infant to the hill of her stomach, trembling. She’d never held a baby—white,
brown, squirming, sleeping, wailing or calm. She had demurred, as with the boxes of damaged chocolates at Raymond Russell’s,
when babies were passed her way, waving them off with a smile.
I couldn’t.
Wendy, Patti and Kim had all offered up their drooling progeny, but even Wendy hadn’t pressed too hard. They had assumed
Mary’s pain and had understood her envy. Gooch knew the truth, though—that she was terrified of such fragile creatures. He’d
promised, “You won’t be afraid when it’s your own.”

The preponderance of stories in magazines about overweight women who gave birth without ever knowing they were pregnant had
once inspired Mary Gooch. After the two early miscarriages, and in spite of the couple’s frequent copulation, there’d been
no swollen breasts, no morning nausea. Nothing but the trips to Dr. Ruttle’s office, and to the specialist in London who couldn’t
find anything wrong except the problem of her accumulating pounds. Her menstrual cycle was irregular, a fact blamed on her
weight, so missed periods were no true indicator, and when in her mid-thirties she first felt the cramping pain in her pelvis
and counted that it had been seven months since her last period, she wondered if she was to be one of those fabled fat women
just walking down the street or trying on shoes at the Kmart one day, who suddenly collapsed and birthed a perfectly good,
if unexpected, baby. She imagined her picture on the front of the
Leaford Mirror
. A dubious distinction, but she wouldn’t have cared.

A knotty collection of fibroid tumors, not a fetus, had caused the cramping. They were benign but troublesome, and after some
observation it was clear they had to go. Along with her faint hope.
Gone to the hospital with hemorrhage.
The loss of
the works
, as the specialist had explained to Gooch when he thought she was asleep, was as painful as the loss of her children. Mary
had been consoled by the Kenmore. And Gooch, because he had no words and was quietly mourning himself, brought éclairs from
the Oakwood and chicken from the Colonel and suggested cheeseburgers three nights in a row because he thought it might make
her smile.

Pulling back the lavender fabric, Mary found the infant’s tiny hand and stroked the soft palm, shivering when the boneless
fingers curled around her thumb. Dark matted hair, thick spreading lashes, puffy eyes, squashed nose, blistered lips. She
watched the perfect brown baby rise and fall with her labored breath, encircling him, encircled by him. She remembered the
photograph Heather had shown her. James.

Under the fabric the baby’s lean legs stiffened, and soon he was squirming vigorously. She watched him open his eyes, not
in the half-cracked way that waking adults do but suddenly, wide. She stared into the black liquid pupils, unaware that she
was smiling until the infant smiled back.

After a lengthy absence during which the child had become fussy, the brown woman returned, sporting wet circular patches on
her blouse which she tried to cover with an uncooperative shawl, holding a small bottle for the baby filled with the breast
milk she’d pumped in the bathroom. She smiled her thanks and put out her arms to take the child back.

But Mary could no more release that tiny brown baby than she could let go of her husband of twenty-five years, and she gestured
to the woman for a few minutes more. The mother seemed relieved and nodded, offering the warm bottle. Mary was unsure how
to fit so large a nipple into so tiny a mouth, and laughed when the rubber tip touched his nose and the infant drew his lips
open wide as a carp, prompting the mother to say in her uneasy English, “Hunger.”

Hunger. Food. Sustenance. Simple and perfect, and perfectly simple to recognize while holding the warm bottle to the infant’s
gulping lips. Water to flora. Sun to earth. Breath to lungs. Gooch to Mary. God to soul. She imagined Irma holding such a
bottle (she knew it had not been a breast) to her own tiny mouth, and wondered when food had lost its divinely simple purpose,
for her or for anyone like her, including the blonde anorexic in the row beside. At what point had food ceased to nourish
and sought to torture?

The baby closed his eyes, still drinking from the bottle as he rode the wave of Mary’s gut. She thought of Wendy’s and Kim’s
and Patti’s children, how they’d sit together at birthday parties cramming cake into their faces and shoveling hot dogs down
their throats. Their respective parents did not seem ashamed of their glorious gluttony, but rather proud. They boasted about
this one or that one being a
good
eater, and despaired of the children who ate just enough. “I swear that boy lives on air,” Wendy had said of her youngest.

Living on air, flying through air, watching the baby’s tiny eyelids drift together and his sucking mouth surrender, Mary put
the bottle aside, prying the lavender satin from his soft, warm skin, and marveled at the body the child was heir to. Perfectly
functioning. Eat. Sleep. Love.

She glanced sideways to find the child’s mother asleep and the young man at the window with his eyes closed too. Across the
aisle the blonde anorexic was flipping through a magazine that Mary’d noticed on the shelf at the airport, whose cover crowed,
Reduce Belly Fat Today
. The woman had no fat, belly or otherwise. She might have stood in for the skeleton at an anatomy class. There the cervical
vertebrae. The radius. The ulna. The floating ribs. The woman nibbled her thumbnail. Hungry.

So what of this matter of self-acceptance? The thin wished to be thinner, the old to be young. The plain to be beautiful.
Was self-acceptance attainable only by the truly enlightened, like Ms. Bolt, or the purely self-deceptive, like Heather who’d
once told her concerned brother, with a shrug, “I need to get high, Jimmy. That’s just who I am.”

Mary recalled a truncated conversation with Gooch some fifty pounds ago, when he cautiously informed her that The Greek had
eaten cabbage soup for ten weeks and lost twenty pounds on his doctor’s orders. Gooch wrote out the recipe, which he passed
to her, sheepishly suggesting that they both give it a try, and falsely claiming that he’d put on a few himself.

“I’m sick of dieting. I’m done,” she announced, defeated, throwing the carefully written recipe into the trash. “I’m a big
girl. Maybe it’s time I just accepted that.”

Gooch took her by the shoulders, embracing her so that she couldn’t see his impatience, saying, “I just want you to be…”

She pulled away. “Thin?”

“No.”

“Healthy? Because people can be fat and fit, Gooch.”

“I know that, Mary.”

“You just want me to be something I’m not.”

“Yes.”

“
See?
”

“I want you to be happy.” He went on to insist that her weight was restricting her life, and that her condition was therefore
something not to accept but to reject. Like the drug addict. The smoker. The gambler.

“But it’s who I am,” she insisted.

“But you’re miserable.”

“But that’s because of
society
, because of the way
other
people look at me. Because of the way
you
look at me, Gooch.”

“You’re breathless from a flight of stairs. You’re tired all the time. You can never find clothes. Your joints ache.”

“I love food,” she offered weakly.

“You hate food.”

In the pause that followed, Gooch unfolded his newspaper and sat down to read. Mary wondered if he was right. She retrieved
the cabbage soup recipe from the trash, dusting off the coffee grounds, venturing, “Gooch?”

Lost in the sports pages, he barely looked up. “Do whatever you want.”