The Wife's Tale (4 page)

Not offended by Gooch’s habit but aroused, she considered briefly what it might be like to sit beside him on the bed and caress
him there, and let him run his hand over the flesh of her back, to heal with strokes and whispers the way they once had. She
craved that powerful love but felt too distinctly the message from her body, that it did not want to be touched. “I grabbed
the wrong box,” she sighed. “It’s
red
.”

Later, Gooch heard a sound in the bedroom and found her collapsed on the bed. It was not a fatal heart attack or even grief
but her stiff black dress, which had been snug at the last funeral, lodged beneath her textured mounds. Seeing her stricken
face, Gooch just squeezed his eyes and quietly left the room.

Locked in the bathroom, naked on the toilet though she had no urge to relieve, Mary had scratched her hairless thighs without
particular shame or horror. Her hunger was ever-present but her self-loathing came in waves. Clothes didn’t necessarily incite
abhorrence for her form, but more often for the tight, scratchy, lumpy articles themselves. All garments except her gray nightgown
were hateful to her skin. She had been delighted when the uniform policy was handed down at the drugstore—roomy navy pantsuits
resembling hospital scrubs, which were supposed to make the front staff look more professional, and in which they all looked
like hell.

The women at the drugstore had griped about the uniforms—especially Candace, with her wee waist and cantilevered breasts—but
no one had asked Mary her opinion. She had thought one sleepless night, without a ladle of self-pity, that she was, quite
literally, the elephant in the room. Her body seemed more illusory for the secrecy surrounding it. Her real weight? Her true
size? Only she knew. Hiding food. Eating in private. Feeding the hungry body to which she’d been assigned, abiding with the
frantic energy of
want
and
want more
.

Restless on the toilet, having shifted tense in what she supposed was the natural inclination of all people’s thoughts—a lobbing
back and forth between past remembrances and current anxieties—she wondered what believable emergency might excuse a daughter
from her own father’s funeral. There was a gentle knock on the door. “Mary…?”

“I’m sorry, Gooch.”

“I think this’ll work, Mare. Can I come in?” He opened the door.

The image of big Jimmy Gooch in his slender tie and pleated pants lent her the courage to rise. He presented a pair of black
slacks borrowed from their short, rotund neighbor, old Leo Feragamo, and a starched white shirt of his own, which she would
have to wear open over her only clean white T-shirt. The roots of her hair sparkled like tinsel around her full-moon face.
She propped a black wide-brimmed sunhat upon her head and did not look in the mirror again. Gooch flipped a thumb and announced
that she looked
funky
, which caused Mary’s throat to constrict.

As they drove in silence on the winding river road, Mary wondered if grief was ever a singular event, or if ghosts lurk in
any passing. She felt a parade in the death of her father: the erosion of her mother’s mind; the splintering of her marriage;
the slipping away of the babies she’d named but never known.

The day of the funeral was an unseasonably warm day in spring. Mary felt the embrace of purple lilac on the path to St. John’s
Nursing Home in Chatham, where her mother had been languishing in dementia for years. She stopped to pick a lilac bouquet
for her mother’s bedside stand, knowing that Irma wouldn’t appreciate or understand the gesture and had no sense of the events
of the day, but it cheered Mary to bring her mother flowers. The receptionist huffed, seeing the bouquet, and explained tightly
that they’d run out of vases.

Irma was parked in the common room, folded neatly into her wheelchair, silver strands teased to a height, looking more winter
shrub than human being, gazing into the distance. Mary imagined Irma turning to smile as the other patients did when their
kin came to call. She imagined herself enfolded by her mother’s cadaverous arms. The whisper of
Mary. Dear Mary.
She wished to be kissed by that gawping mouth, yearned to touch, to
be
touched, longed for a sliver of connection to the Irma who used to be, the mother who, while gently combing Mary’s locks
one day, had confided, “My mother used to tear at my tangles. Just
tear
at them. She’d hit me with the brush if I so much as breathed. I still remember that. I would never hit you with the brush.”
Or the Irma who’d remarked casually, “You have the nicest handwriting, dear.”

Orin had loved Mary in the same somewhat grudging way, but she didn’t blame her parents for her present state nor fault them
for their stingy affection. They weren’t rich with it, and gave what they could. “You get what you get and you don’t get upset,”
Orin liked to say when Mary was sulky. When he wanted her to hush up he’d pretend to pass her a tiny key and warn, “Zip it.
Lock it. Put it in your pocket.”

Pop would have hated it here, she repeated to herself, wheeling her absent mother past her moribund fellows, grateful that
St. John’s was so conveniently located across the road from Chatham’s largest funeral home. As she struggled across the walkway
with her wheezy mother and her chafed thighs, she thought of how Irma had passed in fragments, starting in her fifties, little
bits of her exiting like players off a field—long-term memory, short-term memory, recognition, reason. At least with Orin,
Mary reminded herself, she’d had the chance to say goodbye.
See ya tomorrow, Murray.

Giant Jimmy Gooch and the hunched old men were gathered outside, sharing a tin flask of some homemade concoction that one
of the relations still brewed in his garage. Gooch waved when he spied his wife pushing the remains of her mother up the ramp,
and lifted his shoulders, smiling wanly—his way of saying,
Ah, life
. Mary nodded twice and tilted her head, her way of saying,
I know
.

Ah, life.
She was moved to think how often they’d exchanged those gestures in their years together, then annoyed that Gooch hadn’t
rushed to take the chair from her swollen hands. Maybe he was too far away to see that she was drenched and breathless, and
had failed to note, in the way the parent is never the first to notice the child’s growth spurt, how truly incapable she’d
become.

Longing to grieve with her mother, while grateful to be relieved of the burden, Mary’d returned the frail creature to St.
John’s after the funeral parlor portion, before gathering at the cemetery, where Orin and Irma had joint plots in the vicinity
of the other dead Brodys. Mary had spent many sleepless hours, long before the deaths of Orin or Mr. Barkley, wishing that
her mother would die, complete a cluster or begin one, but Irma’s pulsing body was a wonder of biology, a life but not
alive
. Perhaps she didn’t count.

Shortly before he’d passed, Mary’d confided to Orin her sense of feeling stuck and unbound all at once, her failed attempts
at optimism, her sense that she could only see the glass half empty, to which he’d responded impatiently, “Forget about the
glass, Murray. Get a drink from the hose and push on.”

Birdsong scored the graveside service. Hunger pangs tore at Mary’s gut as she reflected on the liberation of her father’s
spirit by a minister who didn’t know him from a cherry pit. The man was appealing to God to receive Orin Brody’s soul, but
Mary knew that old Orin would never venture such a distance, even if he did make the cut. She imagined him a vaporous cloud
sparring with oxygen molecules in the airspace above his own headstone, content to be wherever he was, the way he’d clung
to Baldoon County all his life. Orin and Irma never saw the point in traveling, and bred a mistrust of wanderlust in their
daughter.

As to religion, Orin had been raised Catholic, a faith to which he’d never truly held so hadn’t exactly abandoned when he
married Irma, who’d been raised Christian but had ideas of her own. Irma had told Mary, when she’d inquired, that they didn’t
go to her church because it gave her bad dreams, and they didn’t go to Catholic church because the priest was a drunk. Mary
had once, as a child, watched some Christians scrubbing graffiti from the wall at the Kmart, struck by the dripping red words—
Where is God when you need her?

No, Mary thought, even Orin Brody’s vapor would never leave Leaford, but she threw up a prayer to heaven, just in case. She
lifted her eyes when several black crows passed overhead, courting the mourners’ revulsion. One of the birds descended, settling
atop the gleaming casket, strutting from head to foot and stopping to appraise Mary Gooch. She glared back with reciprocal
loathing, and felt she’d won when the bird flew away.

Finding Gooch’s eyes wet beneath their fringe of dark lash, Mary yearned to cry along with her husband. She’d felt the same
way years ago, watching him reach for a tissue as the Canadian hockey player Wayne Gretzky announced that he was leaving the
Edmonton Oilers for the L.A. Kings. And that Sunday afternoon when tears spilled from his eyes as the final scenes of
How Green Was My Valley
played out on the new TV. And the long-ago day his own father passed away, when he’d drunk a whole bottle of Southern Comfort
and wept after they’d made love. She’d admired that her husband was man enough to cry, but wondered what that made her.

She flapped her white shirt, the collar damp around her neck, and focused on her breath, or more accurately her odor,
fromage
—oddly pleasant to herself, but she’d need to swab and talc her valleys and crevasses the minute they got home from the cemetery.

The food. Hunger. Details of the wake a blessing. Napkins and plastic glasses on the card table. Casseroles on low in the
oven. Pete and Wendy were out of town but Erika and Dave and Kim and François would be there. The Rowlands, Loyers, Feragamos,
Whif-fens, Stielers, Nick Todino and his wife, Phil and Judy. Merkels wouldn’t come; they barely left the house. No one from
the Gooch side.

Gooch’s father had died after a car accident in their final year at Leaford Collegiate, and a scant year and a half later
his mother, Eden, and her new husband, Jack Asquith—a chain-smoking American whom Gooch referred to as “Jack
Asswipe
,” moved to California, where Jack owned a pet supply company in a place called Golden Hills. Eden had promised they’d still
see each other, but she’d stopped visiting at Christmas after the first few years. Mary had asked Gooch not to bother trying
to contact his tragic older sister, Heather, of no fixed address.

Gooch’s voice had grown distant. Not just on the drive home from her father’s funeral, but gradually over the days and months
and years of their marriage. She thought she heard him say, “Scatter my ashes on the golf course, Mare. Eighteenth hole. That’s
what I want.”

The early trees had just leafed out, and the April rains had greened all that was gray. Impossible not to feel
someone’s
god in the pastoral landscape. The resurrection of the black earth fields. Glory in the sun’s diving rays. The promise of
butter-drenched asparagus and field-warm strawberries. Mary watched the dappled light spray her husband’s profile, wondering
if he was mourning his own long-departed father and his gone-away mother, his athletic scholarship. He must surely think about
the babies, though their names, like curses, went unspoken.

Gooch reached above his head to yank open the testy sunroof, which would never close again. He eased his hand off the wheel
to touch her through the wool casing of Mr. Feragamo’s slacks. When his enormous fingers found the mulch of her thigh, she
stiffened. “Easy on the booze tonight, right, hon? You’ve got that run to Wawa tomorrow.”

“Come with me.” He said it so quickly that she made a pretense of not understanding, to give him a chance to retract. But
he repeated, “Come to Wawa.”

“Tomorrow?”

“It’s a beautiful drive, Mare. Take your mind off…”

“The lawyer’s appointment, though,” she countered. “And I can’t leave Mum.” She tried to catch his eye, adding, “Sorry.”

Gooch hadn’t really expected her to say yes. He’d asked the same thing a hundred times before. Come with me to Montreal. Come
with me to Burlington.
Come
with me. Come
with
me. Come with
me
. He hit the button on the radio, filling the truck with Sly & The Family Stone. “I’m gonna miss old Orin,” he said.

Mary closed her eyes and let the music take her higher.

E
ven with the breeze from the open bedroom window blowing against her damp nightgown, Mary felt no respite from the heat. And
no release from her hunger. Sweet to follow salty. A biological imperative, surely. A powerful craving driving Gooch’s face
from her thoughts, and the misery of her parents’ passing from her spirit, and the worry over the anniversary dinner from
her foremind, and the discomfort of heat from her face. Why hadn’t she grabbed that bag of Halloween candy at the checkout?
Accursed voice of restraint.

She focused on her list. Details. The silver anniversary dinner. Confirm reservations at the lake. Pick up dessert from the
Oakwood Bakery. Gooch? He would be too exhausted and miserable to go ahead with the dinner if he didn’t get home soon and
get some sleep. He was already anxious about the cost, and worried that their guests would order appetizers and pricey entrees
like surf and turf or prime rib. He’d pointed out that Kim and Wendy liked those fancy cocktails, and Pete his foreign beer.
Gooch would dread the check. Mary had already spent weeks dreading Wendy’s scrapbook, the photographic evidence of who she’d
briefly been and what she’d become.

Mary’d dutifully sifted through boxes of old photographs at Wendy’s request, tortured by her glossy image, watching herself
grow with the years until the only pictures she could find of herself were a turned-away cheek or a running rear. She’d tried
to ignore Wendy’s impatience when she’d handed over a dozen photographs, none recent and most taken in a single year, the
year she was slim. “Fine,” Wendy had said. “I’ll just have to use what I can find at home.”