The Wife's Tale (9 page)

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 rogue 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.”

“Okay.”

“And a little lipstick never hurt a girl.”

“I don’t feel well,” Mary muttered.

“And they all have a particular habit. A nasty habit.”

“A nasty habit?”

“They all do it. All of them. You won’t change that. And when you catch him at it, just pretend you didn’t see. Don’t take
it personally. That was the best piece of advice my mother gave me.”

“I really don’t feel well.”

Irma settled onto the bed. “That’s a good sign. I was sick with you the whole time. I didn’t have a second of nausea with
my other pregnancies. That’s how I knew I wouldn’t lose you.”

Mary stroked her womb, feeling the rise of bile. “Doesn’t feel good, though.”

“Lots of things don’t feel good, dear.”

She drew her legs to her stomach, finding some relief, wishing Irma would stay with her on the bed talking like this for the
remainder of the night. But just as she wished it, like a candle blown out, her mother was rising and, without meaning to
sound harsh, saying, “Now get some sleep.”

In her childhood bed in the little room in the blue bungalow where she had been raised, Mary watched the moonlight fall on
the wedding dress hanging on the back of the closet door. The dress had cost three hundred and seventy-four dollars. And the
three separate alterations to let it out, another ninety-two. Shoes, one fifty-nine. So much bread. And most of the fries
with gravy that Kim had ordered for the table. And two slices of the cake. Mary would need to spend her entire wedding day
inhaling, holding in her pregnant stomach, which she’d planned to do anyway, even though she knew there wasn’t a single guest
who didn’t already know, or hadn’t guessed at, her
condition
.

Patti, Kim and Wendy swam around her in a dizzying water ballet. Expressions of genuine concern. Sisterly advice. Sexual frankness.
The kind of friendship ritual Mary had longed for, but whose genuineness she didn’t trust. Frightening bullets of remembered
conversation—
I’d rather be dead than fat.

Some hours after she heard the scraping of kitchen chairs and the settling of Irma and Orin’s teacups in the sink, Mary was
still wide awake. She was sweating beneath her covers and shivering at the same time. She was hungry. Starving. She crept
down the hall toward the kitchen. But she was drawn by the night light in the bathroom, and paused to ponder her pale, pretty
face.

The pain was sudden and tore at her gut. Gas. She belched. She caught her breath but couldn’t leave her reflection. Mary
Gooch
. Mrs. James
Gooch
. She did not want to change her name, but had not expressed that to anyone. Irma would have rolled her eyes. Gooch’s mother
would have protested. And Gooch? She’d been afraid to hurt his feelings. How could she become Mary Gooch when she barely knew
Mary Brody?

Mary had educated herself, at the back table in the Leaford Library, with a variety of books about pregnancy, one of which
showed a weight gain table. She was already off the chart. The same book had explained the issue of incontinence, which sometimes
happened during the third trimester or after the birth, with the stretching and slackening of uterine muscles. She knew, though,
when she felt the hot trickle between her legs, that she was not peeing. Blood. She sank down to the toilet.

Although she thought it a grave dishonor to the memory of James or Liza to recall with too much detail the demise and disappearance
of that blameless soul, the memory often came unbidden to her mind. When she rose for her inspection, she could not connect
the flotsam she saw in the toilet water to the chubby dark-haired baby she’d envisioned at her breast. The baby she’d named
and was besotted with, with whom she’d already shared a lifetime of wisdom. The little boy they’d joked would be the mini-bar
to Gooch’s fridge. Or the little girl whose soft hair she would brush the way Irma had hers. Grief would visit later, in the
days and weeks ahead, but in that awful moment Mary’s instinct was to undo the undone.

She watched the swirl of red, terrified by the swiftness of her action, realizing, too late, that she hadn’t even said goodbye.
I’m sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry.
The plumbing made glugging sounds and then, as if to complete her horror, the water rose slowly back up, spilling over the
porcelain, dripping pink acid onto the tiles below. She reached for the towels, falling to her knees to stop the tide from
leaking out under the door. It was some small mercy that the plunger was nearby.

Scrubbing blood from the grout on the eve of her wedding, she saw that she could tell no one what had happened without explaining
what she’d done. She would convince herself that she had been in shock, that judgment could not be expected from, or imposed
upon, a person in shock. Still, the facts remained, as she imagined them presented, that she had unintentionally suffocated
her baby with her visceral weight,
manslaughter
, and disposed of the body, for that’s what it
must
have been, in a most gruesome fashion,
gross indignity to a corpse
.

The wedding dress on the closet door, the binder of receipts under the lingerie beside her luggage for the honeymoon in Niagara
Falls. Bloodstained towels hidden at the bottom of the trash. A cost to everything. Mary shifted under her blankets, enduring
her first fully sleepless night. She had no fever and the blood between her legs had slowed to a manageable trickle, but she
couldn’t stop shaking.

On that morning of her wedding, as on this morning twenty-five years later, she awoke to a world whose essential rotation
had shifted. She ravenously ate the blueberry waffles Irma set before her, and agreed with Orin that the bees might be a problem
even if it was warm enough to eat outdoors. No matter how much she wanted to confess what had happened, no matter that she
understood her loss could not be hidden indefinitely, she could not find the words.

She shivered into her wedding gown. Having lost a good deal of fluid in the dark night hours, the buttons fastened easily
at her waist. Irma smoothed her skirt, saying, “Don’t be a stranger here, now.”

“You and Pop’ll come out to our house sometimes too,” she returned.

Dressed and done, her dark hair piled elegantly on top of her head, Mary avoided her reflection as she bustled out of the
room. She’d eaten too much. And lost the baby because of it. But how to tell Gooch? A cost. To everything.

When he saw her moving down the short hall, Orin let out a long, low whistle, but she could see he was blinking back tears.
He was losing his baby. She had lost hers. It was the saddest day of their lives. The hot metal smell from the bloody pad
between her legs rose up from the lace and tulle. Irma clapped her hands and said, “Let’s go get this day over with.”

As he escorted his plush, blushing daughter up the church aisle, Orin whispered, “You look like a deer caught in the headlights,
Murray.
Smile
for Chrissake.” She nearly stopped then and ran back out the door, but she walked on instead, entranced by Gooch’s smiling
face until she found his hand at the altar.

She floated through the hours, a guest at her own wedding, fearful that her lie had stained her gown and that everyone, including
Gooch, was pointing at her behind her back. She would not remember the ceremony. The kiss. The pictures. The dinner. The cake.
None of it—only the sound of Heather Gooch’s tearful voice as she read the insipid love poem she’d written herself, and the
look of pain on Gooch’s face when he dipped her on the dance floor and she saw that he’d reinjured his leg.

Just before midnight, in the black Lincoln Continental borrowed from The Greek, Mary suggested that Gooch pull over in London,
where her hemorrhage was addressed in the emergency room and the doctor informed Gooch, “The baby’s been lost.”
Lost.
Like a mitten or a set of car keys. The doctor turned to Mary and patted her soft hand and never told the young groom that
his bride had miscarried the baby on the night before their wedding.

Gooch entered the drab room limping badly on the morning she was to be released from the hospital. Mary felt responsible for
his pain since he’d hurt his leg dancing, even if the dance had been at his mother’s insistence and not hers. Gooch was recovering
from his third knee surgery in the year since the accident, but Eden had warned that people would get the wrong idea if he
didn’t take to the floor with his new bride. And she wouldn’t have people walking around with the wrong idea. Not anymore.

Eden was a hard woman to ignore, with her sharp blue eyes and short black bob, her manicured nails and high-heeled shoes—a
chic beauty, conspicuous in Leaford. In the months after her husband’s tragic death she’d found Jack Asquith and Jesus and
sobriety, in that order, and even the ounce of dignity her daughter, Heather, had insisted she did not possess.

Gooch could not stomach his mother’s affection for the chain-smoking American, and liked to bait Jack over dinner, mocking
his interpretations of God’s intentions.
God
thinks.
God
thinks. “What does God think about you fornicating with my mother, Jack?”

Forgetting her own pain momentarily, seeing the strain on Gooch’s face in the hospital that morning and aware that his knee
was killing him, Mary said, “You can have one more pill every four hours, but no more than that. Okay?”

He signaled his relief. “I’ve got enough till Friday. You’ll be back to work by then.”

Dr. Ruttle had been alarmed when Gooch finished his first narcotics prescription early, and had refused to write a prescription
for any more painkillers. “Sometimes, the best thing to do with pain is endure it,” the doctor had said. The vials are under
lock and key now, but back then the excess stock was stored on the high shelf over Ray Senior’s desk at the receiving door.
Mary had stolen the pills with impunity, but a different brand and potency, so that her theft, should it ever be detected,
would not be traced to Gooch.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as Gooch approached, smoothing back the sheets on the hospital bed.

“It’s not your fault, Mare.”

“I know,” she lied. She had intended in that moment, as she would intend in moments to come, to tell him the truth about losing
the baby, but the aching loss, which she could embrace now that Gooch knew too, and the deep mourning for her very
motherhood
, which Gooch would never understand, stole her impulse back.

He settled beside her on the thin bed, wrapping her in his big arms, his voice sounding for the first time more boy than man.
“It’s for the best, right?” The affront to her baby in the doctor’s suggestion that the fetus had been less than perfect,
and so the miscarriage for
the best
, had been great, yet Gooch seemed comforted by it, while Mary felt enraged.

“Okay,” she said.

He pulled down the fabric of her hospital gown and laid his cheek on her bosom. She read his mind:
We only got married because of the baby.

“We only got married because of the baby,” she echoed. “We wouldn’t have, if I wasn’t…”

“But we did.”

“Gooch…”

“Mary,” he said. “Drinks are drunk. Music is played. Cash is counted. We’re married.”

“Your mother’d be relieved if we got annulled,” she said, noticing the small diamond solitaire on her ring finger, unable
to recall the moment Gooch had slipped it on.

“You know how much that wedding cost your old man?”

“Yes,” she answered. To the penny.

They looked out the hospital window at the raw autumn sky. Gooch’s voice massaged her shoulders. “When we had our lockers
side by side that year…”