Celestial Navigation (10 page)

I wonder if maybe he is never planning to write at all. If he is dead, or has left home himself, or is so angry he plans to drive to Baltimore and wait in person beside my post office box until I come looking for letters. The minute I enter the building every day, my eyes fly to the corner where my box is. No Guy. No letter. I take Darcy by the hand and turn away, feeling relieved, but meanwhile there are all these unused words backed up in my throat: “Oh Guy, I wish you hadn’t come. I won’t go back with you no matter what, you’re only wasting your …”

It’s true I wouldn’t go back. It just isn’t in me. Even if it doesn’t work out with John, even if there is nowhere else to turn. I can’t explain why. After all, what did Guy ever do to
me? He worked hard, made a home, took good care of us. But I stopped loving him. I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world. There are arguments for both sides; I see that. But I made my choice. “Come away with me,” John said. “We love each other, why waste your life? Where is your spirit of adventure?” The first time he said it, he took my breath away with shock. The second time it seemed more possible. He planted a thought in me that grew when he was not around, so that when he stayed away a whole week and then returned I was praying for him to ask me again. It looked as if he might have forgotten. He played all morning with Darcy, didn’t give me a glance. When lunchtime arrived he stood up, still not looking at me, not even touching my hand. “Are you coming?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

To keep Darcy quiet a while I gave her some blunt-nosed scissors and a magazine. I sat on the bed beside her, cross-legged. I pretended that we were in a house that John had built for us, and he was off at work but would be coming home shortly for supper. I even planned what I would cook for him. I love to cook. Lately we have been living on things from cans, heated in Mr. Pauling’s miserable kitchen, and I am starved for the smell of herbs and baking bread. I planned the meal by smells alone: hot dilled biscuits, roast beef, a fresh green salad. John would open the door and the smells would curl around him and draw him in. We would sit down at a table with a white linen cloth, in a house that was stable, calm, warm, clean, built to shelter us a lifetime. It would never even occur to me to run away again.

I cut out squares of paper to make Darcy a dollhouse. I showed her how to Scotch-tape them together. I cut an oval
rug and gave it to her to color, and then we made curtains from a flowered shopping bag. Darcy bent over them with her tongue between her teeth, concentrating. The back of her neck was like a little curved stem, and I kept wanting to reach out and touch it but I didn’t.

You hear a lot about teenaged wives, how they’re bound to fail, but nobody mentions teenaged mothers. They are the best in the world; I’m convinced of that. While the neighbor women were nagging their children not to get the house dirty, I was down on the floor playing with mine. I carried her piggyback wherever I went; I dressed up in old clothes with her, read her my favorite storybooks, fixed tea for her dolls. Instead of shipping her off to nursery school I had other children come visit, and sometimes I felt as if I were running a nursery school myself. Six and seven children would stampede through the kitchen, playing tag or hide-and-seek, with me always It. On rainy days we made picnic lunches and ate them on the dining room floor. Gloria said, “Honey, you spoil that child. She won’t know how to amuse herself when her brothers and sisters start coming along.” I never told her about Guy’s not wanting more children. I kept hoping he would change his mind. But he said, “Ain’t this one taking all your time as it is? What you want to go and ruin your figure for?” He said that every time I brought it up. He never changed.

I would stand in front of the mirror and see how wide-hipped and expansive I was, how tall I loomed, bigger than life,
full
of life, with not enough people to pour it into. My world had turned out narrow after all—different from my parents’, but just as narrow. I looked out the front window and watched the people walking by, and I wanted to climb into every single one of them and be carried off to some new and foreign existence. I pictured myself descending from the sky, all wheeling arms and legs, to sink invisibly into their heads
and ride home with them, to see how they arranged their furniture and who their friends were, what they fought about, what made them cry, where they went for fun and what they ate for breakfast and how they got to sleep at night and what they dreamed of. And having found out, I would leave; on to the next one. I wanted to marry a mad genius and then a lumberman and then somebody very rich and cold and then a poet who would dedicate his every word to me and who would have a nervous breakdown when I left him. Which I would do, of course. As soon as I had been absorbed into his world, as soon as it stopped feeling foreign; on to the next one. I didn’t guess back then that moving on would hurt so.

What would Guy have said if he’d known what I dreamed? His idea of change was to take in a movie on Saturday night. His greatest joy was attending motorcycle rallies. Hours and hours in someone’s hot cow pasture, with me trying to pick out the cloud of dust that was Guy from among a lot of other clouds. When I refused to go any more, he went alone. He was gone overnight, weekends. “That son of mine should stay at home more,” Gloria used to say, but I didn’t mind. It seemed to be part of the pattern that I had married into; the other women’s husbands didn’t stay home either. They were off bowling, or drag-racing, or playing billiards. On summer evenings we would pool all our children and go to Roy’s for hamburgers, which we ate at one of the outdoor tables—a double line of women and children, not a man among us. All the women laughing and scolding and mopping spilled drinks, filling every corner of their world. Then when Guy came home again his boots jarred the house and his bass voice took me by surprise, and when he plucked Darcy out from her dolls she squirmed and looked at me for reassurance, as if he were a stranger.

Which he had been, once upon a time. He was more a
stranger than any boy I’d met. It wasn’t his fault that we finally got to know each other.

I walked with Darcy to the post office and we dawdled every step of the way. I was hanging back, hunting up excuses never to arrive at all. And when we got there, sure enough, a slanted blade of paper was showing through the window. One of my own envelopes, pale blue. It gave me a shock to see it. “Now can we go to the park?” Darcy asked. “No, wait,” I told her. We were supposed to meet John there at noon. I didn’t want him to watch me reading this letter. I leaned against a counter and tore open the envelope. The letter itself was written in pencil, on several sheets of the pulpy gray paper I kept for Darcy to draw on. Every word was smudged over. Guy is left-handed; his hand rubs what he has just written as it travels across the paper. I could picture him at the kitchen table with his hair falling over his forehead, his shoulders hunched with the effort of writing.

I put the letter back in the envelope and slipped it into my purse. I took Darcy by the hand. She said, “Mom, can I buy a popsicle?” “Maybe later, baby,” I said. I led her down the steps, out into the sunshine that was baking the sidewalk, but inside I felt cold and hard and dark like a stone. I looked into a store window and saw my reflection and thought, There goes a black widow spider taking her daughter to the park. The whole world looked different. A different set of colors even, and bigger and flatter. When we got to the park I saw John on a bench and he seemed to have changed too. He wore a black suit with a white shirt; he was all black and white. The grass behind him was such a washed-out shade of green that I hardly recognized it. Some kind of cold white gauze was laid across everything. “What’s the matter?” John said. “Nothing,” I told him. I reached out to touch his sleeve. I thought, You are my only support. I am certain I love you. Certainly with
you
I won’t fail. “Race you to that tree,” John told Darcy, and they were off like two jittery birds. I was the only still thing in the landscape. I stood clutching my purse to my stomach, stone still. Yet when the two of them had touched base and returned to me, and John said, “Shall I take you out to eat?” I was able to smile the same as ever. I said, “That would be nice.”

We went to a delicatessen where he said they made wonderful sandwiches. It was cafeteria-style—a dangerous place to take Darcy. She always thinks she wants everything she sees. When we reached the cash register her tray was overflowing, and the lady who rang it up said, “Somebody’s eyes are bigger than their stomach.” Then she winked at me. What would she say if I grabbed both her hands and begged to go home with her?

Once we were seated John started acting nervous, tearing bits of bread off his sandwich and rolling them into balls. I wondered if he had noticed something odd about me. I would
have to tell him
sometime
. I leaned forward and said, “I got an answer to that letter today.”

John said, “You did?”

“He won’t give me a divorce.”

John smiled, with the corners of his mouth turned down. “It seems we’re beset with troubles from all sides,” he said.

“All sides?”

“Carol has moved back into the house.”

I looked over at Darcy. She was separating her sandwich to get at the mayonnaise. I wanted to tell her not to waste a bite of it, eat all she could hold, take the rest home in a doggy bag; now we were going to starve. John said, “Well, it’s not so bad. You know Carol, she’ll tire of it soon enough. I couldn’t just throw her out of the house, could I?”

“You could move out yourself,” I said.

“Well, yes. Yes. In fact I will, but my studio is there. I can’t just up and leave my studio. What I’m counting on is her changing her mind, by and by. I’m certain she’ll leave again.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked him.

“She operates on
whims
, Mary. She goes through fads. She’ll get over it. Right now she’s taken with the idea of being a homebody again. Says she wants to settle down, have children, grow vegetables. For Carol that’s ludicrous, I told her straight—”

“Children?” I said. “You got as far as talking about
children?”

“Carol
did, I said.”

“You said she couldn’t have any children.”

“Oh, well, she’s talking now about going to a doctor for some tests. Wants me to get tested too.”

“What would they test you for?”

“To see if it’s me that can’t have them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s hardly ever the man.”

“Fifty per cent of the time it is.”

I stared at him.

“Why, sure,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I’m not going, don’t worry,” he told me. He laid his hand over mine. “You’ll see, in a week she’ll move out again.”

“But—what about now? I mean, how are you arranging it? Where is she sleeping?”

“Mary. Look. There’s nothing to get upset about. I’m here with you eating lunch, aren’t I? I won’t let you down. Whatever happens, I think of you as my responsibility. Believe me.”

“Responsibility,” I said.

“I’ve been through a lot for your sake, Mary. I’m jeopardizing my divorce, I’ve given up motorcycle rallies—”

“Well! Are you sure I’m worth the sacrifice?”

“Be reasonable, will you?”

Reasonableness was why I left with him. He was so reasonable and cool; life with him would be so different. I said, “Tell me something. Why did you ask me to come away with you?”

“Now, Mary—”