The Amateur Marriage (12 page)

After that, it took no more than an instant to settle on what to wear. She slipped on a full white skirt and zipped the zipper, stepped into a pair of medium-heeled pumps, and grabbed her purse from the amoeba-shaped plastic chair in the corner. “I’m off,” she told Michael as she passed through the kitchen. He was playing Go Fish at the kitchen table with George and Lindy. Karen, who had just awakened from her nap, sat on his lap, sucking her thumb and dreamily twining a curl around one chubby index finger. Pauline said, “There are cookies for the kids in the cookie jar, and chocolate milk in the fridge if they want it.”

“Who was that on the phone?” Michael asked.

“Phone?”

“The telephone.”

“Oh. Well. That was Wanda.”

“Wanda! You’re just about to see her in person!”

“So?”

“You were talking to her for ages!”

“You know how women are,” Pauline said, and she gave him a breezy wave and walked out.

Their car was a 1940 Dodge Special—a dull-black, turtle-shaped model inherited from her father when he moved up to a pale-pink Deluxe after the war. Michael hadn’t even known how to drive when they got it. Pauline had had to teach him. He’d been almost too good a student. Now any time she drove him to work he found fault with her gear shifting or wondered aloud why she revved the engine so hard. After she had shot backwards into the street and braked a little too sharply, not having noticed an approaching station wagon until it honked, she winced and glanced toward the house. But Michael must not have heard, because he didn’t appear at the window.

She meandered through the curving streets of Elmview Acres and out the gate, took a wrong turn, corrected herself, and eventually ended up on Loch Raven, where she could settle behind a bus and relax into a daydream. Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

Last Christmastime, she and Michael had attended a dinner party so large that their hostess had had to rent an extra table for the dining room. Married couples were separated, the wife at one table and the husband at the other, and it so happened that Alex had been seated next to Pauline. Partway through the dinner, he leaned toward her and asked if she’d noticed that theirs was the frivolous table. “Frivolous?” she repeated, and he said, “Yes, our table’s telling jokes, but the other one’s talking politics. They’re the sober half of these marriages and we’re the jolly half.”

It was true, she saw. Jack Casper, on her left, was in the midst of a very funny story about his three-year-old’s visit to Santa, while his wife at the other table was attacking the Israeli Parliament’s relocation to Jerusalem. When their own table erupted in laughter at the punch line of Jack’s story, Alex told Pauline, “See?” and of course everybody wanted to know, “See what?”

He said, “We’re the fun-loving ones. The other table’s the responsible ones, the ones who balance the household accounts and tell us we can’t afford that vacation trip we wanted.”

Then the other table got wind of the discussion and joined in—Jack’s wife protesting that they were fun-loving too; just because they’d been speaking seriously didn’t mean they weren’t. “But after all,” she pointed out, “certain things are more important than fun, you have to admit.”

Alex said, “They are?”

“I mean, you’ve got to accept reality.”

“Reality!” Alex echoed in horror, and Jack Casper leapt to his feet, shouting, “Never! Never!” and pumped both fists in the air above his head. The rest of their table cheered and clapped, while the other table watched blankly.

Was that when Alex Barrow began to occupy Pauline’s thoughts?

Oops. Somehow, she had arrived downtown. She should have taken a left back there. And the next street she came to had a sign reading No Left Turn; so she took a right instead. Then a left after that. But now where was she? She seemed to have gotten confused.

After another left, though, the scenery grew more familiar. She entered a hodgepodge of stores and houses, the stores’ signs often Greek or Polish or Czech, the houses’ stoops scrubbed white as soap bars and their parlor windows displaying artificial flowers, dolls dressed in native costumes, plaster Madonnas with their arms outstretched in blessing. Black-garbed, kerchiefed old women plodded down the sidewalks laden with knobby shopping bags. Little girls played hopscotch or jacks; older girls in spaghetti-strapped sundresses sashayed past groups of teenaged boys and pretended not to hear their whistles.

Pauline had been right to urge Michael to leave this place. Life here was so jumbled, so gnarled and knotted and entangled.

The canasta party was at Katie Vilna’s. It always was, because Katie was a divorcee—the only one of them free to have her girlfriends over any time she liked without a husband’s barging in. She and her son lived in the apartment where she had grown up, above Golka’s Barber Shop. As Pauline was maneuvering her car into a very obstinate parking space out front, she saw Wanda and her sister-in-law, Marilyn Bryk, walking toward her. She tapped her horn and they stopped to wait for her—Wanda square-hipped and dowdy in a flowered dress with cap sleeves, Marilyn (a New Jersey girl) more fashionable in a bouffant-skirted shirtwaist. “Okay, you’re almost in,” Wanda called. “Just swing her to the left a bit . . . back, back . . . whoa!”

Pauline cut the engine and stepped out of the car, leaving all her windows open because it was so much hotter here. “Hi, there!” she said. “Don’t you look cute in that hairdo, Marilyn!” (She was speaking from a protective impulse, because actually Marilyn’s hairdo—a tightly curled, skull-hugging poodle cut—made her face seem too big.) Each woman set an arm around Pauline in a brief embrace, and then the three of them entered the door to the right of the barber’s.

The stairs inside were narrow and steep, with corrugated rubber treads, and the walls had not been painted for so long that the white had turned custard-yellow. When Katie flung open the door to her apartment, though, it was a whole other story. She had replaced her parents’ dark furniture with the very latest style, all in an automotive motif. Bands of chrome trimmed every edge, the cushions were covered in tangerine vinyl, and the rounded corners gave each piece an aerodynamic sleekness. “Come in! Come in!” she said. “You’re late! I was starting to think you’d forgotten!”

Katie had aged the best of any of them, in Pauline’s opinion. She still had her figure, and the hardships she had been through—the hasty marriage, “premature” baby, and contentious divorce—had given her face an intriguingly embittered look. Of the four women, she was the only one in slacks (capri pants in a chartreuse tropical print). The others seemed overdressed by comparison.

“Donald’s at my aunt’s,” she told them. “She’s keeping him for the night because I’ve got a date this evening and I figured I might as well take him there early and be done with it.”

A date! Imagine. The old ladies in the neighborhood shook their heads over Katie, thankful that her parents weren’t around to see how she’d turned out, but Pauline thought her life was fascinating. The ex-husband was heir to a brewing fortune in Milwaukee, and his alimony payments were how Katie could afford her new furniture and her clothes. She could even buy a better house, if she wanted, and Pauline couldn’t see why she didn’t. Pauline was always urging Katie to move out to Elmview Acres.

To be honest, the canasta game was only an excuse. It was true that they settled immediately around the folding table, and Marilyn shuffled the cards, and Wanda cut the deck . . . but meanwhile, they were talking a mile a minute. Katie’s upcoming date was an unknown, the brother of a friend; not much material there, at least for now. But she did have news of Janet Witt. Janet was living out in Hollywood, California, of all places. She had married a set designer twenty years her senior. And then Wanda reported receiving a letter from Anna Grant, Pauline’s old school friend, whom Pauline herself had just about lost touch with except for Christmas cards. “Does everybody know that Anna’s pregnant?” Wanda asked. “Finally! You remember she wanted to get her music degree first, but now at long last she’s expecting—in early September, she says.” Which reminded the others to ask Pauline about her sister. “She’s three weeks overdue, going on a month,” Pauline said. “Bigger than a house, and about to lose her mind.”

“Which is this, her third?” Katie asked.

“Her fourth. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

“I told Lukas,” Marilyn said, “I told him, ‘God gave me two hands, only two, to walk my children across the street with. There’s a message there,’ I said.”

“Well, sure, if you can follow it,” Wanda told her. (She herself had five daughters.) “Things don’t always go the way you plan them.”

“Isn’t
that
the truth,” Pauline said, and everybody smiled at her, because they’d been the ones who had to console her when she found she was pregnant with Karen. As a girl she had wanted lots of children, but she had changed her mind after those hard early years with the first two so close together.

“I’ll never forget,” Wanda said, “the summer I was expecting Claire and nobody knew it yet, and my mother-in-law kept bringing me vegetables to put up and I would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not able to at this time of the month,’ because I hated, hated, hated canning and Mother Lipska held to that old-time belief that women shouldn’t preserve food on those certain days. She would say, ‘Still?’ and go away tut-tutting. Once she asked if I thought I should see a doctor. And then when she found out later that I’d been pregnant all along . . . !”

They laughed, even though they had heard that story before. There was something comforting about going over and over each other’s memories until they seemed like their own.

Marilyn was dealing. “One, one, one, one,” she said. “Two, two, two, two”—laying out each card meticulously, pausing now and then to take a puff of the cigarette that rested in the ashtray standing between her and Katie. Pauline checked her cards as she got them, but the others left them lying facedown while they went on with their conversation.

What they didn’t know, she thought (moving a three of spades next to a four of spades), was that Karen had not actually been an out-and-out mistake. She was the result of a reconciliation—Pauline and Michael flinging themselves together wildly, almost crazily, after one of their terrible fights, letting what happened happen, in fact wanting it to happen, at least at that particular instant. Was that why Karen was the sweetest-natured of the three children? A love child, Pauline called her in her mind. Even though she knew that a love child was something else entirely.

“Eleven,” Marilyn announced at last, and the rest of them picked up their cards.

Nor did Pauline mention Alex Barrow at any point. First off, they wouldn’t have known who he was. But also, she regretted dropping his name at the pool. So she kept quiet, much quieter than usual, and listened more than she talked. She listened to what Wanda’s husband had said about the new carpet; then to what Marilyn’s husband had said about her golabki—both remarks insulting, so that the other women gave scandalized little gasps of laughter. (Never mind that Marilyn’s husband was Wanda’s brother. In this room, he was The Opposite Side.) Did
all
wives believe they had chosen the wrong course?

When they had finished their game, drunk their coffee, eaten the last of the little sugared pastries from Kostka Brothers and wiped their fingers on Katie’s jazzy Miro-print napkins, it was Pauline who made the first move to leave. “Oh, not yet!” the others cried, but she said, “I’ve got a drive ahead, remember. And no doubt the Anxiety Committee will be wringing his hands at the window.” So they let her go, with hugs and pats and promises to phone.

She descended the wooden stairs feeling the faint sense of bereavement that always overtook her when she parted from her girlfriends.

As usual, the trip home seemed to take less time than traveling in the other direction. And certainly she had less trouble finding her way. Before she knew it she was back on Loch Raven, speeding northward, rolling her window almost shut to stop her hair from blowing. She had a tune repeating in her brain, something her children liked to sing that she hummed in disjointed snatches.
I’m sorry, playmates, I cannot play with you . . .

The entrance to Elmview Acres was a double wrought-iron gate that always stood open, rising in two graceful curves from two square brick pillars. On the right-hand pillar, a black-and-brass sign read
ELMVIEW ACRES, EST
. 1947.

She turned right on Santa Rosa, passing the pool, which was unpopulated now except for the lifeguard silhouetted against the sunset on his high white chair; passing the clubhouse with its glass-encased bulletin board out front (bridge classes, child study classes, Garden Club workshops). She turned right on Beverly Drive and then, for the second time that day, she took an unpremeditated left onto Candlestick Lane.

If he happened to be in his yard, she would stop and roll down her window and call out some friendly question about the progress of his meat loaf. If he was not in his yard, she would drive on.

He was not in his yard. But she didn’t drive on.

She slowed and came to a halt and studied the front of his house. It was a very unrevealing house. The front door was solid, without even the smallest glass panes. The giant picture window was shielded by white fabric so textureless and opaque that it might have been some sort of liner, like the waterproof inner curtain on a shower stall.

She turned off the ignition and got out of the car. She marched up the front walk in a businesslike manner, her purse clamped under her arm—a woman just doing her duty.