The Amateur Marriage (35 page)

“Oh, Anna, you won’t regret it! I’m going to take such good care of you!”

And he gathered her close again.

He should have been the happiest man in the world at that moment. But even as she relaxed in his arms he felt a kind of leftover, lingering ache. It seemed that somehow this day had done some damage, not to her but to himself, or maybe to the two of them.

8. A Cooler Spot on the Pillow

It was ironic that Pauline overslept, because all night long she had wished for morning. At one point, surfacing from an edgy half-dream about a bill she’d neglected to pay, she had been relieved to see that her alarm clock read 6:10—an acceptable time to get up. But the room had seemed strangely dark, and when she checked the clock again she’d realized that it was actually 2:30. She had groaned and thrown off her blanket, turned onto her back, yawned aloud, retrieved the blanket (it was April, a betwixt-and-between time of year), switched to her side . . . and all at once it was nearly nine and the world had started without her. She could hear the Bennett children next door jumping on their trampoline, and the garbage men clanging trash cans in the distance, and, oh, Lord, she’d forgotten to put the garbage in the alley for the Saturday pickup. She hauled herself out of bed and went over to the window, pried two slats of the blind apart and saw the tail of the garbage truck just disappearing around the bend. Carrie Bennett was planting pansies in the plot between their backyards, and the sun was a bright, warm yellow and much too high in the sky.

Then she couldn’t get any hot water. What on earth? She stood naked on the bath mat, one hand reaching behind the shower curtain to test the temperature, for one whole minute and then for two. Stone cold. There were days when she felt this house was out to get her. She turned off the water and considered awhile. All she knew about hot water was that it came from a tank in the basement. And it was heated by gas—a scary, invisible substance. What if gas were flooding the basement at this very moment?

Pagan was away at college, and she didn’t like to phone Michael because his wife might answer. It would have to be George. She checked the clock once more as she tied her bathrobe sash, and then she sat down on her bed and dialed George’s number.

“Hello?” Samantha said.

Oh, goody. Pauline felt a little rush of happiness just at the sound of Sam’s voice. She said, “Hi, sweetheart! It’s Grandma.”

“Hello, Grandma,” Samantha said. She was one of those comically middle-aged children—eleven going on forty, with a self-assured, declarative manner. “Guess what, we’re getting a puppy,” she said.

“A puppy! I thought Jojo was allergic.”

“He is, but Mom read in the newspaper that even allergic kids can have poodles, because poodles don’t get dandruff.”

“I didn’t know
any
dogs got dandruff,” Pauline said. “Can that be right? And poodles: aren’t they sort of high-strung?”

“Not the big kind. Mom’s done research. Also poodles are one of the most intelligent breeds and they’re especially known for—”

“Pauline?” Sally broke in.

“Oh, hi, Sally. I was just—”

“I hate to interrupt your conversation, but we have an appointment with this dog lady out in Phoenix.”

“Yes, Samantha was just telling me, you’re getting a poodle! Isn’t that exciting!”

“Can we call you back this afternoon?”

“Well, actually I wanted to speak to George about a household emergency.”

“George has gone to the hardware store. Tell you what, I’ll leave him a note to phone you when he gets in. Okay? Bye, now.”

There was a click. Pauline was left holding a dead receiver. She couldn’t help but feel hurt, a little, although she knew that Sally was merely in a rush.

She phoned Karen. “Karen?”

“Oh, hello, Mom.”

“The most upsetting development: I don’t have any hot water.”

“You don’t?”

“I went to take a shower and the water just ran cold, never even got to lukewarm.”

“Well, gosh. Maybe you should call the electric company.”

“It’s not electric, though. It’s gas. At least, I’m pretty sure it is.”

“So? The
gas
and electric company; they’re the same thing. Look, Mom, I’ve got to run. I’m late for a meeting at work and I haven’t had my breakfast.”

“It’s Saturday! You don’t work on Saturday!”

“Not usually, no, but if we don’t get on this case a whole family’s going to be evicted by Monday morning, so . . .”

“Oh, fine. Go, then,” Pauline said, and she hung up.

Far be it from her to take Karen away from her precious Poor People.

Unshowered, unshampooed, irritable and hungry, Pauline dug through her bureau drawer for lingerie. It was at times like this that she especially missed Lindy. Lindy had always been the most sympathetic of her three children, the most watchful and attuned, whereas Karen was too wrapped up in saving mankind and George was, face it, under the thumb of that Sally. (Illogically, she knew, Pauline blamed George for not being there when she phoned.) The pair of them; what a disappointment they were!

Whenever somebody warned Pauline that an experience would be difficult—complicated or painful or requiring great stores of patience—her answer was “Are you kidding? I’ve had
children!
”

She stepped into a pair of slacks and pulled a T-shirt over her head. This past couple of years she’d been wearing her hair cut very short and fluffy, but since she hadn’t been able to wash it this morning it clung too closely to her scalp and made her look like a monk. She ran a brush through it with brisk, snappy strokes, frowning into the mirror. The underside of her upper arms reminded her of their old Dodge’s felt ceiling, which had somehow come unstuck from the roof and used to hang down in loose swags.

It never failed to amaze her that she was sixty-four years old now. Sixty-four sounded to her like some other person’s age.

She padded barefoot to the kitchen and turned on the stove, braced for disaster, but the burner lit right away; so the water heater’s problem couldn’t be the fault of the gas line. What, then? She thought about going down to the basement but decided against it. Instead she started a pot of coffee, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and put two slices of bread in the toaster. Really, she reflected (settling with her orange juice at the sunlit kitchen table, curling her feet around her chair rungs), things were not so bad. It was going to be as warm as summer today, and the trees were sprouting green stars of new leaves, and the chittering of the birds outside the window gave her hope that there might be a nest in her little dogwood this spring. She loved her house. The children had urged her to move to an apartment after the divorce, but she’d lived here so many years—thirty-six come September—she couldn’t imagine feeling comfortable anywhere else. Even its dated elements soothed her: the kidney-shaped coffee table in the living room, the out-of-synch “Colonial-style” maple cobbler’s bench in the foyer, the rec room’s ridiculous built-in brick TV niche too shallow for a color TV. She could have redecorated if she wanted, but why would she? She could remember when every piece of furniture had been her dream possession, pored over in magazines for months ahead, scrimped and saved for. It would have broken her heart to see it all out in the alley waiting for the bulk-trash collector.

She wasn’t like some people, who could toss away the past without a backward glance.

Her sister Sherry called. Still the baby of the family at age fifty-six, she was ever ready to throw a tantrum over one thing or another, and today it was the dry cleaner. “I walk in, I tell the man I’ve brought six sweaters. He asks me where’s my ticket. I say, ‘What do you mean, where’s my ticket? I’m just now bringing these in!’ He says, ‘You
brought six sweaters,
you told me. What was I supposed to conclude?’ All short-tempered and crabby, like I was the one at fault.”

Pauline tsk-tsked. She said, “You’ll never guess—”

“This is the very same cleaner that gave me the wrong dress that time, a nasty unbecoming magenta, size twenty-two. Twenty-two! I ask you! I almost think it was deliberate.”

“I have no hot water,” Pauline said.

“Hmm?”

“I got up this morning, went to take my shower, and not a thing came out but cold.”

“I had that happen once.”

“What did you do?”

“I don’t know; Pete took care of it.”

Pauline said, “Oh.”

“Or probably it was the plumber,” Sherry went on blithely, “but Pete was the one who called him.”

“Nice for
you,
” Pauline said.

“What? Oh, honey, I’m sorry; I wasn’t thinking. Oh, it’s awful that you have to see to these things by yourself! It’s just not fair! You want me to try and wake Pete?”

“No, that’s okay. George is supposed to phone me as soon as he’s back from the hardware store.”

“I don’t know how you can bear it,” Sherry said. “I would be so mad! I’d be calling Michael up and saying, ‘Get over here this instant, you rat!’”

“Now, now,” Pauline said. It made her feel sublimely tolerant when Sherry went on the way she did. “Really I’ve gotten past all that,” she said. “Well, I’d be pretty bad off if I hadn’t! I’ve moved on. I’m not going to waste my energy nursing grudges.”

“You’re amazing,” Sherry told her.

Pauline said, “It’s not so hard.” And she meant it. Over the years, she had lost her rancor toward Michael. Or maybe she’d just expended it all, worn it out with overuse. She could tell herself, nowadays, that she might very well be better off without him; for what kind of man would discard a whole marriage on the basis of one little quarrel? His problem was that he was not a forgiver. Things were so permanent, with Michael. Words once said could not be unsaid; deeds could not be undone. So there he was, stuck forever with that stiff-faced, dull-faced Anna.

Pauline would have to admit that she did still hold a grudge against Anna.

When the doorbell rang she thought for a moment that George might have come in person, but it was one of those itinerant workmen who stopped by in the spring and the fall. “Want me to clean your gutters? They’re a mess,” he said, but Pauline said, “No, thanks. Theoretically, I have a roofer who does that.”

“Theoretically?” he said. He laughed. He turned to a teenage boy hanging back at the curb and called, “Lady’s having her gutters cleaned ‘theoretically’; never mind.”

So Pauline didn’t ask if he knew anything about water heaters, which she’d half planned to do when she saw who it was. “Thanks anyway,” she said with as much dignity as possible, and she closed the door in his face.

When had she turned into the general population’s one-dimensional, cookie-cutter, cartoonish notion of a middle-aged woman?

And where
was
that roofer, anyhow? He should have been here last December! You couldn’t rely on anyone nowadays!

She phoned George again but nobody answered. She phoned Mary Kay Bart, who was a nurse in Pauline’s office and whose husband, if Pauline understood correctly, had something to do with kitchen remodeling (which was not unrelated to water heaters, was it?), but nobody answered there either. Everybody was off on jolly, bustling, family-type Saturday-morning pursuits. Well, okay. She hung up and returned to the bedroom for her shoes. No point sitting home moping.

At the Giant on York Road, she bought a few groceries to see her through the week—fruits to take to work for lunch and lo-cal frozen dinners for supper. Then she returned a blouse at Stewart’s. She told the saleslady that her husband hadn’t liked it. Even when she’d had a husband, he had never argued with her taste in clothes, but she didn’t want to give the real reason, which was that the plunging neckline that had looked so enticing in the changing booth had turned all at once pathetic when she got it home. Her cleavage had developed this sort of puckery texture, seemingly overnight.

No wonder she spent less money nowadays! Nothing looked good on her anymore. That made it a whole lot easier to stay within her budget.

One of the cosmetics counters was offering free makeovers. A woman was being swabbed with foundation while several other women watched, and Pauline slowed to watch too but only for a moment. Then she walked out of the store and found her car. She drove home the longer, prettier way; well, partly because it was prettier and partly because she took a wrong turn. The radio was playing oldies that celebrated spring, and she started singing “April Love” in harmony with Pat Boone and forgot to watch where she was going.

As soon as she reached the house she telephoned George again. This time he answered. “Oh! Mom! Hi!”—all surprised and innocent.

“Did Sally tell you about my water heater?” she asked him.

“Water heater? No-o-o. She did leave a note saying to call you and I was going to do that, I was just about to, as soon as I finished—”

“I have absolutely no hot water. It stays cold no matter how long I run it.”

“Ah.”

She waited a moment. “What should I do?” she asked finally.

“Well. That may require a plumber, Mom.”

“A plumber! Oh, God. A plumber on a Saturday; you know what he’s going to say. He’ll say he can’t come till Monday and that means a whole entire weekend without—”

“Of course it could be just the pilot light,” George told her.

“Pilot light?”

“What’s happening in the basement, do you know? Is there water on the floor? Because if there is, you’ll probably need a new unit; but if there isn’t, it might be just the pilot light and that’s a very simple matter.”

“Oh, maybe it’s the pilot light,” Pauline said.

“Is there water on the floor?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure,” George said.

“I’m scared to go see.”

“Mom,” George said, too patiently.

“All right! All right! But you stay on the line, okay?”