The Wife's Tale (3 page)

Christopher did not ride his motorized bike after that day. His funeral was held three weeks later. The Kliks sold the corner
store to the Quick Stop franchise, which replaced the candy with cigarettes and batteries. Irma would say, “You just think
about poor Christopher Klik when you start feeling sorry for yourself, Mary Brody.”

And she did.

Thump
went the clock beside Mary’s bed. The square bedroom window was open and the breeze had the sage curtains in a tizzy. Dazed
and damp and done thinking of Christopher Klik, Mary scrolled through the TV channels, finding only the most profoundly false
reality shows, and in between the blather, cruel commercials advertising deep delicious this, sweet ’n’ gooey that. No celebrity
gossip shows. Shopping channel static. She turned the TV off and tossed the remote control out of reach, wishing to God that
Gooch would come home.

The bookshelf near the bedroom window was listing from the tidy stacks of twice- or thrice-read magazines, the glossy images
of beauty drooled over, the coveted home decor items already out of style, the celebrity wedding annulled weeks ago. Her hard-core
pleasure, the tabloids, she kept hidden between the mattresses.

Gooch and Mary had recently agreed on no more magazines for her, or sports channel for him, until the carpet guy got paid
off. The new broadloom had been Gooch’s idea, and she knew it was because he could no longer bear to look at the rut she’d
worn from her bed to the kitchen. The carpeting was their anniversary gift to each other, and she’d felt some small consolation
in its color being silver.

She’d wanted to ask Gooch for a new wedding ring for their milestone anniversary, the original, a modest solitaire, having
been unceremoniously cut off by the jeweler years ago when Mary’s plump finger had started to turn blue. But there was no
money for a ring, and Gooch had pointed out that wedding rings were antiquated symbols anyway. Still, he never took off his
own gold band, and she’d felt safe in its presence on his finger.

With no television to watch and no magazine to look at, Mary’s eyes rested, as dreamless eyes do, on the smooth, shadowed
ceiling above her lumpy bed. She recalled the sense of being transported by a good book, wishing she had one now while she
waited for Gooch to come home. She used to enjoy reading romance, mysteries when she was young, and then it was the women’s
novels with gold book club stickers. Gooch had suggested she take a trip to the Leaford Library, reminding her that it was
free
, and she’d envisioned herself carrying home a pile of books with star reviews, but the effort of the trip and the walking
down aisles and the looking at and lifting of books all seemed so great that she’d found excuses not to go. Lately it had
been the distraction of planning the humble anniversary party.

The details of the party had burdened Mary’s already long list of things to do. Worse, she had only herself to blame, since
she’d announced the event months ago, the day she went shopping in nearby Chatham and found the too-tight green silk pantsuit,
which a complete stranger had said
makes your eyes pop
. The outfit had been her incentive, but she had bought it before the loss and gain from Mr. Barkley, and the silk ensemble
was now two more sizes too small. As usual, Mary had nothing to wear.

The only guests were going to be three other couples—Erika and Dave, Kim and François, Pete and Wendy—whom they’d known, all
except Erika, since high school, and the affair was to be a simple one. Dinner at the fish restaurant by the lake, and later
a game of poker or bridge in the Gooches’ country kitchen. “We have exactly three hundred and twenty-four dollars left in
the account, Mare,” Gooch had warned, and insisted they serve dessert back at the house.

Mary had begged, “No gifts.” But Wendy was making a scrapbook for the Gooches in her crafting class, a photographic tribute
to their years together, a thought that made Mary’s stomach roil.

Darkness. The toss. The turn. The heat. The hunger. The wish. The worry. For one such as Mary Gooch to find comfort in her
bed was not so simple a matter as shifting a body, but an effort of such sweaty magnitude as to move a mountain. Sunroof repair.
Checks to the nursing home. Pick up dessert for the anniversary dinner.

Gooch had said, “Around ten or so. But don’t wait up.” His last delivery for Leaford Furniture and Appliance was in the Windsor
area, near the border to Detroit. An hour or so away, but forty minutes the way Gooch drove. His partner was off work with
the pink eye, but with his extraordinary size and strength her husband could easily handle the dishwasher on a dolly, and
the seven-piece dinette set alone.

There was a current in the air. And that smell. Wet. Sharp. Electric. Hard rain bullets sprayed through the open bedroom window
as thunder dropped heavy bass notes in the distance. Mary searched the sky for lightning, remembering how as a child she’d
stood in the square patch of grass behind the bungalow on Iroquois Drive holding the metal mop handle above her rain-soaked
head. She hadn’t wanted to die, like Mr. Pline on the golf course, but to be enlightened, like the woman on TV who’d been
struck by a thunderbolt and seen God.

Wiping sweat from her brow with the pillowcase, Mary listened to the rumble of thunder, thinking of Gooch on the rain-slicked
roads, trying to ignore a tiny voice warning her that something was wrong. She reached to turn on the light beside her, serrated
pain stabbing her sternum. Breathless from the crushing weight of her breasts, heart galloping with the strain of rising in
the bed, she shut her eyes.
Breathe,
she told herself.
Breathe.
Rule or no rule, she would not die alone in her bed, dressed in her sour nightgown, on the eve of her silver anniversary.

Sitting up usually brought quick relief, but not tonight. She couldn’t shake the sense that there was something in the air
beyond the rain, a dark foreboding stirred up by the storm. Gooch’s face before he left for work that morning played like
a song she couldn’t get out of her head.

After breakfast, while a lone crow cawed from the field behind the house, Gooch had stood at the door, furrows slicing his
forehead, chapped lips slack at the edges, his round blue eyes searching hers. In his gaze Mary had seen the sum of their
life together, and had felt inclined to apologize. What was that look? Pity? Contempt? Tender affection? None of it? All of
it? She used to believe she could read his mind.

With the noisy bird crowing in the background, Gooch had cleared his throat before asking, “Have you got something to wear
for the thing tomorrow night, Mare?”

Jimmy Gooch was like a vital organ whose function was mysterious but without which, she believed, she would perish. Gooch
was her first love. Her mate. Her partner. The only family she had left. Time, for Mary, was measured in “before Gooch” and
“after Gooch.”

Acknowledging the partisanship of her memory, Mary knew she was making at least some of it up when she recalled the first
day she had laid eyes on Jimmy Gooch. She played the scene in her mind the way she imagined modern people made memories, like
directors filming their own life stories: wide-angle to convey body language, poignant two-shot profiles, tight close-ups
on a long lens, scored with sexy Motown. In slow, heroic motion, wavy hair caught by the wind, Jimmy Gooch pushed through
the double doors and into the halls of Leaford Collegiate, where the crowd of students parted like the sea. Sixteen-year-old
Jimmy Gooch was a god of sorts. Backlit, star-eyed, straight-A student and distinguished athlete, he was the new starting
center for the Cougars, his arrival from Ottawa heralded, already being scouted by American colleges. Long ropy muscles dressing
a stunning six-foot-five teenaged skeleton, welts of abdominals and obliques straining his cool rock band T-shirt.

Mary Brody’s pretty eyes did not blink as Jimmy Gooch drew near the place where her poundage quivered in roomy stretch pants
and over-large school jersey. She felt her uterus contract when he asked, “You know where Advanced Lit 3 is?” Those were the
only words he spoke to her that entire year, despite having their lockers side by side and sharing four classes, but in that
virgin moment, when the very tall man-boy looked ever so briefly into Mary Brody’s eyes, she glimpsed a kindred spirit, saw
a flash of the future and the unlikely entanglement of their fates.

Do all sleepless people play the events of their lives like a television rerun, Mary wondered, heart thudding, saliva gathering
at the corners of her mouth, thinking of that morning again.

“Have you got something to wear for the thing tomorrow night, Mare?” Gooch’s voice was erotica. He could arouse Mary with
the merest stroke of tenor on her hot inner ear. She wondered why she’d never told him so, and felt sorry it no longer mattered.

Frowning, she’d tugged at the waistband of her uniform—the largest of the ladies’ plus sizes, so she’d have to go into the
large men’s sizes now, and Ray Russell Jr., the owner/manager of the drugstore, would have to place the order for her. The
thought burned her cheeks, since she’d recently overheard Ray and Candace making unfunny comments about her ass—Candace suggesting
they take up a collection for gastric bypass, and Ray remarking that it was so big it should have its own blog. Now she had
to clear her throat or cough before entering the staff room.

Mary had assured him, “I’ll find something.”

“What about the green thing you bought?” Gooch had asked carefully.

“The zipper was broken,” she lied.

“Remember what happened the last time you had to improvise? Buy something if you don’t have anything, Mare. This is important.
Find something
nice
.”

Shrunk an inch over the years, standing at the door in his custom-made work shirt and brown corduroy coat and dusty blue jeans
from the Big Man’s store, ball cap plunked down on his wavy gray head, complexion worn like a catcher’s mitt, Gooch looked
handsome but weary. She wondered if he seemed more or less tired than any forty-four-year-old man in any small town. She cocked
her head, asking, “Are you sorry we’re doing this dinner tomorrow, hon?”

He paused, with that look on his face, and said, “Twenty-five years, Mrs. Gooch. That’s a hell of a thing. Right?”

“It is,” she agreed. “When you gonna be home?”

“Ten or so. But don’t wait up.” He said the last after the back door banged shut.

It
was
a hell of a thing to have been married for twenty-five years, but no one ever asked Mary her secret to a long marriage. She
might have said, “Don’t call your husband at work.”

Of course, throughout the years, she would have called Gooch’s pager or cellphone if there’d been an emergency, but her life
was fairly predictable and her tragedies rarely sudden. She’d nearly called Gooch at work when she’d gotten the news about
her father’s passing, but had decided that, like everything except her raging hunger, it could wait. She started to dial his
pager many years ago, when she was seizing with uterine cramps, but had hung up when she realized the ambulance would be there
faster. She had left a note on the kitchen table.
Gone to hospital with hemorrhage.
She’d thought of calling him just recently, the night she tipped the scale over three hundred pounds, but had instead collected
the pain medications from the bathroom cabinet, remembering her vow to kill herself. Even as she was shaking tablets from
vials at the kitchen table, she had confronted her false intentions, and determined that the dosage was not potent enough
for her extreme body weight anyway. The door had suddenly opened behind her and Gooch had tramped inside, filling the house
with his truck oil scent and strong-man vigor, calling, “Hey. You’re still up.” Shrugging off his coat, pulling off his boots,
he had been preoccupied and hadn’t noticed the pills and vials on the table, which Mary swept into a plastic bag and quickly
tossed in the trash. At the time, she’d allowed herself to wonder if he had missed her suspicious behavior because he was
hiding something too.

The night clock. Palpitations of the heart.
Thud. Thud. Whoosh.
Arteries saturated with globules of worry. She reached for the phone but stopped. A good wife trusted her husband and never
checked up on him, or questioned his lateness, or looked through his dresser drawers. The truth she rarely confessed, even
to herself, was that she didn’t call Gooch because she was afraid she’d discover that he was someplace he shouldn’t be, and
she didn’t want the burden of his confession any more than she thought he wanted hers.

F
ifteen pounds with her father. Orin Brody died in the spring of a blood clot, a cunning thrombosis that had slithered up from
his leg to his lung sometime after Mary closed the door to his apartment overlooking the river in nearby Chatham. “See ya
tomorrow, Murray,” he’d called out, using Mary’s pet name, as he always did. Her mother had called her
dear
.

The blood clot came as a somewhat shocking end, given Orin’s history of heart disease and colitis. His post-mortem death weight,
a number that had stung Mary and still buzzed her earhole in the dark—ninety-seven pounds. But Orin had lost his appetite
completely in his final year, for televised sports, food, life, altogether, all the same. His cadaver was the exact poundage
of Mary’s squat nine-year-old self when the doctor had whispered the obvious to her slight mother, Irma. Ninety-seven pounds.
Obeast.
Mary unduly expanded. Orin cruelly reduced. The pressing weight of grief made her hungry.

On the morning of her father’s funeral, she had risen early after not a wink of sleep, and started for the bathroom to color
her hair. She’d found the hair dye box in the bag from the drugstore and opened it before noticing that she’d grabbed the
wrong package—not Rich Chestnut but Rich Red. Resigned to her silver roots, she’d stepped out of the bathroom to find Gooch
addressing the wakening erection in his large, callused hand. He looked caught, and sat up breathless. “I thought you were
going to do your hair.”