The Wife's Tale (7 page)

The clock thumped on the bedside like a voice commanding,
Do it, do it,
and Mary held her hand over her galloping heart. It was time. As good a time as any to make a long-held confession to Gooch,
one she’d resolved to make a thousand times then lost her nerve before she spoke, or had not been availed of the words. Waiting
for him to come to bed, she saw that she’d been presented with the perfect opportunity to disclose. The deer in the road.
He would understand completely. It was another situation in which no one was at fault.

When finally she heard the bedroom door creak open, and felt Gooch heft his freight into the bed, she reached tentatively
for his body and set her heavy hand upon his broad chest. “We need to talk, Gooch.”

“No,” he replied, and then, more tenderly, “Not tonight, Mare. Okay?”

“I need to tell you something,” she insisted. He surprised her then, by kissing her on the mouth. “Gooch,” she whispered as
he buried his face in her neck. She felt him stiff beneath his briefs. “Gooch?” He moved against her, gently at first, faster,
harder, bouncing, grunting as the headboard flogged the wall, until he’d been seized and arrested, and fell back against the
bed. Before passing out he squeezed Mary’s arm, but she couldn’t tell if the gesture was one of gratitude or apology.

At six a.m., the clock alarmed them both. They rose and began their respective morning routines, Gooch heading out to get
the newspaper, Mary cracking eggs. They would never speak of the deer on the road, already firmly entrenched in their habit,
which was not to discuss things painful or obvious.

The anchor of Mary’s secret floated down to the silty bottom until another storm stirred it up again, but like the food she
hid from herself, Mary always knew its precise location.

A
train rattled by in the distance. The rain tapped against the windowsill. The night clock on the table beside Mary’s bed
told her it was past three o’clock. The Kenmore sang a love song from the kitchen. Mary eyed the telephone beside the clock,
foreboding, like a smell brought in with the wind. She reached for her gray nightgown but remembered she’d left it in the
kitchen.

Moving naked through the hall, she felt like a barge sailing toward a cool, distant land.
Just come home already, Gooch. The furnace. The anniversary. I’m worried. And I’m starving.
She looked at the phone but stopped herself from reaching for it.

Squinting from the refrigerator’s sharp light, she found a jar of olives. Could he have hit a deer? No. Even the country roads
were well enough traveled that an hour wouldn’t go by without someone finding him. She leaned against the counter, suddenly
aware that she was not alone but one of millions of humans standing on tile floors before their humming refrigerators, hungering
for food, cigarettes, booze, sex. Love. She wondered if this was the chorus she sometimes heard above the thumping of her
heart. Or was the sound, as she hoped, a beckoning God? Not the vengeful white man from the old movies or the wise black one
from the new movies, but a large, round, female God who might enfold Mary in her motherly arms and show her the path to grace?
Ms. Bolt?

Long ago, it was Irma who planted the idea in Mary’s mind, driving past the red graffiti on the side of the Kmart,
Where is God when you need her?
“God could be a woman, I suppose,” Irma’d said. “The God I grew up with was so angry. I always liked the look of that smiling
Buddha.”

“You can think of God any way you want to?” Mary asked, astonished.

“Of course, dear. As long as you don’t have religion.”

Mary stood watching the night through her kitchen window, as the wind cast the rake from its comfortable lean and set Merkel’s
dog to barking in the field behind. Suddenly remembering something, Mary hurried to look out the dirty glass of the back-door
window. “Snap,” she breathed. On the double laundry line near the overgrown vegetable patch, three of Gooch’s costly custom-made
work shirts flailed like the drowning in the swells of the wind. She was as angry at herself as she was with the storm, because
she’d put the shirts on the line a full three days before. Only sloth would explain their loss to Gooch.

Forgetting her nightgown in her haste, Mary pushed open the back door, the wind, her lover, stroking her puckered skin and
teasing her hair wild. Not now. Not
now
. Her heart began its ceremonial thud. She fought the driving current as the first shirt was kicked high by an updraft and
torn by the stiff maple near Mr. Barkley’s grave. Then the wind took hold of the taupe shirt, ripped it from the line and
flung it toward Feragamos’. Gone, like Mr. Barkley, before her very eyes.

Mary’s cold, bare feet urged her legs to take one step, then another and another, determined to conquer the distance through
the wet grass to rescue the remaining shirt. The wind battered her as she stretched to reach the sleeve. A clothespin popped,
striking her in the forehead. Startled, she lost her grip on the shirt, and as she stepped back to watch the flying fabric
she tripped on the laundry basket and fell hard to the earth.

The wind left Mary Gooch like a hit-and-run victim, sprawled naked in the wet leaves on that stormy October night. Laboring
from the weight of herself, chanting the accidental mantra
Gooch Gooch Gooch,
she found a rhythm in her breath and set her thoughts adrift.

Perhaps it was nudity that gave Mary some fresh perspective. Lying there beneath the tempest, sharing her load with the sweet
damp earth, she felt together the peculiar sense of utter freedom and deep connection. Freedom from what, she couldn’t say.
Connection to whom, she didn’t know. Or, more important, it didn’t matter. Suspecting that oxygen deprivation might be involved
in her awakening, she struggled to breathe more deeply, which heightened rather than diminished her awareness that a switch
of some kind had been turned on. An electrical current, a hum in every cell that connected sublimely to the pulse of all things,
so that she was the earth that cradled her body, and the ant on the twig near her ear. She was the roots of the wind-ravaged
willow, and the air that fed her lungs. She was the newborn crying in the distant house, and Mr. Feragamo in his bed. She
was each drop of rain; Mrs. Merkel’s dog; the compost of her cat. She was all of herself, and nothing but the breeze that
coaxed her higher, until she could see her huge babyish figure, peaceful and pretty, undressed by the wind. Her current position
too enlightened for regret, she regarded the body she was heir to, and err to, without worry or wish or shame.

The wind blew cold and the rain stung her thighs. A cricket raked its legs together near a branch by her toe. She imagined
she heard an orange kitten crying behind the garage.
Mr. Barkley? Is that you?
She had the heart-stopping realization that Gooch could be home any minute; certain that she would rather be dead than seen,
she reached for the laundry basket as leverage to crane herself to standing. She started for the back door, her body waves
in motion, damning wrathful nature. In answer to her silent hatred, or maybe to teach her a lesson about respect, the wind
blasted through the open bedroom window and sent a gust through the house that slammed the back door shut.

The back door locked automatically when it shut but Mary tried the knob anyway, hoping for a miracle. Drawing upon her terror
of being discovered naked in her yard in the middle of a storm, she dragged herself toward the garage and heaved open the
door, her porcine nudity cruelly splashed by motion-sensor light.
Ha ha,
she wanted to shout to whoever was behind this.
Laugh it up.

Gooch’s tools were laid out neatly at his work table. There were boxes and crates of who knows what, the outdoor broom, the
lawn mower, the weed whacker, Gooch’s bike. A sound familiar to the sleepless, of a vehicle in the night, set her flesh to
quiver. She reached for the shovel and looked out to the road, noting the distant headlights. Each thundering step a testament
of will, she waded through the leaves to the locked back door, lifted the shovel’s handle and ran it at the glass. She reached
in to turn the lock, panicked, as the headlights approached.

The shard met Mary’s bare heel the moment she stepped in the door, with a stab of freezing cold followed by a hot shot of
pain. She blamed the glass from here to eternity as she hobbled over the kitchen floor to find support at the counter, as
the vehicle passed outside.

She craned her neck. She lifted her leg. She bent at the side. It didn’t matter from which angle she tried to examine her
foot, she could not see past her extensive body. Tossing a dishtowel to the floor to catch the pooling blood, she put her
foot down, realizing too late that the shard was still lodged there. She dragged herself to one of the red vinyl chairs, blood
spilling off the towel and seeping into the pores of the dirty grout.

Sweating, grunting, Mary attempted to lift her injured foot to her opposite knee so that she could pull out the glass. She
tried hoisting with her hands and scooping with her arms, but neither her knee joint nor her hip joint nor the encroachment
of fat around the patella would allow the transfer. She strained, barely reaching the slippery, maddening shard, nicking her
fingers. There was an alarming amount of blood stemming from the wound. She set her injured heel back on the blood-soaked
towel, which released the glass from her foot.

Breathing deeply, calmer than she ought to have been, Mary found her gray nightgown on the chair and pulled it on, not noticing
or caring about the bloodstains from her fingers. Regarding her reflection in the window, thinking of that other Mary Gooch
she’d met so briefly, hovering in the storm, not defined by this or that but this and that and all of it, she reached for
a recipe card on which emergency numbers were written, picked up the telephone and dialed Gooch’s cellphone number. The stranger’s
recorded voice on Gooch’s message service apologized,
This subscriber is not available. Please leave your name, the time, and the purpose of your call.

“This is a message for Jimmy Gooch,” she said. “Will you please ask him to call his wife?”

Feeling the wind rush in through the broken window, Mary thought of how Gooch would say, “You’re letting out the heat,” when
she kept the door open, and “You’re letting out the cold,” when her nose was in the Kenmore. It struck her that there must
be some other door left open through which she’d let out Gooch.

T
he green drapes danced as cold stormed the wide-open window. Mary woke as she did every morning, with a start, shocked to
have fallen asleep at all. But it was a further shock to see the umber blood on her linens where her nicked hands had bled,
and, when she heaved herself up to look, pooled on the bedspread beneath her foot.

Crows mocked from the fields behind the house, insisting she turn to look, but Mary already knew she was alone. She reached
for the telephone beside the bed and found the card with emergency numbers. She dialed Gooch’s cellphone. When the pre-recorded
message answered the call, she managed to sputter, “I’m sorry. It’s Mary Gooch again. Jimmy Gooch’s wife. If you could have
him call me please. It’s seven o’clock. In the morning.”

Creep of dread. Spiral of fear. Gooch was not home. He was not answering his phone. But then, her phone was also silent. No
police calling to say he was in jail. No one banging on the door to say there’d been an accident. It occurred to her that
the evening had simply been one of high drama, as happened when people ventured out in the dark. As she had. As Gooch sometimes
did. His absence would be explained soon enough, plausibly and with genuine regret for her worry, and then forgotten by them
both, or at least never spoken of again. And no real turning point at all, as she’d been so convinced by her brief tryst with
the night earth.

Mary turned the alarm off before it sounded, struck by the putridity of her breath, recalling how Gooch liked to pronounce
that people had their heads up their asses. She was one of them, of course, though he’d never been so direct with her. Except
maybe last year, when she’d won the Caribbean cruise in a raffle and canceled at the last minute, even though they’d gone
to the trouble of getting passports. She had insisted that with her motion sickness (and she did have motion sickness) she
couldn’t endure an ocean voyage. What she could not have endured were the orgies of cruise food she’d heard two women discussing
at the hair salon when she went for her biyearly trim. The other problem, and it was always a problem, was that she had nothing
to wear.

Gooch had been angry, ranting that there was a whole wide world outside of Leaford, and if she wanted to keep her head up
her ass she could but
he
was going on that cruise. They’d given the tickets to Pete and Wendy. Why Gooch hadn’t gone alone, she’d never understood.
Where was that chorus? That tremolo of hope? Where the hell was Gooch?

Peering out the window, she searched the driveway for the Leaford Furniture and Appliance truck, which Gooch always parked
beside the pickup with the jammed-open sunroof. As with the anticipation of her own reflection, she knew before she looked
that she wouldn’t like what she saw. So severely had her world shifted that she could not find her center of gravity, and
had to grasp the sill for support. It occurred to her that she had never
felt
so heavy, a thought chased by the certainty that she’d never
been
so heavy. It had come to this. She’d finally grown so large that she’d displaced her husband altogether. Like water splashing
over the sides of the tub.

There was a distant mechanical sound, and Mary lifted her eyes to see Mr. Merkel in his field hunched behind the wheel of
his tractor, a big brown dog loping alongside, sprinting off occasionally to chase the plundering crows. Other people’s desperate
lives. “You can always look around,” Irma liked to say, “and find someone else
much
worse off.” It was true, and Mary found comfort in the misery of the Merkels, an older couple who had lost their only child,
a four-year-old son, during a tornado in the early seventies. The furious wind had stolen little Larry from his own driveway
and spirited him to some secret place, never to be seen again. Mary did not set eyes on Mr. or Mrs. Merkel without thinking
of Larry, but she hadn’t seen much of them lately. No one had.