Three Women at the Water's Edge (18 page)

At the beginning it had not been Harry’s fault. Margaret had willingly abdicated her own self, because that was what she had been raised to do. Now, years later, after reading feminist books and psychology books, she saw what she had done, and knew that she had done it to herself, it was her own fault. And for a while she had been happy doing it: happy taking care of the girls, and decorating their new home, and taking care of Harry, and becoming a pillar of the community. But after thirty years of it, when she had wanted a change, only a slight change, Harry had not been able to accept it. He wanted Margaret as she had always been: subservient and worshipful. She saw it now rationally, it helped to see things rationally, and still she hit the water as if it were her past.

Harry had been poor, and becoming a physician had been a victory for him of the largest possible order. And he had been a good physician; he had truly given himself over to his community. He had swelled and thrived on his position as physician, healer, arbiter, guardian, counselor, god. And Margaret had helped him: she had wiped tears and held hands and given advice and loaned money and babysat children and driven out in snowstorms to fetch stranded patients. Their money had accumulated in the bank; Harry never felt secure enough—or conceited enough—to spend much of it until the girls were in their teens, when he took his family each summer on a trip to Europe or Mexico. But the spending of the money had meant nothing to Harry; the
having
of it mattered. Margaret had never been able to convince him that he would never be poor again, that he could spend money frivolously and still have enough to eat. She could not convince him that there was a complete world out there that existed apart from Liberty, Iowa; from him. When she tried to tell him that the lives of many of the people she had been assisting bored her to tears, that she had been bored to tears for years, he had looked at her as if she were a monster. He had suggested that she was entering her menopause and was not in her right mind.

Oh, it was complicated, complex; the reasons for the fat she had accumulated on her body were as tangled as the reasons she had stayed in Iowa, doing good. First, her upbringing; she had been brought up to do good. She had been brought up to give love. She had been raised to feel that any pleasuring of her own body was vulgar and evil. How tangled, how tangled it was: One fall when Daisy was five and Dale was one and they had not yet moved to Liberty but were living in Des Moines while Harry finished his residency, that fall two things had happened.

First, Margaret had taken Daisy to see Richard Atwater, who was a pediatrician; Daisy needed a medical checkup in order to enter public school. Richard Atwater was a few years older than Harry, but still a young man, and a handsome one, and after examining Daisy he had sent her out of the room with a nurse, and asked Margaret to remain behind. Margaret’s heart had thundered with fear; she was afraid Dr. Atwater was going to tell her that Daisy had something horribly wrong with her. Instead, the physician had made a pass at her. He had said wonderfully complimentary things to her, and crossed the room and taken her in his arms and embraced her. And Margaret had responded. She was twenty-four years old, and had been married for six years, and had not traveled or even gone to a decent theater; to her Richard Atwater was romance. He was also sin to her; and although she agreed to meet him later that week at a motel, she did not keep her promise. She could not. She felt that God would have struck her dead—or, worse, would have killed one of her children. She had fretted and burned to think that she could love her husband yet still respond to another man in such a clearly sexual way as she had responded to Richard Atwater. She had begun eating—not purposefully, not knowing what she was doing or why—but she had begun eating then, had begun gaining weight. Before long she felt fat and safe, secure; no man would make a pass at her. She would never feel guilty again; she would never feel the threat of infidelity overcoming her; she would always be faithful to her husband: she would never have to make a decision. She accumulated flesh as if it were a bodyguard—
which, of course, it was.

The second thing that happened to her when she was twenty-four also involved Daisy. When Margaret had taken Daisy to the public school to sign up, she had met a pleasant young woman with a meek-looking little boy, and over the course of their conversation it came about that Margaret offered to drive the little boy to school for a while, because she had a car and the woman didn’t. Actually it wasn’t Margaret’s car; it was Harry’s, and the only way Margaret could have it to drive Daisy to and from kindergarten was by getting up very early in the morning and dressing both little girls and taking them with her out across the city as she drove Harry to work; then repeating the same thing in the evening. It cost her two good hours of driving in order to have the car to drive Daisy to school. It took her an extra fifteen minutes to pick up Chuckie, the meek little boy, and an extra fifteen minutes to take him home, and as the fall turned into winter and the weather grew rainy then snowy and driving became difficult, Margaret began to regret her offer. She wished that at least Chuckie’s mother would call her on the phone and thank her, or ask her in for coffee, or offer to babysit some afternoon when there was no school because of conferences in order somehow to pay Margaret back. But Chuckie’s mother had almost disappeared after the day of enrollment at the public school. She was represented only by a hand that shoved Chuckie out the door of his small frame house in the morning and was seldom seen at all in the afternoon. Margaret talked it over with Harry, growing more and more indignant: who did the woman think she was, asking Margaret to drive her boy to school, and then not so much as phoning to say thanks after three months?

One early December day, when the roads were icy and the wind was bitter and Dale was whining in the backseat with a bad cold and Margaret had a sinus headache, she decided the hell with it, she would stand it no longer. Instead of letting little Chuckie—who was not an especially endearing child—out at the sidewalk as she always did, she parked the car.

“I’m going in to say hello to your mother,” Margaret said cheerfully. She dragged Daisy out of the car and threw Dale over her shoulder and went boldly up the walk. If nothing else, she would get a cup of coffee from Chuckie’s mom.

She entered the house behind Chuckie, calling, “Hello! Hello?” She tried to make her voice bright and friendly.

Then she stopped, paralyzed by what she saw. The house was indescribably dark and messy, with plastic curtains pulled across the windows and a dirty linoleum floor littered with more things than Margaret could take into account: there seemed to be cans on the floor, and toys, and food, and clothes, and papers, and clumps of dust; it was startling. Margaret had not been prepared for this filth, this chaos: Chuckie was a meek little boy who often had green mucus streaming from his nose, but his clothes were always neat and clean.

Then she saw Chuckie’s mother, who was seated in a torn brown chair in the corner of the room. There was something not right about the woman; her limbs did not come out from her body in the way they should, and her head lolled downward toward her chest like a drunkard’s. Yet her expression was alert; she looked worried.

“Is something wrong?” the woman asked.

“No, no,” Margaret had gasped, still standing stiffly, holding on to Daisy’s hand. “I just thought I’d come in and say hello. I hadn’t seen you for so long.”

The woman made an effort and her head rolled back so that she was looking up. “Has Chuckie been giving you trouble?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” Margaret said. “Oh, no, he’s been just
fine
. I just—I just wanted to say hello to you. You look—excuse me for asking, but are you ill?”

The woman laughed, and in doing so her body lost some of its control. When she could finally speak, she said, “I’ve got M.S., Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve had it for four years now; I found out I had it when I was twenty. Sometimes I’m better, sometimes I’m worse. Today I just happen to be worse; I’ve been worse for quite a while.”

Tears sprang to Margaret’s eyes: the woman, Chuckie’s mother, was exactly her age. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You’re driving Chuckie to school,” the woman said. “That’s the biggest help I could have.”

“But who takes care of you?” Margaret said. “Who fixes your dinner?”

“Oh, I can do most of it,” the woman said, and she sounded impatient. “My ex-husband comes around now and then, and I can take care of myself and Chuckie just fine. I don’t need any social workers coming around to snoop. The place isn’t so clean right now, but I’ll get it cleaned up, and Chuckie wants to stay with me no matter how messy the place is.”

“But how do you—” Margaret began.

“Look,” the woman interrupted. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything. But I just don’t like to have strangers see me when I’m this way. I really appreciate you driving Chuckie to school, okay? I really am grateful. But none of the rest of it is any of your business. I wish you would just go on back out the door and pretend you didn’t see me.”

“But—isn’t there some way I could help you?” Margaret asked.

The woman’s eyes began to roll back up toward the ceiling. “Please just go away,” she said as best she could.

Margaret looked: Chuckie had crawled up on a sofa and was eating saltine crackers out of a box. He seemed to think everything was perfectly normal; he seemed content.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Margaret said. “I’m so sorry. Please call me if there’s anything I can ever do to help you.”

She went out the door then and put Daisy and Dale in the car and drove away, back to her house. By the time she had gotten a block away from Chuckie’s home, she was overcome by uncontrollable sobs. The wretchedness of the young woman seemed to be more than anyone should ever have to bear. It occurred to her then, as she drove through the city with her healthy daughters falling into light afternoon sleeps in the backseat, it occurred to her how monumentally lucky she was. She was lucky; and it was not fair. And she thought of Harry, who with each passing year at the hospital became less and less carefree, more and more weighted down with a heaviness he would not discuss. And this was the reason, she now knew: that each day he had to leave his fortunate home and go to the hospital to face misery and grief and injustice. No wonder that he often seemed morose, withdrawn. It was a wonder he had survived at all. How could anyone survive when faced with such disasters? And
he
was doing something about it; he was trying to help others, he was trying to make them well. He was brave; he faced it. He did not back down easily as Margaret had, he did not turn and nearly run out the door. Margaret felt distraught with shame: if she had been a decent person, she would have brushed away the woman’s feeble words, she would have said, “Nonsense. You need help, and I can help you. It won’t take me an hour to do a little cleaning here, and I can go buy you some groceries and fix you a hot meal. I’ll come back once a week to do that; now don’t tell me that wouldn’t be nice for you and Chuckie. I’m a healthy woman and it would give me great pleasure to help you.” That was what she
should
have done, Margaret thought, no matter what the woman had said. But she had not done it, and she would never do it now. She would continue to drive Chuckie to and from school, and she might occasionally give him a little bag of cookies or fresh fruit. But she would never set foot in Chuckie’s house again. Unless Chuckie’s mother called her, and Margaret did not think she would call.

Was she a coward? Was she bad? The woman
had
asked her to go, had not seemed to want anything from Margaret, had seemed to feel totally uninterested in whatever Margaret had to offer. Had Margaret’s face been too revealingly distressed? Or had she looked curious? Undoubtedly she had looked shocked; had she looked repulsed? What had she done by barging in on that woman that way? And what could she do about it now? There seemed to be nothing she could do to atone for the good fortune of her family and the bad fortune of Chuckie’s. Perhaps, it occurred to her, perhaps the one thing she could do would be to help Harry in every possible way; to be patient and understanding and loving and giving, and in that way to help others, through him.

She was now on the twenty-second lap. Her chest heaved as she pulled herself up to the side of the pool to catch her breath before going on. Close by came the slap of someone hitting the water from the diving board, but Margaret did not turn to watch. Her focus was completely on herself now, and the rest of the pool and the large steamy room blurred into insignific
ance. There was only her lane, marked by a long white underwater line, her lane and the enormous box of water which she had to fight her way through eight more times.