Three Women at the Water's Edge (41 page)

Margaret had left the hospital when visiting hours were over and returned to her oceanfront house in an almost trancelike state. Above all she felt the tension of Miriam’s operation, she felt that she could not eat or sleep or feel until she knew just how serious Miriam’s illness was. Toward evening she debated with herself whether or not to have the comfort of a fire: would her temporary discomfort somehow balance out some scale so that Miriam’s cancer would be small and insignificant? But she remembered Miriam’s words, and knew at last that her most seriously superstitious acts would in the end affect only herself. She could hear how Miriam would laugh: “Oh, Margaret, how dumb of you to sit in the cold. If you are thinking of me, for heaven’s sake, sit by a fire. If you’re thinking of me, think of the happiness of life: sit and be warmed, let your evening be warm and bright.”

Margaret gathered up the kindling and wood from her back porch, and knelt at the hearth to build up an imperfect pyramid of sticks and logs. She rolled up newspapers into cylinders and placed them under the grate and struck a match. Then, seeing the fire successfully started, she went into the kitchen to fix herself some herb tea. She would not eat: she was not hungry, she could not eat, no matter what Miriam might say. But she sank onto her sofa by the fire with a steaming cup of tea warming her hands, and sat there a long time, simply watching the dancing flames. And this, too, she decided, was a superstitious act. Although she had never thought of it before in this way, she now realized that being happy, giving joy to oneself, could be as much a superstitious act as being miserable and deprived. For it was happiness and optimistic endeavor and a life well lived that sustained others, after all; joy and contentment could circle out into the world just as surely as gloom, and just as Miriam’s laughter in the hospital room had lifted Margaret’s spirits, so it was the knowledge of the happiness of others that made people go on to strive for happiness for themselves. Otherwise everyone would simply end up in despair. Margaret sensed that for the first time in her life she had been verging on real sin—one of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of
accidie,
of sloth, of the refusal to movement and joy.

She rose when the fire burned low and put more logs on, large heavy chunks of wood that sent out billows of glowing warmth. She took her teacup into the kitchen and poured herself a snifter of good brandy. Then she settled back down on the sofa, and noticed with satisfaction that both Pandora and Ulysses had come into the living room to join her by the fire, and gave herself over to such thoughts as the brandy and the fire and her love of Miriam could cause.

Miriam. Miriam, who had not had children, who had traveled and taught, had listened to Margaret talk and talk about her past, her present, her desires, and never once had she disparaged the life that Margaret had led. In fact, she had told Margaret that she thought that had been a good and valuable life; then she went on quietly to point out the possibilities ahead. She had had an uncanny power and wisdom: She had lent Margaret enough strength to help her cross that particular great chasm in her life, but not so much that Margaret became dependent or obligated. She needed nothing from Margaret’s life to satisfy her own; she would have been equally approving if Margaret had married Anthony or gone back to Harry. It was Margaret she loved, no matter what Margaret might do, and Miriam knew that Margaret loved her with the same steadfast elegance.

Oh, it was really something to be thankful for, Margaret thought as she sat in the light of the fire, this friendship with Miriam, this lasting and complex connection. Margaret slid down on the sofa, stretched out comfortably, and covered herself with a beige afghan which had been folded over the back of the sofa. And she thought how this night, this eve of Miriam’s fearful operation, had two sides to it, two textures, like the pillow she was resting her cheek against; she could really choose whether to feel the rough or the smooth. For the sorrow and fear had to be dealt with, it could not be denied. Ever since Miriam had told Margaret of the probable need for a mastectomy, Margaret had been more and more aware of the brevity of her own life as well as that of her friend’s. The statistics were awesome: each year 106,000 women had breast cancer, and although many recovered from it, the threat of its return, the awful threat of death, was always there. For weeks Margaret had been having nightmares, and worse, had lain awake in the night with vivid visions that were too cruel to go by the softer name of dreams. She had had what Dale had once called “the death willies.” She had imagined herself dead and cold and shut away in a hard box, away from the warming company of people; she imagined her body losing its cover of flesh, her rings lying against bone. These visions had made her stomach cramp, and for once she had wished that someone were in the bed with her so that she could touch them and say, “Please hold me.” Instead she had risen at three or four or five in the morning, and made tea and tried to read; once she had even dressed and gone out to drive around the darkened rainy city, listening to the insipid conversation of a disc jockey who played rock music to night workers and other insomniacs such as herself, until the sun had come out and she was able to go back to her house, to fall asleep.

“Don’t you ever worry about death?” Margaret had finally asked Miriam, hating to bring up such a terrible subject, yet needing to know just how Miriam felt. “Don’t you ever wake up in the night and worry, or find it difficult to go to sleep?”

“Not really,” Miriam had said, then seeing the expression on Margaret’s face, had laughed. “When I feel like that, I take a Valium. Gordon does, too.”

“Oh, Miriam,” Margaret had said, and gently touched her friend’s arm. But later she had called her own physician and explained the situation and gotten a prescription for the same calming drug.

But the night before Miriam’s operation, when it all seemed to hang in the balance, Margaret did not feel she should trick her mind and body of its honest emotions. She could not take a Valium; somehow that would betray Miriam and their friendship and in fact the whole significance of what was hanging in balance: life, the life of a friend. Margaret rose from the sofa to throw more wood on the fire, then snuggled back under the afghan, with a large glass ashtray resting on her stomach. She smoked—knowing it was stupid to have a friend in the hospital with cancer, and still to fill her lungs with smoke—and looked at the fire, and talked with Pandora when she came to settle warmly on top of Margaret’s feet. No, she would not take a Valium, she would not cheat herself of the fear and awesome worry which still made her stomach cramp. But then, she knew, there was still the other side of it all: she could not dishonor Miriam’s friendship or the value of her life by indulging in the bleak stringy luxury of grief. Miriam’s friendship had brought Margaret joy and pleasure and comfort—and Miriam was still alive, the operation was not until the next day—and the only decent way to honor the life of her friend was with thoughts of comfort and pleasure and joy.

Margaret really didn’t take a drug of any sort that night, and the amount of brandy she drank was insignificant, yet later when she looked back on that night, she realized that if someone had looked in the window and seen her there, lounging on the sofa, smoking cigarettes, sipping brandy and then negligently setting the snifter somewhere back down on the carpet so that she always had to search for it when she wanted it again, the observant person would have thought she was either high on drugs or crazy. She had been talking aloud. At first she had addressed the cats; their presence did provide some sort of audience. But as the night had deepened, Margaret had grown strangely exhilarated, so lifted up and high with memories that she almost seemed to leave the earth and enter a drifting sphere of reverie where Dale as an infant and Daisy as a clumsy adolescent floated past each other like giddy grinning fish in a psychedelic sea. The joys, the pleasures, the comforts of her life—for in remembering Miriam, in honoring her friendship with this one particular individual, Margaret had to admit to the importance of all the joys she had had in life. She nearly babbled with excitement at her memories; she held out her hands as if she could literally touch those objects which had once given her such pleasure. The skin of her children. Almost above all, the complex clarity of a Black Watch plaid cotton she had sewn into a dress for Daisy and trimmed with black ribbon; remembering that material filled her with a real sensual satisfaction, for the sight of it, so complicated yet so neat, had been as palpably pleasant as the taste of food. Food itself—so much food, so varied, prepared with care over all those years, ritualized food: the first hot homemade chili of the fall, the pies and turkeys at Christmas, the elaborately decorated birthday cakes, celebratory feasts for friends with anniversaries, served in the dining room with all the lace and crystal and candles in the tall old silver candlesticks. Oh, she had taken pleasure from all the objects in her life. How long ago it was when she and Harry first bought the house and began to furnish it. She had always taken pleasure in the solid and well-wrought objects in her home. Coloring Easter eggs with the girls: those pastels, so pure; and then Dale and Daisy in white robes, singing down the aisles of the church with the youth choir, waving palm branches: Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna in the highest; the secure cordiality of her friends at a large ladies’ auxiliary meeting, sipping coffee, eating coffee cake, discussing just which way to raise money for some particular charity; rubbing the frail freckled flesh of strangers in their white hospital beds, chatting with those people, bringing them the ordinary news of the world outside, the weather, the local town events, and the gratitude those poor ill people gave her: “Oh, thank you, my dear, that felt so good. You are so kind.” She had been glad to be kind, and in the warmth and light of her private fire and her long memories, she saw that she did not have to completely disavow her past in order to have the future.

Now she saw that she could think of Harry with affection and even gratitude. He had been a good husband, a good father, a good provider; there had been years when she had gone through each day simply and unthinkingly happy to be his wife. He had kept her warm and secure for many years, and he was, she had to admit to herself, not an evil man. He had not meant to enclose her in a life she did not care for, and the truth of it was that for years she
had
cared for her life. That she had changed, that she now wanted something different and new—that she had
changed
, and he had not changed and had not wanted to recognize or approve of her changes—was not a bad thing, but then it was wrong in the light of her future to look with a bitter eye at her past. With a bit of sappy wisdom that came from the fire and the strong brandy, Margaret realized that in the past year she had been going through the sort of crisis an adolescent goes through when she leaves home: She had had to negate and furiously criticize the past in order to strike out on her own. But now she was here, really here in her own new life, and that time of ferocious, almost desperate movement was over. She was safe in a new place. And now she felt she could look at her past in a clearer, more generous, and undoubtedly more honest light. She felt she could now place her past in her mind as if it were the mist from a genie’s bottle which she could summon up at will, or leave at rest. It would threaten her no longer. In fact, it was valuable to her, again and at last.

So she arranged her past; and in the next few days after her nostalgic night by the fire she continued to arrange her future. She went out in search of a job, and found three available to her, one that pleased her immensely. She could have been a saleswoman in a gift shop, but she found that the objects for sale bored her; she also did not take a job as a receptionist at a plush advertising agency in downtown Vancouver because there was something about the garrulity of the other people who worked there that put her off. The job she took seemed so perfect that at first she could not believe her luck: It was a position as an assistant in a bookstore in West Vancouver. Margaret sold books, stocked books on the shelves, returned books, sent out notices telling people that books they had ordered had arrived, kept records. After only a few days there, Margaret knew that this was a job she would want to do for years and years. For she knew that she would always like people, she would always be interested in them, she would always want to know how they worked through their joys and troubles, how they went through their lives. And with books she would be able to do this, but at a distance. She could read a book, and put it down when she chose, she could watch the lives of other people, she could be part of the world, and yet have no responsibility for it. And her contact with the real people who frequented the shop was a limited and cordial one; when she closed the door of the shop at the end of the day, she carried no one’s problems home with her. She was dispensable. She again served a purpose in the world, but it was a rather nonchalant one. How different it was, for example, from being a mother and wife, from feeling responsible for the happiness and health of a family. How different it was even from the volunteer work she had done at the hospital, when she came home daily driven with a need to do more for those poor people who lay stricken in their beds with various life-and-death problems. Books were such a nonessential commodity; or if they were a product that some people at times in their lives felt they really needed, as Margaret always needed books, still they were never needed with the urgency that food or medication was, and the customers who entered the store seldom did so with desperation. Books nourished the mind and soul, but in the sense of absolute survival those were luxuries; Margaret felt that her job was luxurious. She could spend time chatting with the customers about books, but she was able to keep busy, for there was always something needing to be done around the shop. Andrea, the energetic young woman who ran the shop, had told Margaret that she was a real plum, and Margaret had been pleased by this. In fact, she could envision the day when Andrea would grow bored with such a rather plodding enterprise as the bookstore and would move on to something bigger and more challenging. Then perhaps Margaret could buy the bookstore from her, and hire someone to do the work she was now doing. She could envision working in the shop for years and years. She liked it so much: the size of it, so small and cozy, and the tiny cluttered back room full of cardboard boxes and papers and the electric burner for heating water for coffee or tea. She liked having a key to the shop, and being able to open the glass door with the ringing silver bells on the inside handle in the morning, or to close it at night. The keys made her responsible. Yet nothing really horrible would happen even if she failed at her responsibi
lity; only books or money could be lost, not lives.