Celestial Navigation

3. Spring and Summer, 1961: Mary

You would think that once he brought me here he would feel responsible in some way. I try not to ask too much of him but having me come to Baltimore was his idea, after all, and for every one of my objections he had some reasonable answer. “But this is just — I’m a homebody,” I told him. “This is just not like me.” And he said, “Do you always do things exactly in character?” Oh, he knew what would win me. He knew to reach down and pat my daughter’s head and say, “Does she, Darcy?” so that Darcy would smile up at him, all trust and confidence. So one day we slid into his red convertible and rode off to Baltimore, with Darcy nestling between us and John’s arm lying across the back of the seat keeping a constant contact with my shoulder. We talked non-stop, making plans. His divorce was already in progress and he said mine would be no trouble at all; Guy could sue me for desertion. We talked about where we would live, what kind of life we would have, how many children. Our words tumbled out and stepped on each other’s heels, we had so much to get said. I never guessed that this would be the last time he would give me such a block out of his day.

Now I hardly see him. Darcy and I are staying in a shabby boarding house, the only place we could find that would take children. We have a downstairs room. I know every crack and cranny of that room by now, the stains on the wallpaper and the old-lady smell and the roses worn to strings on the carpet. I have spent whole afternoons staring at a ripple in the window glass, waiting for Darcy to wake from her nap. I have polished the furniture until it seems likely to melt away — not because I am such a good housekeeper, I never was that, but because there is nothing else to do. We sit for hours on the edge of the bed, neatly dressed, careful to keep our voices down, like guests who have risen too early. I am often irritable, and I cry a lot for no good reason. When Darcy gets whiny or boisterous I snap at her. I never used to do that. The most I ever did was shout, “Hey, quit that!” but here there is such a dead feeling, we are so much on our best behavior, that I scold her in a low hissing voice that no one else will hear and I threaten her between my teeth. Once I gave her a slap, something so unlike me that I wondered right away if I were losing my mind. She had been fiddling with the bureau knobs and one came off in her hand. I said, “Darcy Tell, if you don’t stop that fidgeting I am going to scream. Come over here and sit down.” She said, “I don’t want to sit down, I want to go out. When is John going to come take us out? He said he would.” Her voice was high and cracked; it tore at my nerves. I can’t describe it. I hauled off and slapped her, and for a minute she stared at me with her mouth open. Then she started bellowing. I shook her by the shoulders and said, “Stop that. Stop it this instant.” So she stopped, but she was trembling all over and I was too. I live in fear that she will remember that day forever. At night I go over and over it in my mind. Oh, let Darcy forget all this, please. Let this whole entire stage of her life just fade away and be forgotten, because it is just a stage, isn’t it? Things are going to get better, aren’t they?

We stay in the house so much because I am waiting for the telephone. I seem to be back in my teens, a period I thought I would never have to endure again: my life is spent hoping for things that only someone else can bring about. Some days he calls and says, “I can get away tonight. Be ready at seven.” Then I float through the morning singing, I take Darcy out for walks and smile at her a lot although I often fail to hear what she is saying, and far too early in the afternoon I bathe and figure out what dress to wear. I have only three: the one I came away in and two that John bought me after we arrived. We are going to buy more, but for now I am nearly without belongings — a peculiar feeling. Occasionally I find myself going through drawers—“Now, where is that gold barrette I used to wear? Where is my navy cardigan?”—and then I realize that I don’t have them. They are left behind. I am free.

On the nights we go out I put Darcy to bed early and ask Mrs. Jarrett to keep an eye on her. Then John and I go to dinner someplace and talk, although half my mind, of course, is always back with Darcy. That is the worst of this new life. The people I love are scattered, there is no way of gathering them snugly together where I can keep watch over them. When Darcy and I are alone I think about John; with John, I think about Darcy. I worry continually about my friends, my neighbors, my mother-in-law. Do they all hate me now? I wonder if Guy is very angry, and how he has chosen to explain the situation. “Here,” John says. He leans across the table to pass a hand before my eyes. “Are you with me?” “Of course,” I say. I smile at him.

We have no place where we can be alone. His wife left him before we even knew each other, but he is afraid that if he takes me to his house the neighbors will see and that will foul up the divorce proceedings. Sometimes I say, “Let them see. How could a divorce get fouled up any more than it already is?” But I know he’s right. And he can’t afford a house for us, and he knows too many people for a hotel room to be safe. He takes me to dark parking places in his convertible — another thing I thought I would never go through again. Then being out of the reach of a telephone makes me edgy and before too long I always say, “Oh, please let’s go back. I don’t know what Darcy will think if she wakes up and finds me gone.” So he starts the car in a bad temper and drives me home, leaves me at the door, and I find Darcy peacefully asleep after all and I regret coming in so soon and I stand at the window a long time looking out at the dark through the ripple in the pane.

Then sometimes he doesn’t call at all, not all day, or he does call and says he will not be able to make it. He has a business crisis, or a trip coming up, or his wife is stopping by for some belongings. I have never seen his wife. I believe that she must be very beautiful, because she works as a model for one of the department stores. When they were first married, John says, she was a homey type. She made all the curtains and cooked and kept house, but then she got restless. She took one of those courses you see advertised in the newspaper and became a model, and after that she was never home at all any more and she got a new set of friends and even her personality seemed to change. “Brittle, sort of,” he told me once. “Not at all like the person I married. I wanted a wifely wife, someone warm and loving that smells like cinnamon.” Which made me feel happy, because he always says I smell like cinnamon. But sometimes in low moods I stare at myself in the mirror, I see how enormously tall I am and how busty I have grown since the baby and how even if I lost weight, I would never have that chiseled look that models have. I haven’t the bones for it. And I think, Does John regret me? Does he wish I were Carol’s type? He did marry her, after all. I take down my hair and fold it under to see how it would look if I cut it. I stand sideways to the mirror and suck in my stomach. It is the days when I know I won’t see him that I go through all this. I have nothing else to do. I file my nails or sew on a button, during Darcy’s nap I open library books that I can’t pin my mind to or I leaf through magazines that I have already worn to tatters. When she wakes up, we go on long walks. I know this street now the way I know our room: every crumple in the sidewalk, every spindly tree, every turret and gable and leaded window of these endless dismal rowhouses. We take Mr. Somerset’s toast crusts and feed the pigeons. We go to the library, where Darcy dallies forever in the children’s section, choosing books and changing her mind and putting them away again. I never hurry her. What use is time now? We have so much of it. When she has decided on her books we walk very slowly home and then I read them to her, over and over, until my mouth is dry and my throat aches from imitating squeaky mice and growly bears. Darcy nestles under my arm, following the pictures with her great blue eyes. She has started sucking her thumb again. Four and a half is too old for that, I tell her, but I never really try to stop her. I figure she might as well take her comfort from wherever she can.

It was through Darcy that John first got to me. One morning I looked up and there he was, squatting to talk to her and asking her if she knew how pretty she looked. “You’ve got your mother’s mouth,” he said. Most people see only Guy in her. “Bright, too,” he told me. Then he rose and shook my hand. We had met a couple of times before, but this was the first notice that he had taken of Darcy. After that he spoke to her every time he came by, and often brought her something — a jump-rope, or a set of checkers, and once a little dress-up doll that had a lot of extra costumes they sold separately. He brought her those costumes one by one; in the end I believe she had them all. And meanwhile, of course, he and I were getting to know each other. But Darcy was the starting point. I remember the first time I ever thought seriously about John. It was a few months after we had met. He said, “Now that you have this one pretty little girl, are you going to have a whole crowd more?” “Oh, no,” I said, “Guy says one is plenty.” “He’s a fool,” John said, and he looked straight at me for a long time and then turned and left. I don’t know why that stuck with me for so long. I remember that I went back to the house and started washing dishes, and suddenly I stopped with my hands in the suds and looked out the window after him and got this strange springing feeling in the bottom of my stomach. That was how it began.

The man who owns this boarding house is very odd, and at first I was afraid of him. He reminded me of a slug. You see people like that in the newspaper all the time, caught molesting children or exhibiting themselves on picnic grounds or shooting into crowds; there is something curled and lifeless and out of touch about them. But when I had been here longer I saw that he wouldn’t harm a fly, and now I let him talk with Darcy even when I am in another part of the house. You can tell he loves children. He doesn’t know what to say to them, really, but he tries hard and he often takes Darcy up to his studio and lets her cut and paste. It does her good to get away from me for a while. When I think he might be growing tired I climb the stairs to fetch her, and I find them bending over separate tables, Darcy chattering away a mile a minute and covered with paste while Mr. Pauling works silently on those kaleidoscope things he seems to like. “I’ll take her now,” I say, and he says, “Oh, well, oh, no hurry, we were just — she was just—” Then he stands there wringing his hands, the first person I ever saw who truly does wring his hands. He doesn’t appear to like me much, or maybe that’s just his manner. He makes me feel too tall and too loud and too strong. I never know how to act with him. Evenings, watching TV, which is the only time when we boarders are all together, he is so confused and some of what he says is so out of place — things a deaf man would say, having lost touch with the world — that I have to hold down a laugh. The others are very kind to him. They never laugh. They have a habit of bending their heads toward him as they listen, and then straightening to puzzle over what he says, and even if he makes no sense they give him some grave and courteous answer. Because of this all conversation moves slowly, with long pauses, in a sort of circle that is designed to protect him. No wonder the meek will inherit the earth.

Darcy’s eyes are blue like Guy’s, and her hair is his fine, white-blond color and not much longer — Guy always did wear it long. I remember when I first saw him, he was swimming in Dewbridge Lake and every time he came up for air he had to give his head a sharp flick to get the hair off his face. Wet, it came nearly to his chin. When it snapped back spangles of water flew out from him like jewels. Then he climbed onto this old fallen tree that people used for a diving board. Other people used it; I wasn’t allowed to, for fear of stobs and hidden branches. I wasn’t allowed to do anything back then. I was fifteen, a nice quiet girl who didn’t even wear lipstick yet, and I had come with my parents and we were sitting on an oilcloth with a picnic lunch that would feed an old folks’ home and great quantities of insect repellent and sunburn ointment and wet cloths wrapped in cellophane in case of spills. This boy with the long slick hair (I didn’t know his name then) seemed to have brought nothing but himself, barely covered by one of those tight satin bathing suits that I always thought were so tacky. He stood on the farthest limb that would bear his weight and then flung himself up and out, and he cut through the water like a knife and came up flicking that hair and laughing. I just stared. I thought he was fascinating. Now I am not talking about love at first sight or anything like that — why, he scared me half to death! He and all his friends, with their horseplay and their great splashing butterfly strokes and the wolf howls they gave toward the girls out on the barrel raft. They didn’t howl at me. I was just sitting there in the shade with my parents, watching out for sunburn, shrinking when any of them came too close. And when my mother said, “This lake would be right fine if it weren’t for the rougher element,” I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and meant it. But that didn’t stop me from staring at Guy Tell.

My father was the principal of Partha High School in Partha, Virginia. My mother was an English teacher. They were middle-aged when they had me and I was an only child, which may be why they guarded me so well — that and their being religious. They were Baptists. My father passed the collection plate on Sunday mornings. At one point I was religious too, and had thoughts of growing up to be a missionary and eventually getting martyred, but that all passed away in time. I don’t know why. I just turned out not to be a believer, that’s all. But I continued to go to church with my parents. I sat folding my program into a fan, feeling chafed inside by some irritation that extended even to the starchy smell of my mother’s best dress and the way my father kept tugging his shirt cuffs down when he didn’t need to. Yet I loved them. I was very close to them, especially to my mother. What bothered me was not my parents or even their way of living, but the fact that it seemed to be the only way open to me. I would grow up, of course, and go to college and marry and have children, but those were not changes so much as additions. I would still be traveling their single narrow life. There was no hope of any other. At least, not till Dewbridge Lake.

Is Dewbridge Lake still there? Well, it must be. But after that one summer I have never been back. It’s as if the lake had fulfilled its purpose and then vanished from the face of the earth. Its mildewed gray pavilion was erected overnight for me to do the bunnyhop in with my girlfriends, the only dance I was allowed. Its rainbow-colored jukebox was expressly filled with Pat Boone songs so that one day, at the end of a bunnyhop, Guy Tell might step up to me and say, “This here is for me and you to dance to, honey,” and fold me up in a long walking clinch because I was too scared to say no. That pine forest with its shiny hot floor was grown for the two of us to hide in, leaning against a spruce trunk, Guy perpetually sliding a swimsuit strap off my shoulder while I perpetually slid it back up. His kisses tasted of tobacco. I had never been kissed before and found it tiring; my neck ached and my mouth felt bruised. Drawing back from me, he would smile with his eyes half-veiled as if he had won some contest. I was the loser, and I didn’t even know I was in a contest. Then we would separate and I would return to my parents, leaving the pine trees shimmering behind me. Now I imagine that the entire forest has fallen, giving off no sound, like that tree they always bring up in science classes. All that will remain of it is a little golden dust floating upward in the sunlight. Yet there is a thirty-nine-cent strawberry-flavored lipstick in the dimestore whose smell can still, to this day, carry me back to the ladies’ changing rooms at Dewbridge Lake. Hot pine needles will always make me feel pleasantly endangered and out of my depth. The trashy taste of orange Nehi fills me even now with a longing to break loose, to go to foreign places, to try some adventure undreamed of by my father in his baggy plaid trunks and my mother in her black rayon bathing suit with the pleated skirt. Oh, I would do it all over again, if I were fifteen. Even knowing how it would end up, I would continue to glide across that splintery dance floor with Guy Tell’s hand clamping the back of my neck.

He was twenty-two — older than anyone will ever seem to me again. I wouldn’t be sixteen till December. (Sixteen was the age my parents were going to let me start dating. And even then, of course, only boys my own age. Only boys from good families. Only in groups.) All that fall, when the Dewbridge Lake Pavilion was boarded over and school had reopened, I continued to see Guy without anybody’s knowing. I said I was going to the library, or to visit a friend. Then I stood on a corner of Main Street and waited for Guy to come pick me up in a towtruck, and while he was pumping gas I would sit inside the filling station reading his racing magazines. He worked evenings. Daytimes he was free. Afternoons, as I was walking home from school, he slid up alongside me in his battered Pontiac and plucked me from my girlfriends and bore me off to a country road at the edge of town. While we were continuing our contest — he undoing a blouse button, I doing it up again — I felt lost and uncertain and longed to be safe at home, but once he was gone I forgot the feeling and wanted him back. I remembered the things that touched me: the intent look he wore when I told him anything; his habit of remembering every anniversary of our meeting, weekly, monthly, with some small clumsy gift like a gilt compact or a cross on a chain; the swashbuckling way he dressed and the eagle tattooed on his forearm and the dogtags always warm against his chest. Sitting in church on Sunday morning I called up his kisses, which from this safe distance filled me with a dizzy breathlessness that I thought might possibly be love. My mother sat beside me, nodding radiantly at the reading from Job. My father extended the long arm of his collection plate down the pews. I thought, I am never going to be like them, I have already broken free. I thought, Why aren’t they taking better care of me?

On December seventh I turned sixteen. My mother said, “Well, now I suppose you can go out some, Mary.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. I went to Main Street to wait for Guy, and he brought me a charm bracelet hung with little plastic records to remind me of our first dance. Then he said, “I reckon we could get married now if you want. Don’t look like I am going to get over you any time soon.” So ten days later we eloped. I kept expecting my parents to follow me and take me back, but they didn’t. I had to send them a telegram announcing I was married. And in the motel room, when I cried, Guy said, “Now don’t take on so, you’re tearing me up. You want just for tonight I should sleep in the other bed?” “I’m not crying about that,” I said. “Well, what, then?” Why I was crying was that here I sat, married, and I had never even had a real date. But it didn’t seem the kind of thing that I could tell him.

Last week I took out a post office box and then wrote Guy and asked for a divorce. The box was John’s idea. “You don’t want him coming after you,” he said, “tracking you down to your boarding house and making a scene.” He went with me to the post office, and afterwards we took Darcy to the Children’s Zoo. It was the nicest day I had had in a long time. Darcy played in the sand while John and I sat on a bench nearby in the sunlight, talking over our plans. John said that someone had seen us together in a restaurant and told his wife. “I believe it’s made her jealous,” he said. “You know how she is.” (Although I didn’t know, at all.) “She wants to have her cake and keep another piece waiting in the tin. As soon as she heard she came right over to the house all dressed up, sweet as sugar, asking questions.”

“There’s no law against your taking someone out to supper,” I said.

“That’s what I told her.”

“She goes out with other people. All the time, you said.”

“Let’s not talk about her, shall we?” he said. “It’s too nice a day.”

I feel that way when he talks about Guy, too. I don’t like seeing Guy through someone else’s eyes. Then his leather jacket and tooled boots start seeming ridiculous, and I am aware how his grammar must sound to outsiders and I feel hurt for him and protective. It’s me that’s being insulted as well — six years of my life are tied up with Guy. I changed the subject. I said, “How come you brought your camera?”

“I’m planning to take some pictures of Darcy.”

On the days when John can’t visit I start hating him, even though I know it’s not his fault; but when I see him again he does something like this, thinking up an outing and photographing Darcy, and then I remember why I came away with him in the first place. Guy would never do anything like that. Oh, Guy took her picture, of course — with a camera he got for trading off some motorcycle parts — but he always wanted her dressed up first in those pink organdy frills he liked and he would arrange her hair in artificial-looking curls and seat her on the best piece of furniture. He called her his princess. His doll baby. Darcy is no doll baby. She thinks about everything — I see her thinking — and if there is a mess around she will get into it and she is never still for a second. I don’t believe Guy even knew all that about her. The only time he paid her any notice was when his friends came by and he would show her off like a souped-up car, setting her someplace high and prinking out her skirt just so. “Ain’t she a doll baby? You ever seen anything cuter?” Now John goes down on his knees in the sand, fixing his lens on Darcy, who is sugared over with sand like a doughnut, one of her playsuit straps dangling into a bucket. “Keep still,” I tell her, but he says, “No, no, let her be.” He holds up a light meter, fiddles with mysterious buttons. By profession he is a photographer. He owns a small studio that is still just getting off the ground, which is why it takes so much of his time. Before studying photography he went to college. He is calm and well-ordered and he considers every question from all sides. As far removed from Guy as a man can get. What would have happened if I’d met John before Guy?

I met John when he was shopping for motorcycles. He had just become interested in them. He ran into Guy at some rally outside Baltimore and the following week he came all the way to Partha, looking to see what Guy had in stock. I should explain that by then Guy was managing the filling station, but he had more or less branched out into motorcycles. We lived on the first floor of the house next door, and between the house and the station was a shed that Guy kept filled with spare parts and any used bikes his friends were trying to sell or trade. When John came by I was out in the yard hanging clothes. “Like you to meet a friend of mine,” Guy said. “John Harris. He’s thinking of buying him a cycle.” Thinking is right. He was the most well-thought-out man I’d ever seen. For four solid weeks he tested different models, read up on them, asked questions, went off to different dealers, returned to Guy to see if he had anything new. And when he finally did buy it wasn’t from Guy at all, but some man in Baltimore. By then he and Guy were friends, though. Not what you would call close friends; motorcycles were all they had in common. But they did do a lot of trail-biking together, and sometimes Guy would bring John home with him after a rally. Guy would come in all excited, blaming some fool who’d run him off the road, cursing some flaw in his bike (which he had bought in two minutes flat, on impulse, with money he didn’t have). He would yank the cap off a beer and chug-a-lug it, stomping around the kitchen. And meanwhile there stood John in the doorway, remarking on how nice my kitchen smelled and searching through his pockets for Darcy’s present. Dressed like someone in a sports magazine, in slacks and a polo shirt. Now do you see why I say he was so far removed from Guy?

It’s as if I have to keep trying different lives out, cheating on the rule that you can only lead just one. I’d had six years of Hot Rod magazine and now I was ready to move on to something new. I picture tossing my life like a set of dice, gambling it, wasting it. I have always enjoyed throwing things away.

Darcy said, “Hurry, John, I got to go to the toilet,” and John laughed and snapped the picture. Then he rose, brushing off his knees, and I took Darcy to the restroom. There was sand in her scalp; I could look down and see it, glinting under the white of her hair. “When I come out,” she said, “I’m going to ride the merry-go-round. Can I?” I said, “All right, baby.” I looked back at John. He was smiling after us, turning some knob on the camera that he knew so well he didn’t even have to look at it. “Come on, Mom,” Darcy said, and she reached up and took me by the hand. Her fingers were cool and sandy, and she smelled like sunshine, and she let me bend down and press my face against her hair for exactly one second before she freed herself and danced off again.

Motherhood is what I was made for, and pregnancy is my natural state. I believe that. All the time I was carrying Darcy I was happier than I had ever been before, and I felt better. And looked better, At least, to myself I did. I don’t think Guy agreed. He was funny about things like that. He didn’t want to feel the baby kick, wouldn’t even touch me the last few months, acted surprised whenever I wanted to go out shopping or to a movie. “Won’t it bother you, people staring?” he asked. “Why would it bother me?” I said. “Why would they stare?” He was the one that was bothered. He didn’t even want to come with me to the labor room the night she was born; my mother had to do it. She had thawed out some since I got pregnant. She stayed with me all through the pains, talking and keeping my spirits up, but most of my mind was on Guy. I thought, Wouldn’t you think he could go through this with me? He’ll worry more, surely, out there in the waiting room not knowing. The doctor had been upset about my age. He had told Guy I was still growing, much too young to have a baby of my own. What if I died? Shouldn’t Guy be there holding my hand? But no—“I’m scared I might pass out or something,” he said, and laughed, with his face sharp and white. Then he whispered, “I’m scared the pain will make you angry for what I done to you.” “Oh, but Guy—” I said. Then my mother said, “Never mind, honey, Mama’s here.” She sat by my bed and rubbed my back, and sponged my forehead, and read aloud from yesterday’s newspaper — any old thing she came across, it didn’t matter, none of it made sense to me anyway. When it came time to wheel me into the delivery room she said, “I’ll be right here praying, honey, everything’s going to be fine,” but I saw that she was worried. I suppose she had taken to heart what the doctor said. Well, doctors don’t know everything they claim to. Having that baby was the easiest thing I ever did. I was meant to have babies. Age has nothing to do with it.

When I think back on it — on my mother reading to me from that newspaper, smoothing the hair off my forehead — it seems that starting right there I began to live in a world made up of women. My mother and Guy’s, the neighbor women who gave me their old baby furniture and their bits of advice — women formed a circle that I sank into. I suppose you have to expect that, once children come along. The men draw back and the women close in. I thought that things would be different once I got Darcy settled in at home, but then Guy just kept to himself more than ever — acted scared of holding her, couldn’t stand to hear her cry, wouldn’t help to name her. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Guyette? That would be kind of cute. But, no, I reckon — I don’t know. You name her, you’re the one that knows.” I named her Darcy, my maiden name. I tried setting her on a pillow in Guy’s lap, with cushions all around so that he wouldn’t worry about dropping her. When she cried I said, “Now, all that’s wrong is she’s hungry, Guy. I’ll feed her; then you’ll see.” But mealtime was another thing he couldn’t stand. I was breast-feeding; he said it gave him a funny feeling. Every time I unbuttoned my blouse he left the room. “Other people use bottles,” he told me. “Why go back to this way, now that they’ve invented something better?” When I got worn out with her nighttime feedings he said, “Switch her to Evenflo. Leave her with Mom and you and me will borrow some money and take a little trip somewheres. You need a rest.” I was touchy back then, tired from all those wakeful nights and worried that I might not have enough milk. “The biggest rest,” I said, “would be for you to just shut up and leave me be, Guy Tell,” and then I cried and the baby cried and Gloria came in and shooed Guy out of the house and put me to bed. Gloria was Guy’s mother, whom we’d been living with ever since we were married. A peroxide blonde forever in shorts and a halter. Her husband had died long ago, I forget just how, and she had a truck-driver friend who came over whenever he was in town, bringing a bottle of Southern Comfort that they would polish off in one evening over the kitchen table. I know that sounds depressing. See it on a TV screen and it would be depressing, but the fact is that Gloria was just wonderful to me and I loved her like a mother. I hate to think what I would have done without her. Before the baby, when Guy had switched to working days and I had nothing to do with myself (there was a rule against married students at school), Gloria was the only reason I didn’t go out of my mind with boredom. She talked non-stop, took me shopping, fixed my hair a dozen ways, brought me up to date on all the soap operas we watched and lent me her confession magazines. Why, I was never even allowed to watch soap operas, and the most I’d read of confession magazines was the covers, surreptitiously, while speeding past the newsstand with my mother. And after the baby! I’m ashamed to say how much I leaned on her. She didn’t interfere, she never tried to take over, but whenever I was feeling lost and too young she was right there handing me hot milk and talking on and on in that airy, fake-tough way she had, appearing not to notice anything was wrong but soothing me all the same. Could a man do that? No man that I know of.

I cried when we moved into the house by the station. By then I had no mother of my own any more. I lost both parents when Darcy was still a baby, within six months of each other: heart attacks. I felt as if Gloria was my only strength, and here I was leaving her. “My Lord, honey,” Guy said, “most women would be tickled pink to get into a place of their own.” He said, “It’s me should be crying, it’s my mama after all.” And finally, “Don’t you want to live alone with me?” “Well, of course I do,” I said. But even so, I missed Gloria. I went on seeing her nearly every day, right up to the time I came to Baltimore. And sometimes even now I think back on how it was when I was pregnant, still someone’s child instead of someone’s mother, peacefully floating through those empty days with Gloria. I remember the books that Guy used to bring me; he liked to tell his friends he had married a brain, and almost daily he brought me a paperback from the drugstore. Sleazy romance novels, beautiful heroines in anguish. I loved them. I close my eyes and see myself on the plastic sofa with a book on my stomach, Gloria beside me snapping her gum, great swells of organ music rising from the television. What does Gloria think of me now? Has she cut me out of her mind, now that I have left her son with no more than a note on the refrigerator door?

If things don’t work out with John, I have nowhere to go. This is the first time I have really thought about that. I left in such a rush, whipping off my apron, hanging my wedding ring on a cup hook, giving not a backward glance to my Corning ware and my potted plants. I seemed to be drunk with the joy of doing something so illogical. Now I have hours and days and weeks to think: I am entirely dependent on a man I hardly know. I have no money, no home, no family to return to, not even a high school degree to get a job with, and no place to leave Darcy if I could find a job. I don’t even know if I am eligible for welfare. What if John stopped loving me? Or if his wife came back — came walking in with her model’s slouch, a mink stole draped over her shoulder. (Well, not in June, but that’s the way I picture her.) I would be lost, then. I would be absolutely helpless, without a shred of hope.

This is what I resolve: if it works out that John and I are married, I am going to save money of my own no matter what. I don’t care if I have to steal it; I will save that money and hide it away somewhere in case I ever have to be on my own again.

Only I won’t be on my own, not if it’s up to me. I won’t leave anyone else ever. It’s too hard. I never bargained for this tearing feeling inside me. I didn’t know I would be so confused, as if I were in several places at once and yet not wholly any place at all. I hadn’t ever considered Darcy: how bewildered she would be or how her food and shelter would become a problem. You would think that much would occur to me. Why, Darcy is the center of my life! And her hair is Guy’s, and her eyes; I’ll be carrying pieces of Guy around forever. There was no point to my leaving. I can say that even while I am looking straight at John, even crossing to where he stands in the sunlight with his camera slung over his shoulder, smiling at Darcy and me so steadily: I love you, John, but if I were smarter I would have stayed with Guy.

I check the mailbox every day but nothing comes from Guy. I keep trying to imagine what a letter from Guy would look like. He has never written me before. Never had to. If ever he needed to write to someone else — say a business letter, or something — he would ask me to do it for him, and his dictation was full of et ceteras and, “Oh, you know, just put it like you think best.” He wasn’t too well educated. I would sit there with my ballpoint pen, waiting for Guy to think up a line, wondering what my mother would have said if she could see me. I was supposed to be unusually intelligent. Now look: “Dear Sir: In regards to the used Honda which I seen advertised in the February issue of …”

I wonder if maybe he is never planning to write at all. If he is dead, or has left home himself, or is so angry he plans to drive to Baltimore and wait in person beside my post office box until I come looking for letters. The minute I enter the building every day, my eyes fly to the corner where my box is. No Guy. No letter. I take Darcy by the hand and turn away, feeling relieved, but meanwhile there are all these unused words backed up in my throat: “Oh Guy, I wish you hadn’t come. I won’t go back with you no matter what, you’re only wasting your …”

It’s true I wouldn’t go back. It just isn’t in me. Even if it doesn’t work out with John, even if there is nowhere else to turn. I can’t explain why. After all, what did Guy ever do to me? He worked hard, made a home, took good care of us. But I stopped loving him. I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world. There are arguments for both sides; I see that. But I made my choice. “Come away with me,” John said. “We love each other, why waste your life? Where is your spirit of adventure?” The first time he said it, he took my breath away with shock. The second time it seemed more possible. He planted a thought in me that grew when he was not around, so that when he stayed away a whole week and then returned I was praying for him to ask me again. It looked as if he might have forgotten. He played all morning with Darcy, didn’t give me a glance. When lunchtime arrived he stood up, still not looking at me, not even touching my hand. “Are you coming?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

To keep Darcy quiet a while I gave her some blunt-nosed scissors and a magazine. I sat on the bed beside her, cross-legged. I pretended that we were in a house that John had built for us, and he was off at work but would be coming home shortly for supper. I even planned what I would cook for him. I love to cook. Lately we have been living on things from cans, heated in Mr. Pauling’s miserable kitchen, and I am starved for the smell of herbs and baking bread. I planned the meal by smells alone: hot dilled biscuits, roast beef, a fresh green salad. John would open the door and the smells would curl around him and draw him in. We would sit down at a table with a white linen cloth, in a house that was stable, calm, warm, clean, built to shelter us a lifetime. It would never even occur to me to run away again.

I cut out squares of paper to make Darcy a dollhouse. I showed her how to Scotch-tape them together. I cut an oval rug and gave it to her to color, and then we made curtains from a flowered shopping bag. Darcy bent over them with her tongue between her teeth, concentrating. The back of her neck was like a little curved stem, and I kept wanting to reach out and touch it but I didn’t.

You hear a lot about teenaged wives, how they’re bound to fail, but nobody mentions teenaged mothers. They are the best in the world; I’m convinced of that. While the neighbor women were nagging their children not to get the house dirty, I was down on the floor playing with mine. I carried her piggyback wherever I went; I dressed up in old clothes with her, read her my favorite storybooks, fixed tea for her dolls. Instead of shipping her off to nursery school I had other children come visit, and sometimes I felt as if I were running a nursery school myself. Six and seven children would stampede through the kitchen, playing tag or hide-and-seek, with me always It. On rainy days we made picnic lunches and ate them on the dining room floor. Gloria said, “Honey, you spoil that child. She won’t know how to amuse herself when her brothers and sisters start coming along.” I never told her about Guy’s not wanting more children. I kept hoping he would change his mind. But he said, “Ain’t this one taking all your time as it is? What you want to go and ruin your figure for?” He said that every time I brought it up. He never changed.

I would stand in front of the mirror and see how wide-hipped and expansive I was, how tall I loomed, bigger than life, full of life, with not enough people to pour it into. My world had turned out narrow after all — different from my parents’, but just as narrow. I looked out the front window and watched the people walking by, and I wanted to climb into every single one of them and be carried off to some new and foreign existence. I pictured myself descending from the sky, all wheeling arms and legs, to sink invisibly into their heads and ride home with them, to see how they arranged their furniture and who their friends were, what they fought about, what made them cry, where they went for fun and what they ate for breakfast and how they got to sleep at night and what they dreamed of. And having found out, I would leave; on to the next one. I wanted to marry a mad genius and then a lumberman and then somebody very rich and cold and then a poet who would dedicate his every word to me and who would have a nervous breakdown when I left him. Which I would do, of course. As soon as I had been absorbed into his world, as soon as it stopped feeling foreign; on to the next one. I didn’t guess back then that moving on would hurt so.

What would Guy have said if he’d known what I dreamed? His idea of change was to take in a movie on Saturday night. His greatest joy was attending motorcycle rallies. Hours and hours in someone’s hot cow pasture, with me trying to pick out the cloud of dust that was Guy from among a lot of other clouds. When I refused to go any more, he went alone. He was gone overnight, weekends. “That son of mine should stay at home more,” Gloria used to say, but I didn’t mind. It seemed to be part of the pattern that I had married into; the other women’s husbands didn’t stay home either. They were off bowling, or drag-racing, or playing billiards. On summer evenings we would pool all our children and go to Roy’s for hamburgers, which we ate at one of the outdoor tables — a double line of women and children, not a man among us. All the women laughing and scolding and mopping spilled drinks, filling every corner of their world. Then when Guy came home again his boots jarred the house and his bass voice took me by surprise, and when he plucked Darcy out from her dolls she squirmed and looked at me for reassurance, as if he were a stranger.

Which he had been, once upon a time. He was more a stranger than any boy I’d met. It wasn’t his fault that we finally got to know each other.

I walked with Darcy to the post office and we dawdled every step of the way. I was hanging back, hunting up excuses never to arrive at all. And when we got there, sure enough, a slanted blade of paper was showing through the window. One of my own envelopes, pale blue. It gave me a shock to see it. “Now can we go to the park?” Darcy asked. “No, wait,” I told her. We were supposed to meet John there at noon. I didn’t want him to watch me reading this letter. I leaned against a counter and tore open the envelope. The letter itself was written in pencil, on several sheets of the pulpy gray paper I kept for Darcy to draw on. Every word was smudged over. Guy is left-handed; his hand rubs what he has just written as it travels across the paper. I could picture him at the kitchen table with his hair falling over his forehead, his shoulders hunched with the effort of writing.

Dear Mary,

Now I have never understood you but this time is worse than usual.

I treated you real good Mary always gave you ever little thing you wanted, a house of your own clothes a baby even when I thought we should wait some. I thought you was happy, now I hear it wasn’t so. Come home one night to find it wrote out on the icebox door, your going and won’t be back and sorry you hurt me.

You didn’t hurt me worth a shit Mary I mean that. You could go clear on to California it wouldn’t hurt me worth a shit. I am too blasted mad.

We have been married six years now that I could have been playing around in and buying up fast cars instead of cookpots and I could have had me a lot of other women as well let me tell you but never did as I thought you loved me. I stood for a lot from you Mary. First off I near about raised you, you didn’t know beans when we were married and had my mama waiting on you hand and foot for years, secondly I let you correct my grammer and my table manners and change my whole way of doing things that you looked down on and drive off all my friends account of you thought none of them was good enough for you. Did you ever invite a one of my buddies to dinner, no. When your mama died you acted like it was my fault it happened to her, also that time your cousin came from Washington you didn’t even introduce me but went and ate supper at her motel leaving me a tunafish sandwich. Well I could take all that, what I couldn’t take was this, you held my own baby daughter seperate from me. You named her for your family and you raised her like your mother would do and never even let me hold her without fifteen pillows nor feed her nor have any good times with her, you and her just lived your seperate lives like I wasn’t around. You froze me out. Don’t you think I got feelings too? What do you think I been thinking all these years? Oh I don’t count I’m just a man. You put me in mind of a black widow spider, soon as you got your child then a man isn’t no more use to you. For years I been living a lonely life hoping you would change and you never did.

NO you can’t have a divorce. What is it you already met a man that wants 20 children? You can’t have a divorce as long as you live and don’t try coming back or I’ll kill you, I mean it, I’ll kill you and Darcy both of you don’t neither one mean a thing to me. I mean this Mary I’m glad you’re gone.

Sincerely,

Guy

I put the letter back in the envelope and slipped it into my purse. I took Darcy by the hand. She said, “Mom, can I buy a popsicle?” “Maybe later, baby,” I said. I led her down the steps, out into the sunshine that was baking the sidewalk, but inside I felt cold and hard and dark like a stone. I looked into a store window and saw my reflection and thought, There goes a black widow spider taking her daughter to the park. The whole world looked different. A different set of colors even, and bigger and flatter. When we got to the park I saw John on a bench and he seemed to have changed too. He wore a black suit with a white shirt; he was all black and white. The grass behind him was such a washed-out shade of green that I hardly recognized it. Some kind of cold white gauze was laid across everything. “What’s the matter?” John said. “Nothing,” I told him. I reached out to touch his sleeve. I thought, You are my only support. I am certain I love you. Certainly with you I won’t fail. “Race you to that tree,” John told Darcy, and they were off like two jittery birds. I was the only still thing in the landscape. I stood clutching my purse to my stomach, stone still. Yet when the two of them had touched base and returned to me, and John said, “Shall I take you out to eat?” I was able to smile the same as ever. I said, “That would be nice.”

We went to a delicatessen where he said they made wonderful sandwiches. It was cafeteria-style — a dangerous place to take Darcy. She always thinks she wants everything she sees. When we reached the cash register her tray was overflowing, and the lady who rang it up said, “Somebody’s eyes are bigger than their stomach.” Then she winked at me. What would she say if I grabbed both her hands and begged to go home with her?

Once we were seated John started acting nervous, tearing bits of bread off his sandwich and rolling them into balls. I wondered if he had noticed something odd about me. I would have to tell him sometime. I leaned forward and said, “I got an answer to that letter today.”

John said, “You did?”

“He won’t give me a divorce.”

John smiled, with the corners of his mouth turned down. “It seems we’re beset with troubles from all sides,” he said.

“All sides?”

“Carol has moved back into the house.”

I looked over at Darcy. She was separating her sandwich to get at the mayonnaise. I wanted to tell her not to waste a bite of it, eat all she could hold, take the rest home in a doggy bag; now we were going to starve. John said, “Well, it’s not so bad. You know Carol, she’ll tire of it soon enough. I couldn’t just throw her out of the house, could I?”

“You could move out yourself,” I said.

“Well, yes. Yes. In fact I will, but my studio is there. I can’t just up and leave my studio. What I’m counting on is her changing her mind, by and by. I’m certain she’ll leave again.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked him.

“She operates on whims, Mary. She goes through fads. She’ll get over it. Right now she’s taken with the idea of being a homebody again. Says she wants to settle down, have children, grow vegetables. For Carol that’s ludicrous, I told her straight—”

“Children?” I said. “You got as far as talking about children?”

“Carol did, I said.”

“You said she couldn’t have any children.”

“Oh, well, she’s talking now about going to a doctor for some tests. Wants me to get tested too.”

“What would they test you for?”

“To see if it’s me that can’t have them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “It’s hardly ever the man.”

“Fifty per cent of the time it is.”

I stared at him.

“Why, sure,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, I’m not going, don’t worry,” he told me. He laid his hand over mine. “You’ll see, in a week she’ll move out again.”

“But — what about now? I mean, how are you arranging it? Where is she sleeping?”

“Mary. Look. There’s nothing to get upset about. I’m here with you eating lunch, aren’t I? I won’t let you down. Whatever happens, I think of you as my responsibility. Believe me.”

“Responsibility,” I said.

“I’ve been through a lot for your sake, Mary. I’m jeopardizing my divorce, I’ve given up motorcycle rallies—”

“Well! Are you sure I’m worth the sacrifice?”

“Be reasonable, will you?”

Reasonableness was why I left with him. He was so reasonable and cool; life with him would be so different. I said, “Tell me something. Why did you ask me to come away with you?”

“Now, Mary—”

“No, I mean it. Why didn’t you wait till you were divorced, if you were so reasonable?”

“Well, you know why. I said we might wait and you said no, we’d better do it now or not at all. You didn’t even stop to pack a bag. Once you’d made up your mind you wanted to get going, you said. You weren’t the kind to—”

“Oh, never mind,” I said. I didn’t want to hear what kind I was. I didn’t want to learn any more, ever, about how I appeared in other people’s eyes.

We took Darcy back to the boarding house because she was cross and sleepy. After I put her to bed we came out and sat in the parlor — I in an easy chair, John perched on its arm. He kept stroking the inside of my wrist. “Don’t,” I told him.

“This isn’t like you, Mary,” he said.

“It isn’t like me to go out with someone whose wife is waiting at home either.”

“In time,” he said, “this will all be over. It will seem like nothing. You’ll look back on it and laugh.”

“Well, it may be over someday, and it might seem like nothing,” I told him, “but I will never look back on it and laugh. I don’t feel as if I will ever laugh again.” Then I looked at his face and saw the boredom and irritation drawn across it like a curtain, removed as soon as he found my eyes on him. His mouth was tugged permanently downward by two acid lines at the corners; that much of his expression he could not remove. Think, I told myself, of the clean cut of him, the precision, the logic and decisiveness. Isn’t that why you’re here with him? His forefinger chafed my wrist like sandpaper, as if my skin were peeled back and he were stroking raw nerves. I stood up suddenly, pretending to have heard some sound from Darcy, and I went into the bedroom. Darcy was fast asleep. She lay sprawled across our bed, her mouth slightly open, her hairline damp with sweat. I heard John come up behind me and I felt his hand on my hip. “She’s asleep,” he told me.

“She’s tired out.”

“We’re all alone,” he said.

“No, we’re not. I’m sure Mr. Pauling is up in his studio.”

“Come with me to the couch.”

“Are you crazy?”

I moved his hand away but he stayed close behind me. “What do we care about Mr. Pauling?” he said.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “I wish you would leave now. Will you go on home to your wife, please?”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He stood there a moment longer but I wouldn’t even turn to look at him. I wanted him gone. I wanted to pick Darcy up and sit with her in a rocking chair, just the two of us, shut away from everyone. Yet when he did go (stepping too lightly, as if I were asleep as well), I was angry at him for leaving. I felt abandoned as soon as I heard the front door shut. I sat down on the bed; I took one of Darcy’s stockinged feet and held it tight for comfort, while the tears spilled over and came streaming down my face.

A long time later Mr. Pauling came by with a carpet sweeper and a dirty gray dust rag. I heard the sweeper’s wheels roll through my doorway and then stop short. “Oh,” Mr. Pauling said, “I’m sorry, I thought—”

“That’s all right.”

“I thought you were still — but I’ll come back another—”

“No, please. Go right ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”

I stood up, digging in my pocket for a handkerchief. Mr. Pauling remained in the doorway. When I sidled past him I could smell the Ivory soap on his white, white skin. I kept my eyes down, hiding the tears, so that all I saw of him was his pale plump chest above a fishnet undershirt. “Please, is there anything at all I could do to help?” he asked me.

That one single piece of kindness shattered me. “Oh, Mr. Pauling,” I said, and I took a step closer and bent to lay my face upon his shoulder. I don’t know why. I felt the shock hit him — a short breath inward, the handle of the sweeper clanging against the door and then dropping to the carpet with a thud. He kept both his arms behind him, like someone under surprise attack. Already I was sorry I had scared him so. I thought, Good Lord, I wonder what I will take into my head to do next. I had started trying to smile, to be ready to draw back and face him and apologize, when I felt one of his hands rise up and pat my arm. Little soft pats with the fingers tight together. Little warm breaths stirring a wisp of my hair. “Oh there, oh please,” he said, “please don’t cry, Mrs. Tell.” I shifted my face into the crook of his neck. I put my arms around his waist, which felt soft and had too much give to it. “I just can’t stand to see you cry,” he said. His voice wavered, as if he might start crying himself. Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke.