The Amateur Marriage Read online

  Pauline, meanwhile, was dancing with soldiers and whispering secrets to her girlfriends and fluffing up her hair in front of mirrors. The image of her snug, lacy world filled Michael with longing, though at times it crossed his mind that it was her fault he had enlisted. Well, not her fault, maybe, but her influence—the influence of her admiring and expectant gaze. No, cancel that. A man had to take responsibility for his own decisions.

  That was what he’d told himself, and yet daily his resentment against Army life had grown until he lived in a permanent state of barely suppressed rage. He raged against the itch of flying insects on the exercise field, and the increasing weight of his weapon as he stood rigid throughout some officer’s interminable speech, and the infuriating hawk and gargle of Connor’s cough. One night, after Pauline had allowed eight days to go by and then sent only a breezy note describing a visiting captain’s “cultured” Boston accent, Michael leapt from his bed shouting “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” and clamped a pillow on Connor’s face and held it down with all his might. It took three men to pull him off. Connor sat up, blinking in a dazed and disbelieving way, and Michael sank back on his cot and buried his head in his hands.

  After that, the other men shunned him. He hadn’t made any friends in this new camp anyhow, and now the few who’d been minimally polite began to leave a wide space around him. His superiors observed him too closely, and Connor (a loutish sort) made a point of harassing him every chance he got—”accidentally” upsetting Michael’s coffee mug or jostling him out of formation. Then they took a hike through scrub and Connor’s rifle went off and shattered Michael’s left hip. Nobody even pretended it might have been a mistake. The only mistake, Michael knew, was that he’d been wounded rather than killed. But he was not so naive as to press charges.

  And besides, the joke was on Connor, in the end. Michael got to go home.

  He crossed Purslane Street and turned left. Now he was in front of the Barclay house, its ground-floor windows outlined by threads of light around the edges of the shades and the wooden porch pillars a luminous white. Michael was not accustomed to porches. He thought of them as luxuries, although the Barclays’ porch had a ramshackle air with its litter of tossed-off galoshes and the rusted snow shovel and stubby straw broom propped expectantly next to the door.

  He rang the doorbell. Wiped his feet (unnecessarily) on the coco mat. Started to ring again but changed his mind and raked his fingers through his hair instead.

  “Ah,” Mr. Barclay said, finally appearing in a widening shaft of lamplight. “Michael.”

  “Hi there, Mr. Barclay.”

  “Hi.”

  Mr. Barclay stood aside. He wasn’t yet in his bathrobe, at least. He wore a V-necked cardigan and baggy-kneed trousers. A section of the News-Post dangled from one hand, and his rimless reading glasses were sliding down his nose.

  “I think it might be going to snow,” Michael said as he stepped inside.

  “Yes, that’s what they’re saying, all right.” Mr. Barclay flapped his newspaper in the direction of the stairs. “She’s up there with the baby,” he said. Then he headed back to his armchair.

  From her rocker, Pauline’s mother gave Michael a friendly wave. “How’re you doing, Michael?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m okay, Mom Barclay.”

  She was knitting something blue that flowed across her lap. A fire burned low in the fireplace, and music tinkled faintly from the radio with its fancy tilted dial that people didn’t have to squat to adjust. When Mr. Barclay resettled himself, he gave a groaning sigh of contentment and opened out his paper.

  Michael took in the scene for a moment before he turned away and started up the stairs.

  In the larger of the rear bedrooms, the one that had once been Pauline’s, Pauline stood jiggling the Barclays’ old crib in the rhythm that always put Lindy back to sleep when she was fretful. The room was dark, but enough light spilled in from the hall so that Michael could see Pauline’s expression when she raised her face to greet him. Her eyes were damp and her mouth had a vulnerable look, the two little points of her upper lip touchingly hopeful.

  “Sweetheart. Pauline,” he said, and he let his cane fall to the floor and crossed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around her. He felt her tears dampening the skin just inside his collar. He was astonished all over again by how dear she was, and how fragile and slight. “I thought you’d never come for me, I thought you’d given up on me, I thought you didn’t love me,” she was whispering, and he said, “I could never give up. Of course I love you. I couldn’t not love you. I wouldn’t know how to not love you.”

  Hugging her close, gazing over her head and out the tall, dark window, he saw that the snow had finally begun. Soft white flakes drifted past, so weightless they were almost not even falling. He had the feeling that if he held his breath, the two of them could stay suspended forever in this moment of stopped time.

  3. The Anxiety Committee

  When the telephone rang, Pauline cried, “Sit still, everybody! I’ll get that! Don’t anybody move!”

  Although none of the children was stirring, in fact. Lindy and George stared at her placidly over their morning toast. Karen, who was still too little to answer the phone, continued forcing sodden Wheaties into her doll’s O-shaped mouth.

  Mother Anton was shuffling down the carpeted corridor from her bedroom. When she saw Pauline approaching, she flattened herself against the wall and allowed her to race past. For Pauline wasn’t picking up the telephone in the kitchen. She was running for the one in the rec room, all the way downstairs.

  “Hello?” she said, out of breath, hopping on one foot because she’d stubbed a toe in her hurry.

  “Hi, hon,” her mother said.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Well, that’s a fine welcome!”

  “I was just . . . How are you, Mom?”

  “Very well, thanks, but I can’t say the same for your sister. Seems last night she went into labor, or what she thought was labor, and so at two a.m. she telephoned, I got up, I got dressed, your dad drove me over to babysit, she and Doug went off with her little packed suitcase, and what happened? They told her it was a false alarm. ‘False alarm!’ she said. ‘It can’t be false! I’m an old hand at this! Don’t you think I’d know it if—’”

  One of the children had left a comic book on the bar and now an imprint remained—smatterings of backwards type in white balloons and an image of Minnie Mouse with her big red hairbow. It was silly to have a bar, really. Neither Pauline nor Michael drank much. But Pauline planned to start throwing neighborhood parties as soon as their lives got a little less hectic, and already she was thinking ahead to sock hops once the children hit their teens, with root beer floats and such just like at a soda fountain. Besides, the bar came with the house. You could choose Plan A, B, or C, and while Plans B and C were beyond their means (or beyond her father’s means, for it was he who’d made the down payment), even Plan A, the California Ranchette, had some very impressive features, including not only the bar but a chimney-looking brick column catty-corner from it, except where the fireplace opening would have been there was a recessed cube for a TV set as soon as they could afford one.

  Poor Donna had come home in tears, her mother was saying. “You know how wearisome it gets. Can’t sleep nights, can’t find the right position for your back . . .”

  Pauline put her finger in the i on the dial and rotated it the least little bit—not quite enough to cut her mother’s voice off. Then she went a smidgen too far and her mother stopped short after “water retention.” When she released the dial her mother was saying, “. . . ankles dented like bread dough . . .” Pauline hadn’t missed a thing.

  “Well, maybe I’ll call her later,” she said. “Try and boost her spirits.”

  “Oh, why don’t you do that, hon. She’s just so blue and discouraged.”

  “Gotta go now!” Pauline said.

  And hung up, just like that.

  But th
en stood there a moment longer staring at the phone. It didn’t ring again, however.

  Upstairs, Mother Anton was emptying the cupboard next to the stove—hauling forth salt, pepper, cornstarch, sugar, tapioca. Her hair was wrapped in a kerchief that was knotted over her forehead, and her legs stuck out all white and skinny and veiny beneath her housecoat.

  “Are you looking for something?” Pauline asked her.

  “Prunes.”

  “Sit down and I’ll get them for you. George, stop playing with your toast. Either finish it or ask to be excused. And Lindy . . . Lindy, what is that you’re wearing?”

  Lindy was wearing denim shorts and a lace-trimmed, puff-sleeved pink blouse—the top half of a mother-daughter outfit she had so far refused to be seen in. Every Sunday morning as they were dressing for church, Pauline would ask, “Well? Should the two of us put on our outfits?” and Lindy always said no. She wanted to wear her sailor suit; she wanted to wear her blue plaid. Anything, it seemed, but an outfit that matched her mother’s. She was such a contrary little person! Pauline had just about given up, resigned herself to waiting till the outfit could be handed down to Karen. Who was more the type for it anyway: soft and blond and blue-eyed, while Lindy had Michael’s dark coloring and—even at age seven—his angular, sharp-edged frame. Someday Lindy was going to be a beauty, Pauline believed (though she admitted she might be biased). She’d be what people called striking, arresting—someone who could carry off those clothes you saw in Vogue magazine. But meanwhile, here she stood, a crazy mix of lace and denim on a Saturday morning when Pauline herself was in pedal pushers. “Lindy,” Pauline said, “would you go put on a T-shirt, please? And hang that top on a hanger before it gets all wrinkled.”

  “I’m not in the mood for a T-shirt,” Lindy told her. Chin raised defiantly, eyes squinched into splinters. Her hair hung straight as licorice sticks on either side of her face.

  “Well, nobody’s going to the pool with me dressed that way,” Pauline told her. Then she turned her back and started hunting for the prunes, because you got a lot further with Lindy if you didn’t force a confrontation. For a moment nothing happened, but eventually she heard Lindy slide out of her chair and stalk away.

  “I can go to the pool,” George announced. “I’m wearing a T-shirt.”

  “Yes, Georgie. Mother Anton, I can’t find any prunes. I’m afraid you’ll have to have something else for breakfast.”

  “But Dr. Stanek said prunes. He said lots of prunes and roughage.”

  “How about applesauce?” Pauline asked.

  “Applesauce! Are you trying to kill me? You know applesauce is binding!”

  “Fruit cocktail, then. I know I saw a can of fruit cocktail, somewhere or other . . .”

  “I simply cannot figure,” Mother Anton said, “how my son could be in the grocery business and still we never seem to have any food in the house.”

  Pauline made a face at a box of Grape-Nuts.

  “And where is Michael, anyhow? It’s Saturday! Didn’t he promise he would start staying home on Saturdays?”

  “Oh, you know how he is,” Pauline said. “He refuses to believe that anyone could take his place. He got a call from Eustace about some problem with the fridge, and nothing else would do but that he go straight down and see to it.”

  “And rightly so,” Mother Anton said, suddenly reversing herself. “Whoever heard of leaving your business in the total care of a darky?”

  “Here,” Pauline said. “All-Bran. Can’t ask for any more roughage than that!”

  Mother Anton poked her lips out in a discontented way, but she sat back in her chair and let Pauline pour her a bowl.

  “Go get your towel and swim trunks,” Pauline told George. “Karen, honey, finish your Wheaties. It’s almost time for the pool to—”

  The telephone rang again.

  “I’ll get it!” she cried.

  She flew out of the kitchen and back down the corridor, down the stairs to the rec room. Each time she heard another ring she thanked her lucky stars, because you never knew when Mother Anton (seemingly deaf to phones and doorbells, as a rule) might take it into her head to pick up the receiver.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Pauline?”

  She said, “Oh! Alex! Hi!”

  Very offhand and surprised, as if he’d been the farthest thing from her mind.

  “I hope you’re not up to your elbows in something.”

  “No, no.”

  “I know Saturday’s a family day.”

  “Actually, Michael’s gone into town,” she said. “It’s no different from any other day, for me.”

  “Well, I had this little research question I was hoping you could help me with.”

  “Shoot!” she told him.

  She seemed to have become a different person all at once—somebody slangy and athletic, the type of woman you might find in a flippy little skirt on a golf course.

  “It appears that my basement freezer has got these various meats in it,” he said, “and they’ve been there quite a while. Ever since before . . . you know, the famous departure. So I was wondering, do you suppose it would kill me to eat them?”

  “Oh. We-e-ell . . .” she said. She was drawing out her answer so as to make the conversation last longer.

  “I’m not ready to leave this earth yet,” he told her, “heartbroken though I may supposedly be.”

  “I should say not!” she agreed. “But your freezer hasn’t been off at all, has it? Hasn’t had any malfunctions or power interruptions.”

  “Not so far as I know.”

  “And Adelaide’s been gone since . . .”

  As often as they’d talked lately, this was the first time she had referred so directly to his wife’s leaving. She felt very daring to be speaking the name out loud.

  “Since May,” Alex was saying. “But she was one of those far-sighted types. She could have bought that meat any number of weeks before then.”

  “Still,” Pauline told him, “I imagine it would be safe.”

  “You think?”

  “Maybe a slight loss of flavor, but—”

  “I’m going to risk it, then,” Alex said.

  “Well, don’t take my word for it!”

  “Why not?” he asked her. “Who would know better? Gosh, you’re Madame Betty Crocker! I haven’t forgotten that dip you brought to the Fourth of July picnic.”

  “My Hawaiian Luau Dip,” she said. She couldn’t help feeling pleased.

  “That was pretty amazing,” he told her.

  “Michael said it tasted too foreign.”

  “But that was what was good about it!”

  “He asked me, he said, ‘Why on earth for Independence Day would you serve a dish with soy sauce in it?’”

  Lindy said, “Mom.”

  Pauline spun around so sharply that she knocked her elbow against the edge of the bar. “Well, hi!” she said.

  Lindy was standing at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. She had changed into a halter top that tightly banded her flat little chest. Pauline said, “What is it, honey?” but Lindy just went on looking at her, her eyes so dark that Pauline couldn’t read them.

  On the other end of the line, Alex was still speaking. “. . . got to admire a woman with cosmopolitan tastes,” he was saying. Pauline interrupted him. “Oops!” she said gaily. “Here’s my daughter!”

  “Oh. Okay,” Alex said.

  “Bye-bye for now!”

  “Goodbye, Pauline.”

  She hung up. Lindy said, “Who was that?”

  “A friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “Just a friend, Lindy, asking, you know, a freezer question.”

  “Freezer question?”

  “A cooking question. You know.”

  Lindy went on studying her. “Let’s get going,” Pauline told her, and she walked briskly toward the stairs, rubbing the point of her elbow where she’d hit it against the bar.

  Someday they
would have two cars, the way the people on the corner did, but right now they couldn’t afford it. Pauline had to take the children everywhere on foot, or else drive Michael downtown and pick him up after work. Still, to her, Elmview Acres was worth it. It was so green and safe and peaceful, so structured, so beautifully organized!

  Michael had been against moving here, at first. He had said it was too expensive, and too far from everybody they knew. But how long could they have gone on living in that little bitty apartment where the children had to sleep three to a room? Where Pauline and Michael didn’t have a room, even—just a pull-out couch in the parlor? And anyone who visited had to enter through the kitchen?

  Plus George and Lindy playing in the streets. That was the clincher. The two of them coming home grimy and gray, their knees dented with cinders. While out in Baltimore County every house had a lawn and every new development a swimming pool of its own.

  The pool in Elmview Acres was a graceful blue guitar shape with folding chairs and recliners grouped around the shallow end for the women with young children. Today only two women sat there, though—just Mimi Drew and Joan Derby—because it was a Saturday morning, when most of the wives were running errands with their husbands. Pauline gave Mimi and Joan a wave and then wheeled the stroller toward the changing rooms. After her usual argument with George—”No, you cannot come to the ladies’ side; you’re old enough to go to the men’s side on your own now”—he trudged off with his rolled-up towel beneath his arm. She parked the stroller at the entrance to the ladies’ side and took her beach bag from the rear basket. Then she led Lindy and Karen into a chilly twilight that smelled of damp cement. A wooden bench ran the length of the room, and rough wooden booths lined the far wall. In one of the booths, she dressed Karen in a red-and-white swimsuit with rhumba ruffles across the seat to hide the bulkiness of her diaper. Lindy, meanwhile, clambered into a pair of boy’s trunks and a sleeveless knit undershirt—the only bathing costume she would agree to. Pauline had given up on that particular battle.