The Amateur Marriage Page 9

  Except for Michael.

  Was that the whole explanation? That she had just wanted a boy of her own to send off to war?

  But also he’d been so kind and so handsome, and she had seen something so fine in his face. Well, he was fine! He was a decent, sober, hardworking man, and she could have done a lot worse, as she often reminded herself.

  Still, during their courtship she had begun to notice certain flaws in him. She noticed and yet did not notice; she put them out of her mind. When he didn’t get her jokes, when he sacrificed her feelings to his mother’s feelings, when he showed a lack of imagination, when he criticized one of her friends, she gave a kind of mental blink and persevered in her original vision of him: he was the romance she had been waiting for all her life. And didn’t everyone agree? They were such a perfect couple! So young, so attractive, so star-crossed, so tragic! He was leaving to fight for his country! She was staying home to wait for him! The radio was playing “I’ll Never Smile Again” and the war was raging in Europe and the world was trying to tear them apart, but in the end they would prevail!

  And so she had steadily, stubbornly, pigheadedly continued pursuing the wrong course. Oh, she could see that clearly enough in hindsight. She had dug herself in deeper and deeper, promising to write daily when she detested writing, when there was nothing new to tell a person if you had to write him every single blessed never-ending day of the week and when his own letters were infinitesimally detailed accounts of mock battles in which so-and-so was behind such-and-such a tree, so-and-so on the right flank, so-and-so on the left, on and on and on . . . And promising not to see other men when she was bored half out of her mind, alone and without entertainment, and the city was teeming with good-looking soldiers and she was too young for this! This was such a waste!

  Till finally she had thought, I’ll end it. I’ll write him and end it; what do I care? What does it matter what people will say?

  While she was still choosing just the right words, though, Michael had his accident. You can’t jilt a man in a hospital bed. She would wait a bit. Hold off writing her letter till he was on his feet again. But instead he was shipped home. He alighted from the train with deep new lines pulling down the corners of his mouth although he was barely twenty-one, and his khakis were so crisp and authoritative, and his limp so stirring; and Pauline was the soldier’s young sweetheart running toward him in her summer dress. When he let his cane fall where it might and caught her up in his arms and asked if she would marry him, was it any wonder she had said yes?

  Even then it had not been too late to back out. She could still call it off! And almost had, half a dozen times, including the very last possible minute before the wedding. But here she was, somehow, all these years later.

  She chafed daily at his failings: his rigidity, his caution, his literal-mindedness, his ponderous style of speech, his reluctance to spend money, his suspicion of anything unfamiliar, his tendency to pass judgment, his limited understanding of his own children, his uncharitable attitude toward people down on their luck, his dislike of all social occasions, his stodginess in bed, his magical ability to make her seem hysterical, his infuriatingly patient “Now, Poll,” whenever she was upset, his fondness for reminding her during quarrels of weaknesses she had too gullibly confessed at happier moments. And yet underneath, she knew that none of these was the real problem. The real problem was that they were mismatched. They simply never should have married each other.

  Although whenever he voiced this thought himself, it cut her to the heart. He would be willing to give her up? He could picture a life without her? Then she would see that perhaps it was not that he was too slow but that she was too quick and impatient, not that he was too deliberate but that she was too reckless, and so forth. And she would dissolve into tears and wish she could do it all over again—meet him, fall in love, marry him—but this time, properly valuing him.

  The master bedroom was her pride and joy, the showpiece of the house. In the living room she’d had to make concessions to Mother Anton (Old Country lace doilies and hand-embroidered runners, a crucifix above one door), but step into the master bedroom and you knew you had entered the modern age. The carpet was a beige wall-to-wall, the furniture ash-blond wood with cream Formica tops and asymmetrical slashes of chrome for the drawer pulls. The bed had a white “crackle ice” vinyl headboard and a spread in a vibrant abstract print of red and yellow and royal blue. Over the bed was a framed Picasso that Michael always referred to as Three Musicians After a Train Wreck, and over the vanity a mirror shaped something like a boomerang.

  The idea was that every horizontal surface should be bare, with perhaps a single tasteful object here and there for decoration, but that was easier said than done when you had small children. At the moment the bureau top was hidden beneath a mound of laundry waiting to be sorted, and a drift of Lindy’s paper dolls, and the swim goggles that George had been hunting for this morning. Also, Pauline had a habit of strewing clothes around when she was dressing. Right now she was dressing for an afternoon canasta party, and first one thing didn’t look right on her and then another; so there were skirts and tops and slacks piled on the bed and shoes pointing every which way across the carpet. She had just about decided on a pink V-necked blouse, but she couldn’t think what to wear with it, and she was stepping out of a too-tight skirt when the phone rang. Half staggering, her feet entangled in pleats, she made a lunge for the extension on the nightstand. “Hello?” she said.

  “Pauline?”

  It was Alex.

  “Oh!” she said. She looked toward the door, which was almost shut but not quite. “What do you want?” she asked.

  She hadn’t meant to sound so blunt. She pressed her fingers to her lips. He didn’t take offense, though. He said, “Here I had thought I was thawing a steak, but just now when I unwrapped it I found out it was ground beef.”

  “Ground beef,” she said, and then, audaciously, “Didn’t Adelaide label her freezer packs?”

  “Not this particular one,” he said. “I had to guess from the shape alone, and obviously I flunked. So what do I do now? Help! I find myself in the throes of a culinary emergency!”

  She laughed. Suddenly the world looked less serious, less important. Ground beef and Elmview Acres and domestic life in general were just . . . comical, in fact. She said, “Well, of course you could always have hamburgers.”

  “The last time I made hamburgers, they kept falling through the grate,” he said. “Adelaide was ready to kill me. We had company and there I was, serving up these little charred bits of meat that I’d risked third-degree burns for plucking them from the fire. ‘Here, folks, have some Beef Crumbs Flambé.’”

  “‘Some Burgers Carbonisé,’” Pauline suggested, gargling her r the way she’d been taught in French I. Alex laughed, which gave her a flush of gratification. She said, “How about meat loaf, then?”

  “Well, I thought about meat loaf . . .”

  “I know that sounds kind of humdrum, but I have the best recipe! Meat Loaf Orientale, it’s called. You just take any normal meat-loaf recipe from one of Adelaide’s cookbooks, Better Homes & Gardens or some such, and you stir in a can of chop suey vegetables and half a can of chow mein noodles. It’s delicious.”

  “Wait a minute; I’m writing this down. Chop suey vegetables . . .”

  “But drain them first,” she said. It was fun to feel like an expert at something.

  “Chow mein noodles . . .”

  “And what I do myself, I lay a sheet of foil across the pan when the meat starts to brown. I hate a meat loaf that’s too brown and crusty on top.”

  “Sheet of foil . . .” Alex repeated. “Gee, thanks, Pauline. I knew you’d come to my rescue.”

  “Any time,” she told him. “Hope it works out!”

  Then they said goodbye and she hung up.

  After that, it took no more than an instant to settle on what to wear. She slipped on a full white skirt and zipped the zipper, stepped into a pair
of medium-heeled pumps, and grabbed her purse from the amoeba-shaped plastic chair in the corner. “I’m off,” she told Michael as she passed through the kitchen. He was playing Go Fish at the kitchen table with George and Lindy. Karen, who had just awakened from her nap, sat on his lap, sucking her thumb and dreamily twining a curl around one chubby index finger. Pauline said, “There are cookies for the kids in the cookie jar, and chocolate milk in the fridge if they want it.”

  “Who was that on the phone?” Michael asked.

  “Phone?”

  “The telephone.”

  “Oh. Well. That was Wanda.”

  “Wanda! You’re just about to see her in person!”

  “So?”

  “You were talking to her for ages!”

  “You know how women are,” Pauline said, and she gave him a breezy wave and walked out.

  Their car was a 1940 Dodge Special—a dull-black, turtle-shaped model inherited from her father when he moved up to a pale-pink Deluxe after the war. Michael hadn’t even known how to drive when they got it. Pauline had had to teach him. He’d been almost too good a student. Now any time she drove him to work he found fault with her gear shifting or wondered aloud why she revved the engine so hard. After she had shot backwards into the street and braked a little too sharply, not having noticed an approaching station wagon until it honked, she winced and glanced toward the house. But Michael must not have heard, because he didn’t appear at the window.

  She meandered through the curving streets of Elmview Acres and out the gate, took a wrong turn, corrected herself, and eventually ended up on Loch Raven, where she could settle behind a bus and relax into a daydream. Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

  Last Christmastime, she and Michael had attended a dinner party so large that their hostess had had to rent an extra table for the dining room. Married couples were separated, the wife at one table and the husband at the other, and it so happened that Alex had been seated next to Pauline. Partway through the dinner, he leaned toward her and asked if she’d noticed that theirs was the frivolous table. “Frivolous?” she repeated, and he said, “Yes, our table’s telling jokes, but the other one’s talking politics. They’re the sober half of these marriages and we’re the jolly half.”

  It was true, she saw. Jack Casper, on her left, was in the midst of a very funny story about his three-year-old’s visit to Santa, while his wife at the other table was attacking the Israeli Parliament’s relocation to Jerusalem. When their own table erupted in laughter at the punch line of Jack’s story, Alex told Pauline, “See?” and of course everybody wanted to know, “See what?”

  He said, “We’re the fun-loving ones. The other table’s the responsible ones, the ones who balance the household accounts and tell us we can’t afford that vacation trip we wanted.”

  Then the other table got wind of the discussion and joined in—Jack’s wife protesting that they were fun-loving too; just because they’d been speaking seriously didn’t mean they weren’t. “But after all,” she pointed out, “certain things are more important than fun, you have to admit.”

  Alex said, “They are?”

  “I mean, you’ve got to accept reality.”

  “Reality!” Alex echoed in horror, and Jack Casper leapt to his feet, shouting, “Never! Never!” and pumped both fists in the air above his head. The rest of their table cheered and clapped, while the other table watched blankly.

  Was that when Alex Barrow began to occupy Pauline’s thoughts?

  Oops. Somehow, she had arrived downtown. She should have taken a left back there. And the next street she came to had a sign reading No Left Turn; so she took a right instead. Then a left after that. But now where was she? She seemed to have gotten confused.

  After another left, though, the scenery grew more familiar. She entered a hodgepodge of stores and houses, the stores’ signs often Greek or Polish or Czech, the houses’ stoops scrubbed white as soap bars and their parlor windows displaying artificial flowers, dolls dressed in native costumes, plaster Madonnas with their arms outstretched in blessing. Black-garbed, kerchiefed old women plodded down the sidewalks laden with knobby shopping bags. Little girls played hopscotch or jacks; older girls in spaghetti-strapped sundresses sashayed past groups of teenaged boys and pretended not to hear their whistles.

  Pauline had been right to urge Michael to leave this place. Life here was so jumbled, so gnarled and knotted and entangled.

  The canasta party was at Katie Vilna’s. It always was, because Katie was a divorcee—the only one of them free to have her girlfriends over any time she liked without a husband’s barging in. She and her son lived in the apartment where she had grown up, above Golka’s Barber Shop. As Pauline was maneuvering her car into a very obstinate parking space out front, she saw Wanda and her sister-in-law, Marilyn Bryk, walking toward her. She tapped her horn and they stopped to wait for her—Wanda square-hipped and dowdy in a flowered dress with cap sleeves, Marilyn (a New Jersey girl) more fashionable in a bouffant-skirted shirtwaist. “Okay, you’re almost in,” Wanda called. “Just swing her to the left a bit . . . back, back . . . whoa!”

  Pauline cut the engine and stepped out of the car, leaving all her windows open because it was so much hotter here. “Hi, there!” she said. “Don’t you look cute in that hairdo, Marilyn!” (She was speaking from a protective impulse, because actually Marilyn’s hairdo—a tightly curled, skull-hugging poodle cut—made her face seem too big.) Each woman set an arm around Pauline in a brief embrace, and then the three of them entered the door to the right of the barber’s.

  The stairs inside were narrow and steep, with corrugated rubber treads, and the walls had not been painted for so long that the white had turned custard-yellow. When Katie flung open the door to her apartment, though, it was a whole other story. She had replaced her parents’ dark furniture with the very latest style, all in an automotive motif. Bands of chrome trimmed every edge, the cushions were covered in tangerine vinyl, and the rounded corners gave each piece an aerodynamic sleekness. “Come in! Come in!” she said. “You’re late! I was starting to think you’d forgotten!”

  Katie had aged the best of any of them, in Pauline’s opinion. She still had her figure, and the hardships she had been through—the hasty marriage, “premature” baby, and contentious divorce—had given her face an intriguingly embittered look. Of the four women, she was the only one in slacks (capri pants in a chartreuse tropical print). The others seemed overdressed by comparison.

  “Donald’s at my aunt’s,” she told them. “She’s keeping him for the night because I’ve got a date this evening and I figured I might as well take him there early and be done with it.”

  A date! Imagine. The old ladies in the neighborhood shook their heads over Katie, thankful that her parents weren’t around to see how she’d turned out, but Pauline thought her life was fascinating. The ex-husband was heir to a brewing fortune in Milwaukee, and his alimony payments were how Katie could afford her new furniture and her clothes. She could even buy a better house, if she wanted, and Pauline couldn’t see why she didn’t. Pauline was always urging Katie to move out to Elmview Acres.

  To be honest, the canasta game was only an excuse. It was true that they settled immediately around the folding table, and Marilyn shuffled the cards, and Wanda cut the deck . . . but meanwhile, they were talking a mile a minute. Katie’s upcoming date was an unknown, the brother of a friend; not much material there, at least for now. But she did have news of Janet Witt. Janet was living out in Hollywood, California, of all places. She had married a set designer twenty years her senior. And then Wanda reported receiving a letter from Anna Grant, Pauline’s old school friend, whom Pauline herself had just about lost touch
with except for Christmas cards. “Does everybody know that Anna’s pregnant?” Wanda asked. “Finally! You remember she wanted to get her music degree first, but now at long last she’s expecting—in early September, she says.” Which reminded the others to ask Pauline about her sister. “She’s three weeks overdue, going on a month,” Pauline said. “Bigger than a house, and about to lose her mind.”

  “Which is this, her third?” Katie asked.

  “Her fourth. I don’t know what she was thinking.”

  “I told Lukas,” Marilyn said, “I told him, ‘God gave me two hands, only two, to walk my children across the street with. There’s a message there,’ I said.”

  “Well, sure, if you can follow it,” Wanda told her. (She herself had five daughters.) “Things don’t always go the way you plan them.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Pauline said, and everybody smiled at her, because they’d been the ones who had to console her when she found she was pregnant with Karen. As a girl she had wanted lots of children, but she had changed her mind after those hard early years with the first two so close together.

  “I’ll never forget,” Wanda said, “the summer I was expecting Claire and nobody knew it yet, and my mother-in-law kept bringing me vegetables to put up and I would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m not able to at this time of the month,’ because I hated, hated, hated canning and Mother Lipska held to that old-time belief that women shouldn’t preserve food on those certain days. She would say, ‘Still?’ and go away tut-tutting. Once she asked if I thought I should see a doctor. And then when she found out later that I’d been pregnant all along . . . !”

  They laughed, even though they had heard that story before. There was something comforting about going over and over each other’s memories until they seemed like their own.

  Marilyn was dealing. “One, one, one, one,” she said. “Two, two, two, two”—laying out each card meticulously, pausing now and then to take a puff of the cigarette that rested in the ashtray standing between her and Katie. Pauline checked her cards as she got them, but the others left them lying facedown while they went on with their conversation.