Carole Page - Decidedly Married

“Who? Myra? Myra Mayonnaise?”

“No, silly. It’s Myra Mason.”

“The girl who looks like Wolf Man’s sister?”

“Yes. No! Come on, she’s not that bad. In fact, she’s good. Talented. Her technique is flawless.”

“You’re prettier, with those big, mahogany brown eyes and your golden hair tousled around your face.”

“What do my looks have to do with being an artist?”

“Easy. Watching you made it tolerable for me when it was my turn to pose tonight.”

“Really? And here I thought you hated posing. You balked enough, until Mr. Plotnik reminded you every student has to take his turn modeling for the class or—”

“Or risk lowering his grade. I know. Why do you think I gave in?”

“So you didn’t mind posing after all?”

“I said it was tolerable. That’s a far cry from acceptable.”

“I have to admit, you looked a bit uncomfortable sitting there in your swim trunks.”

“Wouldn’t you be? Sitting like a statue for an hour with everyone’s eyes boring into you? I tell you, Julie, if I hadn’t had you to watch, I’d have—”

“You really watched me? I thought you were joking.”

Michael’s voice is low, caressing, hypnotic in its intensity. “You really didn’t notice? I watched your eyes moving over me, and I imagined it was your lips. I imagined—”

“Michael—really, I—”

“You’re blushing Am I embarrassing you?”

“No, Michael. It’s just that you’ve got the wrong idea. I was looking at you as—as an artist, not—not as a woman.”

He presses my hand against his lips. “The way you’re looking at me now?”

“Yes—no—I mean—”

“Tell me, Julie. Do you believe in love at third sight?”

“Third?”

“Our third anniversary. You said so yourself. We met three weeks ago tonight. And we’ve gone out maybe half a dozen times. And yet, would you believe—?”

“Believe what, Michael?”

“Already I’m falling in love with you.”

My voice is hushed, full of wonder. “How do you know it’s love?”

That smile again, warmly seductive, intoxicating, breaking through my defenses. “It doesn’t get any better than this, Julie—my jewel. You feel it, too. I know you do. I can see it in your eyes. It’s like everything in our lives has led up to this moment.”

Yes, Michael. You were right.

And everything since has led away from that moment.

From that night, seventeen years ago.

The night Katie Lynn was conceived.

Remember, Michael?

Today: the reality.

I’m sitting here.

Sitting here watching Oprah Winfrey on TV.

Thinking how great she looks since she lost all that weight

Watching Oprah interview an elderly couple who were high school sweethearts and are getting married fifty years later after outliving a wife and two husbands. They’re holding hands and looking at each other like there’s nobody else in the world.

I’m sitting here eating the expensive candy Michael got me for my birthday—my thirty-fifth, heaven help me!—and I’m squeezing the round ones to find the chocolate cremes. Feeling guilty that I’m sitting here stuffing myself when I should be at work doing something productive. I would have been at work, if it weren’t for this head cold—persistent little bugaboo.

Julie had taken all the decongestants and antihistamines she dared. And she still felt lousy.

Wish I’d gone to work, she thought. Wish I’d never found that note. Dying inside over that note.

The words of the note reeled through her mind like one of her mother’s old-fashioned vinyl records with the needle stuck in a groove, playing the same refrain over and over:

“Michael,

Sorry about last night.

How about tonight?

My place.

Love, Beth.”

Julie couldn’t get the words out of her mind. Nor the questions. What does a woman do when she finds that kind of note in her husband’s shirt pocket? Written in a feminine hand on faded blue paper. Smelling faintly of perfume. With a phone number at the bottom in her husband’s scrawled hand.

What am I supposed to think?

Julie tried hard not to think about the implications of that note. The idea that Michael was meeting a woman named Beth. Tonight At her place. That he had planned to see her last night, but…something happened. What happened? He was home last night, irritable, distracted. But home.

Julie wrapped her robe around her as if it would ward off the chill numbing her senses. I feel like one of those children who has slipped through the ice and is hanging suspended in frozen waters waiting for someone to fetch him out and thaw him back to life. I am frozen with disbelief. I am too stunned to feel pain. But even through the numbness I already know I am dying inside.

Michael, how could you do this to me? To us?

Oprah was signing off now, smiling that wonderful smile of hers. Julie mused, No matter what issues or ordeals she offers us, the world always rights itself again in her smile.

Julie could imagine Michael on Oprah’s show—a poised, successful real-estate executive with his own office—sitting there on stage in his smooth, professional way, his sturdy hands gesturing expansively as he tells Oprah, “I can explain everything. Julie and I were only kids when we got married, nineteen and twenty. She was pregnant, so what can I say? I did the right thing by her.”

“And how has the marriage turned out?” Oprah might ask.

“It’s been an okay marriage,” Michael would reply. “We’ve got a beautiful daughter named Katie, sweet sixteen and already strong-willed like her mother. I’ve got to admit, when it comes to wedded bliss, the romance department’s nothing to write home about. The fireworks stopped years ago, but Julie and I are comfortable together. What more can you ask for these days?”

“But what about Beth?” Oprah’s asking.

What about Beth?

I’m waiting, too, Michael. How do you explain Beth?

Michael, who in blazes is Beth!

Julie flicked off the TV and headed for the kitchen where she quickly put on the kettle. A cup of hot tea was what she needed now. It would calm her nerves and melt the cold dread gripping her heart.

When she was a child, her mother always gave her hot tea when she was sick. With a dash of cream and a spoonful of sugar. Then her mother would sit beside her and talk about her childhood, about the days when she ate vegetables from her own garden and picked apples from the tree next door, and milk still came in glass bottles with cream at the top. Sometimes in the winter the milk on the porch froze, popping the solid cream right through the cardboard cap. And sometimes her mother would suck on that icy mound of cream until her lips grew numb.

Even now, remembering the tale, Julie could almost feel her own lips turn cold. How she had loved hearing her mother’s wonderful stories!

But now those days were gone.

“They don’t make milk that way anymore, Mama, with cream so rich it’s a delicacy,” Julie said aloud. She found herself talking to her mother more and more these days, as if she were still alive and sitting across from her, carrying on an ordinary conversation. Julie couldn’t seem to break the habit of pretending her mother was there, but what was the harm, if it made her feel better?

“Now everything I buy is low fat or nonfat,” she went on, speaking with the casual, intimate tone she always reserved for her mother. “The stuff today tastes like the watered-down milk you poured on my cereal back when Daddy was out of work, Mama. Such long ago days. Strange. I remember nothing of those days except that watery milk. Now I pay a mint for milk like that, Mama.”