Margaret Millar - Wives and Lovers

“There,” she said, “did someone forget to give my girl her breakfast? We’ll fix that.”

Josephine was in the kitchen, sipping a glass of milk and gazing placidly into space. Sometimes she could sit for hours without thinking of anything, only seeing a lot of warm rich color in her mind.

“Nobody had any breakfast,” she said in a vaguely surprised voice, “except me and Harold. I was wondering if I should do the dishes but there’s hardly enough to bother about.”

“I had breakfast at Mrs. Foster’s house. She asked me to stay there all night.”

With her mind swathed in the warm rich colors, Josephine was incurious. “Harold went out to look at an apartment. The ad was in the paper this morning, three rooms, it said, and no pets and no children allowed. Harold said I’d better stay home on account of someone might suspect my condition.”

“Mrs. Foster,” Ruth said, rather annoyed at Josephine’s obtuseness, “didn’t want to stay alone with the children.”

“Is she scared of the dark? I am, once in a while. I know very well it’s the same room in the dark as it is in the light, but I can’t be positively sure unless I turn the light on again for a minute.”

“Of course she’s not afraid of the dark. She was upset because he didn’t come home. He took the car and ran off last night, and this morning he phoned. She told me every word he said. He’s not coming back, he said, he doesn’t want to live with her any more and she’s to get a divorce.”

“My goodness.” Josephine was shocked. “I thought they were a very happy couple.”

“So did I. You can’t tell from appearances. He said no matter what grounds she gets a divorce on, he promises to give her reasonable alimony and not to ask custody of any of the children. That’s not all, either. There’s a girl mixed up in it. Mrs. Foster thinks they’ve been living in sin together. She’s not sure, but that’s what she thinks. Quite a young girl too. It doesn’t put him in a very good light, I must say.”

“I don’t believe it. No man would leave his kids like that.” The warm colors were gone, the scene was gray. She was having her baby and Harold was leaving her. The baby cried pitifully, and she herself held out her arms, pleading, but Harold turned away. A very slim, pretty girl was smiling at him. “Not a decent man like — like Harold.”

“Who can tell who’s decent nowadays? Look at Dr. Foster. There wasn’t a person in town who didn’t think he was the soul of honor. He fooled everybody, even Hazel.”

“What if he never comes back? Hazel won’t have a job.”

“I never thought of that.”

“It seems a shame,” Josephine said. “Just when she was all settled and getting the yard fixed up and everything.”

Ruth flung back her head as if she’d been challenged. “Well, at least that’s the end of the Mexican anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”

She walked decisively to the sink and began to rinse off the dishes under the tap, but she felt such a sudden sharp pain in her chest that she had to stop. She leaned over the sink, pressing her dripping hands against her bosom. It’s nothing, she thought. I feel very strong, actually. It’s one of those silly meaningless pains that everybody gets now and then. I’m really quite strong.

“Do you feel all right?” Josephine asked.

“Yes — dizzy spell — it’s over now.”

“It’s from that walking. If you walked all the way from Fosters’ house at your age — not that you’re old, my goodness, but it’s the way you walk, so fast no one can keep up with you. You’d think someone was chasing you.”

The pain was gone. She wiped her hands and dabbed at the water on the front of her dress, the damp imprint of two hands, one over each breast.

“I like to walk fast,” she said.

Josephine giggled. “I can’t say the same for myself, right now. I’ve gotten so I just hate to move, unless Harold’s around to help me up out of chairs and things like that.”

“I should change my dress.”

“It’ll dry in a minute on a day like this.”

“I’ll go and change it. I shouldn’t be working around in the kitchen in a good dress like this. It’s wasteful.”

She went into her bedroom, shutting the door against Josephine. Quite frequently lately, the sound of Josephine’s gentle voice talking about Harold, and the sight of her distended abdomen and swollen breasts, set Ruth’s nerves on edge. She wasn’t sure why she had these violent reactions to Josephine. They came at her suddenly, in the midst of quite ordinary conversations about the baby’s name, or the number of diapers that would be necessary, or the house Josephine meant to have someday down by the sea.

“Not a big house. Two bedrooms, that will be enough.”

“You’ll get the fog down there.”

“I don’t care, I never get tired looking at the sea.”

“If you build above the fog line it would be better for the baby.”

“And wistaria vines over the front veranda. I’m crazy about wistaria.”

“It’s all right when it’s in bloom, but think of when it isn’t. It looks like old dead twigs.”

“And maybe a very small orchard, a couple of orange trees and an avocado. And a jacaranda, just to look at.”

“They say you’ve got to plant two avocados side by side, a single one won’t bear fruit.”

“I never heard of that.”

“You’ve got to be careful about jacarandas too. Some of them never bloom and some bloom in fits, maybe every few years. They’re very temperamental, someone told me.”

“My goodness, Ruth, you’ve said something kind of unpleasant about every single one of my ideas.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You have so. About the fog line and the wistarias and the jacaranda—”

“I was just urging you to be careful.”

“Well, it didn’t sound like it. It sounded like—”

Josephine couldn’t explain what it sounded like, and Ruth, who might have explained, didn’t try. It sounded as if she was jealous of Josephine with her baby who hadn’t arrived yet, the two-bedroom house that hadn’t been built, and the jacaranda that wasn’t planted. But she knew she wasn’t jealous of the baby, the tree, the house, only of Josephine’s capacity for dreaming of such things.

She took off the crepe dress she always wore to the Fosters’ on Saturday nights. Where the water had touched it, the crepe had puckered and the imprint of her hands was now indistinct and no larger than a child’s. She hung the dress on her side of the closet she shared with Hazel.

Standing in her white cotton slip, Ruth heard her heart knocking against the bones of her chest, extraordinarily loud and distinct in the stifling closet. It was the heartbeat of fear. She felt that her life was changing, but she didn’t know in which way and she was afraid to have it change at all. The indications of change were there. They were very small things that someone else mightn’t notice, little wings beating against the thin brittle walls of her world like moths at a window.

Dr. Foster had left, and though he scarcely knew she was alive, his leaving affected her. There would be no more Saturday nights for her, telling stories to Paul and Judith and giving the baby his bottle, and probably even no more job for Hazel. The four of them, and the fifth to come, would be forced to live on Hazel’s alimony and Harold’s wages, while the cost of living kept going up and up and up.

The excitement she felt when she entered the house had been only carbonated fear and now that the bubbles had disappeared she recognized it for what it was. She was terrified by the intricate complexities of even one small human act. A man who was almost a stranger to her had decided to leave his wife, and by this decision he had involved not only himself and his family and the girl, but herself and Hazel and Josephine and Harold and the baby, even the dog. Perhaps in the end, she thought desperately, everyone in the world was affected by the actions of every other person, a chain reaction was set up that never ceased. It went on and on, an interminable string tying them all together in an inextricably knotted mass. There was no escape, it was a universal law: one drop of water couldn’t be displaced without affecting all the other drops.