Decidedly Married. Carole Page Gift
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.”
Julie poured her tea, wishing her mother was still around to share it with her. But they had buried her mother—the lovely, charming, devoted Ruth Currey—nearly a year ago. That was another truth still frozen inside Julie waiting to thaw.
I say the words in my head every day, but they never take root. They never seem real. I expect to drive through the canyon and past the lake and around the bend to the house in Crescent City where I grew up, the house just two hours away where my father lives in solitary silence, never opening his door or his heart to the likes of his only child, his wayward daughter, Julie Ryan.
Maybe he never forgave me for getting pregnant at eighteen, marrying a man he didn’t know, giving up my chance for a career to put my young husband through school. Maybe he never forgave me for not dying instead of Mama Or maybe he never forgave me for being born.
Julie took her steaming teacup upstairs to her bedroom and settled back on the sofa in her cozy retreat. As she set her tea beside her on a TV tray, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the TV screen.
I’m wearing an old nightgown and my scuzzy robe that’s soft as fleece but clouds out, adding twenty pounds to my girth. I haven’t dressed all day. I tell myself it’s because I’m sick. I have a cold. I have a right to lounge around and be sloppy and comfortable. Every other day I have to shimmy and wiggle into garments that make me look attractive, that befit my position as administrative assistant to the vice president of Leland-Myer Tool Company. But it’s a glorified title with a beggar’s pay.
I’m a glorified secretary, nothing more. But it’s a life. Not like painting, of course. Nothing matches that. But it’s something. At least my job gives me a satisfaction Michael doesn’t offer these days.
Michael.
Oh, yes. Michael.
Julie had found the note in his shirt pocket this afternoon—she wasn’t snooping, she was sorting the laundry. She sat on the sofa now and stared at it, studied it as if by memorizing every word she could somehow decipher its meaning.
Suddenly she knew what she had to do. Call that number. Like the TV commercial says, “Reach out and touch someone.” She had to reach out and touch this Beth. Make sense of her words. Perhaps it was all a silly, horrible mistake. Maybe Beth was a colleague of Michael’s. Maybe she was sixty and wore geriatric shoes. Maybe Beth was a man’s last name. George Beth. John Beth. Andrew Beth.
No. The note said, “Love, Beth.”
She wasn’t a colleague or an old woman or a man She was someone beautiful and desirable, someone Michael wanted to be with, would have been with, if…
“Sorry about last night. How about tonight?”
That was it. She knew she had to do it Had to know.
She set down her teacup, got up and went over to the kingsize bed she and Michael shared. She sat down on the fluffy comforter, reached for the cordless phone on the nightstand and dialed the number. Fingers trembling. Mouth like cotton. Heart pounding like congo drums. Two rings, then the answering machine came on. A soft female voice crooned, “Hello, this is Beth. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Julie racked her brain for an appropriate response: Hello, Beth, this is your lover’s wife. Sorry, he won’t be there tonight. He already has plans.
Without uttering a sound, Julie slammed the receiver down and covered her mouth with her hands. She was afraid she would vomit.
She returned to the sofa, sat down and sipped her tea, thinking, All I can do is wait. What time will Michael be home tonight? Will he come home at all? Is it already too late?
Julie looked over at the clock on the nightstand. Nearly three. Katie would be home soon, running up the stairs to her bedroom. Her child, her fanciful daughter, her dreamer of impossible dreams. She carries the image of my youth, Julie mused, the likeness of my mother, the steely aloofness of my father. And Michael’s charm. And yet she is so totally her own person I do not know her. Behind the familiar face hides a stranger, a person of such complexity and surprise, I marvel that she came from my body, that she could possibly have been any part of me.
She denies me at every turn, Julie acknowledged darkly, her tea tepid now, tasting bitter on her tongue. In fact, if Katie could manage it she would print a disclaimer for all the world to see: “Any resemblance between my mother and myself is purely coincidental!”
Julie stirred, pushed her teacup away, ran her fingers through her uncombed hair. When Katie walks in the door and sees me still in my robe, she will accuse me of watching soaps and eating bonbons all day She will give me her petulant, condescending look, and she will look exactly like my father. And I will hate her for that. We will argue and exchange heated words. Sling verbal arrows back and forth, aiming for the heart.
And I will lose.
Because I am already frozen inside. I am hanging in dark waters with ice in my veins waiting to be rescued.