Michael’s Wife (24 page)

“No.”

“You'd be more comfortable.”

And more easily watched?
“I want to go home to the beige bungalow. I'll try not to interfere with your life … I promise. Just let me.…”

“You can come home. Now get up off the floor and tell me what the doctor said.”

She repeated what she could remember from her afternoon session with Dr. Gilcrest, but she'd found it hard to concentrate, waiting for him to set a time when she could leave. Something about fear and guilt and an exaggerated aversion to violence, the problem being the fear rather than the things she feared, a tendency to avoid reality (even Michael grimaced at that understatement). “He said he wanted to speak to you.”

“Sounds like I'd better see him. I'll make an appointment.” He rose and picked up his cap with the silver wings. He wore his dark Air Force blue that she didn't see often in the desert clime.

“Wait. Don't go.”

“What do you want now?”

“I want to thank you for coming to see me so often. You didn't have to.”

Michael just shrugged and stood waiting.

“And I want you to tell me about before … how we met and everything.”

“That's a long time ago.”

“You're the only one who can tell me, Michael.”

He sighed, threw his hat down impatiently, and sat beside her. A big man in a crowded room with an unwanted wife he could legally get rid of but under a moral obligation to take care of a nut. It wasn't the first time Laurel had felt sorry for him.

“We met in a little tourist trap in the mountains of Colorado called Estes Park. I'd been hiking with some friends and you were there with some female teachers in front of a sidewalk stand that sold hot, buttered sweet corn.”

Michael rubbed the creases in his forehead, leaning his head on the back of the couch. “You were rather appealing with melted butter running down your chin. Your friends were the lumpy, giggly types that fluster when a man talks to them, but you were relaxed, natural, soft-spoken.

“Eventually, after a lot of silly chatter, both our groups ended up in the park down the street with sweet corn and hot dogs and that night in Denver with beer and pizza. Rather naturally we paired off and you ended up with me.”

“What was I like?”

“Your hair was shorter, your skirts longer. Quiet, dreamy. I didn't analyze you. Perhaps I should have.”

“How did we … come to marry?”

“That I don't know. These things just happen. I was stationed near Denver. We dated fairly often for a few months, enjoyed each other's company. I decided I wanted you all to myself, so I married you. We rented an apartment near your school and.…”

“Wait … were we in love?”

Michael lit another cigarette and then stared at it instead of smoking it. “‘In love,' Laurel, is a silly phrase people use to cover for strong emotions or the lack of them. I personally don't know what it means. I remember feeling proud of you, responsible for you—in some ways you seemed a little … vulnerable … like you needed caring for. I felt comfortable with you, different from what I'd felt around anyone else. I don't know, perhaps it was the beginning of something that might have grown.”

“Did I love you?”

“You seemed to.” He turned his eyes from the cigarette to the ceiling. Was he counting the holes in the tile to retain his patience? She could sense his desire to get away from her, from the dredging up of things she needed to remember and he wanted to forget.

“I think at first you had a kind of schoolgirl crush on me—you were more of a girl than a woman at twenty-four. This is just the way I remember it now. I don't know what I thought then.”

“Did I seem … unstable?” Laurel watched the twitching muscle above his jaw. He wouldn't take much more of this.

“You'd get very depressed at times over hard luck cases at school; you'd get involved with your students and their family problems. I thought it was because you were a good teacher, a sensitive person. You were upset when I left for Vietnam, but that seemed natural. We'd known it was coming. I'd barely arrived there and you discovered you were pregnant; your letters didn't sound happy about it … You had this crazy idea about not wanting children, not wanting them to have to live in this world or starve or whatever … but you seemed to be adjusting to it. Until the last letter.…”

“Did you keep it?”

“No.” Michael picked up his hat and stood by the door. “I've explained all this to the doctor, Laurel.”

“Don't go before you've told me what the letter said.”

He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief and continued, his voice low, controlled, and resonant but restrained, his consonants clipped but precise. “Mail delivery wasn't always the best over there. The letter was garbled—but you wanted me to come home. You were afraid. I'd written you to get your mother out for when the baby came, but in this last letter you wrote that you hadn't even told her about it. You just went to pieces on paper.

“The next day I was contacted by the Red Cross wanting to know what to do with Jimmy. I gave them your parents' address and then wrote the hospital. They said a nurse had seen you walking out under your own steam. Two years later I get a phone call from a motel in Phoenix. It's my long lost wife. And now … I have to leave, Laurel.” He made his escape before she could ask any more questions.

Laurel sat just where he'd left her, trying to assimilate all he'd said and hadn't said, until the nurse came to remind her it was bedtime. It began to sound as if she'd told the truth at the hearing after all.

“My, he certainly stayed a long time tonight, didn't he?” The nurse bustled in, holding the tiny white paper cup with Laurel's pills—yellow for sleep, pink for happy. Or was it the other way around?

“However did you meet a man like that?”

Why did people with bad teeth have such broad smiles, Laurel wondered as she watched the nurse turn her bed down—a gentle hint.

“With butter on my chin,” she said and closed the bathroom door.

Once in bed, she swallowed the pills and decided to shake up the staff by watching the ten o'clock news. Students fought police at the university in Tempe. (Actually, the police watched while students cavorted for the TV camera.)

There was a giant crackdown along the border called Operation Intercept to slow down the drug traffic from Mexico. It also slowed down auto traffic—long lines of cars were stopped at Nogales, one of the crossing points to Arizona, as officials searched for marijuana, heroin, amphetamines, and barbiturates.

Tourists and hippies were flocking back to the desert now that the hot summer was over. It was rumored that John the Baptist was back in Arizona, hoping to organize students and hippies for a demonstration at Luke Air Force Base to protest the training of “murderers and assassins of the air” and the fact that the President's troop pullout of Vietnam was only a “token appeasement of the dissatisfied elements of society” and not really meant as an end to United States involvement there.

The still photo on the screen showed a tall, gangly youth in beard, shoulder-length curly hair, and enormous wire-rimmed glasses that looked ridiculous with his drab monkishlike robes. He didn't appear capable of organizing anyone.

Inflation still soared and babies in Vietnam with swollen tummies and hollow eyes still starved.

Laurel yawned and then giggled. She wished she could give the dour-faced newsman a happy pill. He had trouble rolling out the pompous words and overlong sentences while taking time to breathe and still hold onto his “this-world-is-no-laughing-matter” expression.

But the weatherman was all smiles, congratulating Arizonans on their marvelous winter season as though the blistering summer had never been.

She rolled over and slept. Toward morning her dreams turned to Jimmy's swollen tummy, blank eyes, his bony arms held out to her in a plea for food and she looking around the bombed-out shell of the beige bungalow for something to feed him, feeling an agony too real for a dream because there was no food and he didn't understand. Dawn filled the room when she woke, and she muffled her sobs in the pillow so that they wouldn't hear, make her stay longer because of depression.

On the morning of her release Laurel dressed carefully, wondering what that long-ago Laurel, with the butter on her chin, had worn the day she met Michael.

It wasn't Michael who came to get her, and the disappointment must have shown on her face when Myra bustled in.

“The boys are flying today—guess you'll have to settle for me,” Myra said. And the dimples returned to her plump face, the familiar warmth to her voice. “How are you, Laurel? I've missed you and so has Jimmy.”

“Is he with you?” Laurel bent to pick up her suitcases and hide the tears in her eyes.

“No, I left the kids with Colleen. Are you all checked out or … whatever you do?”

“I'm ready.”

Early October and the sun a soft benign warm, the air sweet and delicious with freedom, the streets and sidewalks crowded. Moving slices of shade cut strange patterns on people's faces as they passed her under the arcade of palm fronds stirring gently overhead.

“This way. I'm parked way down the street. I had quite a time even getting here with all the barricades up.”

“Barricades?”

“Haven't you heard the news? The governor called in the National Guard this morning.”

“Because of the student riots?”.

“Yeah, you can't get anywhere near Tempe.”

Myra stopped in front of a red sports car with its top down. “Well, here it it. Like it?”

“Did you get a new car? It's beautiful.”

“Huh-uh. You did. Came yesterday. But you can't drive it till you get a license.”

“It's mine?”

“Present from your husband. Rather much for grocery shopping, and how we'll fit all this baggage in, I don't know, but I wouldn't mind a surprise like this someday.” She did manage to stuff the suitcases into the little trunk and then turned to laugh at Laurel. “Well, you
can
touch it.”

“Did he say why?”

“A man gives you a brand-new Jaguar and you have to ask why?” Myra rolled her eyes and climbed in behind the wheel. “My advice to you is to take it and shut up.”

Black upholstery hot from the sun stung her bare legs. The car had a smell of new paint and real leather, its engine a powerful rumble as they pulled out into traffic. Laurel couldn't believe it. What had gotten into Michael?

An embarrassed silence fell between them on the way home. Laurel had to hold back her flying hair with both hands as they roared through city traffic, past sloping concrete irrigation canals and then through Glendale—every mile and every minute bringing her closer to Jimmy.

“Laurel, I want to apologize.” Myra had to shout over the rumble of the Jaguar. “If I'd known you … had problems … I mean … well, I wouldn't have hit you like I did with that little talk about Mike. I hope that I didn't … cause … Oh, Laurel, I've felt like a rat ever since you went to the … hospital.”

“Myra, don't blame yourself. This is something that started a long time ago.” And she found herself explaining almost against her will, maybe because of the crack in Myra's voice, the paleness of her round cheeks; they sat in the car after they'd parked in front of the beige house, Myra leaning the side of her head on the steering wheel and staring at Laurel without interrupting.

“You don't know what it's like, not having a childhood, feeling guilty every time you look at your own son or his father, knowing your parents have disowned you—even if you can't remember them, it hurts. And living with the fear that this can happen again any time and there's nothing you can do, your whole life wiped out because something in you decides to forget about it.”

Myra looked so astounded already that Laurel didn't say she had suspected her life was in danger, that part of her still did. Having just come from a mental hospital, she would sound hysterical at best.

“God, Laurel, I don't believe it. Things like that don't happen. Can't the doctor help?”

“Oh, sure. I get to repeat what little I know about myself once a week and take happy pills four times a day. Haven't you noticed how tranquil I am?”

“You always did seem tranquil on the outside—but what you must have been going through inside. Let's go get Jimmy. He'll do you more good than ten doctors.”

Jimmy had grown at least an inch and his hair needed cutting. He sat on the floor of Colleen's living room with one knee propped up to support his elbow and keep his thumb in his mouth, listlessly pushing a plastic dump truck over Sherrie's leg with his other hand.

“Jimmy?”

He looked up at the sound of her voice as she stood in the doorway between Colleen and Myra, but he didn't move. And Laurel's heart ached as she read the expression on his face. He knew her. He just didn't trust her anymore. This was not the reunion she'd expected, and it was a hurt deeper than any she had known.

“Jimmy, Mommy's come home to stay,” she said softly and sat down beside him as Myra and Colleen moved out to the kitchen silently motioning Sherrie to come with them. His eyes followed her and the dump truck lay still under his hand, but that expression didn't change.

“Let's go home and have some lunch, huh?”

He ignored her outstretched hand but stood up obediently and walked to the door, waited sullenly for her to open it. Jimmy had matured more than just physically in the last month.

18

Laurel's absence had done little to change the beige bungalow. Her yellow drapes were drawn across the glass doors, shutting them in with a cozy security. She touched the old refrigerator, ran her hand over the smooth surface of the new stove. Everything seemed so … normal. Maybe she had imagined everything. It was then she decided to paint the kitchen a pale yellow.