“Nice nightgown,” said Herb, and they were off.
It was the only time she wore it, and then only briefly. He might have admired it, but like a gift, only as wrapping for what he was really after.
“For God’s sake, June,” he said, “we’re married.” And then, “For heaven’s sake, relax.”
Relaxing was one thing, difficult enough. Abandonment was beyond her. What had he seen? What did he want? Did he think there was some sluttish waitress underneath her cardigans? It occurred to her that the dapper, flashing Herb, who wore trim suits and a gold signet ring on the middle finger of his right hand, may have wanted what he saw to begin with: someone respectable and proper to make a home for him. Why her, though? Why not some other teacher in some other town?
When people asked how they’d met, he liked to joke, “Oh, I picked her up.” “I wish you wouldn’t tell people that,” she complained.
“But it’s true, isn’t it? And anyway, it’s funny.”
He was never in the war, he’d pointed out in the restaurant the night they met, because he had a bit of a heart murmur. “I always tell people because otherwise they wonder. They won’t buy from somebody they think just skipped out on it.” She admired his forthrightness.
It was lonely, he told her later, out on the road, driving from town to town in his beat-up blue Hudson, spending dull nights in strange hotel rooms. “You know, Junie,” he said during what she considered their courtship, “it’s like coming home, heading here.” His smile was wide, and the skin crinkled around his eyes, laugh lines he called them. His hair and eyes and suits were brown. His jackets, however, concealed shiny, bright-yellow linings and a silver-plated flask in an inside pocket.
She anticipated major changes, greater than the intentions he hinted of when he said, “Sometimes I think of settling down, having a real home, not just hotel rooms all the time.” She understood, long before anything firm was said, that they would marry, he would get a proper job in town, and she would quit hers. She saw that he would no longer have to swear, complaining about some customer giving him trouble over an order, because there would be no occasion compelling bad words. Because he would be home, they would go to church together. They would fall into the right order of things.
And then there they were, running hand in hand down the stone walk after the small reception in her mother’s house, turning at the end, as she had dreamed, to wave goodbye to Aggie, and climbing into the blue Hudson to drive to their new home five blocks away. Where Herb looked up from the bed as she entered the room and said, “Nice nightgown. Where’d you get it?”
“My mother made it.”
First Aggie with her talk of pleasure, and then Herb telling her to relax. “Enjoy” was a word they both used. It’s beyond her how people can talk as if it’s something necessary. Which it is not. Catholics may have the wrong idea of things in general, but look at their priests, look at their nuns.
And what sort of expectation makes chastity a virtue until suddenly a person is supposed to just throw it all away, as if the rules no longer applied? Not that she didn’t understand that chastity itself would go by the boards; it was just that no one had mentioned relinquishing herself entirely. And here it turned out that Aggie was right, he was a bodily creature. She felt disappointment seeping out of him, but how dared he? She was no movie-house usherette, or waitress, and if that was what he wanted, he should have married one. He became a different person in this light, which wasn’t fair, since she remained unchanged.
She watched him at breakfast and thought how unpleasant it looked, a man eating eggs and talking at the same time.
“I wish we could have had a honeymoon,” he said. “I’m sorry I have to be back on the road tomorrow. If it were summer holidays you could come with me. Do you want to do that this summer?”
But was he not going to quit? By summer, surely, he would have a job here and be coming home every night, although that struck her now as a not entirely pleasing prospect. “Whatever made you think that?” he asked, amazed. “I like what I do, and I’d hate being stuck in one place all the time. Besides, I’m good at selling.”
“But you always complain about it. You always say it’s lonely and you get tired of all the driving.”
“Of course I complain, everybody does. You complain about your job too, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to quit.”
But surely that was exactly what she was going to do: quit and stay home and have children and a normal life. Surely that was the point: to have an ordinary life after so many odd years.
“I don’t see how we could afford that, Junie. Weren’t you listening when we talked about buying the house? We were counting on your salary, at least for a while. I make a good living, but it’s commissions, it’s not regular like yours, it goes up and down. I thought we’d agreed not to change things for a while.”
She could not remember any such agreement. What she recalled was some joking between Herb and Aggie about June having a steady job, and Herb saying something like how lucky her pupils were to have what he called a dish like her for a teacher. “Boy,” he said, “it’s sure different from when I was in school.” And Aggie just kind of looking at him. June hadn’t said anything, but she was sure she also hadn’t agreed to anything.
She stood to clear the breakfast table. “We’d better get ready, it’s after ten.”
“What for?”
“Well, for church.”
“Hell, you’re not going this morning, are you? This is all the honeymoon we’ve got, just today. Come on, stay here with me. I know the first time isn’t so good, but now it’ll be different.”
How did he know? On what experience did he base this? She regarded him coldly.
“No, I always go. You should too, people will expect you.”
“Why would they? Anyway, what I expect is that the first day we’re married you’ll stay home.”
She was furious that when she was leaving after the service, the minister shook her hand and said, smiling, “I’m surprised to see you this morning, I must say. But I see we didn’t get your new husband out. We’ll have to work on that.”
When she got home, he insisted they go upstairs. But he was wrong that it got better. He slipped into a nap afterward, but she got right up. She found his hair cream made the pillows smell too sweet.
She was making supper when he came downstairs, sliding an arm around her waist, nuzzling his face into the back of her neck. These gestures, which she might have enjoyed a few days ago, taking them as ends in themselves, now were a threat. The difference was being married. The difference was that before, she had a right to make things stop, and now, of course, she had no such right at all. He had all rights and there was no relaxing, the way there was with the power of God and the inevitability of His will. God wouldn’t be breathing down her neck like this. God was strict and could be harsh, but at least didn’t come sneaking up behind.
Still. Was he not handsome, lounging in the chair listening to a program of band music on the radio? Was she not proud to have married him?
He was up and packing early in the morning, kissed her without paying much attention, and waved goodbye from the driveway with what seemed an inappropriate light-heartedness. At school, other teachers smiled and congratulated her, and that was nice. How strange, though, to be proud with other people of being married, which meant being wanted, but when it was just the two of them, to wish not to be wanted quite so much. It all seemed to have gotten off on the wrong foot.
Funny, going home to a new and empty house: not seeing him stretched loose-limbed in the living room, and making a meal just for herself. She turned on the radio for company. It was a little scary to be alone, and she carefully locked the doors, now that she knew exactly what there was to be afraid of. She turned off the radio, in case there were noises she ought to be hearing.
Lying in bed, she discovered that the house had an entire orchestra of sounds, from stealthy steps on the stairs, to clicks of doors opening or papers downstairs being shuffled. An array of cracks and groans and heaves. “Oh really, don’t be so silly,” she scolded herself, and slipped out of bed to pray. “Oh God, help me.” But circumstances had changed. “Oh God,” she corrected, “help us.”
Actually, once she got used to it, it was rather pleasant not having to make elaborate meals, going to bed early if she felt like it, or staying up late. Privacy was good, being able to kneel beside the bed and pray aloud instead of standing out in the hall whispering. On the weekend with Herb, she hadn’t even attempted a bedside prayer. Well, she wouldn’t have had much chance, with him grabbing, and then, too, prayers were private things, not intended to be witnessed.
She was quite accustomed to being on her own by the time he arrived home; the gravel crunching in the driveway, the car door slamming and then the trunk lid, and then there he was with a suitcase in each hand and a grin on his face. “Junie,” he cried, dropping the cases, gripping his hands around her narrow waist, lifting her off the floor and giving her a little shake and a whirl that seemed playful enough, but lacking the innocence of her father’s similar embraces. “Oh, Jesus, I’m glad to be home, what a trip. I missed my new bride, did you miss me?” The noise he was making! All this shouting and prancing-dancing through the house. “You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ve been telling everybody for two weeks about my new wife and my new house. I tell you, I’m a changed man. I want my slippers and a drink. I want a fireplace to sit in front of, isn’t it too bad we don’t have one? Maybe we could knock out a wall and get one put in, what do you think?”
She, however, had seen quite enough of walls being knocked out, and then there’d be all the ashes to clean up. “Oh no, fireplaces are such filthy things,” she said, and knew immediately she shouldn’t have.
He looked angry, then disappointed. “Oh well. What’s for supper? I’m going to go change and get comfortable.”
She was annoyed at herself for being hurt when later he just fell asleep. Really, she supposed, the poor man couldn’t win. At least the house seemed to be keeping most of its noises to itself, now that he was home. She wasn’t even sure if she’d remembered to lock the back door. Anyone might come in, but she wasn’t afraid. In the quiet darkness, she even felt a little grateful to him.
“What do you say to company tonight?” he suggested in the morning. “Maybe have your mother over?”
It pleased her to have Aggie as a guest; to show her mother the proper way of things now. Also, Aggie entertained Herb, relieving June, since the day had gone in lengthy silences. It seemed they didn’t have a great deal to talk about once he’d told her it had been “a hell of a two weeks on the road”, and she had said that nothing much out of the ordinary had happened while he was gone. She supposed silences were all right between married people, but still, surely there ought not to be this nervous rooting around for topics to discuss. Her mind went blank wondering what they might talk about. What did they talk about before?
Obviously, Aggie had the right idea. She simply asked him about people he met on the road and what they were like and if he went to their homes and how the towns looked and what he might have seen at the movies. He grew quite animated. “Mind the car springs,” he laughed as he left to drive Aggie home. “I can’t afford new ones.” Amazing, making jokes about her weight.
“That was nice,” he said later. “I like your mother.”
Obviously.
“It’s funny you don’t take after her. I mean,” he added quickly, “in looks. You’d never take you for her daughter.”
“I told you, I’m like my father.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’ve seen pictures. They must have made a pretty strange-looking couple.”
“They did.”
The two of them were a pretty strange couple, too, although not so dissimilar in looks. The more he reached for her, the more she moved away. Casual touches were startling, knowing now where they might lead. She grew more accustomed to his absences, and more fond of them, as well.
People she’d never before noticed particularly now stopped to speak to her on the street: his acquaintances. “How’s old Herb? Back in town this weekend, is he?” Instead of being herself, out from Aggie’s thumb, she found she was now his wife.
“It’s my business to be friendly,” he told her, and invited men over on Saturday nights when he was home to play poker, while she made sandwiches for them all.
“No signs of a little one yet?” women asked, stopping to chat on the street, nudging her.
“Not yet,” smiling bravely. The question was like having these people watching when Herb came home. It was bad enough knowing God could see, and possibly even her father, although she tried to avoid the thought of that since it was paralysing, and her paralysis enraged Herb. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he muttered, and sometimes just gave up.
Oh, but she did want to be desired. She dreamed of being desired, when he was away. Just not in a bed with flesh; more from a distance, maybe.
At some point he stopped calling her Junie when it was just the two of them; although when the men came to play cards he might turn and slap her lightly on the rear and say, “Hey, Junie, we got any more of those sandwiches?” As if, she thought, she were a horse he owned, thumping its rump, showing it off.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s just a tap. You’ve got a nice bottom.”
It wasn’t that they actually quarrelled, though.
Sometimes there were three weeks between his visits home. She came to think of them more or less as visits, since the house was her own so much. Sometimes, too, he left Sunday night instead of waiting for Monday morning, explaining, “I can get a head start on the week if I’m already where I’m going.”
“Jesus Christ,” he cried, coming home and throwing open the drapes. “Why is this place so goddamned dark?”
“The furniture. It fades.” Silly of her to have supposed he would have no more need to swear, once they were married.
“This stuff? How’s it going to fade?”
She had chosen from his catalogue, so that they could get it wholesale through his firm, a living-room suite of dark blue, in some tough and nubbly fake material that turned out to show dirt rather badly. He was probably right, though, that it would be hard to make it fade.
“But I’m alone so much. I don’t like the drapes open when I’m alone.”
“Well, you’re not alone now.”
True.
But there were times, maybe when they were walking together over to Aggie’s for an evening, when she admired him. They didn’t walk holding hands any more, or with his arm slung across her shoulder, and when they crossed the street he no longer held her elbow as if she were fragile, but still, being with him on the street was pleasing.
She was, after all, old enough to be realistic about these things: give a little here and get a little there. A bargain, this for that. She was no foolish little girl with outlandish expectations, but a grown woman sensibly accepting, for the most part, what was real.
In church, the minister spoke of those who are specially tested, and she wondered if she might be one of those. It put a new light on sacrifice: crucifixions in various forms, say, for instance, nailed down on a mattress beneath her husband’s body. The concept offered distance and dispassion, and that in turn made events less painful, which had, she realized, the somewhat absurd effect of making her sacrifice less potent.
She prayed, with increasing impatience, for a child. If one were to be martyred on a mattress, some resurrection of life ought to follow.
A child would make resolution possible. If she were expecting, she could no longer teach, for one thing. The money helped, of course, because Herb’s cheques were variable, and whatever he said about being a good salesman, there were times that were flat and that was all there was to it. But there was no pleasure in teaching itself. She began to suspect it would have been that way for her father, too, except that he appreciated the respect it brought.
Anyway, with the war over, women were going back home to raise babies as the men returned to work, and she was out of step once more.
She longed to be one of those young mothers she saw wheeling prams along the sidewalks, leaning down to adjust blankets and fix brakes, and going into stores to shop. It looked a leisurely sort of life, luxurious, to spend days strolling with a baby.
Babies demanded order and sense, put people in their proper places. Herb would have to get a regular job, and they would be a normal family, the three, then maybe four or five, of them. She couldn’t picture these imaginary children, and had no clear idea of numbers. One seemed enough for her purposes.
Then, too, his rights would be altered. With a child to protect inside her, she would be the one with rights. And, once it was born, their attention would have to be on it: he to support it, she to nourish it, and both of them to protect it. Also, she would show Aggie how a real mother behaved. She would bring her child up with care. Her child would not be reared in any slapdash, irregular way.
Eventually the doctor said, “It took long enough, but as far as I can tell everything’s fine. April, I’d say, right about the middle of the month. Herb’ll be pleased, won’t he?”
He was. He looked, when she told him, the way she remembered him before they married: light and glittering. How much he must have changed, without her noticing. He even called her Junie again. “Oh, Junie, that’s great! A baby! Jesus, my very own kid!”
Not the way she would have put it.
“You know,” she said, “I’ll have to quit teaching. You can’t teach when you’re expecting.”
“Yeah, I guess. But we’ll manage. It’s good it didn’t happen right away, so we had a chance to salt away some money. I’ll just have to sell twice as hard, that’s all.”
“But I thought you’d want a proper job now.”
“Jesus Christ,” red-faced, “I wish you’d get it through your head, I have a proper job.” Then, more calmly, “Anyway, where do you think I could get one here? There’s nothing going now the war’s over. And honest to God, June, it’s nice to have a home and it’ll be great to have a kid, but I couldn’t stand being in one place all the time, the same old people day after day.”
Her among them?
So soon the vision of her new and ordinary life was being altered. Why could she never have what she saw? Why was it always up to somebody else and what they wanted how her life was spent?
Aggie took up knitting, and brought over bootees and sweaters. “A grandchild!” she’d said when June told her. “Oh, isn’t that nice. I’ll like being a grandmother, grandmothers get to play with babies and spoil them.” Who’d have thought she meant it literally, to spoil?
In bed, Herb said, “It’s not going to hurt the kid, you know,” but she said quite firmly and finally with some righteousness on her side, “No, I don’t want to take a chance.”
There were other things she could do, though. She could work all day wallpapering the second bedroom with dancing bears. She could hem lengths of cotton into diapers, and hook a little rug for the nursery floor, small flowers on a pale-blue backing.
Heavens it was hard, though, getting so big and unwieldy. It hurt, the weight pulling at her all the time, no getting away from it. Almost it seemed to outweigh her, carrying her wearily through the day instead of the reverse; as if she were its burden, not it hers. The pasty, purple-streaked ugliness stretched so tightly — surely she was going to burst? Her face altered, too; she could see it getting puffy, a resemblance to her mother now. Herb said, “Boy, expecting doesn’t seem to agree with you, does it?” and didn’t mean that it made her ill, because it didn’t. Just that it made her look like someone she never would have recognized as herself. “You must keep your feet up as much as you can,” the doctor warned. “Your blood pressure’s a bit up, and there’s too much fluid.” He patted her shoulder. “Not that it’s dangerous, really, but you have to be careful. You’re pretty narrow, too.” She supposed he tried to be delicate, but it really wasn’t nice, being exposed in his examining room. Quite a trick for him to be both impersonal and kind.
They knocked her out and opened her up and left a garish scar. “It was going on too long,” the doctor told her when she woke up. “But your baby’s perfectly healthy. A big thumper of a girl.”
Even with pain and a scar, she could see she had accomplished something here. Herb came to her hospital room with flowers, kissed her lightly on the forehead, said, “She’s beautiful. Are you all right?” She was amazed herself at the feeling of a miracle — that something had been created out of nothing.
Home, he stared at his daughter with something that looked like fear. June thought it a little sweet, how worried he looked holding her, as if afraid she would break.
“You don’t mind if we call her Frances, do you?” she asked. “It’s a name in my father’s family, and my middle name. I’d like to carry it on.”
“Frances,” he tried. “Fran. Frannie. Yeah, well okay. I’m not wild about it, but it’s okay.”
“Christ,” he grumbled in the middle of the night when she woke them crying, “what’s the matter with her?”
It was just that she was so hungry. She was rosy and plump and had a skitter of dark hair. Watching her voracious child, June was reminded of her mother.
There were only the two of them when Herb was on the road. Frances seemed to take his comings and goings with unconcern, not knowing, June supposed, that it might be different in other households. He arrived excited to see her, exclaiming over changes, since everything about her changed so rapidly.
June herself hadn’t quite expected that someone so small could consume so much time. There was nothing she could plan that might not have to be cancelled. She could hardly go shopping with a screaming baby, but if she planned to stay home and clean, Frances might sleep on and on until June had to shake her awake. Perhaps it was an illusion that the baby did precisely what was not convenient for her, but why couldn’t she sleep quietly in her buggy when June wanted to go downtown and see herself reflected in the glass windows of stores, pushing the pram and smiling gently?
Aggie made a proper fool of herself when she came to babysit, lumbering happily along the five blocks of sidewalk between their houses. She didn’t exactly talk baby-talk, but her voice rose. June, watching in amazement and something else that she didn’t identify but that wasn’t quite nice, saw her mother actually cuddling this child.
“Never mind if she’s crying,” Aggie said, waving her hand as if it didn’t matter. “She’ll stop, you go on to church. I’ll just change her and we’ll sit here and rock and sing for a while.”
June went, but uneasily. Who knew if something might really be wrong this time? Or, if not, who knew what Aggie was up to in her absence? She came home to find her mother cradling her laughing daughter and waltzing across the kitchen floor, looking foolish and quite unlike any Aggie she could remember.
“Come on, June, take a break, let’s go to a movie,” Herb suggested. “Your mother’ll babysit, she likes to.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so. I don’t like to leave Frances, she’s been upset today.”
“Well, then, I’m going to Larry’s. There’s a poker game.”
He did this more and more often. It seemed she hardly saw him, but then, she hardly noticed. When he was home, she left Frances with him while she went to church. She had no idea what happened during those two hours, but, after all, he was the child’s father and should be able to do that much.
“You’ve changed,” he said sadly. “You used to like going out.”
Did she? She could barely remember how things were before Frances, much less before she married. Herb was a phantom. He rarely even reached for her in the night any more, which was fine, she supposed. Except that while she didn’t like being reached for, she did not want to be unwanted.
She said, “You don’t know how much work it is, you don’t understand.”
“One kid! How hard can it be, looking after one kid?” But when she came home from church, he handed Frances over fast enough.
When he came home, he brought Frances small gifts picked up on his travels; the way a guest would, or a Santa Claus.
It was harder when Frances began to crawl, and stand, and then walk. She had to be watched closely so she didn’t hurt herself. He brought home a tricycle when she was still quite little, and June cried, “Oh, but she’s too young, she’ll get hurt.”
“Of course she’ll get hurt,” he snapped, steering Frances along the walk. “Everybody does.”
Did he not care about his own child’s pain?
No point, speaking of pain, in even thinking about him. Insignificant, really, except for Frances, the result. And it doesn’t do to dwell.