5

“There, marriage is like that.” (Thoreau, kicking a
skunk cabbage)

Frank Preston Stearns

Julian and Alice Snow had lived at Pond View for thirty years. They had been married for thirty-two. By now you’d think they’d be used to each other, but they weren’t. Their long union had rubbed them both raw, and the rough places chafed and chafed, scouring bleeding grooves.

Why had they stayed married so long? In the daytime, exasperated, Julian wondered why. In bed at night he didn’t wonder, although it wasn’t sex that kept them together. Sex was only another reason for irritation. It was their two warm bodies lying closely enfolded all night long, every night, year in and year out. In the dark their outer selves fell away, leaving only the deepest core. Clinging together in sleep, they forgot their bitterness, their fuming resentment.

But now it was daytime. It was the end of Julian’s vacation. He didn’t enjoy vacations. He felt trapped. Alice was too much of a muchness. Lying there in bed—Alice was an invalid—she never stopped talking and eating and spilling crumbs and laughing and crying and crocheting and giving orders and picking fights and wanting things. God, how Alice wanted things. She was always ordering useless gimcracks from catalogs, although Julian railed at her that they couldn’t afford it. Next thing he knew, something else would arrive in a United Parcel van, a monogrammed doormat, a skirt for the bathroom sink, a hideous lamp with a ruffled shade, a furry blue scatter rug.

For himself Julian wanted nothing. His job at the landfill next door was just a job, but it was all right. He pumped out the leaching tank, he operated the Trashmaster, the big roller that flattened the rubbish, and sometimes he ran the crawl dozer that buried everything in dirt. On weekends when Alice agreed to spare him, he took his boat out on Walden Pond and fished for trout. Or else he descended the steep slope of the kettle hole behind his mobile home and looked for waterfowl in Goose Pond.

This morning Alice said she needed him. But whatever it was she wanted, it had to wait. A bunch of her friends dropped in and sat around her bed and billowed over into the kitchen, helping themselves to coffee, passing around their homemade goodies, talking loudly while Alice’s television chattered in the background. Then they all stopped talking to watch the next episode of “The Young and the Reckless,” which was everybody’s favorite. Julian, cramped into a corner of the kitchen with the morning paper, heard the sudden quiet as Vanessa confronted Dirk with his infidelity, and Dirk said, “I hoped and prayed my relationship with Angelica would not become a factor here,” and Vanessa screamed at him.

Julian stood up and looked out the window, staring at Goose Pond. Somebody was down there, tramping around, a big guy in rubber boots, flailing around clumsily, batting at mosquitoes. What was he up to? Julian watched him while Vanessa sobbed, “You used me, you lied to me.”

“Well, so long, Alice dear,” said Mavis when the program was over. Shirley left, too. Honey Mooney stayed, loyally cleaning up the kitchen, offering Julian a coconut brownie, at last fussing down the trailer steps with her bundle of leftovers.

“Julian, hey, Julian,” Alice called from the bedroom. “Hey, listen, I want you should go to the store. I want some of that cookie ice cream, okay? And I need some more purple yarn from the dime store, okay? And get me some stamps, all right? I want to order something.”

Julian was glad to get out of the house. His spirits rose like a kite, lifting free from Alice’s clutching fingers. Climbing into his Chevy Blazer, he took off up the driveway.

As he slowed down to make the right turn onto the street, he was surprised to see Charlotte Harris run out of her house and wave at him. She must have been looking out her window. He waited as she ran nimbly across her pretty garden, holding up a white envelope. Without a word she dropped it into his open window and ran back.

Stu LaDue was sitting beside the road as always, keeping an eye on everything and everybody. From under his visored cap his thick glasses flashed at Julian’s truck. Julian didn’t want to read Charlotte’s note under the prying gaze of that bastard, so he left it lying on the seat and drove across Route 2 to the center of Concord and parked behind the post office.

Turning off the engine, he picked up the envelope and read the note.

He read it three times. His eyes kept going back to the last line, “It’s just that I’ve always loved you.”

Julian was touched and dismayed at the same time. What did Charlotte mean by “someday”? Someday after Alice died? Alice wasn’t about to die. Someday after he got a divorce? A divorce! Julian could imagine what people would say, “His wife got sick, so he divorced her.” Oh, that would be just great.

And what about Charlotte’s husband, Pete? It was true that Pete was a nonentity and a slob, but so what? Julian couldn’t ruin Pete’s life. And yet—for a moment Julian allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to be married to Charlotte, to live with a woman like that.

But it was impossible. Julian left the letter on the seat and went to look for Alice’s purple yarn. But he couldn’t get Charlotte out of his mind as he walked out. of the parking lot and into the dime store.

Whoops, wrong store. This wasn’t Woolworth’s. It was some kind of fancy little shop selling perfume. A pretty girl with a fancy haircut was standing behind the counter, looking at him sharply.

Julian went back out to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. The dime store was gone. Instead there were three other shops with snappy hemispherical awnings. They all had magnificent hand-carved signs in gold leaf—Corporate Gifts, the Den of Teddies, the Parfumerie. There were expensive-looking crystal bottles in the window of the Parfumerie, a giant toy moose in the Den of Teddies, and a lamp shaped like a golf club in the window of Corporate Gifts. It was obvious to Julian that none of these stores could supply him with Alice’s yarn.

At least the post office was still there. Julian walked down the street and found it just where it had always been.

He had to stand in line to buy stamps. In front of him a couple of well-dressed women were discussing their winter vacations in the Caribbean. Julian Snow, who had never been to the Caribbean, couldn’t help overhearing them, and neither could the garage mechanic behind him or the old couple behind the mechanic who were living on a pension.

“You might try Nassau next year,” said Mimi Pink, the woman with the weird hairdo and the football shoulders.

“Roger and I are really mad about St. John,” said Marjorie Bland, who was entirely outfitted in lavender, from sporty sweatshirt to running shoes. “We had a little house on the shore, and the houseboys brought in our meals, and there were the nicest people in the next cottage. She was in my class at Sweet Briar.”

Back at Pond View Charlotte Harris was already regretting her impulsive action. Oh, dear God, the letter was a dreadful mistake. But this morning something had boiled up inside her. How many times in her married life had Pete said the same good-bye—“Don’t take any wooden nickels”—when he left for work? How many times? But today it had set off something uncontrollable in Charlotte, something violent. She had snatched up a piece of paper and driven down the words with a smoking pen, and then, no sooner had she stuffed it into an envelope than she had seen Julian’s truck slowing down, preparing to turn out onto the street. Without stopping to think, in all the turmoil of her feelings, she’d run out and thrust the envelope at Julian through the window of the cab.

She shouldn’t have done it. Watching the big vehicle lurch into a pothole as it turned out onto the road, Charlotte felt her heart lurch in the same way. What had she let loose on the world, what havoc had she wrought? Her letter might go on blundering through her life for years to come—and through Julian’s, Pete’s, and Alice’s. Oh, God, if only she could snatch it back. If only she hadn’t written it at all.