“And now things are settled I feel I’m going to be much happier. A fellow can’t keep running around indefinitely. It’ll be a lot better in the long run for my practice too, the clients like to know you’ve got a wife; people get suspicious of a single man after a certain age, they start thinking you’re a queer or something.” He paused, then continued, “And there’s one thing about you, Marian, I know I can always depend on you. Most women are pretty scatterbrained but you’re such a sensible girl. You may not have known this but I’ve always thought that’s the first thing to look for when it comes to choosing a wife.”
I didn’t feel very sensible. I lowered my eyes modestly and fixed them upon a toast crumb that had eluded me when I wiped the table. I wasn’t sure what to say – “You’re very sensible too” didn’t seem appropriate.
“I’m very happy too,” I said. “Let’s take our coffee into the living room.”
He followed me in; we set our cups on the round coffee table and sat down on the chesterfield.
“I like this room,” he said, glancing over it. “It’s so homey.” He put his arm around my shoulders, and we sat in what I hoped was a blissful silence. We were awkward with each other. We no longer had the assumptions, the tracks and paths of our former relationship to guide us. Until we’d established the new assumptions we wouldn’t know quite what to do or say.
Peter chuckled to himself.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Oh, not much. When I went out to get the car I found three shrubs caught underneath it; so I just took a drive past that lawn. We made a neat little hole in their hedge.” He was still pleased with himself about that.
“You big silly idiot,” I said fondly. I could feel the stirrings of the proprietary instinct. So this object, then, belonged to
“When do you want to get married?” he asked, almost gruffly.
My first impulse was to answer, with the evasive flippancy I’d always used before when he’d asked me serious questions about myself, “What about Groundhog Day?” But instead I heard a soft flannelly voice I barely recognized, saying, “I’d rather have you decide that. I’d rather leave the big decisions up to you.” I was astounded at myself. I’d never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing was I really meant it.
11
Peter left early. He said he needed to get some more sleep and he advised me to do the same. However I wasn’t at all tired. I was filled with a nervous energy which refused to dissipate itself in the restless forages I made through the apartment. This afternoon held that special quality of mournful emptiness I’ve connected with late Sunday afternoons ever since childhood: the feeling of having nothing to do.
I finished the dishes, sorted the knives and forks and spoons into their compartments in the kitchen drawer, though I knew they wouldn’t stay put for long, scanned the magazines in the living room for the seventh time, my attention snagging briefly but with new significance on such titles as “ADOPTION: YES OR NO?,” “YOU’RE IN LOVE – IS IT REAL?A TWENTY-QUESTION quiz,” and “HONEYMOON TENSIONS,” and fiddled with the controls of the toaster, which had been burning things. When the telephone rang I jumped for it eagerly: it was a wrong number. I suppose I could have talked with Ainsley, who was still in her bedroom; but somehow I didn’t think it would be much help. I wanted to do something that could be finished, accomplished, though I didn’t know what. Finally I resolved to spend the evening at the laundromat.
We do not, of course, use the lady down below’s laundry facilities. If she has any. She never allows anything as plebeian as washing to desecrate the well-kept expanse of her back lawn. Maybe it’s that she and the child just never get their clothes dirty; perhaps they have an invisible plastic coating. Neither of us has been in her cellar or even heard her acknowledge the existence of one. It’s possible that washing is, in her hierarchy of the proprieties, one of those things that everyone knows about but nobody who is at all respectable discusses.
So when the mounds of unwearable clothes become intolerable and the drawersful of wearable ones are all but empty, we go to the laundromat. Or, usually, I go alone: I can’t hold out as long as Ainsley can. Sunday evening is a better time to go than any of the rest of the weekend. There are fewer elderly gentlemen tying up and de-aphidizing their rose bushes, and fewer elderly ladies, flowery-hatted and white-gloved, driving or being driven up to the houses of other elderly ladies for tea. The nearest laundromat is a subway stop away, and Saturdays are bad because of the shoppers on the bus, again elderly ladies hatted and gloved, though not as immaculately; and Saturday evenings bring out the young moviegoers. I prefer Sunday evenings; they are emptier. I don’t like being stared at, and my laundry bag is too obviously a laundry bag.
That evening I looked forward to the trip. I was anxious to get out of the apartment. I warmed up and ate a frozen dinner, then changed to my laundromat clothes – denims, sweatshirt, and a pair of plaid running shoes I’d picked up once on impulse and never wore anywhere else – and checked my purse for quarters. I was stuffing the pertinent garments into my laundry bag when Ainsley wandered in. She’d been closeted in her bedroom most of the day, engaging in heaven-knows-what black-magic practices: brewing up an aphrodisiac, no doubt, or making wax dolls of Leonard and transfixing them with hatpins at the appropriate points. Now some intuition had alerted her.
“Hi, going to the laundromat?” she said with careful nonchalance.
“No,” I said, “I’ve chopped Peter up into little bits. I’m camouflaging him as laundry and taking him down to bury him in the ravine.”
She must have thought this remark in bad taste. She did not smile. “Look, would you mind very much throwing in a few of my things while you’re there? Just essentials.”
“Fine,” I said, resigned. “Bring them along.” This is standard procedure. It’s one of the reasons Ainsley never has to go to the laundromat.
She disappeared, and came back in a few minutes with both arms around a huge heap of multicoloured lingerie.
“Ainsley. Just essentials.”
“They’re all essentials,” she said sulkily; but when I insisted I couldn’t get it all into the bag she divided the pile in half.
“Thanks a lot, that’s a real lifesaver,” she said. “See you later.”
I trailed the sack behind me down the stairs, picked it up, slung it over my shoulder and staggered out the door, intercepting a frigid look in passing from the lady down below as she glided out from behind one of the velvet curtains that hung at the entrance to the parlour. She meant, I knew, to convey her disapproval of this flagrant exhibition of soilage. We are all, I silently quoted at her, utterly unclean.
Once I had settled myself on the bus I propped the laundry bag beside me on the seat, hoping it looked from a distance enough like a small child to fend off the righteous indignation of those who might object to working on the Lord’s Day. I was remembering a previous incident, a black-silk-swathed old lady with a mauve hat who had clutched at me one Sunday as I was getting off the bus. She was disturbed not only because I was breaking the fourth commandment, but also because of the impious way I had dressed in order to do it: Jesus, she implied, would never forgive my plaid running shoes. Then I concentrated on one of the posters above the windows, a colourful one of a young woman with three pairs of legs skipping about in her girdle. I must admit to being, against my will, slightly scandalized by those advertisements. They are so public. I wondered for the first few blocks what sort of person would have enough response to that advertisement to go and buy the object in question, and whether there had ever been a survey done on it. The female form, I thought, is supposed to appeal to men, not to women, and men don’t usually buy girdles. Though perhaps the lithe young woman was a self-image; perhaps the purchasers thought they were getting their own youth and slenderness back in the package. For the next few blocks I thought about the dictum I’d read somewhere that no well-dressed woman is ever without her girdle. I considered the possibilities suggested by the word “ever.” Then for the rest of the journey I thought about middle-aged spread: when would I get it? – maybe I already had it. You have to be careful about things like that, I reflected; they have a way of creeping up on you before you know it.
The laundromat was just along the street from the entrance to the subway station. When I was actually standing in front of one of the large machines I discovered I had forgotten the soap.
“Oh fiddlesticks!” I said out loud.
The person stuffing clothes into the machine next to mine turned towards me.
