She dragged them through the living room and he leaned forward to say softly, “You fool, Beth. You fool!”
But she couldn’t look at him. She thought she would either faint with her hatred or somehow kill him with the frenzy of it.
In the bedroom she stuffed things into the bags helter skelter. What didn’t fit didn’t go. The rest was left behind in a tangle.
Halfway through this frenetic task she went to the phone and called the Los Angeles International Airport. Charlie watched her, still on the couch, immobilized with disbelief. She made a reservation for that very morning at three o’clock.
And then she called her Uncle John and told him to pick her up at Chicago’s Midway Airport the next day. Her reservation on the plane was for one person only.
“Just you?” Charlie said softly, staring at her. “You mean you’d really leave me here with the kids? You mean you really don’t give a goddamn about your own children?”
“You said I couldn’t take them with me!” she cried. “I’d take them if you’d let me.”
“Never,” he said. “But I thought—God, Beth, I though you’d try a little harder to get them than this. You’ve given up without a struggle.” He was truly shocked; it blasted all his favorite concepts of motherhood to see her behave this way.
“I’ve struggled with you until I haven’t any strength left,” she said hoarsely.
“You never loved them,” he said, hushed with shock and revelation. “You never loved them at all.”
“I haven’t a strong enough stomach to get down on my knees and beg for them,” she cried. “I’ve begged you long enough and hard enough for other things.”
“But they were things. These are kids. Your own kids!”
“I want them,” she cried, “but I want my freedom more. I only make them unhappy, I’m not a good mother.”
“Well, what sort of a mother do you think I’ll make?” he shouted, and now it was Charlie whose voice was loud enough to wake the children.
She left him abruptly and finished her packing. In the children’s room she could hear stirrings and she prayed with the tears still soaking her cheeks that neither of them would wake up and break her heart or change her mind. She forced her suitcases shut with the strength of haste and fear, and half shoved, half carried them out to the car.
Charlie stood in the center of the living room and watched her with his mouth open. When she passed him he said, “Beth, this isn’t happening. It can’t be. I couldn’t have been that bad. I couldn’t have been. Beth, please. Explain to me, tell me. I don’t understand.”
But she gave him a look of hopelessness, and once she snapped, “Is that all you can say? After nine years of marriage?”
Is he just going to stand there and let me go? she wondered. A sort of panic rose in her at the thought that he might suddenly regain his senses and force her to stop. But he let her get as far as packing both bags into the back of the car and actually starting the motor before he yanked the door open and shoved her over so that he could sit in the driver’s seat.
“Beth,” he said, and his eyes were still big with the awfulness of what she was doing to him and their children. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
Suddenly he kissed her urgently, holding her arms with hands so strong and fierce that they bruised her flesh. She felt his teeth pressed into her tender mouth and something in the despair of it, the near-terror she sensed in him at the thought of losing her, brought an uprush of unwanted tenderness in her heart.
He tried to kiss her again, but Beth struggled wildly, trying to hurt him. And all the while he was wooing her with violence, almost the way he had when they first met, as if he knew now too that words were long since worthless between them.
At last Beth grasped one of her own shoes and pulled it off. Desperately she struck him with all her strength on the side of the head. The sharp heel cut his scalp and he gave a soft little cry of astonishment. He pulled away from her at last and they stared at each other, both of them shocked at themselves, at each other, at what was happening, both of them crying.
Finally, without a word, he got out of the car and slammed the door.
Beth dragged herself over to the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. “I’ll write,” she said, but their two white faces, still so near one another physically, were already separated by more than the miles Beth would fly across that night. He flinched at her promise, as if he knew that an envelope full of words would do no more good than those they had flung at each other in a huge effort to create understanding.
“Take good care of the kids,” she said and immediately she began to back out because she could hear one of them starting to cry.
He walked along beside the car, one hand on the window sill as if that might keep her there longer. “What shall I tell them this time when they wake up and find you gone?” he asked.
“Tell them I’ve gone to hell,” she wept. “Tell them I’m a no-good and the only thing they can hope for is that life will be happier without me than with me. It will, too.”
She began to press the accelerator, gathering speed until he had to let go or run to keep up. He let go.
In the street she straightened the car around and gave one last trembling look to her house, her yard and garden, the lighted windows of the living room where the TV set played on to an audience of furniture. Skipper’s
