I let cool water drum onto my head, shampooed and rinsed. Once my ears were freed of the spray of water, I heard rustling sounds and, thinking it was Bijou, I peeked out the shower door. Nell and Libby, dressed in ruffled sun dresses and jelly sandals, were preparing to surprise me outside the open bathroom door. Their whispered plan was to jump out at me as soon as I appeared. So busy plotting, they didn't see my face above them. I ducked back into the shower and began humming “Oh, Susannah.” I heard them giggle. I reached for my towel, slung over the shower door, wrapped it around me and stepped into their trap. The girls leaped into the doorway with gleeful shouts, arms raised and waving; I pretended to nearly faint and they broke into hysterics. I burst into teary laughter and knelt down and swooped them into my arms.
This morning on the phone, Daisy had said Marcus planned to stay overnight on the boat he docked in Palm Beach an hour down the coast, where his office was located, in order to give Daisy and me some private time. When Marcus was gone, his presence resided in the status symbols he surrounded himself with, and sometimes that was true even when he was home. Whenever I asked him, “What's new?” he answered by telling me what he had purchased lately. Though in Marcus' favor, he was generous and enjoyed setting up good times for his friends and family. His latest plan was a Conestoga trip for him, Daisy and the girls through Yellowstone this coming summer.
Daisy first dated Marcus when he worked with her in Dad's Palm Beach store; then suddenly he received a huge commission as a part-time real estate agent selling a cattle ranch outside Ocala and turned to real estate full-time. A year and a half later, he and Daisy married. I knew Daisy truly loved her husband, yet it was also true that a person needed leverage around Dad, and Marcus had so much money and so many powerful friends that his leverage was without question in the vicinity of our father. Jess even joked that Marcus was impressive enough that he could have been a black Jewish transvestite and our bigoted father still would have approved of him as a son-in-law.
My leverage with Dad, Daisy claimed, was that Jess had been artistic and poor and comfortable with that, plus Jess and I ensured ourselves of a certain autonomy with distance. Three thousand miles was good leverage. Mostly though, Daisy's theory was that I chose the opposite values of our father, whereas she chose similar values intensified.
I stopped to think, while I toweled dry and the girls waited outside the door, what Daisy's leverage might be with Marcus. I buttoned up my skirt, pulled on a tank top and slid into sandals. Her indifference to the status symbols he surrounded them with, I decided, as I sauntered through the family room again with its giant stereo system, large-screen TV, pool table with a load of laundered sheets lumped atop it. Nell and Libby skipped ahead, leading the way to their mother.
We found Daisy waiting for us outside, near the pool.
She jumped up from her lounge chair, held her arms out wide, and I stepped into them. Daisy hugged me tightly, then held me for a long moment against her and smoothed the back of my hair. When she stretched her arms to look at me, she said, “I was banished out here so the girls could surprise you.”
I got teary again at the soft, caring look in her eyes and the relief I felt to be with someone I knew would understand all of me. This time the teariness swelled into chest-heaving sobs and I was back in my sister's arms. Daisy told Nell and Libby to find some treats in the kitchen for us and held me and patted me until I subsided into wet whimpers.
The trouble with my marriage and the hopelessness that had brought me here to Florida rose to the surface and swamped me all at once. Filled with confusion and misery, I dumped our age-old manner of speaking about our husbands anonymously and blurted, “I love Jess, but I am drained. Just depleted by his stuff, his unfinished, unacknowledged, repetitious stuff.” I sniffled, accepted a tissue and blew my nose; sobs threatened to take hold again.
“I know.”
“We can be getting along fine, feeling especially close. Then
bam,
Jess hits some invisible wall.”
“I know.”
“Like last night on the phone. I talked to him about his urge to win all our encounters, when it isn't a contest, and I know he finally got what I meant. But could he say so? No. He maintains the upper hand, a certain distance and control when it comes to intimacy with me. He drops out, acts indifferent. And I am left hanging there, wondering what happened, where he disappeared to.” What was I ranting about? Why couldn't I stop? Since Daisy kept saying she knew, why couldn't she tell me?
“And you take this personally,” Daisy said. “But it has to do with his limits, even if it feels like he's deliberately withholding from you.”
“How can I separate from him enough to live my own life while staying connected with what I value about us together?” My voice sounded desperate. “I have to figure this out.”
“You will.”
Daisy had set a small table in between two lounge chairs here on the shaded patio. Two glasses and an opened bottle of cabernet sat on the table beside a box of Kleenex. I mopped my face, and she poured a glass of wine for me and another for herself, and we sat knees to knees on the ends of our lounges. “I have to find rules,” I said.
“Good luck. If you succeed in finding rules, you'll make a lot of women happy.”
“This is my job down here. I need to rest and recuperate and find rules. Something I can remember when I go home again. In the past, every time I felt I'd figured something out, I lost it in the chaos of gunfire during the problem at home. This move down here is an effort to get clarity and some concrete perspective.”
“What is it exactly that's so hard with Jess?”
I blew my nose a final time, trying to clean up before the twins returned. “I knew somebody was going to want that laid out sooner or later. I don't know. . . . I can never organize it in my head. It's like the bruises fade the moment I try to describe them. Emotional bruises, I mean. I just know I feel knocked around.”
Nell and Libby walked toward us, slowly and on wobbly legs, each balancing a plate. Nell's plate had Oreo cookies smeared with peanut butter.
“Oh, Nell,” I said, “this looks fabulous.”
“Libby's is fablis, too,” Nell said.
“Indeed it is,” I agreed, taking the plate from Libby to set on the table.
“Indeed it is,” Libby repeated and giggled, bent at the waist with her hands wrapped tightly into her skirt and stuck between her knees. Daisy and I exchanged looks.
“What do you have here?” Daisy asked Libby, her voice admirably serene.
Nell explained. “This way you don't have to put the cheese on top of the crackers and get the knives dirty.”
It became clear then that the mess we were viewing was Boursin cheese with crackers broken up and smashed into it. The hands that created this ingenious dish were not entirely cleaned of the peanut butter that had been used on the first delicious canapé.
We had to eat one of each while the twins stared at us. They offered to find some more treats, but Daisy dissuaded them. To play my usual role of loving aunt and troublemaker, I said, “Oh, please? Some more?” Then I remembered my new pet and sent the girls on a mission to find Bijou and potty her in the yard. I felt guilty that she'd probably done that in the house already, but knew I wouldn't have to confess anything since it wouldn't be discovered for years.
Later, after the sun set, laying wavy stripes of reflective pastels across Daisy's pool, she and I went inside. I called Dad to tell him I'd arrived. He filled me in on his latest intestinal developments.
“So, Dad, what do you think caused this?”
“I don't know. I been eating good things.”
“Like what?”
“Muskmelon.”
“That's good for you,” I said, relieved it wasn't a sack of peanuts for dinner three nights in a row like once before.
“That's what the dietitian said. She said, âA little melon is good.' So I figured a lot would be great. And then I get diarrhea. That gal doesn't know her stuff.”
I took a big breath. “Like how much is a lot?”
“Just one.”
“One piece?” This sounded too normal. I suddenly caught on. “One whole melon? You ate the whole melon? At one time?”
“In a meal or two yesterday.”
“Well, no wonder.”
“Oh,
you're
a doctor now.”
“Well, I know not to eat a whole melon.”
“That's what you have to do when you live alone. You want a little melon, you have to buy a whole melon. Then you have to eat it before it goes bad and then you get sick.”
“I'll get a melon before I leave, and we'll share it,” I said.
“No. I don't eat melon anymore. It's not good for me.”
I just wanted out of this conversation. I said, “Isn't the news on soon?”
“Oh, you're right, honey. I'll talk to you later.”
We made plans to see each other and hung up. I pictured Dad sitting before the television gathering more material to depress me with when we met for breakfast.
When I got off the phone, I told Daisy, “He needs a woman in his life.”
Daisy said, “He's got one. Me.” And she filled me in on how Dad was transferring more and more of his business at the store to her and called her on the weekends to accompany him socially. We decided he was way too young to be giving up like this and that she had to harden and refuse to accept his assignments. But I knew in the short time I'd been in Florida that I wanted to fill all Dad's needs myself and found I was thinking often of how I could entertain him or solve his complaints.
Daisy and I talked while we started dinner. She'd been at the grocery store when I'd arrived, and only put away the foods that needed refrigeration, so first we unloaded grocery bags into the cupboards. I was little help. I just stood in front of the crammed cupboards with packages of pasta in my hands and shook my head.
“Here,” Daisy said, and handed me a pineapple. “Prepare this.”
The counter seemed to be moving. I looked closer. Tiny infinitesimal ants, nearly invisible, skittered around the countertop. I stood staring at them, feeling hopeless that we could ever prepare food here, that the huge number of ants indicated the only solution was to burn down the house.
This happened to me lately. Defeat loomed early in a situation and suddenly overwhelmed all hope that life could move forward.
Daisy said, “Use this.” She handed me a clear acrylic cutting board. “For some reason these little sugar ants can't climb on that.”
I looked at her blissful countenance with some envy, some disbelief. She continued to put away groceries. I set the cutting board down on its rubbery four corners in the midst of ant Olympics, and as eventually happened in Daisy's house, I dissolved my fastidiousness and lowered my standards. My shoulders relaxed; my stomach muscles eased. The acrylic cutting board became an island of hygiene. The ants slipped off the beaches and soon gave up storming the edges of my sanctuary. I cut off the spiny leaves at the top of the pineapple, then quartered it.
I said, “I have this trouble when it comes to naming what's wrong with my marriage or describing what's hard about living with Jess. I tried telling Lola, a therapist Jess and I were seeing once. It took all her patience, but she listened to my fumbling complaints about how careless Jess is, how he leaves jobs unfinished, drawers unclosed, loses mail, phone messages; how he offers to go to the grocery store, then returns without getting half the list. I told her about the vast amount of small but constant mistakes and messes Jess trails behind him throughout his day. And I felt petty doing it.”
“What did the therapist say?”
I singsonged Lola's words. “ âSo what are you so angry about, Jess? Those are the acts of a man who's angry and not comfortable about it. It'd be easier, Jess, if you'd just acknowledge your trouble with your wife straight out.' ”
“She didn't dismiss it.”
“Not at all. But Jess denied he was angry, and Lola turned to me, raised her eyebrows and said, âThe end.' ”
“Whew,” Daisy said.
“Lola ended up saying to Jess, âWell, Jess, you sound like a cuddly predator to me.' ”
“She did?” Daisy turned to face me with a tower of instant oatmeal boxes in her arms.
“That's when I knew Lola understood completely, that he was both lovable and menacing.” I sawed at the tough outer edge of peeling on one quarter of the pineapple. Daisy's knives were dull; she didn't own a sharpener and in the past just bought new knives if I complained. I said, “Lola quoted Marion WoodmanâI looked this up and memorized it, I loved it soââHis sin is not so much in doing wrong as in not being conscious of the effect of his actions on other people.' ” I said to Daisy, “Isn't that Jess exactly?” I set down one quarter and started on another. “Here's the rest of that quote: âHis lack of emotional empathy shelters him from the conflicts that lead to manhood.' ”
Daisy said, “How did Jess take that?”
“He said Lola was welcome to her opinion. He wasn't even insulted.”
“Which proved your therapist's point, not to mention old Marion's. So then what?”
“So then nothing,” I said. I cored one of the quarters. “Lola said right in front of Jess that he was passive-aggressive, and unless he recognized that, there was nothing I could do but leave him.” I stopped my work and looked at Daisy.
“I said to her, as if Jess wasn't even in the room, âBut I love him.' ” As I looked at Daisy, I felt my face assume the hopeless perplexity I had experienced that day in Lola's office, eyes widening and beginning to water. And now, so did Daisy's.