The Wife's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

considered briefly what it might be like to sit beside him on the bed and caress
     him there, and let him run his hand over the flesh of her back, to heal with strokes and whispers the way they once had. She
     craved that powerful love but felt too distinctly the message from her body, that it did not want to be touched. “I grabbed
     the wrong box,” she sighed. “It’s
red
.”
    Later, Gooch heard a sound in the bedroom and found her collapsed on the bed. It was not a fatal heart attack or even grief
     but her stiff black dress, which had been snug at the last funeral, lodged beneath her textured mounds. Seeing her stricken
     face, Gooch just squeezed his eyes and quietly left the room.
    Locked in the bathroom, naked on the toilet though she had no urge to relieve, Mary had scratched her hairless thighs without
     particular shame or horror. Her hunger was ever-present but her self-loathing came in waves. Clothes didn’t necessarily incite
     abhorrence for her form, but more often for the tight, scratchy, lumpy articles themselves. All garments except her gray nightgown
     were hateful to her skin. She had been delighted when the uniform policy was handed down at the drugstore—roomy navy pantsuits
     resembling hospital scrubs, which were supposed to make the front staff look more professional, and in which they all looked
     like hell.
    The women at the drugstore had griped about the uniforms—especially Candace, with her wee waist and cantilevered breasts—but
     no one had asked Mary her opinion. She had thought one sleepless night, without a ladle of self-pity, that she was, quite
     literally, the elephant in the room. Her body seemed more illusory for the secrecy surrounding it. Her real weight? Her true
     size? Only she knew. Hiding food. Eating in private. Feeding the hungry body to which she’d been assigned, abiding with the
     frantic energy of
want
and
want more
.
    Restless on the toilet, having shifted tense in what she supposed was the natural inclination of all people’s thoughts—a lobbing
     back and forth between past remembrances and current anxieties—she wondered what believable emergency might excuse a daughter
     from her own father’s funeral. There was a gentle knock on the door. “Mary…?”
    “I’m sorry, Gooch.”
    “I think this’ll work, Mare. Can I come in?” He opened the door.
    The image of big Jimmy Gooch in his slender tie and pleated pants lent her the courage to rise. He presented a pair of black
     slacks borrowed from their short, rotund neighbor, old Leo Feragamo, and a starched white shirt of his own, which she would
     have to wear open over her only clean white T-shirt. The roots of her hair sparkled like tinsel around her full-moon face.
     She propped a black wide-brimmed sunhat upon her head and did not look in the mirror again. Gooch flipped a thumb and announced
     that she looked
funky
, which caused Mary’s throat to constrict.
    As they drove in silence on the winding river road, Mary wondered if grief was ever a singular event, or if ghosts lurk in
     any passing. She felt a parade in the death of her father: the erosion of her mother’s mind; the splintering of her marriage;
     the slipping away of the babies she’d named but never known.
    The day of the funeral was an unseasonably warm day in spring. Mary felt the embrace of purple lilac on the path to St. John’s
     Nursing Home in Chatham, where her mother had been languishing in dementia for years. She stopped to pick a lilac bouquet
     for her mother’s bedside stand, knowing that Irma wouldn’t appreciate or understand the gesture and had no sense of the events
     of the day, but it cheered Mary to bring her mother flowers. The receptionist huffed, seeing the bouquet, and explained tightly
     that they’d run out of vases.
    Irma was parked in the common room, folded neatly into her wheelchair, silver strands teased to a height, looking more winter
     shrub than human being, gazing into the distance. Mary