lover, and before that, my high school sweetheart. What a waste, to be chaste in high school. What silly fools we were. Were we saving ourselves for infidelity, for cheating and lies?
I think of how we slow-danced at the sock hops, how we held each other too close. When the song ended, our cheeks were flushed and damp, and they made the smallest sound as we pulled apart. I still remember it; it’s mixed in with the rustle of taffeta and the scuff of white bucks across an old oak floor. And later, much later, after we’d broken up because our colleges were too far apart, after he ran into me at Christmas break one year with Leo Comstock, and the next year with Theo, after both of us had married and lost track of each other—then, only then, were there other sounds, bouncy and breathy and bright. Theo was always so quiet; he arrived in the bedroom in stocking feet, his oxfords in shoe trees in the hall closet. He always undressed carefully, hanging his trousers on the valet by the bed. Placing his nickels and pennies in the leather tray on the dresser, never tossing them. But Peter! Oh! That night at our reunion held not the music of the band, but the music of his silver belt buckle, the pop of the first button, the glide of our zippers… and the surprising warmth of what lay inside. Like a perfectly prepared picnic basket, full of things someone else has packed, but you know you are going to lay out on the ground and love.
Where is that person now? I wonder. When I glimpse Peter occasionally at the post office, or the farmers’ market, it’s always in passing. He doesn’t see me. Perhaps I am as unrecognizable to him as he is to me. It’s always a bit of a shock—not that he could grow lumpy and pink, but that I must have been prescient; I saw it coming. Perhaps I got out just in time.
Betsy tells me that among her divorced or widowed friends who are dating, it’s common practice to exchange photos of themselves in their youth. They display them on the mantel or the piano, and we both find this amusing. Look! My barnacle was once a shiny conch shell! And though it’s also vaguely disturbing, like having a photo of a stranger on your fireplace mantel, Peter’s transformation makes me understand it better. Whoever Peter dates when his wife dies would be proud to have a photo of him at twenty-eight or eighteen. Not because he was so exceptional looking, but because he shone. With eagerness, with curiosity, with metallic rhythm. He leaned toward the world, as if he knew there was a good story about to be told.
But I see now, in his eyes, when I glimpse him two or three times a year, that he believes his wife will live forever. Part of me wants to reach out to him again, to try to say the right thing to him as he once did to me. To tell him that nothing is forever unless you choose it to be.
Things change. People come and go. If a little girl can delight me once again, Peter, isn’t anything possible?
May 4, 1967
sitz bath
orange juice
I GOT IN THE BATHTUB quickly, before the children woke up again. The heat soothed my bottom; it was still a bit sore even after four months. Dr. Kellogg said this happened more frequently in older mothers, which irritated me. Even my mother, who considered unmarried women of twenty-two spinsters, wouldn’t have put me out to pasture at thirty. But some days I do feel as old as a gray washcloth. Flat and dry and stiff. The bath swells me up, plumps me like a grape, and I regain a little buoyancy. But how many times a day can a person take a bath?
No one tells you about that part of childbirth, the pain afterward. After my first baby, I asked Theo to go buy me one of those red rubber doughnuts that make it easier to sit, and you would have thought I’d asked him to lance a wound. He was not good with injury. He was not good with change. He liked order, and I suppose he’d imagined a life with children being akin to running a school. Right now it’s a far sight closer to running a hospital. I imagine the idea of a piece of medical equipment in