of every kind, not just the pillows but the figurines that crowded the shelves and the paintings on the wall) that we couldn’t say to each other, even if we did not choose to say it all, and yet it wasn’t intimacy that existed between us, certainly not warmth, but something more desperate. At no time did we ever address each other as anything but Mr. Bender and Mrs. Fiske.
We spoke of husbands and wives, of the death of her husband eleven years earlier, who had gone by a heart attack while singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the football stadium, of the hats and scarves and shoes of the dead that keep turning up, diminishing powers of concentration, letters returned in the mail, of train travel, of standing over graves, of all the ways that life can be squeezed out of the human body, at least I have the impression now that we spoke of these things though I admit it is possible we spoke of the difficulty of growing lavender in a wet climate, and that those other things were only the subtext, so clearly understood between Mrs. Fiske and me. But I don’t think so, I don’t think we discussed lavender or gardens at all. The bitter tea grew cold, despite the tea cozy. A few strands of Mrs. Fiske’s gray hair came loose from arrangements made earlier.
You have to understand, she said at last. I was thirty by the time I met John, and some weeks earlier I had caught sight of myself in the reflection of a shop window before I had a chance to compose my face, and afterwards, on the bus ride home, I came to accept certain things. It was not a revelation, she said, it was more a question of things having reached a certain point, and the image I saw reflected back at me was the last straw. Not long after that, I was at my sister’s and her husband brought a friend back from the office. John and I found ourselves trying to pass one another in the narrow hall that led to the kitchen, pass without touching, and he asked, rather awkwardly, whether he could see me again. The first night he took me out I was taken aback by how, when he laughed, you could see his fillings, and also the darkness gathered at the back of the throat. He had a way of throwing his head back and opening his mouth to laugh that took me some time to get used to. I was what you might call the solemn type, Mrs. Fiske said, looking past me out of the window, solemn and shy, and despite the music of his laughter I was frightened by what I thought I saw there at the back of his throat. But we found our way with one another, and were married five months later in front of a small group of family and friends, many of whom were surprised to find themselves there, having come to believe that I would become an old maid, if I wasn’t one in their eyes already. I made it clear to John that I didn’t want to waste any time before trying to have a child. We tried, but it didn’t come easily. When at last I became pregnant—this is strange to say—the sensation I had was of a tide washing in and out of me, and when the tide came in the child was safe within me, and when it washed out it was the child being pulled away from me, as if he had seen something bright and shining elsewhere, and no matter how I tried to hold him back I couldn’t. The pull of that other thing, that other, shining life, was too hard to resist. And then one night asleep in bed I felt the tide wash out of me for good, and when I woke I was bleeding. We tried again after that, but deep down I no longer believed I was capable of bearing a child. Those were painful times for me, and if normally I laughed little now I laughed hardly at all, but I remember thinking that John’s laughter remained constant. It isn’t that he wasn’t saddened, but he had a merry disposition, he could turn a corner and see things from another angle, or hear a joke on the radio and that was enough for him. And when he laughed, throwing his head back,