Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [55]
He adores her, that’s plain as the nose on your face.
Since his first wife died in childbirth back in 1905, he has done without the solace of sex. He cannot himself explain how or why he had chosen to live all these years apart from the comfort of women.
He has been busy, he might say, if asked. Other concerns took over his mind: his business, his rise to prominence, the fact that he had a young daughter to bring up. He would—should you question him—shrug, smile, glance upward in that sweet befuddled way of his; most people who cut themselves off from love commit themselves to lies, hypocrisy, and discouragement, but it seems Cuyler Goodwill is one of those rare beings who is happy enough to travel along where the wind blows him. And now the wind of good fortune has brought him Maria.
A woman whose body is full of complications and puzzles.
Broad-breasted, slim-ankled, narrow-waisted, heavy-hipped.
She is indeed an aberration, walking the polite, leafy streets of Bloomington, Indiana, walking always rapidly, with an air of purpose—for she is not just taking the air, no, she is on her way to do the marketing, ever hopeful of what curiosities and bargains she may uncover. She walks home with a canvas sack slung on her arm, and this sack is weighed down with treasure—red onions, fresh parsley, cauliflower, tomatoes. She carries all this as though it were an armload of feathers. Her muscular calves suggest an acquaintance with rough country roads. Her face, on the other hand, is sweetly formed, a pair of liquid eyes, a large but narrow nose and shapely mouth. A nasty scar nested into the left side of her face disappears, almost, when she smiles. She scorns lipstick. Whores wear lipstick. But her heavy dark hair with its henna highlights is clearly dyed. Cuyler Goodwill describes, for anyone kind enough to ask, how he and Maria met—at a seafood restaurant in Naples where she was employed as a hostess. "One look," he tells his Bloomington friends, innocently, "and that was that."
She jabbers and jabbers, and no one understands one word she says—except for her husband who claims he can usually get the "gist." The "gist" apparently is enough for him. His own tongue is suddenly stilled. He looks at his bride, shakes his head with wonder, and grins the grin of a happy man, especially when she bends down—for she is taller than he by a good three inches—and kisses with a loud smack the bald spot on the top of his head. This bending and smacking she does even in public places, at the Quarry Club where they go to dinner, at the Bloomington Foundation for a civic reception, and what does he do on these embarrassing occasions but go on smiling and smiling, as if this were normal behavior between husbands and wives.
Cora-Mae Milltown who has kept house for the Goodwills, father and daughter, all these years gives notice. It’s not that she doesn’t like Maria, she says, it’s only that she feels useless. Maria, with the wearingly buoyant effervescence of a child, is up and about by six-thirty; she likes to get the kitchen floor mopped clean before the others come down to breakfast. Then she’ll shuffle about vacuuming for an hour or so, wearing a robe of red silk that shows the division between her long brown-streaked breasts.
Later in the day, much later, she may change to a loose cotton house dress and apron, and often she answers the front door wearing this apron, sometimes still clutching a paring knife or dustpan or toilet brush or whatever she happens to have in her hand, her mouthful of teeth ready to welcome anyone who comes, not that she’s able to offer a word of common English. "Allo," she shouts, sweeping her arms forward and upward in a hectic gesture. All day long she drinks thick black coffee that she boils up on the