The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [80]
She was not at home at three, when I got there to wait for the big girls.
She was not at home at five fifteen, when I got back from the day-care center with Leah, or at five thirty, when I put in the baking potatoes and turned on the oven.
She was not at home at seven, when we sat down to eat our meat and potatoes. Lizzie said, “Where’s Mommy?”
I said, “I don’t know,” and they all looked at me, even Leah. I repeated, “I don’t know,” and they looked at their dinners, and one by one they made up their minds to eat, anyway, and I did, too, without thinking, without prying into the mystery, without taking any position at all.
She was not at home when Leah went to bed at eight, or when Lizzie and Stephanie went to bed at nine.
She was not at home when I went to bed at eleven, or when I woke up at one and realized that she was gone. At first I considered practicalities—how we would divide up the house and the business and the odd number of children. These were dauntingly perplexing, so I considered Dana herself, the object, the force, the person that is the force within the object. In the confusion of dental school, of fighting with my father, of knowing that my draft lottery number was just on the verge of being not high enough, of taking out a lot of student loans and living on $25 a week, I remember feeling a desire for Dana when she first appeared, when she paused in the doorway that second day of class and cast her eyes about the room, that was hard and pure, that contained me and could not be contained, and I remember making that bargain that people always make—anything for this thing.
No doubt it was the same bargain that Dana was making right then, at one in the morning, somewhere else in town.
She was not at home at three, when I finally got up and went downstairs for a glass of milk, or at four, when I went back to bed and fell asleep, or at seven, when Leah started calling out, or at seven thirty, when Lizzie discovered that all the clothes she had to wear were unacceptable, or at eight forty-five, when I checked the house one last time before checking the office. Dave caught my eye involuntarily as I opened the door, and shrugged. At eleven the phone rang, and then Dave came into my examination room between patients and said, “She canceled again.” I nodded and straightened the instruments on my tray. At two my last patient failed to show, and I went home to clean up for the girls.
She was sitting at the dining room table. I sat down across from her, and when she looked at me, I said, “Until last night I still thought I might be misreading the signals.”
She shook her head.
“Well, are you leaving or staying?”
“Staying.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
I said, “Let’s not talk about it for a while, okay?”
She nodded. And we looked at each other. It was two thirty.
The big girls would be home in forty minutes.
Shall I say that I welcomed my wife back with great sadness, more sadness than I had felt at any other time? It seems to me that marriage is a small container, after all, barely large enough to hold some children. Two inner lives, two lifelong meditations of whatever complexity, burst out of it and out of it, cracking it, deforming it. Or maybe it is not a thing at all, nothing, something not present. I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking about it.