Mary Lee Chase fell in love with my husband when she was 12 months old. Just like that. We stood in my kitchen doorway, the four of us: Mary Lee and her father and Loren and me. Early evening and the last of the sun, slanting in through the open door, cut right across us.
”We just, I don`t know. We just ran right out of everything again,” Jim Chase said. He squinted against the light, and his dirty-blonde hair fell across his forehead in flat, pale clumps. More and more, since his wife, Ella, died, he looked like a caricature of a Midwestern rube farmer. He just made you think of the word hayseed, standing there bent into angles like a coathanger, too tall for the door frame, skinny in his worn jeans and his plaid flannel shirt.
Mary Lee was a long baby, held in Jim Chase`s arms, long legs dangling down. Her feet were bare; that came of having no mother to dress her. But it was warm then, Indian summer flooding into the kitchen through the open door.
”We`ve got plenty,” I said. ”Whatever you need.”
He gave me a confused look.
”Have you had dinner?” I asked. He shook his head. His shirt was seriously misbuttoned. ”Well, then. Let`s see. We`ve already eaten, finished up a roast right down to the bone, no leftovers, even. Otherwise I`d feed you here. How about eggs, can you scramble some eggs?”
Loren was paying no attention to any of this. He wasn`t very good at practical matters because they didn`t interest him much, or maybe it went the other way round, I don`t know. Whatever it was, he left things like this-the what to do with what, how to get from here stuff-to me. Now he just stood there in the shaft of late sun, looking at the baby.
Not a beautiful child. You first felt rather than saw her; then, caught by that mysterious pull, you looked again. She had amazing eyes, luminous, almost without color. I saw them grow larger, saw her gaze catch in Loren`s ruddy beard, which glittered in the light. He was tall and square-shouldered and reddish all over-he came from good Swedish stock on both sides.
Time stood still. It really did. The lines raying out from Loren`s eyes deepened with his smile, which seemed to spread out into the corners of the room. The child`s eyes in that long moment gleamed like opals, clear and irridescent. Behind them you`d have sworn she was thinking, evaluating things, was-amused. And behind the amusement lay, even then, some kind of question. I had-it seemed crazy-the strongest urge to move suddenly, to snap the invisible singing thread that spun itself between me and my husband and this child.
Then she broke it with a deep, throaty chuckle-the baby. I watched her hands, surprisingly large, open and close, open and close.
”I`ll get the eggs,” I said. My words surprised me, tumbling out fast.
”Milk, butter,” talking a iist, ”Rice Krispies for tomorrow morning,”
words bustling. I got busy, finding a grocery bag and shaking it open, filling it with things they`d need. On top I put in a banana to slice over the cereal. That was 13 years ago. Happy. Were we happy then? I thought we were, at the time. Isn`t that as good as? Isn`t it as close as you come in life? Well, maybe happy is too-wide a word. It`s a little Minnesota town. Life isn`t very exciting here. Contented, then. We were contented, at ease with each other and with the life we had together. Oh, there were times-those truncated, midwinter, lightless fights-when Loren would go out ice-fishing and I would wish he`d fall into the hole and the water, black as oil, would close over his head, pull him far out under the ice and never let go. Once I threw all his things out into the driveway. I didn`t bother with suitcases or boxes. They lay there on the gravel in the cold afternoon light: clothes and shoes and boots, a thunder of odd dark shapes; fishing rods snagging the air; the tools from the shed. I didn`t stop to think how, if anyone came by and saw all that, it made me look more of a fool than him-it said I cared. In the morning, everything was gone. Loren had gone out in the middle of the night and brought it all in and put it away, stowing each thing where it belonged. He didn`t say a word. Everything was just the same as before. That was early on; I never lost control of myself like that again.
We got set in our ways somewhat, I guess, what with not having children. Not that we didn`t try for them, at least the first 10 years or so. But I didn`t see the point once Dr. Sorensen told us for sure we couldn`t-I couldn`t have children. Like fish, all that flopping and slapping, wet, cold. Something you only do in the deep of night, under the quilts, and your arms and legs so tangled up with somone else`s that you can hardly tell them apart-it doesn`t seem natural. More trouble than it`s worth. Loren was a thoughtful man, he saw how I felt without my saying anything.
”Irene,” he said one night, the two of us lying there afterwards, fish- pale arms and legs gleaming in the near-dark. ”We don`t have to do this, if you don`t want to. If you don`t like it?” He made it a question, sort of, but his voice was steady and gentle, coming toward me in the dark.
I took back my legs and sat up, pulling my white cotton nightgown down. I leaned against the high mahogany headboard that had belonged to Loren`s parents, so thickly lacquered it was cold against my shoulder blades even on a humid August night like this.
”Maybe we could quit. For a while, anyhow,” I said finally. I bunched up my pillow and wedged it behind my back.
Loren didn`t say any more. In the dark I couldn`t see whether he nodded. I thought, maybe he doesn`t like it all that much either.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and slid down off the high mattress. I felt my way out of the room and down the dark hall and went into the bathroom to take care of myself. When I snapped on the bathroom light, my reflection in the mirror ambushed me. I had to think for a minute who it was, this woman with her lips sewn tight across, eyes smoky-edged and blank, like the holes in the quilt from Loren smoking his pipe in bed.
I started collecting glass paperweights about then-antiques, some of them, greenish or purplish like old doorknobs-with things embedded in them, flowers or insects, a dinosaur, a unicorn with a silver horn. The variety of their shapes and contents was a joy to me. Loren would look over the half-glasses he wore for reading, his hair and beard glinting red in the lamplight. ”Irene,” he`d say, ”you have more paperweights than Pinkham has pills,”
coming down hard on the p`s. He`d turn back to his stamps, slotting them into their places, squares of blue and green and dull red, in an album with a fat leather cover that I gave him for Christmas one year, to start him collecting. So, for the most part, we were contented. Isn`t that the great thing about marriage? That the bad things even out under the steady lapping of days, that the long stretch of the whole is what matters? I was a good wife. Homemaker: I made a home. When I was growing up, my mother, a good Wisconsin German, more than once made me sleep under my bed with the dustballs; I learned to be neat. I learned to make a place coherent and serene, to make objects cluster pleasingly together, seemingly of their own accord, the way a good housekeeper does. Loren appreciated it. He liked neatness and order and certainty. I belonged to the Garden Club and the Lutheran Ladies` Auxiliary, which my best friend Jenny was president of. Loren went back and forth to his job at the post office and cared for the few animals we had-cows and some chickens; usually a pig as well-and did carpentry, mending and building, in his workshop out by the barn. These things marked off the days and weeks and months, partitioned them and gave them shape, while the seasons slid by faster and faster until their colors melted and ran together like the pattern in the rose-and-blue oilcloth on my kitchen table.
She grew into a tall girl, skinny and leggy as the neighbors` colts pastured in the field at the bottom of our land. She came over from down the road two or three times a week. She must have been lonely, no brothers or sisters and her mother dying when she was born. Jim Chase must have had all he could do just trying to keep the farm from going under, those years; and they said he spent a lot of time in town at Chevy`s Bar and Grill, and not only in the evenings, either. I knew how it was-growing up, nobody in Whitewater had had much; my cradle was a box, an apple box. I didn`t like to interfere. She wasn`t mine. But the Chase family and Loren`s had been neighbors for 40 years. Sometimes I`d call Jim and, just in passing, mention that Mary Lee looked she needed new shoes or a warmer coat, mittens, didn`t children grow out of things fast though? And wasn`t it harder to notice when you lived with them day in, day out?
Loren was 27 when Mary Lee first saw him, and I was 30. A man could want a child as deeply as a woman did; some men could. That was what I told myself. At first he used to make her things: tiny wooden puzzles, a dollhouse, once a perpetual-motion machine out of cherrywood with silver balls that ran up and down, up and down. Then, when she was 8 or so, he began to teach her carpentry. ”You wouldn`t believe how that child can use her hands, Irene,”
he said to me at the end of that first afternoon, stamping sawdust and wood-curls off his boots onto my clean kitchen floor. ”She`s a natural, is what she is.” His face, ruddier than usual, gleamed with pleasure. Good, I thought then; it`s good he has something to do that he likes so much, and someone to do it with. It made him look young again and light, and as if he believed in things.
I got so I counted on seeing her. I`d look out on fine days and see them together in the yard, with their sawhorses and saws and T-squares, fitting and joining and mitering. Laughter, like half-heard music. Loren`s head of flaring hair close to her fair one, the two heads drawing even, as she grew taller. Once they made an oak and cherry birdfeeder with as many tiers as a wedding cake and carved as fancy as frosting. Carpenter`s Gothic, we call it in Minnesota, when it`s houses built like that. They were out there in front of the shed for hours a day, their two heads bent over the thing in perfect concentration, radiating care. So much trouble for nothing.
Rapt-that was a word for her in those years. Gazing at the birds that came to the feeder; watching a new calf. Once I came on her communing with one of our neighbor`s colts down in the back pasture. It had come right up to the fence where she stood under a tall Scotch pine. Their eyes were locked, and the black colt, a yearling, trembled lightly all over as if caught in an invisible net.
