Three Women at the Water's Edge Read Free Page A

inordinate betrayal. It was a violation of the flexible laws of their love. It was a wound, a tear, in the fabric of their lives. It was monumentally unfair.
    The best way Daisy could think to handle it was to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t there. For the past few weeks, she had simply gone on ignoring it, she had been living in a false world. She knew it was a false world, she knew she was purposefully avoiding unchangeable, unbearable facts. She thought of the story by Isak Dinesen in
Winter’s Tales
where Peter and Rosa, two young lovers, are swept away from the mainland into the sea on a great sheet of ice. That was what was happening to her, except that unlike faithful Peter, Paul had jumped off, had made it safely to shore, in fact had given the crucial push to the ice sheet that set it off on its way toward doom; and there she was, Daisy, stranded on a sheet of ice, unlike Rosa, without a lover; instead with her two small and completely dependent children. Dinesen’s tale had ended beautifully, in a bursting, a sinking, of true love and passion: the two lovers drowned in each other’s arms. The story ended, saying, “The current was strong; they were swept down, in each other’s arms, in a few seconds.” But Daisy had only the children to hold in her arms, and she certainly didn’t want all of them to be swept down into a cold lonely sea. Dear God, who could face a future like that? It didn’t bear thinking of. So, she did not think of it.
    She did not think of it, she would not talk of it. Paul paced, he stormed from the house, he did not make love to her or touch her, he sat in the bathroom and cried. She could see sometimes in his eyes that he wanted to kill her, or at least to shake her and shake her until she agreed to at least listen, and talk, and be reasonable, and say yes, all right, I’ll give you a divorce. Sometimes when she sat in a hot bathtub late at night, sipping tea from a blue plastic cup (so that if she dropped it in the tub it could not break into tiny shards of glass that could cut her or the children’s feet), sometimes she thought about it this way: What kind of man would leave a woman who has borne two of his children and is about to bear a third? What kind of man would leave his family? A bad man, that’s what kind. And Paul was basically a good man, and wanted to be a good man. So by denying his insane pleas, by refusing to even hear them, she was protecting him from changing from a good man to a bad one. Later he would even thank her.
    But even as she thought it, as she was pulling her weighty body out of the bathtub, she knew that she was wrong. Thoughts like that, which soothed her and made her feel secure, evaporated like the steam that clouded the bathroom mirror.
    And today, resting in bed, under her blue afghan with her mother’s letter lying partially unread on the carpet beside the bed, Daisy was frightened. Through the comfort came the fear. She could not lie still, she twisted this way and that in bed, and the covers pulled away, and she kept getting cold.
    Paul was taking her out to dinner tonight. He had arranged for the babysitter all by himself, something he had never done before. The dinner was entirely his idea. He had said, “Daisy, I’ve arranged for Barbara to come over tonight. I’m taking you out to dinner. Can you be ready at seven?” For one wild moment, Daisy had burned with hope. He was taking her out to dinner, he wanted to start all over again, he loved her after all!
    “Why, yes,” she said, smiling at him. “What a good idea!” She thought: her red maternity dress, she would wear that, it always made her look sexy because it had a plunging neckline that flattered her large breasts, and her tummy wouldn’t show at all: The sight of her in the dress, the red silky fabric against her white skin, flashed before her eyes. So she did not right away read the message in Paul’s eyes, in the taut lines of his face.
    “Okay, then,” he said, and