Too Much Happiness Read Free

Maggie had waited until she was on theverge of the menopause. He was exaggerating how old Maggie was, but it was true that she had waited. She was an optometrist. She and her husband had been partners, and they hadn’t started their family until she could leave the practice and they had a house in the country.
    Maggie’s hair was pepper-and-salt, cropped close to her head. She was tall, flat-chested, cheerful, and opinionated. Lloyd called her the Lezzie. Only behind her back, of course. He kidded with her on the phone but mouthed at Doree, “It’s the Lezzie.” That didn’t really bother Doree—he called lots of women Lezzies. But she was afraid that the kidding would seem overly friendly to Maggie, an intrusion, or at least a waste of time.
    “You want to speak to the ole lady? Yeah. I got her right here. Workin at the scrub board. Yeah, I’m a real slave driver. She tell you that?”
    Doree and Maggie got into the habit of shopping for groceries together after they’d picked up the papers at the school. Then sometimes they’d get takeout coffees at Tim Hortons and drive the children to Riverside Park. They sat on a bench while Sasha and Maggie’s boys raced around or hung from the climbing contraptions, and Barbara Ann pumped on the swing and Dimitri played in the sandbox. Or they sat in the mini, if it was cold. They talked mostly about the children and things they cooked, but somehow Doree found out how Maggie had trekked around Europe before training as an optometrist, and Maggie found out how young Doree had been when she got married. Also about how easily she had become pregnant at first, and how she didn’t so easily anymore, and how that made Lloyd suspicious, so that he went through her dresser drawers looking for birth-control pills—thinking she must be taking them on the sly.
    “And are you?” Maggie asked.
    Doree was shocked. She said she wouldn’t dare.
    “I mean, I’d think that was awful to do, without telling him. It’s just kind of a joke when he goes looking for them.”
    “Oh,” Maggie said.
    And one time Maggie said, “Is everything all right with you? I mean in your marriage? You’re happy?”
    Doree said yes, without hesitation. After that she was more careful about what she said. She saw that there were things that she was used to that another person might not understand. Lloyd had a certain way of looking at things: that was just how he was. Even when she’d first met him, in the hospital, he’d been like that. The head nurse was a starchy sort of person, so he’d call her Mrs. Bitch-out-of-Hell, instead of her name, which was Mrs. Mitchell. He said it so fast that you could barely catch on. He’d thought that she picked favorites, and he wasn’t one of them. Now there was someone he detested at the ice-cream factory, somebody he called Suck-Stick Louie. Doree didn’t know the man’s real name. But at least that proved that it wasn’t only women who provoked him.
    Doree was pretty sure that these people weren’t as bad as Lloyd thought, but it was no use contradicting him. Perhaps men just had to have enemies, the way they had to have their jokes. And sometimes Lloyd did make the enemies into jokes, just as if he was laughing at himself. She was even allowed to laugh with him, as long as she wasn’t the one who started the laughing.
    She hoped he wouldn’t get that way about Maggie. At times she was afraid she saw something of the sort coming. If he prevented her from riding to the school and the grocery store with Maggie it would be a big inconvenience. But worse would be the shame. She would have to make up some stupid lie to explain things. But Maggie would know—at least she would know that Doree was lying, and she would interpret thatprobably as meaning that Doree was in a worse situation than she really was. Maggie had her own sharp way of looking at things.
    Then Doree asked herself why she should care what Maggie might think. Maggie was an outsider, not