As the potato peels dropped from her wet hands into the sink, Sarah looked at them lying there and felt a little sorry as she sometimes did for condemned inanimate objects. Nothing had ever convinced her that vegetable peels did not suffer after they were pushed into the cruel, inescapable grip of the noisy disposal. Of course it was worse that there still existed stupid brutes who didn't want to understand that non-human animals had feelings. Was it a future frontier in enlightenment that the sensitivity of peels would be discovered? If so, then why not do something to save helpless toilet paper, which started out so new, clean and nice to touch, from condemnation to a final resting place in an underground sewage system? How could otherwise decent people take an axe to the base of a glorious big tree, its lush foliage capable of providing shade for at least a hundred people, and take away its life? To make toilet paper, stupid. Forget about the peels, already, and get dinner started.
Perhaps she had simply become, or been born, a type of person who craved a flirtation with madness. She might someday be unable to function because she was tortured by the pitilessness of forcing tires to spin millions of times without respite as the cars pinning them down raced along the highway.
Had it been this self-imposed craziness, this sympathy run amok, that had led her to begin the summer with a casual affair with someone her son's age? It had been possible, after all, that forbidden sex on warm Friday evenings could help shake the frequent fear that everything in the cosmos derived from or led to some sort of cruelty, Being home a lot was nice, and she appreciated her husband George, who both earned enough to support a family and was generous with disposable income. But after giving up her 20-year career as an event planner, she had failed to create a sufficiently rich, independent life away from the sink and the peels. A new circle of friends growing out of an art-discussion group at the Mallinson Gallery -- a non-famous museum right in town that actually had four original French Impressionist works -- would have been better. But one stumbled into things. It was another reminder of the oft-mentioned, humiliating discovery that even in a comparatively long life, one used only a tiny fraction of available brain power.
She knew it would have been better to scuttle the affair with Rick after their first date in June, when he had laughed at her confession of sympathy for the potato peels and used it as an excuse to pull her down onto his narrow bed. Now, with the arrival of September, his life as caretaker of a moored boat would become like autumn leaves -- something beautiful that would seem permanent until the first gusty storm of the season. In this case it would be the return from abroad of the boat's owner.
She ran the water and flicked the switch, fixing her eyes on the backyard rhododendron bushes during the horrible grinding. She almost never viewed the backyard without remembering how her mother had lamented not having a window over the sink in her own kitchen. "Men who built houses didn't understand," her mother had said bitterly, "what it meant to see the blue sky, green grass and the backyard swing set when one was picking hardened scrambled egg off a spatula in brown water.
Suddenly from behind she heard George's light step. He placed his hand gently on her back and noticed she had been smiling slightly, remembering other, happier memories of her mother, like the time mother and daughter had scooped up, at warp speed, the company dinner roast that had somehow slipped off its platter onto the floor. The floor had been washed only the day before, surely the most useful instance of good luck that either would experience in life.
"Happy thoughts?" George asked, ready in his light jacket to go buy the milk she needed for the scalloped potatoes. It was funny how people couldn't distinguish between sad and happy smiles. Maybe that was the miracle of smiles; they were happy by definition. George said how fine it was that their son Alex could visit before he returned to college.
"I can't wait," she agreed. For her, seeing Alex was always a joy but now would be compromised by discomfiture because she had spent most of the summer's Friday evenings in bed with his old high school chum. Rick's life had taken a much different course than Alex's chemical engineering studies. The two were not in contact as far as she knew. If Alex knew that Rick was in the area, he said nothing. George kissed her hair and left.
Even the most demanding woman would have been compelled to admit that George was a good husband. Now, that was something women didn't say -- good husband -- on their honeymoon or the period afterward, maybe a year -- two in some blessed cases -- when there was no sight as beguiling as his chest or forearms, when any little argument could be obliterated by looking at each other and moving toward the bedroom. What mattered later was that the debris from all that hot deferral of ordinary real life together be quietly retired in a manner that made being together still an attractive proposition. She and George had succeeded, more or less, in finding the low-octane pleasures of taking each other's books back to the library and glancing warmly at each other, over the tops of spectacles, from across the room. "This is pleasant," such glances said. "Dinner at seven?"
She had heard dreadful stories from other women whose husbands' repugnancies had completely extinguished sexual desirability. One husband, so outwardly valiant and stalward in the courting days, had turned out to be afraid of the dark. Another counted change at the grocery store bending over his palm with a mean expression and pursed lips like a greedy, disagreeable old miser. Another picked his nose while waiting at red lights. "Can this be me, I say to myself," Emmie Dobson had asked Sarah passionately over tea at Brickman's Department Store, which was still somehow surviving on Main Street. "Sitting on the passenger side, as always, next to a compulsive nose picker?"
George had never been repulsive except in the beginning when his sex had been too tentative and wimpy. Sarah hated little nibbles and half-hearted stroking and had conveyed her desires early in the marriage. "Communication is everything," her mother had lectured her, "don't make my mistake. No man has any idea what you want unless you spell it out with a big No. 1 pencil."
None of that had been necessary with Rick. Events had simply moved from the moment her insides had turned over when she noticed his undisguised admiration for her youthful appearance and visible evidence of regular exercise and healthy eating.
"So you're Alex's mom," he had said near the pier before describing the boat's owner, one Evan McKenzie, a peripatetic rich man with a taste for Asian women.
September was a time of beginnings and endings. Rich men whose travels followed their moods would not remain for the autumn or winter in the summer place of their fancy. The locations of poorer men so unencumbered that they could boat-sit for months would shift accordingly. Sarah's hope that Rick would find a way to stay nearby co-existed with her cognizance that his boarding of a Greyhound bus bound for Alaska would be the real blessing.
When George drove to his bridge game the following Friday, she caught the bus at 12th and Sycamore and walked the half mille from the end of the line to the boat. She passed the waterfront district of warehouses, leaning telephone poles and trash barrels in the middle of pot-holed lots. It was nearly dark when she reached berth 7. Little lights twinkled around the marina.
She glimpsed Rick's bond hair through the cabin window. The familiar warm, dim bulb was burning on top of the liquor cabinet. She saw him remove his shirt. Mortification rushed through her at the sight of his tanned back. She tried to block thoughts of the seaminess of her situation but they gripped her, like the crazy misgivings about peels in the sink.
Walking carefully down the gangplank -- an action sure to remind a middle-aged woman of her age -- she dreaded the possibility that she might appear old and unsteady. For several years now George had been saying "hoo-boy" or grunting when he arose from a chair or picked something up from the floor. She loved him enough not to mind, but it did foreshadow her eventual arrival at the last of a woman's three stages of life with men, identified centuries earlier by Francis Bacon as mistress, companion and nurse.
Moments later Rich was standing close to her under a low ceiling, smiling and unzipping her jacket. She feld the quick, electrifying caress of hands as sure and assuing as a cat's feet. In the beginning he had offered her a glass of wine when she arrived, but it was a clumsy, obligatory ritual -- a feeble cover-up of the fact that their dates consisted of nothing but sex. She loathed the way stale alcohol in her system made her irritable on the bus ride back home and heightened her fear that George would sense something.
Rick tossed back his rock-star mane and lit a cigarette. He squinted at her through an undulating, gauzy haze. She tried to remember if any expression of George's had ever had the same effect on her. It was cool, appraising and possessively penetrating. It riveted her consciousness on a murky dream of life with Rick in some cabin on land, where she would cook in the morning, drink in the afternoon and give in to whatever he wanted. Outside a sudden eruption of excited young voices and splashing halted her slide into fantasy.
"That bunch showed up last weekend," Rick said without taking his eyes off her. "Good thing the season's almost over. They don't know shit about the water."
How did he know that, she wondered, but the question wasn't worth asking. She didn't care that someone from somewhere had shown up for some reason. But the remark did jog her memory of a long-ago summer afternoon on a friend's catamaran with George. They had put out from shore, swaying and bobbing hypnotically on the water. Rocking gently on the small, skillfully maneuvered craft in the warm wind was like heaven until they neared the open water, where the big hulls and tall sails of vessels fit for bigger voyages came into view. She remembered George's uneasy face when he saw the approaching wide mouth of the bay, the beginning of the dangerous beyond. George was an indoor man, except for gardening. Later that day they had all eaten dinner at a good restaurant and lingered long over coffee and good conversation. This is the good life, she remembered thinking in the car going home. These are the good old days.
Rick stubbed out his cigarette and stood up, coming from behind to touch her until she was dizzy and incapable of thinking. They went to bed, where he was his usual delightful self. Nothing seemed different. The messy, shameful pile of her pocketbook, jacket and underwear on the chair looked the same.
Steps suddenly were heard so close to the boat that she grabbed the sheet and covered herself, expecting to see a strange face appear at the window. But the steps went away and Rick yanked the sheet away, looking at her body as if he resented the momentary obstruction of his view. This filled her with such hope that she began to reveal, in words and touch, her fantasies of staying with him. He got up then, not exactly abruptly but will little enough ceremony. He pulled on his jeans and lit another cigarette.
"So McKenzie's coming back next week," he said to a small picture hanging crookedly in the cabin. "Flying in from Kuala Lumpur. I think that's where he's at."
Ah yes, the return of the unknown, unseen captain, making an appearance to move his boat to some winter shelter. In her mind's eye she pictured the forsaken scene of winter at the marina. Tarps and plastic stretched over cavities, stationary boats silent under a white sky, the occasional couple in bright parkas holding hands at the end of the pier.
"So what will you do?" For the first time she consciously faced the meaning of the fact that only pure coincidence had brought him here. There was nothing in town to hold him.
He shrugged the shrug of a healthy young man who drifted, managed to eat well enough and had no conception of how it was to wear a tie on a hot day, sit for examinations or pretend to like a hated boss.
"Head out. Buddy of mine bought a place in the southwest."
"And?"
"And what?" A hostile expression crossed his face. His repetition of her common little word was heavy with disinclination to be accountable. But why should she wait until now to feel used? She hadn't actually considered leaving George. This affair had suddenly been born; now let it die.
"Nothing. Well, look at the time. I have to run." She dressed quickly. Much better, she remembered vengefully, to be the one who dressed first, to claim some urgent appointment as one-night-standers, always male, could be counted on to do at half-past seven on a Sunday morning. "My son is due home in a few days," she added in a tone that lacked intimacy, purposefully refraining from describing him more familiarly as Alex. Rick seemed to read her accurately.
"Look," he said, watching her confident movements and licking his lips almost nervously. "I mean...this has been a great summer, you know? I mean, I wouldn't trade it..."
No, he wouldn't, would he -- a sudden opportunity for weekly immersions in slightly plump, warm, experienced femininity.
That night she gratefully listened to George's bridge report over coffee, not wanting to speak much herself. She was already beginning to feel good about dealing well with a clean break from Rick. Control, that was what a person wanted. One needed to manage and dispense with things, to enjoy the personal power engendered by smart decisions. No more would she fear that someone would say to George, "hey, I saw your wife coming out of a boat the other night."
Then on the following Friday, it was warm, sunny and breezy, an indian-summer day with air full of seduction. She was seized with desire for Rick and found herself boarding the bus at the corner. Passing Brickman's she felt in tune with shoppers who looked more animated than usual. Life is fine, she almost said out loud. I'm not old, I'm still pretty, I have many years ahead of me. Why else would Rick have wanted me?
Near the end of the half-mile walk she froze at the point where McKenzie's boat came into view. Rick was standing on the gangplank, talking to someone inside the boat. Then the person came out and kisssed him. Her hands lingered on his head. As tall as Rick, she was young, blonde and thin. Her white shorts showed off her finely toned, tanned legs. Her slim hips were the kind that looked like mere continuations of her slim thighs instead of like a pumpkin on top of them. That look. The look that made even an attractive brunette of thirty, never mind forty, feel like a washed-up hag.
She turned and ran back to the bus stop, covering ground so quickly it seemed to take only seconds. Angry at her own weakness, she tried to recover by consciously planning dinner, picturing forks, napkins, salad ingredients, to keep tears from spilling out onto her cheeks. Obtaining a newspaper at a considerately located drugstore, she leafed impatiently past the news, in no mood for the latest atrocities in Iraq or photos of senators in perennial pursuit of a presidential run. She quickly found the lifestyle section and read with determination an essay about friendship.
Walking up her street she was startled to see George home early from work. Someone familiar was with him. It was Alex, waving to her. At Alex's feet were George's yellow and orange marigolds, summer's brilliant last stand. Holding his own newspaper, George smiled at her approach until she got closer. Unable to see clearly, she felt George's arm encircle her and heard Alex's voice.
"What's the matter, Mom?"
"I'm just so glad to see you." She spoke with strict veracity, simultaneously lying about the cause of the tears. From her pocket she pulled a tissue she had plucked from a box on the boat.
"Alex has been admiring my flowers," George said, "at my urgent invitation, of course. The marigolds did especially well this year, don't you think so, honey? It's been a great summer." He regarded his flowers with proprietary satisfaction, then peered hopefully into the drying face of his wife.
Alex looked at her more shrewdly. He had always been smart, proving it when he was eight years old and beat his babysitter at Monopoly. Alex didn't describe a person's location as "where he's at." His tone indicated clearly that he was ready to go out and do battle with whatever had made her not okay.
"Yes, dear, thanks. Dinner will take awhile, I'm afraid, but I'll make you and Dad some crackers and cheese and find that bottle of sherry I've been saving." She saw them exchange a look of anticipatory approval.
There might be another Rick someday. She knew that about herself now but felt an almost commanding relief that she needn't worry about why. Not now, anyway. Tonight she would lie close to George and ask him to tell her again the story of how he had nervously left his bouquet of flowers on the bus the night he had come to meet her parents.
"Oh, look at that," George said in a tone of displeasure. He had spotted a small rock, probably blown by the wind, pressing on the stem of a flower, preventing it from standing up straight and able to flick itself back and forth in the breeze.
"I don't think that hurt the flower," Alex said, watching his father carefully remove the stone and toss it across the yard.
"How do you know? Flowers have feelings, you know. People talk to plants."
Sarah stopped to look at the rescued flower as father and son continued on the path toward the house. She quickened her step and reached out to catch hold of George's hand.
As the potato peels dropped from her wet hands into the sink, Sarah looked at them lying there and felt a little sorry as she sometimes did for condemned inanimate objects. Nothing had ever convinced her that vegetable peels did not suffer after they were pushed into the cruel, inescapable grip of the noisy disposal. Of course it was worse that there still existed stupid brutes who didn't want to understand that non-human animals had feelings. Was it a future frontier in enlightenment that the sensitivity of peels would be discovered? If so, then why not do something to save helpless toilet paper, which started out so new, clean and nice to touch, from condemnation to a final resting place in an underground sewage system? How could otherwise decent people take an axe to the base of a glorious big tree, its lush foliage capable of providing shade for at least a hundred people, and take away its life? To make toilet paper, stupid. Forget about the peels, already, and get dinner started.
