Nine Women by Shirley Ann Grau Read Free Book Online Page B

couple of months they got up in time to go to mass. Neither of them liked the English service, so they looked for a church where mass was still in Latin, but they found only a small group of Charismatics, and after that they’d stopped looking.
    Five years.
    Then two months ago, on a Thursday, Edward went home early, saying he had a headache.
    She thought nothing of it. He’d looked a bit tired that morning, and there was absolutely no sense trying to work if you weren’t able to do a good job.
    When she got home, he was sitting in the living room. There were no lights, no lights at all, and evening dark filled the room, obscuring the leaf patterns on the chairs, dulling the white walls.
    “Are you all right?” With the first jolt of alarm, she switched on one lamp. “Are you sick?”
    “No,” he said, “I wanted to think.”
    She hung up her coat, brushed it quickly, put it away neatly.
    “About what?”
    His dark brown eyes were flecked with yellow, they glittered like fancy marbles. Huge eyes with dark circles under them. “The way it is with us, I’ve been thinking, is that all there is?”
    She stared at him, not answering.
    “You’ve been feeling it too, Mary Margaret. I know that.”
    Carefully, levelly, without a shade of anger or fear—words to meet his words, thoughts to be born of them. No midwife here, take care. “Maybe I do wonder. Sometimes. And I don’t know why.”
    He sat down, then got right up again. “It’s hard to talk about it sensibly, you know. People go to psychiatrists for this, to find out how to put feelings into words.”
    “I don’t think—it’s nothing to do with you, Edward. And not with me either.”
    “You know, the books you read, they say it’s sex.”
    So he’d been reading books; she hadn’t known. Maybe he read them at lunchtime, and kept them locked in his office desk.
    “This one book by a New York psychiatrist, he says that if the sex adjustment is all right, everything else in the marriage will be fine.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with sex,” she said, “not for me.”
    “Not me either.”
    They were both silent for a moment, remembering. She felt the familiar flood of blood and heat—only a ghost now, faint and barely recognizable.
    “It’s something else,” she said.
    Because his eyes were glittering as bright as if there were Christmas tree lights behind them, she reached out and touched his cheek, bristly and blue-shadowed. He was sweating heavily, the stubble was slippery with moisture. He smelled sweaty too, heavy and musky.
    They made love there on the couch, quick and uncomfortable. Then in bed, comfortable and insatiable. They both overslept and were late for work in the morning.
    But the words remained. They hung in the living room air; they hung, muted, over the bed. The words had been heard, had danced through ears and rattled in heads: More than this?
    Mary Margaret shook herself back to the present, turned off the TV. To say something, anything, she asked: “Pa, isn’t that a new road sign out front? The curve sign?”
    “No,” her father said.
    “Looks new to me.”
    “No,” her father said. “They put that sign there three, four years ago.”
    “You ready for dinner?” her mother said.
    That meant the casserole was already on the table.
    “Wait a minute, Ma. I’ve got to tell you something, something important. Edward and I are going to get a divorce.”
    They stared at her blankly.
    “It’s not that there’s anything wrong between us.” (How could she explain when she was so uncertain herself?) “We just thought it would be better this way.” (But maybe it wouldn’t.) “Edward got a big promotion and a transfer to the Houston office. He’ll leave in a couple of weeks, they want him right away. And I’m not going with him.”
    Not seeming to hear, her father walked out the front door, slowly, putting his feet down in the manner of very heavy men. He crossed the lawn to check the date stenciled on the sign,