I was walking down the platform, with mostly older women shoppers seated around the platform, my boss, Polly Prudhomme, describing the bathing suit I was wearing to the shoppers while I walked along, turning, strolling, kneeling, and then I saw your father’s head as it came over the top of the stairs. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream. A huge, smiling, suntanned face, a great toothy grin, tiny ears, dark eyes twinkling, a mass of black curly hair, a neck like a tree, and then his broad shoulders, thick chest, great brown arms swinging as he came up the stairs, and then that tiny waist of his, the long muscular legs, until finally he was at the top of the stairs, standing there with his legs apart, his hands in fists on his narrow hips, a big smile across his face, good-natured like a boy’s, only somehow hungrier than a boy’s could be. I was so taken by his appearance, especially the way it had gradually come to me, piece by piece like that, like a mirage floating up from the floor — first the head, then the torso, then the legs — until at last standing there before me was a grinning giant, the handsomest man I had ever seen. Anyhow, I was so taken by his appearance that I stopped midway down the ramp, stood still, and stared straight at him, and I smiled. I smiled! All the women in the audience and all the girls waiting to come behind me and even Polly Prudhomme herself followed my gaze until they too were staring straight at him, most of them with their mouths open. Polly had stopped describing the bathing suit I was wearing and was gaping like the rest of us. It was a strange moment, silent, no one moving, your father standing at the top of the stairs, grinning, while maybe fifty women stared back at him, with me motionless up there on that ramp, smiling at him, as if I was a slave girl or something being auctioned off and he had suddenly appeared from the desert to save me from a fate worse than death. It was like the movies!
WELL, LIKE THE old song says, those may have been the best of times, but they were the worst of times too. At least for me they were. Your father, when he wanted to be, was the most charming, thoughtful, witty — oh, God, could he be funny — intelligent, tender, sexy, and all-around interesting man you’d ever want to meet. And when he was, those were the best of times. I was never a happier woman than I was then. I sang all day long until I got off work and could meet him at the door of the Globe, where he’d be waiting for me, standing there in the late afternoon sun, dirty from his job at the pumping station, chatting with the janitor, old Eddie Coy, who locked the door after the store employees had left. I’d come out the door, and your father would see me, and holding his lunch pail under one arm, he’d whip the other arm around me, and he’d lift me right off the ground and spin me in a half-circle and set me down again, and then he’d stare down into my eyes, and he’d say, in that deep, throaty voice of his, “Hi.”
It was really something. I get a little weepy just remembering those days, the best of them. When it comes to the worst of them, though, all I have to do is remember a single one of them, just one of those days, and my eyes clear up pretty fast, let me tell you. There were Friday nights back then before we were married when I’d get off work and would come out the door, expecting your father to be there, as he’d promised, to take me out to dinner, and not finding him, would ask Eddie Coy if he’d seen your father, and Eddie would shake his head, No, not yet, so I’d wait and wait and wait, a half-hour, an hour, and hour and a half, until finally I’d know that he wasn’t coming, and I’d walk on home to my apartment, fix myself some supper, take a long bath, and try to sleep — until along about one in the morning, when I’d still be awake, tossing and turning, and there’d come a loud banging on the door. Jumping out of bed, I’d rush to the door, and when I opened it, I’d see him, standing there, a vicious snarl across his face, bloodied lips and cut eyes, bruises and scrapes, torn clothing, with a half-emptied bottle of whiskey in his hand. “Ran into a little bit of trouble down at th’ Tam,” was how he’d explain all the cuts and bruises. Then, using nothing but the foulest language, he’d describe in gory detail how he’d single-handedly beaten up half a dozen sailors or brickmasons or electricians or “crackers,” though I was never sure what he meant by the word, who he was referring to, exactly. Probably just anyone he couldn’t identify any other way by uniform and such. Anyhow, he’d stagger into my apartment, brushing off my foolish attempts to clean him up and bandage his cuts, pushing me and any sympathy I might have away, physically shoving me into a corner of the room, where I waited, slowly growing frightened of him, as he talked to himself, only to himself, and drank the whiskey from the bottle, growling like a dog, literally growling and curling his lips back and showing his teeth, snapping and snarling, rambling on about his “enemies,” turning everyone into an enemy — his parents, his sisters, his friends in New Hampshire and the people he’d met here in Florida, and of course, even me. Then, after a while, especially me. I was becoming his worst enemy. Every time he came in that drunk and torn up from fighting in the taverns, he would end the night by cursing at me, spitting out horrible names, a little more horrible each time it happened, a little more personally cutting, slicing into the parts of me that were the tenderest parts, taking the cruelest advantage of whatever fears and secrets I might have revealed to him some other night when we had been holding each other tenderly. Teasing and mocking me for my fears, threatening to expose my secrets, he’d call me “stupid” and “idiotic” and “sentimental” for a while, and then “selfish” and “insensitive” and “cruel,” and finally, “whore” and “leech” and “nag”—those last three, it always came down to them, whore and leech and nag. That’s what probably made them hurt so much, the fact that it always came down to the same three names. If he had just been lashing out at the world in general, he might’ve ended up calling me lots of awful things, sure, but all different. But because he always called me only those three, and all three, never one without the other two, he made me think that he really believed it about me, that even when he was sober and being kind to me, he still thought of me as a whore, a leech, and a nag. And of course, because I loved him and he was a man, I started seriously wondering if I was a whore or a leech or a nag, and there was just enough guilt for my own sexual interests in life, just enough dependency, and just enough nagging for me to slip slowly into believing that I was those things he was calling me, until I too thought of myself as a whore, a leech, and a nag. I even felt sorry for him for having to put up with me, for having fallen in love with me. So when he asked me to marry him I was so grateful, and so eager for the chance to prove by my loyalty that I wasn’t a whore and by my wifely support and devotion that I wasn’t a leech and by my trust and obedience that I wasn’t a nag, that I said, “Yes,” I said, “Oh, yes, yes, oh God, yes! Yes, yes,” I said, “yes.”
WELL, THAT’S WAY behind me now, and I’ve forgiven him, forgiven him for all of it. Really. I have. Part of it was my fault, I’m sure. I mean, I didn’t understand him very well, so it was hard for me to give him what he really wanted and needed — though I’m not sure any woman would have been able to give him what he wanted and needed. He was lonely, terribly lonely, I could tell that much. I could understand that. A stranger in a strange land, like they say. No friends, except the few rough pals he made at work. No family, and unable to be in touch with his family in New Hampshire because of what he was sure he had done to his father. And Florida was just not the place for him — he said he was a man of cold winds and ice and snow. I remember him telling me that, very serious, as if he was telling me he was Catholic or Methodist or Episcopalian. He hated the heat, the sun, the white light of noon, said it made him shrivel up inside, said it made him feel closed off from the world. He was always complaining about the palm trees. “They’re not trees. Why d’yer call them trees? They’re giant weeds, that’s what. Weeds,” he called them. And he disliked the people who lived here, called them “crackers,” even when they were from places like New York or Ohio. “Life in Florida,” he would grumble, “is like living in a motel full of crackers.” So actually, I wasn’t surprised when he left Florida. I expected it. What did surprise me, though, was that he did it alone, that he didn’t take the two of us along with him, his wife and his baby.