Sonje was not the sort of friend who would tell you that she was trying to have a baby and how long she’d been trying and what techniques she was using. She never talked about sex in that way, or about her periods or any behavior of her body-though she soon told Kath things that most people would consider much more shocking. She had a graceful dignity-she had wanted to be a ballet dancer until she got too tall, and she didn’t stop regretting that until she met Cottar, who said, “Oh, another little bourgeois girl hoping she’ll turn into a dying swan.” Her face was broad, calm, pink skinned-she never wore any makeup, Cottar was against makeup-and her thick fair hair was pinned up in a bushy chignon. Kath thought she was wonderful looking-both seraphic and intelligent.
Eating their French fries on the beach, Kath and Sonje discuss characters in the stories they’ve been reading. How is it that no woman could love Stanley Burnell? What is it about Stanley? He is such a boy, with his pushy love, his greed at the table, his self-satisfaction. Whereas Jonathan Trout-oh, Stanley’s wife, Linda, should have married Jonathan Trout, Jonathan who glided through the water while Stanley splashed and snorted. “Greetings, my celestial peach blossom,” says Jonathan in his velvety bass voice. He is full of irony, he is subtle and weary. “The shortness of life, the shortness of life,” he says. And Stanley’s brash world crumbles, discredited.
Something bothers Kath. She can’t mention it or think about it. Is Kent something like Stanley?
One day they have an argument. Kath and Sonje have an unexpected and disturbing argument about a story by D. H. Lawrence. The story is called “The Fox.”
At the end of that story the lovers-a soldier and a woman named March-are sitting on the sea cliffs looking out on the Atlantic, towards their future home in Canada. They are going to leave England, to start a new life. They are committed to each other, but they are not truly happy. Not yet.
The soldier knows that they will not be truly happy until the woman gives her life over to him, in a way that she has not done so far. March is still struggling against him, to hold herself separate from him, she is making them both obscurely miserable by her efforts to hang on to her woman’s soul, her woman’s mind. She must stop this-she must stop thinking and stop wanting and let her consciousness go under, until it is submerged in his. Like the reeds that wave below the surface of the water. Look down, look down-see how the reeds wave in the water, they are alive but they never break the surface. And that is how her female nature must live within his male nature. Then she will be happy and he will be strong and content. Then they will have achieved a true marriage.
Kath says that she thinks this is stupid.
She begins to make her case. “He’s talking about sex, right?”
“Not just,” says Sonje. “About their whole life.”
“Yes, but sex. Sex leads to getting pregnant. I mean in the normal course of events. So March has a baby. She probably has more than one. And she has to look after them. How can you do that if your mind is waving around under the surface of the sea?”
“That’s taking it very literally,” says Sonje in a slightly superior tone.
“You can either have thoughts and make decisions or you can’t,” says Kath. “For instance-the baby is going to pick up a razor blade. What do you do? Do you just say, Oh, I think I’ll just float around here till my husband comes home and he can make up his mind, that is our mind, about whether this is a good idea?”
Sonje said, “That’s taking it to extremes.”
Each of their voices has hardened. Kath is brisk and scornful, Sonje grave and stubborn.
“Lawrence didn’t want to have children,” Kath says. “He was jealous of the ones Frieda had from being married before.”
Sonje is looking down between her knees, letting sand fall through her fingers.
“I just think it would be beautiful,” she says. “I think it would be beautiful, if a woman could.”
Kath knows that something has gone wrong. Something is wrong with her own argument. Why is she so angry and excited? And why did she shift over to talking about babies, about children? Because she has a baby and Sonje doesn’t? Did she say that about Lawrence and Frieda because she suspects that it is partly the same story with Cottar and Sonje?
When you make the argument on the basis of the children, about the woman having to look after the children, you’re in the clear. You can’t be blamed. But when Kath does that she is covering up. She can’t stand that part about the reeds and the water, she feels bloated and suffocated with incoherent protest. So it is herself she is thinking of, not of any children. She herself is the very woman that Lawrence is railing about. And she can’t reveal that straight out because it might make Sonje suspect-it might make Kath herself suspect-an impoverishment in Kath’s life.
Sonje who has said, during another alarming conversation, “My happiness depends on Cottar.”
My happiness depends on Cottar.
That statement shook Kath. She would never have said it about Kent. She didn’t want it to be true of herself.
But she didn’t want Sonje to think that she was a woman who had missed out on love. Who had not considered, who had not been offered, the prostration of love.
II.
Kent remembered the name of the town in Oregon to which Cottar and Sonje had moved. Or to which Sonje had moved, at the end of the summer. She had gone there to look after Cottar’s mother while Cottar took off on another journalistic junket to the Far East. There was some problem real or imagined about Cottar’s getting back into the United States after his trip to China. When he came back the next time he and Sonje planned to meet in Canada, maybe move the mother up there too.
There wasn’t much chance that Sonje would be living in the town now. There was just a slight chance that the mother might be. Kent said that it wasn’t worth stopping for, but Deborah said, Why not, wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? And an inquiry at the Post Office brought directions.
Kent and Deborah drove out of town through the sand dunes-Deborah doing the driving as she had done for most of this long leisurely trip. They had visited Kent’s daughter Noelle, who was living in Toronto, and his two sons by his second wife, Pat-one of them in Montreal and the other in Maryland. They had stayed with some old friends of Kent’s and Pat’s who now lived in a gated community in Arizona, and with Deborah’s parents-who were around Kent’s age-in Santa Barbara. Now they were headed up the West Coast, home to Vancouver, but taking it easy every day, so as not to tire Kent out.
The dunes were covered with grass. They looked like ordinary hills, except where a naked sandy shoulder was revealed, to make the landscape look playful. A child’s construction, swollen out of scale.
The road ended at the house they’d been told to look for. It couldn’t be mistaken. There was the sign-pacific school of dance. And Sonje’s name, and a for sale sign underneath. There was an old woman using shears on one of the bushes in the garden.
So Cottar’s mother was still alive. But Kent remembered now that Cottar’s mother was blind. That was why somebody had to go and live with her, after Cottar’s father died.
What was she doing hacking away with those shears if she was blind?
He had made the usual mistake, of not realizing how many years-decades-had gone by. And how truly ancient the mother would have to be by now. How old Sonje would be, how old he was himself. For it was Sonje, and at first she did not know him either. She bent over to stick the shears into the ground, she wiped her hands on her jeans. He felt the stiffness of her movements in his own joints. Her hair was white and skimpy, blowing in the light ocean breeze that had found its way in here among the dunes. Some firm covering of flesh had gone from her bones. She had always been rather flat chested but not so thin in the waist. A broad-backed, broad-faced, Nordic sort of girl. Though her name didn’t come from that ancestry-he remembered a story of her being named Sonje because her mother loved Sonja Henie’s movies. She changed the spelling herself and scorned her mother’s frivolity. They all scorned their parents then, for something.