Free The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens Page B

fit.”
    Gorgeous drunken Wendy from the cheerleading squad, who was in love with Jimmy Gooch herself, was just saying what they all
     thought, Mary most obsessively—that she would grow fat with the pregnancy and be unable to lose the weight (as had been witnessed
     countless times in everyone’s sphere), and that Gooch would leave her to raise their stinky brat alone.
    Mary had stopped eating dirt sometime after she and Gooch became official. Gooch alone sustained her. But then, when that
     first baby was no larger than a thumbnail, her giant gnawing hunger had returned, and like any compulsion, it began again,
     not at the beginning, but where it had left off. Sneaking from the bed when she knew that fretful Irma and resigned Orin were
     asleep, she would stand in the kitchen munching from foil bags, slurping cold noodles from the leftovers bowl and grinding
     rows of chocolate cookies between her big back teeth.
    “Is The Greek gonna give you guys a crib set?” Kim inquired, to fill the quiet.
    If her fabric had not been woven with lengths of deception and secrecy, Mary might have been able to ask the other girls the
     many questions she had about her body, about the sexual act, about her husband’s libido. Before Gooch, she’d never thought
     to wonder much about male bodies, too intent on the care and feeding of her own. Her only experiences before Gooch had been
     revealing her nipple to Christopher Klik at the bike rack, and the time Jerry, the wrinkled driver from the drugstore, had
     offered to massage her shoulders in the empty staff room. Afraid to appear ungrateful, she’d allowed him to knead her for
     a full ten minutes while bumping his crooked old-man erection against her firm teenage back. She didn’t tell anyone the indecent
     thing the driver had done. She was naive enough to consider that she’d only imagined his intent. She was also, until Gooch,
     in the habit of thinking herself too repulsive to be the object of even warped desire.
    Gooch and Mary’s sexual energy had been powerful, and Gooch’s longing for her wasn’t dampened after they were married. Just
     four months after failing with her first pregnancy, they had discovered that they were expecting again, and Mary’s confidence
     had been diminished by the rapid accumulation of pounds.
    Straddling her husband on the new red vinyl chair, she had concluded that Dr. Ruttle’s counsel was to be ignored. She was
     much too afraid for the second baby (Thomas or Rachel) to satisfy Gooch in their usual way, and thinking of what Wendy had
     said on the eve of her wedding, about the spell she could put Pete under, Mary’d pushed her husband’s wide shoulders back
     against the red vinyl chair he’d brought home that day, and whispered into his ear, “Dr. Ruttle said we can’t do
that
. But we can do something
else
.”
    After, as Gooch was zipping and rising from the red chair, she’d sensed, along with some deep appreciation for what she’d
     just done—particularly as she did
not
pass him a tissue—an undercurrent of suspicion. Reaching for his huge hand so that he could help her from her knees, she
     had felt compelled to whisper, “I’ve never done that before.” He’d arched a brow but not asked more, and Mary had slept that
     night with her hand on her rising womb, reasoning that she must have done what she did very well. She was pleased to have
     gone with her instinct, which was to imagine that his tumescence was edible.

Expressions of Genuine Concern
    A gentle morning rain fell over the landscape. A cold breeze blew in through the broken back window as Mary moved to the telephone
     and dialed her husband’s number. It was the machine again, with the unfamiliar voice, which Mary understood must belong to
     a human receptionist who would pass the message along. “It’s Mary Gooch again. Eight forty-five. If Jimmy Gooch could please
     call his wife at work. Thank you.”
    Scooping peanut butter with her finger, the