Free Three Women at the Water's Edge by Nancy Thayer Page A

black-and-white children’s films on Saturday afternoons. But Dale had had a marvelously busy life as a child: There was Brownies, and then Girl Scouts; and Sunday school, and then Methodist Youth Fellowship; and band when she was smaller—she had played the flute for a while, but not all that well—and cheerleading and French Club and Student Council and high school plays when she was older.
    And their house—their wonderful, wonderful house. It was only a block back from the main square. It was enormous, post-Victorian, brick, with wooden porches and stained-glass windows and a large flat yard. Her mother grew vegetables in the backyard and flowers in the front. Dale and Daisy roller-skated to school together. Each of the girls had separate rooms—Daisy’s of course had been yellow and white, with daisies on the wallpaper; Dale’s had been pink and white, with roses. Dale could close her eyes and see the sun slanting in her window on a summer morning, striking the white bookcase where her books and figurines and stuffed animals sat, turning the white into an indescribable color; it was not a color, it was a light, a brilliance, at once calm and motionless and yet somehow vividly alive. And the kitchen, which smelled of hot chocolate or cherry pie or her mother’s homemade grape jam, and her father’s study, the forbidden room, where he kept his accounts and sometimes had private talks with distraught patients, and her parents’ bedroom, huge and mysterious, with her mother’s books piled everywhere, and the bathroom, with its white octagonal tiles.
    On Sunday afternoons, every Sunday afternoon of her life, it seemed, Dale’s father would walk with her and Daisy across the street and around the town square to the drugstore. In good weather they made the most of the walk, going around several blocks to look at the flowers in bloom in the spring or the colors of the maples in the fall; in the winter they hurried, bundled against the wind, eager for the refuge of the overheated store. Inside, Dr. Wallace would treat his daughters to cocoa or lemonade, and he would have a cup of Ovaltine, and they would all sit chatting with Mr. Pendergast, the druggist, and with whoever else came in. And then Dr. Wallace would buy his daughters a treat—paper dolls in the early years, and then comic books or
Mad
magazine in their early teens, and finally
Seventeen
as they grew older. That was his weekly treat for them. He liked to give them something pleasant to do on Sunday evenings when he and his wife went to the church socials or to dinner with friends. Every Sunday afternoon of their young lives, Dale and Daisy had been treated to this pleasure, the king taking his daughters for a stroll. They would still be wearing their best dresses, which they had worn to church. They would have eaten a large Sunday dinner after church, then helped their mother clean up the kitchen. Then they would go for the walk with their father, while their mother lay stretched out on her bed, reading, sucking white peppermint Life Savers from a blue wrapper. This was the day when Dale and Daisy were complimented; always some old lady who hadn’t seen them for a while would declare over how tall and pretty they had grown; or they would run into the Catholic priest, who would praise Dale for winning the local essay contest; or someone, someone they vaguely knew, but who knew—and who worshipped, this was the important point, who
worshipped
—their father, would say hello, tell them what nice dresses they were wearing, tell them what fine girls they were getting to be. Dr. Wallace would stand smiling casually at them, as if their achievements and all the praise were totally deserved, and had nothing to do with him.
    Dale hadn’t wanted to leave. She had wanted to go to the state university that was only a thirty-minute drive away. But her mother had been ferocious in her insistence that Dale go back East to college. “You’ve got to get out of