Dear Aunt Vinnie,
We're here at the beach until early next week, Dan and the children and I. That may perhaps surprise you a little; no doubt you've heard about the troubles we've been having via Evie, who despite being dense about so much has the most uncanny ability to sense marital discord in her midst (maybe because she's experienced so much of it herself!). Well, to her lasting disappointment, I'm sure (she never could stand Dan, as you know), but probably not to yours, we're back together again. For how long I can't say--after all the upheavals of the past few months I'm hesitant to say that the storm, if that's what it was, is past. We're trying it out--living together again, that is--and taking it a day at a time. So far it seems to be working, but I'm not holding my breath.
For the past few days it hasn't been any figurative marital storm I've been worried about, in any case, but rather this monster out in the Atlantic, which fortuitously switched direction at the last moment and headed towards Canada. The couple we were sharing this house with got antsy and left, but we foolishly took a chance--and the happy result is half a week more of blissful solitude. Not that we didn't get on with the couple, an older professor and his Dutch wife: both of them are very charming people. She has a kind of abrupt European peremptoriness that generally annoys me, but her plainspoken bluntness was actually kind of tonic after several weeks of walking on eggshells with Dan, who tends toward the elliptical and the cryptic. Nevertheless I did grow a bit weary of her relentless criticism of my fitness as a mother! She thinks me an awful one, neglectful and too indulgent by turns, all because I let Sid sleep with us one night and accompanied Mary Renfroe to the outdoor shower, which scares her (evidently I was supposed to let her soldier it out alone), and then let the children play with some bones they had found on the beach (possibly poisonous). But I took it all in stride, reminding myself that she's no great shakes in the mother department either, with her drug-addict son.
At any rate, Dan. To tell the truth my feelings towards him at this point are more of pity and disappointment than of anger, though that flares up quite frequently. It's rather sad to see him limp back home, all tongue-tied and deflated and abashed, having come to the realization that he doesn't perhaps have what it takes to make a clean break with me and start a new life with someone else. I feel for him, truly--in some perverse way I would have liked to see him succeed, though it would of course have been devastating to me personally. But I knew this thing with that girl was never going to amount to anything; really I think it was all some sort of grandiose fantasy he had cooked up in his head, spurred on by her obligingness and passivity and endless willingness to please. Who is she? Why, a little shy, feline, petite, cat-faced yankee girl from upstate New York or some such place, one of his students (I know--it all sounds so banal), with a tiny little whirring voice like a wind-up doll's. An art major. There was a period when she was over at the house a good deal, babysitting and helping with the children. Actually I rather liked her--she's witty and very observant, and good with the children, honestly. But also simultaneously morbidly sensitive and harshly critical of others--not such a surprising combination, really. Some of the things she would say to me about Dan's colleagues and fellow graduate students truly took my breath away with their viciousness. Anyway, something about her cloying precocious little-girl unforgivingness and prim rectitude appealed to Dan, who likes to think of himself as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly. And off he went and promptly made a fool of himself, and a fool of me too. That's the thing about marriage--if one person does something dishonorable and foolish, then the other is automatically compromised, dragged down to that same level of stupidity and banality.
Well, I'm not having it; I'm not going to be the "wronged wife." I'm happy he's back--honestly I am--but now that he is I'm not going to listen to his endless apologies and self-flagellating talk, or respond in kind with recriminations and wifely aspersions. The proof, I say, is in the pudding. In some ways my willingness to start over with him seems terribly corrupt and old-world; maybe I should have instantly filed for divorce when he walked out, and slammed the door firmly shut when he started making noises about coming back. But who am I to be so lofty and imperiously virtuous when it comes to marriage--with my family's history?
So he's back. And the children are certainly glad to see him, particularly Mary Renfroe, who I think believes this whole debacle was somehow my doing. Such a daddy's girl, she is. I fear for her, I really do; she's really too observant for her own good, too sensitive and alert to adult emotions and conflicts swirling about just over her head. "Are you still mad at Daddy?" she asked me the other night when we were out at the shower. I don't want her to be morbidly attuned to that kind of thing, like I was--like I had to be, for my own survival--as a girl; I want her to be free and sloppy and self-centered and messy, and live the life of a child, not the life of some wizened, prematurely sagacious miniature adult. But I don't know what to do about it.
Right now I'm sitting in the semi-dark kitchen, whose sole bulb as burned out, doing this index for a friend of mine by the daylight coming in through the open windows. Dan's taken the children out for a long walk so I can finish it: thoughtful of him. But obviously I'm not making much progress, since I put it aside to write to you! But this is much more enjoyable, I assure you. And calming. It's low tide; the big booming surf of earlier this morning has quieted to a limp plashing. Someone has a transistor radio going on in the next house, playing a song I hate, something about love will keep us together. I feel quite sleepy actually. Perhaps I'll sneak in a nap before they come back.
Last night I woke up when the tide was in and the surf was roaring, and I sensed that Dan was too, and we lay very close together, our hands clasped together, not speaking. And do you know I felt blissfully happy. Blissfully. And that seems to be enough, lately.
Let me know when your moving date is so that I can come up and help you. Though my married life is a mess, I'm quite good at bringing some order to domestic chaos. But of course you're far more accomplished at that than I.
Love,
Patricia
P.S. You may not get this until after we get home--I don't know if we'll get down to the village post office again before we leave.
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