Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Finest Wife

When Rose was sixteen years old and five months pregnant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body. It was as though life was gestating in her thighs and ass and breasts, not in her belly. It might have seemed that she was carrying all the soft weights of motherhood spread evenly and perfectly across her whole frame. Those parts of herself that she could not quite pack into the blue bathing suit spilled over it exactly enough to emotionally disturb several of the judges and spectators. She was an uncontested champion beauty.

Rose’s father, too, saw the pin-up shape that his daughter had taken, and, five months too late, he started worrying about the maintenance of her graces. Soon after the pageant, her condition became obvious. Her father sent her to a facility in Oklahoma, where she stayed until she experienced four days of labor and the delivery of a stillborn son. Rose could not actually have any more children after that, but the lovely figure was hers to keep, and she ended up eventually married, once again on the basis of a fine walk in a bathing suit.

But she didn’t meet her husband until the war was over. In the meantime, she stayed in Oklahoma. She had developed a bit of a taste for certain types of tall, smiling local men in dark hats. Also, she had developed a taste for certain types of churchgoing men and also for left-handed men, and for servicemen, fishermen, postmen, assemblymen, firemen, highwaymen, elevator repairmen, and the Mexican busboys at the restaurant where she worked (who reverently called her La Rubia—the Blond—as if she were a notorious bandit or a cardsharp).

She married her husband because she loved him best. He was kind to waitresses and dogs, and was not in any way curious about her famous tastes. He was a big man himself, with a rump like the rump of a huge animal—muscled and hairy. He dialed telephones with pencil stubs because his fingers didn’t fit the rotary holes. He smoked cigarettes that looked like shreds of toothpicks against the size of his mouth. He couldn’t fall asleep without feeling Rose’s bottom pressed up warm against his belly. He held her as if she were a puppy. In the years after they got a television, they would watch evening game shows together on the couch, and he would genuinely applaud the contestants who had won cars and boats. He was happy for them. He would clap for them with his big arms stretched out stiffly, the way a trained seal claps.

They moved to Minnesota, eventually. Rose’s husband bought a musky flock of sheep and a small, tight house. She was married to him for forty-three years, and then he died of a heart attack. He was quite a bit older than she was, and he had lived a long time. Rose thought that he had passed the kind of life after which you should say, “Yes! That was a good one!” Her mourning was appreciative and fond.

When he was gone, the sheep became too much work, and she sold them off, a few at a time. And when the sheep were all gone—spread across several states as pets, yarn, dog food, and mint-jellied chops—Rose became the driver of the local kindergarten school bus. She was damn near seventy years old.

by Elizabeth Gilbert, The Rumpus |  Read more: