Three Women at the Water's Edge Read Online Free

felt that they were on their way somewhere, and would not have enjoyed a pause. Daisy found a good secretarial position, and on weekends learned how to make cassoulet, beef Wellington, crepes, Doboschtorte, strong highballs, and champagne punch; they had many successful parties that were a completely different sort of enterprise than the beer-and-wine parties at the university. Paul was looked upon with great favor by his company, and he should have been, because he worked so very hard, into the nights, on the weekends, on holidays. He loved it. They saved a lot of money. Paul wanted to be wealthy and stable; Daisy wanted whatever Paul wanted. Many nights during those first two years they had been simply too tired to make love, but when they did it was with their usual greedy and generous passion. And so of course, after a while, in spite of calendars and devices, Daisy got pregnant.
    She had thought that was a natural, inevitable part of their fate. Paul had disagreed. Their first real fights began.
    It was possible that their marriage had begun to end then, with Danny the size of a freckle inside Daisy, and Daisy sitting on their living-room sofa wearing lavender eye shadow and a see-through blouse, because she was making it an occasion to tell Paul, and Paul doing something Daisy had before seen only as a word in a book: blenching. He shrank away, he went white, he looked sick, he looked scared. Daisy’s beef Stroganoff sat unstirred in the kitchen, unnoticed, growing dry and cold.
    “I’m not ready for children yet,” Paul had said. “I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t want the expense.”
    Daisy had argued that if she had the baby now (while she was young and healthy), she could go back to work seriously, permanently, in only five years, when the child was in school, but if they put it off, it would interrupt whatever job or career she had for herself, so it would be more economical in the long run to have the baby now and get it over with. And, she argued, stressing this point, if they had a baby, Paul’s employers would feel that he was a more settled and respectable person, a family man, with real responsibilities; they would probably give him a raise, they would feel they could trust him. Being a father would make him look stable, solid. Besides, Daisy added, a baby would not cost all that much, would not change their lives all that much. She could probably even continue working part time. Daisy was secretly surprised at her ingenuity at coming up with so many reasons for protecting what was still only a gathering of molecules.
    After Danny was born, she could not remember how Paul had not wanted him; if asked, she would have said in all honesty that Paul had wanted the baby, too, right from the start. And she had been right about Paul’s employers; they were pleased by his fatherhood, they did advance his position, they did give him a raise. In the first two years of Danny’s life, Daisy was so wrapped up with the child that Paul had time and energy to work even harder, and so he was given better positions, more raises, he was a golden boy. When Daisy found out she was pregnant with Jenny—an act she had committed without really consulting Paul, but she felt sure Paul wouldn’t want Danny to be an only child—they had bought a house.
    The house was a large, aging Tudor full of drafts and gracious lines. Its best point was that it was “on the lake,” which Paul thought would impress people, and which Daisy thought would make her eternally happy. Going through the empty, echoing house together with the real estate agent, Daisy had looked past the weathered wooden windowsills out at the expansive sheen of blue lake. It seemed so large, so endless, more like an ocean; Lake Michigan was, after all, 80 miles across and 300 miles long. And the back of the land sloped gently down to a small sandy beach. It would be heaven, Daisy thought, for the children.
    They could not really afford the house. It