The Runaway Wife

Harriet Renaud

When the lighted commands to the passengers went dead, the tall woman in the seat next to Delia stretched and said, "Well, I made this with zip minutes to spare. Thought I'd never make it out of that drat meeting. I do this two, three times a week, and it's almost always a toss-up between is it going to be cardiac arrest before or after I make it to the 495. I miss this, I miss my ride into town—big all around mess."

She pointed to the name-tag still pinned to her lapel like an experienced participant arriving at a conference. "Dale," she said. "Richards."

"Delia. Delia—Lapham."

"Howdy," Dale said. She kicked off light blue pumps that were an exact match to her double-knit pant suit, and took blue scuffs out of a nylon attaché case. Almost-white curls, like plastic-coated wires, lay all over her head; when she bent over, none of them moved. "If my feet swell now, serves me right. I couldn't wear those shoes another minute, is all."

"The ones you have on now look fine," Delia said.

Dale turned and smiled at her. "Delia, huh? Pretty name, you know? Different."

"Ah well. Where I was born—not an awfully big city—there are a lot of us—Delias, I mean. There were six in my first grade room. Then they thinned out, and now that we're grown, they seem to be coming back, right into the PTA."

"Six," Dale said. "No kidding."

"The way that happened was, when our mothers got pregnant, a girl in town got murdered, and we all got named after her. That wasn't what anybody meant to do—to name their baby after a dead girl they didn't even know—not her or her family either—but her name was in the air so much—in the papers so much—my mother said. You see, I asked her because there were so many of us."

Three flight attendants, older than expected, two women and a man, imitating expressions of confidence and amiability, moved through the aisles pushing balky carts that were too perfect a fit. If they swerved from a straight-ahead course, there were small collisions—with the side of a seat, an elbow or knee of a sprawling sleeper, a magazine recklessly slanting out of a seat-cover pocket—something always seemed in the way.

The attendants looked away from passengers trapped by the carts, unable to squeeze by to their seats. "No," they said to the others, "no, I'm afraid I don't have that. I surely wish I did." They poured drinks unsteadily into translucent cups made of a plastic that tended to merge with some of the flavors and change them.

Dale leaned over and patted Delia's shoulder. The touch had a different tone than the over-confiding animation in her voice. Her large eyes were startlingly pale, with almost no visible lashes. Delia adjusted her response to the pale blue outfit. "Never mind," she thought. "She is mostly a kind lady who is very worried about something."

"The point was," Delia said, "at least when I got older and got to thinking about it—and I went to a newspaper morgue and looked up the whole story—the point was she was a really nice girl from a nice family—they ran some parts of her diary to show how nice she was in private—and still there was no telling, no telling whatsoever, what could happen."

"No," Dale said. "You never can tell."

"She was fifteen years old, and she had dark curly hair. She was a good student, and she took flute lessons and practiced, and sang in a choir. It seemed as though everyone knew where she was, on schedule, and would know, all the rest of her life. She lived in a big house in the hills with her mother and father and four brothers and sisters, and she wasn't the youngest or oldest, or even right in the middle. About the only thing she seemed to do that wasn't all laid out and accounted for ahead of time was stop at an ice cream place with friends after school.

"And then one day she made a mistake. She took a lift home, after the ice cream place, with a boy in a truck. He wasn't just any boy, either. She'd seen him quite a few times because he delivered the groceries to her house at least once a week. He stopped the truck alongside her when she was walking home, carrying her books, and said he was on his way there—to her house. Then she disappeared, and after a long time they arrested that boy, a really clean-cut looking boy. In his pictures in the paper it looks as though he had light hair, short light hair. He was working his way through a community college in a marketing program, or maybe bookkeeping…

"Everybody believed the police only arrested him temporarily, just so the public would know they were working on the case. Just until they found the real kidnapper. There were statements in the paper every day from her family and other people saying how much they missed her, and how glad they would be to have her back. There were rewards posted all over. Everybody offered to pay ransom—any amount. There were flyers folded into people's newspapers.

"My mother said she was watching the boy on TV when they were transferring him to jail. He was handcuffed and looking sweet and too confused even to try to hide his face from the camera, and she was thinking about sending him a note—of course she never would have—to say she trusted him, when she started having labor pains. By the time I was born and she thought to catch up on the news, the boy had taken the police to the spot where he had buried her, Delia, in the mountains."

Dale sipped vodka with a splash of tomato juice and Delia held club soda over ice.

"It's a pretty name, anyhow—Delia," Dale said.

"Thank you," Delia said. She was surprised at herself for having gone through the whole story again. Her husband told her that she talked too much, especially to strangers, and she had given up telling people about the murder anyhow. It got to seem older and older information, a creaky, olden-time crime in a simple mode, too straightforward to attract contemporary attention. Then too, she'd lost the feel for being able to judge when people were interested in what she was saying.

One way or another, even though she didn't talk or think about it anymore, the story had entered into who she was. Details would surface suddenly and interrupt her in the middle of a thought or activity so that what had started out one way changed into something else. There was her notebook he'd buried in the crawl space of a shabby but nevertheless neat one-bedroom house just this side of the wholesale meat market down on the flats; there was her bra in a desk drawer in his parents' basement. When she woke up that morning, it could have been yesterday morning—everything was so exactly the same—and after that she only let her attention wander that one time. She had taken a bearing from the wrong landmark, and only read one signal wrong, and the consequence was that she lost any chance to make a correction of any kind. Forever.

A man came down the aisle, carrying an air of flurry with him. He walked with his head thrust forward, arms swinging behind him a little, palms turned out as though he were pushing the air out of his way. He stopped and spoke to his seatmate. "Forty-six minutes," he said, looking down at her as though he had communicated a particularly grave piece of news which she deserved, and had only brought on herself.

Dale got two vodkas laced with a little juice "for color," and gave one to Delia. "One thing we have just got to be is cheerful," she said.

"How nice of you," Delia said. "Thanks very much. I have problems with alcohol sometimes—well, most of the time now—it just makes me sleepy. Even white wine. It used to make me talk too much; now when I talk too much, I think it's probably—at least partly—because of loneliness. You see, my husband has times when he doesn't talk—I mean at all. Sometimes it goes on for—a long time. It's a strain for me, but it's his nature; he can't help it."

"Sure he can," Dale said. She sighed, took off her slippers, massaged her toes, and looked up at Delia from her bent-over position. "Hey, you don't buy that loss-leader about how there's two sides to every story, do you?"

It had been much more comforting to fly when you started out watching the propeller, Delia thought. When you were growing up, you saw propellers do their dramatic, visible part in documentaries and war movies, so you naturally were confident they would do their part for you, too. They would whirr into invisibility and make it possible for the wings to use the wind so that the plane could soar to where you were safely cushioned in the clouds. Writing postcards on your way home from school, you described the formations as intricately or elaborately textured, sometimes as charmingly structured.

Now none of the mechanics were available to view, and she also knew she was hurtling four and a half miles above depths of unimaginable emptiness below which a dark and open ocean ceaselessly hauled itself, rising and falling. When the plane climbed, puffs of smoke seemed to ricochet fretfully off its wings, and then the plane flew high above them, and you were in boundless, formidable space, bereft of information or recourse. A door could dangle from a hinge, a fire could smolder in a restroom, an engine could be readying to explode before you had begun to notice any change. It wasn't true that something about to erupt transmits certain signals beforehand.

"Listen here," Dale said, "let me tell you something." She rattled the ice in the plastic cup. "I'm one of those runaways."

Delia smiled and shook her head to indicate she wasn't sure she understood.

Dale nodded. "Yup. What I did was, I ran away from home two years ago. Picked up one morning and departed. Even left a note on the kitchen table. And now I don't own a blessed single thing because the state I ran from, it doesn't have one of those community property divvy-up laws. So after thirty years of marriage, I don't have any of the goodies." She reached over and took Delia's untouched drink. "Fifty-five, working, and minus goodies. Seems as though you should at least get a gold star—solid gold, don't you know—just for putting in the time. Not to mention all that good behavior."

"You just—left?" Delia said. She looked out the window, where there was nothing to see. "You're a really brave lady."

"Well, brave," Dale said. She traced a few curls on her forehead with a forefinger. "It wasn't a whole entire complete new idea, you know. Many a time, over the years, the thought did pass through my mind, I do confess. Then I'd visit the post for something or other—maybe to have lunch with a friend—we're Army—and I'd pick her up at her office, and all the women working there, you know what they were doing? Laughing. You could hear it coming out from the typing pool and coming out from the offices—all that laughing.

"Those women—they were coordinating and typing the reports and the budgets and the what-alls, and fixing them up where they didn't make all that much sense. They were shifting and switching schedules so their boss could play golf, or anyhow goof off, or take vacation time out of turn. They were steering them to where they had to be, when. They were whispering to them before meetings so they'd know what was going on, and then writing them those little old memos so they'd know what had gone on."

Dale stretcher her legs and rotated her ankles. Her feet and ankles showed angry red and purple through her sheer hose. Delia thought it probably looked worse than what it was. Just some poor circulation. Nothing serious, she thought.

"And you know why they were laughing?" Delia said. "They're still doing it, don't you know, all over. It's the way you tell the guys: Not to worry, you don't have to take me seriously. We're in this together, but I'm not about to let on. We've got a secret, but it's so secret we're even hiding it from each other. You can count on me to hold up your end, and you can count on me not to expect you to take me seriously. Hear me laughing? Hear how easy?

"I worked on a post a wee bit, in ordinance it was, before I married the lieutenant, he was then. I tell you, all it took was one of those little visits to remind me, and I'd be saying me my little prayer: Oh Zeus, repress me so I won't have to learn to type sixty-five words a minute."

They laughed together and Dale wound a tissue around a finger and dabbed under her bangs and patted around her eyes. "Ah me," she said, "I do believe I have had a sufficiency of hydration for this one little trip."

Delia looked at Dale's carefully blushed face and shrewd pouched eyes, and the anxiety that regularly foamed up into her throat, without warning, began to subside. It seemed to her that Dale was very probably a person who was in absolute possession of certain facts. She was drawn to her as much as she had been to her husband when she had mistaken his remoteness for an impermanent barrier—something like the provisional curtain of a voting booth—behind which he was working on a whole spectrum of universal problems, the answers to which he would impart to her as soon a all his results were in.

When it became clear that she had, after all, been careless of herself, she intensified her attempts to tease out any insinuations of experience, fragments of her own as well as others', consoling herself that safe moves could be made from even small pieces of well-tried territory. She only needed enough firm ground from which to take true bearings. Without that, she couldn't foresee how there would ever be an end to the nagging at her heart, the sense that she might be a very short way, maybe a single step away, from a vast calamity.

She leaned toward Dale as though she were a source of heat. "Are you good at it now—the sixty-five words a minute?"

Dale massaged the back of her neck and rotated her shoulders. "Oh, lordy no. By the time I ran away, all the ads were asking for seventy words per, minimum. Hopeless. I took two computer courses and got this job, and now I never use any of that stuff I paid all that good money to learn; more-or-less learn. What I am is the company snitch. I go to branch offices, make talky-talk, laugh a lot, sit in on meetings, and come back and report. That's how come I'm on this 495 so much."

In a streak of light that shot up from a wing, Delia saw the small pits and fine lines in Dale's weary face, as though the skin underneath the base and makeup had first been lightly and skillfully distressed. If she loses ten pounds, they'll start to show more, she thought suddenly, as if she ought to protect her.

"But going off and making a whole different life," Delia said. "That was really brave." Fearless, she thought, to acquire a conviction that nothing could slacken, and act.

"Well, brave," Dale said. "Thing was, my husband retired, and what with him being home, not knowing how to stop being the Colonel, and what with me getting turned into his troops, full time, there was a lot of stress going there.

"Then, after cancer operation number two, I started paying a whole lot of attention to was I having a lot of stress, because it's supposed to contribute, and now I don't have the stress—anyhow not that killer type. Mostly now it's can I keep laughing and keep this job and make the 495. No recurrences, no more migraines even, and growing hair. It's coming back right under this wig—curly. Of course, there's no telling…"

Delia clasped her hands in her lap and laced the fingers tightly, as though they had independently expressed an urge that needed to be checked. "So you ran away to save your life," she said.

"Sure. Ran away to save my life. And when it's something you plain have got to do, it's not that much a case of brave, don't you know. The second time, in the hospital, that's what decided me. Didn't even give a thought to giving up the goodies."

"There used to be a lot of stories in the magazines about people who made their really big life decisions on a train," Delia said. "You know—like an architect on his way to Dallas to meet a client deciding to become a minister, or a second-grade school teacher on her way home from Thanksgiving in Baton Rouge deciding to become an opera singer. I know a woman once who decided, on a train to New Mexico, that although she'd never met Gertrude Stein or Alice B. Toklas, she was going to Paris and move in with them… She did, too, but it didn't last long.

"Now lately, I've been hearing about people making those kinds of decisions in the hospital. The last one, before you, was a psychiatrist who'd had a burst appendix. The second day in the hospital, he decided to leave his wife and five children. I guess you might say trains and hospitals are change places."

"Change places, huh? Now there's a thought," Dale said, and smiled at her.

Delia thought that Dale's tired, knowing eyes, with their broad, pale, flickering pupils, looked as though they had never lost sight of anything they had ever seen. It seemed to her that if people would show what had happened to them, not only what they had arrived at, it would turn the world upside down.

"All that long pretty hair you got there," Dale said. "My daughter just got around to cutting hers—short, I mean. You ever notice how sometimes people cut their hair, they look younger, and sometimes it makes them look older? Made my daughter look a lot older—real pretty anyhow—but older. She's twenty-five now; came out here about a year ago and got a job. Food nutrition is what she's in.

"Anyhow, one day she was walking to her car in the parking lot after work, and a blond with a beard followed her. The way she tells it, she didn't use her mace on the spot because he let her know right away that he lived and worked in an aviary. Before I could open my mouth she said, 'Don't waste your breath saying that's for the birds, Mom,' which I didn't, although I was something terrible tempted. I mean, in a parking lot, for gol almighty sake. Although all they did then was go out to dinner.

"She said one thing decided her, his beard had a really cute trim. I think she tacked on that last part just for me, because it sounds so aggravating.

"They were in the truck, and when he started going the wrong way, through the tunnel, he told her, sure we're going to your house, this is just a long way round. Don't get so excited, pipe down… You'd better pipe down…" Delia looked down at her clenched hands and then at Dale, and shook her head.

Dale laughed. "It's okay. She turned out lucky. She said she had this feeling, and it turned out to be right on. He's one of those types—serious and quiet inside, noisy and funning on the outside. But you can't tell without knowing more than the hand that's showing—or the beard either—for that matter."

"No, you can't tell," Delia said. "She was lucky."

"Now the birdman still works in the aviary, him being an ornithologist, but he lives with her. Adrienne and Andrew. They don't either of them like it Addy and Andy, I can't blame them. They're making out fine, just the two of them, although I must say, they asked me to stay. I'll take the compliment, I told them, and keep it packed with my other valuables. Still—what's the mace for, if not for in the parking lot?"

Could you train for it, Delia thought, the trick of having the feelings that turn out to be lucky? She had been found by someone with a composed and thoughtful face into which she had read confidence and hopefulness, and it turned out to be the face of someone watchful and angry. The clean-cut boy, who died by legal injection, closely observed, was courteous and punctual, with innocuous short fair hair. It was the shampoo girl at a local beauty salon, his wife, who kept it so well trimmed, and lightened it once in awhile when neither of them had anything else to do.

An announcement blared in the cabin, sounding like the garbled voice of an oracle.

Dale rotated her shoulders, closed her eyes, and stretched her legs.

Delia watched the male flight attendant patrol the aisle, evidently concentrated on searching for something so stubbornly elusive that it was impossible to catch his eye. In twenty years, she thought, he could be a purser on a ship, a pink-faced boy with improved manners, a perfect memory for names, and the innocent wary eyes of a late adolescent. If making his true feeling invisible was a condition of his employment, it was an accomplishment that could, in time, become a condition of his life—his shield against a world attempting to force adulthood upon him.

Delia was aware of waiting for her children to get older because there was still the chance that when their extravagant reserves of covertness were finally depleted, she would be able to talk with them. She knew they could, of course, evade this; they could exclude her forever from their emotional life and defend themselves from acknowledging hers as, refusal by refusal of the assumptions of maturity, they gradually became middle-aged children.

Dale sat up and did a few bends from the waist in her seat. "Some of these man-mades, they're plain disgusting, did you know that? They pick up stains from the environment, and different environments, different stains. It's gotten so you need to check out your field of operation before you buy your clothes. Ever notice how much there is to complain about, once you set your mind to it?"

Delia laughed out loud. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I have."

"Reminds me," Dale said, "I was in a kind of a club once where what we had in common, the five of us, was we were Army married to CC's—Constant Complainers, don't you know. Bored—you wouldn't believe. So being spouses, Standard Issue, we became Volunteers. Tinkered around three times a week with the enlisted and dependents, and then mostly we bungled. What we did was, we recommended 'compassionate leave' for everybody. We called ourselves 'The Do No-Gooders,' but aside from that, we were nothing but square. Five cubed couples."

Delia opened her carry-on bag and began, unaccountable, to reorganize it, as though she were following an order to discover something extremely important that she had surely neglected to pack. "I've been reading that squaredom is coming back," she said.

"That's what Orin says. Orin—that's my former. He says it's gone out of style, the runaway wife bit. Makes me mad all over again—him cutting down my leaving to something stylish."

Delia turned, her face full of surprise, and Dale gave her a quick flare of a smile. "Oh, we've been in touch. People live together thirty years, they get to be relatives, don't you know. It's easy to divorce a spouse compared to… Well, how do you divorce a relative, anyhow? He hates it out here, but he's coming to visit in October—going to stay with Adrienne and Andrew, he says. Well, we'll have to see, the conditions and all. I didn't have it in mind to get his attention when I left, but maybe that's what I got."

Delia closed her case with the sense that whatever she'd been looking for and couldn't find represented some permanent loss around which she would be called upon to disassemble and rearrange incalculable amounts of herself. The familiar thickening filled her throat and her heart thudded. The wife who shampooed and lightened the boy's hair was having an affair with her boss, the stylist. After work, they went into the back of the shop. Once, when the boy came to pick up his wife, the door was locked. It was all his fault for not going to get the children first, like always, she said. The children were in a daycare center. There were two of them—boys.

To Delia, the climate of departure seems to be gathering in the plane, like a weather front. Short lines are forming in the restroom areas, women holding makeup kits, and there is the sense of a whole planeful turned, nervous and expectant, toward an exit.

"Well, drat," Dale says. She stands, holding her pale blue pumps. "I do believe these have shrunk on me again."

Back from reapplying blush, which somehow makes her look a little sleepy, Dale says, in her socially practiced way, "I surely enjoyed talking with you, Delia. And this trip—are you coming here for a happy reason?"

Delia thinks about Dale's remarkable smile. It changed her face from one kind of face to another kind, and when she looked into the light, her large round lashless eyes, squinting, formed glittering horizontal diamonds, promising treasures of wisdom.

"Listen," Delia says, sliding past Dale's question, having had to practice certain skills herself, "are you going to be all right? I mean, you're going to keep taking care of yourself, aren't you? Doing what's best for you?"

Dale reaches over and puts her hand on Delia's knee, sealing the subject, Delia thinks. "Maybe next to the best," Dale says. "I'll have to take my chances on will I be all right. Truth is, I can't figure where I'm going; I'm not through figuring where I've been. Sometimes, you look back, you notice some things stick up so high, they could give you a direction, or anyhow, an idea? One thing I miss, don't you know, is being a couple."

The aisles begin to fill with people who had risen from their seats prematurely, and now stand with their unwieldy bags in one another's way. A vague air of irritability hovers over the cabin, tinging everyone, Delia thinks, taking her deep breaths.

A flight attendant sits on a jumpseat facing them, listening stonily to a telephone without making and response. The other attendants stand sternly in the exits, not required now to acknowledge anyone's presence, waiting for a signal. Later, when the passengers stumble past them into the dusk, too weary or preoccupied to hear, they will keep repeating, "Have a good day," an insult until it gradually loses sense altogether and the sound is swallowed by the passengers' paraphernalia.

Here and there, a large young man, sockless and sandaled, with a towering backpack, looms over a businessman with a briefcase and a folded newspaper under his arm.

Children tranced with boredom kick the backs of seats.

Teenaged girls in pants that fit like scales and loose Indian cotton tops in violent colors that move as though a perpetual breeze had been woven into them, play with improvised carry-ons and pat tufted hairdos firmed with foam.

Women absently finger their bracelets and scarves, detached and still, as though they are hoarding themselves until whatever is waiting to draw on them compels them to emerge.

The restless middle-aged man who had reported on the time to a companion kicks his bag from foot to foot and appears stalled beside a woman who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with him. They face front, impassive and mute, as though they had been assigned their connection by a central agency solely on the basis of height and weight.

A soundlessness has descended so that the whole scene, waiting to be dismissed, is like a pantomime behind glass, viewed from a distance.

Standing next to Dale at the end of a line, a small thrill of fear is released in Delia at the way Dale's jacket hangs loosely, showing her shoulder blades; at the unconvincing wig, a little curly monument to the race she is running, chased by death.

Outside, in the somber light, a ground crew grapples with the violent disposition of a wind that billows out their jackets and seizes their hair, making them look frenzied. Some of them run through the airport litter of arrivals and departures with their hands over their ears, as though they are protecting themselves from a deafening racket, although nothing can be heard inside the plane.

"That girl," Dale says suddenly. "The one that got murdered? There wasn't anything to warn her. It was an accident."

"Yes," Delia says. "I know."

But knowing, Delia has come to understand, is exactly what doesn't matter because it is in the nature of certain kinds of information that it is available only in particles, notable for their tendency to veer. As a consequence, you can never count on being able to summon the critical piece which, moved into place in time, would keep something from slipping past you.

Delia thinks of something to say to Dale, but in front of them a girl has hit on the expedient of tying up a burst bundle with her garter belt, and Delia and Dale smile at this and at one another, a little absently, a circumscribed end-of-trip smile.

"Listen," Delia would like to say, "matters will not follow from any progression of events you think you've got your eye on"—but the line is picking up speed, the girl dragging her rolled-up possessions by the plastic fastener at the end of a length of elastic, and Dale is caught up in movement, holding her shoes in the air with the toes pointing straight ahead.

What she would like to add, although it is clearly too late, is, "Remember that what happens is churned out by arrangements so remote from us, so complex and obscure, that we really don't have any choice about what to think about it. We might as well call it all—everything—accident or luck," she would say to Dale, who already believes that, and had recently said it to her.

When they leave the plane, Dale waves at Delia with her hand with the shoes, and moves off fairly swiftly, loping because of her long legs and shuffling because of the insecure scuffs. Her pale blue pantsuit and white plastic head are gradually enfolded in the dwindling twilight, and Delia watches her, the runaway wife, become more and more of a dying echo, until she is gone altogether.

Delia's husband is waiting for her well behind the gate, surprising her as always, when she first sees him in an unaccustomed place, with an odd look of being a displaced person, someone unattended to, rumpled and sunken. He waves briefly, not extending his arm fully, and shakes his head with a small rueful smile, forgiving her once again for having done badly in a course she didn't know she had signed up for.

She is flooded with the fear and relief and inexplicable longing that she had for some time thought was a complex of emotions related to love, but which now frequently send a blood-ride of shame and regret mounting in her head. She waves back, and he revokes his arm. As she walks toward him, toward the barrier, he withdraws; he turns away his clenched face, and then he leading, she following, they go to the parking lot. When they started going the wrong way…he told her, don't get so excited…Sure we're going to your house. This is just the long way round. Pipe down…You'd better pipe down…

THE END