Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1942)

Half a Marriage Continued from page 15 [ know they referred to us as the ideally happy couple. And we were. I used to wake up in the morning ready to sing. I'd get up and start breakfast, and between the clean pretty little kitchen with the yellow curtains, and the exciting game of getting Eric out of bed, it was the happiest time of the day. We played the game every morning. He'd lie in bed and shout at me: "I'm up. I'm shaved. I'm half dressed. I'm coming downstairs." Then he'd thump a shoe against the floor and I'd go up and find him still in bed. "Need a reward or a severe punishment," he'd grunt. I'd kiss him, his face still warm from sleep, his eyes closed. And every night he came to me like that — eager and alive, his arms empty, waiting to hold me. It was perfect. For six months. Then it began to cool. I can't explain it. I don't know how or why. But it did. At first it was very slight. Eric no longer clowned for me, and he took to walking alone in the evenings. Not every night, but once or twice a week. At first I didn't like it, then, strangely, it didn't bother me. I just didn't care. Then he began to stay in town more frequently. Then he didn't kiss me when he left for the office. I didn't care, and neither, apparently, did he. rp HIS was it, I thought. This is ■■■ what I knew would happen. I had set my feet on the treadmill. An old friend of mine ran the stationery shop in the village. Her name had been Elsie King and we had gone through grade school together. Poor Elsie had run away when she was very young and married a ne'er-do-well named Jim Townsend, who had become the town drunkard. Elsie had borrowed the money to start her little store, and she had succeeded in making something of it, despite Jim's constant pleas for money. Almost every time I went to the village I stopped in for a chat with Elsie. She began to notice the difference in me. "You're eyes aren't as bright and quick as they used to be," she said. "Is the bloom wearing off? Has romance vanished?" For a while I pretended nothing had changed, but finally I broke down and confessed to Elsie that something had gone wrong. She nodded. "Men! They're fine for a while. Then they begin to get the idea that you're there for the purpose of catering to them. Then they're only good for sitting around and pampering themselves." She paused. "But Eric wouldn't — " I broke in. "Oh no, I don't say he'd stop work like my Jim, but he can develop the same attitude without going to that extreme." "Why don't you divorce Jim?" I said impulsively. "Everyone knows you've got reason enough." Elsie looked at me strangely. "I don't know, Maggie. I really don't know. I've thought of it time and again, but I never got to the point of doing anything about it." On the way home I made up my mind. I wouldn't allow pity or softness to keep me and Eric together SEPTEMBER, 1942 after we no longer belonged together. If our marriage was dying slowly, it would be better to kill it at once, cleanly and sharply. One night he came home with that hard look around his eyes that meant the day had been difficult. "Dinner ready?" he said quickly. "Not yet." "Maybe we should get a cook." "What for? I like to do the cooking myself." "Well — maybe the work is too hard for you." "This little house?" I said. "I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for the house work." "What did you do before we were married?" "That's different." We were sparring. There was no warmth in our talk — no intimacy. Each of us was looking for an opening to sting the other, like two old women or like boxers in a ring. The question of a cook was only an excuse — anything would have done as the basis for a quarrel. "Why is it different?" he demanded. "You never had to do housework at home." His nagging insistence made me angry. I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. "Do we have to talk about it before dinner?" "Yes, we do." His voice was very hard. "I should think you'd like to have someone to help you." "Well, I don't," I said. I preferred to think there was an implied criticism in Eric's suggestion. I wouldn't let myself think that he had become aware of something missing between us, and was trying to find the cause and remedy it. I turned quickly back into the kitchen, but the sudden movement of my body sent the room spinning about me. There was no strength in my knees. I put out a hand to the wall to steady myself, but I could feel myself falling — The next thing I knew I was in bed with my feet propped up on a pillow, and Eric was holding a bottle of smelling salts under my nose. "The doctor's coming," he said excitedly. "Just lie still and rest." But I did not have to wait for the doctor's diagnosis. I knew, already, why I had fainted. I was going to have a child. When he heard the news Eric grew white, then red, and finally he swore under his breath. "And we were almost quarreling!" he said. "Almost?" I said. "We were!" He swung around. "All right — we were quarreling. But let's not do it again, darling." All the sharpness had gone out of me. I'd been upset by the miraculous change taking place within my body, I thought. It had been a form of hysteria. I smiled. "We won't." FN the next weeks I was content to ■*■ rest and be waited upon. I let Eric engage the maid he had suggested before, and I let him do his share of waiting on me too — never thinking, in my sublime content, that I was being selfish. Once I wanted a special color of wool to finish a sweater I was knitting, and he went to eight stores before he found the right kind. IT'S a new and happy experience when you begin using Tampax for monthly sanitary protection . . .The whole process becomes simple, because Tampax is worn internally and calls for no complicated harness of belts, pins and pads. The insertion is simple. Disposal is simple. And so is the act of changing. 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