The New Yorker Stories

When Cynthia was seventeen she married Ewell W. G. Peterson. The initials stood for William Gordon; his family called him William, her parents called him W.G. (letting him know that they thought his initials were pretentious), and Cynthia called him Pete, which is what his Army buddies called him. Now she had been divorced from Ewell W. G. Peterson for nine years, and what he had been called was a neutral thing to remember about him. She didn’t hate him. Except for his name, she hardly remembered him. At Christmas, he sent her a card signed “Pete,” but only for a few years after the divorce, and then they stopped. Her second husband, whom she married when she was twenty-eight, was named Lincoln Divine. They were divorced when she was twenty-nine and a half. No Christmas cards. Now she was going to marry Charlie Pinehurst. Her family hated Charlie—or perhaps just the idea of a third marriage—but what she hated was the way Charlie’s name got mixed up in her head with Pete’s and Lincoln’s. Ewell W. G. Peterson, Lincoln Divine, Charlie Pinehurst, she kept thinking, as if she needed to memorize them. In high school her English teacher had made her memorize poems that made no sense. There was no way you could remember what came next in those poems. She got Ds all through high school, and she didn’t like the job she got after she graduated, so she was happy to marry Pete when he asked her, even if it did mean leaving her friends and her family to live on an Army base. She liked it there. Her parents had told her she would never be satisfied with anything; they were surprised when it turned out that she had no complaints about living on the base. She got to know all the wives, and they had a diet club, and she lost twenty pounds, so that she got down to what she weighed when she started high school. She also worked at the local radio station, recording stories and poems—she never knew why they were recorded—and found that she didn’t mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it. Pete hung around with the men when he had time off; they never really saw much of each other. He accused her of losing weight so she could attract “a khaki lover.” “One’s not enough for you?” he asked. But when he was around, he didn’t want to love her; he’d work out with the barbells in the spare bedroom. Cynthia liked having two bedrooms. She liked the whole house. It was a frame row house with shutters missing downstairs, but it was larger than her parents’ house inside. When they moved in, all the Army wives said the same thing—that the bedroom wouldn’t be spare for long. But it stayed empty, except for the barbells and some kind of trapeze that Pete hung from the ceiling. It was nice living on the base, though. Sometimes she missed it.

With Lincoln, Cynthia lived in an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s a good thing you live halfway across the country,” her father wrote her, “because your mother surely does not want to see that black man, who claims his father was a Cherappy Indian.” She never met Lincoln’s parents, so she wasn’t sure herself about the Indian thing. One of Lincoln’s friends, who was always trying to be her lover, told her that Lincoln Divine wasn’t even his real name—he had made it up and got his old name legally changed when he was twenty-one. “It’s like believing in Santa Claus,” the friend told her. “There is no Lincoln Divine.”

Charlie was different from Pete and Lincoln. Neither of them paid much attention to her, but Charlie was attentive. During the years, she had regained the twenty pounds she lost when she was first married and added twenty-five more on top of that. She was going to have to get in shape before she married Charlie, even though he wanted to marry her now. “I’ll take it as is,” Charlie said. “Ready-made can be altered.” Charlie was a tailor. He wasn’t really a tailor, but his brother had a shop, and to make extra money Charlie did alterations on the weekends. Once, when they were both a little drunk, Cynthia and Charlie vowed to tell each other a dark secret. Cynthia told Charlie she had had an abortion just before she and Pete got divorced. Charlie was really shocked by that. “That’s why you got so fat, I guess,” he said. “Happens when they fix animals, too.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and she didn’t want to ask. She’d almost forgotten it herself. Charlie’s secret was that he knew how to run a sewing machine. He thought it was “woman’s work.” She thought that was crazy; she had told him something important, and he had just said he knew how to run a sewing machine.