Gwen, in Green

April’s warmth produced a forest of bracken fern in the cleared areas. George frowned at them. They were messing up his personal park. With malice in his eyes for all intruding plants, he attacked, pushing the big­-wheeled lawnmower over the clearing and wrapping it around trees to cut the small shoots which grew next to the trunks, bare-­headed, a handkerchief knotted as a sweatband around his forehead, chest bare, muscles being hardened by his work.

Gwen watched from the deck. She hadn’t been sleeping well. The power company people were digging a catch basin for spoil material directly across the waterway. On quiet nights the sound of earth movers and drag lines came and went with the movements of the wind. For­tunately, the work on the ocean side had been discontinued temporarily, so the drag line there, a huge thing, was quiet.

The warm sun lulled her into relaxation. The angry snarl of the lawnmower, close at hand, was a friendly noise, their own noise. It was steady. She dozed.

She heard a voice, perhaps George’s voice, but deep­ened, made hollow as if it reverberated inside a tin tunnel. “Underneath all fear is the fear of death. Pain is bearable, if we know it is a temporary pain. We have faith in our healing ability, but when we feel some irreparable happen­ing, that is true terror.” A bulky form came at her. As in her childhood dreams, she seemed to be rooted to the ground, unable to move, swaying, making scant progress, fighting the force which held her. The mass roared down on her, huge teeth snapping at her. The mouth closed, clashing metal teeth, and she screamed once before she felt the tender flesh being punctured and rendered. Her upper body fell, ripped from her legs and stomach and hips, and blinding terror caused beads of perspiration as she sat upright with a jerk. There was a terrible pain in her chest. She called weakly, then screamed, her lungs emptying themselves in the effort. George heard her over the snarl of the mower, cut off the engine and ran to her.

“Maybe you’re pregnant,” he said, when she’d explained her fright. “Does it still hurt?” He was kneeling beside her, his hair damp with his sweat and his forehead band blackened and wet. “We’ll run into town and see a doctor.”

“No,” she said, eased. “It’s all right now.”

However, after more nights of eerie dreams, she went to work with George and then sat in a doctor’s office for most of the morning before being escorted into an examination room. She described her symptoms, the sleeplessness, the constant feeling of tiredness, and the unexplained pains which seemed to disappear when she was fully awake. She was not pregnant, although she and George were doing nothing to prevent it. Her major organs seemed to be working well. Her red cell count was a little low. She left the office after being assured that she was in basic good health and filled a prescription for vitamins and iron.

“He said I’m nuts,” she told George, as he puttered, head and face hidden inside a TV set.

“For that we have to pay money?”

“No, really. He said it was probably a reaction to the change. He said that whether or not I realized it I was probably deeply affected by the death of your parents and then the move into totally new surroundings, the excitement of building a new house and all. In short, he said it was just nerves.”

“What have you got to worry about?” George asked, coming up for air and looking at her seriously. “You’ve got a rich, charming, handsome sex fiend for a husband, a beautiful house, two hundred three and a quarter acres of swamp cut off from the world by a radioactive canal. You’re probably the best painter of twisted oak trees in the Western world. So what’s the worry?”

“No worry,” she said. “It’s just—” There was no word for it. It was just. Just that she was a fruitcake having nightmares which freaked her out?

She shopped for groceries, spent a pleasant hour talk­ing with a dirty old man in a fantastic little junk shop, examined new books in the library, parked the M.G. on the waterfront and watched the working fishing boats come home with huge king mackerel, dolphin, and snappers, picked up George at four-­thirty. At home she threw two club steaks into the oven, fried potatoes, opened a can of small green peas, and served a good Spanish wine. After dinner, George, feeling happy­, stuffed, and relaxed, opened the gin and tonic season. She drank too much too fast, danced to thunderous music with the amplifier turned up full blast, so loud that the music could probably have been heard across the marsh and waterway in Ocean City, got gloriously giddy and silly, and wrestled on the rug with George, losing, of course. She slept soundly, to wake with a sour stomach and an aching head.

George was infuriatingly cheerful. He ate four eggs and drank half a tall can of V-­8 juice and kidded her about her hangover. “At least I slept well,” she said.

“So the answer is to become an alcoholic,” he said.