Too Much Happiness

Maggie said.
    And one time Maggie said, “Is everything all right with you? I mean in your marriage? You’re happy?”
    Doree said yes, without hesitation. After that she was more careful about what she said. She saw that there were things that she was used to that another person might not understand. Lloyd had a certain way of looking at things: that was just how he was. Even when she’d first met him, in the hospital, he’d been like that. The head nurse was a starchy sort of person, so he’d call her Mrs. Bitch-out-of-Hell, instead of her name, which was Mrs. Mitchell. He said it so fast that you could barely catch on. He’d thought that she picked favorites, and he wasn’t one of them. Now there was someone he detested at the ice-cream factory, somebody he called Suck-Stick Louie. Doree didn’t know the man’s real name. But at least that proved that it wasn’t only women who provoked him.
    Doree was pretty sure that these people weren’t as bad as Lloyd thought, but it was no use contradicting him. Perhaps men just had to have enemies, the way they had to have their jokes. And sometimes Lloyd did make the enemies into jokes, just as if he was laughing at himself. She was even allowed to laugh with him, as long as she wasn’t the one who started the laughing.
    She hoped he wouldn’t get that way about Maggie. At times she was afraid she saw something of the sort coming. If he prevented her from riding to the school and the grocery store with Maggie it would be a big inconvenience. But worse would be the shame. She would have to make up some stupid lie to explain things. But Maggie would know-at least she would know that Doree was lying, and she would interpret that probably as meaning that Doree was in a worse situation than she really was. Maggie had her own sharp way of looking at things.
    Then Doree asked herself why she should care what Maggie might think. Maggie was an outsider, not even somebody Doree felt comfortable with. It was Lloyd said that, and he was right. The truth of things between them, the bond, was not something that anybody else could understand and it was not anybody else’s business. If Doree could watch her own loyalty it would be all right.
    It got worse, gradually. No direct forbidding, but more criticism. Lloyd coming up with the theory that Maggie’s boys’ allergies and asthma might be Maggie’s fault. The reason was often the mother, he said. He used to see it at the hospital all the time. The overcontrolling, usually overeducated mother.
    “Some of the time kids are just born with something,” Doree said, unwisely. “You can’t say it’s the mother every time.”
    “Oh. Why can’t I?”
    “I didn’t mean
you
. I didn’t mean you can’t. I mean, couldn’t they be born with things?”
    “Since when are you such a medical authority?”
    “I didn’t say I was.”
    “No. And you’re not.”
    Bad to worse. He wanted to know what they talked about, she and Maggie.
    “I don’t know. Nothing really.”
    “That’s funny. Two women riding in a car. First I heard of it. Two women talking about nothing. She is out to break us up.”
    “Who is?
Maggie?”
    “I’ve got experience of her kind of woman.”
    “What kind?”
    “Her kind.”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “Careful. Don’t call me silly.”
    “What would she want to do that for?”
    “How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You’ll see. She’ll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.”
    And in fact it turned out as he had said. At least it would certainly have looked that way, to Lloyd. She did find herself at around ten o’clock one night in Maggie’s kitchen, sniffling back her tears and drinking herbal tea. Maggie’s husband had said, “What the hell?” when she knocked-she heard him through the door. He hadn’t known who she was. She’d said, “I’m really sorry to bother you-” while he stared at her with lifted eyebrows and a tight mouth. And then Maggie had come.
    Doree had walked all the way there in the dark, first along the gravel road that she and Lloyd lived on, and then on the highway. She headed for the ditch every time a car came, and that slowed her down considerably. She did take a look at the cars that passed, thinking that one of them might be Lloyd. She didn’t want him to find her, not yet, not till he was scared out of his craziness. Other times she had been able to scare him out of it