Too Much Happiness

by her husband. She could understand nothing of the noises Doree was making. But Lloyd, who was still sitting on the steps, moved aside courteously for her, without a word, and she went into the house and found what she was now expecting to find. She phoned the police.
    For some time Doree kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own clothing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head. She was given a shot of something, regularly, to quiet her down, and this worked. In fact she became very quiet, though not catatonic. She was said to be stabilized. When she got out of the hospital and the social worker brought her to this new place, Mrs. Sands took over, found her somewhere to live, found her a job, established the routine of talking with her once a week. Maggie would have come to see her, but she was the one person Doree could not stand to see. Mrs. Sands said that that feeling was natural-it was the association. She said that Maggie would understand.
    Mrs. Sands said that whether or not Doree continued to visit Lloyd was up to her. “I’m not here to approve or disapprove, you know. Did it make you feel good to see him? Or bad?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Doree could not explain that it had not really seemed to be him she was seeing. It was almost like seeing a ghost. So pale. Pale loose clothes on him, shoes that didn’t make any noise-probably slippers-on his feet. She had the impression that some of his hair had fallen out. His thick and wavy, honey-colored hair. There seemed to be no breadth to his shoulders, no hollow in his collarbone where she used to rest her head.
    What he had said, afterwards, to the police-and it was quoted in the newspapers-was “I did it to save them the misery.”
    What misery?
    “The misery of knowing that their mother had walked out on them,” he said.
    That was burned into Doree’s brain, and maybe when she decided to try to see him it had been with the idea of making him take it back. Making him see, and admit, how things had really gone.
    “You told me to stop contradicting you or get out of the house. So I got out of the house.
    “I only went to Maggie’s for one night. I fully intended to come back. I wasn’t walking out on anybody.”
    She remembered perfectly how the argument had started. She had bought a tin of spaghetti that had a very slight dent in it. Because of that it had been on sale, and she had been pleased with her thriftiness. She had thought she was doing something smart. But she didn’t tell him that, once he had begun questioning her about it. For some reason she’d thought it better to pretend she hadn’t noticed.
    Anybody would notice, he said. We could have all been poisoned. What was the matter with her? Or was that what she had in mind? Was she planning to try it out on the kids or on him?
    She told him not to be crazy.
    He had said it wasn’t him who was crazy. Who but a crazy woman would buy poison for her family?
    The children had been watching from the doorway of the front room. That was the last time she’d seen them alive.
    So was that what she had been thinking-that she could make him see, finally, who it was who was crazy?
    When she realized what was in her head, she should have got off the bus. She could have got off even at the gates, with the few other women who plodded up the drive. She could have crossed the road and waited for the bus back to the city. Probably some people did that. They were going to make a visit and then decided not to. People probably did that all the time.
    But maybe it was better that she had gone on, and seen him so strange and wasted. Not a person worth blaming for anything. Not a person. He was like a character in a dream.
    She had dreams. In one dream she had run out of the house after finding them, and Lloyd had started to laugh in his old easy way, and then she had heard Sasha laughing behind her and it had dawned on her, wonderfully, that they were all playing a joke.
    “You asked me if it made me feel good or bad when I saw him? Last time you asked me?”
    “Yes, I did,” Mrs. Sands said.
    “I had to think about it.”
    “Yes.”
    “I decided it made me feel bad. So I haven’t gone again.”
    It was hard to tell with Mrs. Sands, but the nod she gave seemed to show some satisfaction or approval.
    So when Doree decided that she would go again, after all, she thought it was