A Circle of Wives By Alice Laplante
To David, with much love
1
Samantha
I AM NOTHING IF NOT irresolute. Excuse the double negative. What I mean to say is that there is little I won’t waver over. You know how squirrels flirt with death by the roadside, and how some actually lose their heads and rush into traffic to their doom? I had to give up riding my bike around campus as an undergraduate because of those damn squirrels. They’d make a dash for my tires, and if I would just hold firm and keep going, chances were good they’d scamper back to safety. But if they’d freak, I’d freak, and the result was too many crashes, too many injuries. I walked everywhere my junior and senior years. So. A waverer I am.
Peter and I are at Cook’s Seafood Store on El Camino. We’re warmly greeted as we walk in. I love this place because the men behind the counter—all men, a variety of ages between twenty and seventy—look so happy to be there. I believe the word to describe them is fishmongers. Such a lovely word. And apparently a lovely place to work, as most of them have been there for decades. I like the way they closely attend to customers describing their dinner plans, how they take the time to think before suggesting the exact number of shrimp for a party of four, the precise weight of ahi tuna for six. No, they can’t recommend the mackerel; it’s a bit spongy today. Then, after placing the slabs of raw fish or the handfuls of shellfish on the scale, they wrap the purchases in crisp white paper as carefully as if they were the most special of birthday gifts. The taking of money appears a casual afterthought; the real business of the place is in the human interactions. If I were lonely, here is where I would come for solace.
The store is crowded, but we’re patient. They know what we want, and sure enough, there’s a wink and a broad smile from Eddie today, and out comes a beautiful specimen of smelt, Hypomesus transpacificus, that Peter has been seeking for quite some time. The fact that I use the words beautiful and smelt together in a sentence shows what living with Peter has done to me. As usual, Peter jingles the coins in his pocket and as usual Eddie waves him off. Peter is a scientist, an anthropologist, or, to be strictly honest, an academic wannabe. His doctoral dissertation involves researching the diets of the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay area. He spent all last summer across the bay at the Emeryville Shellmound, wallowing thigh deep in what they now know is a toxic swamp. He will take this tiny smelt home and dehydrate it, carefully preserving the skeleton, and use it as a model to draw in his workbook. I’m wild about his meticulous sketches of these dried carcasses. For pleasure I often go leafing through the pages of his dissertation notes, and for my birthday I requested to have two of my favorites copied and framed. He thought I was kidding. But no. The delicate renderings of the fragile structures truly delight me. God is in those bones.
So here’s where we are: Together almost ten years after we met in freshman rhetoric and I helped him understand the difference between its and it’s and which and that. We became instantly inseparable, although I hesitated to call myself committed. It’s not a word I would use, ever, to describe myself. Now, a decade later, Peter is still in school, and I’m still wavering. I wavered my way from an undergraduate degree in history into a quickly terminated semester of law school, then into a master’s program in education and then less than a full term teaching eighth-grade social studies in nearby Portola Valley, recently rated the second richest town in America by Time magazine.