Maggie adjusts the printer, bending to check the focus with her magnifier. The grain clears, clouds; she rubs the lens on the device with a soft cloth, then wipes her eyes with her shirt cuff. If her eyes water, the lens fogs. She checks again; the grain is distinct. She sets the magnifier aside, and sees the negative image of five faces perfectly framed by black metal arms on the yellow easel.

She will not cry.

She snaps the printer's light off, opens the drawer and takes out a sheet of 5X7 paper. The darkroom's amber light bounces off its glossy surface; she sets it in the easel. She has been developing her own black and white prints for twenty-three years, since Melissa taught her the basics. It was during the time the Donners don't discuss, the five months of stories that are not told, that began when Maggie came home to find Greg in bed with Glorious Gloria.

**

Maggie had known for weeks that something was wrong between them. At first, she thought the problem was hers--she had been sickly pregnant with Sarah, constantly nauseated, exhausted, not in the mood for eating or working. Or sex. Greg's distance reflected her own, and she was at first thankful for it.

But she grew steadier; the pregnancy stabilize. Her appetites for food and for life returned, but he remained estranged. Preoccupied. He was never a demonstrative man, but he had always been at ease with her--except when she cried, which had always been rare and grew more so with each year of marriage. But back then, in her fourth month of pregnancy with her third child, when she had earned her Masters at last and worked part-time in the operating room of a Boston teaching hospital and he was comfortably ensconced as the administrator of the community hospital, when they had finally taken a mortgage on the house they had rented for so many years--when, in short, things were going more smoothly than they had ever gone--he tiptoed around her like a stranger. He was polite; he was respectful. Living with him had become unnerving.

She came home at noon one day with a new nausea that felt more like flu than baby, and she saw his car in front of the house. Her first thought was that he had come for lunch, as he sometimes did. The hospital was only two miles away.

She walked through the door. And this moment she can still recall perfectly, though she prefers not to: the small sound from upstairs: The white-cold flash in her gut, wide eyes, pounding heart, the sudden certainty that it was a woman's voice.

She halted. Life halted; time stopped. Her first thought: not in our bed. Not in the bed that she and Greg had shared for ten years.

Immediately, she saw the foolishness in this, and she nearly laughed.

She considered tiptoeing up the stairs but felt ashamed, as if she were in the wrong, sneaking into her own house. She leaned back, closed the front door hard. Upstairs, there was silence. Not a whisper.

Maggie had run, then, to the small half-bathroom off the kitchen, and vomited herself clean, until nothing came but a clear green string of bile. When at last she looked up from the toilet, hair wild, choking with tears, he stood in the doorway. His tie was crooked, the neck of his white shirt unbuttoned. He wore a half-smile that she recognized as guilt. It did not reach his eyes.

"Tell me." She hiccupped. "Tell me you weren't in our bed."

He lowered his head. "I don't know what to say." His voice was small. "I just…"

She rose from the toilet. "I don't want to see you," she said. " Please. Take…whoever. Just go." She wiped her mouth with a piece of toilet tissue. "You can get your stuff tonight. Later. Late. But I don't want you here. Not to stay here."

He stood for a moment, that empty half-smile twisting his lips, and she hated him. She hated him with a ferocity that rubbered her knees, with all the nauseated hurt in her body.

And yet, at the same time, a part of her, a ghost of herself, wanted to grab him, to hold him there. Because when he went, the house would be empty. She and the children would rattle around like dice. She watched him, thinking of dice she had shaken in a leather cup, a game they all played in Viet Nam. Liar's Poker. Ironic, the name.

**

Maggie twists the knob on the timer. When she first learned to print photographs, she tested exposure time on scraps of photo paper before she set up the full sheet. By now, however, she knows that this negative, with this filter and this paper, with the printer lens set at this F-stop, will require fifteen seconds at most. She sets the timer at thirteen. The exhaust fan in the wall stutters, as it sometimes does, then resumes its low hum; she is sure it will quit on her someday soon. She presses the timer button and watches the light pour down and impress the image of her family on the paper.

Greg bought her the darkroom for Christmas ten years ago. A local carpenter, the man who had opened up the walls between the dining room and kitchen and hallway, built the little room to spec in a corner of their basement. She bought the printer, trays and tongs from a man who had posted a "for sale" card in the Frye Photo Shop.

Before that, she had used the darkroom at the college. She began working part-time for the college two weeks after Greg had moved into a small apartment over the drugstore in the town center, a mile and a half from their house.

She took this second job to help fill the time while Carlton and Trish were in school. The nursing shortage that had sent her back to work, after ten years of mothering and nibbling at her degree, was history; her Boston hospital had nothing to offer her beyond two days a week. She opened the Globe at breakfast the day after Greg left, and found an advertisement in the Want Ads for a part-time instructor in a nursing program.

**

Maggie slips the exposed paper into the developer and gently rocks the tray. They materialize slowly, the five of them. Grinning like happy morons. It fascinates her, even now, the image emerging, sharpening. Like Alice's Cheshire Cat, the darkest details appear first; then the rest fills in and solidifies. She puts on her reading glasses and studies it in its watery bath; so much more detail than a print from 35 mm film.

She feels suddenly lightheaded, grips the counter and fights down the flutter in her chest. She will not cry; she absolutely will not cry.

She stands rigid until the print looks slightly darker than it should in the amber light, draws in a shaking breath, lifts it with bamboo tongs and slips it into the Stop bath.

**

She met Melissa on her first day at the college, in the upstairs hallway. Man-tall Melissa, frizzy blond hair caught in a scarf, a blue clay pot filled with artists' brushes balanced against her bony hip, stood talking with a small man Maggie knew to be a math professor. Melissa absorbed the light, glowed and filled the dim hall; even her low, scratchy voice was a presence. Although she stood well to the side, next to the Art studio door, Maggie had felt an aura, a heat that made it nearly impossible for her to squeeze by.

Within a week, Melissa had volunteered to teach Maggie the intricacies of the Nikon she had owned since Viet Nam, but had used only for snapshots.

Within a month, Melissa had become her lover. It was a strange, wonderful, horrible thing. Disconcerting; surreal.

In truth, Maggie became Melissa's lover; Melissa was the magnet, and she scooped up the pregnant Maggie as a matter of course, a matter of sped-up time and careless, off-handed courtship. One day they stood side-by-side in the red light of the communal darkroom, and Melissa placed her big hand over Maggie's wrist and the bamboo tongs leapt from Maggie's fingers into the stop bath, electrified. Half an hour later, Maggie's prints lay haphazardly stuck together in a blotter book on a chair and, not three feet away, she lay in Melissa's bed.

Maggie was shocked by her own docile acquiescence, her agreement to this new and unholy alliance, this icy, delicious, dangerous game. She was fascinated with that body-long and loosely joined, magnificently full-breasted, so other from her own small self. A goddess body; magisterial. Hard-muscled legs, flat belly; ripe, scandalously unconfined breasts that strained the shapeless cotton print dresses she wore to class. A long, slender neck that bore the perfect oval face like an exotic bloom. Melissa was a work of impossible sculpture. She took up too much space, too much air, too much.

By contrast, Maggie was small, neat, efficient, conventional. A sensible woman who would always keep her head and calmly lead the way out of the conflagration. And yet here she was, herself burning madly, out of control.

On that first afternoon, in the waterbed behind the screen in Melissa's home studio, she fingered aside a lock of Melissa's crazy hair to find a tiny half-moon tattooed on her left earlobe. Maggie laughed, delighted. Whatever prompted you to do that?

Oh, that? I've had that for years. Melissa had taken Maggie's face in both hands, her ice-blue eyes amused. I've always had the need to desecrate things. Confused and off-balance, Maggie had held no illusions. She was one in a line of lovers, male and female. She was not jealous; she was, beneath the passion, strangely ambivalent. And afraid. There were times, as she lay next to her, when she half-hoped that someone would take Melissa away and make everything return to normal. This is not love, she told herself--there will be no life-long sharing.

But what is it? Shelter? Adventure? Revenge?

Perhaps. But even then, she knew she would never, ever tell Greg.

Once, she asked Melissa, Does this mean I'm a lesbian?

Melissa, gloriously naked as she usually was in her studio, regarded her through the smoke of the joint they were sharing. Are you attracted to women?

I don't know. I don't think so. Only to you.

Melissa tossed her impossible hair, her eyes mocking. Everybody swings both ways, she said. Most people just don't realize it.

Melissa sometimes came to her house after classes; the kids called her Auntie. She taught Carlton to paint with water colors. Perhaps this had been Melissa's purpose in their life: long after Maggie left her and Melissa moved to Arizona--which she did the next semester--Carlton moved into acrylics, then oils, and later, the remote-control neatness and definition of computer design.

As for Maggie, she was left with her secret, and access to the college darkroom.

**

Maggie slips the picture into the fix. She traces Carlton's face with the tip of her tongs, and is suddenly furious. How could he have let them all smile together, when he knew? She stirs the fix, stares at the faces, each one, her own. This is the last picture they will have together. "Bastard," she says aloud. She smacks the picture with the tongs. "How can you do this to me? You little bastard!"

Her throat aches. She would scream, but her voice is stuck; she is in control; it is not a large house and the walls of the darkroom are thin, and they are up there above her, all of them, even that horrible cat. She coughs to free her throat, and turns on the light. Lifts and examines the photo. It is good, better than the picture on the mantel. She drops it in the rinse, tears off a paper towel, wets it, presses it to her eyes.

**

Somewhere, perhaps in Arizona, there is a life-sized portrait of Maggie, painted in bold oils by her lover. Melissa finished it two weeks before Maggie was due to give birth. The next day, Maggie told her she wouldn't be seeing her again. At school, yes, but not like this. She had her family to think about, this new baby. Greg. She had been seeing Greg, she told her. Now and then. They were working things out.

Maggie had rehearsed the speech in front of her bathroom mirror, staring into her almond-shaped green-gold eyes, searching her face for vulnerability, for insincerity. It's for the best. For both of us. She made herself repeat it twice, three times. But when she finally said it for real, it came out off-key. It sounded shallow. You understand, don't you? she said, too stiffly, her heart a lead weight.

Melissa looked her over and shook her head, her frizzy blond hair dancing around her perfect oval face. Oh, I do. Three words, low, the whiskey voice curling around them with such irony. A pull on her cigarette, eyes narrowing. Again: Oh, I do.

And Maggie was 12 years old again, alone, afraid. Ashamed. She stood horror-struck, wanting to call back the words, to rewind the clock five minutes. Melissa watched her, smoking. Maggie turned and hurried from the house.

**

Maggie drops the damp wad of paper towel into the trash below the sink, leans over and turns on the faucet, runs a stream of cold water into the rinse tray, over the picture. She adds a bit of warm water to the mix and sighs.

**

What she had told Melissa was true: She had indeed met with Greg. He came to see the children nearly every night. She left him with them--an hour at first, going off to the grocery or the gym because she felt awkward with him. Soon she stretched the time, and went to meet Melissa at the college darkroom. And then, she went to Melissa's studio--not always, two days a week, sometimes three--and left Greg with Carlton and Trish for as long as four hours at a time. Once, she became angry that he was taking over the house and she could not stay in it because he was there--a charge fueled more by guilt than logic, since the arrangement had been her idea. She called to tell him to spend the night; she would see him in the morning. To her surprise and relief, he did not ask for details. She climbed into Melissa's jigging waterbed, burning with righteous resolve--and woke up three hours later, regretful, anguished at her callousness. She slipped from under Melissa's arm, dressed silently in the dark, and drove home, shaking.

She found Greg asleep on the couch. As she stood watching him, touched that he had not taken her bed, something in her loosened. And she tiptoed up the stairs, humbled. The following Sunday, she hired Roger, the high school boy next door who routinely watched the kids after school twice a week until she returned from the hospital, and she drove with Greg to Boston. The day was warm, full of Spring sunshine, and they sat on a bench in the Public Gardens drinking coffee, talking about everyday things; their jobs, the kids, her father's recent mild case of pneumonia--Maggie had spent two nights on the phone with her mother, who was panicked, as usual, at the dramatic if unlikely prospect of her husband's death. It was easy between them, and hard; when the conversation died it became obvious to her that she would have to be the one to open the subject of their future. So she did. He was apologetic. It had been a meaningless thing, he insisted. Glorious Gloria. His new secretary. Former secretary. He had, that afternoon--the afternoon--called a friend at a nursing home and found her a job. It had paid more; she had been grateful.

Gloria. She had met the woman only once-tall, stiletto heels, leather skirt, lace and dangly earrings. Despite the flash, not particularly attractive. And not young; she was probably Maggie's own age. Glorious Gloria?

Harry Squires' name for her, Greg said.

And she laughed: dry, little Harry; all that cleavage at eye level. She shook her head. Your secretary. That is such a cliché.

He gave her his infuriating, sheepish half-smile.

Glorious Gloria. Why? She asked him.

He looked at her with absolute sincerity. I wish I knew, he said.

They would never speak of it again directly. She wouldn't; he couldn't.

She told him she needed to think. She had married him so soon after Viet Nam; she wondered if she wanted to be married at all. She was learning that she could live by herself, sharing the kids, although it wasn't easy. She needed time to think.

It's up to you, he said. Do what you have to do.

**

Maggie stares into the sink, into the rinse tray. The sink is steel; it is corroded around the taps and small brown stains fleck the floor of it. Rust rings the drain. She hadn't known stainless steel would not weather the chemicals, back when she'd had it installed; if she ever builds another darkroom, she will use porcelain. If. The prospect of building anything--of doing anything--feels exhausting. She straightens, flicks the light switch off, and moves heavily to the printer to make another copy.

**

She had made up her mind when Melissa was finishing the portrait, but she hadn't known the words to tell her. When she found them, they were so weak:

You understand, don't you?

Oh, I do. Oh, I do.

And Maggie left. She felt empty. Guilty, depressed. Relieved. She had no courage, she realized then. She had lived through a war, through the Peace Corps, through countless deaths and two births. But she had no courage. A courageous woman would have taken this gift of love, would have flown in the face of convention. But Maggie told herself she couldn't subject herself to scrutiny, to condemnation. And her children. This was 1980, New England. Not California. And Melissa would move on--then what? What she had said was true: she had been attracted to her. Not to women in general.

Maggie returned to Greg, to cooking dinner every night. To the unequal footing of Greg's growing salary. With Sarah's birth, she quit the job in the hospital and took temporary leave from the school. She found a grandmotherly woman to babysit and returned for the Fall semester and threw herself into teaching. It was safe, logical and it fit her. The ordinary life.

When she passed the door to the Art studio, where the new bearded young teacher held court, she felt a visceral emptiness. The smell of linseed oil stirred her nipples. And a glimpse of a blue clay pot bristling with paintbrushes brought her to the brink of tears.

**

Time heals. It has been 23 years since Melissa left Frye. Maggie sets the new print in the developer and tries to see her. She has tried this before; she tries it every time she uses the darkroom. It never works. She sees the oval face; ice-blue eyes; frizzed blond hair. A tattooed half-moon on an earlobe. The long fingers of an artist's hand-like Carlton's, she realizes with a shock. Fingers that traced her breasts, the skin of her thigh, that cupped themselves over the growing life in her womb. The smoke of a cigarette; a smoky laugh. But it doesn't come together; she can't see the whole Melissa.

She feels her sometimes--when she is half asleep, and Greg touches her just so. But then she wakes fully and the pressure is not the same. She loves him; she has forgiven him long ago and trusts him with her heart and soul. But their chemistry is calm, reasoned, thirty-two-years-married.

Going back to him meant giving up a piece of herself. A piece of her sensuality.

She had wondered, at the time, if perhaps he might be doing the same thing.

**

Maggie prints a copy of the photo for each of the children and one for her and Greg. There is a portrait of her somewhere, perhaps in Arizona; in it, she is small-boned, delicate, her green eyes an exaggerated almond shape that take up most of her face. The painting is both abstract and real: You can see that she is hugely, resplendently pregnant, naked on Melissa's old red couch, hand on the bulge that will be Sarah, lips curved into a smile. But the figure is both herself and more than herself. She wishes she could see it now, to see if she can recognize the Maggie she was back then. She feels numbed; it has been 23 years. She wonders, if she could see the picture, if it would wake her up, bring back the passion of the woman who painted it. Life was not simpler then, but the worst that could happen was nothing more than a woman's voice upstairs.

She slaps the rinsed prints onto the big piece of Plexiglas behind the rusted sink, squeegees them, wonders if someday the portrait might turn up in a coffee table book. Once, she had feared that it would. Now…what does it matter.

She peels a print off the Plexiglas, places it on the matte page of her blotter book, lays the waxed-paper facing page over it. Through it the faces are vague, veiled. "Melissa," she whispers, and lays a hand over Carlton's face on the waxed paper, the cool smoothness, remembering the skin of her stomach, her breast. Wondering what possible connection that loss has with this one. She will not cry. Because if she does, she will never stop.

§ § §

Susan O'Neill lives and writes in Andover, Massacusetts.

Sue is the co-editor of Vestal Review, an online flash journal. She has worked as a reporter/photographer/columnist for two weekly newspapers, and has been published over the years in a few national magazines, a couple of regional glossies and many, many local newspapers. Her collection of short stories, Don't Mean Nothing, was published in November of 2001 by Ballantine Books and can be ordered from Amazon by clicking here: Books We Like.

Sue can be reached by email at skoneill@hotmail.com

This piece was first published in INK POT #1 - 2003, a literary journal.

Send the URL for this work to a friend!