When Mavis Married Aaron

When Mavis married Aaron, she thought she was marrying up. It made sense in a distorted way. Aaron was a former athletic star and drop-dead gorgeous, with dark wavy hair, long well-muscled limbs, and sun-kissed skin. All the other girls wanted him, and Mavis nabbed him, plain, bookish schoolteacher that she was. Everyone said, “It will never last”, but Mavis just ignored them.

The thing is Mavis came from a good family, respectable, hard-working, well thought of people. Mavis was also educated and well-traveled. Aaron for all his looks and charm was not. He was also a laborer, as was his father before him. If Mr. Kent had still been alive, Mavis would have been bundled off to Europe and returned married to a doctor or a junior banker. Unfortunately, Mr. Kent was long gone, and Mrs. Kent and her boys could not deny the youngest Kent child a thing. So if it was Aaron Latimer she wanted it was Aaron Latimer she would have. Any misgivings they might have had were firmly put aside.

While Aaron’s profession wasn’t any real indication of his character, it was an indication of the standard of living he was used to. About a week after the wedding he hung up his hammer and took up his bottle; after all, such a well-educated girl should have no problem providing a living and two could live just a cheaply as one. At first, it wasn’t so bad. They moved into the flat above her family’s general store, where groceries and rent were mercifully cheap. The parents of her school children gave her nice gifts; her mother and brothers were always generous; and the sex, God did Mavis love sex, was good.

It was the drinking that finally did them in. Bottle after bottle of bourbon added up, as did the gambling habit that slowly settled in. After all, Aaron needed something to do to past the time and playing cards or shooting craps with the boys seemed like a good filler. If his bets were a bit higher or a bit more reckless that they needed to be, it was only because his wife came from “quality” and there would always be room to cover it.

For a while, it seemed like everything might be alright for Mavis and Aaron. Unfortunately, brothers marry; mothers pass on; and inheritances dwindle. Piano recitals, French lessons, and NYC shopping trips had never prepared her for her current situation. With each passing year Mavis’ clothes and shoes got a bit shabbier, and her acquaintances grew fewer. Her hands became rough from years of cooking, cleaning and laundry. Her hair, once a beautician’s dream, was dull and cropped. The rest of the Kent family, when she saw them at all, was polite but distant. Her Mother and bothers gave Mavis money if she needed it, but didn’t have much to say. After all, why point out the obvious? Aaron changed too. The running and the framing skills that had honed his body and given his skin tone such a nice color were in the distant past. Now, her husband’s arms were flabby; his belly flopped over his belt; his hair was thinning; and his skin was just this side of pasty. The liquor made him mean and surly, and the gambling losses made him evasive.

Aaron began to accuse Mavis of eyeing other men, and wishing for someone a bit more “genteel”. “I bet you wished you had married Bill Harper” he’d shout, referring to Mavis’ high school boyfriend. Any male teacher or dad from her school, married or not, was suspect. Regular customers in the store were even worse. The few friends Mavis still had left began to drift away, and her family’s visits dwindled until she was utterly alone with only her third graders to turn to for comfort.

Third graders can be trying even at the best of times; and as the years bore down on Mavis she had less and less patience and was less and less kind. By mid-career she was stricter than a drill-sergeant, and towards the end, well you get the idea. The kids got harder to handle and less polite with each passing year. Only the threat of expulsion kept them reined in. A combination of respect for the Kent name; the fact that Ms. Mavis’ kids always knew their material; and the third grade’s excellent test scores kept her job secure. Drill-sergeant or no, the woman knew how to get results.

With a stressful job, unhappy home, and nonexistent friends and family, what’s a woman to do? In Mavis’ case she went to the library. People may have deserted her, but books would always be her friends. All those times Aaron couldn’t find her, she was tucked away on the top floor. Mavis slowly worked her way through biographies, history books, science texts, cooking, gardening, and the great works of fiction -with a little Barbara Cartland just for fun. Never once did one of her stories disappoint her. Careful to do most of her reading in the library, Mavis never took home more than one book at a time. If she did check something out, it was usually practical like a cookbook or gardening manual. Even so, a secret so wonderful was bound to trip her up.

One night, she didn’t get Aaron’s supper on the table promptly at six. That might have slipped pass, but one night became two and two nights became three. Until one night, Aaron got so impatient he fixed his own dinner and waited for Mavis to come home. He thought it was time they had a “talk”. Not much needs to be said about that “talk” except to say there was very little actual conversation. Mavis ended up in the hospital with a ton of bruises, several scrapes and a broken hip. Luckily for her, it was summer. She could recuperate without the worry of losing her job.

Many weeks later, hobbling on crutches, Mavis returned her last book. Though it was quite overdue, the librarian waived the fine, saying “It obviously couldn’t be avoided”. No more comfort would be found at the library, since Mavis was forbidden to ever go back again. Instead, she took consolation in her garden. It had everything: roses to daffodils, irises to azaleas, peonies to pyrethrum, onions to potatoes, and comfrey to basil. Some of the plants were edible, some were medicinal, but most were ornamental. It kept Mavis at home, and it helped augment their meager pantry.

In order to keep Aaron from ruining the last thing that mattered to her, Mavis got him involved in her garden from the start. She planted lavender, comfrey, mint and chamomile in order to blend his favorite teas. She carefully cultivated the wild blackberries bushes until they provided lush fruit for pies and preserves. The vegetable garden contained only her husband’s very favorite vegetables. Mavis even coaxed Aaron to take up his tools again in order to build a trellis for some wisteria cuttings that her sister-in-law had given them. Aaron was interested enough in the garden’s bounty to leave the garden and his wife alone. He even got to the point where he “allowed” Mavis to check books out of the library again, but only if they concerned gardening.

Mavis and Aaron probably could have gone on like that indefinitely, that is, if fate didn’t have other plans. Mavis’ older brother had been in a terrible automobile accident and was asking to see her. He and his wife had moved to Charlotte when they married; and Mavis would have to be away for several days. Aaron seemed most unhappy when he realized he would have to fend for himself. “What am I going to eat?” he wailed. “There’s plenty of things in the pantry and I left a whole roast in the fridge” Mavis replied. “Well, what about my tea? Who’s going to make my tea?” “There are some dried herbs in the pantry, too. You can pick your own if you want it fresh. You already know which plants” she said. For every querulous question, Mavis had the answer. She knew her husband.

By the time Mavis returned home, it seemed that Aaron was dead. Aaron, unlike Mavis, couldn’t tell the difference between foxglove and comfrey. She could see the confusion, after all both plants shared the same general form and both had a coarsely hairy surface, not to mention they were planted quite close to each other in the garden. Mavis knew that Foxglove leaves have finely toothed edges, whereas Comfrey leaves were smooth. No matter, Aaron had picked fresh leaves for his tea himself. Thinking a second dram or two would settle his rumbling stomach, he drank cup after cup until he went into convulsions and died. At least, that’s what the coroner told her happened.

When Mavis buried Aaron, she didn’t shed a tear. In fact, she was thoroughly relieved. She would finally have time to get that hip reset properly and to catch up on her reading…