I Give My Marriage a Year

by Holly Wainwright

  You can follow me home. See u in the car park.

  You can still cancel, she told herself.

  But she didn’t.

  The day before, she and Josh had been at a rehearsal for their duet in the hall at the girls’ school. Lou felt absolutely ridiculous, and also like she spent way too much of her life in school halls.

  She’d sat simmering with resentment at the trestle table that had been set up in front of the stage. Other parents had brought cheese and wine, and they came and went as the rehearsal dragged on, talking between songs, applauding each other as they took their turns on stage. Kids were playing at the back of the hall or running around outside in the playground, rushing in every few minutes to cringe at the music and beg for some chips.

  Why can’t I enjoy this? Lou had asked herself. It’s fun. What’s wrong with me?

  She sat there and watched people she knew – some well, some only by sight – push through terrible versions of Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’, Toto’s ‘Africa’ and Lizzo’s ‘Truth Hurts’. And she’d made tortured small talk with one of the mums she didn’t know, the one from the P&C who was always asking her to volunteer for things. Right now, it was helping with the winter carnival, which was a few months away and, apparently, chronically under-supported.

  ‘I know you get a lot of this at work,’ said the P&C mum, ‘but I did think’ – and she put a hand on Lou’s arm – ‘that as a teacher yourself, you’d really understand the value of parents being involved in their child’s education.’

  Lou looked at Josh up on the stage, fiddling with his guitar and laughing with the blonde woman on keyboards. She could almost taste the irritation in her own mouth at the whole situation, at being here in this stuffy hall on a Sunday afternoon, at indulging Josh’s rock star fantasy and having to talk to this woman.

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she said, scanning her brain for the woman’s name and coming up blank. ‘But as a teacher, when I’m not working I prefer to spend as much time as I can with my own kids, as I’m sure you’d understand.’

  The woman took her hand off Lou’s arm and gave a little shrug. ‘Well, I always say, if everyone did just a little bit . . .’ and she turned away to focus on the stage.

  Lou got up and walked outside. She saw her girls swinging on the monkey bars and suppressed the urge to shout at them to get down – monkey bars and broken arms went together like teachers and wine, in her experience. Instead, she pulled out her phone.

  What did we do to avoid awkward social interactions before phones? she wondered, opening Instagram and starting to scroll. One of her friends was in Europe, smiling on a boat. Another was posting every stage of her kitchen renovation, and Lou was trying to think of something supportive to comment about a splashback choice when she felt a hand on her waist and heard Josh ask, ‘What are you doing out here?’

  The music had stopped, she realised.

  ‘I was avoiding that woman who’s always trying to get me to “join in”,’ said Lou, nodding through the open door of the hall towards the one-woman volunteer press-gang, who had moved on to another mother. ‘I don’t want to join in.’

  ‘Well, bad luck, babe, because we’re up in a minute,’ Josh said. He was happy, she could tell, being here, playing music. And seeing him happy made her feel like she wanted to say something horrible, which was not a good sign. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

  ‘And that’s Lyndall,’ Josh said. ‘She’s the president of the P&C. I thought you knew that?’

  ‘I forgot,’ Lou replied. Which was true. ‘Well, she’s scaring off more volunteers than she’s encouraging.’

  Josh pulled the face he pulled when he didn’t agree, mouth down, eyes narrowing. ‘I think maybe that’s just you. I’ve been talking to her about starting a music therapy workshop . . .’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Josh.’ Uh-oh.

  Her husband’s face changed.

  I’m going to say it, I’m going to say it.

  ‘You’ve never given a shit about volunteering until you figured out there was an opportunity for you to feel like a real musician again. I can’t believe that you’re making me do something I don’t have the time to do and pretending it’s about us when, really, it’s about you not facing up to your failures.’

  ‘Are you guys ready?’

  Lou knew they were inexcusable, these harsh words she’d just thrown at Josh in a rushed, hissed whisper, surely loud enough for others to hear.

  Now she turned quickly to the voice of the interrupter, a guy from the band. Lou didn’t know him, but thought maybe he was married to Abigail, one of the yoga mums. Whatever, he clearly hadn’t yet sensed the tension in the air.

  ‘Yes, we’re ready,’ Lou said brightly, as Josh stared at her. ‘Let’s do it.’

  And she turned and entered the hall, her hands shaking. I can never speak to my husband like that again, she thought. There is no justification for being cruel. There is no excuse for how I’m feeling. I need to do something, or we’re not even going to make it to the end-of-year deadline.

  She turned to see if Josh was following her. He wasn’t. He was standing near the door, looking at her. His face – his eyebrows, his mouth – suggested that he was, understandably, furious.

  ‘Come on, babe!’ she called brightly, in front of the dozen or so adults in the hall. ‘Let’s get it over with.’ And she laughed a little too loudly, to show that she was only joking and, really, she was delighted to be here making her husband’s dreams come true and raising money for the school’s new tech suite while she was at it.

  Josh began to walk towards her slowly. Behind her, she heard the band play the opening chords to their song. U2 had been deemed too bleak. They were doing ‘Walking on Sunshine’.

  That night Josh hadn’t spoken to her at all, and after what she’d said to him at school Lou wasn’t surprised. But they’d gone through the motions of dinner and bath time and bedtime books for the girls, passing each other wordlessly as they moved through the hundred little tasks that had to be done between them – toothpaste squeezed out for Rita so it didn’t go all over the tiles, clean pyjamas dug out of drawers, lost books found, stories, hugs, silly bedtime songs – before the house was quiet. And then Josh had gone to his guitar room and closed the door, and Lou had gone to the living room and looked at her phone, and then she’d folded some washing and made the kids’ lunches for the next day and gone to bed, where she lay looking at the outline of the tree in darkness until she woke up and it was morning and Josh was lying next to her, sleeping, and the curtain was drawn, so she couldn’t see the tree anymore.

  And now, with her text answered, here she was rummaging through her bag for her keys and walking towards her car.

  Then sitting in it and looking at the red sedan over by the gate of the car park, blinker on, turning right.

  She looked at the outline of the head visible in the driver’s seat. And she knew he was looking at her in his rear-view mirror, waiting for her to move, to put her family wagon – strewn with icy-pole wrappers and sand and miscellaneous teeny-tiny plastic toys – into drive and follow.

  She turned the key in the ignition and put her blinker on to indicate she was pulling out of her car space. As she did, she saw the man in the red car move his head slightly, in what looked like a short, pleased nod.

  Lou put both palms up to her face, pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes and sat there for a moment, just like that.

  And then she flicked off the indicator. Turned off the ignition. Opened the car door. She didn’t look back at the red car as she turned the other way and retraced her steps through the crowded lunchtime playground towards her classroom.

  There, she sat on one of the tiny chairs and texted: I can’t treat you like that anymore. I’m making an appointment with a therapist. For both of us. We need it.

  She saw the little bubbles on her iPhone that meant Josh was typing. And they were there for the longest time, like he was composing an epic response. And it was a few minutes of th
at before Josh sent back: OK.

  And she flipped to her notes. 3. Therapy, she wrote. We’re going to call in the experts and do whatever they tell us to do.

  *

  ‘I think we’re here because, for a few years now, we’ve been damaged,’ Lou said to the therapist.

  ‘Damaged?’ Sara queried.

  ‘There are some things that have happened between us that I . . . I’ve struggled to come back from.’ Lou realised that in the white light of this office, she was saying this out loud for the first time.

  ‘We’ve been together fourteen years,’ Josh said. He wasn’t looking at her. ‘Every couple has stuff after fourteen years.’

  ‘Well, over the course of these sessions,’ Sara said, leaning forward from her straight-backed chair, where she sat with a notebook resting on her crossed knee, ‘we can begin to unpack some of that “stuff”, and how it’s impacting you as a couple and as individuals.’

  ‘I don’t think Josh thinks we should be here,’ Lou said. ‘Doesn’t therapy only work if you want to be here?’

  ‘I’d like to hear that from Josh,’ Sara said, and turned to look at him. Lou approved of this shift in focus. ‘Do you think you need to be here?’

  Josh didn’t say anything.

  I know you so well, Lou thought. I know how much you are hating this, being asked to talk about us. I know that right now your stomach will be in a knot and anger will be scratching in your throat and you’re just wishing you were in your guitar room, with your vinyl records and your three old six-strings and your garage band. And I’m glad. I’m glad you’re feeling uncomfortable about it, because I feel like I’m looking at our relationship up close all the time, and maybe it’s right that now you have to do the same.

  Josh rubbed his forehead and cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want our marriage to end,’ he said finally. ‘So if I need to be here to stop that from happening, I’ll be here.’

  Lou looked at the therapist. ‘Is that good enough?’ she asked. She desperately wanted Sara to say no, it wasn’t. She wanted Sara to say all the things to Josh that she wanted to say herself, but couldn’t. She wanted the therapist to tell him off.

  ‘It’s a good enough place to start,’ Sara said. And she reached around to her desk and picked up a piece of paper. ‘Here’s something I would really like you both to do.’

  She was going to email them a questionnaire, she said, and on it was a list of values. Words like Fun. Security. Family.

  ‘I want you each to rank these values into a top ten. It will give me a sense of what’s important to each of you, and what shared foundation we have to work with here.’ She looked at them both in turn. ‘It’s crucial that you’re honest.’

  Lou felt herself flinch, just a little.

  ‘And there’s one more thing I want you to think about over the next week.’

  Josh’s leg was shuddering now, jiggling up and down ever so slightly. His hands were resting on his knees and his fingers were gently tapping.

  ‘The “stuff” you’re talking about . . .’ Sara made little quote marks in the air around ‘stuff’. She had a very neat, neutral manicure, Lou noticed. She must be a very organised person. I wonder if she has kids? ‘You’re right, Josh – there’s stuff that every couple does have. But there’s also stuff that shouldn’t be dismissed. Significant stuff. In this room, in this hour, there’s no point in playing down the things that matter.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can tell what matters anymore,’ Josh muttered. ‘Little things are big things and big things barely get a mention.’

  Lou looked at him.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ Sara said. ‘Think about what matters. The milestones that have brought you two here. For example –’ and she began to count things off on her shiny-tipped fingers – ‘some couples have a trauma they can’t move past, an event of grief.’

  Josh looked down at his rapping fingers.

  ‘Or’ – second finger – ‘there’s been a significant breakdown in communication linked to a particular event. Or there’s been a significant breach of trust.’ Three fingers up. ‘That could be, but is not necessarily, an infidelity.’

  Lou looked down at her own hands. Her nails were a mess. Broken, short, bitten.

  ‘Has there been an infidelity?’

  Lou could feel Josh looking at her now. She knew that Sara would be taking this moment in, reading their faces, watching how Josh was looking at Lou. She took a breath in, as if she was about to speak, but she couldn’t. Lou’s mouth was suddenly so dry that her tongue felt heavy, unwieldy.

  Sara spoke first.

  ‘Those are the kind of things I want you to think about that we can unpack over our eight sessions together.’

  The therapist gently slapped her hands on her knees and stood up. ‘Please fill out the values sheet before our next session. And in the meantime, try to listen to each other, try not to blame.’

  Lou knew this was the signal for them to leave. Josh stood up, but he didn’t offer her a hand, which was what he always used to do, once.

  ‘There was –’ Lou began.

  ‘Next time, Lou,’ Josh said firmly, cutting her off. ‘We’ve got to go pick up the kids.’

  The therapist didn’t say anything, but Lou could feel Sara’s eyes on them as she got up and followed Josh to the door.

  Josh

  Josh wanted to put Creativity and Love at the top of his ‘values’ chart, but he knew Creativity would really piss Lou off, and he was stumped on the Love part because it was broken in two: Loved and Loving.

  Did he value feeling loved more than he valued giving love?

  Didn’t everyone?

  Josh was sitting in the guitar room (don’t call it the guitar room), at his old laptop, staring at the exercise from the therapist.

  It was Sunday night. The kids were asleep and he could hear Lou moving around downstairs, putting things in order for the week ahead of them. Tomorrow, they were going back to the therapist to look at their rankings. Josh felt like he was preparing for a test and almost all of the answers seemed wrong.

  World peace was on the list, for God’s sake. If he didn’t put that in the top ten, what kind of person was he? But, then, he’d been deeply irritated when Lou had tried to bring the depressing state of the universe into their therapy session last week. The world might be going to hell in a handbasket, as his mum would say, but that wasn’t what was wrong with their corner of it.

  There was a song in this, Josh thought, if he even wrote songs anymore. In all these words in front of him and how to place them in an order that made them say something profound about him and his life and his family.

  He’d wondered if Eva Bernard used the ‘values’ ranking method. When Lou had sent him the text that day about therapy, it was the idea of Eva Bernard that kept him from resisting.

  The last time Lou had suggested counselling, two years ago, he had said no – even though, on some level, he’d known they really needed it. Every fibre of his being was screaming against being held to account by a stranger. He’d been so full of shame and anger that he hadn’t wanted to give Lou the satisfaction of seeing him fall apart and knowing she was right to bring him here, and bring him down.

  That was how he’d seen it then. But now, his fear of what might happen in that room seemed petty in the face of Lou’s wild frustration. In fourteen years, she had never spoken to him the way she had at the rehearsal a week ago. He had realised, in that moment, just how bad things were. She was right: they needed help.

  So here he was, filling in his survey, uncharacteristically doing as he was told.

  Maybe it was all the late-night Eva videos he’d been studying.

  Maybe he was just tired.

  Maybe the concert last night and its aftermath had drained him of fucks to give.

  He looked at the values he’d ticked.

  Simplicity – To live life simply, with minimal needs

  Hope – To maintain a positive and o
ptimistic outlook

  Acceptance – To be accepted as I am

  Family – To have a happy, loving family

  I sound so boring, he thought, and pressed reset on his answers.

  *

  The previous night’s school fundraiser was held in the cavernous hall at the local leagues club, a place devoid of charm even with several hours spent on homemade decorations – pictures of the rock stars whose tunes were being played tonight had been hurriedly printed from home PCs and pasted to cardboard table-toppers and posters on the walls.

  Josh had arrived early to rehearse and help set up, and Lou had come later, having been relieved at home by a babysitter, one of the many teenagers in their suburb doing very well tonight.

  Parents were beginning to stream in, excited to be out, ordering fizzy wine by the bottle and jugs of frothy beer and plates of soggy schnitzels from the bar.

  Josh saw Lou instantly when he came out from the dressing room – really just a hastily constructed partition – in his outfit of black jeans, black T-shirt, leather jacket, biker boots. Skinny jeans at forty felt like a faintly ridiculous place to be, but Lou’s eyes, that steady look she gave him when she approved, told him he was pulling it off.

  ‘You look great,’ he said to her, and she did, in a black dress that tied around the back of her neck and showed her strong shoulders.

  The important thing was that she was here. Lou was wrong about why he was doing this, he told her and himself – she was wrong. And even though she might not want to be doing this, she was here. She had turned up for him. And Eva Bernard would say that was half the battle.

  ‘You do too,’ she said.

  They stood there for a second, smiling at each other.

  Then Dana had appeared, waving a jar of some kind of hair cream. ‘Let me slick it back, Josh!’ she said loudly. ‘It will make you look seventy-eight per cent cooler.’

  Josh saw Lou’s face flash with irritation, but she gave him a little nod before she turned back to the bar and Dana grabbed his hand to pull him backstage again.