by Marian Keyes
It was a humbling and enlightening experience to find out how wrong I had been. I was a deserted wife. Me, middle-class Claire.
Well, it would have been a humbling and enlightening experience if I hadn’t been feeling so bitter and angry and betrayed. What was I? Some kind of Tibetan monk?
But I did realize, in some funny way, through the self-pity and the self-righteousness, that someday, when all this was over, I might be a nicer person as a result of it, that I would be stronger and wiser and more compassionate.
But maybe not just yet.
“Your father is a bastard,” I whispered to my child.
The helpful gay priest jumped.
He must have heard me.
Within an hour we began the descent to Dublin Airport. We circled the green fields of north Dublin and, even though I knew that she couldn’t really see anything yet, I held my baby up to the window to give her her first view of Ireland.
It looked so different from the view of London we had just left behind. As I looked at the blue of the Irish sea and the gray mist over the green fields, I had never felt worse. I felt like such a failure. I had left Ireland six years before, full of excitement about the future. I was going to get a great job in London, meet a wonderful man and live happily ever after. And I had gotten a great job, I had met a wonderful man and I had lived happily ever after—well, at least for a while—but somehow it had all gone wrong and here I was back in Dublin with a humiliating sense of déjà vu.
But one major thing had changed.
Now I had a child. A perfect, beautiful, wonderful child. I wouldn’t have changed that for anything.
The helpful gay priest beside me looked very embarrassed as I cried helplessly. “Tough,” I thought. “Be embarrassed. You’re a man. You’ve probably made countless women cry like this too.”
I’d had more rational days.
He made a fairly lively exit once we landed. In fact, he couldn’t get off the plane fast enough. No offers to help me unstow my bags. I couldn’t blame him.
three
And so to the baggage pickup area!
I always find it such an ordeal.
Do you know what I mean?
The anxiety starts the minute I get to the carousel, when I suddenly become convinced that all the nice, mild-mannered people I shared a plane journey with have turned into nasty luggage thieves. That every single one of them is watching the carousel with the express purpose of stealing my bags.
I stand there with narrowed eyes and a suspicious face. One eye on the hatch where the bags come out and the other eye darting from person to person, trying to convey to them that I’m wise to their intentions. That they’ve picked the wrong person to mess with.
I suppose it would help matters slightly if I was one of those well-organ-ized people who somehow manage to stand near the start of the carousel.
But instead I’m always down at the far end, squinting and standing on tiptoe, trying to see what’s coming out of the hatch, and when I finally see my bag emerging I’m so afraid that someone will steal it that I can’t stand patiently and wait for the carousel to deliver it to me in due course. Instead I run to catch it before someone else does. Except that I usually find it impossible to breach the tightly knit cordon of other people’s baggage carts.
So my bag sails serenely past me and circumnavigates the carousel several times before I’m able to grab it.
It’s a nightmare! This time, to my surprise, I managed to secure myself a place quite near the hatch.
Maybe people were being nicer to me because I had a baby about my person.
I knew she’d come in useful.
So I waited at the carousel, trying to be patient, jostling with all the other people who had just gotten off the flight, buckling at the knees every so often as a fellow passenger delivered a killer blow to the back of my ankles with his cart.
I made eye contact with as many people as possible, hoping to convince them not to steal my bags. Isn’t that the kind of advice criminologists give you? You know the stuff I’m talking about. That if you’ve been taken hostage you must befriend your captor. Make eye contact with him, so that he realizes that you’re a human being and so is less likely to kill you.
Anyway. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Nothing happened for the longest time.
All eyes were trained on the little hatch for the first glimpse of our suitcases.
Nobody spoke. Nobody even dared to breathe. Then suddenly! The noise of a carousel starting up!
Great!
Except it wasn’t ours.
An announcement over the loudspeaker. “Will passengers recently arrived from London on Flight E1179 proceed to carousel number four to reclaim their baggage.”
This, in spite of the fact that the screen above carousel two had confidently assured us for the last twenty minutes that our baggage would shortly be making an appearance there.
So a mad scramble to carousel four. People shoving and pushing as though their lives depended on it. And this time no one seemed quite so concerned about the infant in my arms.
As a result I was at the very end of the new carousel.
And for a while I was all right.
Calm even.
I tried to look determinedly cheerful as one by one the people around me rescued their bags.
But when the only thing left on the carousel was a set of golf clubs that looked as if they had been there since the late seventies and they had passed me for the fourteenth time and my baby and I were the only human beings left in the arrivals hall and the tumbleweed had started blowing past me, it was finally time to read the writing on the wall.
“I knew they’d get me one day,” I thought, feeling sick. “It was only a matter of time. I bet it was that old lady with the rosary beads. It’s always the quiet ones.”
I began to run up and down, my baby in my arms, frantically searching for an official. Eventually I found a little office with two fairly jovial looking porters within.
“Come in, come in!” one of them invited me as I hovered uncertainly by the door. “What can we do for you on this fine wet Irish afternoon?”
I launched into my story of my stolen bags and car seat. I was nearly in tears again. I felt so victimized.
“Don’t worry, missus,” I was assured. “They’re not stolen. They’re only lost. I’ll find them for you. I’ve got a hot line to St. Anthony.”
And sure enough, about five minutes later he returned with all my luggage. “Are these yours, love?” he asked.
I assured him that they were.
“And you’re not going to Boston?”
“I’m not going to Boston,” I agreed as evenly as I could manage.
“Are you sure?” he asked doubtfully.
“Quite sure,” I promised.
“Well, someone seemed to think that you were, but never mind. Off you go now.” He laughed.
I thanked them and hurried toward the “Nothing to Declare” line.
I rushed through with my cart and my baby and my retrieved luggage.
My heart sank as one of the customs men stopped me.
“Easy, easy,” he said. “Where’s the fire? Have you anything to declare?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“What’s that you’ve got there?”
“It’s a baby.”
“Your baby?”
“Yes, my baby.”
My heart had nearly stopped beating. I hadn’t told James that I was leaving. But had he guessed that I would come here? Had he told the police that I had kidnapped our child? Were all the ports and airports being watched? Would they take my baby away from me? Would I be deported?
I was terrified.
“So,” the customs man continued, “you have nothing to declare but your genes.” He guffawed heartily.
“Oh yes, very funny,” I said limply.
“A great wit, our Mr. Wilde,” sai
d the customs man conversationally.
“A venerable gentleman.”
“Oh absolutely,” I agreed.
“You gave me a terrible fright.” I smiled at him.
He assumed a sheriff-type stance and drawl.
“That’s okay, ma’am.” He winked. “Jest doin’ mah job.”
It was nice to be home.
four
I rushed out into the arrivals lounge. On the other side of the barrier I could see my mother and father waiting for me. They looked smaller and older than they’d looked the last time I saw them, six months before. I felt so guilty. They were both in their late fifties and had worried about me from the day I was born. Well, from before the day I was born, if I’m to be quite accurate, because I was three weeks overdue and they thought they’d have to send a welcome committee in to get me.
I’ve heard of people being late for their own funeral but I started life with the distinction of being late for my own birth.
And they worried about me when I was six weeks old and had colic.
And when I was two years old and wouldn’t eat anything but canned peaches for an entire year. They worried about me when I was seven and doing really badly at school. And they worried about me when I was eight and doing really well at school and had no friends. They worried about me when I was eleven and broke my ankle. They worried about me when I went to a school dance and had to be brought home blind drunk by one of the teachers, when I was fifteen. They worried about me when I was eighteen and in my first year in college and never went to any classes. They worried about me when I was taking my finals and was never missing a class. They worried about me when I was twenty and split up with my first true love and lay in a darkened bedroom crying for two weeks. They worried about me when I gave up my job and went to London to work as a waitress when I was twenty-three.
And here I was nearly thirty, married with a baby of my own and they were still having to worry about me. I mean, it wasn’t very fair, was it? Just as they’d taken a big sigh of relief and thought, “Thank God, she’s managed to land herself a fairly respectable man, maybe we can let him worry about her from now on and get on with the business of worrying about her four younger sisters,” I had the audacity to turn around and say, “Sorry, folks, false alarm, I’m back and this one is worse than any of the other things I’ve forced you to worry about.”
No wonder they were looking a little bit gray and cowed.
“Oh thank God,” said my mother when she saw me. “We thought you’d missed the flight.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and burst into tears again. And we all hugged each other and they both cried when they saw my baby, their first grandchild.
I really would have to give her a name soon.
We negotiated the maze that is the parking lot in Dublin Airport. Proceedings were delayed slightly when my father attempted to leave by the prepaid exit, when he hadn’t, and all the cars backed up behind him had to reverse to let him out. He lost his temper slightly and so did another driver, but let’s not dwell on that.
When we got out on the road we drove for a while in silence. It was a very strange situation. My mother sat in the back with me and she held the baby and rocked her gently. I wished that I was still a baby and that my mother could hold me and make me feel so safe and that everything was going to be all right.
“So Unlucky Jim took off,” my father said abruptly.
“Yes, Dad,” I said tearfully.
My father had never really liked James. My father is the only man in a house full of women and he craves male company, someone to talk to about football and that kind of thing. James didn’t play enough rugby and knew far too much about cooking for his liking. It didn’t matter that my father did all the housework in our house, cooking was a different matter— women’s work, he called it. But the last thing he wanted was to see me unhappy.
“Now look, Claire,” he said in a voice that I recognized as the “I’m about to make a speech concerning emotional issues, I’m not used to doing it and I’m very uncomfortable doing it, but it has to be done and I do actually mean it” voice. “We’re your family and we love you and this is always your home. You and the baby can stay with us for as long as you like.
And…er…both your mother and I know how unhappy you are and if we can help in any way just let us know. Ah…er…right.” And with that he accelerated, mightily relieved that he’d gotten that out of the way.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, crying again. “I do know it.”
I was immensely grateful. It was wonderful knowing that they loved me. It was just that it was no substitute for losing a man who was my soulmate, my best friend, my lover, my one reliable thing in an unreliable world.
We finally reached home. It looked just the same. Why shouldn’t it? Life, against its better judgment, goes on. And it smelled just the same. It was so familiar, so comforting. We carried the bags and car seat up the stairs to the room that I shared with my sister Margaret all my life until I moved to London. (Margaret, was twenty-six, sporty, outgoing, living in Chicago, working as a paralegal, married to the only boyfriend she’d ever had.) The room looked really funny, because no one had stayed in it for so long. Some of Margaret’s shoes were on the floor, but covered in dust. Some of her old clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe. It was like some kind of shrine to our teenage years.
I flung a few of the bags on the floor, I set up the car seat and put the baby in it, I put the bottle warmer with the picture of the cow jumping over the moon on the side on the dressing table, I sat on the bed and kicked off my shoes, I put my books on the shelves, I left my makeup bag spilling over on the bedside table. And in no time at all the place looked like a pigsty.
There, that was miles better.
“So, who’s here?” I asked Mum.
“Well, just us and Dad at the moment,” she said. “Helen is at college, she should be home later. God alone knows where Anna is. I haven’t seen her for days.”
Anna and Helen were my two youngest sisters. They were the only ones still living at home.
My mother sat with me while I fed the baby. After I had burped the baby and put her back to sleep, my mother and I sat quietly on the bed, saying nothing. The rain stopped and the sun came out. The smell of the wet garden came in through the open window, and the sound of the breeze blowing through the branches of the trees. It was a peaceful February evening.
“Will you eat something?” she finally asked.
I shook my head.
“But you must eat, especially now that you’ve got the baby to look after.
You have to keep strong. Can I make you some soup?”
I winced involuntarily. “No, really, Mum, I’m fine.”
Perhaps I’d better explain. The ability to cook skips a generation. I could cook. Ergo, my daughter wouldn’t be able to. God love her. What kind of start in life was she getting? And by the same token my mother couldn’t cook.
Nightmarish memories of family dinners came flooding back to me. Was I out of my mind? What the hell had I come home for? Did I really want to starve to death?
The next time you have to lose a lot of weight very quickly—that two-week beach vacation? your sister’s wedding? a date with the office hunk?—don’t bother joining Weight Watchers, or try to subsist on Lean Cuisine, or fiddle around with powdered meals. Just come and stay in our house for a couple of weeks and insist that Mum cook for you.
Seriously, there’s plenty of space; you can have Rachel’s room. You’ll be skin and bone at the end of the two weeks. Because no matter how hungry you are you still won’t be able to bring yourself to eat a thing my mother makes.
I’m amazed that none of us was ever hospitalized for malnutrition when we were younger.
My siblings and I would be summoned for our evening meal. We would all sit down and stare silently at the plates in front of us for a few perplexed moments. Finally one of us would speak. “Any ideas?�
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“Would it be chicken?” says Margaret doubtfully, poking it tentatively with her fork.
“Oh no, I thought it was cauliflower,” says Rachel, the vegetarian, rushing off to gag.
“Well, whatever it is, I’m not touching it,” says Helen. “At least you know what you’re getting with cornflakes,” and she leaves the table to get herself a bowl.
So by the time my mother sat down at the table and told us what it was we would all have released ourselves from the dinner table on our own recognizance and would be foraging around in the kitchen cupboards trying to find something vaguely edible.
“Margaret,” my mother would call, knowing that Margaret was the most dutiful of all of us, “wouldn’t you even try it?”
And Margaret, being a good girl, would lift a silver to her lips.
“Well?” my mother would ask, hardly daring to breathe.
“You wouldn’t give it [whatever it was!] to the dog,” Margaret would reply. Honesty was another of her virtues, alongside obedience and bravery.
So after several years of tearful evening meals and ever-increasing breakfast cereal bills, my mother, to everyone’s eternal relief, decided to stop cooking altogether.
So, if any of her daughters or her husband told her that they were hungry, she’d take them silently by the hand and into the kitchen. She’d say, “Behold the upright freezer full of frozen convenience foods,” and flinging wide the freezer door, with several flourishes, exhort them to survey the myriad delights within. Then she’d cross the kitchen with the would-be diner and say, “All hail the microwave. My advice to you is to befriend these two machines. You will find them invaluable in your fight against hunger in this house.”
So now you realize why I was so reluctant to take her up on her offer of soup.
But the wonderful thing about my mother’s not cooking or doing any housework is that it meant that she had plenty of time for the truly important things in life. She watched an average of six soap operas a day and read about four novels a week, so she was expertly placed to give her daughters advice on their broken romances.
