by Leah McLaren
“Are you ready for FUNWORLD?” Nick booms in the supervillain voice. The children look unsure, so he casts around for an opening. Beyond the weight-guessing contest and the sledgehammer strength test, he sees a game he’s sure to win. “Who wants a PET?” he says.
The twins cheer as Maya’s expression clouds, but it’s too late—Nick is halfway across the grounds, twins trailing after him like groupies. There it is, his favourite fall fair game: the fishbowl toss. The twins pause for a moment, hand in tiny hand, and stare at an enormous table laid out in a precarious pyramid of teapot-sized fishbowls. Inside each clear glass bowl swims a single exotic-looking fish. They are beautiful and serene—fancy, feathery fins in gleaming jewel tones. There must be at least a hundred of them, each in its own lonely orb. It looks to Nick like a dubious conceptual art exhibit. In a gallery it would make his heart sink, but here at the county fair it fills him with joy.
By the time Maya catches up, Nick’s spent eight red tickets on four Ping-Pong balls—one for each of them. The twins clutch their balls to their chests. Isla presses hers to her lips and closes her eyes in silent prayer.
A mustachioed man in a dotted bow tie explains the rules of the game in an auctioneer’s holler: “Buy a ball, take a toss, win a fish! One ball, one throw! Get one in the drink, take home your very own pet! Goldfish at the bottom, fancies at the top! Buy a ball, take a toss, win a fish!”
Maya goes first. Her ball bounces off the side of the table, not even touching a fishbowl. She steps back with a self-mocking cringe and encourages Foster to step up. Nick is glad to see that he aims high—for the fish on the upper level—but is less pleased when the ball bounces off the first bowl and then falls to the lower level, spinning around the rim of a goldfish’s home before skittering off to the side. Nick slaps his son’s shoulder, muttering at the injustice of life, as Foster’s face crumples into a sob.
Isla goes next, releasing a gentle underhand toss that to everyone’s delight sails through the air, falls cleanly in the drink with an almost imperceptible plunk and floats above the head of a tiny, shimmering creature. The mustachioed carny, who’s been scratching at a crossword until now, perks up and, with a flourish of his stained white glove, plucks the Ping-Pong ball off the surface of the water and hands the winning bowl to Isla. Her eyes go wide with joy, and she jumps up and down, sloshing water all over her shoes and causing the fish to leap up and almost out of the bowl.
“Would you like a bag?” asks the carny, and before anyone can respond he’s pouring the fish and its water into a clear plastic sandwich bag, which he secures with a twist-tie. Isla beams and Foster begins to moan. Maya gives Nick a look that says, Thanks for the awesome idea. Nick attempts to distract his son by sliding the last ball through his line of vision with two fingers like a magician.
“Don’t worry, Fozza. Daddy’s going to win one for you now! Are you ready? On the count of three. One, two …” Nick takes his toss, and they all watch the ball arc up and fall. It plinks off the side of the bowl he was aiming for and drops into one he wasn’t.
Suddenly the mustache is upon them. “We have a DOUBLE WINNER! Congratulations, sir. You are now the proud owner of two very rare and exotic VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FISH!” He pours the second fish into a bag and hands it to Nick, who marvels at the blue-and-green scales glimmering in the afternoon light.
Foster stares at it open-mouthed. “Is it really mine, Daddy? Really?”
“Only if you promise to take good care of it.”
The man in the bow tie bends down and taps Foster on the nose. “Mind you don’t put those two in with the rest of your aquarium,” he says. “Vietnamese fighters like to be on their own. They have a tendency to get a bit vicious with company. Territorial little buggers.”
Foster nods solemnly and clutches the bag to his chest, dangling it in front of himself from time to time to peer at the pet inside.
They walk around the fair like this for a while, the children unsteadily clutching their sloshing fish bags, staring at the games kiosks and the noisy merry-go-round with its wild-eyed horses humping up chipped plastic poles. Nick is surprised when Maya suggests taking the twins onto the haunted house ride, a big black box covered in cotton cobwebs and fake blood. A toy train filled with uncomfortable-looking teenagers moves down a track into the howling mouth of a dodgy Edvard Munch Scream replica. A dark, dusky pop song plays over the ghostly sound effects. It takes Nick a moment to place it: “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.
“Won’t they be scared?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says. “But it’s fun to be scared sometimes. Isn’t that the whole point?”
He looks down at his children and gently lifts away each bagged fish. It isn’t hard. They don’t have much of a grip. “Go with Mommy,” he says, handing Maya the stack of tickets from his breast pocket.
There isn’t much of a line, and soon enough they are being tucked roughly into their seats by a fat guy in a Metallica T-shirt who slams a foam-covered safety bar down over their laps and orders them to keep their hands and feet in the cart. As the ride jerks forward, Maya, who is sitting between the twins, trying to hold their hands under the restraints, looks back at him and smiles a tight little smile. He can suddenly see she is doing this to please him and the effect is like a tourniquet on his throat. He feels a sudden compulsion to throw himself on the tracks and order the metalhead to remove his family from the ride at once. But instead he just stands there. The music starts up—Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”—and Vincent Price’s famous laugh is all can Nick can hear as the train slips into the howling mouth of the painted ghost.
He waits there, a fish hanging from each hand like a surrealist weighing scale, waiting for his wife and children to reappear. When they do finally materialize, several minutes later, cart herky-jerking out of a papier mâché cave strewn with bouncing rubber bats, he finds himself waving like an idiot, fish bags sloshing and leaking over his coat. But they don’t see him. Their heads—pale hair, delicate faces, so familiar to Nick in both individual isolation and mutual resemblance—are all fixed forward, eyes wide, bracing for the next scare. As the cart slips, twists and rattles around the corner, then plunges them back into darkness, he feels a sharp kick to his mid-zone. He wants to go with them. To follow his family into the void so he can protect them from its depths, from the shrieking witches and rattling skeletons, from the horror of the merciless disembodied laughter. He wants all these things, and yet of course he does none of them.
When the ride is over, the twins bound off the cart and over the brown grass toward him, fleece-padded arms stretched out to reclaim their fish.
“Daddy! Daddy! At first I was scared of the ghost, but I touched it and it wasn’t real!” Isla tells him.
Foster is more subdued. He doesn’t look Nick in the eye, rubbing his face in a manner that indicates there may have been recent tears. He takes back his fish solemnly and peers into the bag to make sure all’s well.
Maya brings up the rear, shoving kid detritus into her handbag—a sippy cup, a toy car, a stray pink mitten. She is three feet away, almost touching distance, when she stops, looks up at Nick and smiles. It’s the smile of someone coming home after an extended ordeal, the smile of returning to safety. Nick finds himself taking her hand as they walk, something he hasn’t done in years. The light has a honey-coloured tinge to it, though it’s just past two. The days are getting shorter, nighttime creeping into day. There is a smell of fried fat in the air, and soon the twins start jostling and asking for food. Nick is worried that if he doesn’t find them something, there will be a blood-sugar crash. He looks around for something—anything—that might meet Maya’s exacting standards (a falafel? pretzels?) and sees only cotton candy, swirling ice cream and cages being plunged into bubbling fryers.
“Let’s hit the road, kids,” Maya says. “There’s lots of food at home.”
The children look devastated. “Do we have to go? We love it here!”
Nick shrugs and
reaches deep into the pockets of his oilskin coat. “We could go home or … we could have THIS.”
He pulls out two enormous shrink-wrapped banana–nut bars he pilfered from the pantry before leaving. The twins, who have never seen their father produce anything from his pockets apart from cash and keys, cheer at his newfound powers. They fall upon the bars like starving puppies, mouths and fingers streaked with carob.
When Nick looks at Maya, she’s staring across the field at the corn dog stand. “You saved the day,” she says—a little flatly, he thinks.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” she replies. “Someone had to.”
CHAPTER 10
Maya is pre-packing for a holiday. A proper grown-up week away, with beaches and cocktails and sunsets and a huge hotel bed with creamy sheets and fluffy towels and all the rest of the clichéd holiday stuff you’d find in a deliciously cheesy karaoke video. Their flight isn’t for more than a week, but Maya can barely suppress a grin as she folds her stringiest of string bikinis (unworn for half a decade) into quarters and presses it tightly in her suitcase alongside the Kenyan sarong, three prize-winning novels and a large spritzer of Swiss-made SPF 50. It will be the first time she and Nick have been away on their own since the disastrous pre-booked heli-skiing vacation they took to Switzerland when she was seven months pregnant (not a memory she wants to relive). It’s not just a holiday—it’s a surprise holiday. A trip to a secret location, planned specially and exclusively by Nick for her birthday. She knows they’re going somewhere hot for seven nights, but that’s it. “I’ll take care of everything,” he’d said over dinner at home three nights ago, and she’d had to fake yawn and look at the ceiling to avoid tearing up—not because of the surprise (which was actually a bit unnerving) but because he was being so nice and she really wasn’t used to it.
Over the past couple of weeks, ever since the date night and the visit to the fall fair, Maya has seen a strange transformation in her relationship with Nick. It isn’t just that he’s changed—it’s as if some old dysfunctional part of him has been extracted and replaced. A transplant of sorts. The new old Nick is familiar but unnaturally so. At times it feels to Maya as if the past five years never happened. The company, the twins, his success, the end of her career and their slow, glacial drift into parenthood have vanished and they are their younger, unencumbered selves again. The man before her now is wiped clean, almost eerily so. She can sense his urgency to make things right and is sympathetic to it (how could she not be?), but she can also feel how little he wants to talk about where it all went wrong. Every time she tries (albeit clumsily) to bring up their problems—the years of silent resentment—he heads her off with appreciative comments or upbeat talk of the kids. She can’t make him a cup of tea for the compliments it inspires. (“Baby, have I told you you’re a prize?”) Before she can get back on the topic of What Happened to Our Marriage, he’s off—making all the right noises, doing all the right moves—until she abandons the impulse to pick apart whatever problems they once had. And perhaps he is right to do so. Nick seems so enthralled by their quick recovery that to retroactively diagnose the illness feels a bit … petty. What’s the point of dwelling in the miserable past when the future is suddenly so bright?
In her most hopeful moments, Maya thinks it’s a return to the natural order. Without discussion, they’ve resumed many of their rituals from happier times. He brings her coffee in bed every morning. And he gets home earlier too. She waits until he arrives so they can have a glass of wine together—just one each—and then she makes dinner for the two of them. The twins, after a bit of initial caterwauling, are now sleeping in their own beds on the third floor (Velma helped ease the transition by staying over a couple of nights), which frees up space for Nick in the marital bed. Maya still nurses them before they go to sleep, but without them in bed, the night feeds have stopped altogether. At first she was almost disappointed that they didn’t cry out for her, but soon she came to realize the benefit: a full night’s sleep, something she hasn’t experienced in years. And what a difference it makes! She no longer wakes up each morning with an anvil of dread pressing down on her chest. This, she realizes, is what it feels like to be rested. But most importantly, Maya just feels different around her husband. Not just warmer but more herself. She is interested in him and—more surprising—feels interesting to him, for the first time in a long while.
It’s amazing, she thinks, how difficult it is for us to believe things may change. When we’re in the bad place, it always seems we’ll be there forever. But it’s in fact possible that bad places that once were good can be restored, making the bad times seem like no more than a blip. It’s amazing how easy it is for her to revert to seeing herself as happily married. She feels a bit like a naturally thin person who, having gained a lot of weight over several years, has gone on a successful crash diet and emerged suddenly skinny again. The relief of returning to her real marriage at last.
There is, however, one missing component, and that is the sex. Now that they’re sharing a bed again, they are being more physically affectionate (Nick actually scooted across the mattress and gave her a kiss on the shoulder one morning last week), but this proximity hasn’t translated into actual conjugal relations. It’s not that she doesn’t want to have sex with him—it’s more that she feels she’s forgotten how. After the horror of the botched blow job, Maya opted for a more organic approach. She was hoping that all this loving behaviour would naturally result in … well, the ultimate of loving behaviours—that is, the sweaty, stinky, dirty-talking kind. Yet so far, nothing. This, in part, is why she is so keenly looking forward to their holiday. Just the two of them. No twins. A change of scene—ideally one involving an ocean breeze and a strong rum punch—might be just the thing to coax the skies to open up and end the dry spell.
With this in mind, Maya presses a number of flimsy, filmy things into her suitcase—complicated garments with florets and ribbons and hooks and eyes—things she hasn’t thought of, let alone removed from their tissue paper, for years. Lifting her robe, she touches the small pouch of skin just above her pubic bone, where the surgeons cut her open to pull out the twins. It’s still numb more than three years later, and she can feel where her muscles pulled apart and had to knit back together. The scar is nearly invisible now—the surgeon on duty told her that since the low-rise denim trend, they take care to make such incisions as discreet as possible—but the fact of it being there, and the great change it marks, has altered Maya’s perception of her body more than she likes to admit. No amount of exercise and dieting will change that. It’s as if her body spent the first thirty-three years of its life existing primarily for her own pleasure, and then one day it grew up and put away childish things. It made a baby. Two babies. And then it served as their exclusive food source for months, rose at one and three and five in the morning at the sound of their cries, held them and bounced them two at a time, and generally ran itself ragged in a constant effort to keep them alive. Now that they’d survived, it was time to get back to the pleasure principle. People had been telling her this for years. Every lifestyle magazine seemed to feature a story declaring it. Bradley, the trainer turned life coach, never tired of repeating it. Apparently it was time to have some me time. She’d heard it all before, but she was only now starting to believe there might be a time when her body’s primary function wasn’t serving the needs of the twins.
Maya lets her robe slip to the floor with a swish. She stares at herself in the full-length mirror. It’s difficult, but she tries to be as forgiving as possible while also being empirically self-aware. This is what she sees:
Pale blonde hair streaked silver, shoulder-length, unbrushed.
Reasonably decent skin. Some crinkles around the eyes and a vague hint of peach-pit cleavage, but nothing a bit of deep moisturizer and concealer can’t fix.
Not officially tall at five foot eight, but tallish. (And six feet in the gold heels.)
Narrow sh
oulders and small, almost anxious-looking breasts. Could pass for girlish but for the dark, distended nipples.
Square, jutting hip bones. Hips made for carrying a sack of potatoes. Or a toddler. Or both. But usually the latter.
Pokey knees separating slender thighs from thickly muscled calves.
Long, narrow feet with knobby former-child-ballerina toes.
A face she finds hard to assess, it’s so familiar. Long of chin and wide of eye. A face that wears both makeup and the lack of it well. One that keeps something crucial back instead of giving itself away at first meet.
She curls the corners of her mouth and feels the superficial mood enhancement that comes with even the most forced of grins. She will admit what everyone from her mother to countless construction workers has told her is true: she is prettier when she smiles.
Maya traces her fingertips along her throat, over her breasts, across her rib cage and down her hips, and she feels a familiar shiver of delight. The pleasure-seeker is returning to herself. I am a happily married woman going on a holiday with my husband, she thinks. This is a perfectly normal thing to do. My children will survive a week without me. And it feels right and true. Like an actress in one of those ads for creamy desserts, she looks at her reflection and mouths the words “You’re worth it.” Then she lets out an involuntary half-mad hoot.
She is suddenly conscious of the time—her meeting with Gray is in less than an hour—and so she does something she hasn’t done in years: skips her usual breakfast of steel-cut oats with flax and pumpkin seeds, which takes twenty-five minutes to prepare, and has a piece of toast instead. She smears it with sugarless fruit compote and takes it out to the car, where she eats it while humming along to Velma’s Portuguese pop radio.
