by Helen Brown
She grabbed Jake by the shoulders and shook him savagely. Somewhere in the background, a door clicked. Vanessa and Kerry had made a discreet exit, leaving the peace lily as sole evidence of their presence.
Gordon lumbered over to the kitchen and stooped over the sink. He unravelled the rinse hose and studied it as if it might contain the solution to global warming.
Lisa the lunatic pummelled Jake’s chest with her fists. Then a giant emu wafted over and peeled her off Jake and enveloped her in its wings.
Maxine’s muscles were strong and tense as Lisa sobbed into her neck. Her earrings jangled, and Lisa smelt champagne and Dior’s Poison on her breath.
‘Get out, you bastard!’ Maxine yelled.
Lisa was suddenly six years old again, in the schoolyard. Big sister Maxine was shielding her, throwing sticks at Colin the bully from the butcher shop until he slunk around the corner of the bike sheds.
Jake stood frozen, wild-eyed, like a mouse about to be devoured by a snake.
‘And take your lousy flowers with you!’ screeched the crazed woman Lisa now recognised as herself, as she tore roses out of the basket and hurled them in Jake’s face. A sane part of her was grateful the roses were thornless—not that she would have minded making him bleed.
Jake scuttled into the bedroom.
‘Liar!’ she bellowed, clawing his back as he passed. ‘I hate you!’
Jake dragged a weekend bag from the closet and stuffed it frantically with socks and underpants.
‘When did it start?’ Lisa spat at his bald patch.
Jake pretended not to hear.
‘When?’
‘Dunno . . .’ he mumbled. ‘Nine months ago or so.’
She did the calculation. That would’ve been three months after her surgery, around the time of her last book launch. Belle had been all smiles as she waited in line for Lisa to sign a copy of Charlotte, the first in her trilogy called Three Sisters. ‘Such a brilliant idea to write historical romances based on the Brontë sisters,’ Belle had snivelled, all teeth and fake diamond earrings.
Hang on a minute. What if they weren’t fake? Maybe Belle’s earrings were the cause of Jake’s latest economy drive restricting them each to one latte a day. Anyway, Cow Belle (that’s what Lisa was going to call her from now on) swore she couldn’t wait to read about Emily Brontë in her next book Three Sisters: Emily. She’d then scurried off to screw the author’s husband. Nice work, Cow Belle.
‘Do you love her?’ Lisa asked, her voice steeped in ice.
Jake stopped and stared at the carpet.
Soon after the book launch, Jake had gone away for a two-week conference, which, come to think of it, was suspiciously long. Now Lisa scoffed at her own stupidity. She should’ve been savvy enough to check his emails. But she’d trusted him so naively she hadn’t even bothered to memorise his password.
Then there was the condom-packet-in-the-toiletry-bag incident. She’d been rummaging for dental floss one morning when the silvery little sachet brushed her fingers. It was strange, because she hadn’t had a period for months. When she showed it to him he blushed before swearing it was left over from ages ago and tossing it in the bin.
Why did she always believe him?
‘I said, do you love her?’ Her tone was dangerous now.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied quietly.
‘You don’t know?!’
‘There are two sorts of loving,’ he said after a long silence. ‘Having and desiring. I have you . . . but . . .’
‘You desire her!’
Lisa galloped to the living room, and grabbed what was left of the flower basket. Back in the bedroom, Jake was on his knees jamming T-shirts into his bag. With a rush of satisfaction, she emptied the remaining roses and the contents of the well-filled vase over his head.
Jake stood up and brushed the water off his suit. Then he picked up his bag, rearranged his hair and ran. Lisa chased him as far as the living room, but he was too nimble on his feet. He slid out the door towards the elevator and was gone.
As she stood panting, gazing at her open-mouthed guests, Lisa understood exactly what she was having—a birthday ending with a zero.
Chapter 2
Lisa woke safe and warm inside a cocoon of sheets. Judging by the grey frame of light around the curtains, the sun—or what there was of it—had already dragged itself out of bed. Her tongue slid around the comforting shape of her mouthguard. According to the dentist, she’d been grinding her teeth at night. Lisa was pretty sure his insistence that she be fitted with a mouthguard had more to do with upgrading his Audi than her pummelling her teeth to powder. Lisa ‘teamed’ the mouthguard with a pair of ear plugs—Jake’s snoring wasn’t getting any quieter. She’d put them in the night before out of habit—and to assure herself nothing was going to change.
She quietly fished out the mouthguard and ear plugs and slid them into their boxes. Then she rolled over and reached for the familiar shape of Jake’s head. But his pillow was as vacant as the wastelands of Antarctica. Lisa curled up in the foetal position and sobbed into her pillow—quietly, so as not to disturb Maxine and Gordon or the kids. It was her favourite pillow, so old it probably harboured superbugs. She’d tried to throw it out, but always stopped at the garbage chute and carried it back to bed. Stuffed with meagre lumps of feathers and down, it was anorexic compared to Jake’s anti-snoring plank. But it was a forgiving object, snuggling into the folds of her face without any attempt to improve her posture. Now tears drained into the feathers, reducing them to a soggy swamp.
When she could cry no more, she rolled on her back and ran her hand over the chasm her left breast had once inhabited. The surgeon had offered her reconstruction at the same time as the mastectomy. The mastectomy itself would take only forty minutes to perform, while the reconstruction would drag on for seven hours or more. After hours trawling the internet and talking with friends who knew people who’d had reconstructions and those who hadn’t, she’d decided to bide her time. It wouldn’t be long before you could take a pill to grow a new breast.
Giving an excellent impersonation of a supportive husband, Jake had said he was happy to go along with whatever she wanted. She’d felt a surge of affection when he said appearances made no difference to him. And anyway, the surgeon assured them she could have the reconstruction further down the track. She’d still not got around to it and now doubted she ever would. After all, Lisa had never been burdened with vanity. Her mother, Ruby, had made sure of that. (‘Tidy yourself up, Lisa . . . Cut back on the pastries, girl. They’ll be calling you thunder thighs . . . Run a comb through your hair!’) The scar ran in a horizontal line across her torso like a ruler marking the end of a school essay.
Though Jake had claimed it didn’t worry him, he’d never expressed interest in or even curiosity about her wound. During lovemaking, he’d lavished attention on her right breast, stroking and kissing (never sucking, because that would set her on a post-coital jag about the patheticness of grown men sucking breasts). He’d avoided her left side as if it was an abandoned neighbourhood turned dangerous.
She couldn’t believe how he’d lulled her into thinking their marriage was fine. For all his talk, he was just another primitively wired male who wanted a woman with two C cups. Clearly Jake was going through some kind of man-opause. Surely it would just be a matter of time before he’d come to his senses and beg to come back.
A vacuum cleaner hummed on the other side of Lisa’s bedroom door. The thought of facing up to her guests was almost unbearable. Still, how often did she get the chance to see her kids? So after showering and dressing, she padded out into the living room.
Maxine was hoovering up the previous night’s wreckage. Ted was in the kitchen, wrangling a garbage bag. They both stopped and looked up at her as if she was a piece of crystal that might shatter at the slightest movement.
Gordon emerged from the guest room to fiddle with the coffee machine while Maxine assailed her bedroom with the vacuum cleaner. Lisa
offered to help, but Maxine insisted she sit down and relax.
The black leather sofa squeaked as Lisa flopped on it. The buttons dug into her backside. Everything about the apartment reeked of Jake. He used to go along with her love of what she called ‘soul objects’. New Guinea masks and paint-peeled Buddhas took her back to the freedom of her travelling days. All that changed when he started taking banking seriously and Jake’s tastes changed. In the end it had been simpler to let him move ‘her stuff’ into her study and succumb to his obsession with ‘clean lines’. Now glass table-tops and piles of yachting magazines lent the apartment the air of a medical waiting room.
Lisa ran her eye over Jake’s collection of second-tier Fauvists. Given the choice, she’d have preferred Ted and Portia’s kindergarten daubs. Life-sized stainless-steel nudes stood in a corner, entwined in an outlandish position the sculptor had called the Lustful Leg. She’d tried to replicate the posture for Jake’s pleasure a couple of times. Flinging her leg back over her shoulder had, however, made something in her hip lock in a sharp spasm of agony. As for the white baby grand piano that only Ted knew how to play, she pretended it wasn’t there.
She wondered how she’d let herself slide into such an unlikely setting. Had she been too engrossed with the children, or working too much? She remembered feeling tired a lot of the time, perhaps even borderline depressed. She was a terrible banker’s wife, anyway. Her hair wasn’t blonde-bobbish enough, her laugh too deep and brazen.
The coffee machine hissed and farted, enveloping Gordon in a cloud of steam. It was Jake’s pride and joy, though it had never produced a decent cappuccino in its life. Gordon presented her with a pool of muddy liquid inside a mug emblazoned with a malevolent snowman. Happy Holidays curled in red letters around the rim. The mug usually lurked at the back of the top shelf. Christmas was more than two months away. Proof the dishwasher needed emptying.
To fill vacant air space, Gordon asked how her writing was going. Did people ask plumbers about their drains? Part One of her Brontë trilogy was selling okay, but she’d sunk into a boggy patch with Three Sisters: Emily, which was still not much more than a list of bullet points. She’d been a fool to sign a contract promising to have the manuscript in by March, and now the deadline was approaching with the menace of an asteroid about to collide with Earth.
Portia emerged ashen, her pale hair a mass of tangles. Lisa ached to scoop it into a tidy French plait the way she used to when Portia was six. Her own mother would’ve had no qualms about assailing her adult daughter with a comb. Lisa curled her fingers into fists. Every generation has to be an improvement on the last. If she was going to learn anything from Ruby’s mistakes it was to control the French-plait compulsion.
Maxine put on a pair of wooden earrings the size of Samoa and a gold vinyl jacket (‘You New Yorkers call this autumn?’ Ted reminded her the correct term was fall). Then she spread a map of Manhattan over the piano lid.
Lisa knew what Maxine was up to. When they were little girls lying awake at night listening to their parents yelling down the hall, Maxine would play ‘Let’s Pretend Nothing’s Happening’. As their mother’s voice rose to a series of barks through the walls, Maxine would become a princess, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Lisa had to be the princess’s servant, of course. Or the Scarecrow.
Tight-lipped with denial, Maxine set about organising everyone’s day. The girls would go on a retail-therapy binge while the boys walked Brooklyn Bridge.
Gordon’s face rose like the red planet from behind the coffee machine. He wasn’t sure he’d brought the right shoes. Maxine patted his wine gut and assured him she’d packed his trainers.
After a mind-numbing morning traipsing through shops, the three women stopped at a French bakery. Before sinking her teeth into a croissant, Maxine offered to cancel the cruise so she and Gordon could stay on and ‘provide support’. Lisa smiled at the image of Maxine as a giant brassiere.
When Lisa declined, Maxine’s relief was palpable. ‘I talked to Ted this morning,’ she continued, dabbing her lips. ‘He’s willing to change his flights and keep you company for a week or two.’
Lisa felt like a starving bear presented with a plate of meat. To have Ted all to herself would be . . . But his exams!
‘Never mind. I’ll be fine,’ she said, patting her daughter’s knee.
Portia stood up and flounced to the Ladies’. Heads turned as the gaunt goddess wafted past in a trail of golden hair. Lisa checked the menu for the number of calories in the three dandelion leaves Portia had chomped through (approximately seventeen). It was hard to imagine what was going through the child’s brain. Maybe she was traumatised by her parents’ behaviour.
‘Don’t worry about that one,’ Maxine said, sinking her fork into a perfectly formed strawberry tart.
Lisa guessed from Maxine’s tone that Portia had refused the opportunity to linger in New York to bathe her mother’s wounds. Maybe through some distorted logic she’d decided to side with Jake.
An unwelcome image of Jake sprang into her head. He was running his hands over Cow Belle’s buttocks while he licked her pointy Chrysler Building nipples. His hand drifted to the mound between Cow Belle’s legs, waxed bald as a newborn’s. Ostensibly, Jake had moved into a hotel in Chelsea, but everyone knew he was down in Soho asphyxiating himself between that woman’s legs.
Exhaustion washed over Lisa. She was desperate to go home, but Maxine had other ideas. With the compassion of a slave-ship captain, she urged them on to the Empire State Building and then to see the skaters at the Rockefeller Centre.
When the family finally reassembled at the apartment, Lisa imagined Jake and Cow Belle knee to knee in a darkened restaurant. He’d be ordering champagne, the real French stuff. His hand would be gliding up Belle’s thigh.
While Maxine corralled Gordon into the guest room to help squeeze Macy’s shopping bags into their already overstuffed suitcases, Ted and Portia sat on the sofa like a pair of orphans. Portia wound her hair around her fingers and crossed her skinny legs. Someone, or thing, had taken a razor to her black jeans and slashed them to pieces. Ted made urgent little stabs at his phone.
‘So when will I be seeing you two again?’ Lisa asked in as breezy a tone as she could muster.
Portia picked at a thread dangling from one of the slashes in her pants. ‘I’ve got to get home to LA,’ she said.
LA was home?
‘We’ve set up a theatre group,’ Portia continued. ‘We’re writing a play. They really need me.’
And Lisa didn’t? ‘What about Thanksgiving?’ she asked.
‘That’s close to opening night,’ Portia sighed. ‘I thought this visit could double as Thanksgiving.’
Thanks a bundle, thought Lisa. She turned to Ted. ‘So I’ll keep the spare room for you next year?’
Ted’s dark hair draped over his forehead. She’d seen a photo of her father around the same age, and with his long face and soulful eyes, Ted was almost an exact replica—apart from the darker colouring. The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Actually, I’m thinking of staying on in Australia,’ he said.
A concrete ball settled in Lisa’s stomach. ‘Oh. I guess you’ll want to fit in a month or two’s surfing before you come back,’ she said.
Ted let his phone tumble nonchalantly out of his hand. The brown checks in his shirt brought out the colour of his eyes. ‘I’ve had a job offer,’ he said.
‘You mean you’re going to stay on selling mushroom burgers at the market?’
Ted shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s an architecture firm. They like my environmental approach.’
He was staying in Australia? ‘That’s great,’ she lied. Lisa wanted to weep at the thought of Ted stranded indefinitely on the other side of the world. Still, it was hard enough for graduates to find work anywhere these days. ‘You’ll be based in Melbourne?’
Ted nodded, his colour deepening. Lisa sensed something else going on. He’d taken out scores of girls, hundreds for all she knew, but
he dumped them so quickly he was showing all the signs of being commitment phobic. Maybe he’d at last met the One. For all her disappointment about Ted’s decision to stay in Australia, Lisa’s interest was piqued.
The next morning, Lisa’s guests stood hunched against the cold, their bags scattered on the sidewalk while she tried to hail a cab. Pedro the doorman had seemed disappointed when she turned down his offer to do it. No doubt he would’ve been quicker at catching a driver’s eye, but her Australian upbringing still left her uncomfortable when people performed menial tasks on her behalf. Cab after cab sailed past. They were either busy or ignoring her.
‘Don’t worry, Mom,’ Portia said when one finally pulled in. ‘I was the only one in my friendship group whose parents were still together. We’re normal now.’ Portia always spoke of her Friendship Group with worshipful respect.
‘Look after yourself,’ Lisa said, fighting the urge to pull Portia to her chest and never let go.
Portia flicked her hair and slid into the back of the cab with the effortless ease of youth. The child-woman hadn’t heard a thing. White wires in her ears sealed her off in her own world. Inside her head Portia was already back among the hipsters of Venice Beach.
Maxine rested her hands on Lisa’s shoulders and planted a kiss on each cheek. ‘You take care,’ she said in a big-sisterly tone before climbing into the front seat next to the driver.
Gordon flashed Lisa an awkward smile. He was limping from yesterday’s walk. Brooklyn Bridge had turned out to be longer than it looked. Leaning forward, he aimed his lips at Lisa’s cheek but collided with her chin. Blushing, he retreated into the shadows of the back seat.
Saying goodbye to Ted made Lisa’s heart ache. She and he were carved from the same stone. They both had to fight the Trumperton tendency to sink into moroseness. They laughed at the same things and would finish each other’s sentences. Australia was too far away. ‘See you at Christmas?’ she asked, trying to eradicate hints of neediness.
