‘Mother, Sammie’s not creepy. I don’t understand.’
‘She never had the flu, Jane. She’s got that bohemia thing teenagers get.’
‘Bulimia? SAMMIE?’
‘Why don’t you see how skinny she is? Underneath all those sweatshirts and baggy jeans?’
‘She stayed home sick on Wednesday. Maybe it’s a relapse.’
The mewling of Sammie’s hysterics reached the kitchen table.
‘Jane, she was vomiting on Wednesday and then yesterday danced out of here like June Allyson. That is not flu.’
‘I was just happy she was well again.’ Remorse flooded Jane. She knew she’d been too swamped for weeks with her own loneliness, and anger to focus on her daughter. Sammie’s loyalties divided between father and mother had forced Jane to take her distance. It was Lorraine who’d told her Monday night that Sammie had come down with flu while Jane was managing the Bookworm meeting.
Lorraine shook, more with indignation than remorse. ‘How dare she try acting in front of me!’
‘Maybe it was just a twenty-four bug.’
‘Bug my foot. You don’t vomit Monday, Wednesday, Friday and skip Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘And there’s something worse. She blamed Bulgakov for those scratches on her arm. To think I was going to have him declawed! Haven’t you noticed those stupid fingerless wrist-warmers she dons night and day? She’s hiding razor cuts.’
‘WHAT?’
‘She’s been slicing into herself with a razor. Yes. It’s some kind of fad. Luckily, she used a safety razor and the cuts have almost healed and you never noticed. ’
Jane ran back and threw open Sammie’s door. Her daughter was now propped up in bed and blowing her nose, but still wearing fingerless mittens.
‘What have you been doing to your arms? Have you gone crazy?’
Jane watched with maternal horror as red-faced Sammie thrust her hands deep into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie to keep Jane from pulling off the grimy coverings.
‘Show me your arms, Sammie.’
‘I won’t do it again. I’m sorry.’
‘How could you hurt yourself? Scar yourself intentionally?’
‘I only did it once. Well, twice.’
‘WHY, Sammie?’
‘I don’t know! I want to talk to Dad,’ Sammie moaned and threw herself back into the pillows, wailing harder now and mashing her face into a pile of crumpled tissues. Jane lifted one mitten and saw the little web of cuts, shallow but not the work of a playful cat.
This horror was too alien to their small family. One almost glanced at the door to see what evil influence had infiltrated their peace. Tears streamed down Jane’s face for all four of them. Sammie’s little bingeing escapade had worried them for a night, but was eclipsed by Joe’s defection. Now it was obvious that the nightmarish pleas of Sammie’s soul had taken a more subterranean dive. With her own body fluids, the child was summoning her father home.
Jane returned to the kitchen to find Lorraine shaking her head. ‘When I think of what Joe spent on car seats, bike helmets, swim vests, trainer wheels, knee pads, wrist braces—every time that kid rode her trike, she looked like Robert Taylor in Ivanhoe, all armoured up to joust with George Sanders. Then, one day she sticks a finger down her throat and grabs a razor.’
‘She wants Joe. You’ll have to call him. Go ahead.’
Lorraine did as she was ordered.
‘Sammie wants to see you tonight, definitely. But alone, Joe,’ she glanced over for Jane’s reluctant approval. If ever Joe and she had to mesh as parents, without recrimination or bitter grudges, it was now, although she felt an almost uncontrollable certainty that Joe’s affair was to blame.
Soon enough Jane heard the slam of the very car door that had once signalled happiness at Joe’s return from a long shoot. Lorraine’s murmurs sounded up the stairwell and then Joe’s baritone response and Lorraine’s hushed explanation. How much Joe’s timbre pained Jane.
Damn Bella! Damn celebrity, ambition, travel and perks, accolades and awards, and all the enticements that Joe’s sagging esteem had fallen prey to.
She grabbed a tissue to blow her nose but before she could hide the shredded mess or smooth her mashed hair, she started at Joe’s silhouette framed in the door.
Joe was fat.
Given her distress, it was not the first thing she expected to notice. But there he was—chubby, flabby, pudgy, inflated—you name it, it was all sitting on Joe’s belt, as if every pound lost by his daughter had zeroed in on the father’s waist. He’d popped a button off his old cotton chinos and then disguised the eruption by tightening his buckle over the empty buttonhole. Even his chiselled nose had gained flesh. Here he was to thrash out the issue of Sammie’s eating disorder, but as far as Joe was concerned, a little anorexia might not be a bad idea. He’d never suffered a weight problem on the prosaic menus of 19 Chalkwood Square, but then again, Jane must get used to a new Joe—bloated on Travelling Kitchen leftovers.
‘I can’t believe she’s doing this. Didn’t you talk to her about this stuff?’ He pulled wildly at the back of his hair, the way he always did when trying to sort out a knotty shooting schedule or a screw-up at the airport with a stranded crew.
‘Not surprising, really,’ Jane replied more coolly than she felt. ‘It’s all about food, you see, rejecting the world of food. We know what that’s about.’ To refuse food—its taste, variety, sustenance, even glamour—was to reject the fabulous world of eating à la Bella.
‘You’re saying this is my fault?’ Joe roared at Jane and turning his back on her, he practically threw himself into Sammie’s room after a perfunctory knock on the door. His appearance triggered fresh wails from Sammie followed by Joe losing his temper with that roiling mix of love, distress and horror that Jane shared.
What was said was so ugly that Jane covered her ears. After a quarter of an hour, Joe came back to the sofa where Jane sat, her insides like molten metal with the knowledge Joe wouldn’t take responsibility for Sammie’s collapse.
‘She promises she’s stopped, but I don’t think she can handle this alone. I’d rather she stayed here where Lorraine can keep an eye on her.’
Jane had missed a beat somewhere. ‘Where else would she be?’
‘Well, isn’t that why I’m here? She just said she wants to live with me. I mean, I thought you knew that. Jeez, I don’t know what to do. There’s a spare room at Bella’s, but it’d be really strange. Weekends, okay, but all the time? Would I have to drive her to school every morning?’
‘Live, with you and Bella?’ Jane felt kicked back into the cushions and compressed from three dimensions into two with all her breath ripped out of her. Why would Sammie, whose discoveries about Bella’s relationship with her father had so recently given her loyalties a jolt, now ask to live with them?
Jane had mugged up in the library all week about the effects of separation and divorce on children. How often had she pointed out the family guidance and adolescent counselling books to bleary-eyed dads, dog-haired mums or anxious grandfathers spending an afternoon on their own, ‘hoping to make a little contribution’ to peace at home? Jane had handed out all the info on hand—on ADD, weight control, skin problems, paraplegic ‘Teens On Wheels’, the alcoholic spouse, the late learner . . .
Well, now, it seemed it was the helpful librarian who was the late learner.
‘I’m not sure how Bella will feel about it . . . ’ Joe said in a strained voice.
‘Oh, she adores her Sammie,’ Jane said in a voice frosted with ice.
‘Of course, Bella loves Sammie, but—’
‘Well, Sammie comes first.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘If Sammie eats Bella’s cooking better, well, that’s the solution, obviously. At least for a few weeks.’
‘I don’t understand this at all. I didn’t plan this,’ Joe said, riled. ‘You’re blaming it all on me? I mean, what’s happened since I left
? She was pissed off at me.’
‘She is very pissed off at you Joe. She truly loathes Bella. Just the other day, she called her a cow. But she wants to live with you. You’re her father and she’s worried about you.’
‘But I’m not sure—I mean, how?’
There was a paperweight on the table at the end of the sofa, within Jane’s grasp. She wanted to hit him with it, bash him back into her old Joe, wake up the comatose person she still loved inside, the barely visible, loveable, bewildered man she’d been happy with for so long. In a moment of madness boiling up inside of her, she reached out, intending with all the force of one of Baldwin’s famous warriors, to smack it into Joe’s pudgy mug.
Only the thought of the gentle Baldwin stayed her hand, reminding her that she could only win without fighting, no matter how strong the urge to splatter her outrage all over Joe’s feeble hesitations. She’d just come from a class where the lesson was to steal the fuel from under Joe’s cauldron, but the fiery depths were boiling inside her own soul. How could she stanch that inferno while imagining Sammie with a razor in her hand?
But she wanted to win. Baldwin had made her promise to try.
‘Perhaps it’s not entirely all your fault,’ she said, hardly believing it could be said or believed. She turned on the light switch and returned her hands to her lap.
And at that, Joe’s wild confusion burnt out. He did something Jane had never seen before. He broke down, crumpled with shame and wept, head in his hands. The Joe she loved, her Joe, was still inside there, somewhere.
Jane rose from the sofa and went into Sammie’s room. Listening to her father’s racking sobs, the child looked wide-eyed at her mother. Jane stroked Sammie’s forehead, creased and red, and fetching a cool flannel, patted the swollen eyes with love.
Why not let Sammie go, at least for a few weeks? Watching her mother mope day after day wasn’t doing her any good. Jane couldn’t cut Sammie in half or make her feel Joe was any less her father now that he’d moved out of the square. If Sammie wanted to abandon the Good Ship Mum, Jane hadn’t the heart or the energy to object. She told Sammie in so many words.
What more, the strategy of Number Nineteen suddenly came into play. The thought of Sammie’s unromantic presence tamping down all the flames back at Bella’s love nest held a definite, if underhanded appeal. Jane smiled to herself and returned to the living room.
‘So, she’s moving in with you. She promises to stop all this eating and cutting nonsense and I believe her.’
‘You think so?’
‘Yes, I do. I’ll send her over tomorrow with all her stuff. And you’ll have to work out a way to get her to school on time.’
Joe said a sheepish goodnight to them both. He tossed a wistful glance back at the kitchen table, that humble Sunday morning altar of waffles and cream cheese on bagels lost to him forever.
‘Jane, I’m glad we can still agree on—well—we’re still her parents.’
‘Forever, Joe. That won’t change.’
Jane said it with such tenderness, Joe leaned towards her, and after hesitating with a glance up at Lorraine’s door, planted an awkward kiss on Jane’s cheek and then left.
Joe had come pounding over to the square to take up a defensive position, knowing Sammie had summoned him for some kind of accounting, but with one feeble puff of emotional exhaustion, Jane had taken their pot off the boil. The bluff that had disarmed him during their last round was spent. This time, with one kind phrase that contradicted her sense of justice but worked like a uniting balm, something deep had passed between them.
Her friends would be home from evening class by now. Perhaps Winston was worried Sammie had been in an accident? Maybe Dan was thinking of his own wife or grown son, off in the States, too far even to get a call should something go wrong. She’d left them all thinking the worst had happened, when it was only garden-variety misery. Misery for Sammie but oddly tinged with tenderness for Joe amid that lingering sensation of a precious quiet as they managed their daughter’s woes.
Something had been defused by her struggle. Something had happened to draw Joe to her side, if only for a precious hour. By stifling her righteous jealousy and anger, and with fortitude struggling all over her plain face, the fuel for Joe’s defensiveness had died out. He had stopped backing off. He had, even briefly, held her hand with a naturalness he hadn’t shown in months.
Like a weary survivor, Jane sank into a scalding bath. She had preserved her strength and awakened the enemy’s exhaustion. Joe would insist that Bella, as well as he, would watch closely over Sammie. Their honeymoon was already over.
Tonight Jane had finally seen that Baldwin’s stratagems were more than just a diversion or distraction. Bravely applied, they worked.
And there were seventeen more in the ammunition pile.
Chapter Twenty, Hun Shui Mo Yu
(Muddy the Waters to Catch the Fish)
After a few days of moving rock posters, Twilight volumes, and her hoodie collection into Bella’s pristine guest room just done over by Kelly Hoppen, Sammie returned to the square for the rest of her schoolbooks. Now exposed as a serial upchucker to the double-barrelled scrutiny of both mother and grandmother, the girl worked at bits of porridge on the end of her spoon with self-conscious regularity, but most of the time, waved it in the air while she chatted.
‘ . . . And these guys just kept, you know, smirking like this,’ Sammie imitated a drooling teenage boy, ‘And I was going, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Until Lucy told me they did the same thing to her. Nothing was wrong! It was a stupid trick. I kept checking to see if my jeans were unzipped or I had pimple medicine showing on my forehead. They just kept pointing at me, sniggering.’
‘Well, that’s boys. They got ya,’ Lorraine checked the maple syrup level.
‘Well, I’ll get them back.’
‘Don’t bother. Listen to this old trouper. You know what bugs men most? Ignoring them.’
Sammie nodded. Sailing on this relaxed matriarchal gust, the child swung her jib a little closer to shore. ‘You know, Mum, those two fooled us, too. Not just you. Grandma and me, too.’
‘Who are you talking about now, pumpkin?’ Lorraine gobbled up her spaghetti with the greed of the old for both food and gossip.
Jane stayed where she was, clearing the sink of dishes and scrubbing the countertop. She had to stop staring with eyes brimming with anxiety while her daughter was ‘eating.’ Sammie had tolerated only one spoonful of tomato sauce on her pasta. After asking for porridge instead, she was barely touching that, but Jane also knew the child had gobbled up half a jar of Nutella as soon as she’d dumped her sack of dirty laundry inside the front door. Apparently Bella’s Polish ‘girl’ refused to take on more dirty knickers. Jane wanted to ask how Bella was adapting to Sammie’s arrival, but decided she would judge by the results. Already she noticed a strange payoff to Sammie’s part-time defection: as if from behind the anonymity of a confessional screen, Sammie was blossoming with unexpected disclosures.
Lorraine pointed an arthritic forefinger at Sammie’s forced intake. ‘Promise me that stays down in your tummy ‘til Exeunt, Act III.’
Jane rubbed her daughter’s shoulders a little too anxiously. ‘Dr Landis says you’ll be sorry if you do any more throwing up. Your teeth will rot. You’ll get ulcers and kidney—’
‘I’m talking about Dad and Bella, of course. It started a long time ago—’
‘Well, I don’t think it started until Italy. At least Rachel told me—’
‘Oh, Mum. They fooled Rachel, too. In Italy, they reshuffled their bags as soon as the crew unpacked the van. Suddenly, there we were, Rachel and me, roommates. I mean, it all was done in an awful rush, even if Dad was randy—’
‘Sammie!’
‘Horny men!’ Lorraine snuffled from the depths of her pasta.
‘Mother, that is Not Helpful.’
Sammie sculpted some porridge round the spoon with her tongue. ‘All right, not randy, not horny, lusti
ng for the Unthinking Man’s Crumpet of the Kitchen—even if he was whatever you want to call it, he acted in Italy more like somebody who knew he already had it in the bag. And she is a bag. There.’ Sammie shoved her bowl towards Lorraine. ‘I’ve finished.’
‘Well, we won’t force you.’
Jane took her daughter’s left forearm in her hands and stroked the crisp, spidery scabs. There were no new cuts. Sammie had slathered the lingering traces with cheap makeup, a childish camouflage effort that actually cheered Jane. Was Sammie’s spirit as resilient as her epidermis?
‘Exactly why do you think—?’
‘They’ve been at it for months and months.’ She yanked down her shirtsleeve. ‘Even when Dad was still living here and making all those faces during dinner, ‘member? Because he had to take her phone calls in the other room? When he complained she was in love with her own reflection? That she’d caught the Egola Virus? That was all a cover-up, Mum. ‘Course, the Egola part is, like, so true.’
‘I wondered . . . ’ Lorraine mused, smacking lips coated with syrup.
Jane kept her expression neutral. ‘And since when did two and two make eight?’ She lined up dirty utensils in the dishwasher. A fork, a knife . . .
‘’Member that night I went to her house because I was too out of my skull to come home? Well, Bella kept saying, “Let’s ring your father, let’s ring your father.” And even totally blotto, I was wondering, well, Dad always calls you an over-hyped bag of Botox. And he’ll throw a wobbly when he sees me. Why don’t you call Mum? She’s your best friend, or at least Grandma?’
‘At the absolute least,’ Lorraine snickered.
‘But no. Bella kept insisting: “Let’s call your father. Like they had some special understanding and while she went into her bedroom to get her coat, I went to the bathroom, and there was a bottle of aftershave on her dressing table, the same brand as Dad’s . . . ’
Love and the Art of War Page 19
