Like Being a Wife

by Catherine Harris

  He could hear his wife’s laboured breath as she tried to keep up with their ten-year-old daughter, their harried noises seemingly magnified by the surrounding forest, as though the further in they went the nearer they sounded. They were moving so fast he worried for a moment that they might vanish into the brush, that he and Heidi would be forced to go in after them, the entire family then becoming hopelessly lost, their abandoned bikes the only evidence of their having been there, that and their SUV, leading Nathan to glance around, take a virtual snapshot, imprinting the scene on his memory lest this be his final opportunity to take stock before their disappearance. Thankfully, however, Olivia soon stopped. ‘Why are you following me?’ she demanded of her mother.

  ‘I’m not following you,’ said Joannie.

  ‘You are. You’re following me.’

  ‘You said you wanted to play, but you’re not playing. You’re scurrying up the hill.’

  ‘I am playing. I’m looking for fault lines. There’s more up here.’ She began climbing again.

  Joannie followed her.

  ‘Stop following me.’

  ‘No. That’s it. Enough. Five minutes are up. It’s time to go home.’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘No. Don’t give me Mum. Come with me right now.’

  Olivia didn’t move.

  ‘Right now.’

  Joannie turned and began descending the scrub, inching down on her hands and toes, crablike, her pants now stained in patches, muddy green and smeared with dirt, until Olivia, afraid that she’d be left behind, turned and followed suit.

  None of them said a word as they made their slow way back to the car park.

  ‘So who knows why six is afraid of seven?’ asked Nathan, trying to lighten the mood once they were all safely ensconced in the vehicle.

  ‘Cos seven ate nine,’ snapped Olivia.

  ‘No, nine ate seven,’ countered Heidi, trying to be funny.

  ‘He did not. That’s stupid,’ said Olivia.

  ‘Did too. Nine ate seven. Six is scared of nine.’

  ‘You’re a dummy,’ said Olivia. ‘That’s not funny.’

  Nathan merged onto the Burwood Highway.

  There was a brief silence from the back seat as he negotiated the vehicle alongside the other weekend warriors, all returning home in time for a slapped-together Sunday night dinner on their laps in front of the footy highlights, then Heidi let out a piercing shriek. ‘Ouch! Don’t! Stop it. Dad, Olivia pinched me.’

  Nathan had had enough. ‘Olivia, cut it out!’ he shouted, glaring at her in the rear-view mirror, the car swerving a little as he took his eyes off the road.

  In the back seat the two girls started to cry.

  Nathan looked over to Joannie for moral support but she was staring out the window, her back turned slightly away from him, her thoughts elsewhere.

  Evenings typically followed the same pattern: by seven-thirty pm the children were bathed and fed, at which time Nathan would pour himself and Joannie a ‘half’ glass each of wine (they were big glasses), the first of two or three (give or take) that they’d drink over the course of the evening, assiduously applying themselves to the task as they began counting down the minutes until the girls went to sleep.

  ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ Nathan would call from the hallway before flicking out the light, pausing on the stairs a moment to listen to their last-minute tosses and turns as they settled themselves down and dropped off, and then the house would be quiet, still, a calm descending over the lounge room as he and Joannie kicked off their shoes and swung their legs onto the couch, each relishing the freedom of knowing neither expected the other to say another word.

  He came downstairs anticipating the sight of Joannie already stretched out on the sofa, wriggling his fingers, thinking he might administer a foot massage (and whatever else might follow that), but she was sitting up at the dining table, poring over her diary.

  ‘Can’t you do that later? Come over here,’ he said, smoothing the area next to him on the lounge, inviting her to sit beside him.

  ‘No, I can’t. I have to reschedule the cleaners.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I won’t be here on Friday.’

  ‘What do you mean you won’t be here on Friday? I thought we were still talking about it.’

  Joannie looked up from her papers, her glasses halfway down her nose, as though she didn’t understand. ‘We are still talking about it. You were going to get your mother in, remember?’

  Nathan felt his pores tighten as though his naked body had just been dipped into a clear gelid pool. What did they call those people? Polar bears? Crazy thrillseekers whose idea of a good time was to throw themselves into ice-cold rivers and lakes all for the pleasure of getting out again. But why go through all of that? He didn’t need to assault his nervous system in order to appreciate a nice warm shower and a hot cup of coffee. If one was seeking that kind of diversion, clearly something else was the matter. Not that he believed for a moment that Joannie would tell him what was bothering her, so accustomed was he to her denials and furious evasions, though that didn’t mean he oughtn’t try to placate her.

  ‘Don’t go to the spa, not next weekend,’ he said, attempting to woo her with a direct appeal. ‘Let’s send the kids to Mum’s for a couple of nights and stay here instead, just the two of us, together.’

  ‘A romantic weekend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Joannie sighed. ‘I can’t this weekend. It’s not going to work.’

  Nathan was confused. ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Of course it’ll work. It’s us, we’ll make it work.’

  ‘No,’ she said, reaching for the bottle. ‘I’ve already paid. The deposit’s non-refundable.’

  ‘Well, how much was it?’

  Joannie reddened as she topped up her glass. ‘Twelve hundred dollars,’ she answered, and then drank down her wine like it was orange juice.

  Nathan eyed his wife as though she were a stranger, watching the way she prepared for bed, pulling back her hair before creaming her face, then brushing her teeth and gargling with whitening rinse, a familiar repertoire that he now witnessed as though it were new, taking in her tics and mannerisms from the detached perch of the bathtub rim, finding himself oddly irritated by the way she wiped out the handbasin after rinsing her toothpaste, seeing it as an obsessive quirk rather than an endearing, slightly neurotic habit.

  ‘You know I don’t care about the money,’ he said, despite himself, despite them both knowing it wasn’t true. The money was exactly the issue. Not the amount so much, they could manage it, but what it represented, what Joannie’s spending of it without discussing it with him first represented. They had a clear arrangement about such matters, two hundred dollars being their ceiling for unilateral financial decision making, but he wanted to give her a chance to explain, to come up with some excuse. Though what could she say? It was a mistake? I’m sorry? He’d always been sorry about everything and it hadn’t made a scrap of difference.

  ‘Can we do this later?’ said Joannie. ‘I’m exhausted, okay?’

  Nathan wondered if this kind of delaying tactic had an equivalent in the botanical world. He’d just finished a chapter about allelopathy, the study of the ways some plants produce substances that are poisonous to other plants, changing the chemistry of the soil, influencing the types of microorganisms that grow there, even actively competing with other plants for space. It was a concept completely unfamiliar to him until two weeks ago when he’d started down this vegetable garden track, but now that he understood it better he considered that perhaps it applied to people too and that over time, incrementally, he and Joannie had become toxic to one another.

  Joannie turned out the light, her shallow breath quickly slowing to a deeper sough as he lay staring into the night, waiting for her to answer him, to cede so
me moral authority or at the very least to identify some common ground, a neutral bed he thought, borrowing an image from one of his gardening books, a complementary schematic that would make it all right between them.

  He could hear the possums running across the roof. Next door Mick’s dogs snuffled and growled, their murmurings mingled with the other nocturnal purls and groans, so commonplace he rarely noticed them anymore, except for moments like these when he couldn’t sleep.

  He was tempted to wake her, to insist on some kind of explanation, the idea that Olivia had been right, their marriage having become a polite stalemate of thwarted ambitions, an approximation of his parents’ buttoned-up union, about as palatable to him as no union at all, but he also knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere, the formalities of their estrangements having developed a rambling order over the years, circling out and eventually back in on themselves, so that there was nothing for it but to wait.

  The moon lit up the sky, its diffuse glow suggesting any number of shadowy patterns in the nebulous folds of the curtains.

  Minutes turned to hours as Nathan lay there gazing into the dark, a menagerie of exotic animals emerging from the drapes (zebras, giraffes, an elephant). It was as though he was suspended above the logic of the house, caught in his own waking dream perhaps, his mind flitting from one topic to the next: the problem of Mick and his unwelcome sense of humour, what to do about the unfinished TV stand, possible dates for his return to find the drunken forest. And then he was back to the garden again, contemplating which herbs to seed amongst his vegetables (strong smelling culinary plants often confusing parasitic insects looking for a host); his children slumbering on in their bunks across the hall, furnishing the details of their own fantastic other-lives, all puppies and bunny rabbits he imagined, while Joannie soundlessly hibernated beside him, dormant for the time, temporarily adrift, lost in her own abstract demesne.

  Milk

  Being the best friend of the potential Big M model is like having the TV on all the time. First, people are always coming up to her when the two of us are hanging out, gingerly smiling and interrupting our conversation with proclamations that they’ve just seen her on telly (when in fact they haven’t, hence the yet-to-happen nature of the word ‘potential’), and would she mind signing their serviette, writing pad, newspaper, ticket stub, cricket bat, or, in one recent case, the back of a girl’s hand. And two, it is noisy and distracting and exacerbates my already short attention span and irritable personality. Only last week I told a woman to go home and look up the meaning of the word ‘potential’ after she’d insinuated herself between us on a tram, right as I was making an important point about the merits of flavour diversity as a central component of total milk brand image, and asked if the potential (as inscribed in sequins on my best friend’s T-shirt, reading: ‘The Potential Big M Model’) related to my friend’s clearly inherent general potential to model for Big M, based on her natural good looks and fine physique, or whether it meant she’d be appearing in even more television ads in the future.

  ‘If she’s only a potential Big M model then she can’t already be a Big M model, can she?’ I said.

  ‘I suppose not,’ answered the woman and burst into tears.

  After she’d stopped crying (eventually) and got off the tram, my friend pulled me aside and told me it wasn’t fair to blame the public like that. ‘They’re confused, they don’t understand, and it’s just plain mean of you,’ she said. ‘You can’t expect them to conform to your expectations any more than they can expect you to conform to theirs. Remember, to each his own, and to thine own self be true.’ Which is all fine and good, but essentially just another way of saying I should learn to be less uptight.

  My friend and I always end up in this argument.

  I don’t know if it’s because of her Big M model potentiality, or if she just happens to be like that and she also happens to be the Potential Big M model, but she is so much softer than me on all accounts (possibly with exception of her blind ambition, which is all-encompassing, yet even that takes empathic form). ‘It’s all about giving people what they want,’ she says. ‘This business, it’s one long wrenching of the heart.’

  I find myself caught between envying her compassion and loathing her blanket acceptance of the way the general public chooses to approach her (in its myriad forms) when the two of us are out together on a jaunt. What is so wrong with wanting to have a simple conversation without being interrupted by the attentions of strangers? Where is the harm in desiring to have a quiet meal, for example, without needing to request a table at the rear of the restaurant, preferably one configured in such a way that my friend can sit, unnoticed, with her back to the main dining area?

  My therapist says the T-shirt doesn’t help. ‘She’s effectively asking for it. If you’re going to go around with ‘‘The Potential Big M Model’’ in sequins across your chest, people are going to notice.’

  ‘But you wear a ‘‘The Therapist’’ T-shirt,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘But the situation is completely different. Namely, there’s a big difference between being a therapist and being a Big M model, and furthermore, I actually am the therapist, whereas she is only the potential Big M model, not the Big M model per se. It’s like comparing apples and oranges.’

  When we were kids my best friend wanted to be a veterinarian. We would play make-believe, with me performing any number of roles from pony to kitten to giraffe. The game was usually the same: the said animal would wander off from the mother/veterinarian, becoming lost and confused in the forest, then tripping on a brush-covered tree root as blind panic set in; enter the mother/veterinarian who would comfort said pony, kitten or giraffe, and tend to their twisted ankle with much balm application and winding of bandages, rendering the world safe once more for the fancies and indiscretions of imaginary infant animals.

  I was quite good as the pony, I thought. I could neigh and whinny and shake my mane and whimper with pain in a convincing baby-horsey-sounding tone. But compared to the quality of my best friend’s performance, mine was flat. She completely transcended the bounds of child-play (effectively becoming the veterinarian, as an acting coach would later put it), elevating our game from just that to the superior realm of promising junior theatre.

  Which is how she was discovered at the age of ten (Sunday, 4 November 1990), playing at the park.

  Her parents had it completely wrong. There she was, dressed in jeans, white runners, and a jungle-green army camouflage T-shirt that said ‘VET’ in capitals on the back (her father teaches military strategy at the business school and loves a double entendre), tending to me (as fractured-leg giraffe) on what looked like a standard kiddie-style make-believe jungle floor, and we later found out Rory nearly drove right by, figuring her (and quite rightly so) for the potential tomboy type rather than any kind of potential model, but there was something about her, Rory said, her composure perhaps, that compelled him to stop and give her his business card. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Rory is an independent talent scout with an eye for youth. He signed her right away.

  Before that day, I don’t think my best friend had ever really drunk milk. At least not straight up. Neither of us had. Yet milk tastes completely different when it’s cold with sweet-tasting flavours in it. Or so I am led to believe. My best friend’s current favourite is strawberry. Not only is it a pretty colour, which complements many of her outfits, but it balances well with her lipstick and blusher.

  Initially she was a banana girl – apparently many younger female drinkers are (something to do with the ideational continuity of banana-like flavours from childhood to early teens – mixed lollies, Barney Bananas, etc.) – but after the long hours she spent strolling back and forth along the footpath outside the home of the head of the advertising agency’s creative development team, dressed in her banana yellow capris and matching stilettos, sipping her banana Big M, she went right off a
nything yellow.

  And who could blame her, especially as no one ever actually came out of the house (in fact the curtains were drawn the entire time, so it doesn’t look like that specific initiative will ever really bear any fruit), but Rory maintains she was magnificent nonetheless and often asks her to speak with his much younger clients about the importance of a total commitment to their goal of securing their stated modelling contract, and also ways to bandage aching blistered toes so the dressings won’t show beneath the lacy strappings of high fashion summer sandals.

  My friend gives such impassioned speeches, easily switching from potted snatches of contract law to the inestimable value of properly maintaining one’s Dettol supplies, it is not uncommon to see tears form in the eyes of her little protégées. I am so intolerant, even that annoys me.

  This is when my therapist tells me to use my noggin. ‘She’s shagging the bloke,’ he says. ‘She’s shagging her agent. Of course she’s going to do it. He’s her meal ticket. You’ve got to wise up here. This isn’t nice. It’s self-interest.’

  ‘I’d prefer if you didn’t use that kind of language during our sessions,’ I say.

  ‘Well, he is her meal ticket,’ says my therapist. ‘Do you have some kind of issue with that?’

  On reflection I have lots of issues with that, I suppose, but none I intend to go into right now. And I’m not going to get started on their age difference either. Many a younger woman has been captivated by the perceived comforts and spoils afforded by the successful older gentleman, so there’s nothing more to say on that subject. But I will say this: as the potential Big M model, I think she could do better.