Husband Replacement Therapy

by Lette, Kathy

  ‘Cheer up. The upside of having knee surgery is that you’ll never have to give a blow job again.’ I smiled. ‘“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed on my knees. Doctor’s orders.”’

  ‘Except to a man standing on a ladder,’ Emerald quipped.

  ‘Speaking of dicks,’ Amber added, ‘it’s just as well you didn’t go any further with Scott. He calls his appendage the Conquistador. Did I ever tell you that? Plus, all lawyers are workaholics. He’d soon have had you plea-bargaining for foreplay and outlining all your sexual requirements on a yellow legal pad.’

  ‘. . . which he’d then take under advisement,’ I riffed. ‘And no affection after sex, right? Post-coitus it’s more like, case closed.’

  It was suddenly like old times, us tittering like schoolgirls at silly entendres and wonky wordplay. After we’d stopped giggling, Emerald said, abruptly, ‘Do you think Mr Hire a Hubby can be monogamous?’

  I considered this as I walked along between my sisters. ‘He swears he only ever cheated once, with Amber. In twenty-eight years. So, he’s already monogam-ish.’

  ‘Oh, Ruby, I truly am sorry. Can you ever forgive me?’ Amber said, earnestly, her face aghast. ‘It was nothing more than a desperate cry for help.’ Never was there a woman more genuinely suited to be the poster girl for guilt.

  For the first time in my life, I no longer felt like the youngest Ryan girl, always trying to catch up to and please and impress my older siblings.

  ‘Well, you can tell a lot about a sister by her hands. If she’s holding a machine gun, machete or carving knife aimed at your chest, then she’s probably still peeved,’ I replied. ‘But if not, then I’d say we’ve moved on,’ I concluded.

  I took hold of Amber and Emerald’s hands and squeezed them tight, and they squeezed right back. Then we clung together in a slumped embrace, like exhausted boxers at the end of a long and bloody bout.

  34

  Emerald’s arthritic knee stayed on my mind on the drive home, which was an unusual place for the synovial hinge of the femur, tibia and patella to be. ‘Fancy meeting you at a joint like this?’ I mused. I was only five years younger than my biggest sister. I didn’t often think of ageing, but when I saw my face in the rear-view mirror I recognised, with mild shock, the changes that had come over me. I noted the tiny lines radiating out from around my eyes and mouth, and how the skin was loosening over my cheekbones.

  While I no longer expected to be swept up into a passionate embrace by a passing poetry-quoting brainiac with smouldering eyes, a bionic cock and a sizzling wit, mothering a child at fifty was far from being one of my life goals. But Harry’s lack of paternity angst was gallant and stylish, and reminded me of what I’d loved about him in the first place. Besides this charming, laid-back attitude, he was also still trying so hard to please me. The man was redecorating and painting and gardening constantly. And cooking. When I got home that evening, wrung out and more fatigued than I’d ever felt in my life, dinner was waiting on the table – fish and coriander curry followed by pineapple upside-down cake, a craving I’d mentioned in passing that morning.

  ‘Wow, Harry. What a skill set! All you have to do now is win Dancing with the Stars and your Man of the Year award will surely be in the mail.’

  ‘Wait till you see what else I did for you today. You now have a new loo, with a directional massage jet, automatic lid, power deodoriser, heated seat, and rimless bowl with triple-jet tornado flush. It’s a paperless bidet–toilet hybrid, apparently.’

  ‘Is that a little, ah, toilet humour, or are you actually serious?’

  ‘It’s the latest Japanese model. I thought you’d get a kick out of it. When we renew our vows, that’s gonna be one of them – to spend the rest of my life doing things to make you happy.’

  I kissed him lightly on the top of his head, which smelt of sea and salt and summer, ate a delicious dinner, threw it up again into the new Japanese toilet while cursing the fact that morning sickness could also strike at night, then crawled into bed.

  I was bone-tired but slept fitfully, and eventually woke in a cold sweat. I checked the time. It was only half an hour since I’d last woken. Sleep is one of my favourite things in the world. I often joked that it was the reason I got up in the morning. And yet, since Mum’s death, it had totally evaded me. Finally abandoning all thoughts of slumber, I crept out of bed without waking Harry. I took a pee in the normal toilet in the hall, wondering if my husband really knew me at all. I mean, if I wanted to conclude my seated ablutions with a blast of hot air, I’d move to the hurricane belt in the American Midwest, or alternatively Canberra, where right-wing politicians were still arguing about the reality of climate change while our country went up in flames. I then slipped out into the front garden. The warm summer air felt silken on my skin. At the corner, a streetlight pushed feebly against the darkness that closed in around it. I walked slowly towards the beach, breathing the night’s frangipani fragrance and tasting upon my tongue the sharp tang of the sea.

  Mum’s death had opened an old wound in me. The headlights zipping past on the distant highway brought back my father’s car accident in a sickening rush. Even though he’d died decades earlier, I still hadn’t entirely got used to it. Still, it was comforting that he stayed in my thoughts, silently guiding my actions and giving me parking karma when I needed it – ‘Come on, Dad. It’s raining. I need a spot, right outside the cinema.’

  I may be a grown woman with weekly by-lines in a local newspaper and years of child-wrangling under my belt, but at my core, I will always be my father’s little girl, I ruminated. I thought how much my father loved life and how he would want me to be happy and cheerful, and how I’d better do my duty to him and bloody well be so.

  The big empty beach beckoned at the end of the road. The sand was cool under my bare feet. There’d been a bushfire in the tea-trees by the water’s edge. A black calligraphy of branches was now scratched onto the landscape. I looked at the gnarled arms of the scorched trees, which curled and twisted against the moonlit sky as if in pain. Except then I realised I was the one in pain. I bent double suddenly to cushion myself against the short, sharp stabbing cramps. It felt like a long, long time before I could draw a proper breath. Every inhalation was a shallow, panicked little effort that brought no relief. I lay on the sand, curled up like a frightened echidna.

  An hour later, I knew I’d lost the baby. Having been unsure if I wanted it or not, I now felt nothing but grief: deep grief and profound loss. I cried and cried as if my heart would break. I once more felt estranged from myself. I was like a book with the ending ripped out. What was to be my denouement? And then, lying there, a sticky mess in the sand, the world suddenly clicked into place. I felt as though I’d finally figured out that I’d been holding the map upside down all this time. After the pain and the sobs subsided, I walked gingerly back towards the house. Under the searchlight beam of the big full moon, at last I saw clearly what I had to do.

  35

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, friends, family, workmates.

  ‘Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she’d turned into the wrong person. I’ve gathered you all here on New Year’s Day, at ridiculously short notice, to toast my dear departed mother, and also to apologise for the last time we were all together, on my fiftieth birthday a few months ago. Proving that star signs mean nothing at all, on the day when my very own newspaper’s astrologer had predicted that I would find “happiness and joy, because the moon was in Neptune”, I got misdiagnosed with cancer, discovered my husband had been unfaithful, insulted all of my family, friends and work pals, got iced out of my job and alienated everyone in the Insular Peninsular, my kids included.

  ‘When I sobered up, I seriously considered an emergency operation to have my voice box removed. But I’ve learnt a lot in the meantime – mostly that it’s pathetic to find fault with others while overlooking your own foibles. Of which, clearly, I have many. Anyway, I’ve written down what I want to say this time, so as not to ma
ke any big boo-boos. And because, well, I am a writer, after all.’

  I liked saying that out loud and not being embarrassed about it. I took out some typed sheets of paper from my dress pocket, the same sparkly dress I’d worn at my ill-fated party, placed them on the lectern and started reading.

  ‘First of all, I wanted to use this mini wake for Mum as a chance to say sorry. And, being New Year’s, to beg you all to let me start over. The main thing I’m sorry for is that I didn’t really forgive my mother while she was alive. Our father broke her heart, and hurt metastasises into blame and rage, which means, sadly, we girls never knew what Ruth was like before she started drinking and hating.

  ‘But you only find heaven by backing away from hell, right? Which is what my sisters and I are doing, backing up as fast as we can. We’re not allowing Mum’s bitterness to poison us. So, I just wanted to say thank you, with the deepest love and gratitude, to my sensational sisters, who are my fortune and my blessing, and whose unbridled love, loyalty, inexhaustible wit, warmth and joy light up my life on a daily basis.’

  I looked down from the stage of the Sea View function room at Emerald and Amber, who were standing arm in arm and smiling up at me. I winked, and they winked back in unison.

  ‘And now, to my darling kids . . .’ I searched the small crowd for their sunny faces and beamed over at them. ‘Zoe, Jake, I would take a bullet for you, you both know that. And not just a light graze either, but a full-on Peaky Blinders–type machine-gun body strafe,’ I ad-libbed. ‘You constantly lift me up two octaves on the happiness scale without even realising you’re doing it. And I want you to know that whenever you feel lost or like you can’t find your place in life, I will always be your bookmark. The truth is, though, I have complete faith that you won’t ever lose your way.

  ‘My darling Jake, who will soon be a qualified electrician, has just joined the volunteer firefighters, like his dad, and I couldn’t be more proud.’ I blew a kiss towards my son, then deadpanned, ‘But, wait. Is that actually you? Because most kids consider a Facebook post right up there with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I’ve only seen the top of my son’s head for, oh, about a decade.’

  A ripple of warm laughter from other parents ran around the room. I gave an involuntary shudder, remembering how different it had felt the last time I’d stood on this stage, gazing out at the stunned faces of the people I loved.

  ‘My darling Zoe, I’m so proud of you too. She got great results in her HSC, an ATAR in the mid-eighties, and is now about to leave for Cambodia, where she’s going to do volunteer work in a school run by a non-profit organisation.’ I rested the pages on the lectern and spoke off the cuff again. ‘Mind you, I’m only assuming this because the inquiry “Has anyone seen my passport?” has been echoing around the house for the past two days. This usually tends to happen during the first call for boarding at the airport, so that’s a slight improvement. I probably won’t see her again until she’s married and needs me to babysit. Which is how it should be. Only in American sitcoms do mothers and daughters discuss the minutiae of their lives with each other in funny, frank exchanges that always lead to hugging. Love you, hon.’ I blew a kiss at my darling daughter, who blew a kiss in return.

  ‘But once you fly the nest, kids, no moving back in, okay? Human beings are the only creatures on god’s green earth who take their young back when they’re fully grown. It’s not natural. And, rest assured, if you have your revenge by locking me up in a maximum-security nursing home in thirty or forty years’ time, I will personally come back and haunt you after, okay?’

  This prompted another warm wave of laughter from the parents in the room. I went back to my script.

  ‘And now, to my friends. Thanks for letting me slink back into book club, girls. Especially as we are doing Jeanette Winter-son . . .’ I looked up once more and added, ‘. . . which is not a sentence she’d be entirely displeased with, I’m sure. We’re also doing a book by “Anonymous”, who will invariably turn out to be a married author writing about sexual infidelity. And, next, a biography of someone or other – although, surely, biographies are a fate worse than death. Speaking of which . . .

  ‘To the school mums I say, we survived and lived to tell the tale! Goodbye to fetes and P & C meetings, and hello to spas in Bali, right? Yes, we’ve had our occasional clashes, but we’ve been there for each other through thick and thin . . . and thin and thin, lately,’ I said, harkening back to my drunken birthday rant.

  ‘To my colleagues, especially my boss, Angela, I know I whinge about the mundaneness of working on a local paper, but there are worse jobs, right? I mean, we could be off manually masturbating caged animals for artificial insemination. Although . . .’ I gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling, as though reconsidering the merits of this option.

  My workmates let out an irreverent whoop of support.

  ‘And now, the biggest thank you of all, to my husband Harry. Harry has put up with my annoying ways at close range. And, miraculously, he still loves me, despite my dreadful cooking. I keep waiting for the hallucinatory drugs to wear off, but no. Even after the night I grabbed the very first package in the freezer for dinner, which turned out to be pet mince. Mind you, there’ve been some positive results from this “minor” culinary disaster. My husband now sits when commanded and fetches my slippers. Just don’t judge him when he cocks his leg on a tree, okay?’

  ‘It’s puppy love!’ Harry heckled, affectionately, from the audience.

  ‘But, seriously, Harry, thank you for putting up with me for all these years. Can you come a little closer?’ I beckoned him.

  Harry pushed through the small crowd to the foot of the stage. He wasn’t venturing any further, not after last time. So, I knelt down and pressed my face into his messy hair, tenderly kissing the top of his head.

  ‘Harry says that all we need is a marital tune-up, like an emotional oil and grease change. Harry, darling, thanks for standing by me and for helping me raise our two wonderful children, and for offering to renew our marriage vows . . . Thank you, my love. Thanks, but . . .’ I took a deep breath, reminding myself that I was no longer a cowardly custard pissant procrastinator. ‘But, no thanks.’

  A surprised gasp echoed through the crowd, followed by a sinking feeling of deja vu. For a moment, all I could hear was the murmur of the sea on the rocks outside as the day died through the big glass windows.

  ‘It’s stating the obvious, but when your last parent dies, there’s no buffer left between you and lights out. I mean, can you hear that beating sound? Times’s winged chariot, folks. You suddenly realise that tempus is fugit-ing like there’s no tomorrow. When Harry asked me to retie the marital knot, I was so deeply touched . . . until I realised that the knot would be around my neck.’

  I looked down at my bewildered husband and smiled compassionately.

  ‘I love you, Harry. And I always will. But it’s our kids holding us together, isn’t it? They’re the glue. But now they’re leaving, well, there’s an honest bit inside us both that knows we’re busy covering up the cracks. In years to come, we’ll just regret lying to ourselves. But I’m not lying to you now. It seems to me that women never got the memo that our lives belong to us; that we don’t need a permission slip from the principal’s office to ask really important questions, like, what do I want in life?

  ‘I know what you want – to nest. But I’ve nested, goddamn it! I want to spread my wings. Okay, my bingo wings,’ I joked, wobbling the flabby skin of my triceps. ‘At fifty, it’s time for me to face the fact that I will never be able to make a soufflé rise or head up a FTSE 100 company. Nor will I ever write a global bestseller that will wow Oprah and be optioned by Steven Spielberg. But what I do know is that my least favourite word in the world, besides “bathroom scales”, is “should”. As in, Ruby, you should suck up more to your boss. Ruby, you should keep a tidier house. Ruby, you should push your cuticles back. Ruby, you should do two hundred sit-ups a day. Ruby, you should have a pelvic floor your husband can trampo
line off . . . My other most hated word in the English language is “could”. You could have worked on a national newspaper. You could have written a novel. Well, I no longer want to be a person of cast-iron whims. Which is why, once Mum’s probate is settled, I’m taking a little SKI trip – Spend Kids’ Inheritance. Well, some of it.’

  This statement was met with a shell-shocked silence. After a moment, though, Emerald called out, ‘Good for you, sis!’

  ‘Touché, Rubes!’ echoed Amber.

  ‘I’m drawing up my bucket list, or my fuck it list, as I prefer to call it. And then I’m indulging in some HRT – husband replacement therapy. Only that doesn’t mean finding a replacement hubby, just a replacement life.

  ‘I’ve already explained everything to Zoe and Jake, and they don’t feel aggrieved. I pointed out that I’ve straightened their teeth, taught them to reverse park, finished their homework assignments, let them sweat in my clothes they weren’t supposed to borrow. But they’re cooked. They understand that it’s my turn now. I don’t want to keep putting things off until I “have time”. Because that time never comes, does it?

  ‘I know some of you are thinking that I’m not myself. But maybe this is my real self? Somewhere along the way, I feel as though I lost my identity. I may need to go to a police line-up and see if anyone can make an ID. But I know I don’t want to be this person anymore – all decorative, demure and self-sacrificing. I don’t want to sit at home tending my herbaceous borders. I want to cross borders, into exotic places. I want to get a pet quokka, and wear nothing but sequins. I want to be told off by my progeny because they saw me coming out of a nightclub at two am, and then reply, “Well, you’re mistaken, kids. I wasn’t coming out. I was going in!” I want to write a novel, not posthumously, or anonymously, but honestly. About dying.’