Coming Clean

by Sue Margolis

  Ben didn’t lose his temper. Instead, he became sad and withdrawn. He would climb onto Greg’s lap and tell him how much he was going to miss him. Greg would try to cheer him up with talk of outings and day trips, but Ben said it wouldn’t be the same as hanging out at home. Greg and I would exchange anguished glances. All our hearts were breaking.

  • • •

  It took him a couple of weeks, but eventually Greg found a studio flat a few streets away. He left on a Saturday. We agreed that Ben and Amy would find it too distressing to watch him go—even if it wasn’t very far—so I arranged for them to be invited to friends’ houses.

  I felt guilty as Greg loaded up his newly acquired fourthhand hatchback, but with two kids and their assorted friends needing to be ferried to and from school, birthday parties and after-school activities, it made sense for me-slash-Klaudia to keep the station wagon.

  I didn’t offer to help him move his stuff. The sadness would have been impossible to bear. Instead I sat outside on the kitchen step while he shifted suitcases and books, his collection of CDs and ancient vinyl.

  It was a perfect, cloud-free summer day. Picnic weather. Right now Richmond Park would be full of mums and dads frolicking with kids and dogs. I suddenly felt guilty that we’d never gotten Amy and Ben a dog. They adored Bernard, the drooling greyhound who shared a bed with their grandmother and were always nagging about getting a puppy, but I knew that, with Greg out most evenings, I would get stuck with walking him on dark winter nights. I would be the one who’d have to clean up his accidents. More mess. More stress. I’d told them no. How mean and selfish was that? I took a sip of lukewarm coffee from the TOP MUM mug the kids got me for Mother’s Day. I thought about flinging my arms around Greg and telling him we were making a huge mistake and that we should give it another go—for Amy and Ben—if not for us.

  “Right, I guess this is it,” Greg said, making me jump. I put my coffee down on the step and pulled myself up. I turned to face him. My arms were at my side. I’d decided against any last-minute flinging.

  “You got everything?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  “Well, you can always pop back if there’s something you’ve forgotten. You’ve got a key.”

  “Sure. And it’s not like I’m going far. So …”

  “Right, then.”

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll have the kids on Sunday.”

  “Great.”

  “And I suppose we should think about getting lawyers.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll let you know when I’ve found somebody.”

  “Ditto.”

  He gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek and told me to take care.

  “You, too.”

  I went upstairs to pee. The toilet was blocked.

  • • •

  The dozen or so Coffee Break producers and reporters—plus Nancy and me—piled into the conference room for the program postmortem. Nancy was in a more upbeat mood. She and I had spent the half hour between the end of the show and the postmort in her office, I listening while she continued to vent about Brian’s failing to pay sufficient attention to her vulva. When I suggested that the two of them have a few sessions with Virginia Pruitt, she leapt at the idea. (Her therapist friend didn’t “do” couples.) This didn’t surprise me, since Nancy loved any opportunity to talk about herself. She thought Brian might take some persuading, but she was sure she could get around him.

  Liz had already taken her place at the head of the long table. She was a youthful sixty, but today she looked gray and pinched—completely done in. As everybody sat down, she offered me a tight-lipped smile.

  “What?” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  She squeezed my hand and I knew.

  Liz waited for everybody to settle down and for Nancy to stop moaning about how freezing it was in the room. How quickly the woman’s moods changed. In the end she sent one of the interns to fetch her pashmina.

  “OK,” Liz began. “Before we discuss today’s program, I need to let you know that the latest audience figures are in and they’re down again.” She explained that she’d just come out of a meeting with James Harding, the chairman of Greater London Broadcasting. “Bottom line … he feels that we’ve dithered long enough about making changes on Coffee Break. He’s insisting on a complete face-lift and a program relaunch.”

  “So will he be letting people go?” Nancy asked, voicing what we were all thinking.

  “Absolutely not. There are to be no redundancies. Jim’s assured me on that score.”

  “That’s well and good,” one of the reporters broke in, “but precisely what kind of changes is Harding planning?”

  “He won’t say. He’s playing this thing very close to his chest, but you all know my thoughts on this. All he would tell me is that he’s taking on a media change consultant—whatever that might be—and that he will be guided by this person’s recommendations.”

  Eyes rolled, including mine.

  “I think we can all guess what sort of changes he’ll have in mind,” Liz said. “During our meeting, Jim made it clear that he thought the program needed to be made more accessible.”

  “In other words, dumbed down,” I said.

  “I suspect so. To be honest, this isn’t looking good. You all need to make up your minds about what you will do.”

  “Have you made up yours?” I said to Liz, knowing full well what was coming.

  She took off her specs. “I have. I suggested to Jim that since I am only a few years off retirement, this might be a good time for me to stand down as program editor. He didn’t raise any objections.”

  Chapter 2

  Annie opened the oven door, peered in and said that the scones would be ready in a few minutes.

  She’d phoned at lunchtime to invite me and the kids over. She said she felt like having some company because Rob had arranged to spend the afternoon at his tennis club, trying out one of the newly built indoor courts.

  “But he usually takes the boys swimming on Saturdays,” I said.

  “I know, but he’s had a really stressful week at work and he’s off to Tokyo tonight, so I thought he deserved some downtime.”

  She’d seemed unusually delighted when I said we weren’t doing anything and would love to come. By the time we arrived, Annie’s house was full of glorious baking smell.

  She returned to the table. “So, getting back to Liz,” she said, reaching for the teapot (vintage Royal Albert, decorated with rosebuds and forget-me-nots). “She’ll get a decent payout, plus a pension. I suspect she’ll do rather nicely … Top up?”

  “Please.” I slid my mug (Cath Kidston) across the refectory table (antique pine, painted and “distressed” by Annie). “That’s the point. She is quids in, and if I’m honest, we’re all a bit envious. Nobody begrudges her the money. Coffee Break has been Liz’s baby for twenty years and she’s worked her socks off. The point is that she’s in a position to walk away over a matter of principle and nobody else is. Unlike Liz, we’d have to find new jobs, but with all the cuts and redundancies we wouldn’t stand a hope. Everybody’s petrified about what this media change consultant is going to do to the program. I’m still trying to convince them that the program won’t go that down-market, but if I’m honest, I’m pretty sure it will.”

  “If you ask me,” Annie said, handing me the milk jug, “only an idiot would take it down-market. Coffee Break is an institution. You don’t tamper with institutions. There would be an outcry.”

  “That’s what I thought until now, but these days there’s such an appetite for trash.”

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of people crying out for good-quality, intelligent programs. I bet this media whatnot person gives Coffee Break a few painless tweaks and that’ll be it. Liz could even end up regretting her decision to go.”

  “God, you’re so … so Elmo,” I said.

  Annie laughed. “Well, it’s better than going around like Dr. House all the time.�
� She stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’ve been through a really rough time these past few months. You have every right to be cynical.”

  “I do my best not to be. And I thought I’d really cheered up lately.”

  “You have. God, if I think back to how you were …”

  • • •

  I hadn’t expected to feel on top of the world after Greg left, but the depth of the sadness that came over me caught me off guard. After all, it wasn’t as if I’d had to deal with the trauma of discovering he’d been cheating on me. Our marriage had simply run out of steam. Nor was it as if he’d left suddenly, without warning. I’d been prepared and was ready for him to go. Or so I thought.

  In those early days, it was as much as I could do to get out of bed. All I wanted to do was sleep—which was ironic, because at night I couldn’t get to sleep.

  I couldn’t eat, either. And my body felt like a ten-ton weight. I kept going because I knew that Amy and Ben were depending on me to be strong and because I needed to earn a living.

  I soon realized that I was in shock. Part of me couldn’t believe that my marriage was over.

  It didn’t help that Mum and Dad had left for Florida a month or so after Greg and I split up.

  When I told them that Greg and I were getting a divorce, they were heartbroken, but not in quite the way I’d expected. In the days after I’d broken the news to them, Mum would call and weep down the phone: “I can’t believe this is happening. It’s all too much. I’ve started waking up in the night with palpitations and your dad’s acid reflux has gotten so bad the doctor has upped the dose of his proton-pump inhibitor.”

  It wasn’t that they didn’t care about how the kids and I were doing—or about Greg, come to that—it was simply that, these days, they found emotional upheaval hard to deal with. Mum and Dad were eighty. They had their aches and pains, but they were by no means frail, either mentally or physically. That said, over the last couple of years Phil, my sister, Gail, and I had noticed that their ability to cope with life relied heavily on certainty, routine and an absence of emotional turmoil. When their equilibrium was disturbed, it threw them. Heaven forbid the washer broke down, a delivery was late or they were invited out to dinner, which meant them having to eat at seven rather than six.

  Whereas Mum seemed to take the aging process in stride—“Look at me, I’m falling apart, but what can you do?”—Dad found it harder to accept. He got frustrated with the stiffness in his bones, his lack of puff, his occasional forgetfulness.

  It didn’t help that he wasn’t really cut out for old age. “It’s so demeaning. Now I’m the first person they’re going to let off the plane during a hijack,” he said.

  Until he was seventy, Dad had run his own printing business. Mum and us kids aside, the business had been his life. It defined him. Now it was gone. He admitted that without work he found it hard to fill his days. This particular struggle did, of course, drive my mother crazy. He hated not being the boss, not having a staff to run, that nobody (apart from Mum) was relying on him. He often said that he regretted letting the business go when he did, forgetting that he’d spent the years leading up to his retirement complaining that he didn’t have the energy to keep working.

  Even though Mum found it easier to accept that her body was slowing down, there were some frustrations she shared with Dad. Both of them hated it when younger, often well-meaning people—doctors or nurses—patronized them with their fake jolliness and insistence on addressing them by their first names. Their generation liked to be called “mister” and “missus”—it was a mark of respect. Being patronized was bad enough, but the worst crime a person could commit was to ignore them. It drove them crazy. “Excuse me, young lady, but do you mind telling me why you’ve been busy serving all these people when we were here first?” Mum and Dad believed that once a person hit seventy or so the world pretty much stopped noticing them. They became invisible.

  • • •

  The move to Florida had been Phil’s idea. He hadn’t seen much of Mum and Dad since moving to the United States more than two decades ago—a couple of trips back home a year, if that—and now he wanted to make it up to them. It also seemed to make particular sense, since he and Betsy, whose work as a nurse at the local hospital often took her to the geriatric wards, had a big house with a pool and a granny annex.

  At first, Mum and Dad wouldn’t even consider the idea, which of course came as no surprise. A move to the next street would have been enough to send their anxiety levels soaring, let alone a move to “the other side of the world.” They couldn’t bear the idea of uprooting themselves from their home and the neighborhood where they’d lived for fifty years, of leaving Gail, me and the grandchildren, the few friends they had left who hadn’t departed this life.

  Gail and I said we’d miss them, but we promised to visit with the kids and did our best to persuade them that, at their time of life, lazing beside a pool in the Florida sun was infinitely preferable to struggling in the cold and damp. It was like talking to a brick wall.

  Phil refused to give up, though, and spent months working on them. He even came over to pitch the idea in person. Gradually they came around. They could see that it made sense for them to be living in a warmer, healthier climate where, when they became frail, they could be looked after by their son the doctor and his wife the nurse.

  We promised them that the move would be as stress-free as possible. To that end Gail’s husband, Murray, handled the sale of their house and Gail and I helped them clear out all their junk—not that it was easy, particularly where Mum was concerned: “Don’t throw out all those plastic carriers. There are some nice strong bags there! … I’ll make room in my suitcase for the sachets of sugar and Sweet’N Low.”

  Mum and Dad might have been old, self-absorbed and ill-equipped to offer me their shoulders to cry on, but it didn’t stop me from pining for them. It reminded me of how I pined for them as a child when they went away for the occasional weekend, leaving me with Grandma Yetta, who sat in the armchair all day, watching the wrestling and sucking on chalky indigestion tablets that turned her lips white.

  They had a computer and the Internet now, so we were able to Skype, but only when Phil was around to show them what to do. Because Mum and Dad weren’t at ease with being “on camera,” it was all a bit stiff and overformal.

  I missed the intimacy we’d once shared: our mutual “pop-ins,” Mum calling to say she needed a pound of Jersey Royals and some Ex-Lax and could I pick them up the next time I was in the supermarket? Part of me was even missing the way she walked into my kitchen, ran her finger over the cooker hood and grimaced. “Darling, why don’t you let me and your dad pay to have the kitchen deep-cleaned by one of those companies—you know, the ones who specialize in cleaning up at messy crime scenes? It could be your birthday present.” Cheers, Mum.

  In the days and weeks after Greg left, I felt unbearably, excruciatingly lonely. Night after night, I found myself lying in bed, thinking back to when we were first married. I remembered the laughter, the sex, his warm body lying next to me, his affectionate touches, the arms that would wrap me up when I was feeling down. I remembered the daft late-night discussions we’d have. Why isn’t “palindrome” spelled the same way backwards? What’s another word for “thesaurus”? What do you talk to a coma victim about if they don’t like sports?

  All I could remember were the good times. I had to keep on reminding myself why my marriage fell apart.

  Annie was the person who came over with wine and pizza and held me while I cried.

  “And on top of everything, we’ve still got mice in the kitchen,” I wailed. It was Annie who made the call to the pest control people.

  When I told her that I couldn’t forgive myself for failing Amy and Ben, she assured me that kids were resilient and that so long as Greg and I carried on loving them and remained united as parents, they would be fine.

  But they weren’t fine—at least not in the b
eginning. Amy started coming into my bed in the middle of the night, saying she was scared that I was going to die. Ben wanted to know if parents could divorce their children.

  I knew they were also missing their grandparents. Mum and Dad’s house was as familiar to them as their own, and now that was gone, too. Another great chunk of their security chipped away. They spent a lot of time reminiscing about Grandma and Granddad. I enjoyed hearing them share their memories, but at the same time it made me sad. I couldn’t help thinking that it was almost as if Mum and Dad had died. Ben said he remembered my dad teaching him how to swim underwater and about Nazis. Amy said there were two things she remembered most about my mum. “She taught me to say ‘mother’ instead of ‘muvver’ and how to blow my nose.”

  • • •

  I saw Greg only when he came to collect Amy and Ben or drop them home, or if there was a school function. I never got any sense that he was struggling with the breakup, which—since I was taking it so badly—sort of pissed me off. On the other hand, I had no idea what he was feeling, alone at night in some soulless flat. (I’d never seen it, but the kids seemed to like it. They loved the idea of having a queen bed in the same room as the microwave and TV.)

  Then, one Sunday night after he’d brought the children home—we were a couple of months into the separation—Greg asked me if we could speak in private. It occurred to me that he was going to say he’d had second thoughts about the separation and wanted to come home. Back then, feeling the way I did, I might have said yes.

  We went into the kitchen. I closed the door. It turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong .