by Helen Brown
But then…why does there always have to be a “but then”? Why can’t the sad solo mother queen just meet her prince, fall in love, stroll down the aisle in a tactfully off-white suit and live happily ever after? Because life isn’t written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. Real people have histories, hang-ups, phobias, anxieties, egos, ambitions, not to mention opinionated friends and family just waiting to pass judgment.
We no longer went to huge lengths not to be seen in public with the children. At least, I didn’t think so. So when the four of us drove to town one Saturday morning on a T-shirt shopping mission, we parked on the main street and bundled out of the car. Walking down the footpath, Philip completed one of his elegant mud-protecting moves. The kids galloped ahead into the store. I felt like someone in a movie whose life has turned out wonderfully, when people have finished their popcorn and the credits are about to roll.
“I like this one,” Lydia said, holding up a T-shirt featuring teddy bears dressed as fairies. The color was predictable.
“She’s going through a three-year-old pink phase,” I said to Philip. “I’m not fighting it. If I do she’ll probably end up on a shrink’s couch someday, blaming me for denying her an essential part of her development.”
He didn’t laugh. In fact, he’d frozen like a cat that has spotted a rottweiler.
“Sarah!” he said, smiling broadly over my shoulder.
I turned. Standing outside a changing room in a bikini so miniscule it could have doubled as dental floss was a blonde with legs longer than Barbie’s. I recognized her from the photo board at the lake, one of the famous “boring” girls. Ticks in every single box.
“Philip!” she beamed. “Where have you been? We haven’t seen you at tennis for ages. I’ve been missing you.”
I waited for Philip to introduce me, but he snapped himself inside a Perspex bubble that denied any connection with me. I was just another shopper he happened to be standing next to, and the kids were invisible.
“Work’s been full-on,” he said, moving towards her. “You know what it’s like this time of year.”
“Same at the surgery,” she said, rolling her eyes and flicking her golden mane. “There’s heaps of cosmetic work these days. Everyone wants perfect teeth. You’re looking so well!”
“So are you!” His voice ricocheted off the walls into my ears, collided inside my brain, spun down my spinal column and ruptured something in my chest.
“And your parents? How are they?”
As their conversation grew warmer and more intimate I stood like a Charles Dickens character shivering out in the snow and peering through a window at a flickering hearth surrounded by happy faces.
“Let’s go!” I said quietly to Rob.
“But I want this pink one,” said Lydia.
“Not now!” I said, thrusting it back on a neatly folded pile.
Grabbing her hand, I swept out of the shop with Rob jogging to catch up with me.
“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” Rob asked, as we charged through a sea of faces.
“I don’t think he even knows we’ve gone.”
What a fool I’d been. A consummate moron. Why on earth hadn’t I listened to Nicole and Mum and everyone else who’d warned me? They’d been right all along. The boy-man and I had no place in each other’s worlds. He was no more capable of fitting in with my journalist crowd than I was of suddenly becoming a twenty-four-year-old Barbie dentist. Let alone the kids. It would take an incredibly special man to encompass my kids in his future.
How wrong of me to expose them to someone so shallow and immature. And yes, conservative. So damned conservative and dull he might as well take up smoking a pipe and marry a dentist.
“Wait!” Philip, panting from running to catch up with us, touched me on the shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
I sent Rob into a McDonald’s to buy himself chips and Lydia an ineptly named Happy Meal.
“Ashamed of us, are you?” I yowled.
“What do you mean?” he asked, feigning innocence.
“Why didn’t you introduce us?”
“I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“You mean you didn’t think she’d be interested!”
“Look, I…” An inquisitive shopper paused to absorb as much of our argument as was politely possible.
“I thought you said Sarah was boring.” I hated the vindictive quaver in my voice. It was hideously unattractive and about as un-ticks-in-boxes as anyone could get. “You did a pretty good impression of not being bored.”
“She’s…just a friend.”
“If that’s the case why did you act as if we weren’t there?”
Philip stared up at a neon sign above our head. In a merciless act of cruelty it flashed the words “Engagement Rings.”
“Do you think this is easy for me?” he erupted. “It’s not that I don’t like the kids. I think they’re wonderful. It’s just…”
I waited as a thousand shoppers changed color under the flashing sign.
“I’m not sure I want to be an instant father.”
When he dropped us home and drove off I discovered Cleo’s collar was missing. She’d finally chewed it off and claimed her freedom.
Witch’s Cat
Sometimes it’s easier to love the moon.
There aren’t many options for a brokenhearted woman with attitude, except perhaps to become a witch. Witches fight off curses. They create their own luck. Witchery had potential. Cleo, with her ability to appear on a rooftop and in front of a fireplace almost simultaneously, was the perfect witch’s cat, not to mention the ideal color.
A room is more beautiful when furnished with a cat. Her silken presence transforms a collection of chairs, discarded toys and crumb-sprinkled plates into a temple to soothe the soul. Poised like a goddess on a window ledge she observes the countless frailties of the humans she has blessed with her presence. The poor creatures make countless mistakes with their neurotic attempts to cling to the past and control the future. They need a cat to remind themselves just to be.
A cat’s ears absorb the thump of a school bag hitting the floor or a mother’s curse when she finds ants in the sugar bowl yet again. Humans and their tragic overreactions amuse her. Nothing they can do disturbs her composure, except for the young, when they go through that horrifying stage of wanting to dress her in baby clothes and imprison her in a pram.
Her paws absorb the earth’s slightest tremor. Ever watchful, her eyes perceive more than human eyes can. When she sleeps, a cat draws a third eyelid, a translucent screen, over her eyes so no movement escapes her. A cat is always watching, but wise enough to refrain from offering an opinion.
A black cat is lucky, or not, depending on which side of the Atlantic you are born. If a black cat crosses your path in Britain expect good fortune. In North America, a black cat spells danger.
With their shimmering fur and mirror eyes, black cats were once regarded as malevolent spirits. They blended into darkness, which to some ill-informed minds made them the personification of evil—the devil himself stalking the rooftops of innocent peasants. Even in Britain, where black cats are considered lucky, the superstition isn’t in the felines’ favor. It’s only because a person suffers no harm when a black cat crosses his path, and has therefore escaped evil, that he can congratulate himself on his luck.
There was no point seeing the shrink again. She’d only tell me to have another one-night stand. We all knew how that ended up. Anyway, I’d learned from my mistakes. I withdrew from the dating world and tried to be wise. A scary replica of my mother, I developed the lonely person’s syndrome of telling people the same stories over and over again. As their eyes glazed I’d stop and say, “Have I told you this before?” The polite ones said no.
When they asked, I said I’d never been happier. So what? A cat never loses its smile. I did everything possible to become a self-sufficient witch who didn’t need a man. Compromise was no longer part of my vocabulary. The Chinese pantsuit enj
oyed regular airings. I nailed kitsch pottery ducks to the wall, drank wine and farted when I felt like it. At night, sometimes, when the kids were at their father’s, I turned the stereo up loud enough for the neighbors to notice and danced half-naked to Marvin Gaye. (Never Ella and Louis!) Women friends approved. They said I was empowered.
Empowerment sounds wonderful, but frankly, it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be. Although a witch may seem in control of her life, she has a diligent stalker: loneliness. After the kids had gone to bed I’d pour a glass of wine. Cleo would pad across the floor towards me. The shadow of her tail, an eerie serpent six feet tall, would flicker against the wall. A charge of electricity would shudder up my arm as I ran my hand over her coat. I’d scoop her up and carry her out to the back deck. We’d sit under the stars together, licking our wounds and studying the moon’s acne.
“Nobody touches a witch’s heart,” I murmured, burying my nose in her velvet fur.
Nevertheless, I leapt at the phone every time it rang. It was never him. Why should it be? He’d made it clear enough when we split up. He said he wasn’t “ready,” whatever that meant. If people waited till everything was ready, nothing would ever happen. Life isn’t a menu; you can’t order courses when you’re “ready” for them. I hadn’t been ready to lose Sam. And I didn’t feel ready to say good-bye to Philip. His words were surgical, but his eyes brimmed with sadness and love. Even though I tried to accept what he said I still believed his eyes. Why had he walked away?
I missed his calm presence, his voice warm as a driftwood fire, his ridiculously conservative clothes, the crooked nose, the hairy groves inside his ears. One of the things I missed most was his smell. Even though he seldom wore aftershave, he always smelled like a grove of cypress trees. How come so few sonnets are written to a lover’s smell? Rob was missing him, too. Philip had been a desperately needed role model that had turned out fake, heartless as a shop mannequin. What a fool I’d been. I vowed no man would ever hurt Rob that way again.
I wondered what Philip was up to. Had he shed us like one of his Italian jackets? No doubt he was being devoured by bimbo dentists and lawyers. If our worlds had been closer, a few discreet phone calls would have answered my questions. But we had no friends in common. He might as well have taken off to Pluto. Weeks dissolved into months.
If I was to be a witch, then Cleo needed to look the part. I taught her to perch on my shoulder. Our first attempts were dismal and painful to us both. But Cleo was a willing student with a sense of balance worthy of Cirque du Soleil. She was soon able to dig her claws into my clothes deeply enough to secure a platform without piercing my skin. I enjoyed the alarm that flickered across visitors’ faces when I opened the door with a black cat glaring down at them from my shoulder. For all their technology and sophistication, people are wired like primitive beings. They still believe in witches. Not so long ago, neighbors would have gathered outside my white picket fence at dusk and dragged me and my cat to the nearest bonfire.
“A woman needs a man like a butterfly needs deep-sea diving gear,” I said to Emma, who’d become a regular visitor. I’d met her at a book launch, where we’d both been hovering by the loo doors. Emma worked in a feminist bookstore. She helped me nurture a herb garden and introduced me to her circle of women friends, who had strong views on the male species. Listening to their wine-fueled discussions, I nodded fiercely. Men were a lesser species, slaves to the bulge in their pants and overdue for extinction.
Even if I couldn’t contemplate cutting my hair short and bleaching it silver the way Emma had, I admired her flair. Turquoise was her color. Only a woman with no children would have time to sift through what must’ve amounted to hundreds of shops and market stalls to find so much turquoise junk—bangles, scarves, even a pair of turquoise sunglasses. One of her favorite accessories was a feather-trimmed pendant inlaid with turquoise, a gift from a Hopi Indian chief who had cleansed her aura, smudged evil spirits out of her house with sage smoke and identified her totem animal as a cougar.
Emma often brought over books from her shop—Why Women Bleed, The Disposable Male. Free from maternal exhaustion, she was honorary aunt to the kids. I envied the excess energy she had to bounce on the trampoline with Lydia or kick a ball around with Rob. I was grateful for Emma’s company.
I was also thankful for the restless, throwaway atmosphere of the newsroom. A combination of deadlines and worldly quips from workmates helped stop up the holes in a shattered heart. I was grateful that nobody, not even Nicole, said, “I told you so.” The toy-boy jokes dried up and gradually stopped. They accepted me back into the fold. I loved them for it.
While I didn’t know Tina well, she was showing signs of being an empowerment witch herself. Not so long ago she’d asked me into her office and suggested I apply for a Press Fellowship to Cambridge University in Britain. My chances of being accepted were less than zero, but I filled out the form to practice applying for things. The form invited applicants to nominate an area of interest. Confident I wouldn’t get in, I invented a zany topic—Environmental Studies from a Spiritual Perspective.
Another weekend without the children stretched ahead like a desert. I was pleased when Emma offered a Saturday night oasis, asking me over to her place for pasta and salad. Thank God, whoever She may be, for women friends, I thought, pulling up outside Emma’s cutesy house nestled in the hills outside town.
“How are you?” she said, opening the door.
Emma was one of the few people I could be honest with.
“Good. Bad…Dunno…Tired.”
She poured a glass of wine, a soulful Australian red. We dined outside under the hypnotic toll of a wind chime.
“You’re a wonderful friend,” I said, scraping the remains of home-baked lemon pudding off my bowl. “It’s such a treat to have a beautiful meal just appear like this. It’s magic. I can’t get over it. I didn’t have to peel a potato.”
“My pleasure,” Emma said, flashing her incisors. The Hopi Indian chief was right. There was something cougarish about her, especially in the evening light.
As I stood to help clear the table, Emma took my hand. “No. Sit down,” she said. “Tonight’s your night. I know how hard you work and how demanding it is raising the kids on your own. Tonight I’m taking care of you.”
Her words made me want to crumble with gratitude. At last someone understood.
“What’s that sound?” I asked. “Do you have an ornamental fountain?”
“I’m running a bath for you,” Emma said.
A bath?! Did I smell that bad? I’d showered before leaving home.
“You said a good bath relaxes you more than anything,” she added, sensing my alarm.
“Yes, but that’s when I’m at home on my own,” I muttered.
“This is going to be better than anything you’ve ever had at home,” said Emma. “I’ve been saving some special French bubble bath for you.”
“That’s…very…kind,” I said, wishing she could’ve just handed over the bottle of bubble bath and let me go home.
“I’ve put a robe out for you,” she said, looking more cougarish by the second. “In the bathroom.”
I felt suddenly hot and confused. Over the years I’d known lots of women, strong wonderful people like Ginny, who I’d trust with my life. We’d laughed and cried together, moaned about men and shared intimate details about our bodily functions. Those women had helped me grieve and give birth, let go of my marriage and laugh off life’s indignities. So far not one of them had invited me to have a bath. A bubble bath at that.
“Don’t worry,” soothed Emma. “It’s your special night.”
Oh, well. What was wrong with taking a bath? She might think me unsophisticated if I said no. I liked Emma a lot. She was obviously trying to help. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings or seem unappreciative.
The French obviously knew a thing or two about bubble bath. Giant rainbow domes rose from the water. A row of colored candles blazed on the window
ledge. Surely a fire hazard. A robe was folded thoughtfully on the vanity. I instinctively raised a hand to lock the bathroom door. There was no lock.
Sinking into the bubbles, I examined the Women Can Do Anything poster on the wall. Had I sent unusual signals to Emma? I hoped not. She knew my tastes were straightforward. Perhaps I’d been naive to assume hers were, too. She certainly hadn’t gone out of her way to talk about previous love affairs. I’d respected Emma’s need for privacy. Maybe I should have been more curious. She’d mentioned a man once, and women friends. But I’d assumed “friends” was the operative word. Maybe I’d been loose in my use of language. When I’d told her I loved women I hadn’t felt it necessary to add “but not in that way.” Strange sounds warbled from under the door that I had closed firmly as possible.
“Whale song!” called Emma. “With subliminal messages.”
“Oh,” I replied nonchalantly. “What do you mean?”
“They recorded messages you can’t quite hear under the whale song,” she said. “To change your way of thinking.”
Suddenly on edge, I craned my neck out of the water to listen for whatever hidden message there was behind the yodeling whales. Some sort of mumbling was definitely going on. Maybe Emma was trying to brainwash me to join some religious sect.
“What does it say?” I asked, trying to conceal my anxiety.
“Oh, relax, let go, that sort of thing.”