Take It Easy

by Pat Rosier

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be expecting …’ Bob looked worried. They had eaten, beef casserole with carrots, peas and mashed potatoes and were still sitting at the table.

  ‘I know, and so do my parents and they asked first.’ Isobel was glad she sounded stronger than she felt. There would be nothing gained by saying her mother hadn’t actually asked, had assumed their presence for Christmas dinner.

  ‘Yes, I suppose …. We can go home in the afternoon.’ It’s not my home Isobel wanted to say and didn’t, struck by the thought that there wasn’t anywhere she thought of as home, not really This flat was where she lived, but it was half of someone else’s house, it wasn’t home the way Bob said it of the house he grew up in, where his parents still lived. Oh well. She was certainly home to the boys, that would do for now. She stood up and gathered their plates. ‘I’ll talk to Dad later,’ Bob was saying as he headed for the living room and the television.

  ‘Mum’s pretty upset.' Isobel knew that, she’d heard Bob’s end of the conversation. ‘Next year,’ he had promised. Isobel was not going to think about Christmas next year, when the boys would be one and she … no, she would not think about that at all. ‘She likes those big tins of mixed biscuits,’ Bob was saying, ‘and whisky, single malt, is always good for Dad.' So she was to shop for presents.

  ‘There’s not much point in buying presents for the boys yet,’ she said. Bob blushed. ‘I’ve already….’

  ‘Oh. What?’

  ‘I was going to surprise you.’ With presents for the babies? She quickly composed her face and tried a smile. ‘Go on, tell me, or even better show me …’ She wanted to laugh out loud.

  ‘Tease,’ said Bob. ‘I haven’t picked them up yet. Two of the biggest teddy bears you’ve ever seen. One with a striped kerchief, the other with spots. I can’t decide which one for which. I’ll make up my mind on the day.' He was looking at her, trying to figure out what she was thinking. She mustn’t be unkind.

  ‘Of course, they’re presents from santa,’ he went on, seriously, ’you could always get them something as well ….’

  ‘It’s okay.’ If she laughed she’d be hysterical. ‘I think I give them plenty already.' She jiggled. Bob blushed. ‘I don’t always understand you,’ he said, and leant over to turn up the sound on the television. ‘Ironside’s starting, you like that.’

  Her mother liked and expected what she called ‘smelly soap’ and she always gave her father cigarettes, he said they were a treat from the roll-your-owns he usually smoked. She bought Bob a tie, more colourful than he usually wore, Daniel and Sally a box of chocolates, and age-appropriate books on the recommendation of the bookseller for Nathan and Sarah. At the last moment, after she’d paid for the story-books, she picked up two identical rattles, plastic in primary colours and bought them too.

  There was a string of days with heavy showers, days when she didn’t notice in time to bring in the washing before it was wetter than when she put it out. Her supply of clean, dry nappies was reduced to three. When she realised, she started to look up the phone number of Bob’s work then changed her mind. She put the babies in the pram, snapped on the wet weather cover, and walked twenty minutes to the Four Square store, where she bought a packet of twelve toweling nappies, which was all they had. She preferred the other sort, the ones made of densely woven cotton, slightly fluffy on one side, with a red stripe on two edges and hems on the other two. She only used plastic pants over the nappies at night and when they were going out, she thought they caused nappy rash. And she had all the ointment and potions for that, too.

  In fact, she had all the practical details of looking after two babies well worked out. She knew she was lucky, because people kept telling her, that they both slept reasonably well at night and neither had been colicky or badly unsettled, and they were not fussy eaters (what’s to be fussy about she thought when Sally said this, they have breast milk or breast milk); they qualified on every count as good babies.

  Isobel would play with them, read to them, recite nursery rhymes, put them on the floor to kick their legs, all the things she read that babies needed. If she read or was told about something that didn’t work – like a feeding schedule – she abandoned it. She liked always having a next thing that had to be done without thinking about it, had the two of them asleep at the same time at least once a day so she could read and generally found one day indistinguishable from another. Being tired all the time didn’t matter, really, and it made her flat and not inclined to think about anything difficult, so she could pass her days in neutral, not unpleasant numbness. When she read about mothers falling in love with their babies, she felt strange, and anxious that maybe hers were missing out on something, she could forget about them so easily when she was reading, or even watching television, and be startled for a moment when they woke and cried. She supposed she loved them – of course she did, she told herself! – and she knew she looked after them as she should, but she wasn’t besotted and every so often she got the idea that she should be. They cuddled a lot, into her neck, wriggling against her when they were feeding, grasping her breast or arm and she liked the feel of holding a baby against her shoulder, or lying across her lap; it was good, in the best sense.

  Visits from the Plunket nurse had turned into visits to the Plunket room next to the library. Isobel liked some of the nurses better than others, and after a while, enjoyed seeing the weight lines travel up through the graph in the Plunket books. She always left them out for Bob to see and he always relayed the details to his mother on the phone.

  The boys were six months old and weaned and Isobel was feeling herself coming back to life. when she was plunged into days and nights of red-cheeked fractiousness brought on by a phenomenon no-one had warned her about, a process, she discovered, known as teething. Bob had been back in the big bed with her for three weeks, they’d spent a Saturday afternoon putting up the cots in the second bed-room, stacking the cradles that were now too small in the space behind the back door. There was just room in the second bedroom for the cots against one wall and the single bed against the one opposite, with a narrow space between them. The chest of drawers had to go out in the hall otherwise the door could only be opened a few inches. And the sash window opposite the door had to be opened at the top in case one of the boys learnt to climb onto the sill from his cot. As soon as Isobel heard a baby in the night she went and picked him up, climbed into the single bed and stayed. At five months she had weaned them both so she could go on the pill and stop worrying about getting pregnant. Her mother’s exhortations to be careful because she already had her hands full, and Nana’s suggestion that they should wait awhile until trying for a sister for the boys, had both scared her in different ways. She didn’t talk to Bob about it, but did manage to say enough to the doctor to get a prescription for some green pills with white ones for the days when she didn’t need to take a real pill, just one to keep up the habit. She wondered how many other women were insulted at the implication that they were too dumb to manage taking a pill a day for three weeks out of four. There was no way she would have another child. She’d go to Australia for an abortion if she had to, without having any idea how she knew that was possible or how to go about it. Believing completely that the magic green tablet would keep her safe from pregnancy didn’t make her any more interested in sex. She obliged if Bob wanted to, with the vague acquiescence that characterized her days. Responding to the boys’ needs had become second nature; feeding, washing, changing, picking up and shushing, rubbing gel on their gums, whatever needed doing she did it equably.

  Some days she talked to and at them, a running monologue of her activities and thoughts. ‘Would you like to help me fold the washing, Andrew? No? All right then, have a rattle, look here’s one your Daddy bought, maybe you could bring yourself to shake it for Nana when she comes, she’d be so pleased with you ….' Talking nonsense was how she thought of it, and fun, she liked talking to them in her usual voice, not the cooing tones that even her mother sometimes
fell into. The boys were sitting now, and they’d wave their arms and gurgle at her and each other whatever she said. Neil specialized in a smile that became a hiccup-like giggle. Andrew smiled more often and more quietly.

  Bob was working longer and longer hours, very excited about the upcoming currency change. ‘Out with the old imperial nonsense,’ Isobel was telling Andrew one day, as she wiped mushy vegetables off his face, ‘and in with the new, modern, decimal currency system. No more twelve times tables. And your Dad is very important in all this, he’s going to make all the cash registers work perfectly from day one,’ when he snuggled in to her shoulder and went to sleep. Isobel laughed to herself. She often stifled a yawn when Bob told her, with an earnestness she was sure was new, about the change — still a year or more away — and how important his firm — and hence he himself — was to its success. He’d brought home the booklet from the Decimal Currency Board and she read it and tried not to get impatient with his re-explanations of every detail. It was quite clear and straightforward in the booklet, she thought, really, there was nothing that needed saying.

  The boys had slept better, especially at night, when they were tiny babies. Days merged into nights into days.

  Daniel and Sally and their two came by now and then at weekends, usually briefly on their way to or from somewhere else. Nathan ran everywhere, with a disregard to his own and anyone else’s safety that meant Isobel was always watching where he was in relation to the boys. This made their visits tiring, though she was pleased Daniel took an interest. He would at least always ask how she was, and look at her while she answered that she was fine. There weren’t many chances to talk to him, everyone assumed the men and the women would have separate conversations. Sally would talk about the children or an antique she had picked up for a song somewhere, and Isobel mostly nodded and smiled. Once Isobel started to talk about a book she was reading, but Sally’s lack of interest was so palpable she never bothered again.

  She’d given up on the Russian novels, but kept an eye on the new novels and librarian’s choice shelves, taking out any with a blurb that interested her. That was how she had come to read Maori Girl and The God Boy and realise that novels set in New Zealand were written and published. She wished she liked them more but found them both familiar and not, and unsatisfying.

  Catcher in the Rye she’d loved even though Pete’s comment about it being the novel of the day didn’t make sense — it had nothing to do with her days, though she thought she understood Holden Caulfield pretty well. Kerouac had been stolen, the librarian said, and she doubted they would get another. It didn’t matter, she was gathering her own list of writers. When she found one she liked, she tried to read everything they had written, as much as she could in the order they had published it. A Frank Yerby blockbuster would keep her going through a whole weekend. She found Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Lawrence, Lessing and interspersed them with her favourite crime fiction. Graeme Green introduced her to spy stories, but they made her anxious. She pounced on anything of Raymond Chandler’s or a new P D James.

  An attempt at To The Lighthouse discouraged her from trying any more Virginia Woolf, she couldn’t get interested in the characters and it took too long for anything to happen. She might have given up all together and stayed with crime but she felt as though she was keeping up a link with Pete if she got at least one real’novel every trip to the library.

  After a while she bought a cheap exercise book and started writing down what she read. Occasionally she made a note, as when she finished The Grass is SInging and wrote that Doris Lessing ‘knows something about isolation,’ followed by seven exclamation marks.

  ~~~

  Chapter 12

  ‘It’s a Triumph, it goes with my new position.' You certainly sound triumphant, Isobel thought. They were standing at the window looking out through drizzling rain at the car parked by the gate. Cream, with brown, or maybe maroon, trim.

  ‘I could learn to drive,’ Isobel said.

  ‘No!.' Bob’s tone made it clear what he thought about that. ‘It’s a work car, only I can drive it. But I’ll have it all the time, you know, weekends, we won’t have to get the bus to go to Mum and Dad’s.

  Whoopee. She imagined sitting in the back, holding the two boys trying to keep them still, driving to Bob’s parents.

  ‘You don’t seem very pleased.’ That edge in his voice again. Appreciate me, it said, tell me I’m smart and doing well.

  ‘Sorry.' She did her best to smile. ‘I’m impressed, really, it’s just that I’m so tired all the time.’ With a big effort she put her hand on his arm. ‘The teething goes on and on and on, they slept better when they were babies.’

  ‘Regional sales and service manager.' He couldn’t help being pleased with himself, and patted her hand. ‘I knew that job had my name on it.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’ She tried for more enthusiasm. ‘My mother is most impressed! And so am I, of course.’

  Bob moved away from the window. ‘If it wasn’t raining we could all go for a spin. We’ll do it at the weekend, I promise.’ Isobel moved off to the kitchen to finish dinner. Both boys were asleep. Bob hadn’t noticed that he had woken her up, coming in excited, wanting to show her the car. Of course he was excited, he hadn’t had a car of his own before. Obviously he had a driver’s licence, she hadn’t known that. She wished she was more pleased. It was harder and harder to feel anything. Just walking around the house sometimes she felt as though she was dragging herself through syrup. But there were other days when she was desperate to get out, and would put the boys in their pram – the pram they would be too big for very soon – and go out in any weather and walk and walk, to her mother’s, to the shops, the library or nowhere in particular, just around the streets until she turned and made her way home. They could sit now, with the support of the pram, and lean forward, twist around, pull at the sides, she had to use the harnesses.

  Bob had followed her into the kitchen. He leant against the door and watched her pour frozen peas into a pot. ‘It will mean being away overnight a bit, this new job,’ he was telling her, ‘maybe a couple of nights a week.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ She didn’t look at him for fear her pleasure showed. No evening meal to get. No trying to get the boys to sleep in their cots. Doing things at any time of the night or day and sleeping whenever she could.

  ‘You could write it on the calendar,’ she gestured towards the one on the wall by the door, ‘it’s got a space for every day. You know, when you’ll be away.’

  ‘Uh huh. Yeah, that’s a good idea.' She knew he wanted more from her, more interest, more enthusiasm for his so-important job. She tried, she really did but could not get excited about cash registers, the change-over to decimal currency, the high regard he was held in by his boss. It looked as though they were about to have a meal without either of the boys awake, she’d make a real effort, she’d be pleased for him, she wouldn’t let it show how she already looked forward to those days when he would be away overnight.

  As she was dishing up, she heard one baby then the other. She looked at Bob, pulling a face she hoped was rueful, and he went off and came back holding Neil out in front of him.

  ‘I think …’

  ‘Okay,’ she took him, ‘would you finish off ….’

  ‘Sure. Shall I dish up for you, too?’ She nodded. Mostly she ate lukewarm food these days. By the time she had cleaned and changed Neil, and then Andrew, Bob was putting his plate on the bench. ‘I’d better watch the news,’ he said, heading for the living room, ‘the Queen mother’s in the south island and Mum will want to talk about that if she rings.’

  With both boys on their backs on the floor rug, Isobel picked up her fork and pushed cold peas and potatoes around her plate. ‘Surely I’m the queen of the mothers around here,’ she said to them. Andrew rolled over. ‘Crawling’s not allowed yet,’ she told him, getting up to turn him back on his back. They’d slept an hour. She moved the rug and the two boys onto the flo
or in the living room between Bob and the television. He was watching a news item about Vietnam; Prime Minister Holyoake was holding forth, an interviewer was pointing at a map. Cleaning up the kitchen and the dishes took only a few minutes and the washing was more or less up to date, so Isobel picked up her book — A Mind To Murder — and retreated to the bedroom. She got ten minutes before she heard Bob calling, pushed the book under her pillow and went back to the living room. Andrew was being jiggled on his knee and Neil was beginning to grizzle, so she picked him up, put him on Bob’s other knee and sat down on the sofa beside them.

  The news had finished and a Town and Around reporter was interviewing someone about extensions to the Harbour Bridge.

  ‘Which one looks most like me, eh?’ She studied his face and theirs, head on one side, joining in. ‘Neither and both,’ she said. ‘Neil’s got your nose and Andrew your smile.’ He was a good man, she told herself, her mother was right to approve of him, he didn’t get drunk, he liked the boys and was proud of them, he gave her enough money. It’s just that I’m not good at being a wife, she thought. Mother I can do, wife, I keep messing up. Thinking I’m at least as bright as him for a start. Not admiring him enough. She sighed.

  ‘Okay?’ Neil had gone to sleep on his shoulder, Andrew was chewing his tie, which he hadn’t noticed yet.

  ‘Yeah, sure, thanks.’ She hid a yawn. Being tired all the time was a fact of life for now, but what would she do when the three of them were sleeping regularly again? She couldn’t be tired for the rest of her life. Then what? She jumped up. ‘Gotta, you know, go to the loo.' Sitting on the toilet, Isobel forced herself to breathe slowly until the panic subsided. Every time she had a thought like ‘the rest of her life’ that referred her to a future she couldn’t imagine, especially when she hadn’t had a chance to prepare herself for it, she felt this panic. Her heart beat fast and loud, her stomach cramped and she had to move – away – from – towards – she had no idea, but she had to physically move or – well, that was the thing about panic, she didn’t know. Then there was a decision, clear as a bell, in her head. When the boys were two – October 1967 that would be – she would go back to work. How that could happen she had no idea, but she had time to work on it.