I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1:06 P.M. The heating has burst on the train down to London, the windows of the empty carriage are iced up; it’s like traveling inside a giant Fox’s glacier mint. I join the queue at the buffet. My fellow Christmas refugees are all eager for alcohol. Either they have no family or are in flight from too much family, both of them lonely and exhilarating conditions.

  I purchase four miniatures—whisky, Bailey’s, Bailey’s, Tia Maria. Back in my seat for just a few seconds when I hear the mobile chirrup in my bag. Can see from the number that it’s Rod Task. Before answering, I take the precaution of holding the phone away from my ear.

  “OK, can you explain how we bought this shitload of stock in some fucking Jap outfit that makes fucking mattresses that fucking kill kids? Jesus wept, Katie. Do you hear me?”

  I tell Rod I wish I could hear him, but sadly he’s breaking up and the train’s about to go into a tunnel. Press CANCEL. As I’m mixing the second Bailey’s with the whisky, it occurs to me that maybe the reason I got Salinger as a client was because someone knew that Toki Rubber was about to go belly-up and unloaded it onto me. That bastard Bunce, probably.

  A few seconds later, Rod rings back so that he and I can have a conference call with the appalling Abelhammer in New York. Delivering the customary reassurances to a client 3,500 miles away, I watch my words rising up in steamy rings of hot air. With a gloved finger, I scratch one word on the frosted window: RICH.

  “Hoping for a lottery win are you, love?” the Scouse steward says, pointing at the window when he comes along later to collect my empties.

  “What? Oh, Rich isn’t money,” I say. “He’s a man. Rich is my husband.”

  MUST REMEMBER: NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS

  Adjust work–life balance for healthier, happier existence.

  Get up an hour earlier to maximize time available.

  Spend more time with your children.

  Learn to be self with children.

  Don’t take Richard for granted!

  Entertain more—Sunday lunch & so on.

  Relaxing hobby??

  Learn Italian.

  Take advantage of London: theaters, Tate Modern, etc.

  Stop canceling stress-busting treatments.

  Start a present drawer like proper organized mother.

  Attempt to be size 10. Personal trainer?

  Call friends, hope they remember you.

  Ginseng, oily fish, no wheat.

  Sex?

  New dishwasher.

  Helena Rubinstein Autumn Bonfire?

  6

  The Court of Motherhood

  A DENSE CHURCHY hush fills the oak-paneled room. In the dock stands a blonde in her mid-thirties dressed in a white cotton nightie with a red bra clearly visible underneath. The woman looks exhausted yet defiant. As she faces the gentlemen of the court, she tilts her head like a gun dog that has got the scent. Occasionally, though, when she scratches behind her right ear, you could be forgiven for thinking she is close to tears.

  “Katharine Reddy,” booms the judge, “you appear before the Court of Motherhood tonight charged with being a working mother who overcompensates with material things for not being at home with her children. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty,” says the woman.

  The prosecuting counsel jumps to his feet. “Can you please tell the court, Mrs. Shattock—I believe that is your correct name—can you tell the court what you gave your children, Emily and Benjamin, for Christmas?”

  “Well, I can’t remember exactly.”

  “She can’t remember,” sneers the Prosecution. “But it would be fair to say, would it not, that presents approaching the value of four hundred pounds were purchased?”

  “I’m not quite sure—”

  “For two small children, Mrs. Shattock. Four... hun... dred... pounds. Am I also to understand that, having explained to your daughter Emily that Santa Claus would buy her either a Barbie bicycle or a Brambly Hedge doll’s house or a hamster in a cage with a retractable water bottle, you then went ahead and gave her all of the three aforementioned items plus a Beanie Baby she had expressed interest in during a brief stop in a petrol station outside Newark?”

  “Yes, but I bought the doll’s house first and then she wrote to Santa and said she wanted a hamster—”

  “Is it also true that when your mother-in-law, Mrs. Barbara Shattock, asked you if Emily liked broccoli you said that she absolutely loved it, even though you were at that time unsure of the answer?”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t possibly tell my husband’s mother that I didn’t know whether my child liked broccoli.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the kind of thing mothers know.”

  “Speak up!” demands the judge.

  “I said mothers know that kind of thing.”

  “And you don’t?”

  The woman can feel her throat constricting and when she swallows she gets no moisture in her mouth but a thin cardboardy coating. This, she thinks, is what it would taste like if you were forced to eat your words. When she starts to speak again, it is very softly.

  “Sometimes I don’t know what the children like,” she admits. “I mean, the things they like change from day to day, hour to hour even. Ben couldn’t stand fish and then suddenly . . . You see, I’m not always there when they change. But if I told Barbara that she’d think I wasn’t a proper mother.”

  The Prosecution turns to the jury, his long vulpine face twitching with the addition of a tight little smirk. “Will the court please note that the defendant prefers to tell a lie rather than suffer any embarrassment.”

  The woman shakes her head fiercely. She appeals to the judge. “No, no, no. That is so unfair. It’s not embarrassment, your honor. I can’t describe it. It feels like shame, a deep animal shame, like not being able to pick out your own hands or face. Look, I know there’s no way that Richard—he’s my husband—well, there’s no way that Richard would know whether Emily liked broccoli or not, but him not knowing seems normal. The mother not knowing, it feels unnatural. . . .”

  “Quite so,” says the judge, jotting down the words “unnatural” and “mother” and underlining them.

  “Obviously,” the woman says quickly, fearing she may already have said too much, “obviously, I don’t want to spoil my children.”

  We see her stop speaking. She appears to be thinking. Of course, she wants to spoil her children. Desperately. She needs to believe that, in this way at least, they’re better off for her not being with them. She wants Emily and Ben to have all the things she never had. But she can’t tell the men in the court that. What do they know about turning up on your first day at junior school in the wrong shade of gray jersey, because your mum bought yours at the Oxfam shop and everyone else in the class was in the new gunmetal range purchased from Wyatt & Moore? Nothing. She knows they know nothing about what it is to have nothing.

  Clearing her throat, the woman attempts to find the cool unemotional register that experience has taught her the men will respect. “Why do I work so hard if not to buy my children things that give them pleasure?”

  The judge peers stonily over his half-moon glasses. “Mrs. Shattock, we are not concerned here with the realms of philosophical speculation.”

  “Well, maybe you should be,” the woman says, rubbing fiercely behind her right ear. “There’s more to being a good mother than an in-depth knowledge of vegetable preferences.”

  “Silence! Silence in court!” says the judge. “Call Richard Shattock.”

  Oh, no, please don’t let them call Richard. Rich wouldn’t testify against me, would he?

  PART TWO

  7

  Happy New Year

  MONDAY, 5:57 A.M. “Aaaannnd open the world. Aaaand close the world. Open the world aaand close the world.”

  I am standing in the middle of the living room, legs wide apart and arms above my head. In each of my hands I hold a ball, one of those squidgy ones that feels like a giant octopus
head. With the balls, I am required to draw a circle in the air. “Aaaand open the world aaaand close the world.”

  The person telling me to do this is a loopily cheerful fiftysomething woman with a crystal on a chain round her neck; she probably runs a protection league for animals that everybody else would be perfectly happy to see run over: rats, bats, stoats. Fay is a personal trainer hired to help me with my intensive new year relaxation and exercise program. I got her over the phone from the Juno Academy of Health and Fitness. Not cheap, but I figure it will save me a lot if I can get back into my pre-pregnancy clothes. Plus, it must work out as less expensive than joining gyms I never have time to visit.

  “The only exercise you ever get, Kate, is lifting your wallet with all those health club membership cards in it,” says Richard.

  Unfair. Unfair and true. According to conservative estimates, my annual swim at the most recent health club, sneaked between lunch at Conundrum and a new business pitch in Blackfriars, worked out at &Bembo.xa3;47.50 a length.

  Anyway, there I was expecting Cindy Crawford in pink Lycra and what do I find when I open the door but Isadora Duncan in green loden. A windblown faery creature, my personal trainer was sporting the kind of double-decker cape previously only worn by Douglas Hurd when Foreign Secretary. “The name’s Fay,” she said dreamily and, from one of those carpet bags that Mary Poppins keeps her hatstand in, she produced what she called “my Chi balls.”

  Rotating the Chi balls in slow patient circles is not exactly what I had in mind. I ask if we could possibly move on and do some work on my stomach. “You see, I had a cesarean and there’s this overhang of skin which just won’t go away.”

  Fay shivers at the interruption, fastidious as a greyhound at a sheepdog trial. “My approach is to the whole person, Katya. I may call you Katya, mayn’t I? You see, once we have freed up the mind, we can move on to the body, gradually introducing the various parts to each other until we establish a harmonious conversation.”

  “Actually,” I tell Fay, with as much harmony as I can muster, “I’m incredibly busy, so if we could just say, Hello, stomach muscles, remember me? that would be terrific.”

  “You don’t have to tell me you’re busy, Katya. I can see by the weight of your head. You really have a very heavy head. A poor stressed head. And the neck ligaments. Loose! Loose! Looose! Barely supporting your poor head. And this in turn is bringing truly intolerable pressure onto the lower lumbar region.”

  And there I was thinking you paid these people to make you feel better. After thirty minutes of Fay, I feel as though my next appointment should be with an embalmer. Now she suggests I lie flat on my back, extend my arms over my head and pretend I’m lying on a rack. Mind flicks to thoughts of traitors having secrets dragged out of them in the Tower of London at twenty-five quid an hour by ye olde personal torturer. According to Fay, this exercise will realign my spine, the spine that is one of the saddest and most misshapen Fay has ever seen.

  “That’s it, that’s it, Katya, excellent.” She beams. “Now, bring your arms slowly forward over your head and repeat after me, If we com-pete, we are not com-plete. If we com-pete, we are not com-plete.”

  7:01 A.M. Departure of Fay. Truly intolerable pressure lifts immediately. Treat myself to bowl of Honey Nut Loops; I cannot do exercise and self-denial in the same morning. Sitting at the kitchen table am suddenly aware of unaccustomed sound, a dry scratchy wireless hiss, and look round the room for its source. It takes a couple of minutes to track it down: silence. The sound of nothing is shouting in my ears. Have five minutes to myself, drinking it in, before Emily and Ben come whooping through the door.

  After the holidays, I always sense a special edge to the children’s neediness. Far from being satisfied by the time we’ve had together they seem famished, as ravenous for my attention as newborns. It’s as though the more they have of me, the more they’re reminded how much they want. (Maybe that’s true of every human appetite: sleep begets sleep; eating makes you hungry; fucking stokes desire.) Clearly, my kids have not grasped the principle of Quality Time. Since we got back from Richard’s parents, every time I go out the door it’s like the Railway Children seeing their father off to jail. Ben’s face is a popped red balloon of anguish, and Emily has started doing that hideous coughing thing in the night—she hacks and hacks until she makes herself sick. When I mentioned it to Paula for reassurance, she said, “Attention-seeking,” with a quiet note of triumph. (Implying that attention is lacking, obviously.)

  Then there are Emily’s nonstop requests for me to play with her, always at the most inconvenient times, as if she were testing me and at the same time willing me to fail. Like this morning, when I am desperate to get to a doctor’s appointment, she comes up and hangs on my skirt.

  “Mummy, I spy with my little eye something beginning with B.”

  “Not now, Em.”

  “Oh, pleeese. Something beginning with B.”

  “Breakfast?”

  “No.”

  “Bunny rabbit?”

  “No.”

  “Book?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t know, Emily, I give up.”

  “Bideo!”

  “Video doesn’t begin with B.”

  “It do.”

  “It does.”

  “It does begin with B.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It begins with V. V for van. V for volcano. V for violent. If you choose the right letter, Emily, it saves an awful lot of time.”

  “Katie, give her a break, she’s only five years old,” says Richard, who has ambled downstairs, hair still damp from the shower, and is now carefully cutting out a Cruella De Vil mask from the back of a Frosties packet.

  Glare across the table at him. Trust Rich not to back me up. He is so bad at presenting a united front.

  “Well, if I don’t correct her, who’s going to? Not those all-spellings-are-equally-valid mullahs at school.”

  “Kate, it’s I Spy, for God’s sake, not Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

  Rich, I notice, no longer looks at me as though I am merely mad. A certain sideways flicker to the eyes and corrugating of the brow suggests he is now weighing up how long he should leave it before calling the ambulance.

  “Everything’s a competition for you, isn’t it, Kate?”

  “Everything is a competition, Rich, in case you hadn’t noticed. Someone wanting to smash your conker, someone wanting a prettier special-edition Barbie, someone wanting to take your biggest client away just to prove you couldn’t handle it.” As I unload the dishwasher, I think of Fay and her daft mantra. What was it? “If we compete, we are not complete.” She should try that one in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster. “If we do not compete, we are out on the street. In the sheet.”

  “Mummy, can I watch a bideo? Pleeese can I watch a bideo?” Emily has climbed up onto the granite worktop and is attaching a Barbie slide to my hair.

  “How many times have I told you, we don’t watch bideo—Jesus, video—at breakfast time.”

  “Kate, seriously. What you need is to slow down.”

  “No, Richard, what I need is a helicopter. I’ve got an appointment at the doctor’s for which I am going to be ten minutes late, making me even later for my conference call with Australia. The Pegasus minicab number’s on the board, can you ring? And tell them not to send that weirdo in the Nissan Sunny.”

  * * *

  RICHARD IS A NICER person than me, anyone can see that. But in suffering, in bitter experience, I am his superior and I carry that knowledge like a knife. Why am I so much tougher on Emily? Because I guess I’m scared that Rich would bring up our children to live in an England that doesn’t exist. A place where people say “After you” instead of “Me first,” a better and a kinder place, for sure, but not one that I have ever lived or worked in.

  Rich had a happy childhood, and a happy childhood is terrific preparation—indeed, the only known apprenticeship—for being a happy adult. But happy childhoods are no bl
oody good for drive and success; misery and rejection and standing in the rain at bus stops are the fuel for those. Consider, for instance, Rich’s tragic lack of guile, his repeated undercharging of clients he feels sorry for, his insane optimism up to and including the recent purchase of erotic underwear for a wife who, since the birth of her first child, has come to the nuptial bed in a Gap XXXL T-shirt with a dachshund motif.

  Children do that to you, don’t they? He is Daddy and I am Mummy and finding the time to be Kate and Richard—to be You and Me—well, it slipped down the agenda. Sex now comes under Any Other Business, along with parking permits and a new boiler. Emily—she can barely have been three then—once found us kissing in the kitchen and turned on her parents like Queen Victoria discovering a footman with his finger in the port.

  “Don’t do that. It gives me a tummy ache,” she hissed.

  So we didn’t.

  8:17 A.M. Despite my specific request, Pegasus Cars has once again sent round the Nissan Sunny. The back seat is so damp you could start a mushroom farm in there. Tensing both thigh muscles and buttocks and hiking up my Nicole Farhi gray wool skirt, I do my best to squat an inch or two above the mildew.

  When I ask the driver if he could possibly find a quicker route to the surgery, he responds by turning up the volume on the tape deck so high my cheekbones start to shiver in gale-force music. (Is this gangsta rap?)

  After my attempt to be friendly to Winston before Christmas, I have no plans to talk to him again. But as I am fighting my way out of the car door, he turns round and, on an exhalation of yellow smoke, says: “I hope they got something strong enough in there to treat you with, lady.”

  Bloody cheek. What does he mean by that? Things don’t improve when I get in to see the GP and ask for my annual supply of the Pill. Dr. Dobson taps his computer and the screen starts to flash a green hazard light as though I am some devious criminal mastermind wanted by the CIA.

  “Ah, Mrs. Shattock, I see you haven’t had a smear test for... how long is it now?”