I Don't Know How She Does It
Page 11
I look at Alice now, gaunt as an addict. From a distance, she looks as youthful as when we first met, but up close you see how motherhood has stolen her bloom: the boys seem to have literally sucked her blood. She may have won a Bafta, but her sons are even needier by night than the talent she corrals by day, and how would she find the time to meet a new man, even if there was one out there willing to take on the bolshie scions of another male? Reading my thoughts, she says with a grim smile, “My only fix now is the boys, Kate.”
I place my hand on the golden orb of my own boy’s head. A clump of chocolate Rice Krispies is nesting in his left ear. Time to sing “Happy Birthday.” Paula produces a Zippo from her pocket to light the candles (Christ, she’s not smoking now, is she?). I carry the cake to the table. Ben’s eyes are watery with wonder, mine with regret at the fleetingness of it all. Is this the last time I’ll see a baby of mine turn one? And how much of that first year have I actually seen?
“Oh, Kate, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” says Alice, eyebrow raised and gesturing at the Teletubbies icing.
“Bad mother,” I mouth silently at her across the table.
Laughing, she whispers back, “Me too.”
MUST REMEMBER
Nits, cheese, Valentine’s card.
11
Reason Not the Need
IT’S HARD TO EXPLAIN how my relationship with Jack began. I really wasn’t looking for anyone. I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t unhappy either; I was in the gray survival zone where I imagine most of us live most of the time. When a badly injured patient gets admitted to Casualty, the hospital staff do what they call triage. Triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to decide the order of treatment of wounds. I first heard the term one night when I was watching ER on Channel 4—it was that riveting period when we were all wondering how things would work out between Hathaway and Doug—and I thought how much triage sounded like my life. Daily existence was a constant assessment of who needed my attention most: the children, the office or my husband. You’ll notice I leave myself out of that list and that’s not because I’m a good and selfless person. Far from it. Selfishness just wasn’t an option: no time. Most weekends, on the drive home from the supermarket, I would look through the steamed-up windows of a café and see a couple, fingertips touching over cappuccino, or a lone man reading a newspaper, and I would long to go in there and order a drink and just sit and sit. But it was impossible. When I wasn’t at work, I had to be a mother; when I wasn’t being a mother, I owed it to work to be at work. Time off for myself felt like stealing. The fact that no man I knew ever felt that way didn’t help. This was just another area in which we were unequal: mothers got the lioness’s share of the guilt. So the last thing, the very last thing I needed was someone else to love—and then the e-mails started.
In the weeks that followed our first dinner in New York, Jack e-mailed me, first daily and then hourly. Sometimes we would reply to each other within seconds and it felt like one of those rallies in a tennis match where a great return spurs the other player to an inspired lob. I was cool at first, but he was so playful and persistent that natural competitiveness took over and I was soon running to the back of the court to retrieve the ball and return it with some topspin. So, no, I didn’t need him, but he created a Jack-shaped need in me, a need that only he could satisfy. Does the woman in the desert know how thirsty she is till they press the bottle to her lips? I started to look forward to the name Abelhammer dropping into my Inbox more than I have looked forward to anything in my life.
To: Kate Reddy, EMF
From: Jack Abelhammer
Nasdaq hit like Pearl Harbor. heavy casualties. Client seeks considered professional opinion of respected British fund manager: should I shoot myself now or wait till after lunch? Jack
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Rest assured respected fund manager has you constantly in mind. Awaiting interest-rate pronouncement from Al Mighty Greenspan.
Professional opinion: long-term recovery inevitable. Don’t shoot.
Unprofessional opinion: hide under desk till shelling stops, go out and see if any stock left standing. Eat turkey club sandwich. Then shoot.
Katharine xxxxx
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Did you know Alan Greenspan’s wife said he was so oblique that when he asked her to marry him she didn’t even notice? That guy’s harder to read than Thomas Pynchon.
Hey, shouldn’t you be in bed? Middle of the night there, right?
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
I like the night. More time in it than the day. Why waste it in bed?
K xxxx
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Bed not invariably a waste of time. Do you know that speech where the guy tells his lover he wishes that seven years were rolled into one night? Must be Shakespeare, right?
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Seven years in one night sounds just about enough hours to pay off my sleep debt. Not Shakespeare. Marlowe, I think. That’s the unfair thing about Shakespeare, though—everything beautiful belongs to him whether he wrote it or not. He’s the Bill Gates of emotional software.
How come you read Marlowe anyway? Did the Wall St J predict a resurgence in Renaissance playwrights?
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Unfair, milady, unfair. Don’t judge a man by his portfolio. Was once a poor struggling English major but had to find a way of financing my first-editions habit. Some men buy boats, I buy a first edition of Ulysses. What’s your excuse?
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
Was once a poor struggling English minor. Poverty, when it’s not being boring, is really quite scary. I didn’t want to be scared all my life. In Britain, there are plenty of people who will tell you money doesn’t matter; these are the people we call the middle classes.
Owning first editions such a boy’s own thing. Respectfully suggest, sir, you should spend your money on something really important, like SHOES.
K xxxxxxxxxxx
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Do you realize you have now sent me exactly 147 kisses and I have not sent you a single one?
* * *
To: Jack Abelhammer
From: Kate Reddy
It had crossed my mind.
* * *
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
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* * *
7:01 A.M. Ben has discovered his penis. Lying on the changing mat, he wears the rapt, triumphant expression of a being who has just found the on-off switch for the solar system. Small fingers curled tight around the original joystick, he is absolutely outraged and sheds fat warm tears when I confiscate his favorite new toy by trapping it in a Midi-Pamper and hastily sealing the Velcro flaps on each side.
“No, there’s a good boy. We have to put it away now and go downstairs and have our Shreddies.”
What is the correct mother-of-the-world attitude toward an infant son’s sexuality? Delight that the penis works, of course. Amazement that I could, in my own female body, have grown this caterpillar-sized miracle of plumbing and pleasure. But also strange shyness at evidence of early masculinity with all that it implies—tractors, soccer, other women. One day Ben will have females in his life who are not me, and already a splinter of ice in the heart tells me how that will feel.
Downstairs, I pick my way across the debris on the kitchen floor. Over by the bin, there is a hill of raisins; surely can’t be the same raisins that were there before Christmas? Must tell Paula to stop kids dropping them. (No use asking cleaning lady: Juanita has problem with cartilage and cannot kneel down.) I find Richard bowed in worshipful attitude before the TV. Unshaven, my husband is at his shaggiest and most primitive, like Ted Hughes left in a tumble dryer. Suspect he has developed a crush on children’s TV presenter—Chloe? Zoe?—and when I ask how come he has the kids’ show switched on before either of ours is even awake, he murmurs “very educational” in a gruff not-now-woman manner. Don’t think he has forgiven me since the Great Pesto Row.
I can’t help noticing that Chloe-Zoe is dressed for a Geordie hen night rather than a fierce February morning. She wears an orange sleeveless vest with HOW ABOUT IT? picked out in pink sequins over small but inquisitive breasts. When did children’s presenters start looking like jailbait rather than, say, the estimable Valerie Singleton?
“Richard?”
“Yes.”
“Ben keeps fiddling with himself—I mean, he’s only just one. Seems a bit early. Do you think it’s normal?”
Rich doesn’t even look up. “Happiest form of entertainment known to man. A lifetime’s pleasure ahead of him. Plus it’s free,” he says, cocking his head on one side and returning Chloe-Zoe’s gruesome chipmunk grin.
A gurgle of pleasure across the room makes me turn round. Ben has moved over to the fridge and yanked open the door and stands there upending an economy bottle of Toothkind Ribena over my shoes. Black currant hemorrhaging all over the place. Dive into action, attempting to stanch the slick like the exotic yet authoritative Nurse Hathaway in ER. Call for more kitchen roll. There is no more kitchen roll and Ben is now sitting in a puddle of purple glucose. He squeals when I pick him up by the collar of his pajamas and hold him under the tap.
I ask Richard how he could have failed to get kitchen roll as per my underlined (three times) request on Friday’s shopping list. Rich explains he was unable to find the specified Kitten Soft in the supermarket and simply couldn’t bring himself to ask for it.
“I don’t understand.”
“There are certain words a grown man cannot be expected to say, Katie, and Kitten Soft are two of them.”
“You won’t say Kitten Soft Kitchen Roll?”
“Not out loud, no.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t know. I just know I’d rather eat a soft kitten than ask for one. Even thinking those words ...”
With a theatrical shudder, Richard turns to the TV and makes a silent appeal to the melting chocolate-button eyes of Chloe-Zoe.
“But we don’t have any kitchen roll, Rich, and, as you may have noticed, we have the Exxon Valdez going on here.”
“I know, but I wasn’t sure if Kitten Thingy was the only option or if Absorbent Luxury Three-Ply Cushion stuff would do instead.” He lets out a moose-sized groan. “No, it’s no good, Kate. Don’t make me.”
For future reference, I ask my husband to give me some other words grown men cannot be expected to say. In no particular order they are: Toilet Duck, glade-fresh, rich aroma, deep-dish, filet o’ fish, Cheezy Dipper, wash’n’go, Bodyform, Tubby Custard, panty liner.
8:01 A.M. Got to dash. Major presentation to EMF directors today. A make-or-break career opportunity. A chance to impress with cool authority, matchless knowledge of world markets, etc. Swipe Ribena glaze off my shoes, leave note for Paula asking her to buy kitchen roll and please return Snow White video to the library. The fine now exceeds production costs on the original Walt Disney movie. Grab my bag and air-kiss sticky Ben, who hurls himself at me like Daniel Day-Lewis bidding farewell to Madeleine Stowe in Last of the Mohicans.
“Mum, what’s a suffer jet?” Emily is blocking my path to the door.
“Don’t know, darling. Have a nice day. Bye now.”
3:26 P.M. Presentation is going brilliantly. The managing director, Sir Alasdair Cobbold, has just praised my grasp of the problems of European integration. Up here in the boardroom on the seventeenth floor, with London spread out like a Lego village beneath me, for one giddy moment I feel as though I am mistress of all I survey.
I am just moving into the closing sequence when there’s a cough at the door. I look across and see Celia Harmsworth hovering in that fluttery don’t-mind-me way people who pretend they’re unimportant have of making themselves the center of attention. “So sorry to interrupt, Robin,” she simpers, “but there’s a drunk in reception causing a few problems for security.”
Robin Cooper-Clark raises an eyebrow. “And what has that got to do with us, Celia?”
“The thing is, he says he’s Kate’s father.”
12
Meet Kate’s Dad
THE PATTERN OF MEETINGS with my dad has not altered much in the last twenty years. For months on end I don’t hear from him, except for reports passed via my sister of scandalous excesses and a list of ailments you thought had died out with Lord Nelson—lockjaw, scurvy, Vesuvian boils. Then one day, when I’ve given up on him, when the tug that feels like a bell pull on the heart has gone away, he pitches up and launches into a conversation that draws on a relationship we never had. My dad has always confused sentimentality and intimacy. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still his little girl, although when I was a little girl he asked things of me that demanded a woman’s strength. Now that I’m grown he wants a child’s docility and is quick to anger when he doesn’t get it. Sometimes he has been drinking, you can never be quite sure, bu
t always, always, he wants money.
In the chrome and white lobby of Edwin Morgan Forster, Joseph Aloysius Reddy stands out like a creature from a more provisional primitive age. Visitors in suits can’t take their eyes off him. The disbelief he arouses is so strong he might as well be a bad smell. With a third hand herringbone coat and a skein of gray hair, he’s like a tinker come to sell his pots and pans to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Two security guys with crackling walkie-talkies are trying to persuade him to move, but Joe is planted mulishly on one of reception’s perforated steel benches, a white plastic bag slumped at his feet. He has the drunk’s huffy dignity. Catching sight of me, he uncrosses his arms and points a triumphant finger. “There. There’s our Kathy. What’d I tell you?”
“Thanks, Gerald,” I say quickly to the guard. “My dad’s not himself today. I’ll take over now.” Steer him to the door, making sure to look straight ahead to avoid the pitying smiles that have been the Reddy family’s constant companions for almost as long as I can remember.