I Don't Know How She Does It

by Allison Pearson

  Seem to be happening again. . . .

  But who knows where or when?”

  Sleep well, love Jack

  * * *

  10:09 A.M. NEWARK AIRPORT. Plane is delayed forever. I am stretched out across a bank of seats in the Club Lounge. The fog outside the window is matched by impenetrable gloom inside my head. Think of last night while trying not to think of last night. Infidelity Reddy-style: all the guilt and none of the sex. Brilliant, Kate, just brilliant.

  You get drunk with a client who carries you back to your hotel room, removes all your clothes and then politely takes his leave. Hard to know what to feel: outraged at the sexual invasion or mortified by the lack of it? Perhaps Abelhammer was repelled by nonmatching bra-brief combo or did he flee at sight of Reddy stomach which, after two pregnancies and an emergency cesarean, resembles one of her grandmother’s rice puddings—the top skin puckered over the granular slush beneath. One problem with being unconscious in presence of prospective lover is inability to pull belly button to spine as advised by personal trainer.

  At the thought of Jack undressing me, my whole being feels like a stocking silkily descending a leg.

  “Kate, are you OK?” Momo is back with black coffee and the British papers.

  “No. Terrible. Anything in the news?”

  “Just the Conservative Party killing each other. And working mothers all cracking up. It says that 78 percent would give up their job tomorrow if they could.”

  “Can’t be accurate. Those of us who are really stressed out don’t have time to fill in stupid surveys. What are you thinking, Momo?”

  She is doing that cute wrinkly thing with her nose. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to have any. Kids. I really don’t know how you do it, Kate.”

  “Compartments, that’s how. They go in one compartment, work goes in another, and you have to stop them leaking into each other. It’s tricky but not impossible. Anyway, you must have children. You’re beautiful and intelligent and there are enough gruesome morons reproducing out there.”

  Momo shakes her head. “I like kids, I really do, but I want to go on with my career, and you said yourself how the City sees mothers. Anyway,” she says coolly, “I’m overeducated for looking after small children.”

  How to explain to her? So many women of Momo’s age look at the likes of me, driven crazy by our double lives, and decide to put off having kids for as long as possible. I’ve seen it in my friends. They get to their mid-thirties, panic, pick the wrong guy—any sperm donor will do by then—find they can’t get pregnant and embark on IVF: painful and ruinous. Sometimes it works; mostly it doesn’t. We think we’ve outwitted Mother Nature, but Nature isn’t called Mother for nothing. She has her way of slapping us down, making us feel small. The world is going to end not with a bang but with a woman staring through a glass panel at her frozen eggs and wondering if she’ll ever have time to defrost them.

  I try to shut out the noise of the airport and think of what Emily and Ben mean to me; then I gather what remaining strength I have and let Momo have it.

  “Children are the proof we’ve been here, Momo, they’re where we go to when we die. They’re the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there’s nothing else. You have to believe me. Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there’s any answer, it has to be them.”

  Momo reaches into her bag and passes me a tissue. Is it the thought of the children that’s made me cry or the thought that last night I didn’t think of them at all?

  8:53 P.M. FLIGHT FROM NEWARK TO HEATHROW. Adrenaline always gets you through a job, but on the way home the fact that I’ve been away kicks in like a hangover. Home. I feel both vital to it—how will they manage without me?—and painfully peripheral—they manage without me.

  When I’m abroad, I sit in my hotel room in front of the laptop and call up my e-mails using Remote Access. You hear it dialing a long way off, somewhere at the far end of the universe. It takes a few seconds of bronchial static, then the bips do a tap dance off a satellite and come bouncing back. Remote Access. Isn’t that how I communicate with my children, dialing them up when I need to but otherwise keeping them at a distance? If I’m ever with Emily and Ben properly, for a few days and nights, I’m always struck by how shockingly alive they are. They’re not the shyly smiling girl and boy in the picture I just showed Momo, the one I keep in my wallet. Their need for me is like the need for water or light; it has a devastating simplicity to it. It doesn’t fit any of the theories about what women are supposed to do with their lives: theories written in books by women who never had children, or had children but brought them up as I mostly bring up mine—by Remote Access. Children change your heart; they never wrote that in the books. Sitting here in the front row of Club Class, nursing a large gin, I feel that absurd organ inside my chest, swollen and heavy as a gourd.

  Momo is right next to me. Since the tears at the airport my assistant has been anxiously attentive; unnerved by this wistful stranger talking about the meaning of life, Momo wants normal Kate service to be resumed as soon as possible, and I’m pretty keen to get it back myself.

  “Kate, I’ll swap you my Harvard Business Review for your Vanity Fair.” She offers me a supplement with a sober gray typeface.

  “Does it have any pictures of Johnny Depp?”

  “No, but there’s a terribly interesting article on the Do’s and Don’ts of Kinesthetic Presentation. Guess what point one is.”

  “Undo two more blouse buttons than is strictly respectable?”

  “No, Kate, seriously. ‘Ensure that your physical moves signal your intentions to the client.’”

  “Like I said. Two blouse buttons.” (Why do I feel compelled to relieve this lovely solemn girl of her illusions? Perhaps I feel it’s better I get in first, before the men take them away.)

  Across the aisle from us, a harassed brunette in a baggy pink sweater is trying to quiet a yelling baby. She stands up and jiggles her. She sits down again and attempts to pull the baby’s thrashing head into the cave of her shoulder; finally, she opens her shirt and tenders a breast. The suit in the neighboring seat takes one look at the mammary boulder and makes a bolt for the toilet.

  There is a little-known Universal Law of Infant Crying: the greater the mother’s desperation and embarrassment, the louder the volume. Even without looking round, I can gauge the effect the mechanical howling has on my fellow passengers. The cabin crackles with the static of resentment: men who are trying to work, men who are trying to get some rest, women who may be savoring their last few hours of freedom and don’t want a reminder of what they can get at home, women away from their own kids and pricked by guilt.

  The mother has a look on her face I know all too well. It’s two parts manic apology (“Sorry about this, everyone!”) to three parts defiance (“We’ve paid for our seat, just like the rest of you and she’s only tiny, what do you expect?”). Baby can’t be more than two or three months old; a pre-hair furze, fine as dandelion down, forms a corona around a skull that has the tensile strength and beauty of an egg. When she screams, you can see the pulse jump in the blue hollow at her temples.

  “No, Laura, no, sweetie, that hurts,” the mother chides as the infant tugs furiously on her long dark hair. I get a sudden deep pang for my Ben. He does that when he’s overtired too: a baby’s frustration at not being able to enter sleep is that of an alcoholic locked out of a bar.

  Momo looks on with a twenty-four-year-old’s horrified incomprehension. Under her breath, she asks me why the woman can’t shut the kid up.

  “Because the baby wants to go to sleep, but the pressure in the baby’s ears is probably really hurting her. The only way you can equalize the pressure is to get her to drink something, but she won’t latch on to the breast because she’s too exhausted to suck.”

  At the word suck, Momo gives a fastidious little shudder inside her Donna Karan gray wool and says she finds the whole idea of breastfeeding deeply weird.

  I tell her it’s the opp
osite of weird. “In fact, it may be the only time in your life when your body makes perfect sense to you. I sat there in the delivery room and Emily rooted around and the milk started flowing and I thought, I am a mammal!”

  “Sounds gross.” Momo does that wrinkly thing with her nose again.

  “It wasn’t gross, it was comforting. We spend our whole life overruling what remains of our instincts and this one—how does that Carole King song go? ‘You make me feel like a nat-u-ral woman.’”

  Shouldn’t have started singing. Pink Sweater overheard and clearly thinks I am being sarcastic about her doing the Earth Mother bit in public. I try to make amends by giving her a conspiratorial Don’t-worry-I’ve-been-there! smile. But I have forgotten that I’m in uniform. Seeing the suit and the laptop, she obviously mistakes me for the childless enemy and shoots me a twelve-bore glare.

  I must try and get some sleep, but the thoughts are sparking in my brain like an electrical storm. When I think about Jack, I feel—what do I feel? I feel idiotic. Who is he, anyway, and what does he want with me or I with him? But mainly I feel excited, I feel ambushed. There are forces gathering around my heart and shouting at me to come out with my hands up. Sometimes I want to surrender. And then I think about my children, waiting like those owl babies in Ben’s book for their mummy to come home from hunting. I know the damn thing by heart.

  And the baby owls closed their eyes and wished their Owl Mother would come. And she came. Soft and silent, she swooped through the trees to Sarah and Percy and Bill. “Mummy!” they cried, and they flapped and they danced, and they bounced up and down on their branch.

  “What’s all the fuss?” their Owl Mother asked. “You knew I’d come back.”

  “Momo, d’you think we can get some more gin over here? I appear still to be in radio contact with my conscience.”

  With the Atlantic below, I try to compose a message to Jack that will make things right again between us.

  1:05 P.M.

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  Unaccustomed as I am to being undressed by a strange man while drunk —

  * * *

  No. Too flippant. Delete. Try business-as-usual approach.

  1:11 P.M.

  Further to our recent meeting, I have been thinking of increasing the turnover of the fund temporarily. Should you have any further desire—

  Should you need me—

  I am most eager—

  You know I would bend over backwards—

  I have been considering some options which need to be put to bed—

  * * *

  Oh, hell.

  1:22 P.M.

  Jack, I just want to say how entirely out of character my behavior was the other night and I hope that temporary aberration will in no way alter our professional relationship which I value so highly. My memory of events is a little vague, but I trust that I was not too great an embarrassment when you kindly returned me to my hotel room.

  Obviously, I hope this will in no way affect your future dealings with EMF, for whom you remain a most esteemed client.

  Yours faithfully, Katharine

  * * *

  And that’s the one I send, as soon as I get home.

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  In the United States, when a woman kisses you on the mouth and invites you to join her on a desert island of your choice this does tend to “alter the professional relationship” somewhat, although maybe this is now part of standard client management techniques on your British MBA program?

  The Sinatra Inn was a great evening. Please don’t be embarrassed about the hotel room: I kept my eyes closed at all times, ma’am, except when you asked me to take out your contacts. The left eye is greener.

  When I got back to the apartment, Butch Cassidy was on TV. Kate, do you remember the end when Sundance and Butch are holed up with the Mexican army waiting outside? They know it’s no good, but they run out all barrels blazing anyway.

  For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.

  Jack

  * * *

  MUST REMEMBER

  Children, bouncy castle, rabbit molds for blancmange, husband.

  MUST FORGET

  You. You. You.

  18

  The Court of Motherhood

  WHENEVER SHE APPEARED before the Court of Motherhood, the woman never seemed to do herself justice. It was hard to figure out exactly what went wrong. There she was, all the arguments on the tip of her tongue, the perfectly good reasons why she went out to work, the way it benefited both her and the children, the killer quote from Gloria Steinem about how no man has ever had to ask for advice on how to combine fatherhood and a career. And then, the minute she was standing in that dock, the justifications turned to ashes in her mouth.

  She thought it was something to do with the way they always summoned her at night, when she was asleep, so obviously she wasn’t at her brightest. The courtroom didn’t help either. Airless, oak-paneled and lined with mournful wigged figures in black, it was like testifying in a giant coffin while the undertakers looked on, waiting for you to dig your own grave. And she loathed the judge. Must be at least seventy and very hard of hearing.

  “Mrs. Shattock,” he booms, “you appear before the Court of Motherhood tonight charged with leaving a sick child in London while you flew on business to the United States of America. How do you plead?”

  Oh, God, not that. “I left Emily in London with a temperature, that’s true, your honor. But if I’d pulled out of the final at such short notice, Edwin Morgan Forster would never ever have let me do another big pitch.”

  “What kind of mother leaves her daughter when she’s ill?” demands the judge, peering stonily down at her.

  “Me, but—”

  “Speak up!”

  “Me, your honor. I did leave Emily, but I knew she was getting the proper treatment, she was on antibiotics, and I did speak to her every day I was away and I am planning on organizing a swimming party for her birthday and I do genuinely believe women should be role models for their daughters and . . . I do love her so much.”

  “Mrs. Shattock.” The prosecuting counsel is on his feet now and pointing at her. “This court has heard how you confessed to your colleague, a Miss Candace Stratton, that you felt a surge of what you termed ‘almost orgasmic relief’ at leaving your family after half term and returning to the office. How do you answer that?”

  She laughs, a dark, bitter laugh. “That’s incredibly unfair. Of course, it’s nice to be in a place where you’re not being followed around all the time by someone shouting ‘Mummy, poo!’ I don’t deny that. At least people in the office can see that you’re busy and don’t ask you for toast or lollies or to pull their knickers up. If it’s wrong to find that a relief, then I’m sorry: guilty as charged.”

  “Did you say guilty?” The judge has perked up.

  “In my defense,” she continues, “I’d like to have it taken into account that I did build three sand castles at St. Davids and I did let Emily plait my hair with the bits of crab she said were mermaid’s jewels. And I did all the songs and all the sandwiches. I made two kinds every day, even though they only ever eat the crisps—”

  “Mrs. Shattock, please confine yourself to the charges!” roars the judge. “Guilty or not guilty? The business of the Court of Motherhood is not seaside activities.”

  The woman cocks her head to one side and you can see something mischievous, almost mutinous, enter her eyes. “Is there a Court of Fatherhood, m’lud? Stupid question, really. Think how long it would take to process the backlog of cases. All those blokes who just popped into the pub on the way home and didn’t make it back for the bedtime story for, what shall we say, three thousand years?”

  “Silence! Silence, I say. If you continue in this manner, Mrs. Shattock, I shall have you taken to the cells.”

  “Sounds lovely. I could get some sleep.”

  The judge pounds his gavel on the
bench. He is getting larger by the minute and his old white face suffuses with scarlet like a syringe taking in blood. The defendant, meanwhile, is growing smaller and smaller. No bigger than a Barbie doll, she scrambles up onto the edge of the dock and balances there precariously in high heels. When she starts to shout at the judge, her voice is a gerbil squeak.

  “All right, you really want to know the truth? Guilty. Unbelievably, neurotically, pathologically guilty. Look, I’m sorry, but I have to go. For heaven’s sake, just look at the time.”

  19

  Love, Lies, Bleeding

  CAN YOU SMELL treachery on your lover? I am convinced Richard can. He’s been all over me since I got back from New Jersey, perching on the edge of the bath while I tried to soak away the journey, insisting on washing my back, complimenting me on a hairstyle that hasn’t changed in three years. And staring and staring, as though trying to place something he can’t quite put his finger on, then looking quickly away when our eyes meet. For the first time, there is a shyness between us; as carefully polite as dinner-party guests, we will have been married seven years at the end of July.

  While Rich is locking up downstairs, I jump into bed and simulate deep slumber to avoid reunion sex. Lying next to him with my eyes closed, a montage of guilt, work, desire and shopping flickers across my lids: bread, rice cakes, Jack’s smile, canned tuna, check cash level of funds, apple juice, Alphabite potato thingies—ask Paula, spreadsheets, the word kiss spoken in an American accent, cucumbers, blancmange rabbit, green jelly for grass.

  At first light, when Rich and I finally make love—with the children starting to stir in their beds overhead—there is something driven and possessive about it, as though my husband were acting out some deep territorial impulse to plant his flag and reclaim me. And, in a way, I am grateful to be reclaimed; less scary than setting out for a foreign land with its curious habits, its unknown banners.