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I Don't Know How She Does It

Page 21

by Allison Pearson


  (What did it feel like before? Before I was waiting for his messages. Waiting and waiting. Either waiting or reading his last message or composing my reply and then waiting again. No longer in a state of living but in a constant state of waiting. The impatience like a hunger. Staring at the screen to summon the words into existence, willing him to speak.)

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  Jack, are you there?

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? Speak, dammit!!

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  Did I say something wrong?

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  Hello?

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  What could you POSSIBLY be doing that’s more important than talking to me? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend,

  Nor services to do till you require.

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  OK, you’re forgiven. That’s lovely. Sonnet by Bill Gatespeare, right? But let’s get one thing clear: any more silences that long and you’re in Big Trouble. In fact, you’re a dead man.

  That’s a promise xxxxx

  * * *

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Jack Abelhammer

  Bill Gatespeare, I find, has the emotional software to fit any occasion. . . . As far as you’re concerned, Katharine, I’m already in Big Trouble. If killing me means I can look forward to a personal appearance from my fund manager, then I’m prepared to die like a man.

  I knew you were going to Disneyland with the kids, so I figured you’d be caught up in the preparations and not welcome my msgs. I try to think of you being happy without me, without letting it make me unhappy.

  Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

  Where you may be or your affairs suppose,

  But like a sad slave stay and think of nought

  Save where you are, how happy you make those.

  You write so lovingly about the children—Emily’s reading, the way Ben tries to talk to you—that I know you’re a great mom. And you notice so much. My mom stayed home and played bridge and drank vodka martinis with her friends. She was there all day and never really around for the three of us. Don’t go romanticizing the stay-home parent—you can screw up whether you’re near or far.

  Because you live in my head, you’re very portable, you know. I find myself talking to you all the time. The worst thing is, I’m starting to think you can hear me. Jack xxxxxxx

  * * *

  To: Jack Abelhammer

  From: Kate Reddy

  I can hear you.

  * * *

  23

  Easter

  SATURDAY LUNCH, TOAD HALL RESTAURANT, DISNEYLAND PARIS. Enthusiastic French kiss and passionate hug from a tall dark stranger. Regrettably, his name is Goofy. Overcome with shyness at meeting her favorite cartoon characters, Emily hides behind her mother’s legs and refuses to say hello.

  Seconds later, Paula enters the restaurant like a struck gong, reverberating with resentment. She “agreed” to accompany us to EuroDisney in much the same way the British “agreed” to give back India. I just know the short-term relief of having her here to help out will not be worth it for the long-term tactical disadvantage.

  I feel I have to spend the entire time apologizing profusely for things I haven’t done. Sorry Ben woke everyone up last night with his snoring, sorry room service is so slow, sorry French people don’t speak English. Oh, and I forgot to apologize for the rain. For that I am truly sorry.

  Meanwhile, Paula sits back and observes my mothering skills with the fat contented air of a driving instructor guiding a know-it-all pupil towards the inevitable prang.

  After fifteen minutes of queuing for lunch in Toad Hall—mock baronial, gargoyles made of gray polystyrene—we reach the counter and Paula orders chicken nuggets for herself, Emily and Ben. On the grounds that the chicken is more likely to be antibiotics in bread crumbs, I decide to take a stand. Suggest that it might be nice for children to have quiche instead, on the off-chance it will be made of ingredients from a farm rather than a test tube. “If you say so,” says Paula cheerfully.

  At the table, when I present Ben with quiche, his tiny almost prim mouth contorts into a gash of grief. He starts those hiccupy sobs where he can barely take in air quick enough. French families sitting nearby, all with enfants in navy or gray linen sitting up straight eating haricots verts, turn and glare at barbarous Anglo-Saxons. After one mouthful, Emily announces that she doesn’t want quiche because it tastes like egg. She wants chicken nuggets. Paula does not say I told you so. Instead, she gives Ben one of those extra-reassuring never-mind hugs and feeds him fries off her own plate.

  (Sometimes when I’m with Paula and the kids, I get that feeling I had at school when three girls in my group got closer, apparently overnight. How had I missed it? I, who had always been allowed to link arms on the way home with the fabulous popular Geraldine—Farrah Fawcett blonde, ankle bracelet, breasts—was bumped to the outside of the line, where I was expected to take the elbow of Helga—glasses, alp-tall, Austrian. I was still a part of the group but excluded from the inner core and its giggles, whose target I increasingly, achingly, took to be me.)

  “Stop that, Emily, please.”

  Em is decapitating paper batons of sugar and pouring them all over the table. We do a deal: she can make a sugar mountain for her Minnie Mouse key ring to ski down, but only if she eats her quiche and three green beans. No make that five green beans. OK?

  I wish I could relax more, but a buzzing in my brain tells me I’ve forgotten something. What else? What else?

  7:16 P.M. At bedtime, an overexcited Emily wants to discuss the Easter story one more time. She has been obsessed with it since she figured out last week that the Baby Jesus she sang carols about at Christmas grew up to be the man on the cross. It’s one of those occasions when you wish you could press a button and the Fairy Godmother of Explanations would appear and wave her wisdom wand.

  “Why did Jesus get killed?”

  Oh, God. “Because—well, because people didn’t like the things he was saying and they wanted to make him stop.”

  I can see Emily searching her mind for the worst crime she can imagine. At last, she says, “They didn’t want to do sharing?”

  “In a way that’s right, they didn’t want to share.”

  “After Jesus died he got better and went to Heaven.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How old was he when they crossed him?”

  “Crucified. He was thirty-three.”

  “How old are you, Mummy?”

  “I’m thirty-five, darling.”

  “Some people can be a hundred years old, can’t they, Mummy?”

  “Yes, they can.”

  “But then they die anyway?”

  “Yes.” She wants me to tell her I won’t die. I know that’s what she wants: the one thing I can’t say.

  “Dying is sad because you don’t get to see your friends anymore.”

  “Yes, it is sad, Em, very sad, but there will always be people who love you—”

  “Lots of people are in Heaven, aren’t they, Mummy? Lots and lots.”

  “Yes, sweetheart. Millions.”

  As Sunday lie-in agnostics, Richard and I decided that when we had children of our own we would not give them the false consolation of a guaranteed afterlife. No angels or archangels, no harps, no Elysian Fields full of those people you couldn’t stand at college in dodgy footwear. That resolve
lasted—oh, approximately three seconds after my daughter first said the word “die.” How could I, who wouldn’t let her have Roald Dahl stories on the ground that they were too cruel, open a furnace door and invite her to contemplate the extinction of everyone she would ever know and love?

  “And the Easter Bunny is in Heaven?”

  “No, the Easter Bunny is not. Absolutely not.”

  “Sleeping Beauty is, though.”

  “No, Sleeping Beauty is in her castle, and we’re going to see her tomorrow.”

  EMILY’S QUESTIONS OFTEN SHOCK ME, but not as much as the fact that I’m allowed to give her any answer I like. I can tell her there is a God or that there is not a God, I can tell her that Oasis were better than Blur, although by the time she’s old enough to buy albums there won’t be albums anymore and Madonna will be as distant as Haydn. I can tell her that Cary Grant is in a dead heat for the title of Greatest Englishman with William Shakespeare, I can encourage her to support a football team, or I can tell her sport is incredibly boring, I can advise her to be careful who she gives her virginity to or I can give her brisk early advice on contraception. I can suggest she start paying a quarter of her annual income into an index-linked pension as soon as possible or I can tell her love is the answer. I can tell her any damn thing I like, and that freedom feels both amazing and appalling.

  When they sent a baby girl home from the hospital with us almost six years ago, they forgot to hand out a Meaning of Life Manual. I can remember Richard carrying her in from the car in her little seat with the big handle and setting her down with extreme tentativeness on the living-room floor. (At that stage, we still believed we might break her; not knowing it was more likely to be the other way round.) Rich and I looked at our daughter and then at each other and we thought: What now?

  You needed a license to drive a car, but with a baby you were expected to pick it up as you went along. Becoming a parent was like trying to build a boat while you were at sea.

  What the hospital did give us was a thin booklet in a blue plastic binder with several cartoons to the page, each starring two stick-figure parents. There were stick-figure parents tentatively dipping their angular elbows into baths or trying out the temperature of milk on the back of their stick hands. There was a feeding timetable, tips on the transfer from formula to solids and, or so I seem to recall, a list of common rashes. But there was definitely no word on how to prepare your child for the fact of your own death.

  As I look down at Em’s face, at once radiant and perplexed, I get that breathless feeling you get every so often as a mother, the pressure of hundreds of millions of mothers before you, all fighting tears as the child poses the most ancient of questions.

  “Are you going to die, Mummy?”

  “One day I will. But not for a very very long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Not for as long as you need a mummy.”

  “How long?”

  “Not until you’re a mummy yourself. Quick now, Em. Eyes shut.”

  “Mu-um?”

  “Go to sleep, love. Sleep now. Exciting day tomorrow.”

  Well, did I handle it right? Is that how you tell them? Is it?

  * * *

  SUNDAY, 3:14 P.M. Em and I together on the Circus Roller Coaster, our screams riding shotgun with our stomachs. I close my eyes and take a Polaroid for my memory: I am having fun with my wonderful child. Her hair in the wind, her hand tight in mine. But even here I can’t escape: there’s something about this ride that says work. Equity markets going up, up, up, then whump! the trapdoor in your belly opens.

  Oh, Kate, you stupid, stupid, unbelievably brainless woman.... God, no.... Forgot to place trades on Thursday. Needed to sell 5 percent of fund—Edwin Morgan Forster house policy is to have more cash, less equities with the markets melting down. As we crest the hill, northern France and my entire career flash before my eyes. EMF already has a recruitment freeze. Redundancies next. And who will be prime candidate? Step forward the fund manager who forgot to sell her clients’ shares because she was buying chocolate bloody Easter ducklings in Thorntons.

  “I’m sacked.”

  “What?” Richard is there to meet us as we clamber out of the little train.

  “I’m fired. I forgot. I was trying to remember everything and I forgot.”

  “Katie, slow down. Just tell me slowly.”

  “Daddy, why is Mummy crying?”

  “Mummy’s not crying,” says Paula, who has appeared out of the crowd and picked Emily up. “Mummy’s having such a great time she laughed till the tears fell out by themselves. All right, who wants to get a crepe? Do you want jam or lemon? I’m having jam.

  “OK if I take them, Kate?” Paula says quickly. And I nod because, obviously, I can’t speak. And with Ben in the buggy and Emily skipping along beside her, Paula takes the children away. How would I manage without her?

  4:40 P.M. Calmer now. The calm of the condemned woman. Absolutely nothing to be done. It’s a Bank Holiday tomorrow; can’t sell anything till Tuesday. No use spoiling the rest of our trip. I am climbing out of one of the Mad Hatter’s Dancing Teacups when I notice a man in the queue trying to place me. It’s Martin, an old boyfriend. You know that weird sensation seeing an ex can induce? I feel it now. The ghost of a passion, a silk handkerchief being pulled out of the heart. I turn away quickly and secure Ben’s already tight buggy straps.

  FIRST THOUGHTS:REASONS NOT TO BE RECOGNIZED BY EX

  a. Am wearing yellow plastic rain poncho, purchased from Disneyland Universal Stores, which is decorated with Mickey Mouse logo and smells of lightly rolled condom.

  b. My hair, dried this morning with gnat’s buzz of a hair dryer in the hotel bathroom, lies basted to my skull like threadbare helmet of old lady in retirement home.

  c. Am about to be fired, therefore poorly placed to show how sensationally well my life has gone without him.

  SECOND THOUGHT

  a. He doesn’t recognize me. He doesn’t even recognize me. Am hideously changed and shriveled and no longer desirable to man once sexually obsessed with me.

  Across the pastel blur of spinning teacups, I meet the eyes of the man. He smiles at me. It’s not Martin.

  8:58 P.M. We take the Eurostar home to London. Ben is lying on his back across me. His eyelashes are long, his hands still chubby baby hands; the dimples along the knuckle are like air bubbles in batter. When he’s big, I won’t be able to tell him how much I loved his hands. Maybe I won’t remember. I stretch to reach my laptop, but baby turns and sighs as if to wake. Don’t want to check e-mail, anyway: probably nuclear bollocking from Rod and gloating “commiserations” from the ghastly Guy. Will prepare for my fate as penniless stay-at-home mother, purchase penitential Gap sweatshirts in khaki, try to remember the words to “Eency Weency Spider.”

  So you see that was why I didn’t pick up the e-mail from Rod that evening, the one that told me everything was OK. The one that told me things were much much better than OK.

  To: Kate Reddy

  From: Rod Task

  Kate, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? Fed cut the rate again. Rest of team liquid up to their necks. You the only one who didn’t sell. What’s your secret, genius? Are you shagging Greenspan?

  Push the old guy off you and come back. Buy you a beer.

  Cheers, Rod

  * * *

  24

  Kate Triumphant

  TUESDAY, 9:27 A.M. OFFICES OF EDWIN MORGAN FORSTER. Hallelujah! I am a guru. My superb market timing—otherwise known as forgetting to place several trades and being saved by a surprise rate cut—has granted me temporary office goddess status. I hang around at the coffee machine receiving tributes from grudgingly awed colleagues.

  “You must be the only person to have anticipated the Fed cut and the market recovery, Kate,” marvels Dandruff Gavin. I compose my features into what I hope is an impersonation of humility and quiet pride.

  “Shit, I was 6 percent liquid. That cost us a few basis points,” groans pi
nk-faced Ian. “And Brian was 15 percent liquid. That’s another nail in his coffin, poor sod.” I nod in sympathetic condescension and say casually, “I only had 1 percent cash, actually.” Tasting success, enjoying its champagne tang on my tongue.

  Chris Bunce walks past on the way to the Gents and can hardly bear to meet my eye. Momo comes up and gives me a dry little kiss which lands on my cheek around the same time that Guy’s dagger look harpoons into my shoulder blades. Across the office, I see Robin Cooper-Clark approaching with an amused smile as if he were a bishop and I a jammy young curate.

  “And on the third day she rose again,” says Robin. “Well, well, Miss Reddy, who says Easter is drained of all meaning?”

  He knows. He knows. Of course, he bloody knows. Brightest man in the solar system.

  “I was extremely fortunate, Robin. Alan Greenspan rolled the rock from the tomb.”

  “You were very fortunate, Kate, and you’re very good. Good people deserve their good fortune. By the way, did Rod tell you we need you to go to Frankfurt?”

  When I sit down at my desk, am so buoyant I practically don’t need a chair. Scan the currencies, check the markets, then call up my e-mails. Smile when I see that at the top of the Inbox are two from my dearest friends.

  To: Kate Reddy, EMF

  From: Debra Richardson

  Desperately trying to recruit new nanny. Anka stormed out after I confronted her over the stolen property. Jim’s mum has come up from Surrey to cover for a bit, but she has to go back Friday. Help!!!! Any ideas? Most candidates seem to require a car, all the rest are 37 w severe personality disorder demanding salary equal to editor of Vogue.

 

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