by Jessica Bell
I roll over and slip my arm around Alex’s waist. I put my hand down the front of his boxers, in the hope that a little sexual contact might bring us closer together. But without moving an inch, Alex says, “Just because I took you to see Patti Smith, doesn’t mean I forgive you.”
Forgive me? For what? I pull my hand away, without a word. As I roll onto my back, the wrinkling sound of the duvet reverberates through the room. I close my eyes and focus on the bed linen caressing my body. But tonight it doesn’t feel very soft.
Six
As I open my mouth to yawn, my lips disengage like Velcro. The bedroom window is ajar. Our avocado-green cotton curtains flutter in a brief warm zephyr. I cock my head. I listen. If I were a cat, my ears would twitch as I interpret the time through the rhythm of traffic sounds below—a few swift travelling sighs, but no horns, or beeping garbage trucks yet.
It’s quiet for a Saturday morning, so it must be early. My hand reaches for the mobile phone on the bedside table like an uncoordinated sea lion’s flipper. It’s only 7:30 and Alex has already gotten out of bed. I sometimes wonder whether he avoids waking me on purpose—to be alone. I’ve tried myself, but failed.
Saturdays for Alex are just as busy as every other day, if not more so—especially if he has an event planned for the evening. But as far as I can remember, he should be free tonight. Maybe Heather can look after Tessa so we can finish that conversation. Perhaps if we have the opportunity to vociferously disgrace each other like two squabbling Tasmanian Devils, we’ll end up having a civilized chat. Right or wrong, it always works that way.
I prop pillows up behind me and lever my cumbersome and languid body backward against the head board. Pushing my knotted hair out of my face and rubbing sharp sleep from my eyes, I wonder what Tessa is up to. It’s supposed to be my day off today from work and from care giving. Alex promised he’d entertain Tessa on his own so that I could have at least one day every other week with no responsibilities calling for my immediate attention. We did, however, organize this six days ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has forgotten, because all I can hear is Alex’s muffled aggressive Greek shouting and his thick heavy footsteps pacing back and forth.
“I’ve ridden all around Exarchia and I can’t see even one fucking poster for The Incredible String Band … Where? Where have you stuck them? … Don’t you fucking lie to me, you— What? That’s bullshit!”
“Papa—”
“Not now sweetie, go play with your dolls.”
Tessa’s complying feet trot back to her bedroom. She mumbles something I can’t make out and then something ricochets off her wall.
I get up and put on my white terrycloth robe. It smells like mold; week-old damp cloth. I thought Alex said he’d washed them. Or perhaps he just washed his.
I shuffle into my flip flops and make my way to the kitchen. But instead of heading straight for the percolator to make a coffee, I’m confronted with a Coco Pop tip. Along with Tessa’s half-eaten Coco Pop, muesli and strawberry yoghurt concoction is a scattered mixture of cereal all over the table and floor. Again. He left Tessa to fend for herself—again.
I grab the brush and pan from under the sink. My head throbs from front to back like a pendulum as I bend over—a blatant reminder that my stress is not going to dwindle merely because it is the weekend. Weekend stress is like your airline losing your luggage on the way to a secluded holiday resort. When you arrive, you still want to enjoy yourself, to relax, but you can’t. Want to take a swim? Well, sorry, you’ll have to swim in your skanky underwear.
Once I clean up the mess, and prepare coffee, I walk by Tessa’s bedroom to make sure she isn’t sulking. Of course she’s not sulking, she is cutting off her favorite doll’s hair.
I contemplate trying to stop her, fearing a possible scissor hazard mostly, but then decide against it when I realize she’s cutting away from herself like I taught her. An odd grin contorts her face as if she’s been possessed by Chucky. Is she enjoying it? It’s either that, or she’s using it as a voodoo doll to exonerate her frustration toward Alex for dismissing her. Hmm. Like grandmother, like mother, like daughter.
I grab the morning paper Alex left on the small mahogany table in the hall and make my way into the lounge where Alex is texting on his phone, facing toward the balcony.
“Morning,” I gurgle, rattling the paper about, trying to turn it inside out at the Holiday Packages section.
Alex raises his brow and hand in reply without making eye contact. Every time Alex ignores me I experience a brief moment of asphyxiation, as if I’ve poked my head into a room of smoke. Despite this, I say to myself, Don’t let it bother you. It’s your day. And you’re not going to let anyone ruin it for you. Sit back. Relax. Read a book. Treat yourself to a proper coffee from down the street. Take the dog for a walk in the park. Collect some pinecones. Make some decorations with Tessa. Remove your mind from this rotten routine.
I sit on the couch crossing my legs like a child on the floor at kindergarten, imaginary earplugs in place, and tongue in position to inadvertently slip out of the side of my mouth when I see something interesting while scanning the Holiday Packages section—a habit I haven’t been able to kick since my mother’s newfound career as a travel agent. I like to snoop. To see the prices of the packages she scores commission from. It gives me an idea of what kind of money she’s making. And how much I’m not. How did everything turn out so good for her? Whatever happened to karma?
Alex puts his phone in the back pocket of his tailored black pants, spreads his legs apart like a bouncer, and crosses his arms in front of the Ramones logo on his T-shirt.
“Clothes on the line. Pasta on the stove. Do something about it. You know I hate things lying around when I’ve got business to do,” he says in a tone so cold I can hardly recognize his voice. He turns his back to me and gazes out of the window. He pulls his phone from his pocket—again—and begins to type. Click, click, click on the keypad like boiled candy against teeth. Who is he constantly messaging?
I glare at the back of his head. If my eyes could emit an electric current I’m sure I’d render him unconscious. My nostrils flare as I clench down on the back of my jaw.
“Let me drink my coffee,” I reply in an indifferent tone despite how I feel. “And then I’ll do it.” If I have to control my temper any longer I’m gonna need to smash a window. Maybe I am going to turn out like my mother, after all. Maybe I’ll lose it, just like she did, like the day she hit herself over the head several times with a frying pan to make herself pass out—to escape reality—to “sleep through the shit.”
“Hurry up and drink it then. I can’t work with this mess around me. You know that.”
I clear my throat. I want to ask how he can live with Coco Pops scattered liked confetti around the kitchen, but not with the clothes hanging on the line where he can’t even see them. But I won’t. Rise above, Melody, rise above. “Er, sorry, but could you just put yourself in my shoes for a minute and try to realize that I need some time to chill out? Tessa is calmly playing on her own, the dog isn’t whining and whacking the glass doors with her filthy paws, and it’s Saturday—the day you promised I could have to myself. Remember?”
Alex exhales slowly from his nose, lips pressed together, and stomps out of the room and into the kitchen. I can hear him scrape the chairs on the floor as he pushes them under the table. He crashes crockery in the sink. The pantry squeaks as he swings it open and it slams shut with an elastic flick. He throws the pasta into the trash, then the pot in the sink. Something breaks. He yells, “Fuck!” I hang my head in my hands and wonder when the hell he is going to snap out of this. What is going on? Is this some sort of mid-life crisis?
“Mummy, Mummy!” Tessa wails as she runs into the lounge with tears streaming down her cheeks. “She’s ugly! Look, Francis is ugly!”
“Oh honey,” I look at the doll. It looks like David Bowie on a bad hair day. “Let me help Daddy clean up a bit and then we’ll go and have a look for a new
doll.” I take her left hand and massage her palm with my thumb. “Okay?”
Seemingly satisfied with this answer, she skips back to her room, to probably mutilate Francis even more.
“What does she need a new doll for?” Alex yells above his racket from the kitchen. “She has plenty.”
I get up and walk to the kitchen doorway, chanting in my head to stay calm. There must be something going on with Alex that he isn’t telling me. Can this temperamental behavior seriously stem from what happened yesterday morning? All I was doing was voicing what I want out of life. How is that a crime?
“She was giving it a makeover and now she doesn’t like the way it looks,” I say, picking at a fingernail, as if I’m having a casual conversation with Heather at a café.
“Don’t. Buy. Her. A new doll. She should to learn to take care of her stuff. If you buy her a new one, she’ll never value anything,” Alex growls as he shakes a breakfast bowl in my face.
I lean backward and frown, looking for the gentle twinkle that is usually in his eyes no matter what mood he is in. But I can’t see anything except my fishbowl reflection in their watery sheen. They’re like double-glazed windows. You can see through them, but you can’t hear what’s happening on the other side.
“Sorry,” he whispers, stepping back a little. He looks at the bowl in his hand, as if he has no idea how it got there, before putting it in the cupboard.
I move toward the sink to help him with the dishes, but he raises his hand like a policeman directing traffic.
“I’ll do it. You have your, er, ‘day off.’ ”
I pull out a chair and sit at the kitchen table. I crush a runaway Coco Pop with my right index finger, and then lick it off. Alex is right about the doll. I know he’s right. But I also remember how I felt when I destroyed my Barbie dolls as a kid—when I turned them into punk goddesses, with a pair of blunt nail scissors, green food dye, and a purple glitter pen.
“Alex, I did the same thing as a child. I know how it feels to regret experimenting with my toys and then realizing I liked them better the way they were. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to argue about it.” I put my hands in the pockets of my robe, not knowing what to do with them on the table top.
“Fine. Do whatever you like. But if you’re gonna buy bullshit, use your own money,” he says putting on the rubber dishwashing gloves.
“And why wouldn’t I? And why is that even an issue?” I retort, craning my neck.
Alex doesn’t respond.
“Alex. We need to talk about yesterday morning.”
Alex tsks and shrugs. I glare at his back as he fills the kitchen sink with suds.
“Fine,” I say. “Have it your way.” I get up and walk down the corridor to get dressed.
“Take your keys,” Alex calls, “I might not be here when you get back.”
I pause, balancing myself with one hand against the corridor wall, staring at an oil stain on the carpet. “Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Where out?”
“Just out.”
Seven
In a department store called Jumbo, the aroma of plastic purity reminds me of all the toys my parents could never afford to buy me as a child; when I would look over at the girl next to me in class, holding a ‘Li’l Miss Make-up” for show-and-tell, and I’d be there with the matchstick man my father helped me glue together over the weekend.
The scent of brand new calms me like a quaff of vodka as Tessa and I stroll down the aisle of stuffed toys. I drag my fingers over a row of toddler-sized zebras like a schoolboy bouncing his hand along a stranger’s picket fence. The fluffy material used nowadays seems a lot softer than when I was a kid. My teddy bear felt like a heavy woolen sweater. But these feel like they’re made from kitten fur.
“Mummy, I want that doll,” Tessa says, standing on her tiptoes when we reach the shelf displaying a vast array of porcelain dolls. She points to the biggest, most frilly, and through my eyes, the most breakable doll on the shelf. My body stiffens when I see the price: 89 Euros! Saliva spawns behind my molars like water through a squirt gun. Do I let myself make decisions based on my mood now? If I wasn’t angry at Alex would I be averse to such a large purchase, or would I buy it with the enthusiasm Tessa craves?
“Honey, you, er, don’t want that doll,” I say, holding a closed fist to my lips as if about to cough.
“Yes, I doo-o-o!” Tessa replies jiggling about on the spot like wobbling jelly on speed.
“Of course you don’t.” I manage a tight-lipped smile and flick my head in some sort of attempt at a shake.
“I do!” Tessa puts her hands on her hips and looks at me as if she is saying, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mummy. How would you know what I want and don’t want?”
“I’ll tell you why you don’t want it. ’Cause our Doggy is going to like this doll too, and because it is too big to fit in your toy drawer, we’ll have to keep it on the shelf. You know what that means don’t you?”
“No.” Tessa shakes her head, hands still on hips, and narrows her eyes like she’s performing in a pantomime and addressing someone in the back row of the audience. An acute urge to put my foot down without any further discussion and say, “Too bad, take a small doll or no doll at all,” sends needle-and-pin-like adrenaline through my limbs. I swallow and massage the bridge of my nose. Please don’t make this day harder than it already is.
I kneel down to Tessa’s eye level. “It means that Doggy will eat her. You don’t want this poor doll to die, do you?” The image of my mother pulling the head off Lissy, my one and only life-sized baby doll, when I was five, flashes before me like a shorting lamppost in heavy rain.
“No,” Tessa whispers, pouting her lips in thought.
“Okay, then. If you don’t want this beautiful doll to die, you’re going to have to leave her in the shop and choose another doll that will fit in your toy drawer, okay?’
Tessa frowns, then smiles like she has just caught onto the fact that I’m talking nonsense. She responds with another no and this time she sounds more sure of herself.
“No?” I ask, almost touching my chin to my chest and raising my brow.
“I’m not a silly duffer anymore, Mummy. I’m four. I’m big. Dolls can’t die! That’s silly.” She snorts as if it’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard. “If Doggy eats her, we can just come here again and get another one!’
I visualize Alex shaking his head and finger in my face. I told you so.
“Well, noooo. You can’t just get a new one, honey,” I say, trying to sound rational and in control. “Today is a special day. If this doll breaks, I will decide when you can get a new one … if you will get a new one. Deal?” Did I just agree to buy the doll?
Tessa scrunches up her nose, looks at the ceiling for a few seconds, puts her dainty right hand out to shake, and nods, “Deal.”
When we arrive home, Tessa runs around the entire apartment looking for Alex to show off her new doll. But he’s gone.
“Where’s Papa?” she asks, with a hint of desperation in her voice.
“I think he’s got some errands to run in town,” I say, hoping it’s a fact. I throw my handbag on the couch as if it reeks of garlic breath. “He’ll be back later.” I push paranoid thoughts to the side of my mind like Tessa pushes her vegetables to the side of her plate—at a psychologically tolerable distance from immediate view. Tessa replies with a little sigh and a forced pout.
“It’s okay, Mummy,” she nods. “I can go and play on my own.”
I watch her, jaw agape, skip down the corridor and close her bedroom door a little too hard. The door handle falls off. It lands on the carpet with a thud. Great. Another thing to fix.
Rejection hits me like an unexpected fall. I flop onto the couch—listen to the distant dragging of Tessa’s toy drawer—stare at an old cigarette burn in the armrest, reminding myself that Alex isn’t really as selfish as he seems sometimes. I should cut him some slack. He quit smoking when I a
sked him to. He stopped inviting his cocaine-snorting best mate over to the house. He even promised to stop coming home drunk after his events. And he kept his word without a single complaint.
Silence endows the room with a lonesome hum and the echo of emptiness amplifies the quieter it gets. I need to make some noise; enough to bulldoze an exit into this dead-end alley, giving free reign to a new and undiscovered highway; to hear the bang of success fill a stadium like a thunderous bass drum beating the rhythm of risk.
What if I am offered the position in London? Would success really resonate as loud as I imagine it would? Can relocating to London really give me the opportunity to pursue everything I want?
It doesn’t feel like it anymore. What if my outburst of forged confidence yesterday morning really is the cause of Alex’s behavior today? And why won’t he talk about it? Why can’t we come to some sort of compromise?
As I walk past our bedroom to make myself a sandwich, I catch a glimpse of my black guitar case in the corner, collecting dust like wooden floorboards in a deserted weatherboard hut; abandoned like an old filing cabinet, storing years of written documentation I feel I ought to keep, but will never need to refer to again. How could I have left it sitting there, untouched, for the last four years?
If I pick it up now, will regret reach a boiling point? Or will the vibrating strings stab me like an adrenaline shot in the heart, reviving the passion that once pumped blood through my veins? Will one pluck me from life as I know it, with no option to turn back?
There is a line that separates reality from reality lost, and when I’m alone, I can see the line as clear and straight and taut as the strings on my guitar. Do I take this opportunity to step over it? Or will that first step plunge me into some other desperate version of my life that I’ll eventually want to escape? What if nothing will ever please me?
I walk into the bedroom and stare at my guitar case, propped up vertically against the wall. I run my forefinger along the top—the ridged black vinyl surface. A thick layer of dust renders my fingertip dark gray. I grab a pair of underwear from my drawer, dust the case off, and lay it flat on the bed. I unfasten the three chrome latches. They pop open, one by one. I lift the lid. I can see the reflection of my arm in its shiny jet-black body. Its stunning mother-of-pearl inlay still makes me giddy.