Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  No. It is her phone. Her obscene designer case with the magnetic clasp.

  The message says:

  I am heartbroken too Carmen but this really is the way it has to be x x

  I stare at the words. I grab the phone and unlock it. Her passcode is my birthday.

  I open the messages and scroll through. She has been texting him since I told her. I scroll and scroll.

  I just need

  to understand xxx

  Maybe you need to talk to Jenny x

  She hasn’t talked to

  me for 20 years xxx

  NO ONE EVER THINKS

  ABOUT THE IN-LAW XXX

  She loved you when you were a nobody how can you abandon her now xxx

  Please take her back

  Art PLEASE XXX

  I know she’s hard work but

  it’s not her fault. She’s always

  been difficult

  but I still love her xxx

  I see a bright future for you

  two, I always did.

  The true mark of a man

  comes out in the end doesn’t

  it. They all warned me

  about you xxx

  Just miss you

  so much xxx

  There are reams of them. Reams. Swinging from needy to abusive and back again.

  My insides churn. Now I see it all so clearly. Is it any wonder I am alone and anxious when this, this … duplicitous fiend has raised me?

  SENT ITEMS

  Subject: Column idea

  Hi Mia,

  I wonder whether you might consider this idea for a column? My mother has moved in with me and it’s a complete nightmare. How about I do a weekly exposé of how hideous it is? The primal female relationship, skewered.

  Best,

  Jenny

  INBOX

  Subject: Re: Column idea

  Jenny,

  If you can crank up that skewered to crucified, you have yourself a gig.

  M.

  SENT ITEMS

  Subject: Re: Re: Column idea

  Mia,

  Of course! You’ve got to fight pain with pain.

  Jenny.

  EXHIBITS A AND B

  I get ready in my room. I think, what would Suzy Brambles like out of my clothes? A long black skirt and good boots and a ruffly blouse. I cover my body, layer by layer, not looking until it is dressed. My own nakedness is a historical fact to me.

  When I am ready I wander along the hall toward the sad back room with the drafty window. The house creaks around me. The complaining crackles of the pipes and the floors. Familiar and unfamiliar sounds. For the first time, I feel the house’s loneliness. A wintry sort of longing. My mother is in Sid’s old room. Also the room of something that was not to be.

  My mother is doing her vocal exercises. I peer in. What was once a big, bare space is now a messy, pleasant room. There is a tapestry throw over the bed. On the bookshelves are various objets d’art, French-sounding perfumes, powder puffs. There’s a Cow & Gate formula tin, one of my old ones, that she keeps samples of beauty products in. She is half-naked, on the bed, her back to me, sitting on a towel. She is wearing the “quick-drying” pink towel turban she always wears when her hair is wet. She stops noodling when she sees me. She puts on a hotel bathrobe from the Shelbourne, Dublin. As she changes, I ogle her body the way I have always ogled it—with wonder, gratitude, fear, and a profound self-reflexive humiliation. Her lower back and thighs are clawed with fading red stretch marks that, if I’m not careful, I might start to romanticize.

  “You kept that old tin! Why?”

  “It’s as good a receptacle as any. Just because all of your shit is in a cloud, darling.”

  “It’s not. A lot of it is in your garage.”

  My childhood and teen years are chronicled in six or seven boxes in her double garage. Polaroids and airline tickets, soft toys and plastic tat, paper clips and hair grips shoaling like krill. Tax receipts, key rings, snapped candles in whiskey bottles. The fallout of every ending. The episodes of my life set in amber. I have moved from mammal to mammal, like a flea.

  “Not anymore,” she says, starting to apply her primer. “I had a clear-out.”

  “What?”

  “I tossed it. Sorry, darling, I applied the six-year rule. If you haven’t needed it in six years, it can probably go.”

  “Those were my old schoolbooks! My A-level files!”

  “You did all right on them, didn’t you?”

  “In spite of you! You never respected my work!”

  “Ditto.”

  She moves, and I catch a scent of her coconut body butter—the same brand for thirty years now. She starts on her foundation, smoothing it over her cheekbones and eye sockets. She overplucked her eyebrows in the seventies and has been drawing them in ever since in a thin Garbo arch. There are two gin and tonics on the dresser.

  I sniff. “One of your eyebrows is higher than the other today.”

  “Eyebrows are sisters, not twins, darling.”

  I stare hard at her face some more. And some more.

  “Look, if you’re that bothered about those files and books, you should have said one time when you were home.”

  Home. The word still presents itself, ludicrously. I am thirty-five years away. “Away” rather than “old,” that’s how it feels sometimes.

  I shake my head. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Let’s have a gin.”

  “It’s very early. We should watch it.”

  “I have a very good relationship with all intoxicants,” she says. “Much healthier than any human relationship I’ve ever had. I’ve never had a comedown I couldn’t handle. Never had a hangover I couldn’t talk myself through.”

  “Good for you. They finish me off for days now. I obviously didn’t inherit that resilience from you.”

  She daubs bronzer up her cheeks. I pass her a gin and sip delicately from the other glass.

  “Are you almost ready?” I say. “I don’t want to be late.”

  “What—don’t tell me you’re ready? Are you just going like that?”

  “As you see.”

  “You seem … agitated, darling. Are you agitated?”

  “Maybe a little. It’s understandable, don’t you think?”

  “Well, drink up. Good girl. Now, why don’t you let me lend you something to wear.”

  “Because I am two sizes bigger than you. Why do you think we have the same bodies? We haven’t been the same size for a long time now. Why are you laboring under this delusion? God, this is strong.”

  “It’s medicinal. We should have two. You could wear a belt.”

  “I like what I’m wearing!”

  “Want me to do your makeup?”

  “No thank you.”

  “You should look good.”

  “I do look good.”

  “You could look better.”

  “The last time you did my makeup, I looked like the Babadook.”

  “It was a smoky eye!”

  “I didn’t ask for a smoky eye! Who wants a goddamn smoky eye? It’s not 1996.”

  “It’s a classic look.”

  “I am not classic, I am modern,” I say. “I am so modern it hurts.”

  She says, “Even though you don’t want to be with Art, it is important you look better than you have ever looked in your life.”

  “That is just a disgusting, terrible cliché, and you should know it.”

  “That may be true, but I’m sure Suzy is going to be making an effort.”

  Once, when I was comparing myself to a dark-eyed friend, my mother said: “There are some people who can wake up in the morning and look good, and you are not one of those people, Jenny, but when you do yourself up you’re as good-looking as anyone.”

  I sit down at the dresser. “Okay,” I say, “but if you oversmoke me I’m not going at all.”

  “F ine. Now, don’t smile.”

  * * *

  As we stand waiting at
the Tube station, I look online to see if Suzy and Art are preparing, but they are giving nothing away. I look at people I know they know and who might be there, but nothing. No clues. I should be a lot better at waiting, since I spend so much of my time doing it.

  I take the crook of my mother’s arm as we get on the Tube. Walking with her is like steering a full shopping trolley. We sit down. She says: “The last time I took the Tube these PHENOMENAL ACROBATS got on.”

  “Shh,” I say. “You’re being too loud. No one talks loudly on here.”

  “Oh, no one gives a monkey’s what I’m saying, least of all you.”

  “Shhh!”

  A man next to us laughs. Seeing this as active encouragement, my mother gets louder.

  “Not everyone is interested in our conversation and lives!”

  “He is!” I hiss. “He just laughed.”

  The man straightens his face and gets out his phone.

  Another man gets on at the next stop and walks past us and down the carriage. He has no top on. His chest hair gleams. His nipples look like baked beans. I look away. The man next to us looks away. “Well,” my mother says, “the things you see when you’ve not got your gun.”

  The man next to us guffaws.

  My mother leans toward me. “I’m trying to make you laugh,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Because I can hear your nerves jangling.”

  “That’s just my bracelets.”

  “My proud girl. I’m proud of you.”

  “Don’t say things like that now, for God’s sake!”

  “Sorry, darling.”

  We sit in silence the rest of the way.

  At Embankment we get out and walk toward the bridge. Two women dressed as hot nuns walk past. It strikes me that I haven’t seen a nun in ages. It’s like even God’s been avoiding me.

  DRAFTS

  Subject: A request

  Dear God, or whoever picks these up,

  Please let my death be comical. Please let it be the sideways spring off the trampoline into the unsuspecting mouth of the yawning hippopotamus. Please let people be applauding before they realize there’s been a terrible accident.

  Thanks,

  Jenny McLaine (CHRISTENED)

  GOOD FAMOUS PEOPLE

  Art and I once went for dinner with an American pop star whom Art had shot album artwork for. He was passing through London, as American pop stars do. Ray Brazier. We had dinner at a swish place off the Strand. I dressed up, course I did. I even wore Spanx under my satin dress—God knows what possessed me, I never usually subjected myself to such things, but I must have felt the occasion called for it. I was misguided. They cut into my thighs viciously, and the hems kept poking out when I sat down. I was conscious of them, especially when Ray Brazier decanted himself into the restaurant (late) wearing nothing but a sly smile and a loose purple caftan. He stank of weed. The really famous didn’t have to try—I knew that from doing celebrity profiles; from Art’s slow but sure slide into huffy, comprehensive self-acceptance. Makes sense, really. They’ve done their trying, haven’t they? And there’s nothing—nothing—a famous person loves more than another famous person (ideally, another famous person who is slightly more famous than them). I stood out like a sore thigh.

  “Oh, hal-lew,” Ray drawled—soooo satisfyingly Californian. He sat down and raised an eyebrow. “Look at you tew.”

  Art was wearing a suit. Nevertheless, he didn’t flinch. He gracefully straddled worlds—the high and the low, the smart and the casual—talking about his latest shoot with a band in the mountains, and another he was doing for an Icelandic film director. Ray chuckled and marveled and proffered his own latest stories, amongst the olives and breads and butters (“Would you like some water, for the table?” the waiter asked. I almost said, Yes—and some accolades. Bring some more over, would you? We don’t have nearly enough over here.…). Instead, I sat there quiet—too scared to speak in case I sounded stupid, or worse, mundane—discreetly (not discreetly) yanking my Spanx periodically back under my dress. They asked the waiter’s name and visibly committed it to memory and then used it at every opportunity like Good Famous People, who acknowledged the little men. I caught them, both of them, having a moment as they perused the menus (Ray had the duck, since you ask) and they sighed in time, laughed, and shrugged at each other. They were both in the New York Times and here they were, together, in the flesh. It was so … pleasing. They could hardly believe it themselves.

  “NO photos,” Art had said before we left the house. He was quite strict about it.

  I was so alone, in my big body, with all that breath. I looked at my phone under the table for most of the meal and smiled benignly whenever I looked up. At the end of the meal, as we said our good-byes, Ray had clearly forgotten my name. “Je-mima?” he said eventually. Well, I wasn’t going to relieve him. “Jezebel,” I said. And I let my Spanx slide down as I waddled to the door.

  Back at ours, we drank tea in the lounge. Art said: “You were quiet tonight.”

  “I was just listening.”

  “You were looking at your phone. I bet Ray thought you had narcolepsy. Your head kept dropping.”

  “I didn’t feel I had much to add to the conversation.”

  “You just sound jealous now. Who are you, Jenny, between these parameters you batter?”

  I think he was right. My ambivalence about life. About people. About everything. Art saw straight through it to the nothingness beyond: the nothingness that was me. The many flying fragments.

  He sighed. I sighed. The elephant in the room trumpeted.

  “Listen, is it really really okay?” he said.

  I looked out of the window, across the street, into the window of the ground-floor flat opposite. A man was often there in his kitchen, pottering around. He was there now, making a hot drink. We had never looked at each other directly, but I felt connected to him in that way we often do in cities: by proximity, by similar living spaces and activities. I had fantasized about going over there, pressing his buzzer, walking into his flat, and fucking him against his cooker, looking back out through his kitchen window and across to my lounge, straight into the eyes of Art.

  I said: “Define okay.”

  “I guess I might just feel like you’re starting to resent me.”

  “Resent you about what?” I mean. Bless me.

  He looked at me. “The baby thing.”

  I wondered whether to say it. I thought of my options in the quick-fire way I always do—down every avenue like a rocket, to each conclusion and back again and down the next, testing each hypothesis, a series of blistering speculations. For some reason I decided to be brave. I said, “I just know that we have both refused to budge, but in that, it’s my desire that has been pushed down. How is that?”

  “Because yours is the thing rather than the not-thing, and the thing is too much of a risk.”

  It was a prepared answer, I could tell. Our conversations had been going round and round.

  Why should I back down?

  Why should I?

  Why should I?

  But how?

  How do you know you want one?

  How can you be sure?

  We could have gone round in circles a lot longer, I suppose. If we were younger, easier, less proud. All I was left with was: “I DON’T FUCKING KNOW. I’m sorry if that isn’t good enough. I’m afraid it just has to not be good enough. You know how sometimes you just have to start walking to see which way the blob is going on the map? That.”

  “Why are all your analogies about phones?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “You need to be a lot clearer on this if you want me to understand, Jenny.”

  “Well, I don’t know a hundred percent whether I want one, but I want to keep the possibility open.” I feel rushed and limited and very mortal. I said: “Do YOU feel that you’ve interrogated things fully?”

  He looked frantic then. “Don’t pin me down on this!”


  “You’re the one pinning me down, asking impossible questions about resentment! I’m not a fortune-teller!” I’m a fortune-teller’s daughter.

  He nodded and looked out over the street at the man in his kitchen. He was still making a cup of tea. For all I knew, Art had been having similar fantasies about him. And then Art said: “I just don’t want us to get to our fifties and you be resenting me. That’s all.”

  “I promise you I won’t let it get to that.”

  “But how do you know, if you’re not a fortune-teller?”

  “Maybe I have a little of it in my DNA.”

  Art looked at me and said, with a horrible gentleness: “I don’t want this to become a point of self-torture, because neither of us has time for that.”

  “Oh, I always make time for self-torture.”

  MY MOTHER

  and I walk toward the gallery. She takes my hand and I let her.

  “You’re not off the hook, by the way, about binning my school files.”

  “You really should have said if they were so important.”

  And then I see the milling crowd through the glass windows. I tell myself to be strong. To walk tall. That’s it. Hold yourself together. Walk like a man. I am Ripley in the elevator with the flamethrower. I can do this.

  We step into the spacious gallery. I always hated galleries and could never tell Art, but they give me an instant migraine, like shopping malls and churches. It’s the pressure of a building with intent. My mother takes two glasses of wine off a tray and hands me one. I drink half of it. I can feel the gin inside me, looking for a friend. It finds the wine. They hit it off. My head is a party. I look around at all the people, and for a second I am happily lost—and then I feel the darkness of their clothes and the situation. It is inevitable I will see Art—the one my soul dreads and seeks (there’s always one at any given time)—any second, even if I try to talk to my mother, even if I pretend to smile at a stranger, even if I look for the bar or the toilet when I do not want the bar or the toilet or maybe I do want the toilet, even if—