I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “It’s not an exact science,” she said. “There are a lot of theories about how it works.”

  “And what’s yours?”

  “They think that early man may have communicated by song, don’t they? Sort of grunts with tunes. So maybe we were like birds and we lost it. Except we didn’t really lose it.”

  “Birdsong is pretty strange stuff,” Bill said. “You think it’s all territory and sex. But it turns out they’re doing it because they love it.”

  “You mean the birds.”

  “This one guy, biologist or something, takes his clarinet to play in a forest. Flocks of thrushes around. At the end of it all, his only conclusion is they’re making thousands more sounds than they actually need to. Just for the joy of it, improvising as they go along. Like Charlie Parker.”

  “You mean Bird.”

  “Yeah,” Bill said. He paused. “I thought you were a classical girl, not a jazz fiend.”

  “Just a general fiend,” she said. “If you get brain damage in your right temporal lobe, which controls higher auditory processing of sound—speech on the left, music on the right—”

  “You’re losing me,” he said.

  “No, you’re okay. Right temporal lobe, just behind your ear, here. I’m guessing yours is pretty well developed. If it’s injured, patients exhibit a complete failure to recognize recently heard songs, although they can still respond emotionally to them. It’s called amusia.”

  “Amusia. Great title for a book. I love it.” When Bill smiled he looked like a different person.

  “So what if humans sang before they spoke?” she said. “I mean, music may be profoundly instinctive to us, maybe it’s our truest form of communication.”

  “You haven’t heard me in the shower at six in the morning.”

  “Like I said, early man.”

  “Ouch,” Bill said. “Where did you come from?”

  As Petra thinks this over, she is returned to her living room by a loud rhythmic pounding coming through the ceiling above. Molly. Still awake and on her keyboard. At 10:25. On a school night, for God’s sake. She pinches the bridge of her nose, the part that’s supposed to take away headaches, or so the magazines say. All their worst fights these days are about bed. Not going to bed early enough, not being able to go to sleep, then not being able to get up the next day. Bedtime, her daughter announced loftily, is babyish. Petra thinks back to Molly in her crib, curled tight as a cashew nut, her tiny fists clenching and unclenching. That had felt like the hard bit; the night feeds, the bedside clock’s beady green digits telling you it was 3:15; back then, it always seemed to be 3:15. Sleep deprivation made you light-headed at the same time as your feet felt like they were shod in lead. During a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Petra had nodded off for a few seconds, which would have been just about okay, except she was one of the performers. Petra always reckoned she could play the cello in her sleep, though only motherhood had given her the opportunity to test that hypothesis.

  Then the baby years passed, like an April shower, and the hard bit turned out to be the easy part, only you didn’t find out until it was over. Motherhood was like being in a play and only ever having the lines for the scene you were in at any given moment. By the time you figured out how to play the part, the curtain dropped and it was on to the next act. Some days, she felt so nostalgic for that little baby.

  “Being a parent doesn’t get any easier,” Carrie said. “It just gets hard in a different way.”

  Petra was the family disciplinarian, a role that Marcus had been quite happy to delegate. No, happy to abandon, she thinks, and then checks herself. She can’t stand being bitter, the taste of it like cheap mouthwash. Walking away from the solicitor’s office after discussing an amicable settlement—Mr. Amos used to be their solicitor, but suddenly he was Marcus’s—she retched up the bile that had been accumulating in the back of her throat into a green wheelie bin.

  I have become the kind of woman who spits in the street and doesn’t carry a handkerchief, she thinks. If her mother were alive, it would have killed her.

  Now that Marcus is gone, Petra must somehow be good cop and bad cop for Molly. Cagney and Lacey.

  Which was which? She never did get that straight, though the blonde was definitely harder, the brunette rounder and more maternal. You didn’t see enough portraits of women who loved and depended on each other like those two; in real life, it was female friendship that kept most women going, in her experience, especially once the rivalry over men had fallen away.

  Every weekday at ten to seven, Petra goes into Molly’s room and stumbles across the carpet. With its scattered heaps of debris, the room is like a beach after the tide has gone out. She switches on the radio—some jackass DJ irritating enough to raise the dead; then, fifteen minutes later, she yells up the stairs, by which time her daughter is usually in the shower. This morning, though, she had literally had to shake her awake. Molly, her features snared in a mess of golden hair, surfaced like a marsupial from some deep burrow. This was not sleep, it was hibernation. Petra had gotten angry. “Lost it,” in Molly’s tearful accusation.

  “And if you’re going to wear your hair long, young lady, you’re going to have to learn to brush it every night or we’re cutting it off.”

  Young lady? Where did that come from? How prim and predictable are the words that travel down the maternal line on the reproachful gene. Did Darwin guess that survival of the fittest involves a hairbrush? No, but mothers do. Greta used to grab Petra by the hair and say, “Ach, it’s szo greasy.” So many of her mother’s sentences began with that guttural ach of disgust. She thought it was because Greta was disappointed in her daughter’s looks. Now that she has a girl of her own, Petra sees with frightening clarity how the world will judge Molly, and it won’t be for her dry humor or her wonderfully mobile hands, which straddle complex chords like bridges made of flesh and bone.

  She loves her daughter passionately, but she is highly critical of her. With a son it might have been different; she always wonders about that. Instead she has a teenage girl, a creature with a whim of iron. Will of iron. No, whim of iron is better. The way Molly juts that heart-shaped chin of hers, determined to have the last word in any argument, most confident when she is most ignorant. And it stings when she accuses Petra of not understanding her. Compared to her own mother, Petra feels like a limbo dancer of flexible compassion and comprehension. Greta could have taught those ayatollahs a thing or two about rigid intolerance. At least Molly has not inherited the relish for gloom and disaster. Petra was brought up to believe that anything invented after 1959 would give you cancer.

  “Not the old days again,” Molly sighs if Petra dares to suggest that, once upon a time, there were mothers even stricter and more annoying than she is.

  “That was like twenty-five years ago,” says Molly.

  Not for Petra. I am approaching the middle of my life, she thinks. I am a grown woman. A mother. I have a home in a pleasant suburb of London with a south-facing suntrap patio where I grow surprisingly good tomatoes and basil, which I tear with my hands to release the fragrance and then strew over the chopped tomatoes with a little balsamic vinegar. I have come to like the word strew. Strewth. I have a job that I love and that may even do some small good in the world, I am supposed to be a mature person anchored by all the trappings of a decent, slightly dull life, yet increasingly I feel like a child who suspects that the past is sweeping round in a big circle to ambush her.

  She has only the faintest grasp of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but she knows that something strange has happened to time since she found the letter from the David Cassidy magazine in her mother’s wardrobe. Her brain, which generally spins through a Rolodex of worries, has started making dramatic leaps between the years and decades, as if some invisible director were putting together a package of Petra highlights for an awards ceremony. While she was reading in the bath the other night, it was Steven Williams’s penis that surfaced. She saw it for the first time w
hen she was babysitting, for her Geography teacher and his wife, and Steven dropped round unannounced. (Petra and he had just started seeing each other, after Gillian grew tired of Steven. She had never wanted him; she had wanted others not to have him.) Petra remembers, for example, how, when she opened the door, he was standing there on the porch with a bottle of Woodpecker Cider and a hopeful grin. How he took off his leather jacket and threw it over the banister as if it were a saddle and the buckles jangled like stirrups. The way they both padded upstairs to check that the two little girls were asleep, and how it felt as though they were trying on adulthood for the first time. How she found herself scrutinizing Steven’s face in the glow of the toadstool night light and realized, to her mild astonishment, that she was looking to see what kind of dad he might be. She could only have been fifteen.

  She startles herself by recalling things she didn’t know she’d noticed. How, when they’d been kissing on the settee, he lifted himself onto one elbow to keep his weight from crushing her. The way she liked being crushed by his weight. Her heart pounding like she’d run a hundred miles. When his mouth found her breast, it sent an electrical signal Down There, a spasm of longing that created a new pathway as it convulsed. He undid the button on his jeans, adjusted himself with a single movement and there it was. Huge and unmanageably alive. No Chinese whisper in the needlework room, no Biology lesson, not even Carol’s mime with a saucisson on the fifth-form trip to Paris could have prepared her for the thing itself.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or faint, though neither would have been right because it was unmistakably a solemn moment. Knowing that something had to be done about the erection—done with it, to be exact—and finding out what that was just at the moment the Geography teacher put his key in the front door. Steven leaped to his feet, tucked himself back in and scooped her bra up and into her bag with a single movement, years of training on the rugby field paying off.

  Petra said the girls had been no bother. No bother at all. The teacher knew, and they both knew that he knew, but they were saved by mutual embarrassment.

  Steven gave her a lift home on the back of his bike, along the seafront. Petra felt happy simply to be alive. The salty wind on her raw, kissed lips, her hands laced round his middle, her body and his leaning together to take each corner. Her first brush with sex left her feeling drugged, hugging the secrets of womanhood to herself.

  One whole wall of Molly’s room is wallpapered in boy. The same boy, in picture after picture. A boy on the prow of a ship, a boy on a beach. A boy with cool, blue eyes and a prominent, dimpled chin. A boy whose floppy, too-long fringe is parted to the side and threaded with blond streaks. Petra doesn’t think much of him, this boy. With his button nose and round eyes, he looks like a child’s drawing, not entirely real. She dislikes the fact that her daughter’s bedroom looks like some kind of Renaissance chapel dedicated to the cult of this youth, but she doesn’t say so. Instead, in a pleading voice she dislikes, she says: “Mol, I’ve told you before, if you use Sellotape to stick posters up, it’ll bring the paint off when you take them down.”

  Molly doesn’t respond. She is in bed, listening to her Discman and writhing with the duvet as if it were a sea monster.

  “You know we can’t afford to redecorate.”

  As so often with her daughter, Petra finds her tongue keeps talking when silence would be the wiser course. That’s not what I meant to say, she thinks. This is not who I am.

  “But I’m not going to take the posters down, am I? Duh,” says the shape under the duvet.

  “Don’t say duh.”

  “What’s wrong with duh? Honest, Mum, I don’t get you sometimes.”

  “There’s no need to get me. I’m your mother.”

  Petra bends to scoop up an armful of tights and underpants.

  “Is that the boy from Titanic?”

  Molly sits up, incredulous with disdain. “Leonardo DiCaprio, Mum. He’s world fay-mous.”

  “How did he end up with a name like that?”

  “His mum was pregnant with him and she was in Italy and she was looking at a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “How on earth do you know that?”

  “Because I read it in a magazine.”

  Petra sighs, exasperated. “You can’t believe everything you read in magazines, darling.”

  “It happens to be a true fact. Ac-tchew-ull-ee.”

  Petra bends forward slightly to allow this falsehood to go over her head. “You know, when I was your age I wasn’t allowed posters on—”

  Molly doesn’t wait for her to finish. “And your point is?”

  The awful, hand-on-the-hip sarcasm she has learned from those American TV shows she watches.

  “Molly, please don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  Along with the rest of her generation, Molly is bored by foreign languages, but somehow manages to speak fluent Beverly Hills brat. “It’s sooo gross,” she will say, wrinkling her nose. Petra, who still thinks of gross as a pay packet before deductions, feels old and weary.

  “Always try to remember you’re the adult.” That’s what a neighbor with older children told her when Molly started nursery. It seemed such a strange thing to say—who was the adult, if not the mother? Now her baby girl is a teenager, Petra knows exactly how hard it is not to be provoked into childish retaliation. Well, how do you think I feel? is what she finds herself wondering.

  Molly doesn’t care how Petra feels. Petra’s job is to absorb whatever Molly feels.

  “Mol?”

  “Okay, I’ll use Blu-Tack.”

  “Good.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s so late. I hoped you’d be asleep by now, my love.”

  Petra perches on the edge of the bed and strokes her daughter’s forehead with her index finger. Over the past few months, the child’s features have been going about their urgent task of morphing into a woman’s; right now, they are slightly too big for her face—eyes, nose and pillowy lips, all slightly out of scale. Molly complains that she is not even pretty, but one day she will be beautiful, her mother thinks. The prettiest girl in class seldom grows up to be the beauty.

  A sudden image of Gillian at their school reunion, four years ago. A Home Counties wife and mother now, living in one of the shires—Berks or Bucks—pleasant features under a neat bob with expensive caramel highlights, just a millimeter too wide. Gillian Edwards as a grown woman, talking about their place in Portugal, the palms of her hands stained a telltale Darjeeling by self-tan. Gillian. All her fearful magic gone.

  “Can’t sleep. I keep telling you,” Molly says. The bags under her eyes are a livid plum. Her lids, fluttering as if a moth were trapped beneath.

  Petra bends to kiss them. “Is everything okay at school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Hannah okay?”

  Said casually. Tricky Hannah, the volatile one in Molly’s group. Hannah, whom Petra long ago spied as a threat to her daughter’s happiness, though she keeps that thought to herself lest she make Hannah more attractive to her daughter. Tricky Hannah, the queen who moves the other girls around the board. Every group has one. Hannah, who regularly demands to be Molly’s bestest friend, hers alone and no other. More demanding than any lover.

  It’s just teenage girls, Petra tells herself, but she knows the other things that teenage girls can do, so she stays alert. Petra counsels Molly to maintain a wide circle of friends. She doesn’t say that the more friends you have in different groups the less chance there is of being abandoned. Adolescence is a worrying time for mothers, but Petra knows she worries more than is strictly reasonable. Her antennae for rejection are overdeveloped; even though she seems to have produced a popular, well-adjusted kid, she can’t switch them off.

  “Mu-um, it’s no big deal, okay?”

  That’s what Molly says whenever Petra inquires why she isn’t part of a shopping trip the other girls are going on or has, inexplicably, been left off the guest
list for some disco. Petra experiences every snub to her child, both real and imagined, with a lurch in her belly. She can’t help it. Even Molly hates it if they’re running late for a sleepover, yells at Petra when they’re stuck in traffic; hates the other girls to get started without her. Fear of missing out is married to the twin dread of not being missed at all. Some things never change.

  Petra adjusts her position on the bed so she is lying alongside Molly, their two heads next to each other on the pillow. The cushion between them is Molly’s breasts, a recent addition and swelling fast. She is glad about her daughter’s breasts, proud even. Is that normal? Recently, Molly has become very private, banning Petra from the bathroom when she is in the bath. Not long ago, they used to chat about their day, with Petra perched on the loo and Molly lying back in the water like the girl in that Millais painting, hair a skein of seaweed floating behind her head.

  She wonders now if she will ever see her daughter’s naked body again, the body she grew inside her own—probably not. The next person to see it will be a boy, a real one, not the Leonardo kid in the posters on the wall.

  As she puts her arm around her, she feels all the fight leave Molly. When she was a toddler, Molly would go quite rigid during a tantrum, until the demon departed and she allowed herself to be cuddled and soothed by a warm drink from her bottle. She liked to have the bottle held for her so she could twirl her hair with one hand and clutch her blanket with the other. How easy it was back then, Petra thinks. You could comfort her, smooth it all away, tell her everything was going to be all right. And it was. Because you could control the world. You were the world, pretty much.

  Drifting now, Molly burrows closer. If she’s honest with herself, this is what Petra misses most about Marcus. It’s not the sex. It’s another body that can, as if by osmosis, drain all the tension out of your cells. She has to hand it to him, Marcus was good at massage, his cellist’s fingers powerful and nimble, finding the knots.

  “I knead you,” he said, turning her over and pressing his way down the rungs of her spine, springing each vertebra like a catch. He always was terrific at vibrato.