by Joan Barfoot
She was young. She was extremely happy to marry James.
And when Jamie came along, she was tickled stupid. That skin! Those tiny round tugging lips! That sleek, soft, dark hair! The family gathered back around, too, the wonders of Jamie the lure.
“What will you do when he’s old enough?” asked Madeleine, who seemed always more intent on Isla than on Isla’s family.
Isla shrugged. “Maybe advertising,” she said for want of anything else, but felt, still, far too young and certainly unready. She did watch television and read magazines, though, often with a keener eye on the ads than on the programs and articles. She watched structure, design, different appeals; what was funny, what sentimental, what plain and workmanlike. She felt as if, in a desultory way, she was still learning, still pursuing some future beyond her house.
They had brick walls with chocolate-shaded trim around windows and doors, graceful gardens and shade trees. They were tucked nicely away, for such a young family. Some people put that another way, said “set up nicely.” It was like playing house, roaming stores, sometimes with James, looking for the right furniture, picking up vases and candles and placemats and little sculptures and other small touches. It felt like making something together, in addition to Jamie. Coming home from the supermarket, groceries in the trunk, Jamie locked into car seat, pulling into the bricked driveway, reaching for the garage door opener, Isla sometimes saw the house as an unusually attractive fortress, perfect for warding off the unpleasant, the distressing, anything very unhappy or painful.
James’s business flourished. He was moving much faster than his father would have into computers, new kinds of software, bidding on supply contracts for offices and schools with a boldness his father would not have dreamed of. He wore his lean suits but no longer moved languidly, liquid as water, was too busy now for such grace. She admired the risks he was taking. “We grow or we die,” he liked to say. He wanted, all the time, new, larger challenges. Stimulations. As for herself, she was waiting. Meanwhile her days felt captivating enough; if also sometimes, alone with Jamie, amazingly dull and dull-headed.
When James turned towards her some nights, energetic and ambitious and with his eyes confiding and tender, or she touched and stroked him into turning towards her, she thought that was a good conversation, speaking of the fundamental part of the deal, which would have to be love. Having supposed they were understanding what each other was saying with their mute messages back and forth between bodies, she was bound to be surprised to find this was not necessarily so.
Jamie was just a few months past two, already a runner, already subject to nightmares, when Isla got pregnant again. James was busy with schemes to expand into a small chain, then a large one. Both his ventures and hers for sure had their perilous, gambling aspects, but she hadn’t imagined he would think his was threatened by hers. “For God’s sake, what were you thinking? Jamie’s barely under control, never mind another one,” he said when she told him. He was angry, and looked for the moment quite unlike the tender man who’d been so delighted, swamped by sentiment, when she’d told him she was pregnant with what turned out to be Jamie. “You know what a dicey time this is anyway.” He used the word sabotage.
She leapt from disappointment to injury, then directly to fury. “You know what causes pregnancy, I suppose? People have known all about it for quite a few years now, although I understand there was a time — Neanderthal, maybe? — before the connection was made. Turns out it’s a mutual sort of thing. One act, two people, you know the drill.” He looked at her as if he found her unpleasant, even barely tolerable. She couldn’t imagine how she was looking at him.
He turned away first, moved to the drinks cabinet, poured a Scotch. “Sorry,” he said, with no heart in the words.
“Me too.” She didn’t imagine either of them was apologizing, only expressing regret at an unpleasant exchange. Maybe also they were speaking of sadness, that between them they’d just damaged and diminished something they’d counted on.
With Alix, Isla was in labour much longer than she had been with Jamie, fifteen hours, which was unexpected and the wrong way around, she thought, in these matters. James stayed at hand, although a few times he looked too weary to go on, and during moments when she had her wits together, she was able to think that was natural: she was fully occupied, while he was just waiting, which could also get very tiring. By the time Alix appeared, they were both collapsing, although they revived briefly, cheerfully, on seeing her. The crumply red skin, the frail curls of red hair! The plump little fingers and toes! The scrunched-shut eyes, the tiny, devouring mouth! “She’s gorgeous,” James said.
“Perfect,” Isla nodded, and promptly fell stone-tired asleep.
Having more than one child makes all the difference in the world, she concluded a few months later. With one, life still seemed optional, as if not every choice and decision were already made, and a range of possibilities might still be open. With two children a gate closed and locked.
Which was fine; it was only that certain choices had been irretrievably made.
Jamie, it turned out, was not entirely pleased with his sister. This sort of thing was expected, although Isla felt she’d gone to some lengths to prepare him, then to reassure him. Nevertheless she had to watch, when he began by playing with Alix’s little fingers and toes, that he didn’t go on to slap her small cheeks, or lock his own little fingers around her delicate throat. “I hate her,” he said bluntly a couple of times, and Isla gave him points for honesty, at least. Also he was mesmerized, could stare at Alix for ages as if she’d appeared by magic and he was waiting to see how this trick was done. And also he could touch her with enormous, grave tenderness.
He had, Isla supposed, like any growing human being, increasing reserves of ambivalence. He could feel two or three contradictory things very strongly, or he could feel two or three contradictory things in a muddled, unsure sort of way, but he could at least feel two or three contradictory things, which seemed to her an achievement.
James was the big surprise. “My baby angel,” he crooned. “My little sweetheart.” Who would not lap up such tenderness? Isla would have lapped it up herself; certainly Alix did.
His stores expanded: to three, to five, to eight in cities spread over the country. He was often away for days at a time. Isla found, slightly to her surprise, that she wasn’t lonely. She made friends and had family. She liked, for the most part, being in the company of Jamie and Alix. Alix picked up speech very early, perhaps from her brother because her early sentences, among more pleasant ones, included “I hate you.”
Isla was also glad enough to see James when he came home, bringing fresh air into a space that sometimes felt too enclosed. She remembered her father did much the same thing, bounding with his outside-world stories into her life with her mother. She hoped Jamie and Alix wouldn’t see her, as she was afraid she had sometimes seen Madeleine, as slightly pathetic.
When he came home, James read stories to Alix, and to Jamie if he was around but Jamie was growing out of toddlerhood into boyhood and had his own friends. Alix rode on James’s shoulders, and roared as he pushed her high on the swing set or caught her at the bottom of the slide. He carted home reams of paper from the head office store and coloured pencils and crayons from the now-separate school supplies outlet. Both children had all the paper, pencils, and crayons they could dream of, which Isla thought might make them take those things too lightly. James watched them draw, and tried to play tic-tac-toe with Alix. Upstairs in his home office they played elementary games on the computer. At night Alix lay loose as a rag doll, splayed on her back, legs and arms tumbled, mouth open, breathing hard in the deepest, most worn-out, safest, and most contented of nightmare-free sleeps.
Sometimes James went on at length about inventories, expansions, new products, hopeful contracts. Isla sympathized with how swiftly things changed, how quickly the importance of
words like ergonomics and virus had to be absorbed, acknowledged, and dealt with. Other times he didn’t have much to say. She could understand that, too. He was tired, and anyway there would be many aspects of his daily life she could know nothing about, and which wouldn’t be interesting, and would be wearying to set out to explain. Same went for her: too many exhausting, small details.
Sometimes he asked people important to his business to dinner. When Jamie was six, Alix three, one of those people was Martin Amery. “You’ll have things in common,” James said, introducing them. “Martin’s been working in advertising and now he’s going out on his own. We’re thinking our businesses might help each other to grow.” To Martin he explained, “My wife’s always been interested in advertising. She used to talk about it back when we were first dating.”
Had she? And did he expect anything to come of this? No. He’d only intended to create a little dinner-time conversation between them, hadn’t of course foreseen more. But she liked Martin, who struck her as a serious, energetic man with serious, energetic ambitions, not unlike James himself, although since Martin was short and pudgy and blond the resemblance wasn’t at all physical. Moreover, he took her seriously. He phoned the following week and suggested they meet. “If you’re interested,” he said, “I have an opening you might want to take a look at.”
And so she did. That closed gate — it now seemed to her that it only really meant she had secured herself a base from which she could begin to operate outwards.
Madeleine said Isla was lucky to have opportunity handed her “on a platter,” and she was right. Who said no to serendipities that fell right into the lap?
James, for one. “You want to do what?” he asked, sitting up sharply. The kids were in bed, he and Isla were alone in the living room, she on the deep, soft, flowery-pastelly sofa, he in the matching chair across the coffee table from her. “When did you dream this up?”
“Over lunch. It may not work out, I may be no good at it, or we may not get along, or I may decide I was wrong to think I’d be interested, but I want to do something and this sounds good to me at the moment.”
“There’d be nobody home with the kids.”
“The kids are going to be home less and less themselves. We’ll just have to organize care for when they are and you and I aren’t.” She thought it might be useful for him to hear he could have more opportunities himself to do more than play with them. She thought that might be a good thing for all of them, not least James. This hint flew right by him. Or he ignored it.
“But if you were working for Martin, and I’ve given him all my business, it doesn’t look good. It isn’t good. I don’t want him thinking I won’t dump him if he doesn’t work out. I don’t want him thinking he has some kind of edge. Have you thought about why he’s really interested in you? It’s not as if you have any experience.”
“Yes, I’ve thought about that. We’ve discussed it.” She hadn’t, though, thought of how unhappy James would be, or how far he would stoop. “Obviously it’s a way to get some experience. Then I may or may not move on, or get out altogether, who knows? Or his business may fail. I don’t think either of us imagines any edge with you. He’s just setting out to sink or swim, and so am I, and we seem to get along all right so we thought we might sink or swim in the same boat.”
That sentence didn’t go well, but she expected James would know what she meant.
“You didn’t think we should talk about this?”
“We are talking about it.”
“But no matter what, you assumed you’re just going to do it?”
“Well, I don’t know about ‘no matter what.’ Things might come up, I suppose.” She didn’t want to feel angry, or hurt. She didn’t want James to feel those things, either. She reached across the coffee table, touched his knee with her hand. “Here’s the thing. I have to do something or one of these days neither of us is going to like me very much.”
“There’s volunteer work. There’s going back to school. There’s other ad agencies, even.”
“Yes, there are,” she agreed.
He sighed. “I see you’re planning to do whatever you want, never mind anyone else. So I wish you luck, but don’t come crying to me when it blows up in your face.”
“I won’t.”
She was fairly proud of herself, felt she’d demonstrated in this exchange some of the professional skills she would need. Naturally she was disappointed in James; not only because he was so opposed, but because he was so objectionable, not to mention transparent, about it. When he began touching her breasts in bed that night, they wound up making love with unusual, forceful, nearly angry and equal passion. It felt very good.
So did the work. Starting off writing bits of ad copy, she found an unexpected talent for adjectives: words like vital and discerning. She developed a gift for verbs, too, although verbs turned out to be of less consequence in advertisements, at least in print, and might even be absent altogether. She told James, “It feels as if I’m exercising a part of my brain I didn’t even know was there. I mean really exercising, like jogging or lifting weights.”
James was not Martin’s only client. Nor was he his biggest one. When Martin set out on his own, he drew some clients of his former agency with him, and worked hard to get more. Isla watched him and imagined this helped her understand better how James’s very busy days went. Martin scrutinized Isla’s work and often told her she would have to start over. Every Friday, over a long lunch, they talked about clients, bounced slogans and presentation ideas off each other. It was very satisfying when sales charts sparked upwards as a result, presumably, of certain campaigns. Two heads did work better than one. Martin, the artist, covered napkins with little drawings, showing her shapes and plots and how words might fit into and around them. He said clients found her easy to talk to, and clever, and quick, but with a comforting appeal. “Will you be mad if I say maternal?”
She did not, of course, attend any meetings between Martin and James. It seemed to her that James was now not unhappy that she was occupied in ways that interested her, and that she came home as lively and as tired as he did, and with stories to tell, entertaining information to offer — was, in short, not a drain or a particular strain on him. There was money in it to boot, which might not matter to him but, somewhat to her surprise, did matter to her. Nor did the kids seem to mind. She’d read somewhere that the successful raising of children amounted to gracefully encouraging a long succession of farewells. At first she had found the idea inexpressibly sad, saw herself having her heart perpetually torn, waving an endless bye-bye.
Madeleine said, “Your father would have adored these children, it would have made him so happy, how well you’ve all done.” How had Madeleine borne losing her husband? Isla sometimes looked at James as he watched the late TV news, or as he lay sleeping, and wondered how she would feel if he vanished. She thought she would miss his boldness and determination and impatience. Certain habits. A warmth in the bed. The knowledge there was something, someone, to fall back on if need be.
Between Bert and her job, Madeleine was too busy, but James’s parents would have taken over Jamie and Alix’s spare-time care, if Isla had considered that wise. “Why have a babysitter when you have us?” James’s mother asked, and there was no good, kind answer. Isla said, “I know, and it’s very generous of you to offer, but we want them to have a place nearby to go to after school, and anyway Mavis has a houseful of kids and that’s good for them.” Mavis, who lived down the street, was large and red-faced and ate a great many chocolates, which as an addiction was preferable to most other things, a sort of jolly attachment to sweetness. Isla thought Mavis looked like someone who enjoyed kids, embraced them, but wouldn’t hurt or ruin them. There were no such guarantees with James’s parents who had, after all, raised James, who had turned around and pushed his father aside.
Isla saw that she no longer
regarded this as admirable, or inevitable. She supposed she saw these matters now as a parent might, not as a child; as someone vulnerable, not as natural victor.
Nevertheless, ten-year-old Jamie was in Mavis’s care the late afternoon he and a bunch of kids were tearing around Mavis’s back yard and he tripped. Mavis called Isla from the hospital emergency department. “He’ll be okay but it was close. You’ll want to come.”
Martin just said, “Go.”
She thought she would try to reach James from the hospital, saving time.
Mavis was holding a restless, upset seven-year-old Alix, and trying also to keep a grip on her own eight-year-old Tim when Isla raced into the waiting room. “I told them not to run with sticks in their hands,” Mavis said, “but they did anyway, I guess. He tripped. He’s got a pretty bad gash on his forehead, but it missed his eye as far as I could tell. I think they’re just putting in stitches right now. I’m sorry, Isla. I told them not to run with those sticks. They were pretending they were guns.”
Isla’s mistake. She wouldn’t let him have a toy gun, felt those awful computer games were bad enough, and stupidly hadn’t foreseen that Jamie would then just conjure make-believe weapons. “Not your fault,” she told Mavis, because although it was, it also could as easily have happened in her own yard. “Settle down, Alix, please, you’re not helping.”
Jamie had eighteen stitches. His entire forehead was a swollen, discoloured, angry-looking wound. This all came as a big surprise to James when he got home, since in the hospital panic she’d forgotten, after all, to call him; a difficult omission to account for. “Jesus, Isla,” he said, and to Jamie, “That’ll teach you not to be careless and do what you’re told. There’s a reason for rules. Maybe you’ll pay better attention next time.” He folded Alix into his lap. “You won’t be so silly, will you?” he asked, and she shook her head solemnly. Gratified, Isla thought. A little creepy.