Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  Maya wiggled up the bed and cupped her hand.

  She was tired. Too tired to think of Liz in that way. She imagined Liz as a bed to sleep on, and her head fell to the side. Her mother would understand. Cole would talk to her mother, fill her in on the progress of the second bathroom renovation and how much Gitsy liked her teachers at Franklin Montessori. He would tell her mother that they didn’t want the children spoiled rotten this year. No more than five presents each. Nothing that needed batteries. He’d show interest in the dog. Yes, he could be relied on and she could sleep, with her hand on Liz.

  Maya lifted her phone up to her face and typed.

  Don’t make me go to sleep in a room with a green carpet without you.

  She sent the message and her arm flopped down on the bed. She thought of how bad it would be to fall asleep with her phone on, wide open, with its 300 messages to Liz. Before she turned the phone off she wrote one last message. Liz’s wet hair would leave a sopping halo on the pillow. The tea was a special blend of herbs Liz had come up with just for her. Gingko for her circulation problems and valerian for her unreliable sleep patterns.

  Don’t make me go to sleep in a room with a green carpet without you.

  *

  Last night I thought I would die

  in the dust

  without you.

  My only desire:

  to go up in flames

  in that same old spot.

  I have my papers to prove it.

  Brothers and sisters

  we were, back then,

  (some details are classified)

  before the fighting, before

  I disarmed him.

  Two people

  in a room at the Sheraton

  hacking away

  hashing it out.

  Men, women:

  all of us volunteers.

  All of us volunteers.

  Spell it out for me:

  I thought I would die

  without you.

  Lois hit save and closed her laptop. Nick was sleeping against the window, his mouth slightly open. His hand was between the two of them, open, even now. Lois rubbed her toe in circles on the pine-green airplane carpet. She imagined the Historian, Christmas shopping for his wife. She tried to picture him thumbing through bras and panties in a high-end lingerie store, but all that came up was a Historian-shaped blob, seen from the back.

  In the end, nothing could soothe her like a note from him. He became a vocation. Once, he told her to meet him at the end of Pier 51. He left his office late, and sent a message from every block. Every message sent her into a silent panic that only made her heart more audible. I’ve never been inside the Church of the Holy Apostles – have you? And, There’s a stairwell on the corner of 22nd and 10th. I’d like to fuck you standing in that stairwell. He made her sick with longing. He killed her appetite. His want was an added benefit that flavoured just about everything. I’d like to get a room at the Jane, and go in and out of you all night like there’s nothing else left to do.

  She tried to recall what happened when he finally got to the pier – how they kissed, if he pushed his fingers through the buttons and up her shirt like he sometimes did, if they remained standing, or if she sat down in his lap like she sometimes did. But the memory was vague, and her recollection of the embrace not as unctuous as she had hoped. Her mind kept switching back to the new, approximate vision of the Historian in the lingerie store until finally her old lover melted into the racks of bras and knickers, sending Lois into a fragile but welcome tranquillity, 20,000 feet above the ocean. There was nothing else left to do.

  5. The Nativity Scene

  OFTEN IN NEW YORK, Lois saw the Alps from her desk. She described it to Nick as a stroke of nostalgia, halfway between memory and a headrush. She’d be translating a pharmaceuticals catalogue or subtitling a video, usually with her headphones on. Her eyes would look out of the window and for a second of lost focus, the Manhattan skyline, behind the lesser, Greenpoint skyline, became the saw-toothed Alps.

  To be precise: it looked like the view of the Alps she knew best, the one you had from the top of the mountain behind her parents’ house – the same mountain that had been the backdrop of many a family nocturnal. If you looked east and squinted, the Alpine jag melted into a rickrack of eternal snow that blended blue rock into blue sky.

  Coming through town, Lois and Nick got their first glimpse of real mountain. The drive from the airport had given them rolling hills and dips, but the peaks were only promised later, when you reached the lake. The town centre at midday was full of cars and people carrying shopping bags. The backdrop lake looked like unrealised ice. They passed the old condemned hospital with its red and blue windows, and went up into the foothills of the Semnoz to drive home the back way, avoiding the traffic of tourists on their way to the ski resorts.

  On his first trip to the Alps – their honeymoon – Nick had followed Lois up and down the mountains and around the lake like a child follows a butterfly. Lois was that eternal child with a contagious devotion to the small and miraculous facts of life. He was tickled that a girl like that might want him. In fact, it made him giddy how much she seemed to want him. They broke into the playground of her old senior school and made out in the gymnasium, fucked in cinematic meadows and carved their initials on a tree. She slid her toes up his leg under the table, while Frank pontificated about biodynamic wine and Latin roots. She told him the place had been waiting for him, had been nothing but a vexation until he set foot in it.

  It was his first time going back to France since the affair – back to the place where Lois was once a child, and not a person with the ability to murder his trust. It was also his first time back since the miscarriage. He worried that spending a week with her sister’s kids – particularly Finn, with his drooling, fat-cheeked perfection – might be hard on Lois. The few times she’d brought up her uncertain, gloomy desire for a baby since the affair, Nick was disgusted with her. ‘If you wanted a baby so badly, why did you fuck someone else?’ or: ‘Is it just anyone’s baby you want?’ Both of them knew, deep down, that there were two answers to that last question.

  Today, driving along the back road to the family home and despite grogginess from the flight, Lois seemed upbeat. But that was the thing about Lois – she could go from butterfly to sinking stone in a beat. And the intensity went both ways. Nick sometimes wondered whether, when he’d met Lois, he’d mistaken her anxiety for energy.

  Back when she was fourteen, Lois begged Frank to drive to school the back way, even though it stretched out the drive, because it went past the house of a boy she liked. Their statuses at school were inversely proportional – she was the half-English new kid who was too odd to bully, he was a semi-pro snowboarder two years older than anyone in his year. That he was the best-looking boy in school went undisputed.

  It is not an exaggeration to say that the entire playground went quiet the day he walked over to Lois one break. At first, she suspected a prank. It turned out he wanted some Metallica lyrics translated into French. They hung out together again the next day, and the day after that. By day four his aura had granted her a certain immunity in the playground, and no one dared tease her about this irregular friendship.

  One day he invited her over to his house after school. His parents were out. He took her up to his older brother’s room in the attic and locked the door behind them. Lois closed her eyes, stopped breathing, and tried to make her mouth some version of kissable. Instead of kissing her, the boy walked straight past her to where a small, round mirror hung on the wall. ‘Open your eyes,’ he ordered. She did. He took the mirror down and flipped it around. ‘See this?’ he said. On the back were scribbled the word ‘Ersatz’, and underneath, ‘Steffi, ich liebe dich.’ Steffi was the German exchange student who lived with them. He put the mirror back on the wall, unlocked the door, and swore Lois to secrecy.

  She had to wait another four years to be kissed, in the dank cloakroom of a nightclub called Sug
ar in a depressed university town in the West Midlands.

  Lois pointed out the house to Nick, who pointed out that she’d already pointed it out six, and four, and two years ago. ‘It’s the same truck from twenty years ago,’ said Lois. ‘It’s practically a historical artefact.’

  There was no room behind Maya and Cole’s rental SUV, so they parked at the foot of her parents’ driveway. Frank was in the garden, holding two metal stakes in one hand and a mallet in the other. Simon stood by him, panting clouds of hot breath into the sunny cold.

  Lois took out their bag, handed it to Nick, and slammed the boot so hard the dog winced. As they walked up the driveway Lois picked up a stick, and Simon wondered if it was perhaps for him.

  ‘What are you doing, Dad?’

  ‘Making the garden safe for the children.’

  Lois kissed her father on the cheek and Frank thought of the questions he should ask about her life, and the knowledge he should fold into said questions to prove he was up to speed.

  ‘Is everyone here?’ she asked.

  ‘Your sister and your mother are up there, getting everything organised. I think your brother’s coming tonight.’

  ‘What is there to organise?’ asked Lois.

  She looked for signs of the emotional affair her mum had mentioned – something in his voice, perhaps, or his appearance. But Frank didn’t look like much of a lothario. He looked like a man defeated, with his stakes and his garden full of holes, his mortal slopes and balconies deprived of guard rails. Lois could only imagine what shit Maya and Joan combined had given him.

  ‘Hey, can I borrow some money and the dog? I’m going to go to the bakery.’

  ‘Aren’t you going upstairs to say hi to your mum and sister?’ asked Nick.

  ‘Tell them I’ll be right there. I’ll bring breakfast back for everyone.’

  Frank took what he had out of his pockets and gave it to Lois. Lois looked at Simon. Simon walked to her.

  ‘He doesn’t need a leash,’ said Frank.

  ‘I know that,’ said Lois.

  Nick shook Frank’s hand and continued up the steps. They were both thinking it: how come she gets away with leaving before she’s even arrived? How come we all indulge this aloofness of hers, encourage her childish instinct to do whatever the hell she wants? And Frank: how come she gets to stand outside the circle without being yelled at?

  Lois took her hard-fought right to oddsheep it down the lane with the dog.

  ‘We don’t have to talk,’ she said to Simon, when they were out of earshot. ‘We can just enjoy the last of the quiet, and I can share my crazy pass with you.’

  Simon looked up to Lois, and as he did so his wet nose banged against her hand. She extended her fingers and scratched the side of his snout, which was damp from drool.

  Frank went back to child-proofing the garden, and as he banged the first stake into the ground he watched his daughter and his dog walk away from his unsafe trap-of-a-house.

  *

  Simon had fallen in love with Lois in the spring.

  There had been no acts of love, just the dull certainty of love, its titillating deadlock. He didn’t know when he would see her next, only that until then days rolled into days, rolls rolled into rolls, and his eyes got dry from gazing into space. Seats that were once comfortable were now functional. Meals that tasted good were just matter. He lost his opinion about baths.

  Simon knew this might very well be the last time he loved, and it made him feel like a one-worker factory. So many things to keep running despite this love crisis.

  He was in love with a beautiful, brilliant woman and there were all these things he wanted to say to her, like: I want to eat your heart right out of you, I want to cock my head so I can lick the side of your foot – but all that came out of his mouth was woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof.

  *

  As he watched his daughter – the one they all made allowances for – run off with his dog, Frank thought of Heide. She had no children, no dog, and he supposed she lived the selfish life of a twenty-year-old, only with more money, less time and assuaged ambitions. There must be no frenzy in her life, he imagined. He thought of how much room the woman had in her life for intellectual pursuit, and decided she must have chosen her current situation as a means to erudition. He felt old, bewildered and besieged. He envied and wanted Heide in equal measure, or, if the balance tipped one way, he couldn’t be sure which.

  Frank’s affair was a jutting bone on a man who’d stopped growing. Heide, long hair flying in the wind out of the window of Frank’s VW, was like a stunted-growth diagnosis. Joan was the healthy part of him – that time of the evening when his knee stopped jerking, the absence of an eye twitch, the invisible dickering in his blood once he’d taken his meds.

  He had known her forty years ago. They met in Italy, the year before some mutual friends introduced him to Joan. It was in Trento, in the summer. It was the first time he’d ever tasted medlar fruit. She was hitch-hiking, he picked her up, and instead of dropping her off near Geneva as planned, drove her the extra 400 miles to her parents’ house in Wiesbaden.

  He stayed in Wiesbaden four days, sleeping in a youth hostel. He swam lengths in the narrow Opelbad pool while she packed up her life to follow him back to France. They returned via Freiburg, and Frank splashed out on a night at an inn in the Black Forest. He would return to the Black Forest three years later with Joan, on their honeymoon.

  Frank and Heide joked that it was a long trip for a change of clothes, and compared notes on membership numbers in the youth wings of their respective countries’ Communist parties. They lived together for nine months in Frank’s one-bedroom apartment, on one of the pedestrian streets that moated the castle. They spent all their money at the market and in the German tavern by the canal. One day, when Frank came home from the office where he worked as a junior architect, Heide was gone, along with the things he’d driven halfway across Germany to fetch.

  The abandonment had been painful, but lined with the utter certainty that new opportunities for love would present themselves. And Frank certainly had a love of opportunities. Particularly, opportunities for obsession. He met Joan that same year.

  Frank placed two wooden garden chairs by the side of the pool and tied a rope between them. He knew they would disapprove. He didn’t particularly want to anger his wife and youngest daughter, but the ease with which he could do so disguised itself in his mind as placation. He walked up the steps to the house with the shears, and on the way cut a few branches that could arguably poke a child’s eye out.

  Inside, Gitsy had hijacked the hallway for a wedding procession of Maya’s old stuffed animals. The animals were wrapped in toilet paper and the bride’s train was leaking its felt-tip designs onto the grey-white marble. Frank sat down on the step to remove his garden boots, which were shedding clots of earth onto Joan’s clean floor. He thought of getting a dustpan to clean up the mess, but he didn’t know where to find it, and if he asked Joan she’d be angry, which would defeat the point of pre-empting her anger.

  Maya appeared with Finn sitting on her hip and chewing on her scarf.

  ‘Oh my God, is it true you paid Lois to not come in and be normal and say hello to us?’

  ‘She went to get croissants for everyone.’

  ‘It’s 11.20 a.m. We all had breakfast four hours ago.’

  Joan came out of the kitchen and stared at Frank’s muddy feet. Cole and Nick were sitting at the table, drinking coffee. For a second, he thought he should join them. Frank did not know what to talk to the husbands about. He would give himself until Lois came back to be alone, and then, he promised himself, he would think less of H and take part in the family.

  Frank walked into his office and closed the door behind him. He noticed his email was open on the desktop and felt like vomiting. He logged out and then logged in
again. He took his sketchbook out of the drawer and whistled for the dog. He remembered the dog was out with Lois. He wondered how Lois would handle Simon on the main road. The dog knew to stop, but you had to put your hand on his back to remind him. He’d neglected to tell her that.

  It was Lois and Maya’s idea to get a dog. Their argument was that, now that William was gone too, he and Joan would tear each other apart if they didn’t have a third party to come between them. Frank said it was out of the question, and Joan reminded everyone that she hated dogs. The pressure built up for several months and Frank even wrote them a sonnet titled ‘You Get a Dog’, which he published on a blog created for the occasion. And then one night Joan had driven to her friend’s chalet up in the mountain and spent an evening drinking rosé next to a litter of puppies. She was tipsy, and pissed off at Frank about the stupid house, and the fact that the glass door in their first-floor bedroom opened onto a fifteen-foot drop. She adopted out of anger.

  And now Frank had a dog that followed him around building sites, and ensured that he stuck to the exercise regimen the doctor had prescribed for his heart. At first Simon learned Frank’s tricks too quickly, and since there was no satisfaction in that for either of them he endeavoured to eke out his training, so that Frank might feel like the master of something.

  The door opened slowly and Finn crawled into the office. Frank looked at Finn for a second.

  ‘Dad.’

  Maya came in and scooped up Finn.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mum and I are planning to have oysters tomorrow, so we’ll need you to shuck them.’

  ‘I always shuck the oysters.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s weird how Lois didn’t even come in to say hello?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘Are you going to be in front of your computer the whole holiday?’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Great,’ said Maya. ‘Whenever you two sociopaths want to join us, we’ll be decorating the tree.’