Maya scowled at Lois, and travelled the glass the last foot back to her. She picked it up and drank.
‘So, who is it?’ asked Lois.
‘This woman I work with. Worked with.’
‘Oh.’
‘See? You’re shocked.’
‘No. I’m just shocked it took the gender expert eight years of practising gender expertise to figure out she liked women.’
‘I don’t like women.’ Maya paused. ‘Just her.’
Simon was snoring under the table and giving Lois a cramp in her left foot.
‘I’m telling you because...’
‘I know why you’re telling me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve thought of telling me so many times since it started that by now, blurting it out is just a formality.’
‘You think you’re so clever,’ said Maya.
Maya had always been the beautiful one. She hadn’t grown up with the anger of Lois, who burned easy in the summer and had been slamming doors since she was ten. Maya had olive skin, long brown hair, long black eyelashes, and didn’t look as if she had to be negotiated.
‘Does Cole know?’
‘Of course he doesn’t know.’
‘Are you going to tell him?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I tell him, I know he’ll forgive me.’
While she was still on the wrong side of Cole’s understanding, Maya felt her life might still change, that she was still a mass of possibility, a ballot not yet cast.
Lois and Joan had from the start envisaged Cole in the abstract, and known that whatever alliance Maya made would be forged in mutual strength and healthy good looks. There was going to be no time given to flailing in this marriage. Cole and Maya were late university sweethearts. They’d both gone through the people who were almost as promising as them but not quite, and their love was touching and efficient, a deep-running partnership. There was always respect there – the kind that Lois and Joan looked at suspiciously and with some envy, but with a realistic lack of ambition.
Maya’s problem today was not that she was cheating on Cole. Her problem was that in his romantic temperance and soft spot for those who fucked up, he denied her the last drop of agency in her own nihilism.
‘So who is this woman?’
‘She’s called Liz.’
‘Liz what?’
‘I’m not telling you.’
Lois thought of telling Maya about the Historian, about how she, too, had crushed and been crushed more than was decent. She considered warning Maya about how shitty all this would look when she realised that the end of that love was written into its very existence, and how there would be no painless exit when you most needed one.
But it was Maya’s moment, Maya’s cataclysm. Lois was in a different phase now. She had been forgiven – or almost. Maya was in love in the present, still out in a storm of her own making. Lois was back inside, in a room with a man who thought he still might want to, perhaps, be loved by her.
‘How did you meet?’
‘At a workshop on gender violence at my NGO. She ran it. She lives half the time in DC and half the time on this farm, her grandparents’ farm, in West Virginia. Mum would love it – it’s that kind of place.’
‘Wow.’
‘What?’
‘It sounds...’
‘What?’
‘So different from what I’ve always thought you wanted.’
Maya breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Now you tell me a secret,’ Maya asked her older sister.
‘I don’t have any.’
‘Of course, you do. Everyone does.’
‘Not really.’
Lois wondered whether to tell her sister about the curse of their family, that shared restlessness that had made her, Frank and Maya look elsewhere for what they felt the universe owed them. She thought of how unbearable it would be for Maya to hate Frank for lying to Joan while she was lying to Cole.
‘You always do this,’ Maya said.
‘Do what?’
‘Make me believe we’re making some kind of deal, and then break the deal I can’t actually prove we made.’
Maya had everything to lose. The fact that she couldn’t lose it drove her insane.
‘Are you going to leave Cole?’
‘Why would I do that? How would I do that...’
‘I don’t know.’
Lois and the Historian had never discussed what life, if any, there might be for them. Existing partners, children begotten and children lost had not come into it. They made no plans for a future together, instead snatching handfuls of time where they could, guzzling the hours down, like drinking liquor to stave off thirst. At home, they both continued to build their chronicle. His seemed richer, because of the children. Somewhere, the fact that he seemed to have more to lose than Lois became part of the justification.
‘How much do you think they actually like this dog?’ asked Lois.
‘Dad pays more attention to the dog than to his grandchildren,’ said Maya.
‘I’m thinking of stealing him.’
Lois decided not to tell Maya about Frank. Joan could tell her herself, if she wanted to. Joan was a big girl. So was Maya. They were all adults. They were all entitled to ruin their lives, and to love.
6. Apron
THE LIGHTS FROM the other bank dotted the lake with milky sequins that moved with the wind. The sky was hiding its depth behind a lustre borrowed from the surface. Between lake and sky lay the mountains, like a black ribbon.
There were twice as many houses today as there were when they were growing up. The area where they lived was a strip of land between the forest and the water, a route from one end of the lake to the other. Most people just passed through on their way to town or to a higher altitude. It had changed a lot since they were kids. Now there was an organic bakery that showed classic films on Friday nights, an independent bookstore, a green market – comforts that Joan used as excuses for her tethering.
The noise from the main road came in through the kitchen window, which was cracked open. Lois watched her sister walk into the kitchen. She tried to imagine her transfixed and sloppy from love, but butted up against other, acquired visions. Maya was such a planner. She never ran out of anything. She always had spare toothbrushes for last-minute guests, extra bars of soap, glue sticks for the glue gun, white undershirts still in their packaging. Maya could usually see shit coming.
Simon walked over to the window and pressed his muzzle against the glass. As Lois slid the door open, the icy air sharpened her eyes. In the distance she saw her old senior school, which she recognised from the floodlit football pitch where she’d continued running on a broken toe to impress a boy. Next to the pitch was the bike shed where she’d picked up and quit smoking in Year Nine.
Simon walked out into the wintry night. Lois closed the door behind him. In the kitchen, Maya lit the stove and put the kettle on.
‘Did you put Mum’s apron on to make tea?’ Lois asked.
‘No. I was going to make a cake.’
‘It’s eleven o’clock. Why on earth would you make a cake now? There’s cake everywhere already.’
‘I’m feeling restless.’
‘Absence makes the heart grow frantic.’ She’d read that on a fortune cookie once. Maya remembered the breathing exercise. She lay down on the kitchen floor, in a spot where the underfloor heating had been historically reliable. Sharing the existence of Liz with Lois had given more weight to Liz’s absence, suddenly put her missing on display. She wanted to tell Lois about the things they said to one another, about how dull her own precious children sometimes seemed when Liz hadn’t given news for a while. She wanted Lois to know that she was more than just a wife – she was adored by a person who was better and smarter and more successful than either of them.
In the kitchen, Lois poured out two sherries.
‘I’m definitely not doing that.’
‘For years it’s been French cartoons on YouTube so they grow up bilingual, and visualising how much space there is in the freezer, and having a box – I mean, a dedicated box – where I keep party favours for future birthdays, and now I’m listening to music again. I mean, like a teenager listening to music. You know? Where you think the songs are about you. It’s tragic.’
Outside, Simon barked.
‘She gets me books,’ said Maya. ‘Poetry books.’
‘Oh no. Don’t get into poetry, that’s my thing.’
‘Your thing... Do you know how tired I am of Mum calling me up to talk about you?’
‘She does?’
‘All the fucking time. Lois is having a hard time, I’m worried about Lois, Lois stopped seeing her therapist it’s-such-a-shame-I-think-it-was-doing-her-good. Do you think Lois and Nick are trying again... Blah blah blah.’
Lois fetched the box of candied chestnuts from the pantry.
‘Do you think we can eat these?’
‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Maya.
‘Will you eat one too, so if we weren’t meant to, I can say it was your fault, and not be completely lying?’
Lois opened the box. She placed one of the chestnuts in its crinkly brown wrapper on her sister’s chest. The chestnut went up and down with Maya’s missing heart.
You never forget your first magic trick. When Lois was five, Frank made a chestnut appear from behind her ear. He made it disappear again behind her other ear. He tried and tried to conjure up the chestnut again, but couldn’t. Lois asked her dad where the chestnut went, and Frank said it must have got lost inside her ear canal and travelled into her head. Frank seldom backed down from anything, least of all a joke. For years, Lois believed she had a chestnut lodged inside her cranium. In later years, when the missing chestnut was ruled a fiction, Lois kept a chestnut-shaped space inside her brain, a black hole on which she blamed all the missteps and regrettable turns of her teens, twenties and thirties.
Outside, Simon started barking again.
‘He’s going to wake up the children,’ said Maya.
‘I’ll let him in.’
‘I don’t get that dog.’
‘Why should he be get-able?’
‘Why do you even say things like that?’
The front door opened, and Simon came bounding into the kitchen, followed by William.
He was carrying Frank’s red rucksack – the one that had once transported Frank’s past, present and future to this jagged part of the world. He was the spitting image of a young Frank – tall, kind-gloomy eyes and hair that seemed thicker than necessary.
‘Fuck,’ said Lois. ‘I totally forgot. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Wim, dropping the bag to the ground. ‘I hitched a ride.’
‘No one hitch-hikes any more,’ said Maya.
‘I do.’
Maya blew her brother a kiss from the ground.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he asked.
Lois shrugged and gave him a long, hard hug.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ she asked.
‘My phone was dead.’
Wim walked to the kitchen and opened the fridge. The order within was intimidating, so he shut the door and went looking for the reliable hard end of a baguette.
‘Are you hungry?’ asked Lois, handing him the box of chestnuts.
He took the box from her and unwrapped a chestnut.
‘Where is everyone?’ he asked.
‘They’re sleeping,’ said Maya, extending a hand to be lifted up off the warm floor.
As William pulled Maya upright, Lois went to fetch the mystery Calvados from the dresser. The mystery Calvados had no label, and no one knew for sure where it came from. Frank said it had been given to him by a contractor. Joan insisted it was a present from Frank’s late uncle in Normandy. The mystery Calvados was contained in a huge brown-glass jug, and had never been opened. It had been with them for as long as any of the kids could remember.
Lois uncorked the jug and poured some of the mystery Calvados into three fat little glasses etched with vines.
‘I can’t,’ said Maya.
Lois rolled her eyes at her and raised her glass.
‘This is a toast to our baby brother, who has deigned to join us at last. The last piece of the puzzle. We forgot you were coming, but we’ve been looking forward to seeing you. And just because you’re an uncle, doesn’t mean you’re not a little shit. We both love you more than the others do, and more than we love the others. Welcome to the madhouse.’
The three of them clinked glasses. They were together for Christmas for the first time in five years. The last time they’d been together, Wim was still a boy. Not any more. Now he was in his last year at university, where he was learning how to prospect for ethereal values. It was the eve of all eves. A milestone or a notch, depending on your perspective.
‘See you on the other side,’ said Maya, downing her Calvados.
*
Up in Lois’s old bedroom, Gitsy’s golden head was giving Joan a cramp. Joan wriggled the girl out of her arms and hiked her own head up the pillow. Finn’s breathing was loud through his sniffling cold, and Joan remembered how her own babies had rattled in their cots, and how she had only half slept, in order to keep an eye on them.
She wondered if Lois would ever have a child – a child that looked like both of them. She longed to tell her she’d be a good mother. But then again, she wasn’t sure. There were parts of Lois that seemed antithetical to devotion: the parts that liked to lose it, disappear, or go on hiatus. As a teenager, Lois sobbed frequently. Joan would find her in her room, eyes red and cheeks shiny with tears. ‘Why are you crying?’ Joan would ask. ‘I don’t know,’ said Lois. And she didn’t.
She worried about Lois, about how calm she was with unhappiness, about how put-on her ferocity could seem. With Maya she could be irrationally worried – like a parent who worries their child is in the path of a cyclone, or stresses about all the things that could go wrong with their health. Cole and Maya were a front that took care of all the mundane worries like money, health insurance, room to house guests... When things got stressful at work they rented an old mill in Virginia to decompress. Lois and Nick, on the other hand, seemed to be pursuing independent agendas with a common lack of vision.
She remembered how Lois had behaved on Nick’s first visit – energetic and madcap, but also jealously guarding him, as though the family might steal him away from her.
It was an odd thing, she thought, to look more like one daughter but to feel more akin to the other. There were only two years separating Lois and Maya, and what they’d each done with time and age was completely different. Maya had fulfilled expectations at the first opportunity, and then gone and improved on them. And then there were the children. Their birth forged an unspoken and permanent understanding between Maya and Joan.
When Lois miscarried at three and a half months, Joan flew out to New York to stay with her for two weeks. She cleaned the apartment top to bottom and filled the fridge. Replaced the depleted shampoo bottles with fat white shampoo bottles from Khiel’s, and got Lois a hot-water bottle. Threw out Nick’s college flannel sheets and bought them the heavy, white bed linens of grown-ups. And while Lois was grateful, her mother’s motherly efficiency had ultimately reinforced her own sense of uselessness.
These days, Joan was worried that Lois was wasting her talent. If she had committed to something, like Maya, she could have soared. She imagined Lois editing art books; big fat ones in hardback that she’d leave on the coffee table for her girlfriends to marvel at. Instead, Lois was a freelance translator, with no savings account and no commitment to a career. She took months out to go on poetry-writing residencies to work on a chapbook that got photocopied 150 times somewhere in the Midwest. She sent links to poems published onli
ne and PayPal requests for money to help pay for flights home.
Before going to sleep, Gitsy had asked Joan to read her a book she once read to Maya. Joan had read Maisie Middleton, and how she jumped up and down on her lazy parents’ bed, clamouring for toast and jam. She made a note to send Frank out for eggs in the morning so she could make French toast for the kids.
‘Now a memory story.’
‘Hmm, let me think.’
‘One that happened in real life.’
‘A story with your mummy and auntie?’
‘No, a story of you, when you were a little girl,’ said Gitsy.
‘How about a story that starts when I was a little girl, but also has a bit about your mummy and Auntie Lois?’
Joan’s mother worked at a cigarette factory in the north of England. Her dad was a low-level manager at a stationery factory. For her sixth birthday, Joan had asked her mother for a pinafore she’d seen in a magazine. The pinafore was dark pink, made from crushed velvet, with lace trim and white ribbon ties. It was fancy – like a French maid’s apron.
On the morning of her birthday, her parents presented her with a single parcel. In it was a perfect replica of the pinafore. In the front pocket, her father had slipped a notebook clasped shut by an elastic band that held a tiny black and white fountain pen.
For most of her adult life, Joan had tried to recreate this memory, or rather, the feeling of the memory – the way the ersatz apron had absorbed the world and spat it out perfect for a while. Her mother had perhaps made the apron one night, tired after a day packing cigarettes, and her father had probably found the notebook at work. But for some reason, the gift had answered a question unknown, filled a need so subconscious that Joan had felt her heart fall into place that day.
It was Lois who understood this, at the age of six, when she came into the living room, turned the volume all the way down on her mother’s Frankie Goes to Hollywood record, and presented Joan with a package.
‘Happy birthday, Mum.’
It wasn’t her birthday.
‘Thank you, darling. What is this?’
It was something that matched perfectly the shape that was now missing from the curtain in the tiny bedroom shared by Lois and Maya. It was a little pink apron, with white shoelaces for ties and white-out lace on the border. Sellotaped to the front was a pocket – another chunk from the curtains – containing a notebook, bound with more sellotape, with a pen sellotaped to it.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 10