Stories We Tell Ourselves

by Sarah Françoise

  ‘With each copy,’ said Joan, ‘the apron became more special.’

  But Gitsy was fast asleep. Looking at the curtains, Joan thought it was probably for the best Gitsy had missed the last part. The curtains had been a gift for Maya, when they moved into the new house. They were log-cabin, in blues and pinks – Maya’s favourite colours back then.

  Joan turned off the bedside lamp and walked over to her room. Tonight Frank had fallen asleep in bed instead of in front of the news. The kids must have kicked him out of the living room. Joan liked the idea of the children disturbing Frank’s routine. It could only be good for him. Frank’s presence in the bed reversed their natural order. She hadn’t climbed into a bed that contained Frank in a long time, although he usually materialised by sunrise.

  At first, him sliding into bed at two or three in the morning used to wake her up. But after a while she learned to sleep through his later boarding – learned to sleep through Frank. She thought she heard William’s voice downstairs, and wondered whether the children would remember to let the dog out for a pee before bedtime. And if they did, whether they would remember to let him back in afterwards.

  She considered waking Frank up, telling him she knew about Heide. She thought of humiliating him by pointing out how much she knew about his innermost thoughts. What a strange idea: humiliating someone with evidence of their capacity to love. She wondered how Frank would react. Probably he wouldn’t. She thought of how taxing that lack of reaction would be on her. It would all be her burden to shoulder. Just like Christmas. Just like just about everything.

  She must love Frank like a mother, because that was the only brand of love whose instinct was to shrug in the face of sabotage. What would happen to all that motherly, wifely love when she left him?

  If she left him.

  Maybe she could settle the matter with a letter. But the idea of Frank responding with his own, self-exonerating letter was too exhausting even to think of. She looked at Frank’s shape in the bed. His mouth was open and his head tilted back. He looked quite dead.

  Would it make her happy to leave him? Would she feel freer if she lived alone? It occurred to her for the first time that, while she wouldn’t be leaving him for his bad habits, a separation would take care of those, too. No more beard residue in the bathroom sink. No cutting bread directly on the table. It would be like a bonus.

  She would miss the day trips to Turin, she thought, when she left him. she left him. They still did that, every now and again – drove to Turin for a meal and a mosey around an Italian supermarket. Or did they? On the other hand, she wouldn’t need to get used to the idea of going to bed alone. She considered whether this was just another decision that would be delicately forced on her, like studying languages instead of art at university. Decisions like that had a way of making you believe they were for the best.

  Downstairs, Lois was making one of her loud, drunken toasts. She’d leave them to it. She could wait one more night to see them all together. As she slid in bed next to Frank and his pitiful old-man secret, Joan tried to be sad, but only managed to feel lucky.

  *

  Like millions of his peers before him, Frank had let himself be swayed by the promise of instant conversation and life-altering reconnection. He had been presented with abstracts of the various social media platforms by his three children, who not only contradicted each other, but also hierarchised the platforms according to different criteria. It concerned him that his offspring, who spanned barely more than a decade, couldn’t agree on what it meant to ‘be active’, and where one should concentrate said activity. He was older than any of them by at least thirty-five years, so where did that leave him?

  Like others before him, Frank looked out of a window at a familiar landscape, and hoped the world would give up a suitable alias. When this didn’t happen, he thought about it for the next forty-eight hours, writing the various possibilities out on a piece of paper to see how they read. Once he settled on a pseudonym (greenlit by Wim), he spent the next three weeks being conspicuously inactive.

  And then one day, the thought of Heide came to him like a bat out of hell. Later he decided the memory had been dredged up under duress, after having the promise of ‘reconnection’ rammed down his throat one too many times.

  It took no time for Frank’s latent curiosity about H to blow up into a round-the-clock obsession. First he found out that she owned an art gallery in Hamburg. Then he found out that she frequented other people’s art openings, also in Hamburg. Finally, he found her. There she was, in a long black coat, towering black heels and dark-red lipstick. The only thing in the way of their reconnection was a friendship request. And so Frank requested her friendship – a gesture that seemed superficial, given that they’d once lived together for several golden months, and slept on top of each other in Frank’s metal twin bed. The fear of having made a fool of himself and the fear of having to stare at his (so far) unrequited friendship request were such that Frank had to walk away from his laptop for two days.

  When he returned, she had accepted. As easily as she had turned him down back in 1975, she had taken him back into her fold.

  While their renewed friendship remained a thing unconsummated, Frank travelled back and forth between the present and the memory of his stillborn relationship with Heide. He made the journey so frequently in the week after H accepted his request that by day seven he jumped straight from 2014 to 1975, eluding the decades gone by.

  Frank wanted to crawl inside Heide’s brain and see what was left of him there. In thoughts he invoked her name three times – Heide Heide Heide – until he started saying it out loud, in the street, while walking the dog.

  Then came the missive. ‘Well...?’ she asked. By that point, Frank knew the rudiments of social media navigation. He knew she had no children, no husband, and nothing more than a feeble, irregular attachment to a curator called Klaus who didn’t even live in Hamburg.

  ‘Your email address?’ he replied, as though social media, having completed its goal, were now obsolete. Like any other disposable article you use once and then toss. Half an hour after this exchange, at the small corner table in the backroom of Chez Josée, some heart was consumed.

  Frank pretended to be asleep as Joan got into bed. She stayed on her side of the middle dip (the mattresses were twins joined together by a king-size sheet with elasticated corners, and could always be separated). Lying in the dark, Frank constructed a new letter to H in his head. H had become one of his permanent concerns. He imagined it was H lying next to him, not Joan. Unlike Joan, who turned one year older every year, H appeared in his mind as a twenty-four-year-old. After his initial detective work, he never looked for pictures of her online. Frank closed his eyes, and the image of H melted momentarily under a stronger vision of vegetables and an egg, captured in shimmering aspic. It was sometimes a starter at Chez Josée. He opened his eyes again to lose the food, and beckon once more the face of H.

  There she was, asleep on the bed, her toes curled like a ballerina’s. One of her legs was resting on the other, dropping a light-grey shadow on the skin of her calf. The back of her knee was a warm, dark fold. He remembered her thighs – or did he? He thought maybe he had spent some time there, prized between her thighs, like a toddler a mother keeps near during a picnic on a cliff. And then her ass, and her back, arched in sleep, and up to her shoulders, dotted with freckles... Freckles? Frank, who was on his way to sleep, rolled closer to the woman. Joan’s breath reached him gently, waking the skin on his face.

  He thought of all the things Joan had done for him – body and soul. Chopping, raking, waiting, birthing, ironing, settling, counting, decorating, driving, hiking. He was one of her beneficiaries, one of the people she gave to, again and again, perhaps as an excuse not to address her own needs.

  *

  Last night you were in my dream. You had a spattered apron and a blue shirt rolled up at the sleeves. You had come to the house to help us cook Christmas dinner. You took breaks lik
e a worker, and smoked cigarettes.

  I’d like to lick your ears. I’d like you not to wipe off the drool.

  Last night I dreamed we’d gone to Corsica for Christmas. Mum and Dad had rented a house. We’ve never been to Corsica.

  I forgot.

  Me and you saw a big rainbow and we saw a motorcycle. It was a snow day. There were many snow days and we went home, took a nap, then played, then took a nap, and we had lunch, dinner and breakfast cereal and we went to bed.

  I dreamed I had decided to repair one of the old wooden docks on the lake. Once, I rode my bicycle off one of those docks. It fell on me and my ankle got stuck in the spokes. I could see the sky through the water, and it looked wobbly. In the dream I was using cement, and I was working underwater, and when I said I needed a trowel, you went to the village to buy me one.

  You were exceptionally nice to me in this dream. Nice like thoughtful.

  You tied my cock with kitchen twine. You tied it so hard I was afraid it would break off.

  You showed me your orchard and the trees your great-grandfather planted. You showed me the birdhouse you made when you were ten. You showed me a cupboard of stacked quilts and soft towels. You have a dryer in the mudroom. You have an actual fucking mudroom.

  You blink too much.

  We smoked and drank beer, and I told you my husband doesn’t drink beer, wouldn’t know how to order a beer. You didn’t find him foolish because of this. The house spun round and round but we couldn’t feel it because of all the padding from the quilts.

  I want to shower with you.

  I want to shower you with acts of kindness.

  Can you overuse artificial tears? I mean, could you drown in them?

  I dream that I’m leaning over an abyss, and everyone is laughing at me. I’m holding onto a tree so I don’t fall. I’m getting vertigo and the drop is going to my head. You’re down there, in the abyss. Everyone I love is either laughing at me or down there in the abyss. I want to wake up but when I do, I’m still dreaming.

  I told you I was a gender expert. You said, yes, I know, it says so on your apron.

  I never dream.

  I have a whole chapter about your town. About it being a centre of the French Resistance.

  Yes, do it like in the dream.

  Watch out for the holes in the dream.

  We really need a map to this dream.

  Come close to me, it feels soft.

  We are all volunteers.

  Good houses always have cold bathrooms.

  I think ich liebe dich.

  This dream is going to my head.

  This dream is going straight to my head.

  7. Oysters

  AND THEN IT was Christmas Eve. A sacred day, divided into two, the first ten hours spent preparing a celebration that would last perhaps five. Later, sleep would come – a lull between rituals that had gained layers with the years, and aged slower than the children.

  As the crumbs of brown sugar became molten between the bread and the skillet that was only ever used for pancakes or French toast, Joan looked at her three adult babies, sitting in their respective spots at the breakfast table. Lois and Maya seemed gigantic on the bench where they’d once bickered and concealed their greens under the edge of their plates. Squeezed between them was Gitsy, in longjohns and snow boots. Finn was on his mother’s lap, stretching his little hand out towards the butter knife. William sat at the end of the table, in the spot where he’d once gurgled and spun the built-in beads on his high chair. The high chair was still around in the basement somewhere, but Finn turned his nose up at it, tensing his little body and screaming at the top of his lungs every time he was introduced to it. Nick and Cole sat in the parents’ chairs, no longer occupied by the parents – who were retired from the job of refereeing family meals.

  The predictable absence of Frank from the breakfast table was matched by an enigmatic absence of weather outside, as though a bubble had trapped a stagnant second of December and kept the air perfectly still around the lake. Frank and Joan noted this at exactly the same time – Joan from the kitchen, and Frank from his office.

  The French toast was seared but still bouncy enough for Joan’s back-of-the-fork test – the first rite of a day that would deliver dozens more.

  ‘We were going to do no gifts this year, but instead we thought we’d do cheap, tacky gifts,’ said Lois.

  ‘Isn’t that what you did last year?’ said Maya.

  Wim laughed at his reliable, hungover sisters. Maya had woken up with a stinking headache from her three and a half drinks, for which she blamed Lois. Finn had been up since five. He had spent the first twenty minutes of the day loudly rejecting the bottle of formula. When he finally gave in and guzzled down the bottle, he looked up at her with big, quizzical eyes, and Maya felt guilty. She’d forgotten to swear Lois to secrecy about Liz, but she also knew the only person Lois might tell was Nick, and she could live with that.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’ asked Wim.

  ‘In a parallel universe,’ said Lois.

  Joan put the French toast on the table, and went to beat the eggs for her ten-egg dried-fig brioche.

  Joan wondered whether Lois had told Maya and William about Frank. She had told Lois for no other reason than that Lois was the daughter that looked the most like her. Telling Lois felt a bit like going back in time and warning her younger self. Lois hadn’t mentioned anything since their phone conversation last week. She wondered if the children saw her as long-suffering. The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She was pretty sure none of them saw Frank as long-suffering.

  ‘This is why I come home all the time,’ said Wim. ‘Mum’s famous French toast.’

  ‘What do you mean, famous?’ said Lois. ‘You say it like it’s a Mum thing.’

  ‘It is a Mum thing.’

  ‘Mum’s made French toast maybe three times in her life.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She used to make it all the time.’

  Joan listened to the children argue over the Truth. Perhaps one day, after she and Frank were dead, the children would sit down for breakfast and Lois would recall how Frank had become a socialised hermit in his sixties. Perhaps Wim would remember things differently. Perhaps Maya would say, rubbish, he was always that way. Joan decided to keep the Truth about the frequency of the French toast to herself, even if they asked. They didn’t ask.

  ‘Can someone pick up the oysters?’ Joan asked the husbands, thinking they might like to come up for air.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Nick volunteered.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ said Cole.

  ‘They have a lobster tank,’ Nick told Gitsy. ‘If you come with us, you might get to pet a lobster.’

  ‘I wanna go!’ screamed Gitsy. She kicked off the snow boots and ran upstairs to get dressed.

  In his office Frank heard Gitsy, and remembered a game the girls used to play while sledding. They would start screaming at the top of the hill and keep screaming for as long as they could, or until the sled came to a stop. Whichever came first. He wondered how long he had left before he was made to pitch in with the Christmas chores.

  Today would be a long, introverted kind of day, strung together from last-minute errands and contributions, a crucial kind of day that would be eclipsed by its last waking hours – hours they all knew had to become memorable. Christmas 2015: it had the potential either to resemble itself, descend into chaos, or both. The same thing that had happened every year for seventeen years would today happen differently, as it did every Christmas Eve.

  Tonight’s party would have several concentric rings of celebration. Gitsy would be up for the first, and would spend most of it negotiating access to the second. With a bit of luck, Finn would be banned from Christmas Eve altogether and put to bed early. The second circle would involve a toast, and the passing around of thinly sliced things topped with fish roe. Frank would oversee the third stage, with its two round trays of oysters and dishes of vinegar sauce that would gravitate around the t
able like sacraments. The family would murder oysters until ten-ish, when Frank would be forced by the others to sing a song by the Dubliners in his terrible French accent. Frank would stay up until the fourth circle of Christmas Eve, which ended after Joan’s foie gras. This year he would pretext exhaustion, but spend another two or three hours in the office, writing to H or expounding some aspect of German Romanticism for his blog-tome. Joan would give up at circle five, after the dainty china cups came out for coffee, and kiss her children goodnight. She would go upstairs, change into her nightgown and bathrobe, and come back down with bags of presents that had been wrapped exquisitely days ago, by someone not in a rush. Cole would try to get Maya to bed in circle six, but this year Maya would be texting well into circle eight, which involved drinking games and poor decisions by Wim and Lois. Nine would be the Kate Bush karaoke dance party in the basement, with whisky, or perhaps this year more mystery Calvados. Level-eight-drunk Lois would be too much for Nick, who would by then have given up on sex and gone to bed alone.

  But all that was yet to come, or perhaps it wasn’t at all. Perhaps Lois and Nick would go to bed at the same time and fuck each other’s brains out while Santa tiptoed around in the dark in her slippers. Perhaps Frank would turn his computer off before dinner and put it away in his briefcase, on its special shelf. Perhaps this would be the year Cole got blind drunk, and interrupted one of Frank’s scholarly anecdotes with a nicely soused ohfuckoff. Perhaps Gitsy would fall asleep without a fight in front of The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, and perhaps this year Joan would announce she didn’t believe in shooting puréed food down a duck’s gullet until its liver tripled in size.

  *

  After breakfast, Wim walked over to Tara’s house with a tin Joan had filled with mince pies. ‘Give Tara’s mum my compliments on her wreath,’ said Joan. Relations between the two families had broken down in May, when Tara’s parents added their names to the neighbourhood petition against the eastward spread of Frank’s bamboos.