The only thing Lois and Simon would ever be able to join, in public, on a Christmas morning like this one, was their resignation. Her understanding that she could not become his mistress, and his stoicism over the knowledge that she was not to be had by him. In this respect, he supposed, they were unified in their own way. Their relationship was articulated around walking, lying or sitting – it was devoid of any other concern, practicality or desire. With them there were no goals. Perhaps that was what Nick resented. To have no hopes for a model love from the start. With Simon, there were no such ambitions, so Lois could successfully not meet them.
And then there was the question of until death do us part. Simon’s seven-year lifespan removed any burdensome aspiration of perpetuity. A dog was not for life. Not like a Nick.
Sometimes Simon felt like they were two children at summer camp. They were flung together in their new shorts and sensible sandals, and for a week ate breakfast together every day and held hands as they walked to the park, and everyone knew which ones were their seats around the campfire. For a while it looked as if they would eat breakfast and hold hands and sit together for ever. But then camp ended and they each went their own way and exchanged phone numbers and said they would see each other next year, but even at their age they could feel how fast they were changing, and that there was no guarantee that, even if they did meet again next year, they would want to sit next to each other at the breakfast table or in front of the fire.
‘Why do I do this?’ thought Simon. ‘Translate everything into human?’ Perhaps it was because they translated everything into dog for him. Even the things he could perfectly grasp in their human iteration. They must think he was stupid. That he didn’t notice things. But Joan talked to herself in front of him, Frank picked his nose, Maya texted her girlfriend... In their eyes, he was not a credible witness. He was a walking, barking thing of no consequence.
Simon knew that he wouldn’t kill himself over her. Not that he didn’t feel desperation. He did. But he had also to accept that he had a stronger response to Joan fetching his leash and saying ‘Walkies!’ than to this other situation. Besides, any thought of suicide was clouded with the stress of knowing how to do it, how on earth to find a process that could be controllable by a beast like him, and efficient at the same time. The thought made him leaden. Whereas the mention of a walk and the promise of a bone-shaped peanut-butter treat still made him want to jump up and bound to the door. That is why their love was perfect – he would probably never lose actual sleep over her because his instincts drove him despite his better judgement. He would never want to die from love, because while he was wired for suffering, he was too distracted to be properly morbid.
Like right now: upstairs was a woman he had come to love, and he would like the ownership of him to shift from Frank to her, and he was mulling this over in his head, but also he had a strong desire to run into the garden, piss on the bamboos, and then roll in the snow until his tail was cold. And he might – he thought – he just might want that more.
*
The first to raise an objection was the butcher. He wiped two bloody hands on his starched white apron, and said that the proof was in the pudding. Joan wondered whether he meant black pudding or pudding, as in dessert. She hated black pudding – the thick smell of blood evaporating in oil. The way apples cooked in the same pan turned to protein. Frank’s sister always made it for him when she came to visit. Sat him down and watched him eat until his plate was clean, like a baby.
‘Once a cheat, always a cheat,’ said the woman who was carrying an infant in her yellow shawl. Joan tried to remember the figurine’s catalogue description. Was it ‘Mother’? Perhaps she had just been labelled ‘Woman’. The baby in the shawl had bouncy pink cheeks, just like Finn.
‘I say get out while you can,’ said the woman. This confused Joan. Why would she not be able to get out in the future? What, aside from the vows of marriage, could keep her tied to Frank against her will? Guilt, perhaps.
‘It’s not like anything’s happened yet,’ said the knife sharpener. The clay wheel kept spinning under the clay blade of his clay knife as he said this, and Joan wondered whether it would in time disappear completely. ‘We’re talking emails. It’s a fantasy. It’s not even real letters.’
Joan had an inkling Frank had crossed into the analogue world, and sent some real letters too. The thought of him writing a love letter in his pathetic, stringy handwriting, licking an envelope, walking to the post office to purchase a stamp for the first time in years made her queasy. All that effort. All that effort that proved he still could, if he wanted to.
Once upon a time, he’d written her some letters. There was that one summer, after her term in Annecy, when she went back to England, to her parents’ house, to weigh up her options. Frank wrote to her most days. Every day a letter would fall through the letterbox and land on the mat. Often she would see them cascading through the door from the kitchen table. Sometimes there’d be no letter for days but then a stack of them all at once. She organised them according to the ascending postmarks – not the order in which she received them – and hid in the garden shed to read them. She still had them somewhere. The letters were probably downstairs, in among the junk they collected, perhaps to prove to future generations they’d really been around at one point. That they’d really been good at that love thing.
One of the children came forth carrying a tray of heather corsages. ‘You’re an ENFJ,’ she said. ‘You’re a strong, capable, empathetic woman. Repeat after me, Joan.’
‘I’m a strong, capable, empathetic woman,’ said Joan.
Lois walked past with a cup of coffee and sniggered.
‘You should put the sweet potatoes in soon,’ the clay child said. Or maybe it was Lois who had said that.
She would prepare as much as she could this morning, before they all came down and left their coffee cups lying around, and made eggs in five different pans that would need soaking five different ways.
Gitsy was unwrapping gifts in the living room, squealing with each new toy, explaining breathlessly what it did and how. Joan wondered whether Wim had unwrapped his sweater yet. She knew she had the receipt somewhere.
‘Mum! Come and open your presents, you strong, capable, empathetic woman!’ yelled Lois.
She didn’t like the way Frank always got her the books he thought she should read. So condescending. But then again, that was the least of her problems these days. She would never have admitted it to them, but it pissed her off the way Lois never made an effort with presents at Christmas, like it was no big deal. It was just another matter that had been settled by the years. Lois didn’t really try, and that was also part of Christmas. Joan always went out of her way to get the girls perfect gifts – small, useful luxuries that were ‘so Maya’ or ‘so Lois’. Maya got her things like a blender, a crock pot or a magazine stand. Once upon a time, Lois had really, really known her. Had read her desires better than she herself could. Perhaps this year there was a crushed-velvet apron for her under the tree. A reminder that her children knew she had existed before all of them.
‘If you forsake him now, you may live to regret it.’
It wasn’t obvious at first where the voice was coming from.
‘Of course, if you don’t, you may die to regret it.’
In the sectioned paper-mâché barn, laid out on a pillow of genuine straw and flanked by his virginal mother and Jeanot, the village lush, was baby Jesus. Jeanot must have sleepwalked over to the manger in the night. Baby Jesus was looking straight up at her. The clay swaddling had been painted over with Tipp-Ex where it had chipped, and the baby’s lips were so red, it looked as if he was wearing Joan’s YSL Rouge Pur Couture.
Life, death and regret. And Christmas dinner cooked in a convection oven that was one of the most expensive ones on the market in 1998. And at least the door to the office had stayed closed this morning.
10. Capon
FRANK, WHO WAS suffocating in the sea of wra
pping paper, curly satin ribbons and aromas from the flesh of the neutered fowl that was roasting in the kitchen, announced it was time to attack the day.
‘Here we go,’ growled Maya. Her second hangover headache in months was just starting to dissipate. ‘Dad wants to lead us all down his personal warpath through the day.’
‘Maybe for once you could see the day as something other than your personal enemy,’ Joan chimed. ‘It might even help with your blood pressure.’
Frank remembered the pills he’d forgotten in all the morning’s activity. As per usual, he’d lined them up the previous day on the Fliegende Hollander CD case – 1959 Bayreuth recording. He swallowed down the pills with the last of the coffee, and took a clean pan from the cupboard to fry himself an egg. Joan sighed.
‘Those of you who want to pretend that living is not about fending off impending death can also join me,’ he said.
Gitsy, who was busy examining Simon’s paw under her new telescope, looked up. ‘Why did he say death?’ Maya shot her father a look of death.
None of them got it. None of them had yet reached their best-by date. None of them felt like he did – a still-edible yogurt at the back of the fridge that no one wanted to touch. They weren’t having to distract mortality with a saltless diet and pills. None of them had hearts that needed to be controlled with drugs. None of them felt the need to offset this control by letting their hearts roam a little wild.
Frank cracked the egg on the edge of the pan and held it together for a while over the spitting oil. Joan was acting as though last night had never happened. Frank wondered whether it meant that the last six months had never happened. He felt a lightness this morning from his digital untethering of the previous night, but at the same time he was wound up tight. The situation felt positively Brechtian.
He pushed the two halves of the shell apart and the egg flopped into the pan. The edges started to go white, and soon the whole thing hardened around the only part Frank liked soft.
*
After breakfast they piled into Maya’s rental SUV and Frank’s garbage car and drove down to the lake – a Christmas morning ritual for as long as anyone could remember. In the car, Simon’s snout kept bumping up against the back of Lois’s head through the headrest. Her hair felt like damp straw, but it smelled like Joan. Frank pointed to the mountain and asked Nick if he could see the lying woman. ‘What is she lying about?’ said Nick. There was an altar to the Virgin atop her left mountainous breast, said Frank. ‘The best hike is where her hand – do you see her thumb, over there – rests against her thigh. You climb up her thumb and into her crotch, and then it’s another hour’s walk to her forehead,’ said Frank.
Two years ago, Frank had found himself lost in her. When he didn’t recognise the trail he turned back, but never managed to get back on the loop. By the time he found his car it was dark. When he got home he told Joan he had had dinner with a client, but the words came out defensive. ‘What, are you having an affair?’ she snorted. He laughed at the idea, too – to punish himself for being late, and to punish himself for being old. The next day Frank called his doctor and asked to be tested for Alzheimer’s. The test had come out fine. The only thing to worry about, said the doctor, was his heart and cholesterol. That was when the privations were first introduced.
Age had shrunk Frank’s playground. Once he had known his way around blinding-white glaciers, navigated amateur climbers between invisible crevices. Today he couldn’t find his way around the shape of a woman, and was outwalked by a pedigree dog with doomed joints.
Frank parked next to Cole and Maya, who was bundling up Finn and ordering Gitsy away from the icy puddles. Gitsy ran off to swing on the turnstiles.
The structure of this family, thought Frank, had something harebrained about it. The alignment of these wills and personalities, all in some common effort dictated by the rituals of dead people no one could even remember, was almost unnatural. It’s not possible, he thought, that every one of us wants to be here this morning. And yet here we are.
It was what they did on Christmas morning. They had breakfast, Joan put things in the oven that had to stay in there for hours, and they went for a walk by the lake. They rarely patronised the beach in the summer, preferring to borrow a catamaran or rent a pedal boat, and swim where the water didn’t have to be shared with others.
Once, Wim had gone to the beach with friends and opened his foot jumping off the diving board. He needed twelve stitches and a tetanus shot. As he recalled, the diving board was huge and terrifying. But today it looked piddly and ancient, with its rusty ladder and the mossy cracks in its waterslide.
Lois was wearing her mother’s coat and was cocooned up to her nose in her mother’s scarf. Simon was sticking to her like a limp. ‘Simon!’ yelled Frank, shaking a big stick. Simon ignored him. Frank felt conspicuous without his dog. Joan was talking to Maya by the water. He wondered whether they were talking about him. Whether Joan had told the children about him. He didn’t think so. There hadn’t been time.
‘How’s university?’
‘Fine,’ said Wim.
Frank tried to remember what year Wim was in, in case Wim quizzed him. That was the kind of cruel trick the children played on him every now and again. Asked him if he remembered their age, or birthdays, or other details. What did it prove, anyway? That they could be placed on a timeline? Frank had feigned ignorance about his own age for so long that some days he really wasn’t sure.
‘How’s Tara?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Wim was by far the most unreadable of the three children. Lois was always betrayed by her behaviour or appearance, and Maya uttered every thought or feeling as though it were a dangerous weather alert.
‘I have three essays that are due in March. I want to get them done this holiday.’
‘Why?’
‘So I don’t have to stress out about it.’
‘Yes. Don’t be stressed now. None of the stressful part of life has started yet.’
The stressful part of life was getting lost in your own garden, making sure the chalet was ready in time for your wealthy client’s skiing holiday. Waiting for Part Two of the you’rewritingtoanotherwoman conversation.
‘Sometimes I think we live on the wrong side of the lake,’ said Joan. ‘It’s much nicer on that side.’ The other bank had the sun in its eyes and the road there was winding and picturesque. Theirs was the functional side, with the roadside supermarket, auto concessions and the bike lane. The other side had more whimsy, with green-grass beaches, listed abbeys and tall trees to obscure gardens that were really small parks.
‘Of course, the one bad thing about that side of the lake is they have to look at us,’ she said.
Frank ripped the stick out of Simon’s jaw and threw it into the lake, as far as he could towards the other side.
*
Rinse capon out like you would a chicken and pat away excess moisture with paper towels. Rub with salt and stuff with preferred stuffing (sausage, chestnut and sage base plus apple, pear or orange zest). Add herbs (marjoram, tarragon or thyme). Stuff large bird at both ends: neck and cavity. Stop the stuffing with a medium-sized fruit or citrus (small apple, pear or lemon). Truss with twine and sear on all sides in large pan using butter. Place bird in deep roasting tin adding shallots, whole unpeeled garlic and parsnips. Cover with parchment paper. Baste often/generously for an all-over glaze. Serve with giblet and white wine gravy. Side dishes: potato (roasted, mashed or sautéed), watercress, devils on horseback, boiled carrots, creamed onions.
Joan wasn’t sure which of the girls had found her mother’s recipe cards, and stuck her instructions for roasting a capon to the refrigerator door. Lois, she guessed. Maya was more direct, more likely to create a small scene around such a find. There was a small brown stain in the top-right corner of the card in the shape of Saturn. Probably gravy. She thought of her mother thickening the gravy with cooking wine and minced giblets, before splashing it onto t
he index card. Joan rubbed the stain between her fingers and saw her mother at the sink. Her mother’s white apron strings fell into the pleat of her woollen skirt. She turned to Joan and smiled, her hands foaming with big yellow bubbles from the new bar of Pears soap.
Joan had thought of her mother often in the last twenty years. How much her mother would have loved the house in Brittany, with its royal-blue shutters and Herculean blackberry hedge. What a kick she’d get out of Gitsy. How, if she’d been alive today, Wim could have visited at the weekend and taken her grocery-shopping at Morrisons. Joan thought of her mother in relation to the landscape and to the children, drawing wishful lines between her and those who didn’t miss her as much as she did.
Looking at the stain today, she longed for her mother in a way that wasn’t altruistic. Wanted to crawl head-first into her mother’s itchy grey lap, and have her head stroked firmly like everything would turn out all right. Removing the yams from the oven, she thought of how cruel it was to be a mother without a mother of your own.
None of them ever bothered to check in with her. Including Lois, who still hadn’t mentioned a thing about their phone conversation. In fact, Lois seemed to spend as much time on her computer as Frank these days. Like father like daughter, thought Joan, immediately regretting the thought.
As she basted the capon often/generously for an all-over glaze, she resolved one day to surprise, really surprise the fuckers.
*
Frank was full from dinner, even though he’d barely touched the food. Throughout the meal he’d tried to catch Joan’s eye, complimenting her on the stuffing, and generally delivering over-eager punditry on the unfolding meal. Joan gave him no more – or less – attention than the others, as a consequence of which Frank had no idea what was going on in her head. On a practical level, he wasn’t sure where to sleep tonight. He could hardly go upstairs and sleep next to Joan, pretend that nothing had happened. He considered the sofa, but the kids would likely be up all night again, drinking and being loud. Frank went to the landing and dragged Simon’s dog bed back to his office, just in case.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 16