The Secrets of Married Women

by Mason, Carol

  I push back an overgrown rhododendron bush by the gate then walk up the path feeling a tad impatient and yet hating myself for it. My dad opens the door, near gleeful. ‘Guess what? Your mam gave Jenny a good hiding for bringing her home!’ My dad finds it funny that such a lady-like woman as my mother has taken to smacking people for the smallest of reasons. Then the smile disappears and he looks like he’s going to cry again. ‘Oh, Dad!’ I go to give him a big hug but he says, ‘Get off me!’ and swats at me, because we’re not supposed to be soft with each other in this family. The object of our near heart-failure is sitting prettily on the sofa, dipping Jaffa cakes into a cup of tea and staring bewildered at her fingers that keep ending up with nothing in them. Every time I come through that door I die a little, until she recognizes me, then I’m reborn. It’s called my reprieve from the inevitable. ‘Hello my bonny lass,’ she looks at me, benignly. My mother never was benign. Nor was she razor-tempered, like she can be now. I kiss the top of her fragrant head, unable to take my eyes off her, just massively grateful that she’s still here, powerfully aware that I must treasure each moment I have with her. I still disbelieve the change that this illness has brought about in her, and, as there’s no going back to the way she was, I sometimes think that if I stare at her long enough and hard enough I will somehow manage to preserve her, so she’ll stay exactly as she is and never get any worse. Because I dread worse. I dread it with an agony that fills every corner of my rib cage and pushes and pushes until it threatens to blow me apart into two pieces that will never be welded together again.

  She looks me up and down as though making her pronouncement. ‘Long skirts look very nice indeed… on daughters.’ She nods her approval. My dad gazes at her, beguiled.

  Sometimes, through my heartbreak, I can smile at my mother, in the way that you’d smile at a child. That’s in my moments when I accept that when we get old we somehow get stripped of rank, instead of getting the respect we deserve. And when I believe that dementia in some ways is kind, because at least eventually, when it gets really bad, they are too far gone to know. But I’m rarely this generous. Mostly I burn and I rail and I disbelieve there’s a God. And I grieve for the lively-minded woman she was, the friend I had. I can still hear her say, with her unsentimental bluntness that seemed to contradict her exterior reserve: ‘Shoot me and put me in a box if I ever get like that.’ And we said, oh-ha-ha, don’t worry, we will. Because it’s fine to joke about that stuff when you think it’s never going to happen. What we should have done was bag her off to doctors early on, have every test and scan under the sun to somehow pre-empt fate. But, as Rob will say to me, you can’t do that Jill. That’s not how life works. And I’ll say, I know. But a good daughter would have tried.

  My dad makes us tea in the kitchen. ‘Other than this episode today she’s been fine you know!’ he says brightly. ‘Almost like the old Bessie. The other day she even asked when you’d be home from school.’

  There is a moment where my dad seems to register what he has just said and he frowns, worried and a little freaked out.

  My heart sinks. ‘Oh Dad,’ I stare at the back of his bird-like brown hair that’s miraculously defied going grey. What was this? A normal, forgetful blip? Or is he losing his mind too?

  He puts his mug down, studies me for moments like he’s trying to recall me, then his chin wobbles and the tears come. ‘You don’t go to school do you,’ he says. ‘You’re thirty-five.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Dad. You’re just under stress.’

  He shoots a quick glance at my mother. ‘I’m not,’ he says. Because his first thought is you can’t take her away from me.

  I stay for a couple of hours, valiantly trying to cheer him. Then he waves me off at the door, looking at me with that pathetic little face that will forever be etched in my memory. My dad used to be a manual worker. Everything about him was virile and aboveboard, and, like Atlas, I imagined he could hold the world on those strapping shoulders and effortlessly run a marathon with it, breaking all records, setting new and impenetrable ones. I can’t accept him as raw-boned and in the poorhouse.

  I drive around the corner, pull over, and ring Rob. ‘Of course he’s not losing his mind too,’ my husband assures me, through my stammers and sobs. ‘He’s seventy-five Jill. He can barely take care of himself let alone your mam. You’ve got to forgive him the odd slip. Hell, I forget things all the time and I’m only in my thirties.’

  ‘Do you ever think your wife’s still a teenager?’

  ‘Only when you give me reason too. Which, come to think of it, is quite often.’

  ‘Bastard,’ I say, my sniffle being replaced with an ailing smile.

  ‘Cheer up now, okay?’ my hubby softly scolds me. ‘I don’t want you driving home upset or the next time I see you you’ll be wearing a toe tag on a gurney.’

  Rob’s ability to always bring me out of my crisis is like some giant safety net I know will always be there when I fall. ‘Well if I am, will you make sure they give me a nice-looking toe tag? Not one of those dismal ‘I’m dead’ toe-tags. A lively one that matches my nail polish.’

  ‘I’ll see what they have in stock.’ He laughs then says, ‘I love you.’

  Going home I’m stuck in yet another traffic jam on the Tyne bridge. I don’t feel like going to Yoga now, but I hate missing things I’ve paid for.

  ~ * * * ~

  In the mirrored studio of Better Bodies Gym, Wendy and I deftly try to extricate Leigh from a tricky Lotus position. Her stick-skinny body resembles one of those pipe-cleaners I’d twist into my hair to make ‘doofahs,’ when I was a little girl. Wendy is having thigh-slapping fits of the giggles at Leigh’s sticky predicament. Her china-doll skin is flushed like a nectarine from the silly business and the exercise. She’s got her chin-length bob that she colours a dark auburn youthfully pinned up in tiny clips with messy wet bits around her nape, making her look cute and about thirty-two instead of forty-two. Leigh sits on her haunches with her legs disappeared behind her and her feet flopping over her shoulders. ‘I’m getting slowly bruised flanks here!’

  ‘Gordon Ramsay’s favourite,’ I tell her. I’m glad I came now. Friends are the tonic I needed.

  ‘I know what her feet remind me of, stuck there,’ Wendy turns to me. ‘Elephants ears!’

  ‘I think it’d be better if you somehow tried to get her head out from round the back of her armpit first,’ one of the other Yogis tries to help.

  ‘Pity heads weren’t like lids and they could screw off,’ Wendy chirps.

  ‘Did you say screw off?’ Leigh smiles. ‘Now there’s a suggestion...’

  ‘Oh God, did I tell you Lawrence’s parents are coming next weekend?’ Leigh blabs, when we have methodically unravelled her limb-from-limb and are towelling off in the changing room. She pulls the lip.

  ‘Have you got the beer in then?’ Wendy asks her. Lawrence’s parents claim they don’t drink. Yet when they visit the booze miraculously disappears from the fridge and Leigh can never find the empties. Then they turn up in the most mysterious places. Potted in the cheese-plant. Lined up in the back of the china cabinet. Stuffing the fleecy hot water bottle cover.

  ‘Yes, but this time I’m filling the empties with ginger ale!’

  ‘You’re not!’ Wendy’s jaw drops when she looks at me.

  ‘I am!’ She chortles.

  ‘You know,’ Wendy looks in the mirror and wiggles a roll of the ab-flab she’s always fighting, ‘you should rent one of those nanny-cams.’

  ‘What’s a nanny cam?’ I ask.

  ‘You know, one of those hidden cameras rich people have to spy on the hired help to see if they’re bashing their brats.’

  ‘Maybe I should direct one on Lawrence,’ Leigh says. ‘To find out what he does all day. Maybe he’s into hardcore porn. Or getting laid on the Internet. God I wish he was. Give me a spell off.’

  Wendy and I smile.

  As we leave the building, four handsome firemen are on their way in and stand a
side to let us pass. ‘Cor,’ Leigh gawps after them. ‘If there’s a fire in there I think I’ll run back inside. I mean, look at them. Is there any such thing as an unattractive fireman? I swear you never see one.’

  ‘Oh come on, that’s not true,’ Wendy, who never has eyes for anybody but the man she’s married to, tugs Leigh’s sleeve. ‘That is such a cliché. There are plenty of very, very unattractive firemen.’

  Leigh, duly reprimanded, pulls a playful face.

  In the car park, Lawrence and Molly sit on the wall. Molly is chastising her Barbie doll for not wearing her blue ballerina dress. ‘Well we’ve both got our men picking us up tonight!’ Wendy says, conspicuously looking around for hers. Her BMW is in for a service so she got a lift here off Leigh. Leigh reversed into a pole when she was late for a meeting so she’s in Lawrence’s old Honda, and Lawrence and Molly have bussed-it here.

  ‘They’re taking me out to the Gate to see a movie,’ Leigh whispers. ‘If we can ever agree on which one we want to see.’ Lawrence smiles benignly, like he knows he’s being talked about.

  ‘Hiya.’ Lawrence kisses his wife. Funny, but they do look an unlikely pair—Leigh in her short, sharp little power suit, and Lawrence exuding Make Love Not War in his trademark flowery shirt and ripped jeans, with his blond dreadlocks ponytail and beaded leather necklace. Leigh wraps Molly in a big hug. ‘So what are we going to see then?’ she nudges Lawrence affectionately. I’m pleased she seems back to her old self again.

  Lawrence has a beautiful face. Nobody would be slapping it on a composite of their idea of a sex god, but it oozes peace and goodness. And when he looks at his wife, it’s with a certain quiet manliness that issues forth from him in the same way that his thinness exudes strength.

  ‘Whatever you’d like,’ he looks at her with a warm contentment. ‘We thought we’d let you decide, didn’t we Molly?’ Molly nods, only caring about forcing a resisting glittery shoe on her doll’s foot.

  ‘Well what’s playing?’ Leigh gently growls.

  ‘Oh. I’m not sure.’ He gets the frightened-deer face. ‘I’ve not looked.’

  ‘Well what time do they start?’

  I get the distinct impression that, in the good intention of taking his wife out to a movie, Lawrence knows he’s screwed it all up like only he could. ‘Oh, well, er, we’ll have to go pick up a paper…at…the…store.’ I often wonder if he ever just tells Leigh to sod off.

  ‘Well I’m going to need something to eat first,’ Leigh says.

  ‘Ta-da!’ Molly produces a brown paper bag. ‘Pasta, mammy! We made it for you!’

  Lawrence blanches. ‘See,’ he says to Wendy and me. ‘We’re not as useless as we look.’

  Leigh makes a face that says I never thought they were.

  ‘See you on Monday boss,’ Wendy calls after Leigh, then her perky little gaze goes around the car park again. ‘Where is my husband? Neil’s never late. And I have to finish reading ‘Curious Incident’ for my book club meeting tomorrow night.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a novel with a pink high-heeled shoe on the front. I’d probably hate it.’ I tell her I’ll wait with her. Wendy’s just started working at Leigh’s company, filling in on reception for a maternity leave. She’s been throwing herself at the job market for some time now but nobody seems to want a forty-two-year-old junior when they can get a twenty-something one instead. It doesn’t help that she hasn’t worked since before the lads were born. But Wendy sees the forties as the start of life, whereas with Leigh, age is death by numbers. If you’re feeling crap, Leigh will ultimately make you feel crapper by relating, with enthusiastic misery, to your problem and thereby legitimising it—which is usually just what you need. Whereas Wendy’s glass is always so half full that sometimes you don’t even bother trying to get her to see the empty bit, because she just wouldn’t. You’d just end up feeling rotten for seeing it yourself.

  We perch on the wall and she asks about my mam and dad and I tell her about today’s episode. ‘Sometimes I feel so guilty Wendy. I mean I got there, somebody had brought her home, and rather than just feel thankful she was okay, I felt sorry for myself for having made a wasted trip.’

  Wendy’s face softens like a good friend’s would. ‘Oh Jill, you’re only human. I’m sure you only felt like that because you saw her and you knew she was okay.’

  ‘Sometimes I lose my temper with her though and I feel so bad. I’ll want to shake her and say, “Think, mam. How can you still be living in Yorkshire when you left there when you were twenty-one? And how can you still be twenty-one when you have a thirty-five-year-old daughter? It doesn’t make sense.” It’s basic stuff. Nobody’s asking her to remember the mathematical formula of Pi.’ Even saying this to Wendy feels like such a betrayal of my mother. ‘Sometimes I think she’s somehow letting this happen to her. Or I’ll think, is this some sort of attention-seeking game she’s playing with us? Or is she just being stupid? And then it kills me to think like that about my mam. I must be some sort of horrible, monster of a person. I’ll burn in hell, whether or not I believe in it.’

  She squeezes my hand briefly then gives her meaty, freckly arms a good rub. ‘I bet there’s nothing you’re feeling that countless other families haven’t felt in the same circumstances.’

  I feel the fizz of frustration. I’m sure she’s right. But I still don’t know why I react this way. ‘Well, anyway, how was your first week at work?’

  ‘Oh very good! Everybody’s really nice. Leigh’s been fantastic. Clifford’s certainly a character.’ Clifford La Salle is Leigh’s gay, eccentric boss who founded the Fatz empire and interviews a person by asking to see what’s in their handbag.

  ‘Does he really fart all the time and light matches to hide it? I often think Leigh exaggerates the hell out of her stories.’

  ‘He must have a gastric problem.’

  ‘Ergh!’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Poor you! But other than that—the wind problem—you’re liking it then?’ I sensed there was a ‘but’ coming, and Wendy Robinson’s not a ‘but’ sort of gal.

  ‘Oh yes. Definitely. When you think but for the Grace of God I might have got that job at the call centre.’ Wendy got up and walked out in the middle of one of the rare interviews she’s had, when a very jumped-up nineteen-year-old kept asking her to prove that she had experience of dealing with people. She looks at me with lively candour. ‘Oh Jill, Leigh has a lovely job! She runs that place. The clients adore her. She’s so capable.’ She inspects her well-bitten fingernails. Everything about Wendy is sporty, no-frills and down-to-earth. ‘I told her over lunch the other day. I said, you’ve done so well for yourself just by being smart and working hard. You’ve got your family…you hold it all together and nothing has to give.’

  ‘She wouldn’t see it that way.’

  ‘She didn’t. She said good jobs were overrated.’ She gives a hearty shrug. ‘But that’s easy to say when you have one, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong I’m very grateful she hired me when nobody else would, but it’s a bit humbling when you compare yourself.’ She pulls a big smile on me. ‘The whole thing of women juggling a career and family… I’d have liked that problem to solve.’

  ‘Well you shouldn’t compare yourself to Leigh. You had twins in your twenties. Your parents had passed away. Neil’s had retired to Spain. You had literally nobody to help you. Leigh has Lawrence. And Neil—’

  ‘—was never there.’ Her gaze goes around the car park again. ‘Speaking of my workaholic husband, where is he is now?’

  ‘I’ll take you home.’

  ‘No. I don’t want to tell him not to bother, not when he’ll be on his way.’

  Because that would be awful for him. If he’d driven unnecessarily for even five minutes. I look at my generous, considerate friend. From the moment I met her—through her younger sister, Joy, who I used to work with when we both had Saturday jobs in a pub as teenagers—I liked her massively, instantly, and the feeling stuck. (Joy moved to Austr
alia years ago and married an outback man, and nobody really hears from her now). Interestingly though, because Leigh’s an open book, in many ways I feel I know her on a deeper level than I do Wendy, even though I’ve known Wendy twice as long. (Leigh and I met when I did a brief temping stint at M&S where Leigh was a junior buyer, and we just instantly hit it off). Leigh can sometimes piss you off; Wendy never does. There’s a radiance to Wendy that comes from the inside out. It’s that of a person who is genuinely happy and has nothing hiding in her. This makes for a very uncomplicated friendship. ‘So you’re not regretting taking the job?’ I had misgivings about it, though I don’t know why.

  ‘Oh I’m thrilled to bits! There’s a lot to do. It’s not brain surgery, but it’s detail. So I’ve got my lists written out and my post-it notes all over the computer, and I’m trying to teach myself Excel because Clifford said he could use me helping him with some spreadsheets.’ Humour twinkles her straight face. ‘It took me a while to realise he wasn’t talking about something that goes on the bed!’

  Her dark brown eyes soften again. ‘Leigh was particularly sweet the other day. She took me out for a nice lunch because it would have been Nina’s birthday. She’d have been three.’ She searches my face. ‘I literally don’t know where the time’s gone Jill.’

  I squeeze her hand. ‘Oh Wend. I’m sorry. I remembered the date but didn’t know whether to bring it up.’

  ‘That was sweet of you both to remember.’

  How could we not? Wendy was nearly finished a part-time degree at Northumbria when she surprised everybody by falling pregnant with Nina. It was a difficult pregnancy from the word go. Then Nina was born severely premature, making the possibility of her living as fragile as a snowflake on the plume of a feather. There were so many problems, but she kept bouncing back. Then she had to have part of her liver removed. But she survived when all the doctors said she wouldn’t. Then Leigh and I were at the hospital visiting. The doctor came in and broke the bad news. I remember Wendy and Neil, Leigh and me, walking to the incubator, and watching Wendy’s large finger stroke Nina’s limp little finger-like arm. And I think that was the day I started to rethink my views about not wanting to be a mother.