by Joanna Walsh
You might have thought we could have done it, but we were so poor.
At the end of each day when our men came home we young mothers were already tired. We were younger than our children: the children that had birthed us. Our men wondered how they could be married to such children. Bedtime approached, and the men settle down to something adult on the television. We mothers were terrified, did not want to go once more into the interrupted dark. Distracted by noises, bewitched by things that sparkled, we lulled ourselves to sleep, overtired, tearful, telling ourselves tomorrow it would be okay.
In the playground the next day, we watched older mothers bring lunch boxes and spare sweaters to children who might not have wanted this kind of mothering. They made sure the kids were still kids. And the children, ignoring them politely, went on letting the mothers be mothers, for who knows what ends.
THE CHILDREN’S WARD
I have had some good times in this body like right now, looking out of the window. Opposite the window is another window, and through that window, another. The window frames are dark brown and made, perhaps, of metal. They come in pairs, one frame inside another, the inner located in the top right corner of the outer. The smaller frame might open, but none of the windows is open. This might be because it is raining. Through the window opposite is a white wall with a doorframe and, through that, a window that looks onto another white wall. Sometimes people pass between the brown frames and the white walls, and their colors look shabby.
Perhaps, walking along the corridor with the windows, the people who come and go can also see me through this window, sitting and not moving, my face toward them, with the back of a smaller head between me and my window, which they must see only as a shape blocking the lower part of my face. I realize that my body is enjoying looking out of the window, and that this is because it has not been asked to do anything for some time. It has been sitting here, constrained, not so much from coercion as politeness, while, inside it, I have been waiting. In the seat across from me, he is waiting. Though he is a child, the nursery-red plastic chairs we have both been given are too small even for him, and child us both further.
The nurses wear blue—the uniforms of attendants at petrol stations: blue polo shirts, loose blue slacks. Around their necks, ID on red ribbons. Each visits us alone. Each brings a clipboard. We fill in our details with erasable pen. Each nurse asks me questions. The questions are not for me. The questions are for him and, not so much from coercion as politeness, I repeat them until he answers.
“Are you an atheist?”
“I think I’m more of a pessimist.”
He is nine years old, and he is the oldest child here. At the table behind us a girl aged about five, with one eye placed halfway down her face, looks at her fingers, which are short and twisted toes. Her mother hands her a book about princesses. She pries at it, then walks away, her elbows pressed into her sides, a flightless bird. Far at the other side of the waiting room, a different girl aged about three vomits onto the floor. Then a buzzer sounds until a cleaner comes with a bottle of amnesia.
The person who brought our clipboard (a nurse? a consultant?) takes it back, wipes it clean, and takes us away.
And now I am still sitting, waiting by his bed, which may or may not be appropriate, as he is not in the bed, and never was in it, so it may not be the right object at which to direct my waiting. The bed is in a cubicle whose walls are made of curtains decorated with pictures of teddy bears that sit at right angles to each other, never parallel to the horizontal. They remind us that the people in the ward are children, though these children do and say nothing childlike. The seat I am sitting on is a long narrow couch. It is decorated with pictures of dinosaurs also at right angles. This seat makes me small again. My feet don’t reach the ground. I cannot sit back against its back: my thighs are not long enough, because the couch is also a bed. Its smell is the same smell as new clothes shops: synthetic, sweet as a nut. There’s something of the body about it, but only just: the body removed, perhaps.
The ward is hot, and there is always sound. Somebody’s baby is wired up to beep. There is always light. The people who wait are all women. The nurses are women. So is the receptionist, the cleaners, and some of the doctors. I saw a man once but he left. You left me at the door on the ground floor, holding me by the elbow, that most reluctant handle. Did I not expect you to stay, or did I not want you to? Or was it that I wanted but knew it would not work. You left gladly enough, or, not gladly, but perhaps without feeling anything at all. You did not see the ward. You could not imagine all this. Text, you said. Text.
The women with babies have one-way conversations. They do not speak to each other, but then neither do I. One of them makes a screaming noise but softly, then laughs, then repeats a scream caught in the back of her throat, dragged across her tonsils. It is directed at her baby and the noise is a noise of love. She presses a button on a remote and, behind her, someone on the TV appears and says something that crackles. Is she listening with pleasure? It sounds like a crossed wire. It doesn’t sound like fun.
What will compensate me for this wait, which is so much longer than the wait expected?
Will it be clotheschocolatebooks?
I could buy, say, a silk dress jacket blouse for the summer. I could look online to see if any garment meets my thought: that would occupy my mind, would it?
A nurse comes.
She tells me Charlotte will update me.
I do not know who Charlotte is. I do not ask. I could stop watching the bed in which there is nothing, and go, once again, to the information desk across the hall, where the woman wearing an apron with puppies has no information.
If Charlotte comes she will tell me.
If she tells me there will be no more words.
There will be no more words soon.
Get ready for it.
No more words ever now.
No more ever.
I don’t dare to ask anymore.
I wait. I watch the bed.
The baby wakes. It cries. It beeps.
I hope she’s OK.
I hope we’re OK. I hope we’re all OK.
OK?
But Charlotte being not here to give the reply it goes unvoiced perhaps will always which is sentimental so I guard myself against it by labeling it as such when the toddler in the bed beside sits up and vomits blood into a cardboard bowl he has been holding on his knee for this purpose which makes me start to sweat. It makes my body start to part. In a moment I know it will no longer be with me. Sensible of it to want to get away. Good luck to you mate, I can hardly blame you. If Charlotte comes with her words comes to tell me it all went wrong how would my body know it? How long before the parts of my body realized, independently, that something was wrong and arrived, severally, at panic? Panic is a still thing. I have felt it before: each limb nerve organ coming into extreme alert unrelated to any other, ready for action, but who knows what action, as there is no action that could help here. Each part of my body knows, individually, what action it will take, but none of them are telling. I sit in the middle of them. I have no control. They seem to be ready to run in all directions. But without their cooperation I cannot run, cannot scream, so I sit still and I look quite meek. I know what this feels like. I have felt it before. I am waiting to feel it again.
To occupy my mind I could think wouldn’t you through time backwards to milk cereal first school-wear awww plasticine cookies wooden blocks whatever slippery tales someone dreamt up so feelings can be applied to the objects we passed between us but that would be wrong it hasn’t been all sweetness no has it not the hitting biting swearing complaining and the downright lying all of which happens to more or less everyone if we’re to be honest especially if there’s something going wrong and not all on one side oh no not by any means. No if I’m to construct a hypothesis let’s have one utterly other. I’ll play a game or tell myself a story, which will kill a few minutes at any rate. Games are math things, stories are not, or maybe
they are. The name of my game (or my story) is, “What would I do?” If someone came for us, for instance, at night when I am in the house with the children but otherwise alone. This is not logical. There’s no reason, from this person’s perspective, why he shouldn’t arrive in broad daylight when we are equally alone. And there is no reason that, if he arrived at night when we were not alone, well-equipped for murder as my fantasies allow him, we would have a significantly better chance of survival.
He makes a noise downstairs, this person. What would he be doing in the kitchen? There’s nothing to steal there. He should be searching for laptops. He should be in the living room checking out the widescreen TV. With what does he make his noises? With the tools in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet. He wants them to break things open, he wants them to hurt us. There is nothing in my bedroom I can identify as any means of defense. There’s nothing from which to construct a story about how I might defend myself. I rattle around in drawers for it, but still I cannot find it. I need the story to escape from one disaster into another, neither of which I can imagine. But why did he come without tools, without a weapon? Perhaps he is not the burglar I’ve planned for but a junkie, a drunk, a psycho. I am more comfortable with a drunk or a psycho: his passion, when I counterattack, will answer mine.
What should I do then? First off let’s take no action: not to alert him by switching on the light, by breathing. Not to alert him to his role by picking up something that could be used as a weapon. Not to alert him by being. The less I breathe, the more any audible breathing must be his: the less I move, the less any noise of movement must be mine. The less I make myself, the more he is, the more what I am becomes him. The more I allow him to come into being, the fewer defenses I have, the fewer defenses I desire. I wait. And I am getting impatient. Does this person find me, and my children, insufficient prey? That I, or my possessions, or my children, are not desired by this person is more or less unimaginable. I am trying to imagine it, but failing. He will desire me, still, when no one else does. Is he a comfort to me then? Perhaps there will be a time when he will not come anymore but I don’t believe it. If he is not in the kitchen it may be necessary to search for him room by room. If he is not in the house there is still the garden, the shed. If none of these there is the street, the town, the rest of the world. Wherever he is, he remains a certain distance from me, and all his movements and intentions are relative to me and always will be until he comes for me. I don’t know when he will come and whether, when he finally arrives, I shall be surprised that he is real after all. There is a phone by my bed but I will not use it. No police will cheat me of this encounter.
Nevertheless I think I couldn’t kill the anesthesiologist, who looked like a baker in his white tie-cap. Nor do I think I could kill the surgeon, who looked like a banker without his suit. When he went under they said, did I want to kiss him? Or, not did I, but did mum. I looked around for her but she wasn’t there. I touched his leg because I couldn’t reach his arm. There were wires. I didn’t want them to think me heartless after all, but did they imagine that was contact?
They’d already taken him out of his body. Sensible of him to get away too. I have no idea if he is still in there. Couldn’t they see he had already gone.
I cannot make a body meet another body, not even to kill in thought. Try another story.
When this person leaves my kitchen and arrives, armed with my fantasies, at the very door of my room, which of my children would I save first: the vulnerable youngest or the one able to run? A friend who worked a summer as a lifeguard told me how they do it: identify those most likely to survive and save them first; let the baby sink to the bottom. They are told, he said, to be “pragmatic.” We tell stories in which lifeguards heroically save the most hopeless people when all hope has gone. It seems that, all the time, we should have been telling a different story. I didn’t tell my friend at the time, but this seemed wrong. It would not do for my story. His story would be a bad story, whether about a lifeguard, or about the person downstairs.
Can either of my children be saved? Could I, as saver, make a heroic decision that results in a positive outcome, or could I make a decision that results in a negative outcome but which remains heroic nonetheless? Or could I make a pragmatic decision that results in a positive but unheroic outcome, or a pragmatic decision that results in an optimum outcome and also makes a heroic story? What if the pragmatic decision turned out worse?
In another story I walk along the hospital corridor of the children’s ward in which portholes wink at adult-eye level. The woman with the baby is in the parents’ room, where tea and instant coffee are “supplied by local freemasons.” The baby is not with her. She is crying or at least tears are coming out of her eyes but she is silent and also turning the pages of a gossip mag. I eat Rice Krispies from a plastic bowl with a cow on it, with a plastic spoon. I ask her if I can make her tea. She says no. One distress parallels the other. Or, no, how could it, or if it does, it is only for a moment, before each returns to the specifics of her own misery. I look out of the window, while the kettle takes its foreign time to boil, onto a central courtyard whose walls are white, and all down every wall are brown frames that answer only each other. At the bottom of this pit is a white roof. The tea I make tastes of soap.
Back in the ward, the baby is there. It beeps. The woman has returned. She is watching television. She watches baby programs. It is too loud. Her baby is too small surely.
I sit on the couch beside the bed. My legs dangle. Above the bed dangle a machine’s legs, waiting. The doors of the bedside cabinet look like saloon doors, but they do not swing open. Perhaps a troop of mice will come out, perhaps a miniature marching band. And I have stopped breathing neither on the in nor the out breath, either of which would have been a bit showy, but in the middle of a breath so nobody would notice, just to see if time might stop and the people in the room might stop too in the middle of their activities, and I didn’t even know I was doing it until I was about halfway to empty.
Then Charlotte comes, and all across her apron kittens kiss.
ONLINE
My husband met some women online and I found out.
His women were young, witty, and charming, and they had good jobs—at least I ignored the women he had met online who were not young, witty, and charming, and who did not have good jobs—and so I fell more in love with my husband, reflected as he was, in the words of these universally young, witty, and charming women.
I had neglected my husband.
Now I wanted him back.
So I tried to be as witty and charming as the women my husband had met online.
I tried to take an interest.
At breakfast, I said to him, “How is your breakfast?”
He said to me, “Fine, thanks.”
I said to him, “What do you like for breakfast?”
(Having lived with him for a number of years, I already know what my husband likes for breakfast, and this is where the women online have the advantage of me: they do not yet know what my husband likes for breakfast and so they can ask him what he likes for breakfast and, in that way, begin a conversation.)
He did not answer my question.
So I tried to take an interest in what my husband was doing. I asked him, “What are you going to do today?”
He said, “I will strip old paint from the shed.”
(I already knew he planned to do this. But, again, that is where the women online have the advantage.)
I said, “That’s nice. Have a good strip.”
He did not respond to my jokey sexual innuendo.
Instead, my husband went outside to strip paint from the shed.
When he had gone I thought:
His women are the sum of all their qualities, not several but complete, massive, many-breasted, many-legged, multifaceted, and I participate in these women. Some of his women have been chosen because they are a bit like me, some because they are unlike. He likes them. And he likes me. He likes
me for being both unlike but like them. He likes them for being both like and unlike me. If I met them, I know I would like them, most of them, as we are all a little alike. Or at least I would not dislike them for being like, but unlike, me, and for him liking them not better but—although, and because, they are different—exactly the same amount as he likes me. We are all trapped behind the same glass. He can make us spin for his amusement and turn us to view any side. He is greater than the sum of our parts, though each part of them competes with me: their qualifications, and their legs, and their hairdos, and their cup sizes. And I compete with them, and some of my parts even outshine some of theirs, which are occasionally mediocre. But I cannot outshine them when they are added together.
After some time I went outside into the garden where my husband was stripping paint from the shed, and said,
“Why didn’t you tell me about the women online?” And he said, “I did, when you asked me,” and I said, “Why did you lie about how long you’d been talking to them?” and he said, “I didn’t.” And I said, “I saw your emails and it’s been going on for months. And I don’t care what you’ve done,” I said, “I just don’t want you to lie to me about it,” and he said, “I can’t take this from you again. You have to let it go. You fucked someone. All I did was send a few messages. You have to let it go.”
And I said, “I didn’t lie about that. You lied about it. Just tell me you lied about it and I’ll let it go.”
And he said,
“No.”
In the evenings, my husband listens to old vinyl. My husband says to his women, “I like old vinyl,” and so they listen to some old vinyl for him.
“You remind me of Debbie Harry,” he tells one of his women, “and you look like Belinda Carlisle. You make me think of Debbi Peterson (from The Bangles), and you look like Dale Bozzio.” My husband has a line and he follows it.