Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

  “Mummy. A good heart is never proud. Is that true?” said Maxine.

  “What?”

  “It was on my Little Mermaid tape. I can make my eyes squelch, listen.”

  “Oof, careful, Robin,” said Dorrie as Robin brought his head up under her chin and crashed her teeth together.

  “Good-bye,” said Max from the doorway.

  “Don’t forget we’re going out tonight,” said Dorrie from the pillows.

  “Oh yes,” said Max. He looked at the heap of bodies on the bed. “Your mother and I were married eight years ago today,” he said into the air, piously.

  “Where was I?” said Maxine.

  “Not going out,” hissed Robin, gripping Dorrie more tightly. “Stay inner house, Mummy.”

  “And I’m not going to stand for any nonsense like that,” growled Max. He glared at his youngest son. “Get off your mother, she can’t move. It’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s all right, Max,” said Dorrie. “Don’t make yourself late.”

  “Go away, Daddy,” shouted Robin.

  “Yeah,” joined in Martin and Maxine. “Go away, Daddy.”

  Max glared at them impotently, then turned on his heel like a pantomime villain. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

  “Yesss!” said Robin, punching the air with his dimpled fist. The bed heaved with cheers and chuckles.

  “You shouldn’t talk to Daddy like that,” said Dorrie.

  “Horble Daddy,” said Robin dismissively.

  “He’s not horble,” huffed Dorrie. “Horrible. Time to get up.” They all squealed and clutched her harder, staking her down with sharp elbows and knees wherever they could.

  “You’re hurting me,” complained Dorrie. “Come on, it really is time to get up.” And at last she extracted herself like a slow giantess from the cluster of children, gently detaching their fingers from her limbs and nightdress.

  When she turned back from drawing the curtains, Martin was painting his shins with a stick of deodorant while Maxine sat on the floor galloping her round bare heels in the cups of a discarded bra, pulling on the straps like a jockey, with shouts of “Ya! Ya! Giddy-up, boy!” Robin ran round and round his mother’s legs, wrapping and rewrapping her nightdress. Then he rolled on the carpet with both hands round her ankle, a lively leg-iron, singing alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

  “Don’t do that, Martin,” said Dorrie as she climbed into yesterday’s jeans and sweatshirt. But he was already on to something else, crossing the floor with a bowlegged rocking gait, a pillow across his shoulders, groaning under its imaginary weight and bulk.

  “I’m Robin Hood carrying a deer,” he grinned back over his shoulder. Maxine roared with laughter, hearty as a Tudor despot.

  “Come on, darlings,” Dorrie expostulated feebly. “Help me get you dressed.”

  They ran around her and across the landing, ignoring her, screeching, singing, bellowing insults and roaring into the stair-well. She pulled vests and socks and jumpers from various drawers, stepping around them like a slave during a palace orgy. Their separate energies whizzed through the air, colliding constantly, as random as the weather. She grabbed Martin as he shot past and started to strip off his nightclothes.

  “No!” he yelled, and tore himself free, running off trouserless. He was as quick as she was slow. It was like wading through mud after dragonflies.

  “I hate you!” he was screaming at Maxine now for some reason. “I wish you were dead!”

  “Now now,” said Dorrie. “That’s not very nice, is it.”

  Then there were pinches and thumps and full-chested bellows of rage. By the time she had herded them down for the cornflakes stage, they had lived through as many variants of passion as occur in the average Shakespeare play. She looked at their momentarily woebegone faces streaked with tears of fury over whichever was the most recent hair-pulling or jealousy or bruising, she had lost track, and said with deliberate cheer, “Goodness, if we could save all the tears from getting ready in the mornings, if we could collect them in a bucket, I could use them to do the washing up.”

  All three faces broke into wreathed smiles and appreciative laughter at this sally, and then the row started up again. They did not take turns to talk, but cut across each other’s words with reckless thoughtlessness. She was trying to think through the hairbrushing, shoe hunting, tooth cleaning, packed lunch for Martin, empty toilet roll cylinder for Maxine’s Miss Atkinson, with an eye on the clock, but it was a nonstarter.

  “SHUSH,” she shouted. “I can’t hear myself THINK.”

  “Are you thinking?” asked Maxine curiously.

  “No,” she said. “Hurry UP.”

  It was not in fact possible to think under these conditions; no train of thought could ever quite leave the platform, let alone arrive at any sort of destination. This was what the mothers at the school gates meant when they said they were brain-dead, when they told the joke about the secret of child care being a frontal lobotomy or a bottle in front of me. This was why she had started waking in the small hours, she realized, even though heaven knew she was tired enough without that, even though she was still being woken once or twice a night by one or the other of them; not Max because he had to be fresh for work and anyway they wouldn’t want him. They wanted her. But when they were all safe, breathing regularly, asleep, quiet, she was able at last to wait for herself to grow still, to grow still and alive so that the sediment settled and things grew clearer. So that she could think.

  “Mrs. Piper said Jonathan had nits and she sent him home,” said Martin, lifting his face up. She was brushing his hair, and pushed his brow back down against her breastbone. Then, more muffled, came, “ Don’t make me look like Elvis de Presto.”

  “What I want to know, Mum,” he said as she pushed him back and knelt at Maxine’s feet to struggle with her shoe buckles, “what I need to know, nobody will tell me,” he continued crossly, “is, is God there, can he hold the whole world in his hand—or is he like the Borrowers? I mean, what is he? Is he a man? Is he a cow?”

  She was working grimly against the clock now. Her hands shook. She was shot to hell. Maxine was complaining of a blister on her little toe. Dorrie ran off upstairs like a heifer for the plaster roll and cut a strip and carefully fit it round the pea-sized top joint of the toe. Maxine moaned and screamed, tears squirted from her eyes, her face became a mask of grief as she felt the plaster arrangement inside her sock even more uncomfortable once strapped into her shoe. It all had to be removed again and a square quarter inch of plaster carefully applied like a miniature postage stamp to the reddened area.

  “We’re late,” hissed Dorrie, but even in the middle of this felt a great sick thud of relief that it was not two years ago when she had been racing against the clock to get to work, pretending to them there that all this had not just happened. When at last she had caved in, when she had given in her notice, it felt like giving up the world, the flesh and the devil. It had been terrible at first, the loss of breadth, the loss of adult company. There were the minutes at various school gates with the other mothers, but you couldn’t really call that proper talk, not with all the babies and toddlers on at them. After all she had not managed to keep both worlds up in the air. She knew she had failed.

  She picked Robin up and jammed him into the buggy.

  “Teeth!” said Martin, baring his own at her. “You’ve forgotten about teeth!”

  “Never mind,” she said through hers, gritted, maneuvering the buggy across the front doorstep. “Come on.”

  “Why?” asked Martin, pulling his school jumper up to his eyes and goggling at himself in front of the hall mirror. “Burglars don’t show their noses, Mum. Look. Mum.”

  These days Martin flew off towards the playground as soon as they reached the school gate, for which she was profoundly grateful. For his first five years he had been full of complaints, faultfinding and irritability. He still flew into towering rages and hit her and screamed until he was pink or blue in the fa
ce, often several times a day. As he was her first child this had come as a shock. She even asked the doctor about it, and the doctor had smiled and said his sounded a fiery little nature but he would no doubt learn to control himself in time. “Also, all behavior is learned behavior,” said the doctor reprovingly. “Never shout back or you’ll just encourage him.” Plenty of the other mothers had children who behaved similarly, she noticed after a while. You just had to take it, and wait for time to pass. It could take years. It did. He was loud, waspish, frequently agitated and a constant prey to boredom. When she saw him nibbling his nails, tired and white as a cross elf, she would draw him onto her lap and make a basket of her arms around him. She saw his lack of ease in the world, and grieved for him, and knew it was her fault because she was his mother.

  Maxine was less irritable but more manipulative. Her memory was terrifyingly precise and long—yesterday, for example, she had raged at Dorrie for stealing a fruit pastille, having remembered the color of the top one from several hours before. She relished experiments and emotional mayhem. Her new trick this week was to fix you with her pale pretty eye and say, quite coolly, “I hate you.” This poleaxed Dorrie. And yet this little girl was also utterly unglazed against experience, as fresh and easily hurt as one of those new daffodil shoots.

  Only when Robin was born had she realized what it was to have what is commonly known as an easy child. No rhyme nor reason to it. Same treatment, completely different. They were as they were as soon as they were born, utterly different from each other. That was something at least. It couldn’t all be her fault.

  Now it was halfway through Martin’s first school year and he had settled in well. It was wonderful. She glanced in passing at other less fortunate mothers talking low and urgent with their infants, entwined and unlinking, like lovers, bargaining with furtive tears, sobs, clinging arms, angry rejections, pettish-ness and red eyes.

  It was the same when she dropped Maxine off at nursery school half an hour later. On the way out she and Robin passed a little girl of three or so saying to her mother, “But Mummy, I miss you”; and the mother, smartly dressed, a briefcase by her, rather tightly reasoning with her, murmuring, glancing at her watch. Dorrie felt herself break into a light sympathetic sweat.

  The little scene brought back Robin’s trial morning there last week. He had refused to walk through the nursery school’s entrance and was shouting and struggling as she carried him in. She had set him down by a low table of jigsaw puzzles and told him sternly that she would sit over there in that corner for five minutes, that his sister was just over there in the Wendy house, and that he must let her go quietly. From the toy kitchen he had brought her a plastic cupcake with a fat ingratiating smile.

  “Here y’are,” he’d said.

  “Save it for when I come to pick you up,” Dorrie had said, handing it back to him, pity and coldness battling through her like warring blood corpuscles. At last he had given her a resigned kiss on the cheek and gone off to the painting table without another look. (Two hours alone, for the first time in months. Wait till he’s at school, said the mothers; you won’t know yourself.) She dashed a tear away, sneering at her own babyishness.

  Now, today, there was this precious time alone with Robin. He liked to be around her, within a few yards of her, to keep her in his sight, but he did not pull the stuffing out of her as the other two did. He did not demand her thoughts and full attention like Maxine; nor that she should identify and change color like litmus paper with his every modulation of emotion as it occurred, which was what Martin seemed to need. Sometimes those two were so extravagantly exacting, they levied such a fantastic rate of slavish fealty that they left her gasping for air.

  No, Robin talked to his allies and foes, sotto voce, in the subterranean fields which ran alongside the privet-hedged landscape in which they moved together. He sent out smiles or little waves while Dorrie was working, and took breaks for a hug or to pause and drink squash, him on her lap like a stalwart beanbag.

  She sorted the dirty whites from the colored wash up on the landing, and he put them into the washing basket for her. Up and down the stairs she went with round baskets of washing, the smell of feet and bottoms, five sets, fresh and smelly, all different. Robin stuffed the garments into the washing machine one by one, shutting the door smartly and saying “There!” and smiling with satisfaction. She did some hand washing at the sink, and he pushed a chair over across the floor to stand on, and squeezed the garments, then took handfuls of the soap bubbles that wouldn’t drain away and trotted to and from the bucket on the mat with them.

  “What a helpful boy you are!” she said. He beamed.

  “Now I’m going to iron some things including Daddy’s shirt for tonight,” she said. “So you must sit over there because the iron is dangerous.”

  “Hot,” he agreed, with a sharp camp intake of breath.

  He sat down on the floor with some toys in a corner of the kitchen, and as she ironed she looked over now and then at his soft, thoughtfully frowning face as he tried to put a brick into a toy car, the curve of his big soft cheek like a mushroom somehow, and his lovely close-to-the-head small ears. He gave an unconscious sigh of concentration; his frequent sighs came right from deep in the diaphragm. Squab or chub or dab had been the words which best expressed him until recently, but now he was growing taller and fining down, his limbs had lost their chubbiness and his body had become his own.

  No longer could she kiss his eyelids whenever she wished, nor pretend to bite his fingers, nor even stroke his hair with impunity. He was a child now, not a baby, and must be accorded his own dignity. The baby was gone, almost.

  Abruptly she put the iron on its heel and swooped down on him, scooped him up and buried her nose in his neck with throaty growling noises. He huffed and shouted and laughed as they swayed struggling by the vegetable rack. She tickled him and they sank down to the lino laughing and shouting, then he rubbed his barely-there velvet nose against hers like an Eskimo, his eyes close and dark and merry, inches from hers, gazing in without shame or constraint.

  It was going to be a long series of leave-takings from now on, she thought; good-bye and good-bye and good-bye; that had been the case with the others, and now this boy was three and a half. Unless she had another. But then Max would leave. Or so he said. This treacherous brainless greed for more of the same, it would finish her off if she wasn’t careful. If she wasn’t already.

  She took Max’s shirt upstairs on a hanger and put the rest of the ironing away. What would she wear tonight? She looked at her side of the wardrobe. Everything that wasn’t made of T-shirt or sweatshirt fabric was too tight for her now. Unenthusiastically she took down an old red shirtdress, looser than the rest, and held it up against her reflection in the full-length mirror. She used to know what she looked like, she used to be interested. Now she barely recognized herself. She peeled off her sweatshirt and jeans and pulled the dress on. She looked enormous. The dress was straining at the seams. She looked away fast, round the bedroom, the unmade bed like a dog basket, the mess everywhere, the shelves of books on the wall loaded with forbidden fruit, impossible to broach, sealed off by the laws of necessity from her maternal eyes. During the past five years, reading a book had become for her an activity engaged in at somebody else’s expense.

  The doorbell rang and she answered it dressed as she was. Robin hid behind her.

  “Gemma’s got to be a crocodile tomorrow,” said Sally, who lived two roads away. “We’re desperate for green tights, I’ve tried Mothercare and Boots and then I thought of Maxine. I don’t suppose?”

  “Sorry,” said Dorrie, “only red or blue.”

  “Worth a try,” said Sally, hopeless. “You look dressed up.”

  “I look fat,” said Dorrie. “Wedding anniversary,” she added tersely.

  “Ah,” said Sally. “How many years?”

  “Eight,” said Dorrie. “Bronze. Sally, can you remember that feeling before all the family stuff kicked in, I know it�
��s marvelous but. You know, that spark, that feeling of fun and—and lightness, somehow.”

  Immediately Sally replied, “It’s still there in me but I don’t know for how much longer.”

  “You could try Verity,” said Dorrie. “I seem to remember she put Hannah in green tights last winter to go with that holly berry outfit.”

  “So she did!” said Sally. “I’ll give her a ring.”

  “Kill,” whispered Robin, edging past the women into the tiny front garden. “Die, megazord,” and he crushed a snail shell beneath his shoe. Half hidden beneath the windowsill, he crouched in a hero’s cave. Across the dangerous river of the front path he had to save his mother, who was chatting to a wicked witch. He started round the grape hyacinths as though they were on fire and squeezed his way along behind the lilac bush, past cobwebs and worms, until he burst out fiercely into the space behind the hedge. She was being forced to walk the plank. He leaped into the ocean and cantered sternly across the waves.

  They were late coming out of nursery school, and Dorrie stood with the other mothers and nannies in the queue. Some were chatting, some were sagging and gazing into the middle distance.

  In front of her, two women were discussing a third just out of earshot.

  “Look at her nails,” said the one directly in front of Dorrie. “You can always tell. Painted fingernails mean a rubbish mother.”

  “I sometimes put nail polish on if I’m going out in the evening,” said the other.

  “If,” scoffed the first. “Once in a blue moon. And then you make a mess of it, I bet. You lose your touch. Anyway, you’ve got better things to do with your time; you give your time to your children, not to primping yourself up.”

  Robin pushed his head between Dorrie’s knees and clutched her thighs, a mini Atlas supporting the world.

  Dorrie saw it was Patricia from Hawthornden Avenue.