The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  My most frequent nightmare used to be the one about discovering that you hadn’t in fact finished your exams at school, but had to do one more paper that you hadn’t done any revision for. Now, my recurring one is that I’ve left the house, arrived at my destination and suddenly realized that I’ve forgotten to arrange for someone to look after the kids and they’ve been left at home on their own. I’m rushing to get back, frantically phoning neighbors, but things keep stopping me from getting there.

  “Hello, Deena, sorry I’m a couple of minutes late,” I say breathlessly. I run not only because I don’t want to be late, but also because I long to see the boys again, like a girl on her way to a first date.

  “Don’t you worry about it, we’ve been having a grand time, haven’t we?” Deena beams, balancing her latest grandchild on her hip. I look past the door to the sitting room to see Rufus and Gabe’s ketchup-smeared, television-glazed faces and don’t doubt it. Deena is, as ever, looking as if she is about to enter a glamorous granny competition, with stacked heels, makeup applied with a paint-sprayer, and a magnificent embonpoint. After the patchwork of disastrous childcare arrangements that we’ve had over the years, I’m craven in her presence. I want to say something about the television, the nuggets, and the fact that the squash she gives my kids is not butternut but additive-filled drinks, but am worried that whatever I say will have an invisible subtitle ticking along below it, reading: “Can you just be a little more middle class, you know, like us?” And it’s unfair, really, given how much she reads to them and properly plays with them and how much better her own children have turned out than the offspring of some of my friends.

  Gabe is sitting on Rufus’s lap while they read a book together. Rufus is ignoring the text and making up a story that involves the little girl in the pictures, but rather than being afraid of shadows in the night, in his story she is attacking them with invisible swords made out of thoughts. They look up and see me.

  “Mommy,” says Rufus. “Do you know? I missed you.”

  “And I missed you both, so much.” For this brief moment everything is perfect.

  “Don’t want to go in buggy. My want to walk,” Gabe begins.

  “I don’t have time for this,” I reply as I karate chop him into the stroller.

  “You’re always saying that,” says Rufus. “You say it ten million times a day.”

  “I say it because it’s true, now come on. How was school?”

  “You’re always saying that, too,” Rufus says.

  “About ten million times a day?”

  “No, not that much.”

  “So how was it?”

  “All right.”

  “Who did you talk to?”

  “No one.”

  “Did you eat anything?”

  He shakes his head. I give up. I briefly entertain a fantasy about my unborn girl child, Willa or Aphra or Eudora is her name, who’d giggle and share secrets with me of who her best friend is as we sit on the bed looking at books with a reading age of at least five years in advance. Mothers of girls are always telling me how amazing their daughters’ reading and handwriting is, while I vainly try to counter with the fact that Gabe can divide up vehicles into those with caterpillar wheels and those without. If you’re a mother of girls, these women tell me with indulgent pride and barely hidden pity, you get to choose Disney Princess duvet covers together, and have the chance to buy patterned tights and to dress your daughter in a sticky-out pink tutu. We poor mothers of boys instead merely learn ace new skills, like a bicycle kick, as we burn off calories with our adrenalin-pumping games of football in the park. We replace our single women’s knowledge of star signs with hard facts about the order of the solar system and the size of the planets. We enjoy their wondrous otherness and melt at the sight of their tiny, unthreatening willies.

  I banish all thoughts of Eudora/Aphra/Willa. I love being the mother of boys, however much those with girls find it hard to believe. When I think about Rufus and Gabe, how could I ever want them to be anyone other than themselves?

  An hour after I return home, Joel gets back.

  29) Times his return to the exact moment when he’s too late to help with bath- and bedtime, but not late enough to allow me to eat my unmessy toast for supper and watch what I want on TV, which is usually property shows.

  30) Scoffs at property shows and says they’re part of a horrible Little Englander conspiracy to coerce us into an obsession with house prices. Usually starts frothing about “Thatch” and the 1980s while he’s at it. Generally we fight along male and female lines over the remote control. I concede that he is a rare man who doesn’t like watching football (I gave up my own, rather transparent, interest in it when we got together), but he is following classic middle-aged male precedents by getting into military history and so watching endless documentaries about Nazis. All men do this, don’t they? Reach a certain age and begin to obsess over military history. Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad is their gateway drug and, whoosh, before you know it they’re reading books filled with maps showing fronts and pushes. That and suddenly deciding that ₤5 bottles of wine are no longer good enough for them—those are the male symbols of being over your prime. For women, it’s the development of an interest in interior design. I plead guilty. Men begin to read the business supplement that comes with the Sunday papers, women the travel and gardening ones.

  As he comes in, I realize that he’s not alone.

  “Ursula, what a surprise,” I say on seeing my mother-in-law, resplendent in full-length velvet skirt, floral turban and dangling parrot earrings. Ursula is a 1980s Posy Simmonds cartoon made flesh, but doesn’t seem to have any awareness of the fact that she dresses like a feminist in panto. I kiss her cheeks, which smell and feel like Vaseline Intensive Care and turn to Joel. “You never told me that your mother was coming over tonight.”

  “Didn’t I? I thought I had.”

  31) Never writes anything on the family calendar that I designed and printed out myself on the computer at work and that now hangs prominently in the kitchen.

  “Sorry, Ursula.” I gesture down at her ugly-but-not-in-a-fashionable-way boots, but her feet are staying firmly shod.

  She looks quizzical, so I nod my head toward my discarded shoes and my own socked feet.

  “Oh yes, of course, you make people take their shoes off before they’re allowed into your house. I always forget that. Do you know what Geoffrey Manley says?” she asks Joel. “He says that if you go to a house where you have to check in your shoes at the door, you’ll need to check in your intelligence at the same time. Isn’t that just too true?”

  “Actually,” I say, “I think it’s a sign of intelligence to take your shoes off inside as that way you’re avoiding dirtying the carpet and having to vacuum it later on. I mean, would you call the Japanese stupid?”

  “Here you are, Urse,” Joel says, while waving my new sheepskin slippers and rolling his eyes to communicate that the “no shoes inside” rule is nothing to do with him.

  “Are you staying for supper, Ursula?” I ask. “I’m afraid I didn’t buy quite enough for three.”

  “Chill,” says Joel. “We’ll just get a takeaway.”

  32) When it’s his turn to cook anything less fancy than the complete works of Escoffier, gets a takeaway and thinks it counts.

  Ursula clasps her hands together in excitement. “What a treat!” Ursula regards using taxis and going to restaurants as decadent luxuries, while living alone in a five-bedroom, albeit rapidly deteriorating, house in one of London’s more expensive areas is frugality itself.

  “You haven’t tasted it yet,” I say. “I wish I’d known and I’d have cooked us something more wholesome.”

  “Darling, don’t waste your time. I’d much prefer a takeaway.”

  She clasps her hands with slightly less excitement to say, “Now, where are my gorgeous grandsons?”

  “In bed. Sorry, if I’d known…”

  “It’s not even eight o’clock,” she sa
ys. “I love the idea of little children running around until midnight like they do in Italy and Spain. So wonderful. Why don’t you ever eat with them? Sometimes I wonder whether you really like them.”

  “I love them.” As I say this I am momentarily tempted to wake them to show them that I do with my kisses. Much as I long for them to go to sleep, I long for them when they’re gone from me and sometimes gladden when one of them has a nightmare and needs comfort. But I won’t wake them now because we’re a house with evening stories and regular bedtimes. “Children need their sleep. Poor Rufus is tired enough as it is with all this school stuff without having his night interrupted. There have been studies showing that they get ill and it damages their brains and they become obese if they don’t get twelve full hours every night.”

  “Nonsense,” says Ursula. “When Joel was a baby, he’d stay up and join in with all our discussions. I can’t tell you the number of times he’d curl up and fall asleep in a pile of Afghans—coats, I mean, obviously not people from Afghanistan, though we did have quite a few of those too. My darling boy has been to more consciousness-raising meetings than any other man has ever been allowed. Of course, some of the sisters used to say, ‘No one with a penis,’ but I told them not to be so ridiculous—my scion is hardly the enemy, is he? Quite the contrary, and anyway his penis is so tiny you can barely see it. I’m sure imbibing all that marvelous thought is why he’s so enlightened today. You ought to think about the women who might end up with Rufus and Gabe, I’m sure they’d benefit from all we’ll have to talk about tonight.”

  “Let’s go and wake them to find out, shall we?” I say.

  “We could do,” says Joel. “I didn’t get a chance to see them tonight. You can be a bit of a routine Nazi about bedtimes.”

  33) Takes his mother’s side over mine, every time.

  “No, we can’t. I’m not having them woken. They need their sleep and it wouldn’t be fair on anybody.” I pour myself some more wine to make myself clear.

  “Maybe next time, Mother,” says Joel.

  Ursula gives me a look that says: what a shame you hate your children so. It’s the look she gives me every time we’ve gone on holiday to a place with a kids’ club.

  “Seriously,” I say, “please can we just leave them be? They’ve had a tiring day. And more to the point, I’ve had a really tiring day.” She snorts. “Sorry, Ursula, what was that?”

  “You’ve hardly been down the mines, have you? Or raised a family of four children single-handedly like some of my friends? Honestly, you lot don’t know you’re born.” Joel retreats from the kitchen. “You young women seem so angry.”

  Oh no, here we go again. The “you young women have never had it so good speech” and “you can never thank me enough.” “More wine, Ursula?”

  She is not so easily deflected. “Angry all the time when you haven’t really got anything to be angry about, have you?”

  Except being lectured by you every time you come over and get a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir down you. “Well…” I begin, but she’s off.

  “You’ve got it all: the right to have interesting yet flexible jobs and still see your children; to wear what you want, even if it is most dreadfully whorish in the name of so-called empowerment; wonderful husbands who work so hard and still do all the housework—not that there is any these days, what with all your dishwashing machines and microwave cookers. You’re so lucky. Maybe you’re angry that you haven’t got more to be angry about.” She chortles, a particularly irritating chortle that her son has inherited from her.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I say truthfully. “You’re right that feminism has brought us many benefits…”

  “Thank you,” she says, as if it were she that powered the revolution single-handedly.

  “It’s great that we can work—great, really. But it’s as if the outside world has moved at one pace and the inside one, what goes on here,” I jab my finger, “at home, has gone at another, much slower one. There’s like this disconnect…”

  “Disconnect? What a horrid piece of management speak.”

  “Looking after the house and the children, it hasn’t caught up,” I continue, gabbling my words to stop her interrupting me again. “No, that’s wrong. It’s like women’s development has moved on one track and men’s on another. We’ve had the revolution for women, but we didn’t realize that of course it wouldn’t work unless men had a revolution too.”

  “Some men have, haven’t they? Just look at Joel,” says Ursula.

  I try to follow her command, but Joel is nowhere to be seen—as is always the case when Ursula and I do battle.

  “Joel is wonderful. You’re so lucky,” she continues.

  “Yes, obviously I’m really lucky. But even someone as wonderful as he is, is not quite 50–50 when it comes to the dirty washing and the worry and the shoe-buying and the thank-you letter writing and the organizing of playdates…”

  “Playdates?” she exclaims.

  “It’s like when you arrange to meet another parent so that—”

  “Yes, I know what it is. But my dear, what a ghastly Americanism. It’s like all these people saying ‘hey’ instead of ‘hello.’ Don’t you think it’s dreadful, Joel, the word ‘playdate’?” He reappears on cue in a way that he never does for me.

  “Yes,” he agrees, of course. “It sounds like something you might have with a Playboy bunny in the Playboy mansion. Involving two of them wearing something pink and fluffy and grappling each other in a softplay zone.”

  Ursula and I uncharacteristically unite to throw him a despairing glance. He sometimes adopts this irksome men’s magazine persona when his mother’s around. He disappears into the back garden for some unfathomable reason. I think about the first time that Ursula lectured me. I agreed with everything she said and felt giddy with flattery that she should think me worthy of her energies.

  “Seriously, Ursula…” I’m wondering whether to go into the fact that part-time work is a con. That shared parenting is a myth. That her feminism has got me the work outside the home but hasn’t rid me of the work inside it. That her son is a disgusting slob who’s been brought up with unhygienic levels of tolerance of squalor. By her. “The battle’s not been won. Men aren’t doing much more at home.”

  “I think you’ll find that statistics show they’re doing a lot more childcare.”

  “Childcare, yes, maybe. The fun bits of childcare, certainly—the trips to the zoo and the panto, and the organized stuff. But not the boring bit, the daily grind…” At that moment, Joel chooses to walk past us, straining under the weight of our over-filled rubbish bag.

  “I thought I’d do this now,” he says to no one in particular. “In case it’s forgotten about later.”

  Ursula looks at him the way I do Gabe when he gets a poo in the potty—bursting with maternal pride.

  34) He takes the rubbish out. That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, not when it’s seen as the domestic equivalent to doing the laundry. Four people’s dirty clothes every day—the washing, the sock-ball rolling, the pant folding—versus taking the rubbish out once a week. Hmm, like that’s fair. When I think about it, all his domestic chores are the one-offs, the once-a-weeks, like rubbish bags, or the annual jobs like the car’s MOT, the insurance. While mine are the ones without end or beginning, the ones that can never be ticked off. The wiping down of one surface while another is being smeared. The putting clothes in drawers while the laundry bag fills. I get all the modern Herculean labors.

  Though I can only remember one of Hercules’ labors now that I think about it, and it’s the one about the stable where as fast as he clears the hay, more dirt just keeps appearing—there’s a river running through it, carrying a perpetual tide of filth. There’s one streaming through here too.

  “Shit,” I hear him shout, followed by the sound of objects being picked up, accompanied by an exaggerated gagging sound.

  35) Insists that we only fill one rubbish bag
a week. I try, I really do, with the compost and the recycling and, for a very brief time, the reusable diapers, but Joel is going to have to accept that we are profligate landfill site contributors and that’s just tough.

  “Yes, it’s great that Joel does the rubbish.” I’m distracted by the little trail of non-specific rubbish bag juice that’s zigzagging across our kitchen floor and is now no doubt variegating our oatmeal-colored carpet in the hall. “But there’s those daily, endless, non-tickable-offable”—Ursula raises her eyebrows at my poor use of English—“bits and pieces that only women seem to do. Just ask anyone. Any woman.”

  “I do hope our conversation isn’t going to just end up being a discussion of who does the washing-up,” she says. “In the old days, when we were having a barnstorm about gender wars, we’d joke to one another, ‘this isn’t going to end up as an argument about who does the washing-up.’ Sadly, it too often did. Don’t you think you’re worrying too much about petty domestic tasks when there are more important issues like the global levels of female circumcision or the lack of financial equality at work?”

  I’m on my knees, physically and probably metaphorically, as I wipe the floor of the bag’s dribble. “But don’t you see, there will never be equality anywhere until there is at home?”

  “Equality begins at home?” she chuckles.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  “Really, dear, you’re far too concerned with the outward appearance of your house.” She glances at me and the carpet cleaner gun I’m wielding as I plan to do battle in the hall. “You all are, your lot. Obsessed with shiny new kitchens and bathrooms that look like they belong in a hotel. Do you know, it would no sooner have occurred to us to replace a kitchen that hadn’t completely collapsed than it would have to replace our own bodies with bits of plastic. Then again, your lot do quite a bit of that too.”