The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  “I don’t see what’s wrong with trying to make your house hygienic…”

  “Don’t think we didn’t talk about all this. We had ‘wages for women’ campaigns and housework strikes and we did all this to death. But I think we’ve moved on, don’t you?”

  She has certainly moved on, from me to the living room to squeal delightedly over the takeaway menu that Joel’s pulled out for her to have a look at, grinding in some of the rubbish bag’s juices along the way. She strokes his cheek in a frankly revolting way.

  “Can we have Thai, rather than Indian? You know all that ghee is a nightmare for me,” I ask as they excitedly pick out their choices.

  “Yes, remember that Mary’s intolerant,” says Joel, giving a fine example of the aforementioned chortle.

  “Dairy intolerant,” I correct.

  “Yeah, intolerant,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” says Ursula. “Nobody was ever allergic to this and intolerant to that when I was young. I think we were too busy fighting the state to fight the plate.” I can see her mentally note the phrase down for her next book.

  “I get all wheezy,” I protest. “My nose streams for weeks if I dare have a non–soy milk latte. Isn’t that true, Joel?”

  He shrugs his shoulders, allowing Ursula to continue to expound her latest theory.

  “I notice that a lot of young women seem to be vegetarian without actually caring about animals, and intolerant to—what a coincidence—anything that might be considered fattening.”

  “Joel’s the one who used to be a vegetarian. Hard to believe now…”

  “Yes, but he was a vegetarian for ethical rather than aesthetic reasons, wasn’t he? Isn’t it all a socially acceptable way of controlling your food? By banning whole food groups, you can essentially eat less, can’t you? But it’s all food disorderly conduct.”

  “I haven’t got a food disorder,” I say.

  “Well, you did have that phase when you were a teenager, didn’t you, with your sister?” says Joel.

  Crime number 33 over and over again.

  “Jemima and me got into a bit of competitive dieting, that’s all. It’s completely normal.” Of course, Jemima won that little bout, by only going and getting herself full-blown anorexia complete with protruding ribs, a brief stay in the hospital and traumatic parental self-recrimination.

  “For your generation, yes,” says Ursula. She turns to Joel. “They’re a generation of control freaks, aren’t they?”

  “Too right.”

  Did she just call me a control freak? Preceded by a general accusation of being a lazy, silicone-filled, hygiene-obsessed ingrate. I have to get out of here. “Excuse me, I think I just heard Gabe.” I run out.

  I sit on the marital bed. What will it be called after the divorce, I wonder? The ex-marital bed, I suppose. I tell you what, though, I’m definitely getting it in the settlement, for the dozen times you just agreed with your mother over me. I look down at my chest and wonder whether I might as well get myself some plastic surgery, since Ursula seems so convinced that everyone of my generation is at it.

  When Ursula was my boyfriend’s mother, there was no one I liked and admired more in the world. I think I fell in love with her as much as with Joel. To have a famous feminist for a mother seemed to me to be the most glamorous background in the world, added to which she was not only right-on, she was also from a rich and aristocratic family. The fact that she was a single mother, too, just made her impossibly exotic. And her house! Book-filled and decrepit, ancient furniture stained by Isaiah Berlin’s gin and tonics, an old-fashioned drinks trolley sticky with liqueurs that she’d picked up from speaking engagements in far-flung places. It was just the sort of life I dreamed of as a teenager, the kind I read about in novels by Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch. I’d even read her seminal work, Cleopatra’s Needle Wasn’t Used for Darning (followed up, with diminishing returns, both intellectual and financial, by Ophelia Should Have Learned to Swim, Joan of Arc’s Inflammable Tunic etc., etc.) and had vowed to live my life by such creeds.

  My boyfriend’s mother was the person I most admired, yet my mother-in-law is the one I most resent. Some sort of reverse alchemy takes place on marriage and having children, where all the things that I most loved about Joel became the things I now most hate.

  By pretending that Gabe has woken up, it seems I’ve caused him to do so in reality and I hear him wailing in his bedroom. Joel and Ursula go in and begin reading to him.

  “Thomas is all covered in mud,” I hear Joel saying. “Really useful engines must be clean. He needs a bath.” Short “a.”

  36) Does really irritating Northern accent for the Fat Controller in the Thomas the Tank Engine books. I suspect he bases his characterization on my dad. I can’t stand Thomas the Tank Engine and his endless friends. I’m sure my unborn daughter Eudora/Willa/Aphra wouldn’t want to read them. She’d probably be on C. S. Lewis by the age of three.

  I update The List and feel a lot better.

  When did everything that I love about Joel turn into everything that makes me want to wax his chest, not because I like hairless torsos, but in order to cause him pain? The way we met and got together was a chick-lit novel made real, role reversed with Joel taking the part of the ditzy protagonist, forever losing things and arriving late, while I was the haughty Mr. Darcy figure. Our romance came complete with a full complement of misunderstandings and wrong impressions, the victory over the heroine’s more attractive friend, and the culmination in a love and sex fest of a few years’ duration. I used to stare at him and wonder how on earth I’d ever got so lucky. I used to think, “I don’t deserve you.” Now I think, “I don’t deserve this.”

  The rot sets in as the placenta comes out, when we had our first child. Looking back, there had probably been intimations of how life was going to be when we moved in together, and a few more when we got married, but I ignored them. Maternity leave was when our roles got stuck in aspic. When I became sitcom woman—shrewish, nagging, worrying about getting my whites whiter—and he became sitcom man, avoiding The Wife by hiding with a can of cold lager, and later, making up for not being there all the time with the children by being the “fun one” when he was.

  It’s ironic that we should have turned into Man and Woman, because when we met, I loved all that was feminine about Joel. I can cry tears of frustration and anger, but rarely ones of happiness or melancholy. Joel, on the other hand, wells up at the mention of Joe Strummer or when Leonard Cohen sings “So Long, Marianne.” He notices sunsets and will call purple “lilac,” “indigo” or “mauve.” He was, is, an amazing cook and will want to discuss whether it’s dill or chives in the side dish that we’re eating at a beachside café on holiday. He spent his teenage years experimenting with eyeliner and even kissed a few equally hairy-faced men. He has a penchant for exquisite socks and likes to smell nice. I took all this as proof that Ursula had done her job and that here was a truly emancipated man, one who was in touch with his feminine side. In short, a man as different as could be from my father, who has to have a week’s worth of meals labeled and put in the freezer when my mother escapes him to go on a work conference.

  And Joel loved all that was masculine about me. I could read maps and put up shelves. He used to beg me to get naked but for my tool kit, said that me wielding a power drill was as sexy as it got, while at the same time useful as I did all the DIY at his place. I knew more about football and could beat him at table tennis. He loved that, and I loved that he did—unlike previous boyfriends, he never felt threatened by my competitiveness and joy in winning.

  Then Rufus came. I, much to Joel’s initial envy, got the maternity leave. He expressed jealousy at this fact and said that he was sad he’d never know what it would be like to grow a living creature in his stomach, while never offering to give up alcohol and soft cheese in sympathy. He said he wished he could feel the closeness of a breastfeeding mother to her child, but never bothered to help me arrange the bank of cushions nece
ssary for this unromantic maneuver, or think to get me a glass of water once Rufus had finally, painfully, become plugged in.

  He had a fortnight’s paternity leave, which he kept on referring to as “holiday” and treated it as such. “What are we going to do today?” he’d ask each morning. “Who’s coming to visit?” I could only sit on an undignified inflatable ring due to the macramé performed on my nether regions, while Rufus seemed to be feeding constantly and yet not putting on the requisite weight. I’d listen to Joel telling the world how much he’d never known that such a tiny creature could inspire so much love, while I was thinking about how I’d never known that such a tiny creature could create so much laundry. As Joel would proclaim how much he loved being a father, I’d think, yes, a father, I’d love being a father. He’d never known love like it and I, too, was oozing love, except mine was overwhelming me. Joel’s love for Rufus seemed fun, like a summer affair, all giddy and euphoric. Mine was anxious and exhausting, as my head filled with calculations about feed times and terrifying visions of the accidents that could happen to my darling vulnerable boy. Joel would laugh when I tried to tell him how frightening I sometimes found it to carry Rufus up and down stairs. “What if I trip and fall?” Or worse, unspoken, that some malevolent spirit would cause me to throw him. “What if someone steals him in the buggy when I turn to reach something down from the supermarket shelves?” I asked. I didn’t understand how it could not have occurred to Joel that a baby of Rufus’s evidently exceptional beauty and intelligence was a magnet for child snatchers.

  Once we had a baby, I used to wonder what I had ever found to worry or argue about before then. Having a baby had opened up huge over-stuffed cupboards of fights to be had. All the love I had felt for Joel seemed to have been transferred to this tiny creature with his little cap of already red hair. The more enchanting I found Rufus, the more irritating I found my husband. He who I’d loved so unreservedly, I loathed. I loathed the way he put on diapers, the way he wouldn’t bother to do up all the snaps on a babygro, the way he’d throw Rufus at me the minute he started crying with the words “I think he needs feeding again.”

  If paternity leave was bad, life got worse when he went back to work. He was at work, I was at home and without it ever being said out loud, this meant that I was responsible for all things to do with the house. He stopped being able to wash his own shirts or go to the supermarket—after all, what else did I have to do all day? I was lucky enough to have this holiday, this protracted honeymoon of baby bonding, and so I had no right to complain about a few extra chores.

  I envied him going to work, but when the time came for me to do so, I was horrified at the prospect. Only a combination of Mary Poppins and Mother Courage could be trusted with my golden child. Since she didn’t exist I put him into a nursery, which might as well have been a Romanian orphanage for the cruelty I felt in doing so. I went back part-time, because the law said it was my right. Mitzi had said she didn’t know why people had babies if they weren’t going to be with them, though she managed to have as much childcare as I did, despite not having a job to go to. Twenty percent less money and one more day with Rufus had seemed like a favorable exchange rate, but I hadn’t realized that it represented about 100 percent of the money I had to spend on anything other than mortgage and food. Somehow, too, the fifth of the job that got reduced was all the bits that I had liked best about it and none of the boring grind I’d gladly have eschewed.

  Part-time work had seemed to be the perfect solution and everyone told me how lucky I was. But it only further calcified the roles that had begun to form on maternity leave. I’m home, he’s work. Part-time work for me didn’t translate into part-time home for him, and my longed-for weekday with Rufus was quickly filled with fixing the washing machine and standing in the line at the post office clutching passport applications. The legislation that gives the right to part-time work for mothers is cited as a great victory for women, but I felt like I no longer fit in at the office, nor did I fit in with those mothers who didn’t have a job. I needed to be amphibious, but instead I was a fish out of water. I ruminated on going full-time or giving it all up. I’m not sure it would have made much difference if I’d gone back full-time, since Joel’s level of housework would not have risen as much as my resentment; while if I’d given up, I’d have been buried in even more dirty laundry than I already was, not to mention the disastrous effect on our finances.

  So here we are. I’m not quite sure how we got here, though I suppose I must have done my fair share of the driving.

  The next day over breakfast, I ask Joel, “Can you remember any of the labors of Hercules?”

  “Hmm,” he answers, not at all surprised that I am asking him this random question, but eagerly searching for some trivia. “There was the lion, wasn’t there? The one whose skin was impervious to arrows or daggers. Ursula had a brilliant illustrated book of the myths of Greece and Rome. What was its name?”

  I shrug and he continues: “The best one was that he had to capture the Hound of Hades—he had three dog heads. Did that involve Medusa? I wonder if I could find my old copy. We should get a Greek myths book for Rufus, shouldn’t we?”

  “Yes, that’s what I was thinking,” I say. “Just what I was thinking.”

  3

  Wet Towels on the Bed

  Friday comes and I throw off the shackles of domesticity to prepare for the party. The party in a fancy flat with architectural details and skylights and industrial concrete floors and child-unfriendly sculptures. Cara’s party.

  Cara and her flat deserve an unusual amount of care with my appearance. I put on a new dress, a claret-colored chiffon affair, which shimmies over my Spanx pants (these serve the dual purpose of squidging in my post-partum belly and being sexually repulsive to Joel. Result). The dress also requires that I plump up my cleavage, which, with the help of an extra-strength shove-up bra, can go from National Geographic to Sports Illustrated in seconds. I’ve just lost the last of those remaining pregnancy pounds and if I squint at the mirror I feel really quite pleased with the result. I don’t know if I’m the old me, the pre-children one, or a very new me, some post-breeding upgrade, but I feel good.

  My makeup bag is ringed with stains, like the trunk of a tree telling of past eras. To look through its wares is to look through my history: the set of brushes I bought after a terrifying makeover in a Manhattan department store, which I went to on a trip with a previous boyfriend; the ancient lip gloss I wore on my first date with Joel in an attempt to make my thin smackers look sensual and gooey, but which instead seemed to trap locks of my hair and then later in the evening, mission accomplished, some of his; the full eyeshadow palette that I got for my wedding day makeup, only one color of which I’ve ever used. Each item tells of a previous life of vanity. I miss my vanity, which abandoned me the day that Rufus was born. I feel like narcissism was one of those school friends you’d had since your teens, who you both loved and loathed in equal measure and long wished to be rid of, but then when she was gone you missed dreadfully. Looking in the mirror so much reminded me that I was there. Now I don’t even know that I have a reflection—I might be like a vampire and when I look, there’ll be nothing. The only time I see myself in a mirror, it feels like, is to hold up a baby to show them their reflection, providing a mocking contrast between their pudgy, non-sundamaged skin and mine.

  I emerge, as glamorous as it gets, to the bathroom, where I am greeted by a husband and two wailing children, the older of whom has recently become self-conscious about nudity. They both stand up, shivering, in the bath, with Rufus cupping himself like a footballer about to defend a free kick.

  37) Never pulls the plug on the boys’ bath water, leaving me to do it later, which involves me being elbow-deep in tepid water and ensures that the stain of grime around the edge has calcified.

  38) Bathroom floor is always soaked whenever he’s been in there. Doesn’t matter if he’s had a bath or not. It’s like he’s got some sort of unique ecosys
tem running in there, with permanently rising sea levels.

  39) Ignores the towels hanging on the boys’ pegs and instead takes out some fresh, fluffy, special occasion towels out of what I like to refer to as the “airing cupboard,” aka one shelf squeezed above the immersion tank.

  40) Leaves used bath towels to marinate in said pools of water.

  41) Or throws them on the bed.

  Joel does a proper builder’s whistle. It was one of the talents that really impressed me when we first got together. “Nice dress. Nice body, too.”

  Rufus will soon reach the age where he’ll gag at this sort of remark, but instead adds, “You look really pretty, Mommy,” and I feel a flush of love along with a fearful acknowledgment that it won’t be long now before he decides that he doesn’t want to marry me after all.

  “Is it chiffon?” asks Joel. “It’s gorgeously floaty.”

  “Thanks.” In the litany of Joel’s faults, I cannot add a failure to notice a new haircut or outfit. He’s frighteningly in touch with that bit of his feminine side, the bit that appraises a wardrobe rather than ever tidies it. “You look smart too.” He’s put on a suit in the manner of a man who doesn’t have to wear one for work so it’s quite fun to dress up at weekends.

  We make our journey to Cara’s flat, which is in an old factory in an area of town once colonized by young artists, but now populated by estate agents advertising “live-work spaces.” I know it well since it’s also infested with small television production companies, including mine.

  A couple clutching a gift buzz on Cara’s entryphone system before us and we slip in with them and have one of those embarrassing “I guess you’re going where we’re going” conversations, where you hope you get to the flat quickly enough to avoid the “So how do you know Cara?” next stage. Should I have bought a present? What would I bring Cara? Some sort of bespoke olive oil?