“Or been born with red hair,” she chips in. “Not that it isn’t lovely. I’ve always loved your hair.”
“Flame,” I say, “as in flame-haired temptress.”
Joel laughs a little too heartily.
“Do you want to go and check that the boys aren’t killing each other?”
“They’re fine.”
I give him the look that conveys this was a rhetorical question and he slopes off.
Jemima physically slumps once Joel leaves the room. “It’s not that great, you know.”
“What isn’t?”
“Internet dating. It’s all very well having a limitless supply of fresh meat, but the thing is, you don’t want it to be endless, do you? I mean, the whole point is that it should end with you meeting someone great. Me meeting someone great.”
“It’s not the end, though, meeting someone. It’s not the end of problems and the solution to everything. It’s just the beginning of a whole set of new ones.” How can I communicate to her, without being patronizing, that there’s a whole long life beyond the chick-flick ending.
“But at least you’ve got the option of all these new problems. I’m beginning to worry that your thirties is like some gigantic game of musical chairs and somehow I’ve been left standing.”
“Jemima, I’m really sure that should you choose to settle down, then you will. And anyway, you’re young. You’ll always be my little sister.”
“I’m almost thirty-five.”
“And you’re gorgeous. You’ve always been the gorgeous one. I once heard Mom on the phone saying, ‘I know, who’d have thought it, but Jemima’s the unmarried one.’ ”
“God, she is awful, isn’t she?” We snigger. Ganging up on our mother has always united us. Joel and I might not have mastered the concept of shared parenting, but Jemima and I have got shared daughtering licked. Although of late, I’ve been wondering whether we haven’t been a bit unfair to Mom. We did nothing to help her around the house. She tried everything to induce us. Timetables, lists and bribery, but nothing worked. She did housework too well, that was her mistake. She did it so seamlessly, secretly and silently, that I never actually realized she was doing it all and how much there was of it.
“Honestly, make the most of this time,” I say. “What may follow is not an endless honeymoon of perfection. I always think that being single is like being unemployed—if you knew how long it was going to last, you could have such a fun time of it.”
“It’s not fun anymore,” she says. “I’m so bored of it. I’m bored of the bloody dates and the swapping childhoods and the ‘Did you have any pets when you were growing up?’ and the phoning and the not phoning. There are so many ways to be not-called these days. They can not-call you by email, by Facebook, by mobile, by landline, by office phone, by text. Fuck, I’m sick of it. Do you know why I go to the beauticians so much?”
“To look as good as you do?”
“It’s because I want to be touched. Oh, god, that sounds really pervy, doesn’t it? When you’re single, you crave being touched so you end up paying for face massages and full-body seaweed wraps. You crave human touch and it’s better to pay for it this way than have stupid one-night stands with men you don’t even particularly like but who still manage to make you feel shit if they not-call you. And guilty if they do because you have absolutely no intention of ever seeing them again.”
“I have too much touch in my life. I’m always picking them off, like tics.”
“Who, Joel or the boys?”
“All of them. Urgh.” She smiles. My ploy to make her feel better has worked. It’s a lie, of course, at least partially. I love that my boys are like hooks of Velcro, ever-ready to attach themselves to the mother loops. I grab at them when they walk past me to crush their skinniness into my chest, pulling them in so tight it’s as if I want to be one again, as we were in pregnancy. It’s a wonder to me that I have this constant and accommodating source of physical comfort and I dread the day, which cannot be too far off, when it will end. Joel, though, with his clammy arms at night and the way that he is rendered on a different scale to Rufus and Gabe—I was telling the truth about that.
“I’m sorry you’re feeling like this, Jem. Maybe twentysomething surfer boys aren’t the way forward.” Jemima still has her penchant for pretty boyband member types, which was a good look when she was an equally exquisite young thing, but doesn’t make for ideal settling-down material.
“You think I should lower my standards?”
“Not lower so much as change them. An actuary rather than an actor this time? Dad’s fat whistling man, you know, the one he said he wanted us to end up with.”
“He’s fat because he loves his food.”
“And he whistles because he’s so jovial and contented.”
Jemima puts her head in her hands. “Oh, god, I don’t want that. I want thin angsty man.”
“And I just want you to be happy.”
I do want her to be happy. Despite all the fighting and the dieting and the clothes-stealing, that’s all we’ve ever wanted for each other. I want her to have what I have, I suppose—the marriage and the children—but what arrogance is it of mine to think that’s what will make her happy? I mean, it’s not exactly working for me, is it? I worry that in fact, I want her to meet someone and settle down not because I want her to be happy like me, but because I want her to be unhappy like me.
She perks up once again as Joel returns. People do that, around Joel—he can make everyone but me glow. He’s well on his way to becoming fat, though I haven’t heard him whistle much of late.
“Joel, do you think you can tidy up the breakfast things so I can get on with laying the table?”
Jemima makes that rising-inflection “ooh” sound that children do when their teacher gets annoyed, as in “Ooh, Miss has got a bit batey.” “Mary,” she says, “nobody would ever guess that you kept your side of our bedroom so messy that there were things growing in it.”
“I know, she was wonderfully untidy,” says Joel. “It was one of the things I fell in love with, her fantastically slatternly ways.”
“Yeah, well, you have to do a bit more maintenance when you’ve got children, Joel.”
“Do you remember,” Jemima says, “how you used to make a line out of tights across the room. Do you remember those really thick woolly ones that Mom used to try to get us to darn if we got holes in them?”
“Make do and mend, she used to say. Don’t know the last time I darned a sock.”
“I’ve got some you could work on,” says Joel.
“Very funny,” I say. “I do remember the Maginot Line of tights. You weren’t allowed to step over it or put any of your stuff in my territory.”
“You used to move it a few inches further into my side of the room every day and think I wouldn’t notice.”
Joel laughs. “I expect you’d like to do that in our bedroom too.”
“It’s odd,” I say, “that you spend the whole of your childhood wishing you could have a bedroom of your own and your entire twenties trying to share one again.”
“But even when we were small,” Jemima continues, “you used to count up the number of tiles on the bathroom wall to make sure that we had exactly half the bath each to sit in. Although there was an odd number of tiles, so you took the extra one as you said you were older.”
“You were just as bad.” These stories are well worn and age has weathered them from bitter battles to fond memories. “One time you wouldn’t let me get out of the car over ‘your side’ and we were parked up against a wall, so I ended up having to climb into the boot and out that way.”
“You complained if I looked out of ‘your’ window. And you counted the hundreds and thousands on my fairy cake just to check it didn’t have more than yours.”
“What about tubes of Smarties? We always had to pour them out to check that they had equal amounts.”
“That was you that used to do that. You’d nick all my orange ones.�
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“I love these stories,” says Joel, accompanied by the chortle that reminds me so much of his mother. “Go on.” Being an only child, he thinks that sibling bickering is like the national dance of an Eastern European country—hilarious to witness, but mortifying to have actually partaken in. When our sons fight—which they do, constantly—he thinks it’s some unique family trait that has been inherited directly from me, like the red hair.
“You’ve heard them all before,” I say.
“But I’ll never tire of them.”
It’s fine for me and Jemima to laugh at each other’s pettiness, but not for Joel to join in.
“Have you spoken to Mom recently?” I ask her.
“Usual Sunday nighters. Just when I’m feeling most depressed and least likely to talk.”
“Same here,” I say. “She always rings when I’m grappling with the boys’ bedtime. She sounds worried about Dad.”
“She should be. He should cut down on his pork life, as the song says.”
“He is fat, isn’t he? Hope I haven’t inherited his gene.”
“Me neither.” We both do a check of our respective stomachs for reassurance.
Lunch is not the Italian family feast that I always fantasize it might be. Gabe spits out his shepherd’s pie, which his interpreter Rufus explains is because “it tastes like sick.” Jemima and I push the pie around our plates with reflexive competitiveness, throwing little glances at each other. If it wasn’t for Joel’s prodigious appetite, there would be leftover mince for weeks.
Joel brings out the cake, which he made the day before. It’s fudgy and sludgy and I have to concede, heavenly.
“Oh my god,” mouths Jemima, “this is a-maze-ing.” She dips her finger in the fudge icing and sucks it, making me want to put my own finger down my throat. Ah, happy memories of our shared bulimic phase. “Do not tell me it’s dairy-free.”
“It’s got marge and soy milk instead of butter. Plus best-quality dark chocolate,” he tells her. “And white wine vinegar, weirdly, but it seems to work.”
“That is so nice of you to do that for Mary.”
“It is my birthday,” I protest. “It’s not my fault I’m dairy intolerant.” Eyebrows are raised. “What is it with everyone thinking that? You wouldn’t say that if I had asthma or something. It’s a medical condition.”
“You are such an incredible cook, Joel,” Jemima says. “You’re so lucky, Mary. Why can’t I find a nice man like him? How come you managed to nab such a winner?”
How had I? I had often wondered this when I’d been enjoying the first flush of our love, many years and children ago. I can remember so clearly him walking into the office; he was wearing a thick slate-gray polo neck that was shredded at the cuffs, worn-down gray cords and Converse trainers long before they were fashionable. I don’t know why I keep the vision of his first appearance so pristine in my memory since at first I didn’t find him remotely attractive. Being immune to the charms of Joel Tennant put me in a minority of one in the office. The other women, including Mitzi, ran around him though he was barely more than a runner himself. I prided myself on remaining aloof, but then, like the last sibling in the family to catch chicken pox, when I fell, I fell the hardest.
I look at my birthday cake. It has nine candles on it, three and six added together. When I had my ninth birthday, Jemima stripped naked and tried to do headstands, which everyone else thought was adorable. Mom made an elaborate cake in the shape of a fat little pony and found a redheaded doll to sit on top. It was back when she didn’t work, so she could devote herself to her pair of ingrate daughters and slothful husband. She went back to work again when we were at secondary school, but her devotion to the house and the household remained unstinting. Dad’s work within the home didn’t increase in line with hers outside, and when he did make some minimal contribution, badly—laying the table or a fry-up—he’d call it “helping your mother.” And if she ever asked Jemima and I to do anything, we’d shout “Why don’t you ask Dad to do it? God, you’re so sexist, Mom. Stop colluding with the patriarchal society!” Rather touchingly, our mother could not hide her excitement at getting out of the house to work and would carry a completely unnecessary briefcase and take “urgent” phone calls from the university office where she did admin, during which she’d talk too loudly about “faculty strategy” and return to the kitchen looking flushed with self-importance.
I think of the other times my birthday has added up to nine. My eighteenth, when I snogged David Parsons, who was absolutely gorgeous but also trying to see how many girls from our school he could rack up. Jemima turned him down a couple of months later, to her credit, although when I asked her why, she said, “Blergh, he’s revolting,” which made me feel small about my own feelings of triumph at having kissed him. I didn’t have a party for my twenty-seventh. I felt like I was hurtling toward thirty, which at the time seemed so old and so scary. When I finally got there, I felt giddy with relief after dreading it for so long. Why didn’t I enjoy my twenties more? Why didn’t I revel in my youthful gorgeousness and enjoy the power that I could have yielded? I wasn’t perfect looking, but my god, it was as good as it gets and I didn’t appreciate it. If only I had known on my twenty-seventh birthday that later that year, I would meet Joel and become as happy as I’d ever been or probably will ever be.
“Nine candles,” I announce. I have nothing else to add.
Joel ruffles my hair in the manner of an uncle to a small child. “What are your plans for your thirty-seventh year?”
“I’m going to find myself a keeper,” says Jemima. “And then I’m going to have a baby. Maybe not all this year.”
“My plans are…” I trail off. My plans, if you must know, Joel, are this: today is the last day of January and the last day of the phase of List Compilation. Tomorrow is the first day of February and it shall also be the first day of List Implementation. I shall spend the night of my birthday not dancing in a club nor out in a restaurant with friends, but putting the finishing touches to my Excel spreadsheet of marital investigation.
Every month you shall have an allowance of two debits a day. These are your freebies, if you like. Anything you spend over this and don’t claw back by positive points will go toward your monthly total. Thanks to Becky’s intervention, I won’t count yin negatives that follow yang positives, does that make sense? It means that if you change a diaper, you won’t be penalized for not putting it in the diaper bin, or if you make a delicious meal, you won’t be penalized for not clearing it up.
Any debits over your monthly allowance (i.e., 60 in September, April, June and November; 62 for the others, save February, 56) will be added to your total score of infringements. If, after six months, this score is over 100 points, then that’s it; the proof I needed that you’re a selfish, lazy pig with no respect for me, this house or this family.
It needs a bit of tweaking, but it’s almost there. I itch to get back to the laptop and finesse its wonder. Each month has its own spreadsheet. Across the top are written the dates. In each of the columns, I will be writing a number that can be cross-referenced to a separate tab where I have sorted the top 100 of his crimes into subsections like kitchen, bathroom, laundry and general ineptitude. There’s another tab with the dozen or so credits that can offset them.
“Do you two mind emptying the dishwasher?” I ask Joel and Jemima. They slowly do, with Joel leaving the more obscure items in there for me to repatriate, as is his habit. Once I left Rufus’s soup flask in there just to see how long Joel would manage to ignore it and it survived five cycles before I realized that this repeated washing was eroding the dinosaur transfer and I decided to rescue it. It’s the same when he empties the plastic bags brought by the online supermarket delivery. Doesn’t know where baking powder goes, just leaves it in the bag. Black-eyed peas? Sing “Where Is the Love?” and leave them lying on the counter.
I briskly wipe surfaces, pick up food from the floor and look at the way they have moved plates nearer
the dishwasher but not actually into the dishwasher. Joel has already settled back into his chair and is looking at me with bemusement.
“Relax, Maz,” he says. “Why don’t we just do it later?”
“Because it will be me not we that does it later. I hate it when you say that.”
Jemima gives me a quizzical look. We’ve shared everything from nits to knitwear, but I don’t ever tell her all that I have to complain of in my life. Rufus’s belief in the tooth fairy and Jemima’s in the happy-ever-after are precious gobbets of innocence in a corrupted world. “Fine,” I say. “Let’s clear it up later then. Why don’t you switch on the kids’ channel, ASBO parent style, and I’ll make some tea?”
Later, Jemima and Joel are playing a game with Rufus and Gabe that involves eating pistachios and throwing the shells back into the jar. Everyone finds this hilarious and I don’t dare be the boring one, as usual, and tell them to throw the empty shells into the compost.
“Jemima,” I say. “Do you remember how Mom used to get you a present on my birthday, so you didn’t feel left out?”
“You’ve reminded me often enough.”
“And then on your birthday I didn’t get one too, and they used to tell me not to be so silly and that I was older…”
Joel and Jemima say together, “It’s not fair,” their voices a whining imitation of mine. They fall about laughing at that.
“Well, it wasn’t…”
“Life isn’t,” they say again with one voice.
“No, I suppose not.” I look at my husband and my sister. One large and dark, the other thin and blonde, but the same, they are the same. Both effortlessly favored, blessed by love, the people that others gravitate toward, the ones whose names are remembered. Now we are always “Joelandmary,” just as it was always “Jemimaandmary” as I was growing up. I’m an idiot. I spent my whole childhood grappling for popularity in the face of an alpha girl sister and now I’ve only gone and married someone who makes me feel the same way. As a child, I lived with parents who seemed to prefer the other one. As a parent, I live with children who definitely prefer the other one. I’m a second-class inter-generational sandwich.
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