Turn Us Again

by Charlotte Mendel

  My father wears a pained expression. For a second he props his great head in his hands again, maybe he is shedding tears. I am glad that the remembrance of what he did to my mother is painful for him. “I didn’t mean it was the same. What I did to your mother was shameful. There is no justification for it. However, there are feelings leading up to such behaviour which I believe you have experienced, and I’m trying to recreate them for you. Not to justify, but because it wasn’t just an outrageous hit in the middle of nothing. It was the result of a complex hybrid of feelings which your mother exacerbated instead of dissipating.”

  I feel a heaviness in my chest. If he tries to put the blame on my mother I will crush him. He is infinitely crushable. I am big and he is dying. Why does the ability for revenge outlast the need?

  “The story doesn’t end with yanking Fleabag’s collar. When you yanked her, she fell on her back in a subservient position. You were contrite and spent several days patting her and spoiling her in apology, but Fleabag still trembled when you made a sudden movement. The injustice of her fear when you had always been so good to her was infuriating, and you asked me about it. We were sitting side by side just like we do every evening, except that we were sitting by a real wood fire, not a nasty electric thing like the one in this house. Fleabag had just made some unnecessary cringing motion as your hand approached for a caress, and you said, ‘Daddy, I hate Fleabag!’

  “I was surprised, because I had observed the munificence of your affections. I asked what you meant and you said, ‘I am so good to her, always! I shouted at her once, when she deserved it anyway, and since then she’s been cringing and minging as though I’m a cruel tyrant.’

  “‘She’s a timid dog. It’s a shame we didn’t notice it at the pound, and pick another one. You will have to be gentle with her always, if she is so easily cowed.’

  “‘I can’t be gentle always! She should love me anyway, the way that I am! Because I am so good to her.’

  “And then of course, it happened again, because she was a stupid, irritating dog and impossible to train. And the next time she cringed in exaggerated terror you thought you might as well be hung for a wolf as for a lamb, and you belted her. Then she cringed all the time, and you began to hate her and ignore her.”

  “Yes, I remember some of this. I remember that I was upset about something one day, and I took her for a walk to calm my nerves. I tripped on a stone or something and she leapt to one side as though I meant to kill her. I was having a bad day and I lost control. I grabbed her and smacked her again and again. It made me feel terrible, and I sucked up to her for days afterwards.”

  “I ‘sucked up’ as you call it, to your mother as well. She exploited my conciliatory mood more efficiently than Fleabag.”

  “It’s not the same,” I shout, furious.

  “The feelings are the same. The desire, the struggle to be good, the slight lapse (which, in the beginning, is barely a lapse) followed by endless recriminations.”

  “Barely a lapse?”

  “You’ve read about her family, how they lived with each other’s faults without saying ‘boo’ to one another. In my family we yelled all the time. I don’t think one way is worse than the other. Neither are ideal modes of communication. But in the beginning I just yelled and was treated like a pariah for reacting the only way I knew how. She never helped me to change by being understanding or communicating about how she felt. She just put on a cold face and ceased to talk to me, sometimes for days. So I grew indifferent. The first time I hit her I was drunk. That didn’t excuse it but if she had come and held my hands, said this mustn’t happen again, what can we do to prevent it? What can we both do, not just me, then maybe the situation wouldn’t have deteriorated in the way that it did. Instead she opted for long faces, recriminatory silences and cringes, yes. An exaggerated, unfair reaction, almost as if she were pretending to be frightened, because how could she really be, when she knew I loved her so much?”

  “At the beginning.”

  “Yes, at the beginning. These things get worse, if they are not resolved, as you know.”

  “What do you mean, as I know? Because I got angrier at Fleabag? How can you compare the two?”

  “I’m sorry. I thought that if you had this temperament, it would show up in your relationships as well.”

  My outrage at his comparing his wife-beating activities to my childhood anger with a dog shudders to a stop as I think about Jenny.

  Christmas 2003, Jenny’s parents — with whom I have no real relationship — and her sister who has a toddler called April. They are boring, staid, they do not converse. They regard me warily, as I try to talk about interesting things like the government’s wheeling dealings with our tax money, slipping it to friends and losing millions in embarrassing holes. The political situation in the Middle East. They chew their cud and nod agreement, never contributing any ideas of their own. They drain my energies, but it wouldn’t matter if only they saw me as dynamic and interesting. Perhaps rather unstable, but a worthy mate for Jenny — she provides the stability and the sanity, and I provide the excitement.

  I am warming to my subject despite the lack of input, waving my fork about a little. Jenny nudges me and says, “You’re upsetting April.”

  I am astounded. “Excuse me? I’m just talking. Surely April can stand listening to animated conversation once in a while.”

  “You’re shouting.”

  This is outrageous. “I am NOT shouting — evidently you don’t know the difference. THIS IS SHOUTING, ALL RIGHT?” Pursed lips, bent heads, judgment and recrimination all around the table.

  I still struggle to be good, to be quiet, but I can feel my anger welling up inside, the same way that Jenny says her tears well up when she has PMS. She wants to quell them, but she can’t, they come anyway.

  I half-rise to cut myself another slice of bread from the loaf on the table. The knife slips and the sudden pain as it slices into my finger makes me yelp, “FUCK!”

  Both Jenny and her sister leap to their feet in anger. The sister claps her hands over April’s ears. “Come on sweetie. Let’s go watch TV.”

  I leap to my feet too and snap after them, “Yes, go vegetate in front of the idiot box. I’m sure April will learn more important truths from the television than the fact that adults get angry and yell once in a while.” I raise my voice to make sure it reaches them as they scurry down the stairs to the den. “It’s good for her to realize people get upset and yell, and the world isn’t going to fall apart! You bring a child up wrapped in cotton wool, she’ll feel ashamed of her own emotions.”

  Jenny’s father also rises from his seat. “Young man, if you don’t stop shouting I will have to ask you to leave.”

  I look at the bent, embarrassed face of the mother. “You’re all emotional eunuchs,” I hiss at them, furious that they are judging me, wanting to judge them back.

  Then I leave the table and race up to our room, where I pound the pillow in absolute hatred of the world and the destroyed evening, which I had wanted to be nice. And of course everybody thinks it’s my fault. Another proof that I have a screw loose. But I’m just a human being, doing the best I can with what has been allotted to me. Perhaps my allotment contains stronger emotions than theirs, and they cannot understand me. I despise them for their pride in a control which takes no effort, because there are no real feelings to challenge it.

  A hand on my shoulder snaps me out of my reverie, and I sit bolt upright, jerking my body to dislodge the hand. Jenny falls off the bed, where she must have been perching with extreme precariousness. She comes up hissing (God forbid she should scream for her parents to hear) “You need help! Talk to a psychiatrist or something and learn some control. I’m wasting my time with you.”

  “GET OUT OF THIS ROOM!” I yell. It is all so fucking outrageous. I don’t even understand how it happened. It was all so quick. What did I do that justifies
my partner suggesting that I am a nut?

  As a result, of course, I behave like a nut.

  I look at my father, who removes his gaze, though he had been looking at me. I nod, trusting that he can see me from his peripheral vision. I understand that he doesn’t want to justify his behaviour, because obviously it is terrible to hit your wife. He just wants me to understand his perspective. There are always two perspectives. Even with murder, there are things called extenuating circumstances.

  While he’s sleeping I pop out to Marks and Sparks and buy a fish pie for our dinner. Most of our meals come ready-made and frozen, but familiarity does not yield weariness.

  If I had known it was the last meal I was to eat with my father I might have bought something a bit fancier.

  After dinner we sit opposite each other on either side of the electric fire. I think my father looks a little anxious.

  “This is the ending,” I say to him.

  “It’s not the ending,” he replies. “I’ve already told you, the manuscript is incomplete — it just stops.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sam’s foreboding, morose presence seemed to cast a pall over the house. Madelyn brooded over the incident on the beach. His violence must have had something to do with her remarks in the car, but she could no longer recall why she had said it. She had never thought, or cared, about where Jewish allegiance lay. As to the comment about Jewish men preferring their mothers, perhaps it was a silly comment. So what? Other people made silly comments without incurring physical punishment.

  He had never hit her in public before. He must have been in a towering rage. She wished that someone on the beach had leapt to her defence and beat Sam to a pulp.

  The depression shuffled on for months, with rainy, miserable winter weather doing little to relieve it. Quarrels flared sporadically, followed by long, indifferent silences.

  Madelyn had difficulty remembering the particulars of any one argument. They blended into an interminable season of unhappiness. She picked up her diary for the first time in months to record the details of specific fights, in case an avoidable pattern should emerge.

  Sam and I have quarrelled. I thought it trivial enough, but he seems to be welling in bitterness and digging up all the wrongs I have ever done him, as usual. I feel like a straw doll. Whenever there is hostility between us life seems unendurable, or perhaps I create the hostility when life is unendurable.

  We have both been tired all week. Last night we went out to the ‘faculty club.’ Despite his initial reaction, Sam has taken my advice and is trying to be chummier with his colleagues. In any event, he has arranged a weekly meeting at the club with those who hate him least. We might enjoy it, if he didn’t get in such a state about it.

  We have to be in the Ladies (Ladies!) beverage room every Friday evening on the exact dot of 8:00, even though nobody else arrives till at least 9:00. We settle ourselves and wait for anyone else who might turn up. Often one or two couples come, but one time there was quite a crowd, and ever since then Sam has been anxious about seating space. The following Friday he rushed off to find a waiter to see if we were allowed to put two tables together. It being agreed upon, Sam rushed through the tavern, proceeding to scrape chairs and tables, yakking about ‘his club.’ We were the object of a great deal of observation, from one end of the place to the other. So we sat at our two large tables, watching the door and feeling foolish. At 9:30 the others started to arrive.

  The following Friday the same performance, except I believe this was the Friday one of the waiters rushed up to prevent us moving tables, thus providing further entertainment. I felt certain that few people would show up, for some reason, and no doubt I made a few foolish and neurotic remarks about the agony of waiting for the others, and the fuss we always have to make. I was trying to prevent the embarrassment of sitting alone at an enlarged table (the place is always full). Foolish, vain feelings, these may be, but they are real enough so why should they be the object of Sam’s sneers? (He told me to ‘go and get some more pills.’) We sat in black and complete silence for another forty-five minutes. Then Ruth and Mark appeared, making some irritating remark on our solitude. Sam launched into a heated account of the throng of new faces we had met last week, finishing with an unexpected attack on me, and how I was trying to sabotage the faculty club by insisting nobody would show up, and then sitting in aggrieved silence when they did.

  Mark of course was uncomfortable, as strangers always are when married couples attack each other publicly. (I have never known anyone indulge in this activity apart from us, although I often feel hostility and scorn between married couples.) Things got a little better when the Smiths arrived, until Sam and Mrs. Smith got into a scarcely amiable battle about the merits of Liberals versus Conservatives in the Canadian government. Sam managed to get in two parting shots as we left, while the Smiths sat gaping like fish.

  I made a few nasty comments about Sam’s childishness on the way out, causing him to shout all the way to the car,

  ‘You fucking idiot — shit — fucking…’ etc etc.

  Very English gentleman!

  All the way home he bellowed, ‘And who likes me the most (talking of the Smiths), not only likes, but respects me the most! You don’t have any friends but me’ and so on and so forth.

  Madelyn decided to go away for twenty-four hours, making arrangements for a babysitter to come while Sam was lecturing. Sam often talked of the recuperative effects of isolation. Perhaps a night in a nice hotel might jerk her out of this ongoing hopelessness.

  She left a detailed list of instructions regarding Gabriel and watched the purple hue of stress and anxiety mounting in Sam’s cheek as he read it. Still, he accepted her request because he understood it.

  The hotel was wonderful. It boasted an indoor pool and she swam for hours, back and forth, admiring her shimmering pale skin underneath the surface. She took great delight in the passage of her smooth body through the water and imagined that the other occupants of the pool were watching her as well. How long had it been since she had revelled in her own body like that? Not for years. Not since Gabriel.

  The food in the restaurant was first class, and she sipped an expensive glass of white wine with her salmon and profiteroles. Eating alone was a strange sensation, and she felt self-conscious, in case other people thought she had nobody to eat with.

  There was a band playing in the adjoining pub, and Madelyn kept looking in that direction, wishing she had the courage to walk in alone.

  “Have you finished, Ma’am?” the waiter asked, one hand hovering over her empty plate.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “That’s great music. Why don’t you go in and listen to them for a while?”

  Madelyn looked up, startled. Brown eyes held hers, crinkly laugh lines, grey lacing his goatee.

  “It is hard to go into places like that alone,” she said, surprised at her own frankness.

  “I’m getting off soon. I’d be happy to go in with you.”

  Madelyn hesitated, then thought she would not have hesitated before her marriage.

  “Thank you. I will wait.”

  She took his arm like a shy school girl, but when he steered her towards a table she pulled in the opposite direction. “Let’s dance.”

  And Madelyn danced. Her feet flew over the dance floor just like they used to, and everyone watched her, and the waiter swelled like a proud turkey and tried to dance closer but she whirled away, laughing like a mad woman.

  In the end he captured her, and leant too close as he pulled her to the table. “I’m not fit enough for this. Can I get you a drink?”

  While he was away another man approached. “You’re some dancer.” Then he hesitated, so Madelyn prompted him. “Shall we?”

  And she let him press up against her in the slow part. “What’s your name?”

  “My name is Anne.”

&
nbsp; And the waiter waited, and Madelyn danced, and bestowed a few kind words as she knocked back the drink he’d bought her before pointing to the handsomest of a group of womenless men. “You! Know how to dance?”

  And when she got back the waiter wasn’t waiting but it didn’t matter because The Handsomest had a drink in his hand. “You are so beautiful. Why haven’t I seen you here before?”

  “Maybe because I’m an old married woman,” Madelyn said, and roared with laughter. And by the fifth gin and tonic he put his hand on her thigh when he told her she was beautiful, and by the seventh he put his hand on her breast. And she flicked it off like a spider, overcome with an overwhelming urge to leave. She stood up. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  “That’s it? Stay for one more.”

  “Another time.”

  “When? When will you be here again?”

  “Same time next week,” she lied and lurched out of the pub.

  It was pleasant to escape to the sanctuary of her room, away from all those eyes. She ordered coffee and soaked in the bath. Luxury.

  The tension in the house was palpable when she got home the next evening. Sam was drunk, crouched over the kitchen table like a huge black bear. Gabriel ran out of his room to greet her with a kiss and then disappeared again. Madelyn realized he had got into the habit of disappearing whenever the atmosphere was unpleasant.

  Sam looked at her with a vile expression. “I was awake most of the night. Gabriel had nightmare after nightmare.”

  “I hope you were patient and sympathetic. Did you take him into bed with you?”

  “I did. He started rolling back and forth like something demented.”

  “Yes, his nights are very exhausting. I don’t know what’s going on inside his head, but the doctor said he’d grow out of it.”

  “I did not sleep, and I had to teach classes today as usual.”

  “Well, it’s only one day. I’m tired every day.” Madelyn wondered at herself even as the words slipped out of her mouth. She knew Sam suffered from stress and could visualize him lying beside the restless, sweating young body, incapacitated by anxiety and tension all night long. Wondering if he could cope, wondering if Gabriel would come to harm at his hands.