The Lives of Women

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  Some day, she will say so to Martha Shillman. She’ll say it right up to her face. Her words will be assured and crisply delivered; they will put Mrs Shillman back in her place.

  ‘Well, Mrs Shillman, not everybody is the same, you know. Some of us like to make people happy, whereas others, it would seem, prefer to make them unhappy.’ Some day, she just might say that.

  She is arranging the cheese onto the bread when she sees, through the hall, her mother’s shape on the porch window. Elaine puts down her knife and takes a step back.

  Serena puts down the phone and opens the door.

  ‘I won’t come in, Mrs Greene,’ her mother is saying, ‘I just wanted to say – you know the way Mrs Hanley is having the, you know, the thing tomorrow afternoon?’

  ‘The mother-and-daughter afternoon, do you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that. Now, I know I haven’t had my turn yet, mine will be next week, but as I’ll be extending my invitation tomorrow at Mrs Hanley’s, I thought I should let you know that, well – and I hope you don’t mind – but I’m going to exclude the children from my invitation. You see, I’m not sure it’s fair on Mrs Townsend – as she has no daughters. And if we start inviting all the boys too, well, goodness knows where that could end up.’

  ‘Oh, you’re so right,’ Serena said, ‘I really only wanted the girls to get to know one another, and they’ve certainly done that by now. But I totally agree with you. Absolutely, I do.’

  On a rainy day, the women sit in the Hanleys’ garden room and look at each other. Her mother says: ‘Did you cut those flowers from the garden, Mrs Hanley? They really are beautiful and so perfect for that vase.’

  ‘Thank you, and I really wish you’d call me Mary,’ Mrs Hanley says. ‘Now, which will it be – tea or coffee?’

  ‘Tea would be lovely,’ her mother says.

  ‘Well. I’d like a drink actually…’ Mrs Shillman says, sounding as if she may already have had a few. ‘That’s if nobody objects?’

  Mrs Hanley hesitates before saying, ‘Of course. Please, help yourself.’

  Elaine’s mother gives a wittery laugh.

  Serena and Patty are last to arrive. Serena brings a plate of homemade French biscuits shaped into hearts. They’re called palmiers, she explains, and puts the plate on the table beside Mrs Hanley’s Swiss roll and chocolate digestives. Mrs Shillman says, ‘And we didn’t bring a thing! Really, Serena, you’re showing us up. I feel quite mean now, I really do.’

  Serena says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought everyone… I mean, it’s just something that’s done where I’m from…’

  ‘Something that’s done! Now you’re making us all feel mean. And bad-mannered at that.’

  Mrs Shillman’s eyes are glassed; her bottom lip is pouted.

  Mrs Hanley admires the French biscuits. She takes some of them off the plate and places them beside her slices of sponge cake. Then she picks slices of cake up and puts them on Serena’s plate alongside the remaining palmiers. She adds some chocolate digestives and then hands the plate to Elaine.

  ‘Agatha,’ she says, ‘why don’t you take the girls into your room and have a chat? There’s a jug of lemonade and glasses on a tray in the kitchen, if you wouldn’t mind bringing it, Rachel?’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you just all go and do that now!’ Mrs Shillman says loudly with a large sweep of her arm.

  Rachel turns and looks at her mother.

  ‘And what are you looking at?’ her mother says, the words sounding a little sticky in her mouth. ‘What the hell are you looking at now! Go on. Have a good look. Don’t forgot, now, to take it all in. Do you want a pen and paper in case you’d like to make a few notes?’

  Rachel’s face goes up like a balloon. She turns away from her mother and goes through to Agatha’s room. The girls follow in silence. They lie on the bed or on the floor and listen to music. The rain dribbles down the glass ceiling. They don’t speak for ages until Agatha says, ‘Has anyone got a smoke?’

  Patty stands up and goes around the room opening all the windows. She pulls a pouch out from the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I can do better than that,’ she says.

  When Elaine comes back into the garden room, the women have already gone. The cups have been cleared, the plates taken away, the ashtrays emptied. The flowers Mrs Hanley cut from the garden are balls of coloured fire in the grey rainy light.

  9

  Winter Present

  December

  I’M BACK IN MY old room. The room of my childhood and teenage years. The room where I slept until I was sixteen years old. Every trace of me has been removed from this room: here there is nothing to suggest the least of my former existence. I know it’s been a long time – but still, you’d think there’d be some little thing.

  I imagine my mother bagging my life, resisting the temptation to sniff and poke, to open a copybook, read a letter, examine more closely that curl of hair hidden in the blue plastic pouch. In her rush to be rid of me, suppressing her very nature.

  Did she give my things to charity, I wonder – what were my things then anyhow? A few clothes? Anything half-decent would have been put in the suitcase for New York. Apart from that winter coat that had cost her a packet a few weeks before I fell ill – by the time I’d recovered, I was swimming in it. There had been talk of having it altered. It owed me, she’d said, another winter.

  I imagine her, mourning the waste as she folded it like a shop assistant would fold it, edge to edge, before easing it into a black refuse sack. Bagging it all, bit by bit, week by week, so the neighbours wouldn’t notice.

  There was the box of books: those Mrs Hanley had given me, a few later additions bought with my pocket money. I’d been on a Steinbeck spree, as I recall; Steinbeck and Sartre.

  Until Jonathan introduced me to the Russians. The elation of being singled out (he thinks I’m clever, like him!) followed by the immediate deflation (oh no, if he thinks I’m clever, he can’t possibly fancy me).

  I stayed up all night to finish one, just to have something to talk to him about the following day. A slow, dense wade through the words; tangled names I practised in the middle of the night: Raskolnikov, Razumikhin. Crime and Punishment, a title that would turn out to be somewhat significant.

  What else? The cassette player I’d been given for Christmas – the last gift from my parents to me, although we weren’t to know that then. And a few cassettes Karl had loaned me which I pretended to enjoy just to feel part of something. For much the same reason, the posters on the wall: rock stars I might yet learn to admire; political ideals I might grow to understand.

  Always that bit behind; I wasn’t sure of anything then – I was only starting out.

  And of course the journals! Every thought in my stupid little head laid out in their pages. Now those she would have definitely thrown on the fire. She may well have done the same with Mrs Hanley’s books – flicking through the pages, finding those sentences I’d underlined – deciding on reflection that, after all, they had been a corrupting influence.

  Lastly, the furniture – there would have been no reason to get rid of every stick of it, but I know that’s exactly what she would have done. Did she saw it up like an axe murderer – the laundry basket lined in pink plastic? The dressing table and matching stool? What about the bed – how did she get rid of that? Why did she get rid of it at all? My old bed was far superior. My old bed was sturdy and large. A bed you could bounce on. The bedspread was candlewick. The curtains, a greenish gold. When you looked out the window you always saw something. When you lay on the bed you could hear things.

  Now, a car comes into the cul-de-sac in the night and it’s enough to jolt you awake. The clanking of the recycling truck terrifies the ear.

  An alarm goes off two blocks away and it’s like someone is screeching right into your brain. Mostly, though, there is silence. This has nothing to do with peace – in fact, it’s the opposite.

  I am used to New York noise, to being lulled to sleep every night by it and b
rought safely with it back into the morning. No matter what heartache or headache has been going on in my life, no matter which part of the city I’ve been living in, the white noise of New York has reached in and rocked me to sleep in its steel-plated crib. It’s been that way almost from the start – I say almost because for the first five or six weeks I had forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed.

  We were staying in a small midtown hotel then, while Serena searched for a permanent place for us to live.

  Every night, she carefully bladed a sleeping pill: one half for me, the other for herself. I saved all mine in the zip compartment of a vanity case my mother had given me when I was ten years old – a reward for coming first in an essay competition called ‘Summer Sundays with my Family’. A five-page fabrication in bright blue ink, heaving with lies I came to almost believe.

  I was so tired. In daylight, I would often pass out like a drunk – once when we were visiting a friend of Serena’s in her swish uptown apartment, I dropped my coffee cup mid-sentence and slid off her sofa.

  Another time, on the subway, in a graffiti-smothered car, I felt myself disappear into the wall as if I was just another one of the scribbles. When I came round I was slumped over a Chinese woman who was squawking like a chicken, while I clung on to her lap and had to be prised off by her husband.

  ‘Jet lag,’ I heard Serena apologise, her voice sounding as if it was submerged under water. And then sharper, and definitely not submerged, Patty: ‘For Christ’s sake, Mom, how could it still be jet lag?’

  Serena and Patty slept with their heads hermetically sealed: eye masks and ear plugs, a helmet of orange-coloured sponge curlers – so this was where their beautiful wavy hair had come from?

  I would lie in the dark, listening to their breathing, and try to think of a way to escape on my own – I wouldn’t need long, just enough time to find a private corner where I could take the stash of half-pills, lie down and quietly die.

  That was my plan; my only plan then. After everything that had happened, I had no interest in staying on in the world.

  In the morning, I would watch in a sleep-deprived daze as Serena and Patty did their exercises, lying on the floor, making scissors shapes in the air, courtesy of a contraption they carried in their luggage called a thigh-trimmer. I hated them then, their callous indifference, their ability to care about things like hair waves and trim thighs.

  Sometimes, I was starving and gorged on food all day; other times, I could hardly lift the fork, never mind get it to go into my mouth.

  I was forever biting my tongue and stubbing my toes; it was impossible for me to hold on to the shortest conversation. I heard Serena say: ‘I’m really worried about her. Do you think I should take her to a doctor? A therapist maybe?’

  And I heard Patty reply, ‘Oh, do what you like with her. I don’t care, I really don’t care!’

  And then one night I went into the bathroom, opened the window and listened. Below me, the sounds from the street. Horn honks and brake screams; cars twanging across man-hole covers; chimes from a nearby subway station. Behind all that, the slender whistles of doormen calling taxis to hotels and apartment buildings. Sirens catcalled across the city. Ambulances gulped nervously at street corners and junctions. A whine from a long-forgotten burglar alarm. Things clattered and whooshed and churned and farted and pinged. Wheels forever turning in this factory of outdoor noise.

  I took the cover and pillow from my bed, returned to the bathroom, lay on the floor and listened.

  My eyes shut down, my senses eased off, my thoughts were smothered. Distinctive, discordant sounds, almost but never quite blending. And yet there was a sort of promise running through it too. The first time I would hear an orchestra tuning, I would think of that big city sound.

  And so I was sleeping again and, physically at least, could begin to recover. I had a dream one night that a swarm of large insects had invaded the city; I could hear their metallic wings stridulating outside on the street and, terrified, woke myself up. When I looked out the window it was a caravan of rattling supermarket trolleys as scores of homeless people pushed their few possessions around town, in search of a soup kitchen or night shelter.

  Human voices sometimes intruded. All night voices: talking, laughing, disagreeing – in that slightly whiney, reasoning tone that I would come to recognise as a New York argument.

  Or foreign accents – usually drunk – that would sometimes break into a song of homesickness and longing. Mostly, it was a general late night chatter: friends, lovers, work colleagues, cops, night porters, junkies. Accents I’d only ever heard on the television. In fact, I sometimes woke in the night and for a moment imagined I was back on my mother’s sofa, where I’d fallen asleep with the television set still on.

  We stayed at that hotel while Serena searched for, and found, one apartment after another, before finally getting the go-ahead from her ex-husband. She explained to me, ‘Well, you know how it is – don’t you, honey? He who pay gets to say.’

  She was talking to me as much as ever; talking and forever explaining herself – a habit I was finding increasingly wearing as well as irritating. I had long stopped being interested in what Serena – or anyone else, for that matter – had to say. I wanted nothing to do with words or the commerce of words required for a conversation. Words were heavy, cumbersome things to me then.

  ‘You need to talk, sweetie, you need to let it out,’ Serena would say.

  ‘We’re here for you now – you know that, don’t you? If you think I’m too old to understand, then you can always talk to Patty.’

  But Patty wasn’t talking to me – except to remind me, every now and then, that she was never going to speak to me again.

  She took up a sulk the minute we got on the plane and has pretty much stayed in it ever since. She was civil enough in front of others – or at least no ruder to me than to anyone else. But right from the start, Patty made it clear that I was there only because my father was paying her mother to be my caretaker. I was not welcome in her life: not in the room we shared in that midtown hotel, not the apartment we would later move to, not the neighbourhood we were living in and certainly not in New York. At first I felt the weight of her resentment; later I learned to ignore it and, to be honest, I was grateful too, for the solitude it allowed me.

  They had an argument in the lobby of our hotel, Serena and her ex-husband. They didn’t scream at each other; there were no tears or slammed doors like the rows I had heard several times coming from the Ryan house or the Shillmans’. Not like the half-drunken snipes I had witnessed in the hallway of the Jacksons’ while I waited to be paid for a babysitting job after they’d come home from yet another unsuccessful night on the tiles. Nor was it one of those bitter, impenetrable silences such as I’d known in my own house.

  They just spoke very loudly to each other: loudly and slowly, as though each believed the other was deaf and maybe a little slow off the mark.

  It was a small, respectable hotel – the reception desk on one side and on the other, in an alcove, a half-moon bar counter and sitting area where people on leather sofas read newspapers and drank coffee. Everyone around listened in on the argument – the bartender, the bellboy, the woman on the desk, two businessmen having a meeting at a nearby table. I couldn’t get over that, the way Patty’s parents, and even Patty herself, didn’t seem to care that people could hear every word. Nor did the onlookers even try to disguise their interest. One man sitting at the counter turned his stool right around so he could get a better view – as if he’d paid for a ticket to the event.

  It was the first time I’d met Serena’s father. The first American man I’d seen up close and in action. He was not a handsome man; he was stocky and his feet seemed a little small for his body. His movements were abrupt. But I do remember being struck by his physical confidence, his startling masculinity. The way he looked right into your eyes when he spoke or turned his head to follow the sway of a woman’s backside as it moved through the lobby
. And the way he stood up suddenly as if about to make an announcement, and then did: ‘I don’t have time for this, so let me just say again – I don’t want Patty having her head turned by a load of phoney arty types: you better find some place else.’

  Serena said, ‘Oh, come on now! You’re being a little unreasonable – don’t you think? It’s not in the village as such, it’s more…’

  He said, ‘I’m not paying for it. You wanna live with pigs. You pay for the stye.’

  She said, ‘What are you talking about – pigs? You know, this is why we divorced – your intolerance, your blatant disregard for my feelings…’

  ‘I’m not here to talk about my intolerance and I got no interest in your feelings. I don’t want my daughter living there. Look what happened to you, for Christ’s sake, mixing with all those phoney assholes.’

  Then he flicked a slice of money off a wad and threw it on the table. He leaned down to Patty, cupped his two hands around her face, kissed her and said, ‘Call me if you need anything, sweetheart – okay?’

  ‘Nice meeting you,’ he said right into my eyes and I felt my face steam up and my heart give a disturbing little pop. Then he turned on his dainty heel and was whipped out of sight by the revolving door.

  She settled on an apartment in the mid-fifties. It was on the sixth floor and had a working elevator. It was close to a secretarial college where Patty would enrol in October. There was a doorman who would whistle you a taxi. You could walk a couple of blocks before coming across a destitute person sleeping in a bin or a door -way. There was a committee that made sure all the residents behaved nicely and that the public areas were maintained. Every -one knew one another: Mrs Rose across the hallway; Doctor Philips down the way. A retired college professor lived on the floor above; an art gallery owner on the floor below. In the building there were five small dogs and two Persian blue cats. The apartment itself was large; the kitchen had a huge oven. It allowed us a bedroom each. Large and quiet and entirely respectable.