The Lives of Women

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  ‘I hate this apartment,’ Serena said. ‘I hate the neighbourhood. I hate the walls, I hate the windows, I hate him.’

  Now, when I wake each morning, it’s to a sense of unease. I keep my eyes shut until I find the wherewithal to let in the light. I am always wary, if not exactly afraid. It’s this silence, I think, this hard, intransigent silence.

  I look across the street and can’t tell who lives in the Hanley house now, who owns the Townsends’. Elbow-height hedges have been replaced by tall trees. Gates, solid and high, are electronically operated. Cars come and go. From the upstairs rooms, specks of electric light show through the sparse winter foliage but I couldn’t say whose hand has turned on the switch. I can’t tell if the Hanleys’ garden room is still in place, or if Doctor Townsend’s surgery still exists – it could be a computer room now, or maybe a home gym; it could be completely razed. I don’t know if Agatha’s old room is still there – her glass prison. The walls are too high and I can’t see over. When visitors call, they speak into an intercom built into the pillar, then the gates cautiously part and a car is slowly sucked in.

  Other houses in the neighbourhood have cut themselves off to a lesser degree: no house seems to be without a burglar alarm and a few have electronic gates – there is a general security awareness around here that didn’t exist when I was a child. But the Hanley and Townsend houses are different: both gates are identical and look pretty old, as if they were put up at the same time – while the Hanleys and Townsends were still living there, most likely. In which case the reason for the gates would not be to keep out intruders, but to keep themselves in.

  Since I’ve been back, I’ve hardly seen any of the old neighbours. Apart from those faces I found on the memorial cards in my mother’s shoebox, I don’t know for certain who has died or who has moved away, who has gone into a retirement home.

  I drive past some doddery old guy and he could be anyone. Sexpot Jackson or fussy little Tansey. I see a car parked outside the local hairdresser’s, a zimmer frame protruding like an overbite from its open passenger door, and I wonder who owns the fading blue rinse on the other end of it – Mrs Preston or Jackson or Owens?

  Mrs Ryan is my only real contact from the old days, the only person around here that I could come close to calling a friend – although I’m not sure she would care to return the compliment.

  Sometimes I think I see it in her face when we sit opposite each other at her pinewood kitchen table. We don’t talk about the past as a rule, or at least we have learned how to skate around the edges. But it’s there, like a leaked fart in the room that we both pretend not to notice.

  The first time I called in to see her was a couple of days after my return, when I arrived with my excuses warm in my pocket.

  She said, ‘Elaine – my goodness!’ and stepped aside to let me in, then proceeded to fill up every minute of the visit with other subjects: the recent government cuts; the ridiculous amount of new television channels; the price of electricity; her garden; her hip surgery. Anything. In between she asked me questions about New York – simple, narrow things that could just as easily have been applied to any small town in almost any country: the cost of living, the size of apartments, the transport system, the food.

  She was still going on about New York over an hour later as she showed me out.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘is it as cold there in winter as it looks on the news?’

  ‘Colder,’ I said, which seemed to make her happy.

  *

  My ears were ringing after that first visit, but I was grateful too that she hadn’t given me the smallest opportunity to lie about my mother’s funeral.

  Almost four months ago, in New York, the phone woke me up just before dawn and not long after I’d gone to bed.

  A voice on the end of it told me that my mother was dying in hospital and that if I wanted to see her I should get on a plane.

  ‘Does she want to see me?’ I asked the voice.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Let me put it this way, Nurse,’ I began, ‘has she asked to see me? Actually asked? Because otherwise…’

  ‘Elaine, dear, it’s Sally Ryan.’

  ‘Sally Ryan?’

  ‘Yes – you know? Sally Ryan from next door.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, of course, Mrs Ryan. How are you? I presumed you were a—’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind but you see your phone number was in a little book in the drawer in the hall and I just thought well I thought I’d better what with your father after his cancer – you know about his cancer – of course you do oh he’s recovered in almost every way except of course he can’t walk… and there’s the oh now what do you call it yes colostomy bag and the wheelchair I’ve been helping out since your mother went into hospital but Mrs Larkin well she’s going to Australia at the end of next week and will be gone for quite a while and he needs to find a nurse now wouldn’t you say and a housekeeper I suppose too a temporary one though because Mrs Larkin swears she’ll be back in a couple of months and I wouldn’t like to think of her out of a job she’s been saving so long for this trip her son you see and there’s a grandchild now as well as other relatives all over Australia and New Zealand too I believe I’ve been doing what I can a bit of shopping and that but I’ve just had my hip done you see and… and I think he’s a bit awkward with me in the house to be honest you know how it is and in any case I’m not sure how to go about getting a nurse that might suit him and well your mother God help her is so bad now that the doctors are saying it’s only a matter of… Elaine? Elaine – are you still there?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes, Mrs Ryan, thank you for letting me know. Of course I’ll come. I’ll come right away.’

  I put down the phone and opened the blinds. Then I stood for a while watching the dawn spit orange fizz all over New York. And all I could think was I never even asked about Jilly – that is, if Jilly was even still alive.

  And so I got in a taxi and got on a plane and then got off it again. Anything in between was a Xanax-blurred, vodka-tinged muddle of colours and queues and shrill overhead voices. I was in a different airport then, standing at a car hire desk and wondering what I was doing hiring a car when my parents’ house was probably only a twenty minute taxi ride away. I decided maybe it would be as well to have a car in case things got awkward and I needed to stay in a hotel. Or even if things didn’t get awkward and I needed to make myself useful. My father, now wheelchair bound, probably no longer had a car. There would be errands to run, arrangements to make. Yes, much better off with a car.

  And so, glowing with my own efficiency and all round good sense, I got in the car and began to negotiate my way out of the airport. A road sign appeared in front of me – at the next roundabout I would need to turn right and stay southbound to get to my parents’ house. I circled the entire roundabout once then I circled it a second time. Third time round, I turned left and headed due north.

  I turned left and stayed northbound for maybe four hours, only stopping when I needed to – once at a gas station, another time at an isolated roadside bar that turned out to be closed down and where I ended up peeing around the back, between old beer kegs and crates of empty bottles. When I could go no further without driving the car right into the sea, I found a hotel for the night. Next day I began moving west. And there I stayed, just another Yank of a certain age on a solo vacation. During the day I went touring; in the evenings I ate dinner and sometimes drank a little too much. If I happened to fall into a conversation, I invented myself – once I was a teacher, another time a librarian. I was here on my own because my friend and would-be travelling companion had broken her leg a few days previously, but had insisted I go anyway. I always felt the need to explain or even apologise for my lack of a companion and each time had to wonder what it is that makes us so ashamed of being alone?

  I had coffee by the fireside of a country house hotel on a day of relentless rain and hooked up with an elderly Swedish couple. Later we went fo
r a walk through the sodden grounds where the woman slipped and fell on her back and stayed there laughing in a patch of wet grass, her old face in an anorak hood, plump and crumpled with joy, while her husband and I, now also laughing, tried to haul her back up on her feet. That evening they invited me to join them for dinner. And I remember looking at them and thinking – here I am with these two elderly, laughing strangers, while my own mother is dying in hospital and my father is inching around an empty house in a wheelchair, and I can’t honestly remember when I last had this much fun.

  In a grim hotel in a dismal town, I hooked up with a hefty Lithuanian barman. He had a hairy back and gave an even-sized grunt each time he shoved himself into me. ‘Shove away,’ I thought, ‘just don’t take all night.’ I was too drunk to care and, besides, the sex wasn’t the point – and I’m not sure what was really, except that I needed to feel the weight of a man on top, crushing me.

  Every day I checked the death notices and waited. And then one morning, in the corner of a musty dining room somewhere on the north-western seaboard, I found out that my mother was dead.

  Greatly missed by her daughter Elaine… I read and almost laughed out loud.

  Greatly missed! After thirty-four years I was over it.

  I folded the newspaper, ordered more coffee and sat for maybe an hour. I remember the room: thin salmon-coloured tablecloths, red plastic carnations, one to each table; thick brown velvet drapes coated with ancient cigarette smoke. But I can’t remember myself in the room – how I was feeling or what I was doing. I may have been sobbing – although I doubt it. I may have just sat there staring out through a veil of soft rain at the steady, grey sea.

  And then, two days later – as if there was the slightest chance of making it to the funeral – I drove back down country like a maniac.

  I call in to see Mrs Ryan about twice a week. We have tea – sometimes she’ll have cake or I’ll bring in some biscuits. Often we’ll just have the tea and she’ll smoke two cigarettes. Shortly after the second one, she’ll begin to yawn and then I’ll know it’s time to think about leaving.

  For the first few weeks I called on the same days, at around the same time in the afternoon, and then she asked me not to do that any more.

  ‘Oh it’s not that I’m on a timetable or anything,’ she laughed, ‘I just don’t want to start expecting you – you know?’

  And I thought of the fence at the end of the garden and wondered if it was still there and, if so, had it ever been mended.

  I always liked Mrs Ryan, a calm-eyed, timid sort of woman with a touch of steel in her bones. Like Maggie Arlow, she had seemed somewhat removed from the other women, although for entirely different reasons. When I was a kid, I used to go to the shops for her and she would insist on giving me something for my trouble, pressing a coin or a bar of chocolate into my hand and showing far more gratitude than this small deed warranted.

  In her heartache over Jilly, she had been very much alone and, I suppose now, the fact that I visited Jilly, spoke to her and even played with her in my own clumsy, one-sided way, stood me in good stead with Mrs Ryan. She didn’t have to feel ashamed of her daughter in front of me anyhow, and that must have meant something.

  The night of the ‘unfortunate tragedy’ – as Serena came to call it – it was to Mrs Ryan’s house that I ran in the middle of the night, banging down the door and waking her. She calmed me down, hugging me until I stopped jerking like a caught fish. Then she had me breathe into a brown paper bag. Mrs Ryan was the one to call the ambulance and then she held my hand while she spoke on the phone to my father and, without letting go of it, led me down her back garden and up mine, towards his dressing-gowned figure standing stark against the fluorescent light of our kitchen.

  Since the first visit, I’ve known Jilly was dead, but it takes a few further visits before I bring up the subject again – not out of any indifference on my part but because of the frantic way Mrs Ryan hops from subject to subject like a basketball player trying to block an opponent, and I simply can’t get past her.

  One evening she opens the front door and, instead of leading me into the kitchen, invites me to follow her into the sitting room. There is a fire in the grate. Two glasses of sherry are waiting on the coffee table, along with a plate of neatly sliced cake. She hands me a glass, raises the other one and wishes me a happy birthday. I can’t believe she has remembered and I don’t know how to feel about this but, in any case, I have to turn away. My eye catches on a photograph across the room; I go to the sideboard and lift it. For a moment there is silence.

  ‘That was taken the day before she went into the home,’ Mrs Ryan finally says.

  ‘The home?’

  ‘It became impossible to mind her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I still have the dress – you know. God, the trouble I had getting it on her. The way she was all folded into herself. And all angles. The elbows on her! And as for those knees! I managed in the end – though I don’t suppose she even noticed.’

  ‘But you did.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I come back to the sofa, and sit beside Mrs Ryan, accepting a piece of cake. She lights her first cigarette and begins to explain.

  ‘I never went to see her, you know – years and years of looking after her and I never went near her. You probably think I’m a terrible mother?’

  ‘You must know I think the opposite.’

  ‘Too painful you see. People forget how painful it is… how seeing her there with all the others… She died a year later. Forty-five years of age. This used to be her room – do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Her bed over there – so I could get around it. You used to love pressing the button on it when you were a little one. Up down, up down. And the wheels on it. You used to help me to push it.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Poor old Jilly. You know – they told me she’d be lucky to reach puberty? All those years, I kept her alive. I wonder sometimes… Oh well.’

  ‘And what about Tom?’

  ‘Tom? He lives at the other end of the country.’

  ‘Married?’ I ask

  ‘To a witch,’ she says and laughs her head off.

  ‘And Mr Ryan?’

  ‘Oh, he left me, years ago – you heard that surely?’

  ‘No, I never hear anything. I guessed though.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Well, he’s not here – is he? And if he’d died you would have said.’

  ‘Oh no, he didn’t die. Just did a flit with a typist out of his work.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Hooo-ooo,’ she laughs again, ‘no need to be.’

  She lights up her second cigarette.

  ‘You weren’t upset then?’

  ‘More embarrassed than anything, I’d say. Embarrassed by myself for a start. My own stupidity.’

  ‘But why? You had no need to be—’

  ‘Of course I had. I wasted my life. We only get the one. And I wasted it. Giving it up, to this… to this man I hardly knew. I was twenty-one when I married. I had my few friends, a job I liked. Started at seventeen and was promoted twice, you know. In those days, you had to leave work when you got married. Yes. Give everything away. Your job. Your independence. Even your name. And when he left, I thought – well what a waste of bloody time that was! A stupid, shameful waste. I’ll admit, though, at first I was a little worried about money. How would we manage? But we did manage of course. The new one, you see… well, I didn’t imagine she’d be keen on him throwing too much our way and the thoughts of having to chase after it, month after month… I was cute, though – I told him stuff your maintenance, just sign over the house.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course he did, anything for a quick getaway. I remortgaged it too. Up to the chimneys. They’ll let me stay here till I die, then the bank will own it. I leave nothing behind, just enough to bury me, that’s all. Do I give a damn? No, I
don’t. But if you’re asking me did I miss him, the answer is no, Elaine. I didn’t. Not in my bed. And certainly not around the house. He blamed me for Jilly, you know, never forgave me. Like it was a trick I played on him. Do you know what he said to me during our last conversation – I mean, after he’d just told me he was leaving? “I only married you anyway because you were pregnant.” Wasn’t that a lovely thing to say, as you walk out the door? I wouldn’t mind but there was no need. I wasn’t stopping him from leaving. I wasn’t shouting at him nor calling him names. “I only married you because you were pregnant.” And do you know what I said right back up to him? I said, “And why do you think, now, that I married you?”

  ‘And that was the truth. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I’d have dumped him. I’d well gone off him by then. Well, when you’re young, you think sex is love – don’t you? Different nowadays – you can test each other out in the bed and no one thinks the worst of you. Get each other out of your systems. Ready to finish with him and then I found out Jilly was on the way. Poor Jilly, the way he couldn’t even bring himself to look at her.’

  If I was to talk to anyone about what happened all those years ago, it would probably be to Mrs Ryan. I have come close to it once or twice, but have always stopped short of the door. She is elderly, and I’m not sure it would be fair to burden her in order to unburden myself. I could trust her, at least – and it’s good to know that. Just as she once knew she could trust me.

  When Mrs Ryan found out she was pregnant on Thomas, apart from the doctor, I was first to know. I knew even before her husband did. I saw her coming out of the doctor’s surgery on the far side of the village, when I was on my way home from school one day.