The Lives of Women

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  Rachel is carrying her riding helmet like a basket over her arm. She pulls a packet of cigarettes out of it, then a lighter.

  ‘I have to say – it’s a bit mean on us. It’s not as if we did anything on her. And my mother, old bitch that she is, was always very nice to her. We’ve offered loads of time to have her – but no, it’s only the Donegans for her now. I said to my father – it’s your fault. You should have seen his face! I was just teasing him about that time he made her cry – you know the menorah story – and then he had to drive her home, she got so upset.

  ‘How do you know about that – were you in school?’

  ‘Brendie told me.’

  ‘Brendie? Agatha told Brendie?’

  ‘Agatha told her and she told me. Anyway, that was weeks ago… Ah, come on, cheer up, Elaine. Here, see what I have!’

  She pokes her finger into the lining of her riding hat and pulls out a folded note. ‘Nice big one,’ she says, holding it up. ‘This will buy a lot of fun. Agatha just has a snot on. Don’t mind her. Now why don’t we put the snot to the other side of her face. Show her we can have just as good a time without her. Let it filter back to her through Karl. She’ll soon wonder what she’s missing.’

  Another few days and she has had about enough of Agatha’s huff. She decides to call and see her in the middle of the night when Agatha can’t pretend to be out. She knows Ted is spending every other night at his mother’s house now and that Mrs Hanley will be sleeping in her room at the far side of the house. If she knocks at Agatha’s window, she’ll have to listen to her. She’ll have to believe how sorry she is.

  But when she gets to the side of Hanleys’ house, the glass room appears to be empty. She peers in all the windows but Agatha isn’t there. She waits for a few minutes in case Agatha is in the bathroom but there is no sound from the glass room. She turns to go home, but then remembers the shed.

  Halfway down the Hanleys’ back garden path, she hears dull thumping noises coming from the shed. Another few steps and she sees shadows through the window. The lamp is on – Agatha wouldn’t need to put the light on. In fact, she would keep it turned off in case Mrs Hanley noticed. A taste comes into her mouth, like a taste of fear. She senses there is someone in the shed with Agatha, someone who is trying to hurt her. In her mind she sees a sudden image of Agatha lying on the floor, someone on top of her, holding her down. Agatha – she has to save Agatha. She rushes to the window and looks in. And there is someone lying on the floor, but it isn’t Agatha. It’s a man. Agatha is sitting on top of this man. Agatha naked. Agatha naked and rocking on top of a man; his big hands holding her slight hips, pushing them back and forward, making them rock.

  She wants to run away but can’t seem to move, can’t stop looking in through the window. If Agatha could see, they would be staring right at each other. Elaine’s eyes burning, Agatha’s eyes hard and distant, like two river-washed stones.

  She knows the man. She knows him but can’t allow his name into her head. He is a man, that’s all. A half-dressed man. He is wearing a shirt and a loosened tie. His trousers are in a crumple on the floor; his underpants clinging on to the legs of them. His shoes on the floor, his jacket thrown over Mrs Hanley’s bookcase. The man’s eyes are closed; he is making a horrible face. Elaine feels sick. She gates her mouth with both hands, turns and runs back through the Hanleys’ back garden.

  At her bedroom window, she waits. A few minutes pass – hardly any time at all – before she sees him turning the corner. He must have got out over the Hanleys’ back wall, crept along by the back of Serena’s house, then the Townsends’ before slipping out onto the main road and coming into the cul-de-sac on the opposite side of the road to the Hanleys’.

  She watches him now, moving along, slyly tightening his tie as he goes. His walk is leisurely. He moves past the Ryan house, then her house, then on past the Jacksons’ before disappearing into the left-hand curve of the cul-de-sac.

  In the coming days, she will search back through the moments. She will look through her journal and try to find them, pressed between the pages like forgotten tokens. She will hold each one up to the light and examine it. She will pull out each moment; she will lay them all out end to end then add them all up. She will say: I should have known. I should have known. I should have seen it.

  11

  Winter Present

  January

  THE SMELL OF BRAISED onion crouches over the landing and as I come down the stairs there are other stray whiffs: red wine, bouquet garni, bacon, beef. On a tray on the kitchen table, last night’s empty plate sits like a small triumph.

  I go to the drawer, pull out the list, put a tick beside Boeuf Bourguignon – another one down.

  I am leaning the list on top of a large, thick brown envelope, as yet unopened since its arrival yesterday by registered post. Later today – or probably this evening – I will open and read it and then sign whatever needs to be signed.

  For the moment, though, my only concern is with this list here under my hand. As soon as I’ve crossed the last item off, it will be time to start another list. The second list will be less time-consuming; the second list will have nothing to do with food.

  This list-making business – it’s a habit inherited from my mother.

  She had one for all events and every eventuality: weekly menus, laundry, household chores, plans for diets – plenty of those. She probably even had a list of all the lists she intended making. My whole childhood was dictated by lists. It helped her make sense of her life, I suppose, brought to it some small sense of purpose.

  My present list is compiled from memory. It consists of dishes I mastered a long time ago, so that my name could earn its place on three French diplomas: le premier, l’intérmediaire, le grand.

  My time in Paris – tuition fees, equipment, travel and living expenses – all paid for by my father and I can’t begin to imagine what that would have cost although I doubt he would have minded. Whatever else about him, I could never say he was mean with his money.

  I clear then re-set his tray for breakfast.

  In all, I remembered twenty dishes – seventeen of which made it onto the list. Some I’ve repeated for the sake of convenience: coq au vin, cassoulet, navarin of lamb. Some I’ve yet to attempt: foie gras with mustard seeds, turbot with beurre blanc – tricky ingredients and certainly not to be found around here. I have deliberately omitted escargot and frog legs. Even if Carmel sold them in her shop, I would still leave them off – with all the things one can eat in the world, I have never really seen the need for such nonsense. I feel much the same about Vichyssoise: cold soup tastes – well, like cold soup, at any time of the year.

  Today is Friday – a good day for fish. I feel well today, lifted even. I look down the list and see all my smug crossed lines and little ticks and feel better than I’ve felt in a very long time. Later on, I will go shopping. I will borrow the car and go into town. I will buy cinnamon for his porridge, a jar of honey. Bakery bread. This time, I will look for a fishmonger’s. The one I went to that time with Serena – if it’s still there, that is, and if I can remember how to find it.

  We were shopping for her art exhibition party. The party that was supposed to have taken place a few days later, but of course never did. She took me to lunch. Showed me how to eat real spaghetti without using a knife. Later we went to the fishmonger’s.

  I often wondered what happened to all that party food afterwards? Did she give it away? But under the circumstances, who would want to take it? Did she just leave it there to rot? The estate agent arriving a few weeks later, opening the fridge door to a sticking sludge of shrimp cocktail and vol-au-vents.

  She didn’t buy the fish – she ordered it in advance and asked to have it delivered on Friday morning: shrimp, smoked salmon, crab meat. The boy behind the counter, confused by her order, had to go off and look for his boss who came in from the pub next door, a rim of foam still around his mouth.

  Then we went looking for the delic
atessen. I was supposed to be helping her to find it. She didn’t exactly get cross with me, but she was surprised at how little I knew my own city, a girl of my age. Over-protected, she said I was, over-protected by motherly love.

  Eventually, we found ourselves at the end of an alleyway, dim and slightly buckled, tight little jewellery shops all in a row. A smell of roasting coffee. There was a wrought-iron gate with a church tucked behind it – I remember that came as something of a surprise. A woman came out blessing herself, little button face in a coloured headscarf, shopping basket weighing her down to one side. Never heard of a shop called Deli, she said. We kept going to the end of the lane where, stepping out of the dim alley and into the light, we found it.

  Through the window, a confusion of shapes. I had to lean in, make a cave of my hands against the glass in order to see. Even then, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. Row over row of odd-shaped jars, stuffed with odd-shaped things, all the way up to the ceiling. In the dim light, other heftier shapes were hanging from hooks. Each piece an individual: no two things the same, nothing appeared to belong with anything else. A world away from McKenna’s grocery store, with its fluorescent-lit, repetitive order. When the door opened, the warm gust of salami on my face.

  I am thinking about Serena since the envelope arrived. I am thinking about her more than usual. Last night I dreamed about her. In the dream she was talking to me on the telephone. She said ‘No, no – white anchovies only. Tell them we need white anchovies. Grey sea salt. Red mullet, yellow polenta.’

  Serena still talking in colours.

  From Serena, I learned to be particular about food, but I’ve never really been keen on that whole food-as-a-vocation concept.

  I’m not saying I regret the job – there were things about it I loved: the planning and preparation; the algebra of this many ingredients and that amount of time. The pleasure in nursing everything along to the finishing line. The camaraderie, the concerted effort. The babel of insults, the magnificent swearing. But in the end what are you left with, really, but an edible picture on a plate? It’s a brothel arrangement: money for temporary pleasure and seldom worth the price in the end.

  If there was ever passion on my part, it was a cold sort of passion. If there was love, it was warped.

  I did it for the white noise of a busy kitchen, the barely controllable chaos: the sense that I was just about keeping hold of the galloping stagecoach. I did it because the concentration required to run a kitchen fills up every nook and corner of the mind.

  For fifteen years after my return from Paris, I did it – until I couldn’t seem to speak without shouting and, under my skin, my nerves were constantly wriggling. After work, I sometimes found myself buying drink for bums in all-night dives or waking up beside a colleague that I neither liked as a person nor had ever found remotely attractive. Or I would sit alone on my night off, staring at the expensive walls of an apartment that I rarely saw in broad daylight.

  And yet for all the noise in my life, all the pandemonium that surrounded it, on the streets and in the restaurant, all the agitation that went on backstage in the kitchen, I often felt like a nun in a convent who continues to tend to her duties: the matins, the masses, the evening chanting, the reading and teaching, the praying in her cell – day following day, night after night, going through the ropes, without truly believing in the God she is serving.

  I did it until Michael found me in New York and left me six months later with this realisation: no matter how much noise there is in a room, there are some voices that will always be heard.

  And so when Serena called on me for help, I had no difficulty accepting. Besides, it was a good proposition. From her first timid offer to cater for Dr Philip’s retirement party in that apartment off 57th, she had built up a strong business. But she was growing tired – I could see it on her face, hear it in her voice – the cancer, already sniffing around in the dark. She still loved what she called ‘the artistic side of the business’ but wanted someone to help her shoulder the rest. She was lonely too, of course. Her second marriage had broken up; her best friend had moved to Alaska. She hadn’t seen Patty in over four years.

  What Serena really wanted was someone to sit down with at the end of the day and help her look back over the hours. I owed her, I guess, but I was ready too.

  She said, ‘I hope I’m not tugging you, sweetie. I wouldn’t want to do that.’

  I said, ‘Serena, of course you’re not tugging me.’

  But of course she was, just as she’s tugging me now, five years after her death.

  And now, after all the years of study; of testing and tasting; for all the tricks and turns I have learned; the diplomas earned that still hang on the wall of Serena’s old office. For all the consultations and the blazing rows; the numb ears suffered from hours with the phone clamped to my head. All the backs of spoons licked, all the slit fingers, all the knives sharpened – here I am, spending my days cutting chiffonade sage leaves and hand-crushing peppercorns and worrying about where I’m to find ingredients – for one grumpy old bastard in a wheelchair.

  And yet, I know he’s enjoying it. The clean plates tell me so, the slight puffing around his middle, the rounding of his face. Once or twice, we have even come close to discussing the menu – well, referring to it anyhow. The first time I made magret de canard: ‘I’m doing duck tonight and was wondering if you’d prefer it well-done.’

  A little bristle from his newspaper, a vague clearing of his throat then, without looking up, ‘What? Oh, I’ll leave it up to yourself.’

  Last night he said thank you again. God only knows where all this could end.

  Lynette is ecstatic. ‘Soon, he will be fat,’ she cries. ‘Oh, he will be so fat!’

  The phone rings and I jump. The phone in this house so seldom rings and mostly I forget that we have one. It’s Lynette’s voice on the other end.

  ‘So sorry,’ she says and begins to explain how her car wouldn’t start. How she’s at the garage right now but will have to take the bus and will be late by at least an hour. Two buses she will need to cross the city. (I had no idea she lived so far away.) She is full of apologies; there is a sort of plea in her voice, as if I’m going to have her whipped when she arrives. I want her to stop saying, So sorry, so sorry…

  ‘It’s fine, Lynette, please take your time.’

  I would like to tell her that I can manage without her today; that she should go take care of her car. That I can see to my father myself. Do whatever needs to be done. But I can’t seem to bring myself to say the words.

  As if she knows what I’m thinking, she says: ‘Just do usual, though. Breakfast and pills. Put chair beside bed. He can get in. I take care all else. His little worries, I take care.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure, Lynette. You see, I was going to go into town today. I have a few things I really need to… I’ll leave the key under the brick then if you’re sure.’

  ‘Soon I be there. I stay late.’

  ‘There’s no need to stay late.’

  ‘I stay.’

  ‘No, Lynette, please, really. There’s no need.’

  ‘He pay. I stay.’

  I put down the phone and think of Serena again. So sorry. So very sorry.

  The porridge is cold by the time I come back to it and so I clump it out into the dog’s bowl, top it up with a little boeuf bourguignon I’ve kept from last night and take the dish over to him. He looks at me tiredly but doesn’t get up.

  ‘Brekky time,’ I tell him, ‘come on now. Have a sniff, go on. You know you want it… Come on, Boy. Come on. Please?’

  Back at the stove, I start a new pot of porridge and wait for it to thicken about the spoon and burst into slow, lazy bubbles.

  I glance down at the list again: only three more dishes to go.

  When the tray is ready, I carry it into his room and lay it down on the coffee table. There’s no need to tell him that Lynette will be late – the phone is right outside his door and I know he’
s heard every word of the conversation.

  In my head the list grows: unwaxed lemons. Salted capers. Eggs.

  I draw the curtains back and open the top window.

  Then I help him to pull himself into a sitting position, the way Lynette taught me to do at the start of September – a lifetime ago. Hooking him underarms with my arms, hauling him backways, I can smell his breath, he can smell mine.

  I wait while he edges himself into a sitting position. As he does this his colostomy bag gives a small coy slosh. His breath stinks of sulphur and pills, overnight garlic. His pyjamas are clammed to his back. But these are his little worries and Lynette’s little worries – not mine.

  Salami. Smoked bacon. Swiss cheese.

  I straighten his bed and fix his pillows around him then lift his tray from the coffee table, pulling the little side legs down and settling them into his quilt. I spread the napkin across his chest. Then, from a shelf over the television, take down three bottles of pills. I peck out this morning’s dose and place them into the plastic container which I leave beside his plate. I take his handbell from the window ledge and put it within his reach.

  Throughout all this, we exchange not a glance nor a word. It’s as if none of this is happening: the tray, the bed, his breath, the bulging colostomy bag – they simply do not exist. And neither do we.

  On my way out, I switch on the radio.

  Mushrooms and balsamic vinegar.

  I get to the door and say, ‘Would it be all right to take the car this morning?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says to his porridge.

  Back in the kitchen, I survey last night’s havoc. I am a messy cook, a cook that expects to always have someone two steps behind, cleaning up after her. The sink is the aftermath of an earthquake. The floor is an upheaval of things I dragged out of the cupboards last night. My mother’s pamphlets and cookery books are strewn everywhere. Yesterday I was getting ready to dump them but was waylaid by such titles as 100 Recipes for Slimmers. The Joy of Cooking. A Summer of Low Fat Meals. Recipes for a Happy Family. Woman’s Way Tricks with Mince. And most intriguing of all: Woman’s Own Ten Things to Do with a Sausage.