The Change Room

by Karen Connelly

  9

  Firefly

  ANDREW PUT HIS HAND ON ELIZA’S THIGH, NOT TO encourage her, but to try and keep her quiet. They were at Maliq and Heather’s place, sitting side by side in the glittery, mirror-filled dining room with three other couples. The first course, almond soup, had been a little watery, it was true, but why did Eliza have to offer three different suggestions to thicken it? He squeezed her thigh. She concluded, “Adding a third of a cup of ground almonds would be enough.” Heather made tight bobble-head nods, her blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders. Andrew moved in to do a quick repair, smiling into his hostess’s eyes. “I loved it this way, Heather. It’s so light!”

  The woman was in an obvious rivalry with the chef Eliza used to be. This had happened before; Heather had made dishes that used to be on Thalassa’s menu. Did she realize that she was competing with a woman who no longer existed? Jealousy was probably the most ungovernable emotion, Andrew thought, mopping up the last of his soup with a chunk of bread, because it’s rooted in the imagination. Heather imagines that Eliza’s cooking is excellent, superior to her own. He longed to tell her about the overcooked leftover spaghetti he’d packed for lunch.

  Dinner parties were easier at their house, not so uptight. Heather liked her table to be over-the-top lavish, with real china and silverware, candles, an embroidered tablecloth. It was beautiful, but for what? He’d come thinking that this time it was just a casual get-together. The wives worked together on the school council’s spring fundraiser, which was a big kiddie fair with a silent auction. Eliza contributed organizational advice and a couple of Fleur gift cards. He glanced at Maliq’s nicely detailed jacket and felt underdressed in his old sweater. Maliq was a corporate lawyer who always looked like he’d just walked out of a GQ ad featuring Distinguished Older Gentlemen. Big deal, Andrew thought. As a mathematician, I’m in touch with the sublime no matter what I wear. He smiled magnanimously around the table.

  Seated across from him were John and his wife, Zi Lan, a stocky, scrubbed-looking woman wearing fire-engine red on her beautiful lips. (What chemicals must be in lipstick, he wondered; she was eating energetically, but the blazing colour did not fade.) He knew Zi Lan from the boys’ school; she dropped off her seven-year-old every morning with the rest of her brood in tow. What did John do again? An engineer of some kind? Of bridges? Highways? He had close-shaven tawny hair; a tensile, straining look flicked over his face, into and out of his eyes. When Andrew glimpsed John, now and again, through the flowers, it was like catching sight of a chained coyote. Obviously the flowers weren’t from Fleur; the arrangement was too tall and English-garden blowsy. Eliza’s dinner party flowers were compact yet voluptuous little sculptures, in one or two colours; they sat low on the table so guests could see over them. He knew she would mention this to him after they left.

  “Andrew? Don’t you think so?”

  “Sorry? I was busy admiring these lovely flowers.”

  Heather blinked an eyeful of gratitude in his direction. In a flash of useless insight, he realized how unhappy she was. But why?

  Eliza repeated, loudly, “I was just talking about how great it would be if we could find some fathers to participate in the fundraiser this year.”

  She had that disturbing glitter in her eyes. What was up with his wife these days? She swung her head rakishly to the left, the right. “So, gentlemen, any takers? At our last meeting, we decided that our husbands should join us in our efforts.” Laughter gurgled weakly round the table. “Who’s prepared to do some good for their kids’ cash-strapped school?”

  Heather smiled. “Eliza, that’s not what we were saying at the last meeting. At least, we weren’t all saying that.”

  Zi Lan jumped in. “Don’t you remember, Heather? We were complaining about the hours of labour we give to the school while our husbands are busy at work. Or playing on their iPads.” She poked her tawny-headed husband in the side; he yelped in surprise and rushed without hesitation to the defence of manhood itself: “Women have a gift for school fundraising. Men have other gifts, like…rewiring the doorbell. And war. And understanding the stock market. We can’t organize a bake sale to save our lives.”

  As Eliza put down her glass of wine, Andrew braced himself for whatever she was going to say. “You get war and the stock market and we get the school fundraising! Thanks so much. Does that come before or after nursing and teaching?”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “That’s how it sounded. And I understand the stock market, too, thank you very much.” Smiling, she indicated her empty glass to Maliq, who was pouring wine on her right, at the head of the table. Andrew touched her thigh again; she swatted his hand away. “Come on, John, you’ve got a house full of children. A bake sale would be…well, a cakewalk! Contribute a few hours to the cause!”

  “But that’s why Zi Lan volunteers at the school, so she can get away from me and the kids. Especially now.”

  Everyone at the table knew that John and Zi Lan, a couple in their mid-forties, had an eight-month-old baby daughter. Andrew knew more, though, because Zi Lan was also a swimmer. Eliza had told him how the petite woman had stood weeping in the change room, two weeks overdue, her towel popped out like a tent over her legs. “Unexpected” did not begin to describe her pregnancy, she told Eliza. She’d been on the pill because their third child had somehow slipped in under the rim of a condom. With three small children, her career on hold, she and John already worn out, they decided almost as soon as they learned she was pregnant to abort. But on the morning of the procedure, they just couldn’t go through with it. Women and fertility, Andrew thought, equalled a veritable minefield. He smiled at John. “How is your new baby girl?”

  John beamed, despite all the talk of being tired. “She is gorgeous. We adore her. But we’ve stopped sleeping. Sleep is for wimps. We don’t need sleep.”

  Zi Lan piped up, “Oh, stop being so macho!” She looked around at her friends. “Four kids under seven, my friends, and two still in diapers. Tonight is the first time we’ve been out together in over a year. John asked me whether we should go to a hotel room or to the dinner party.” Everyone laughed.

  John said, “We decided we needed adult conversation more than we needed sex.”

  “Really?” Eliza asked.

  Zi Lan said, “You forget what it’s like, to be surrounded by children and Cheerios all day long.”

  “No, I don’t,” Eliza replied. “My brain atrophied, even though I worked part-time with both of them.”

  “It’s the breastfeeding!” Miriam cried out. She was a doctor and medical researcher who studied the effects of various drugs on aging bones. “I lost whole chunks of my memory with each kid. I should be studying memory loss, not arthritis!”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Eliza said.

  “What’s that?” Heather asked brightly. Andrew heard in her nervous voice how much Heather wanted to change the topic.

  But Eliza was just getting started. “It’s amazing that we keep having kids. What the fuck is the human race thinking? The planet doesn’t want any more of us!” Heather frowned at her—the word fuck did not match her china, admittedly—as Eliza forged on. “Really. Don’t you ever ask yourselves if it was the right decision?”

  Miriam’s husband, Simon, the fashionably bespectacled architect, said, “We only allow ourselves to ask that question about our cat. The little bastard has started peeing on the sofa.” Frowning at Simon’s language, too, Heather said, “But children are not pets.”

  Eliza clapped her hands. “Exactly my point! So much more is at stake. Parenthood is a monumental undertaking. Why don’t we talk about it more honestly?”

  John said, “You mean, how much we regret having sex that one time, the shag that produced yet another baby?” Zi Lan hit him, not so lightly.

  Miriam said, “No one wants to talk about regrets when it comes to their kids. Regret sounds like the opposite of love. And someone might call the Children’s Aid Society on you.”
>
  “Tell me about it!” Zi Lan said. “Last week, I left Xander in the wagon for about twenty seconds by himself at the bottom of our porch steps—I just had to run up the stairs and grab something I’d forgotten by the door—and some older lady walking by told me that if she ever saw the child unattended again, she would tell my employer! She thought I was the nanny. When I told her I was Xander’s mom, thank you very much, she said, fine, if there was a next time, she’d call the police!”

  “What? What a racist bitch!” Eliza was incensed, as were the other guests. Righteous indignation flared around the table like a brush fire. Andrew sat back. No matter how right righteous indignation was, its blindsiding power almost always made him uncomfortable.

  Eliza wasn’t letting it go. “That’s what everyone fears, right, even a total stranger—your child is in constant danger of being snatched away by a monstrous sexual predator!”

  Zi Lan said, “Yeah, I should’ve asked that lady what she was doing, hanging around my unattended child….”

  Missing Zi Lan’s ironic tone, Heather asked, seriously, “But women aren’t sexual predators, are they?”

  Eliza immediately responded, “Not the way men are…”

  Andrew squeezed her leg.

  “What?” Eliza snapped, turning sharply toward him. “It’s true, men are—”

  Andrew interrupted her in a surprisingly stern voice. “What’s true is that predators rarely look the way we’d expect them to look, male or female.” Everyone stopped talking and stared at him, expecting him to hold forth, but he did the opposite, and deftly steered the conversation away from predation of any kind. “Miriam, didn’t you say something just now about regrets?” He grinned at her. “I can’t believe you have any regrets.” Through a common friend at the university, Andrew knew what the other guests did not—that Miriam had just accepted a prestigious endowed chair in the Faculty of Medicine.

  Miriam tilted her head thoughtfully. “Regret is natural. I like to think of regret as a measure of wealth. Not necessarily material wealth, though a wealth of choices usually goes along with money. I could have chosen to live a different life. But I did not. I chose this one.” She looked around the table. “We all have lives we didn’t lead. Don’t we? Sometimes it’s a pleasure to think of those lives. And a luxury, I know. I could have gone to Boston for work. I was offered an excellent job right out of med school. Big pharma.”

  “Big bucks!” chimed in Simon. “We would have been rich!”

  Miriam raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “Uh—no, dear. I would have been rich. And most likely, I would have married somebody else. An American.”

  He waggled his head back and forth. “All rightee then. I don’t think this unlived-lives conversation is such a good idea. If my wife leaves for Boston next month, Andrew, you’ll be hearing from me.”

  Miriam gave Simon a withering look. “It won’t be Andrew’s fault.” Again she sought the eyes of her friends around the table. “Don’t we all wonder, what if? What if I had chosen another life? We all have moments of doubt about the choices we make. Don’t we?”

  Eliza exclaimed, “Yes! What a great toast!” She raised her glass and waited for the others to do the same. “Here’s to our doubts, not our certainties!” She tossed back her wine in one go.

  Andrew removed his hand from her leg, turning her loose. He could only sit back and hope for the best. She leapt into the conversation, asking point-blank, “But Miriam, why didn’t you take that job?” He hoped that she wouldn’t ask poor Zi Lan if she regretted cancelling the abortion. His social life was full of episodes of not knowing what Eliza would say, or ask, or how people would respond to her directness. Sometimes it was awful. But it was also thrilling, and occasionally hilarious. He did not know where her curiosity and brashness would lead them. Which is why he followed.

  —

  At the end of dinner, Andrew announced, “That was delicious, Heather. Another wonderful dinner.” Murmurs of assent rounded the table.

  Eliza winked at Zi Lan. “And it’s probably not too late to get a room. You know, fit it all in.”

  “So to speak,” said John, guffawing. “But where could we go?”

  In his lordly baritone, Maliq announced, “Upstairs. To my study. But you’ll have to move all the guests’ coats off the sofa.” Surprised that Maliq had taken up the joke, his guests took a moment to laugh, but laugh they did. It was as though a window opened in the room.

  “That’s what used to happen at the best parties!” said Simon. “Sneaking off to the spare room.”

  “Yeah, when you were eighteen,” said Miriam, drily.

  “Eighteen?” John echoed. “I never saw the inside of a spare room until I was at least twenty-three.” He tipped his glass to Miriam. “Late bloomer.”

  Maliq opened another bottle of wine. An erotic firefly flitted through the air, lighting upon each guest; they turned to each other, laughter erupting at a more private joke, or at nothing, just for the pleasure of it; they smiled into each other’s eyes and wine-flushed faces. Why, Eliza wondered, don’t we talk to each other like this more often? Why can’t we just relax? She reached under the table to squeeze Andrew’s thigh. To encourage him, not to keep him quiet.

  Just before the party broke up, the women discussed their next fundraising meeting. Miriam quietly asked Simon if he would be able to come home early that night, to take care of the kids. He looked at her blankly. Eliza blared in a union-organizer’s voice, “What about it, husbands? Can we count on your support? Can you look after your own offspring while your wives tirelessly contribute to the richness of the children’s education?”

  “Tirelessly and without complaint,” Andrew added facetiously.

  Simon mock-saluted both Miriam and Eliza. “Yes! Yes! I’ll be home early that night. God, it’s like having two wives.”

  “In your dreams,” said Miriam.

  Simon shot back, “Are you kidding? Two of you telling me what to do all the time? In my worst fucking nightmares!” Everyone laughed.

  Still making jokes, the guests all trooped up to the salacious second-floor study to fetch their coats. Heather touched Eliza’s arm before she went back down the stairs. Eliza stopped, turned to her, smiling, pleasantly drunk. Heather murmured, “You know, I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had at the beginning of the meal.”

  Eliza smiled broadly. “Which one?”

  “When you were talking about feeling so ambivalent toward your kids.”

  “Wh-what?” She had no idea what Heather meant.

  “I wouldn’t say this to just anyone, but…it really helped me. You might want to see a therapist.”

  “Pardon me?” It came back to her now, something about children and regret. Had Eliza used the word ambivalence? Then she got it: it was a joke. Heather was teasing her. Eliza grinned.

  Heather’s expression faltered into an awkward smile, then grew more serious still. “Because it could be wounding them.”

  It took another moment to sink in: Heather was serious. The realization made Eliza start laughing. Shoulders seismically shaking, stomach muscles clenched, she managed to say, “Sorry. I don’t know why I find that so funny. But.” She took a big breath and wiped a tear from her eye. “Come on, Heather. It was an adult conversation. I love my kids. They’re fine. I’m fine.” And again. “We’re all fine.” She thought of Shakespeare—doth she protest too much?—and another bolt of giggles hit her. She apologized again. Andrew called out, “What’s so funny?”

  —

  In the car on the way home, however, she was not amused. Andrew, having consumed his usual two small glasses of wine over three hours, drove confidently and legally through the snow-filled streets, a bemused expression on his face as he listened to his wife, who mocked in a singsong cadence, “I think you need to see a therapist!” She made a strangled, desperate sound. “I can’t breathe!” Her voice abruptly became that of a TV broadcaster: “Woman chokes to death at dinner party on wad of political corr
ectness!” Then she returned to her rant. “Doesn’t she know that you shouldn’t pair a white soup with chicken breast? That was all just too fucking white!”

  “Eliza, that’s not very gracious.”

  “Gracious! She just told me I need therapy. Heather’s going to call Children’s Aid and get a social worker to check up on me. Make sure my maternal ambivalence isn’t causing rickets.”

  “Come on, you’re taking it too seriously. Heather’s just—”

  “A control freak! Do you know that she sent me an email and a text this afternoon asking me not to bring up the aftermath of the Arab Spring because it would be too upsetting for Maliq? She must have sent all of us that note. She meant that it would be too upsetting for her. He’s Egyptian, for god’s sake, and he’s not supposed to talk about what’s going on in his own country. She wants to micro-manage everything. Including this damned fundraiser.”

  “Last year, you said you weren’t going to do it again.”

  “Oh, I know. But Miriam begged me. And Zi Lan. What John said is the absolute truth. The only time Zi Lan gets to visit a few girlfriends is when she does slave labour for the school. Or goes grocery shopping. I hardly ever see her at the pool anymore but I always run into her at the supermarket. Kids and food in the wagon, baby in the pouch on her chest, babbling a mile a minute. The poor woman is desperate for adult conversation.”

  —

  When she stepped into the house, it was so quiet that she thought Sophie must be asleep upstairs in the TV room. Andrew was still in the car, waiting to drive the babysitter home. When she heard a sudden shuffle and thump overhead, she understood viscerally that someone else was in the house, too, apart from Sophie and the boys. Fear folded quickly over her shoulders, slid around her neck. “Sophie? Are you up there?”

  On the second floor, one voice murmured low and throaty, as another rose up to call, “Hi, Eliza! We just finished watching a movie.”