It Sounded Better in My Head

by Nina Kenwood

  ‘No, it’s not a date. And even if it was, Natalie, so what?’

  ‘So what? So what? You told me you were breaking up two weeks ago, on Christmas Day, which, quite frankly, I’m not over yet, and Dad just moved out today, and you are already dating? I mean, that’s ridiculous. And hurtful. And emotionally scarring. I’m not ready for any of this.’

  ‘We haven’t handled this whole thing very well. I know that. I’m sorry. But all that’s happening right now is that I’m going out for dinner. I’m socialising with my sister and her husband. That’s it.’

  ‘And another man.’

  ‘Yes. A friend of theirs.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’ I throw myself on her bed, lying across the clothes she’s already tried on and discarded. All of Mum’s clothes smell faintly of the rose and sandalwood body cream she always wears. No matter how I’m feeling about Mum at a particular moment, this smell makes me feel safe.

  ‘There’s no rush,’ Mum says, but I can’t trust anything she says anymore.

  Mum is forty-eight. That’s too old to get pregnant, surely, even with IVF, even with donor eggs? But maybe not. Forty-six is the new thirty-six, I think I read in a headline somewhere. I try to picture Mum pregnant, I try to picture myself with a sibling. A stepfather and a baby and my mother having an entire do-over, and Dad and me standing outside their lounge-room window, peering in while eating ice-cream and gently weeping.

  ‘Do you want to get married again?’

  ‘I’m not divorced yet, so getting married again is the last thing I’m thinking about.’

  ‘I doubt it’s the last thing. After all, you are going on a date right now.’

  ‘It’s not a date.’

  ‘It’s date adjacent, at the very least.’

  Mum holds different earrings up against her ears, turning to me.

  ‘Which one?’ she says.

  ‘The left.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. The other ones are too much with the shoes.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘See, that question about the earrings? That’s a question you would only ask if you were going on a date.’

  ‘Natalie.’ Mum sounds tired.

  ‘What?’

  She turns around. ‘It’s one dinner. Please let me have this.’

  ‘You have it. I can’t stop you, can I?’

  ‘If you really don’t want me to go, I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, please.’ Arguing with Mum is almost comfortingly predictable. I knew she would say this, because when we fight, we throw guilt back and forth like a ball.

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? I tell you not to go, and then you get to sit home and feel sorry for yourself, and I have to feel bad.’

  ‘I wouldn’t love it. I’m looking forward to this dinner. But I’ll give it up if you want me to.’

  This is Mum at her passive-aggressive best, and she knows it.

  ‘The last thing I feel like doing is spending the night with you, to be honest,’ I say.

  ‘Good then. I’ll go with your blessing.’

  ‘You do not have my blessing.’

  She ignores me, staring into her mirror and tweezing her eyebrows. I seethe silently, and let the silence between us draw out, knowing she’ll speak first.

  She stops plucking and turns around. ‘Look, this isn’t a date, okay? I am not going to bring a man back to this house. It’s dinner with my sister and her husband and his friend. It’s not a date. Please don’t make me feel bad about this.’

  My greatest power over my mother is making her feel bad about things. Being considered an inadequate parent is one of her fears. I once saw her google history and it included a late-night search for ‘signs you’re a bad mother’ and I went out and bought her a World’s Greatest Mother mug that week. I gave it to her as a joke present but that was three years ago and she still uses it all the time and seems to care about it, which makes me feel a little bit worried for her, and also for myself, because, when you really think about it, she would only think she’s deficient as a mother if she thought there was something wrong with her child. Sometimes last year I used that very thought to motivate myself to study more and study harder, which is probably psychologically unhealthy but it worked pretty well.

  Right now, though, I am motivated in the opposite direction. ‘You can just add it to the list of things you should feel bad about. Which includes lying to me for a year, ruining your marriage and destroying our family,’ I say. I can see from Mum’s face in the mirror that I’ve hurt her, and I quickly get up to leave.

  ‘How did I raise such a horrible daughter?’ she says as I walk out of the room, which hurts me, so now we’re even.

  I lie on my bed with my door shut. After a while, Mum comes and stands outside the door but doesn’t open it.

  ‘Bye, Natalie. I won’t be home until late. Call me if you need anything.’

  I say nothing. There’s a long pause, but I know she’s still there.

  ‘I love you,’ she says.

  I continue to be silent.

  ‘I’m sad too, okay? Your dad moving out is hard on me too. I’m trying to do something to cheer myself up, that’s all.’

  Still, I say nothing. For all she knows, I might have headphones in. For all she knows, I might be dead.

  She sighs and walks away. I hope she feels bad and I hope that feeling bad ruins her night.

  God, I am a horrible daughter.

  After I hear the front door close and her car start and drive away, I wait to see if I’m going to cry. I feel like I want to cry but tears don’t come. I scream into a pillow, which feels good the first time I do it but very over the top the second time.

  23

  Unsent

  I spend a lot of time that night drafting text messages to Alex and then not sending them.

  — Hey

  (too serious)

  — Hi!

  (too eager)

  — Hey…

  (too suggestive)

  — Hi [smiling face emoji]

  (completely desperate)

  — Hey what’s up

  (trying so hard it takes my breath away)

  — Yo

  (utterly, utterly ridiculous)

  — Hello Alex

  (a robot would sound less formal).

  Alex and I last saw each other yesterday lunchtime when we all left the beach house. He said, ‘Talk soon,’ and I nodded. One of us should have contacted the other by now.

  I need to stop thinking about him. I can’t stop thinking about him.

  I am considering photoshopping my face next to Alex’s, and comparing it to a photo I found deep in someone’s Instagram history of Alex and Vanessa, just to see if Alex and I are a comparably cute couple, but I quickly abandon that idea when I picture a scenario where Alex somehow stumbles across this photoshopped image. The thought is so horrifying I want to wipe my laptop completely clear of all images I have ever saved and immediately get hundreds of hours of therapy.

  I spend the rest of the night trying to distract myself by reading theories about celebrities who might be in secret relationships, writing down a list of all the evidence I might have missed that my parents fell out of love, and being mad at Zach, who I have also not heard from since our fight in the car.

  Mum comes home from her non-date date and I ignore her and pretend to be asleep. Then, when she is in the shower (a couple of years ago, Mum became the kind of person who showers at night and Dad remained a shower in the morning person, and really, now that I think about it, there might be no stronger indicator of impending divorce than this), I take being a horrible daughter to the next level. I sneak into her room and look at her phone, feeling mostly like a psychopath but also a little bit like a really cool spy.

  There is a series of text messages between her and a man called Eric. They’re not sexy texts. I’m not completely sick, I would not read sexts between my mother and a stranger.
They are barely even flirty. In fact, Eric seems very polite. He invited my mother to play golf and he also sent her a promo code to use to get 20% off when buying printer cartridges online. I don’t know which is worse—the thought that this was related to an actual conversation they had, or that he sent the codes unprompted. Eric has the personality of a spambot.

  My father will die alone, and my mother will marry a man who uses cheap printer ink as a seduction tool.

  And now I also have to consider the fact that Eric texted my mother three times within an hour of dinner finishing. Either he is a stalker or I should definitely be freaking out that I haven’t heard from Alex in thirty-four hours.

  Or both things could be true. Eric is a stage-five clinger, and Alex is ghosting me.

  After her shower, Mum comes into my room in her bathrobe, combing her damp hair. I’m not fast enough putting my phone down, so she knows I’m not asleep.

  ‘Let’s talk,’ she says, lying down on the bed beside me. She is a big believer in never going to bed angry, which really gets in the way of my desire to hold petty grudges and stew on things at 3am instead of sleeping.

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ I say.

  ‘How was your time at Zach’s?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Natalie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give me nothing answers.’

  There was a period of time, when I was in my early teens, when Mum and Dad banned me from saying ‘nothing much’ and ‘fine’ in response to questions about my day. I had to think of something interesting to say. Sometimes I just made things up to appease them. Sometimes I would research random facts, because I knew if I said, ‘In Switzerland, it’s illegal to own just one guinea pig,’ then Dad would be completely distracted by that information and they would both forget to ask any more questions about my day.

  But I don’t have any random facts on hand tonight, and Mum was never as easy to distract as Dad anyway.

  ‘Fine. Let me see. I went to the beach, I got sunburnt, we watched some movies, and I kissed Alex.’

  A part of me has been bursting to tell Mum this, because I want to shock her and show her how she doesn’t know as much about me as she thinks she does. I guess you’ve been so busy dating other men, you can’t keep up with my life anymore.

  I also want to tell her because we haven’t been talking as much lately and I am scared we are going to drift apart, that maybe she’ll fall out of love with me in the same way she did with Dad, which is ridiculous because parents don’t fall out of love with their kids, but maybe they do and no one talks about it.

  ‘You…what?’ Mum says. She sounds as shocked as I was hoping she would.

  ‘I kissed Alex, Zach’s brother.’

  Mum sits up a little and turns to me. ‘When?’

  ‘We were hanging out and it just happened.’ I shrug, trying to look nonchalant.

  ‘Do you like him?’ Mum’s eyes are lit up with excitement and also slight panic. This must be what I looked like when Lucy told me she’d had sex.

  ‘Well, I kissed him.’

  ‘I thought you liked his friend, Owen.’

  ‘No.’ I scrunch up my nose.

  ‘But you said in the car—’

  ‘That was ages ago.’

  ‘It was a week ago!’

  ‘Well it feels like ages ago.’

  ‘I guess I can’t keep up with your love-life anymore,’ Mum says.

  ‘Well, I just told you the biggest thing that has ever happened to my love-life, so consider yourself all caught up.’

  ‘Honey, this is…this is great. I’m excited for you. We’re excited, right?’ She’s looking at my face, trying to gauge my feelings. I’m not giving her much.

  ‘It’s semi-exciting,’ I say. I mean, it’s nice to have one person in my life excited by Alex and me, but she’s excited for the wrong reasons, and her excitement is like an alarm bell. Ding, ding, ding, sad desperate Natalie should be over the moon that anyone is paying attention to her.

  ‘I should meet him.’

  ‘Mum. Calm down. You definitely don’t need to meet him.’

  ‘You could invite him over for dinner.’

  ‘I’m absolutely not doing that.’

  ‘Not now, obviously. Next week or the week after.’

  Oh god, she’s going to suggest a golfing double-date with Eric next. ‘We might not even be a thing next week,’ I say.

  ‘What kind of thing are you now?’

  ‘The smallest thing possible, too small to even classify. We’re seeing where things go. Which is nowhere, since I haven’t heard from him since yesterday.’

  ‘Why don’t you text him?’

  Very easy for her to say, a woman who’s just had three texts from the man she left a couple of hours ago. Her eyes are bright, and I can see her next thought will be to help me decide what to write to him. It’s all there, flashing through her mind right now, the fun we’ll have being two single ladies figuring out the dating world together.

  No, no, no, no, no, no. No, we are not doing this.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this with you.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ Her shoulders slump. Here we go with the guilt again.

  ‘Mum, can’t you see I’m still upset with you? For lying to me for months.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And for breaking up with Dad.’

  ‘You keep saying that, honey, but the truth is, we made the decision together.’

  This can’t be true. Someone had to be the instigator, but they clearly don’t want me to know who it was.

  ‘Well, it was a terrible decision,’ I say.

  ‘This is not how I wanted my marriage to go, either. Trust me. I didn’t plan to be single in my late forties.’

  ‘Well, why did it go this way? I don’t understand.’

  I think of the list I wrote a few hours ago, of evidence I had missed. There wasn’t a lot of tangible proof. As a family, we’re not shouters or criers, not in the traditional sense. Our fighting style is all quiet viciousness: sharp-edged comments, sarcasm, eye-rolling and pointed silences. They sometimes argued about money, but in a way that was so detailed and intricate I was too bored to listen in. Here’s my list of things I do know:

  Dad doesn’t like the way Mum makes Vegemite on toast (too little butter, too much Vegemite), but she doesn’t change her method when making it for him

  Mum hates the brand of toothpaste Dad buys, but he still always buys it

  Mum once said Dad would never survive in the zombie apocalypse (I mean, of course he wouldn’t, it didn’t even need to be said), and Dad was so offended he wouldn’t watch the next episode of The Walking Dead with us

  Dad thinks Mum interrupts him too much

  Mum thinks Dad fails to defend her when she disagrees with other people

  Dad thinks Mum has poor time-management skills

  Mum hates Valentine’s Day, but is also offended when Dad does nothing to celebrate it

  Dad doesn’t like Mum stealing his good work socks to wear around the house

  Mum has always wanted a cat, but Dad is allergic to cat hair, though Mum questions the severity of this allergy

  Mum thinks Dad is bad at apologising

  Dad snores

  I once found Mum crying, alone, in the car and I got the feeling that maybe she’d gone to sit and cry in the car before.

  None of these things seems enough to end a twenty-year marriage, but maybe, when you add them all together, they are. The thing is, there was lots of good stuff too. I’m sure of it. They laughed a lot. They loved talking to each other. They genuinely seemed to enjoy each other’s company, and they always wanted to know what the other thought of things.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Mum says.

  ‘I am capable of understanding complex things, you know,’ I say. I can’t see
m to stop saying everything in the bitchiest tone possible.

  ‘I know. I just…I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to share all the details with you.’

  ‘All the details’ makes it sound like there was a scandalous affair.

  Mum can see where my mind is going. ‘No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Your father and I just no longer felt like we worked as a romantic couple.’

  ‘Don’t all marriages go through that phase?’

  ‘It wasn’t a phase.’

  ‘But did you actually try to fix it?’

  ‘Yes. For a long time.’

  ‘But…’

  But, but, but. But this doesn’t give me any answers. And it doesn’t explain to me how to know if a relationship is good or bad or wrong or right.

  ‘I hate that you’re breaking up,’ I say, and, finally, the bitchy tone is gone.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll get married again?’ I am so scared of the answer to this question.

  ‘To your father?’ she says.

  ‘No. To someone else.’ I don’t want my mother to spend the rest of her life alone if she doesn’t want to be alone. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want to share her with other people either—she’s mine.

  ‘I don’t have any plans to.’

  ‘I’m scared of having awful step-parents.’

  ‘I will never marry someone you don’t like, I promise.’

  ‘Well, that’s a lot of pressure to put on me. I might be a terrible judge of character. Don’t give me that much power.’

  ‘Fine. You have some power but not veto power.’

  ‘No, I’ve changed my mind. I want veto power.’

  ‘Sweetie, you’re jumping way ahead. A lot is going to change in your life in the next few years too. We don’t know where any of us will be in five years, or how we’ll be feeling about things.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  Growing and changing is only fun if my parents stay the same and I can show them how different and better I am without having to process their stuff too.

  ‘Are you worried about next week?’ she says.

  Next week is when university places are announced, and the rest of my life will be decided. Of course I’m worried.