by Jane Green
Dan sighs and shakes his head. “The truth is that Lisa is the kind of woman I would have asked out on a date, and by the end of the evening I would have been itching to get away. She’s beautiful, and she’s funny, but her superficiality drives me up the wall. I would never want to be with anyone that shallow.”
“Oh, thanks, Dan. She is one of my best friends.”
“Stop it,” he says. “You asked, so I answered.”
“I can’t believe what a bitch your mother is,” I say, a few minutes later as we’re getting undressed. “What a total bloody bitch.”
“Ellie!” Dan turns to me with a bark. “Don’t talk about my mother like that.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. But why did she have to say all that stuff? Why would she even think that, let alone say anything to me? I swear she just wanted to upset me.”
“First of all, you know that’s ridiculous. You’re always complaining that my mother wants to be your best friend; the last thing she wants to do is hurt you. And second, she wasn’t trying to upset you; she probably just feels threatened by Lisa and was taking it out on you.”
“Great. Why was she taking it out on me?”
“I didn’t mean taking it out on you. Look,” he sighs. “I don’t know. I don’t know what got into her tonight, or why she put this ridiculous notion into your head that I might fancy Lisa, but I don’t; I fancy you, and you know I don’t want to get in the middle with you and my mother. If you’re that upset, why don’t you talk to her about it tomorrow?”
I look at Dan in amazement. How can we have been so warm, so loving just a few minutes before, and how can he inspire such fury in me now?
“I don’t believe you,” I practically spit at him. “You never bloody stand up for me, do you? All you ever say is that you don’t want to get in the middle. Well, how about you do get in the middle for a change? How about you realize where your priorities lie? I’m your wife, for God’s sake. I’m your family now. Not her. She is not the most important woman in your life any more, I am. And if you stopped being such a bloody wimp and made sure she knew that, if you stood up for me for a change, she might stop playing these stupid fucking games.”
Dan just shakes his head at me in silence, and I know I should shut up. I know that we’re having the same argument we always have, and that it will end up in the same place it always ends, where neither of us speaks to one each other, sometimes for days at a time, but I can’t help it. His silence only serves to increase my rage, and when he turns his back on me to get into bed I have to resist the urge to hit him.
“Don’t turn your back on me,” I hiss, walking round to his side of the bed and standing there, hands planted on my hips. “Don’t you dare turn your back on me. Who do you think you are?” Echoes of my mother, my mother in a drunken fury, play around my ears, but I don’t care, blinded by my anger at my husband’s silence, at his refusal to defend me against his mother’s attacks, just as my father had refused to defend me all those years ago against my mother’s verbal attacks.
What goes around comes around.
And it ends as it always does. With both of us lying in bed, not talking, barely moving, pretending to sleep, although I can tell from his breathing that he is not sleeping, and I know, from previous experience, that I will probably lie here until the early hours of the morning, heart pounding with anger, wanting everything to revert back to normal but not having the ability to say I’m sorry.
I know exactly what to say to make it all better; I’m just not able to say it.
18
They always say never go to sleep on an argument. If only it were that easy. When we do row, we always go to sleep on it, and when we awake, there are the same silences, the same resentments, the same recriminations.
This morning I pretend to be asleep. I don’t want to have to look at Dan, talk to him, be around him, and I lie in bed listening to him get up and leave the room. I plan on following him, to give Tom his breakfast, but the next thing I know I wake up again, groggily reach for my watch on the bedside table and see that it’s 11:16.
It’s 11.16? I stare at the numbers as my brain attempts to click into gear—this is what happens when you don’t get to sleep until 5:00 A.M.—11:16! I leap out of bed and run out of the room to look for everyone, my immediate thoughts being of Tom. Would he have coped without me? Could he still be—irrational as it sounds—in his cot waiting for me to come and get him?
Tom’s face breaks into a huge smile, his little chubby arms reaching out for me as soon as I round the corner to the swimming pool. Everyone’s there, chatting and laughing, and they cheer as I blearily make my way over to where Tom’s sitting on a towel.
“I wish my husband let me have a lie-in,” Trish says, looking pointedly at Gregory as I approach her sun bed and sit down on the edge, perching Tom on my lap.
I look over at Dan, but as soon as our eyes meet he looks away. He’s still pissed off about the row last night, but so am I, and while I appreciate his letting me sleep, I can’t make everything instantly fine. I don’t know how to do that.
“Thanks,” I say coldly to Dan, and it comes out grudgingly, and he merely nods without looking at me and stands up, diving into the pool to swim.
Lisa smiles up at me, her book resting on her stomach, her hands behind her head as Amy sits between her legs playing with some brightly colored plush blocks. “Do you remember that girl we bumped into on the plane? Kate?”
I nod.
“She phoned earlier. Wondered whether we’d like to go over there this evening for a drink, and then out for supper. We were waiting for you to see what you thought.”
“Sounds lovely,” I say. “But what about the kids? Tom goes down at seven sharp.”
“Don’t worry,” Linda calls out. “Michael and I already said we’d babysit.”
“What? All of them? Anyway, I don’t think Tom will go down here without our being there. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Dan snorts. “What do you think’s going to happen, for God’s sake? Tom will be fine. They’ll all be fine.”
He’s right. If it were anyone other than my in-laws, I’d happily leave Tom. I’m being childish, I know, so I shrug and nod my assent.
“As long as we don’t have to bathe all of them,” Michael says quickly. “I’m not sure Linda and I could manage that.” He laughs. “It’s been a long time since we had to look after three children and we’re not as young as we once were.”
Lisa rolls her eyes as if he’s talking rubbish, a fine specimen of malehood like my father-in-law. “We thought that we could leave after all the kids go down,” she says. “That way Tom and Amy probably won’t even know we’ve gone.”
I hesitate. “What about Oscar?”
I know Trish is more liberal with Oscar than Lisa and I are with our children. While Lisa and I have practically memorized The Contented Little Baby Book, while we spend hours expounding our theories of babies needing routine, and structure, and discipline, Trish believes in feeding on demand, letting the baby sleep in the family bed, and generally allowing Oscar to run the household.
Aside from paying the bills, of course.
It is the one aspect of our friendship that I find difficult. I am so sure that I am right, that my way of parenting is the right way—that we, Dan and I, are the parents, the adults, the ones who dictate how and when our children do what they do—that I find it infuriating that Trish can’t see the light, as it were.
I had Tom on a routine from the beginning. He is up at seven, has breakfast, then goes down for a short nap at nine. At eleven-thirty, every day, he has lunch, and then is always, always, down for a nap, in a darkened nursery, by noon at the latest. He’s up at two, has a bottle at half past, a walk in the afternoon and then supper at five on the dot, bath at six, then his last bottle before bedtime at seven.
Oscar, on the other hand, tends to do pretty much what he feels like. Trish is still breast-feeding, although she’s now doing
a combination of bottle and breast, and has admitted devastation as Oscar is beginning to choose the bottle over the breast.
I swear, if Trish had anything to do with it, she’d be breast-feeding Oscar until he went to a university. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with breast-feeding, but I do find it rather disconcerting when you see a child who is walking and talking latched on to its mother’s breast.
Trish has admitted she’s not at her best in the mornings and luckily Oscar wakes up quite happy, so they stay in bed together for a good hour at least, watching breakfast television. He gets bottles throughout the day when he starts getting grizzly, and doesn’t usually nap unless he falls asleep in his buggy.
The consequence is that by five o’clock Oscar’s impossible. Trust me. I’ve seen it. The only thing that makes him happy is being held, so Trish holds him from five until he goes to bed, which is basically whatever time he wants. Gregory likes to play with him when he gets home around half past seven, so on a good day Oscar’s asleep by nine.
Heaven forbid Oscar should cry at any time during the night. He’s immediately pacified with Trish’s breast, before being rocked to sleep in Trish and Gregory’s bed. And she wonders why she’s permanently exhausted.
My GP, with whom I’ve discussed Trish on many an occasion, is adamant that an eleven-month-old baby does not need any night feeds, and I did pass the information on to Trish, who shrugged and laughed, saying she went to bed every night hoping he’d wake up, so much does she love his cuddly warmth.
And her life is so hard. Many’s the time she’s phoned to cancel something because Oscar’s just too difficult, or he’s fallen asleep when we were supposed to meet at the park, or he’s not tired and won’t go to bed.
I know I ought to be supportive of the way she is doing things, ought to accept that all of us do things differently, and there is no right or wrong way to bring up a child, but when you look at our children, at how happy and easy Tom and Amy both are, because both Lisa and I follow routines, and then you look at Oscar, who’s fairly unhappy most of the time because I’m convinced he’s not getting nearly enough sleep, you do have to ask yourself whether Trish is doing the right thing.
I love being a mother, and now that I am experiencing the joys of female friendship, I love being a woman. I love the way that you can share anything and everything with your girlfriends, that you are not judged but accepted for who you are.
And I count myself incredibly lucky to have found friendships like this at this stage in my life. And yet, despite the support we give one another, it has been a shock to discover that raising a child is the one area in which women are absolutely not supportive of one another, not unless you find kindred spirits who agree wholeheartedly with your philosophy, whatever your philosophy may be.
Trish and I may bond over a shared lack of appreciation of the way Lisa appreciates the finer things in life, but Lisa and I have in turn bonded over our shared way of bringing up our children, and I have found myself, many a time, asking Lisa how Trish can possibly not see that ours is the right way.
We’ve tried to tell her, but carefully, subtly, for mothers cannot be criticized in the way they treat their children, not even by their best friends. But I don’t dare risk losing her, and so I have learned to keep quiet, to vent my frustrations with Lisa when the two of us are alone together.
So when I ask Trish, “What about Oscar?” it is because I am quite sure Oscar will throw a tantrum if we attempt to leave him with Linda and Michael. Not that I’d particularly mind. It might be quite funny. Then again it could scupper our chances of having them babysit for us again.
“I know.” Trish frowns. “I have to say I am worried about leaving Oscar.” She turns to Linda and Michael. “Not that I think you’re not up to it; God, I’m so sorry, that didn’t come out the way I meant it to, but Oscar’s so sensitive”—Lisa and I look at each other and she almost imperceptibly rolls her eyes—“and he might completely freak out if we’re not around.” She turns to Gregory for advice, but he just shrugs—motherhood is very much Trish’s domain in their household. She makes the rules, even if there aren’t any.
“Would you mind if we brought him with us?” Trish looks at the rest of us. “He’ll be fine; I promise you. We’ve been bringing him out a lot recently and he usually falls asleep in his buggy. I’m just nervous he’ll be terribly unhappy without us.”
Nobody says anything, but the look of relief on Linda’s face is enormous. She’s the first to speak. “I think that’s an excellent idea, Trish,” she says. “If the baby will get upset without his mummy, then you’re far better off keeping him with you.”
Great.
Dan and I barely talk throughout the day. We make a show of everything being all right for the others, but I’m waiting for him to apologize first, and he’s clearly waiting for me.
He’s going to be waiting a very long time.
We sit and play with Tom, and if you didn’t know we’d had the mother of all arguments the previous night, you’d certainly never guess. We manage to talk to each other, look at each other, ask each other questions, but there’s an underlying coldness that I’m sure no one could possibly detect, so good are we at putting on a brave face.
“Everything all right?” Linda says to me when I’m in the kitchen helping myself to a Diet Coke.
“Fine,” I say breezily. “Why?”
“You and Dan haven’t had an argument?”
I look at her incredulously. “No. Why?”
“Nothing, nothing. None of my business. I just know Dan very well, and I can always tell when he’s cross about something; he gets these little frown lines right here.” She points to between her eyebrows. “Tom’s going to have them too. I can see already.”
“Not necessarily.” I try not to snap. “Everyone says he looks just like me when I was a baby.” Not strictly true. There’s no one to actually say that, as my father hasn’t seen Tom in months, and there’s no one else who would know.
“Really?” Her eyes widen. “How strange. He looks exactly like Dan did. You really can’t see it?”
“No.” I finish putting the ice in the glass and walk out of the kitchen. “I really can’t see it.”
I can’t go bitching to Dan, not after last night, but I need to get Linda off my chest, need to talk to someone. When I get back to the pool, I find that Lisa’s disappeared, gone for a walk down in the olive orchard, so I slip on my sandals and wander down to join her.
“What are you doing?” She’s sitting on the ground, guiltily shoving a hand behind her back as a telltale waft of smoke drifts over her head.
“Smoking?” I’m shocked. “Jesus! You are! You’re smoking!”
“Shh,” she says guiltily, bringing her hand out to reveal a cigarette. “I don’t want the others to know.”
“But you don’t smoke. At least, I never knew you smoked,” I say, still in shock. “How can you manage to be one of my best friends and not tell me you smoke?”
“First of all, I don’t consider myself a smoker.” Lisa takes a long drag on the cigarette and exhales as I wave the smoke away. “And second, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you talk about. How are you? How are the kids? Yes, we’re great and by the way did you know I smoke?”
I frown. “I know, but still.”
“I don’t really smoke,” Lisa says.
“Clearly.” I can’t help but grin.
“No, seriously. I gave up for years, and just have the odd one now and again. If I’m out drinking, I tend to have a cigarette, and sometimes on holiday.”
“Tell me you don’t smoke in front of Amy,” I say sternly.
“Oh, God, no! What do you think I am, some sort of reprobate mother?”
I shake my head. “No, you’re a great mother. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“That’s okay. You had to ask.” She grinds the cigarette out and buries it under some twigs. “So, what’s going on with you and Dan?”
“Wh
at do you mean, what’s going on? Nothing.”
“Right. And I wasn’t just smoking a cigarette, it was a figment of your imagination.” I can’t help it. I laugh.
“Okay,” I say. “We had a huge row last night and neither of us is willing to admit we’re in the wrong, so nobody’s apologized and right at this second I pretty much hate him.”
“Was it the usual?”
I sigh. “Yes. Can you believe it? You’d think we’d be a bit more creative about our arguments instead of rowing about his bloody mother over and over again, but I just can’t stand the way he never sticks up for me.”
And I vent. I don’t tell her what it was about specifically, obviously, but I vent general stuff about Linda, and how she always tries to take over, and how Dan never sticks up for me. “What do you think?” I finish. “Tell me what you think about her.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she says. “I mean, I understand how you feel, I really do, and maybe I would feel the same way if I were married, but I’ve never known what it’s like because The Deserter’s parents lived in America and I barely knew them.” She looks at me and sees the expression on my face. “Okay, I think it sounds like Dan probably could, and should, stick up for you more than he does, but Ellie, they’re really not that bad.”
“Not they,” I say. “Her.”
“Yes, okay, then. Her. I just don’t think she’s that bad. God, it could be so much worse. She’s just trying to be a good mother-in-law and grandmother. You’ve got yourself so worked up by your hatred of her that you jump down her throat at everything she says, no matter how innocuous.”
“Thanks for the support,” I grumble, in what even to me sounds like an incredibly puerile way.
“Ellie, you know I support you, but you have to get things into perspective. Have you ever thought that maybe she’s the way she is because she isn’t happy?”
“Not happy? What does she have to be unhappy about?”