Rotten Peaches

by Lisa de Nikolits

  He jumps off the bed and grabs me. “I have not fucked you over. I am thinking about us, our long-term. You always agreed we had to think long-term. You told me you wanted to be a mom to your kids. That you never wanted to be a parent like your own parents were. And what long-term plan have you ever come up with? How were you thinking we’d fund our days together? That we’d live off the petty cash you take from the shows or from the money you skim off the company credit card? Or the product you sell off the books? I am thinking about us. You’re the one who’s being short-sighted.”

  “I’m a terrible mother,” I say and I slump with the admission of my failure. “I wasn’t exactly winning gold stars before I met you and now I’m worse. You said so yourself. Dave is a better mother than I’ll ever be. But at least now I know how I figure into your future.”

  “Why can’t you see that I am only thinking of us?”

  “If that’s true, then why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t exactly text you, hey, hon, I’m thinking of marrying Iris. Isn’t that a great idea? I needed to see you. I was going to tell you as soon as we saw each other.”

  I give a half smile. “Yeah, that wouldn’t have gone down well. But you didn’t have to disappear. I’ve been a crabby bitch to Dave and the girls. I’m going to have to make it right. They won’t be happy.” I look over at the alarm clock on JayRay’s scarred pine bedside table. “They’ll be back soon. I’ll stop by Walmart and buy them presents and say I was there the whole time.”

  I have a quick shower, come back into the bedroom and start pulling on my clothes.

  “Let me ask you something.” I’ve been afraid to broach the subject but I have to ask. “Did these mean anything to you or were you just fuck drunk and out of your skull?” I point to the tattoo on my pubic bone. It isn’t a pretty sight, the tattoo is scabbing and the hair is growing back and the whole thing looks diseased. He flips the sheet aside and shows me his, which isn’t in much better shape.

  “It means the world to me. I take it Dave hasn’t seen it?”

  I shake my head. “I managed to evade him. My fucking bush better grow back quickly and cover it. Not like he examines me down there or anything.”

  “So, Iris?” I can’t help but comment as I gather my purse and keys. “For real? Good thing no one knows about you and me at the shows.”

  “There is one other way,” JayRay says quietly and I stop, deadstill.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Dave…” JayRay says vaguely, waving his hand around. “All his money. His family’s moola. Moneybucks Grandma Nancy … I don’t know. That pile of cash you live in.”

  “You’ve seen where I live?” I had told JayRay about the place but as far as I knew, he’d never been there.

  “Of course I do, sweetcheeks. I’ve driven past a few times. I even stopped outside for a while. You never saw me. But I saw you, not looking too happy might I say. Can’t you get Dave to sell that big old castle and split the money with you?”

  “No,” I say, through clenched teeth. “I cannot. Nor would I, ever. You might be happy to skin your half-sister alive JayRay, but I would never do that. How can you even think that? Not an option. Anyway, he’d never sell. He’ll rent out the basement, do shit like that to keep it. It’s all fucking falling apart anyway. Place looks like a giant shithole inside. And Dave said investments are down right now, so we’re living off his salary and mine. And Nancy? There’s no way we’d get a penny out of her tight-fisted, tennis-toned ass. She hates me. Plus she’s selling my product for extra cash, so you’ve got your answer right there.”

  JayRay shrugs. “Had to ask,” he says, nonchalantly. “No Picasso’s on the wall, shit like that you could offload?”

  “No Picassos. No nothing. Forget about it JayRay. Shit, I can’t believe you even thought about it.”

  I glare at him and he jumps off the bed. “Listen, Leo honey, I was only thinking of you and me. Bernice is history. You think you don’t want me humping Iris for our lottery win? Well, neither do I. I was just exploring all the avenues out there.”

  I relent. I guess it was an obvious question for him to ask, particularly if he’s seen the house. Anyone would think we had money coming out of our ears.

  “Well it’s not an avenue, cross it off your list. I’d better get going. I’m in more shit than I can tell you. See you in a few days.”

  “You are my everything,” JayRay says and he holds me close and kisses me goodbye. “You know that, right?”

  I nod and close the door behind me. My focus is back on my family. I have to put things right. My fix taken care of, I’m horrified by how I missed the hockey game and I’m shocked by my own actions. If JayRay’s going to make other plans, then I’d better make my own too, and that means making things right at home. My family are my own personalized Hallmark card come to life, a safe haven from the pain. I need that comforting cocoon of familial chaos within which to lose myself.

  I turn on the car and swing towards home, trying to figure out what gifts I can buy to make amends for what I have done.

  12. BERNICE

  I FINISH THE BOTTLE OF WINE. Dirk still isn’t home.

  “Madam?” It is Betty, faithful Betty still wearing her neat pink-and-white servant’s uniform, her turban neatly in place, her apron tied in a perfect bow, and not a crease in sight despite her long day.

  I sigh. “Ja, Betty, what do you want?” I am still annoyed with her for being less than co-operative about new ideas for another book, and for disappearing and not making me supper.

  “Madam, would like something to eat?”

  “No. I didn’t know where you were so I made a sarmie.” I gesture to the dry uneaten sandwich and Betty makes a disapproving sound.

  “That looks very bad,” she says and I nod in agreement.

  “Ja well, I’m a bit drunk to be honest, Betty. I don’t know where Dirk is and I’m worried.”

  “He will be back, Madam, do not worry.”

  “Do you think so? How can you know, hey?”

  “Men,” Betty says. “Come, Madam, let me put you to bed.”

  “No, I am fine here, I am going to wait.”

  “Then I will go to my room. You will be all right?”

  “Ja, I’ll be fine, Betty, thank you. Have a good night.”

  Betty nods and leaves. I try to think back to the men that Betty has seen come and go in my life and I wonder what Betty thinks of me. I know so little about her life. I know that Rosie is twenty-six and that she’s gone from being an angry, lazy, lout of a girl to an angry, couture-wearing, go-getter with a big career at the South African Broadcasting Corporation. My father paid for Rosie’s school fees and sent her to the same private girl’s school that I attended, but she was ten years behind me and I never saw her.

  These days she comes into the kitchen and scowls at me, as if I am holding her mother hostage, and she mutters in Zulu, things that I know are not complimentary.

  Betty has been a part of my life forever. She came to help my mother shortly after my first birthday. Betty is more of a parent to me than my own mother ever was. Betty isn’t even that old; she’s nearly fifty-five. My mother would have been fifty-four had she lived. My mother had me when she was nineteen, and when Betty arrived a year later, she was only a year older than my mother.

  I wasn’t happy when Rosie was born, but Betty made sure that I hardly noticed her. Betty kept her strapped to her back, wrapped tight in a blanket, in the traditional way of carrying children, and all I ever saw of Rosie when she was a baby was her tiny head. When Rosie grew up she was a vortex of spinning fury who hated the world and everything in it. I stayed as far away from her as I could.

  We lived on the farm back then, and it was to Betty that I turned when I needed affection or solace. My mother spent most of her life in a darkened room, resting, and emerging briefly to host parti
es and socials and teas for the other bored farm wives.

  My mother died suddenly of ovarian cancer that had spread. She was only thirty-eight when, out of nowhere, she fell ill and very shortly after that, she was dead.

  I was nineteen at the time. The same age that my mother was when she had me. I had just started my studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and I was finding it hard to get into the rhythm of adult life after the safe and cloistered confines of the convent boarding school and the equally cloistered summers at the farm. No sooner had things settled for me, in Johannesburg, when I had to return home to bury my mother.

  “She hated the farm, you know,” my father told me as we prepared her funeral arrangements. “She married me because she thought I could save her. She hated modeling for a living and she had you to support and she thought I offered her a way out. But instead of being her salvation, I brought her to live in a dusty hell. When I asked her to marry me, I told her that we would live on a farm, and I explained our way of life in detail. I told her she was more of a city girl but she said that wasn’t true. She said the city had hurt her and she couldn’t wait to leave. So she accepted my marriage proposal but I don’t think she understood what life here would really mean.”

  “I don’t care what she thought or felt,” I said, linking my arm through his. “You saved me. What would have become of us if you hadn’t married her? Modeling doesn’t pay the rent for long and god knows she could never have gotten a real job. The only thing she was good at was being a coat hanger for pretty dresses, and giving tea parties.”

  “Ah now, don’t talk about her like that,” my father was reproving. “She was a creature made to decorate this world. She had her beauty and that was her gift to me and to the world. But I would like to think I made her happy in some kind of way.”

  “You did,” I insisted. “You gave her everything she ever wanted and she did love it here or she would have left.”

  “And gone where? With what money?”

  “She would have made a plan,” I was certain. “Ma would never have stayed anywhere she didn’t want to be. You must know that?”

  My father looked doubtful. “Well there’s nothing I can do for her now except miss her. And miss her I shall, every moment of every day. Come on, poppie, let’s plan a tea party that would have made her proud.”

  After my mother’s white, lily-strewn coffin was lowered into the family burial ground on the farm, I walked away with my father. I glanced briefly over my shoulder at the large feather-winged marble angel standing guard over my mother’s grave. Who was the woman who birthed me? She was the shadow of a butterfly, pretty, distant, and vague, paging endlessly through fashion magazines and making her dresses from bolts of cloth that she had delivered to the farm.

  We held a fine afternoon tea and the neighbours came. Betty baked kooksisters and melktert and other traditional treats, and the table was weighed down by the array. We drank Rooibos and Earl Gray tea and there were tiny cups of espresso coffee for my father, only he was crying too hard to drink anything. He sat, immobile, trying to swallow his tears, and I watched his face, so still, awash with tears that he dabbed with his already-soaked pale blue handkerchief. My mother had made those handkerchiefs for him; he had a drawer full of them.

  I was hardly aware of the neighbours, although one woman in particular seemed inappropriately upset. Certainly, my mother had been known to throw a good party but it wasn’t as if any of them had been her real friends. After they left, I sat on the sofa in the quiet darkening of the late afternoon and I looked at my father who hadn’t moved.

  I was thinking about my mother’s room. I had not crossed the threshold of that room since she died. I was a stranger to her room, having visited only twice when I was a child. The feeling of trespassing was thick in the air and I knew to leave as quickly as possible.

  When I came home for the holidays from the boarding school in Johannesburg, I lived in my bedroom, reading, or I hung out in the kitchen, talking to Betty, or I took my horse out for long rides. After a formal but simple dinner with my father, I spent the evenings with him in his study, reading or playing games or watching movies. My mother’s absence was an accepted fact. She joined us for dinner now and then, dressed in one of her sparkly creations, but I preferred the evenings without her. It had never occurred to me that my mother might be depressed or have problems of her own; to my mind she was simply inordinately vain and selfish. But she never sought me out either.

  “What will you do with her room and all her stuff?” I asked.

  “Keep it exactly like it is. I can’t bear to lose her in that way too. When do you go back to university?”

  “In two days. Pa, I don’t think I want to be a lawyer. I want to study psychology.”

  My father rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Too much introspection is not a good thing. It’s better, if you ask me, to learn a trade. Law is a trade. It’s objective, it is this or it is that. But psychology deals with the grey area of life and grey can be dangerous.”

  “But it’s what I want to do. I signed up for Psych 101 and it’s fascinating. Law is dry and boring.”

  “I will always support you, poppie, in everything you do. And if that is what you want to do, so be it.”

  “You always have supported me.” I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “I love you, Pa, you know how much?”

  “How much?”

  “A gazillion pieces.” I smiled at him.

  “And I, you, poppie, and I, you.”

  And he was good to his word. He loved me in spite of everything. In spite my anger, my sadness, and my loneliness.

  My anger, my sadness, and my loneliness. The worst of these was my anger. It was the main reason I wanted to study psychology. My father knew I had a temper but he didn’t know the depth of hatred that lay beneath my skin like a virulent second dermis. A dermis that crawled with impotent rage, hating life, hating my mother. I hated her beauty and her, for giving none of it to me. I hated her fragility that I knew was really her armour.

  I knew I needed to untangle my feelings about her or I’d never be happy. Besides, being that angry was exhausting.

  I graduated when I was twenty-six, in 2008, and I published the first Bake Your Way book a year later. My father died in 2010 and I was grateful that he had witnessed my success. I buried him next to my mother, under the watchful eye of the six-foot angel. I did not have a party or invite any of the neighbours over because I couldn’t bear to share my grief. And I understood then why my father kept my mother’s room untouched. I too, could not bear to change a single thing on the farm. My father’s world had to remain intact, as if he might come back at any moment.

  But I sold the sheep and I locked the farm up tight, leaving Isaac, the groundsman, to mow the lawns, keep the gardens alive, and see that no harm came to the place. I had no idea if or when I would ever return but I needed it to be there, because it was my childhood home.

  I was already living in the Westcliff house that my father had bought for me, and Betty lived with me. And, according to my father’s wishes, I continued to pay for Rosie’s university tuition, as he had done mine.

  Still hoping to hear the sound of Dirk’s car, I open a new bottle of wine and wonder what my father would think of Dirk and the current mess I am in. I’m sure he wouldn’t approve but I am in too deep and I don’t know how to fix things.

  I think about faithful Betty, asleep in her room, with her bed set high on bricks to keep her safe from the tokoloshes, while Rosie toils late into the night at her fancy job and dreams about being an even bigger shot. She is fueled by her own brand of anger, and here I sit, drinking to drown my sorrows, not that this is anything new. Sometimes I find my life ironic. I am, after all, a world expert on happiness and the state of the human psyche. It’s a good thing no one knows the truth.

  I try to call Dirk again but his phone stubbornly goes to
voicemail.

  I drink until I fall asleep on the sofa. Betty wakes me the next morning, a cup of coffee in her hand. Dirk is still nowhere to be seen.

  13. LEONIE

  “IT’S GOING TO TAKE MORE than cheap crap from Walmart,” Dave says and he’s angrier than I have ever seen him. “Do you have any idea how upset the girls were?”

  It turns out I let Muffin out and were it not for the observant eye of a neighbour, Muffin would be history.

  “The old guy across the street saw Muffin running out and he managed to grab him,” Dave tells me while I unload my parcels onto the kitchen table.

  “Yeah, that guy watches us all the time,” I say, trying to lessen the magnitude of what he said, but I am sick to my stomach.

  “Thank god he does,” Dave retorts. “The girls were hysterical when we got home and found him gone. We searched the house for hours. You can’t imagine. First, they were extremely upset that you didn’t come with us. Maddie played badly and Kenzie was so stressed. And then we got home to find Muffin gone. They were out of their minds. It took an hour of them wailing and me looking in the garden before the old guy thought to come over with Muffin. The kids were so noisy he must have heard the commotion but, still, he waited. Anyway, thank god he had him. I don’t know what I would have done. I can’t carry on like this, Lee. The girls can’t carry on like this. We love you but what’s up?”

  The question was an echo of the one JayRay had asked me. JayRay, who texted me five times after I left, declaring his love and undying commitment such as it was. At least that was back to normal.

  I had stopped at Walmart and bought Kenzie’s favourite bubble bath, a new Maple Leafs T-shirt for Maddie, and chocolate-covered pretzels for Dave, and I drove back home wondering how bad the wrath would be, hoping it would be negligible and that I would be able to breeze through it. And, were it not for Muffin, things would have been manageable. Stupid fucking dog. I’m annoyed that no one paid any attention to my gifts. No one was giving me credit for trying.