AREN’T YOU HAVING ANY?
I have a friend I’m too frightened to see. We used to be close, but when she calls during the smashed days of late summer I shrink from the sound of her voice. I read a story about a woman whose dead grandmother keeps calling the house, leaving long messages on the answering machine in which she bewails her purgatorial loneliness. The woman was fond of her grandmother but eventually she becomes angry, pitiless, shouting down the phone at the dead woman to go away. The calls are making her feel guilty.
My friend lives with her two daughters in a town about an hour from here, in a house an estate agent would describe as ‘deceptive’. From the outside it appears tiny: the deception lies in the fact that once the scale of the street has been removed, everything inside is at least in proportion to everything else. My friend is tiny herself, with child-sized hands whose bitten nails she hides in the long sleeves of her too-big jumpers. Once she lived in London with her husband, in a grand establishment where dinner parties were held from which one would come away feeling lacerated, as though the evening had contained a hidden blade that nicked the skin unnoticed. That blade, I suppose, was the animosity between man and wife that later dismembered their household and whole way of life so brutally. The husband met another woman, had new children, bought another grand house to replace the first; and my friend and her daughters were cut away, like the excess cloth fallen from a seamstress’s table that the pattern doesn’t require.
She moved to this cheaper, less fashionable location, got a job that fitted round her children’s school day, gave up drinking, took up yoga. She sees different people, has new opinions, a new haircut. Everything in her doll’s house is dainty and white and fresh. It is as though, in the absence of man, woman seizes the opportunity to recover her innocence, to make her world virginal again, to cleanse herself of the gore of sexuality and perfect her femininity. For a while I cleaned my own house incessantly, a maternal Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains everywhere. The messy cupboards and cluttered shelves were like an actual subconscious I could purge of its guilt and pain. In those cupboards our family still existed, man and woman still mingled, children were still interleaved with their parents, intimacy survived. One day I took everything out and threw it away.
So I’m frightened of my friend. I don’t return her calls. Her existence is virtuous, honourable, yet the thought of it paralyses me with terror.
My daughter comes back from a school trip with a long face. I ask her how it was. It was all right, she says.
All evening she is quiet, but once she’s in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, she begins to speak. The trip was to a local nature reserve, a place I know, the broad estuary banked by desolate wetlands and marshes. They were there all day. They were asked to choose partners, and each pair was given maps and information packs and questionnaires with which to negotiate their own way around. They were asked to make a note of birds and animals they saw, and to sketch the different wildflowers and grasses. It sounds like fun, I say. Well it was, she says, I mean it would have been. That’s what makes it so hard, she says, the fact that it would have been fun.
When the class chose their partners, standing in the car park beside the coach that had brought them there, the group was an odd number and my daughter found herself left out. I ask why she wasn’t in a pair with H, her longtime best friend. H chose someone else, she says. It seems that she and H are no longer friends, and that my daughter has been slower than H to make new alliances. I don’t blame her, she says. It’s not her fault. I’d probably have done exactly the same thing. But all day I had to go around on my own. And it was such a long day, she says, and so much walking and so many things we had to do. The teacher was meant to be her partner but it didn’t really work out like that. She kept having to go and help other people, and my daughter kept finding herself alone again.
I didn’t realise, I say, about you and H. You didn’t tell me.
It’s just as much my fault as hers, my daughter says.
What happened? I say.
My daughter shrugs.
She didn’t like it when I talked to other people, she says. I wanted to be her friend but I wanted to have other friends too. And she wanted it to be just us.
In the mirror my daughters and I look at ourselves. They are growing, getting bigger, and I am shrinking. I can’t eat, like a lovesick girl. But I am not a girl and this is grief. It is the opposite of excitement.
In the mirror their faces are young and strong and richly coloured, yet blunt and half-formed, full of the unknown, of sentences not yet uttered. Their heads reach my shoulder. I stand between them, recessed, shadowy, a creature concealed in the foliage of their girlish vigour. I feel I could stay hidden like this forever, hidden in this virginal life with my daughters, but then the image breaks apart; time resumes; they vanish from the mirror to do other things and I am left there, as though holding the long and close-typed book of myself in my hands.
Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope. I have cousins I have rarely seen, for our families did not get on: they were like us but they were not us. A few years ago I saw them at a funeral, grown up now, a group of white-faced strangers clad in black. We spoke, politely, and it was unnerving to see in these strangers the lineaments of my siblings’ faces; to see coolness in their expressions instead of warmth, indifference where usually there was interest, to feel the lack of meaning and connection in what looked, nonetheless, like intimacy. And grief is somehow the same, resembling what it negates, each cousinly attribute a denial instead of a reinforcement.
I can’t eat, and soon my clothes are too big for me, all gaping sleeves and sagging waistbands, everything seeming to be on a different scale from myself, just as my mother’s clothes were when long ago I opened her wardrobe and curiously tried them on. In a way I enjoy the feeling of becoming a child again. It seems to acquit me of men and marriage, this loss of substance; to pair me with my daughters, as though I were rejoining them on the other side of what created them. I feel safer this way. I look at people eating, at restaurant tables, in cafes and on park benches, and compared to them I feel protected, as though what they are ingesting in all its richness and density is compromise. To need is to be compromised. They seem almost vulnerable while they eat.
As a family we would eat around the kitchen table, but now I carry my daughters their supper on a tray. The table is covered in papers and books and electricity bills. I try to remember what our family meals were like, and though the detail escapes me I remember it as a kind of tree, nourishment, with all of us fastened to its branches, as indistinguishable as fruit. Ours was a communal body: there was no individual drama of growing or shrinking. That same tree existed in my childhood, its cycles by turns reassuring and tyrannical. One could break away from it but the tree still stood. As a teenager trying to escape family mealtimes, I remember my mother’s disapproval — almost, her fear — of such absences. There was something she wanted us to believe, something she feared we might find out the truth of if we went elsewhere. That there were other places we could eat, perhaps; that this tree, family, was not the only source of life. To reject her food was to reject her; perhaps she thought food was the only thing we really needed from her, or the only thing she could provide. Mealtimes had the religiosity and infallibility of an institution, until we stopped believing in them and they were revealed to be just my mother, providing or needing, it wasn’t clear which.