By the time she had settled on a tartan skirt and plain white T-shirt, it was time to call the taxi. The taxi was late. Janet was red-faced and anxious when she arrived at the restaurant.
“I ordered us oysters,” he said, his eyes anxious to know if he had done the right thing.
Normally Janet hated the pushy male thing of ordering for the little woman. But he was trying to be generous, to make a gesture. She smiled such a smile, her face nearly broke in half.
“What could be better?” she asked.
The lunch was like their coffee break at the fish market only better. They talked about the world of banking and how hard it was for Liam to meet real people anymore. Instead he met corporate people and committees and read reports and acted on them. And Janet told him eagerly about school and how there was no time to get to know the children and find out what they really wanted to do, and what they were like and what they hoped for. Instead you had to follow a curriculum, and get them to pass exams, and achieve a good result for the school.
They couldn’t finish the prawns, the sauce was too rich. As they pushed them around their plate he said unexpectedly.
“Will you spend the afternoon with me?”
“Yes, of course, where?” she asked.
“I have a place.”
Her smile was broad again. He couldn’t be married or tied up or have a whole complicated lifestyle that he was cheating on. Not if he said he had a place.
“Oh, really?” Janet said, face full of hope and eagerness.
“Well yes, I booked, just in case, just in case you’d say yes,” he said.
It was a motel. A place you book. He had been so sure of her, he had thought it worthwhile to make a reservation. Her heart felt heavy, and her face must have shown it.
“Something’s wrong,” Liam said.
“No, not at all.” Her smile was brave and his came back. He was so simple, really, and straightforward. He had liked her, liked her enough to invite her to lunch, to call her on Christmas Eve, to order oysters, to book a place for the afternoon, to be with her. Perhaps she was the selfish one, she was the one demanding commitment, assurances that he was available, and a catch, and maybe even a meal ticket. She was a liberated woman. Janet knew you could meet and enjoy each other as equals if you wanted to. The days of demanding that a man be a protector or a provider were long gone.
“So shall we stop pretending to eat these prawns?” he asked with a laugh.
“I’ve given up the struggle,” she agreed.
They drove to the motel. A place Janet had often passed and wondered idly how it made a living. Now she knew; they rented by the hour. It was clean and functional. He had a bottle of wine in a cool bag that he had brought with him, another sign that he had known she would agree to the motel, and he poured her a glass. It was a good wine from a vineyard they had talked about, but today it tasted like vinegar. He was a gentle and courteous lover, and he lay afterward with his arm around her shoulder, protectively, as if they had often lain like this before and would for many more years. Her heart lifted for a while. Perhaps this is the way people were nowadays. Behavior had changed. You didn’t have to play games, pretend to be hard to get, exchange sexual favors for continued attention, trade sex for commitment.
“I got you a little gift, a silly thing,” he said, and he reached out for a wrapped parcel that he had on the bedside table. She couldn’t have loved him more. She was glad that she hadn’t played at being outraged when he suggested an afternoon in a motel.
“What is it?”
No present she had got this Christmas could compare. It was a little tin fish, the kind of thing you might hang on a Christmas tree or, if it had a magnet, it could be stuck to the refrigerator door.
“It’s a baramundi,” he said, pleased with what he saw as her pleasure. “To remind you of when we met pointing at that fish and fighting over it, and then becoming friends.” His arm was around her again, squeezing tightly.
“Great, great friends,” he said, appreciatively. She turned over the little fish in her hand.
“It’s great,” she said. She knew her voice was flat, her pleasure was not real.
“Well, it’s a jokey gift,” he said, embarrassed.
“No, it’s great.” She wanted to be a million miles from here. Why had she not taken her car? She tried to remember. It had something to do with being available for him. Well, she had been that all right. In spades. Now she would have to ask him to drive her to somewhere near her home or to a taxi rank. It would be squalid. But she would not let it be that way. If only she could guard herself, not say anything foolish.
“Where does your wife think you are?” Janet heard herself ask.
He looked as if she had hit him, but he rallied.
“She didn’t ask. I didn’t say.”
“And your children?”
Why was she asking these things, ruining what was good between them.
“They’re in the pool. They don’t know where I am. I work such long hours they don’t expect me to be around.”
He had answered her truthfully. He had asked her nothing in return.
They left the bed where they had been so happy, so close, and she noticed he took a very long time having a shower. As if he had been to a sports club or a gym. He passed her a clean towel when she went into the shower, and she held it for a long time to her face to force away the tears that she thought might come.
In the car he was still boyish and happy. But he was so intelligent, surely he must know that whatever they had was over? He asked where she lived and she suggested that he leave her in Balmain.
“No, no, door-to-door service,” he laughed, then looking at her face, realized it might be crass. He patted her on the knee.
“I didn’t mean to be flip. It was lovely,” he said.
“Yes indeed.” She tried, but she couldn’t put any life into her words.
He drove her to the gate. Out in the back garden Maggie might have been half sleeping in the sun, dreaming of her married man who could not leave his family at this festive time. Kate would be in her room studying. Sheila might have gone to play tennis and beat back the guilt about not having gone home to Ireland for Christmas Day. None of them would know that Janet’s heart had cracked in two. Liam was looking at her.
“Will we meet again?” he asked; his face was enthusiastic. He liked talking to her, laughing with her, holding her, making love with her. He couldn’t see any reason why it could not go on, as sunnily and easily as it had begun.
Struggling to be fair, Janet couldn’t see any reason either, except that she knew it was over.
“No, but thank you, thank you all the same,” she said.
He looked at her sadly.
“Was it the fish? Was it the little Christmas baramundi?” he asked anxiously.
“Why do you say that?” Janet asked.
His face was troubled.
“I thought you’d like it. I thought it was silly and sentimental and not commercial. I could have got you a pin, a brooch or something for five hundred dollars, but I thought it looked wrong somehow.”
“The fish is great,” Janet said.
“And we did meet over a baramundi,” he said.
“Or something,” Janet said.
There was a silence. Liam looked at the house.
“It’s a nice place to live,” he said, as if trying to bequeath her a good life.
“Oh yes, it is.” She realized he didn’t know. He had never asked if she lived with a man, a husband, or children. He just assumed she was a free spirit who could live life in compartments as he could.
“Has it a garden at the back?” They talked like strangers now, like people at a cocktail party.
“Yes, a small garden. Do you know, Liam, I was happier there on Christmas Eve than I ever was in my life, and than I ever will be again.” She knew her voice was very intense and that he was looking at her uneasily. But somehow it was a great relief to have something defined. The
y said that women became more like their mothers as they grew older.
Janet shivered. She felt that she was becoming very like her mother. Soon her face would tighten in a hard smile. What a pity there was nobody she could talk to about it. The man who was saying goodbye at her gate was someone who might have understood, had things been different.
THIS YEAR IT
WILL BE DIFFERENT
Ethel wondered had it anything to do with her name. Apart from Ethel Merman there didn’t seem to be many racy Ethels; she didn’t know any Ethels who took charge of their own lives.
At school there had been two other Ethels. One was a nun in the Third World, which was a choice, of course, but not a racy choice. The other was a gray sort of person, she had been gray as a teenager and she was even grayer in her forties. She worked as a minder to a Selfish Personality. She described the work as Girl Friday; it was, in fact, Dogsbody, which scanned perfectly, and after all, words mean what you want them to mean.
These were no role models, Ethel told herself. But anyway, even if it weren’t a question of having a meek name, a woman couldn’t change overnight. Only in movies did a happily married mother of three suddenly call a family conference and say that this year she was tired of the whole thing, weary of coming home after work and cleaning the house and buying the Christmas decorations and putting them up, buying the Christmas cards, writing them and posting them so that they would keep the few friends they had.
Only in a film would Ethel say that she had had it up to here with Christmas countdowns, and timing the brandy butter, and the chestnut stuffing, and the bacon rolls, and bracing herself for the cry “No sausages?” when a groaning platter of turkey and trimmings was hauled in from the kitchen.
She who had once loved cooking, who had delighted in her family’s looking up at her hopefully waiting to be fed, now loathed the thought of what the rest of the world seemed to regard as the whole meaning of Christmas.
But there would be no big scene. What was the point of ruining everyone else’s Christmas by a lecture on how selfish they all were? Ethel had a very strong sense of justice. If her husband never did a hand’s turn in the kitchen, then some of the blame was surely Ethel’s. From the very beginning she should have expected that he would share the meal preparation with her, assumed it, stood smiling, waiting for him to help. But twenty-five years ago women didn’t do that. Young women whooshed their young husbands back to the fire and the evening newspaper. They were all mini-Superwomen then. It wasn’t fair to move the goalposts in middle age.
Any more than it was fair to stage a protest against her two sons and daughter. From the start those children had been told that the first priority was their studies. Their mother had always cleared away the meal after supper to leave them space and time to do their homework, or their university essays, or their computer practice. When other women had got a dishwasher, Ethel had said the family should have a word processor. Why should she complain now?
And everyone envied her having two strong, handsome sons around the house, living with her from choice. Other people’s twenty-three- and twenty-two-year-olds were mad keen to leave home. Other women with a nineteen-year-old daughter said they were demented with pleas about living in a bed-sitter, a commune, a squat. Ethel was considered lucky, and she agreed with this. She was the first to say she had got more than her fair share of good fortune.
Until this year. This year she felt she was put upon. If she saw one more picture of a forty-seven-year-old woman smiling at her out of a magazine with the body of an eighteen-year-old, gleaming skin, fifty-six white, even teeth, and shiny hair, Ethel was going to go after her with a carving knife.
This year, for the first time, she did not look forward to Christmas. This year she had made the calculation: the thought, the work, the worry, the bone-aching tiredness on one side of the scales; the pleasure of the family on the other. They didn’t even begin to balance. With a heavy heart she realized that it wasn’t worth it.
She didn’t do anything dramatic. She didn’t do anything at all. She bought no tree, she mended no fairy lights, she sent six cards to people who really needed cards. There was no excited talking about weights of turkey and length of time cooking the ham as in other years. There were no lists, no excursions for late-night shopping. She came home after work, made the supper, cleared it away, washed up and sat down and looked at the television.
Eventually they noticed.
“When are you getting the tree, Ethel?” her husband asked her good-naturedly.
“The tree?” She looked at him blankly, as if it were a strange Scandinavian custom that hadn’t hit Ireland.
He frowned. “Sean will get the tree this year,” he said, looking thunderously at his elder son.
“Are the mince pies done yet?” Brian asked her.
She smiled at him dreamily.
“Done?” she asked.
“Made, like, cooked. You know in tins, like always.” He was confused.
“I’m sure the shops are full of them, all right,” she said.
Ethel’s husband shook his head warningly at Brian, the younger son.
The subject was dropped.
Next day Theresa said to the others that there was no turkey in the freezer, nor had one been ordered. And Ethel turned up the television so that she wouldn’t hear the family conference that she knew was going on in the kitchen.
They came to her very formally. They reminded her of a trade union delegation walking up the steps to arbitration. Or like people delivering a letter of protest at an embassy.
“This year it’s going to be different, Ethel.” Her husband’s voice was gruff at the awkward unfamiliar words. “We realize that we haven’t been doing our fair share. No, don’t deny it, we have all discussed it and this year you’ll find that it will be different.”
“We’ll do all the washing-up after Christmas dinner,” Sean said. “And clear away all the wrapping paper,” added Brian. “And I’ll ice the cake when you’ve made it. I mean after the almond icing,” Theresa said.
She looked at them all, one by one, with a pleasant smile, as she always had.
“That would be very nice,” she said. She spoke somehow remotely. She knew they wanted more. They wanted her to leap up there and then and put on a pinny, crying that now she knew they would each do one chore then she would work like a demon to catch up. Buzz, buzz, fuss, fuss. But she didn’t have the energy, she wished they would stop talking about it.
Her husband patted her hand.
“Not just words, you know, Ethel. We have very concrete plans and it will begin before Christmas. Actually it will begin tomorrow. So don’t come into the kitchen for a bit, we want to finalize our discussions.”
They all trooped back to the kitchen again. She lay back in her chair. She hadn’t wanted to punish them, to withhold affection, to sulk her way into getting a bit more help. It was no carefully planned victory, no cunning ploy.
She could hear them murmuring and planning; she could hear their voices getting excited and them shushing each other. They were trying so hard to make up for the years of not noticing. Yes, that is all it was. Simply not noticing how hard she worked.
It just hadn’t dawned on them how unequal was the situation where five adults left this house in the morning to go out to work and one adult kept the house running as well.
Of course, she could always give up her job and be a full-time wife and mother. But that seemed a foolish thing to do now, at this stage, when the next stage would be the empty nest that people talked about. They were all saving for deposits, so they didn’t really give her much, and they were her own children. You couldn’t ask them for real board and lodging, could you?
No, no, it was her own fault that they hadn’t seen how hard she worked and how tired she was. Or hadn’t seen until now. She listened happily to the conversation in the kitchen. Well, now they knew, God bless them. Perhaps it hadn’t been a bad thing at all to be a bit listless, even though it had
n’t come from within, it wasn’t an act she had put on.
Next morning they asked her what time she’d be home from work.
“Well, like every day, around half-past six,” she said.
“Could you make it half-past seven?” they asked.
She could indeed, she could have a nice drink with her friend Maire from work. Maire, who said that she was like a mat for that family to walk on. It would be deeply satisfying to tell Maire that she couldn’t go home since the family were doing all the pre-Christmas preparations for her.
“You could always go to the supermarket.” Theresa said.
“Am I to do any shopping?” Ethel was flustered. She had thought they were seeing to all that.
She saw the boys frown at Theresa.
“Or do whatever you like, I mean,” Theresa said.
“You won’t forget foil, will you?” Ethel said anxiously. If they were going to do all this baking, it would be awful if they ran out of things.
“Foil?” They looked at her blankly.
“Maybe I’ll come back early and give you a bit of a hand …”
There was a chorus of disagreement.
Nobody wanted that. No, no she was to stay out. It was four days before Christmas, this would be a Christmas like no other, wait and see, but she couldn’t be at home.
They all went off to work or college.
She noticed that the new regime hadn’t involved clearing away their breakfast things, but Ethel told herself it would be curmudgeonly to complain about clearing away five cups and saucers and plates and cornflake bowls and washing them and drying them. She wanted to leave the kitchen perfect for them and all they were going to do.