I Don't Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson. (2/2)
Title: I Don't Know How She Does It.
Author: Allison Pearson.
Genre: Fiction, family, humour, domestic fiction.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2002.
Summary: With unsentimental irony, this novel dramatizes the dilemma of working motherhood at the start of the century. Meet Kate Reddy, hedge-fund manager and mother of two. She can juggle nine different currencies in five different time zones and get herself and two children washed and dressed and out of the house in half an hour. In Kate's life, Everything Goes Perfectly as long as Everything Goes Perfectly. She lies to her own mother about how much time she spends with her kids; practices pelvic floor squeezes in the boardroom; applies tips from Toddler Training to soothe her irascible boss; uses her cell phone in the office bathroom to procure a hamster for her daughter's birthday; and cries into the laundry hamper when she misses her children's bedtime. And when she meets a handsome American client and begins getting closer and closer to him, her juggling ability begins to suffer more and more. Both funny and sad, the novel captures the guilty secret lives of working women. (Only the PART 2 in this post, refer to PART 1 for the rest of the quotes).
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ I cannot imagine what I was thinking when I let Alexandra Law, Abbess among Mother Superiors, sign me up for the Parent Teachers Association. No, that's not true, I know exactly what I was thinking: I was thinking that just for one hour in some underlit overheated classroom I could pretend that I'm like any other mother. When the chair makes a reference to the absentee caretaker, I want to give a knowing little smile. I want to groan when someone brings up the matter of the summer fete-that time of year again already!-and I want to breathe that fuggy companionable air. And afterwards, when we've voted on a computer levy and plans to improve the sports facilities, I want to clasp my fingers round a white plastic cup containing a boiling orange beverage and I want to refuse a Hobnob, patting my waist significantly, and then I'll say, "Oh, go on then!" as though succumbing to a chocolate biscuit was the most reckless, heady thing I'd done for a very long time.
But, realistically, what were the chances of my making the PTA meeting at 6:30 on a Wednesday night? Alexandra described 6:30 as "after work," but what kind of work lets you go before 6:30 these days? Teaching, obviously, but even teachers have Himalayas of marking to do. When I was a child, there were fathers who still came home in time for the family's evening meal, dads who, in the summer months, would mow the lawn while it was still light and water the sweet peas in the dusk. But that age-the age of working to live instead of living to work-feels far away in a land where district nurses arrive by Morris Traveller and televisions glow like embers at the back. I don't know anyone at the office who eats with their kids during the week now.
♥ I immediately recognize the type. One of those wives, tensed like longbows, who have a full-time career keeping in shape for their husbands. They exercise, they get their hair done twice a week, they wear full makeup to play tennis and, when that is no longer enough, they willingly submit to the surgeon's knife. "Those rich stay-home mums are jogging for their lives," Debra says, and she's right. These women are not in love, they are in fear-fear that the husband's love will slip away and land on some replica of their younger selves.
Like me, they are in asset management, but my assets are most of the world's resources and their asset is themselves-a lovely product but threatened with diminishing returns. Don't get me wrong. When the time comes I'll probably have my neck lifted to the back of my ears and, like the Dianes of this world, I'll have it done to please someone; the difference is, that someone will be me. However much I sometimes don't want to be Kate, I really really don't want to be Diane.
♥ "How are the boys?"
"Well, we're luckier than a lot of people," says Robin, switching smoothly into Head of Investment mode. "You know Tim's at Bristol now, Sam's doing GCSEs and Alex is nearly nine. It's not as though they're little boys anymore who really-um, need a mother in the way that younger boys do actually need their mothers." And then he makes a noise that no one has ever heard in the offices of Edwin Morgan Forster before. Halfway between a bank and a moan, it is barely human-or maybe all too human-and I never want to hear it again.
♥ "Jill left this," he says, handing over a sheaf of paper. Twenty pages of close-typed script, it bears the title YOUR FAMILY: HOW IT WORKS!
"Everything's in there," he says, shaking his head in wonder. "She even tells me where to find the bloody Christmas decorations. You'd be amazed how much there is to remember, Kate."
No, I wouldn't.
..It's all there, for page after page: the minutiae of the children's lives, the rhythms of their days. I wince when I think how badly qualified I would be to write such a memo for Richard. On the Birthdays page, there is a stain the size of a cup. Something oily with a scab of flour. Jill must have been baking as she wrote.
Want to read on but prevented by blur of tears. Pick up the Telegraph instead and flick to the Obituaries page. Today there is an eminent biologist, a man who ran IBM in the sixties and a platinum showgirl, name of Dizzy, who "romanced" Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and the Aga Khan. No Cooper-Clark to be seen. Jill's kind of life doesn't get recorded for posterity. What was it Momo called it: "a waste"? How can all that love go to waste?
..I arrive in time to hear the vicar invite the congregation to thank God for the life of Jillian Cordelia Cooper-Clark. I didn't know she was a Cordelia-it suits her, principled and defined by love.
♥ Because we were in confessional mood, I told her I was afraid of letting myself feel too much. I didn't know how I could go back to the job without hardening my heart.
"The thing is, Kate," Jill said, "they treat us as though they're doing us a great favor by letting us work after we've had a child. And the price we pay for that favor is not making a fuss, not letting on how life can never be the same for us again. But always remember it's us who are doing them a favor. We're perpetuating the human race, and there's nothing more important than that. Where are they doing to get their bloody clients from if we stop breeding?"
♥ And you know something else? She was the only person who never said, I don't know how you do it. She knew how you did it, and she knew what it cost.
♥ As the vicar intones the liturgy and Robin steps forward to drop a handful of earth on his wife's coffin, I look away quickly and with washed eyes focus on the headstones all around us. DEVOTED SON. FATHER AND GRANDFATHER. PRECIOUS ONLY CHILD OF. BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. SISTER. WIFE. MOTHER. MOTHER. In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.
♥ Down in the piazza, thirteen floors below, I'm attracting a bit of a crowd-the first commuters pointing up at the woman on the ledge. Probably wondering if I'm a casualty of the recession or of the heart. A broker threw himself under a train at Moorgate the other morning and he missed: fell into the pit under the rails instead and got pulled out by an emergency team. Everyone kept saying what a miracle it was, but I wondered what it would be like to feel so bad you try to end it all and then fail at that too. Would it feel like rebirth or a living death?
♥ "Well, Mrs. Shattock, in certain home situations where neither parent is present, these kinds of things can, shall we say, slip. Did you learn an instrument yourself as a child?"
"No, but my father sang a lot to us."
"Oh," she said, the kind of Oh that kind of woman holds in a pooper-scooper.
♥ "But there's a list, Kate," he reasoned, in his man-in-a-white-coat voice. "How could I possibly go wrong?"
What every woman knows and no man can ever grasp is that even if he brings home everything on the list, he will still not have got the right things. Why? Because the woman truly believes that if she had gone to the supermarket she would have made better choices: a plumper chicken from a more luxuriantly pastured region of France, a yummier yogurt, the exact salad leaf she has yearned for and whose precise name had, until the epiphany in front of the Healthy Eating cabinet, eluded her. Men make lists to order the world, to tie it down; for women, lists are the start of something, the coordinates by which we plot our journey to freedom. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not claiming that any of this is fair. When a woman buys an item not on the list which turns out to be inedible, this is called "an experiment"; when a man does the same thing, it is "a waste of money."
♥ Pass the Parcel took a mere one hour and forty-five minutes to assemble. Debra warned me that you're not allowed to have just one gift in the middle like we used to have when we were little. These days, there has to be a present in each layer in an attempt to convince kids that life is fair. Why? Life is not fair; life is layers of wrapping with one broken squeaker in the middle.
♥ I finally find the box wedged at the back of a cupboard under a weeping bottle of soy sauce. A year past its sell-by date, the icing sugar comes out of the packet in one piece. It looks a lot like one of those Apollo moon rocks my dad cooked up thirty years ago. Or fifty pounds' worth of crack cocaine. Luckily it is not the latter, otherwise would consume entire piece by myself and lie down on kitchen floor awaiting merciful instant death.
♥ "And anyway you have to go with boys, only sometimes they're too naughty."
I stand here in the thick hot dark thinking of all the conversations we will have on this subject in the years ahead and of the ones we won't have, because she will need to have secrets in order to grow away from me and I will need to have secrets to keep her close.
♥ When I was young I left men like I left clothes, in heaps on the floor. It seemed better that way. You see, I had figured out that it was hard for someone to leave you when you'd gone already. Emotionally, I always had my suitcase packed. A therapist, if I ever had time to consult one, would probably say it was something to do with my dad walking out on us. Besides, I took the Groucho Marx line: Why would I want to be in a relationship with anyone dumb enough to be in a relationship with me? It took Richard to show me that love could be an investment, something which could silently accrue and promised long-term returns instead of a gamble that would leave you broke and broken.
♥ Men leave their children because they can; women, in general, don't leave because they can't. A mother's life is no longer her own to leave.
♥ I call up the Salinger file. The figures on-screen comfort me-the way they do my bidding so readily, the fact that I cannot lie to them. Whereas at home, I'm a forger, a faker. I'm not ashamed of it; I don't see any alternative. A good mum makes her own jam, doesn't she? Secretly, we all know that. Wen they start naming preserves Jet Lag Maman or Quality Time Mum, when bread comes in wrappers marked Father's Pride, it will be safe for us bad, exhausted mothers to come out with our hands up.
♥ Manager says that kangaroos been discontinued. "There's been a big trend away from the softer animals towards plastic novelty creatures, Mrs. Reddy. Would you perhaps be interested in a Mr. Potato Head?"
No. I already work with a dozen of those.
♥ Yes, I thought, surveying the scene at dinner, this is one of those rare times when life approaches the condition of color magazine. The domestic goddess entertaining her admiring parents-in-law in her lovely stylish home. Barbara had just asked me for the peppers recipe and then I saw it. Moving across the oak floor, the plump suede rear of a rat.
Etiquette books are unnaturally silent on the subject of rats a dinner parties. Do you
a. Laugh gaily and pretend the rat is a treasured pet?
b. Exclaim, Ah, there's the main course! Nigel Slater says rodent's the coming thing. Very good done the Vietnamese way, apparently?
c. Invite your guests to adjourn upstairs, ply them with as much drink as possible and put on a Burt Bacharach CD to drown out the sound from the kitchen where your husband is pursuing the rodent with your daughter's Marry Poppins umbrella?
Richard and I went for c.
♥ ..I found Barbara and Juanita in an accusing huddle. My mother-in-law was tutting audibly as my cleaner mimed a rat scurrying along the worktop and pointed to parts of the kitchen made impassable by newspapers and toys. "It's no wonder," said Barbara. Although my mother-in-law is not a Spanish speaker, she was able to communicate with Juanita in the international female language of Disapproval.
♥ You even dream differently in summer: fevered, tentacular dreams that pull you down towards thoughts you'd rather stayed buried.
♥ "I can't do very much about it, Winston. I'm what's technically known as the main breadwinner."
"Whoa." He stamps on the brake to avoid a nun on a zebra crossing. "How your man feel about that? Kind of thing tend to make the guys feel a little small in the Johnson department."
"Are you seriously suggesting that the size of my salary is shrinking my husband's penis?"
"Well, it would account for why no one out there can't make no babies no more, wouldn't it? Fertility rate was doing just fine till women went out to work."
"I think you'll find that's down to estrogen in the water."
"I think you'll find that's down to estrogen in the office."
Even from the back seat, I can tell he is grinning broadly, because his cheeks are stretched so taut they have rumpled up the skin under his ears.
"For God's sake, Winston, this is the end of the twentieth century."
He shakes his head and a sprinkling of gold dust fills the cab. Like a fairy godmother, Emily said, when she saw it. "Don't matter what century it is," he growls. "The clock in men's head always set to the same time. Pussy time."
"I thought we'd all grown up and got over that caveman nonsense."
"That's where people like you got it all wrong, lady. The women they outgrew it and the guys they just went along so they could keep getting the women to have sex with them. The guy, he just ask himself, What tune she want me to play now? and he play it."
♥ ..Andrew shrugs helplessly and says, "You know how it is, Kate." Slips into his jacket and out of the room.
Indeed, I do know how it is. Man announces he has to leave the office to be with his child for short recreational burst and is hailed as selfless doting paternal role model. Woman announces she has to leave the office to be with child who is on sickbed and is damned as disorganized, irresponsible, and Showing Insufficient Commitment. For father to parade himself as a Father is a sign of strength; for mother to out herself as a Mother is a sign of appalling vulnerability. Don't you just love equal opportunity?
..A man is allowed to advertise the fact that he is a father; it's a sign of strength, a sign he is a good provider. The women in the offices of EMF don't tend to display pictures of their kids. The higher they go up the ladder, the fewer photographs. If a man has pictures of kids on his desk, it enhances his humanity; if a woman has them it decreases her. Why? Because he's not supposed to be home with the children; she is.
♥ Once upon a time, in a land far away,
a beautiful, independent, self-assured princess
happened upon a frog as she sat contemplating ecological issues
on the shores of an unpolluted pond
in a verdant meadow near her castle.
The frog hopped into the princess's lap and said:
Sweet lady, I was once a handsome prince,
until an evil witch cast a spell on me.
One kiss from you, however,
and I will turn back into the dapper young prince that I am.
Then, my sweet, we can marry
and set up house in yon castle
where you can prepare my meals,
clean my clothes, bear my children,
and forever feel grateful and happy doing so.
That night, dining on a repast of lightly sauteed frogs' legs,
The princess chuckled to herself and thought:
I don't fucking think so.
♥ Men today can only be better fathers than their fathers. Simply by knowing how to change a nappy or figuring out which hole you stick the bottle in-these things mark them out as more capable parents than any previous generation. But women can only be worse mothers than our mothers, and this rankles because we are working so very very hard and we are doomed to fail.
♥ All I knew was that I didn't want my mother's life. I didn't need a role model to teach me that being dependent on some man was debilitating, maybe even dangerous. But would Emily really want my life? When she looks at her Mummy, who does she see? (If she ever sees her Mummy.) Back in the seventies, when they were fighting for women's rights, what did they think equal opportunities meant: that women would be entitled to spend as little time with their kids as men do?
♥ I am still lightly stoned after the joint accepted in a moment of madness this morning. What could I be thinking of? As I was getting out of the car, Winston invited me to join him at a concert a fortnight on Sunday. Might find it not totally my scene, he said, the music was a bit overwhelming, but he thinks it would do me good. As the proud-fortress fund manager composed her polite but frosty refusal, I opened my mouth and out fell the word yes. Presumably, I now have a date at a rave with my new drug dealer.
♥ Well, she should know. Seeing Celia's name in an article on gender equality is like finding Heinrich Himmler conducting a guided tour of a synagogue.
♥ Did I mention we have RATS. One ran across the floor when the in-laws were staying. OH, AND MY CLEANER HAS FIRED ME. Came in to work to discover 61 e-mails, pitch to do in NYC, nanny "sick," only available temp is close relative of Slobodan Milosevic. Plus I am EMF's new "Diversity Coordinator." Have to take urgent steps to redress the firm's gender imbalance. Any idea where I can purchase some kind of automatic weapon?
♥ Sitting at the computer one afternoon, stomach so stretched my skin felt it was crawling with ants, I felt a few Braxton-Hickses, those practice contractions that sound like a retired colonel living in Nether Wallop.
♥ My waters broke on the escalator at Bank, splashing the Burberry of a Japanese futures analyst who apologized profusely.
♥ They offered me an epidural, but I didn't take it. I was the bitch who had endangered her baby's brain development; not having drugs was my way of showing how sorry I was, showing the baby there was something its mother would bear for it. There was an ocean of pain and I dived into it again and again. The water was as hard as wood. It smacked you like a wave hitting a deck, and each time you got to your feet it smacked again.
After twenty-five hours of labor, Rich put the stopwatch down and asked the midwife if we could see a consultant. Now. Down in the operating theater, during my emergency cesarean, I heard the surgeon say, "Nothing to worry about, this will feel a bit like I'm dong the washing-up in your tummy." It didn't. It felt like the baby was an oak being pulled up by the root from claggy November earth: tug and wrench and tug again. Finally, one of the junior doctors climbed onto the operating table, straddled me and yanked her out by the heels. Held her up like a catch, a thing from the sea, a mermaid marbled with blood. A girl.
♥ ..I spot an evening dress. I don't need an evening dress. I try it on. Black and floaty with a fragile braid of diamante fixed down each side and a plunging V under the bust, it's the kind of dress they once danced the Charleston in. I just about have the figure for it; I just don't have the life. My life is the wrong size; there's no room in it for a dress this beautiful. But isn't that part of the thrill, buying a dress and hoping the life to go with it will follow soon like a must-have accessory?
♥ I pause at the one on Marriage.
I have never called my wife "wife," but "home."
-The Talmud.
Home. I look at the word for a long time. Home. Hear its rounded center. Picture what it means. I am married but am not a wife, have children but am not a mother. What am I?
I know a woman who is so afraid of her children's need for her that, rather than go home after work, she sits in the wine bar to wait until they're asleep.
I know a woman who wakes her baby at 5:30 every morning so she can have some time with him.
I know a woman who went on a TV discussion program and talked about doing the school run. Her nanny told me she barely knew where her kids' school was.
I know a woman who heard down the phone from a baby-sitter that her baby took his first steps.
And I know a woman who found out her husband left her from a note that was read out to her by her nanny.
I lie there for a long time in the bed, maybe hours, waiting until I start to feel something. And finally it comes: a feeling both intensely familiar and shockingly strange. It takes me a few seconds to know what it is. I want my mother.
♥ However hard I search, I can't come up with a memory of my mother sitting down. Always standing.
..My mother's generation was born for service; it was their vocation and their destiny. The gap between school-routine, things you do because you must, bad smells-and motherhood-routine, things you do because you must, bad smells-was a matter of a few years. Those fifties girls had a window of freedom, but the window was seldom wide enough to climb through, and anyway what would become of them if they got out? Women like my mum didn't expect much of life, and in general life did not disappoint them. Even when the men they served ran out on them or died too early from strokes and disorders of the stomach, they often stayed at their posts-preparing meals, hoovering, grabbing any ironing that was going from their children or grandchildren and never sitting down if they could possibly help it. It was as though they defined themselves in doing for others, and the loss of that definition left them blurred, confused: like the pit ponies who kept their tunnel vision long after they had been let loose in a field.
For my generation, coming to it later and sometimes too late, motherhood was a shock. Sacrifice wasn't written into our contract. After fifteen years as an independent adult, the sudden lack of liberty could be as stunning as being parted from a limb; entwined with the intense feeling of love for your baby was a thin thread of loss, and maybe we will always ache like an amputee.
♥ As I entered my teens, it occurred to me that things were not what they seemed: although the men round our way took all the leading roles, it was the women who were running the show, but they were never allowed to be onstage. It was a matriarchy pretending to be a patriarchy to keep the lads happy. I always thought that was because where I came from people didn't get much of an education. Now I think that's what the whole world's like, only some places hide it better than others.
♥ I never want to eat the sandwiches, but a couple of years ago I had one of those maturity leaps when I realized that eating wasn't the point. My mother's sandwiches were there to give her something she could do for me, when there is so much she can't do anymore. Overnight her need to be needed seemed more important than my need to get away.
♥ "Have you worn that red cardigan I got you, Mum?"
"But it's cashmere, love."
Since I've been working, I've bought my mother lovely clothes-I wanted her to have them, I needed her to have them. I wanted to make things all right for her. But she always puts everything I bring her away for best, best being some indeterminate date in the future when life will at long last live up to its promise.
♥ No matter how battered family relations, a baby can make them new. When Emily was born and Mum came to see us in hospital and laid her hand, speckled with age, on the newborn's, I understood how having a daughter could help you to bear the thought of your own mother's death. I wondered then, but never dared ask, whether it helped Mum to bear the idea of leaving Julie and me.
♥ "Has he got another woman, then, your Richard?"
It hadn't even occurred to me. "No, I don't think so, I think it's me that's another woman. The one he married isn't there anymore."
♥ "Mum said you always had to have the best of everything from when you could stand up. 'Champagne taste on beer money, that's our Kath.' So you went and made the money for champagne, didn't you?"
"It's not that great," I say, studying my wedding band.
"Bubbly?" Julie looks at me as though she really wants to know.
How can I tell my sister that money has improved my life, but it hasn't deepened it or eased it? "Oh, you spend most of your money trying to buy yourself time to make money to pay for all the things you think you need because you've got money."
"Yes, but it's better than that." Julie gestures across the recreation ground to the child mothers. She speaks angrily, but when she says it again it sounds like a blessing. "It's got to be better than that, love."
♥ "And Benjamin's date of birth-you are familiar with that, I presume?"
The insult is so biting that the tears jump to my eyes as if I had walked out into snow. I do really well in tests. I know the answers, but I don't know these answers and I should know. I know I should know.
Ben was born on the twenty-fifth of January. He is very strong and very happy and he never cries. Only if he is tired or if his teeth hurt. And his favorite book is Owl Babies and his favorite song is "The Wheels on the Bus" and he is my dearest sweetest only son and if anything happens to him I will kill you and then I will burn down your hospital and then I will kill myself. "The twenty-fifth of January."
♥ As I close the shutters, I keep thinking of what will happen over the next few days. In the morning, Momo Gumeratne will make a formal complaint about the behavior of Christopher Bunce to her line manager, Rod Task. Task will refer the complaint to Human Resources. Momo will then be suspended on full pay pending an internal inquiry. At the first meeting of the inquiry, which I will be invited to attend, it will be publicly noted that Momo Gumeratne is of previously impeccable character. It will be silently noted that Christ Bunce is our leading performer who last year moved 400 million pounds of business. Quite soon, the offense against Momo will be referred to as "a bad business" or simply "that Bunce business."
After three months at home-enough time for her to start feeling anxious and depressed-Momo will be called into the office. A financial settlement will be offered. The Cheltenham Lady in her will stand up straight and say she cannot be bought off; all she wants is to see justice done. The inquiry panel will be shocked. They too want justice to be done; it's just that the nature of the evidence is-how shall we say?-problematic. Casually, imperceptibly, it will be implied that Momo's career in the City could be over. She is a young woman of exceptional promise, but these things have a way of being misinterpreted. No smoke without fire, all tremendously unfortunate. If news of the pornographic computer images, say, were to get out to the media...
Two days later, Momo Gumeratne will settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. When she walks down the steps of Edwin Morgan Forster for the last time, a woman reporter from the TV news will poke a microphone in her face and ask her to give details of what happened. Is it true that they called her an Asian Babe and ran porno pictures of her? Lowering her lovely head, Momo will decline to comment. Next day, four newspapers will run a story on page 3. One headline reads ASIAN BABE IN CITY PORN PICS STORM. Momo's denial will appear in the second-to-last paragraph. Soon after, she will take a job abroad and pray to be forgotten. Bunce will hold on to his job and the black mark against is character will be erased by a steady tide if profits. And nothing will change. That much is certain.
♥ I seem to recall it was Candy's idea that seven women meeting in secret in the City would look less conspicuous in a lap-dancing club than in, say, a restaurant where people were wearing clothes.
..We are not the only women in the Suckling Club, a gentlemen's entertainment emporium located within easy reach of the world's premier financial district, but we are the only ones with unexposed breasts.
♥ I raise my glass. "Screw our courage to the sticking-place, and we'll not fail!"
"Die Hard 2?" asks Momo.
"No, Lady Macbeth." What are they teaching them these days?
♥ Sweetings is a City institution. A fish place that wants to look like a fishmonger's-lots of cheery shouting, bustle, marble slabs-it's like a Billingsgate for the moneyed class. There are counters at the front where people can sit on high stools and pick at crab, and at the back there is a room with long tables like a school canteen. Looking around, it strikes me that there are men in here who have moved from prep to public school to Oxbridge and then on to the City or the Bar and never had any contact with the world as everyone else knows it. If privilege is another country, Sweetings is its corner café.
..I'm still laughing when Robin says, "Kate, I'm getting married again," and it's as though the noise in the room is turned off at the tap. The diners around me mouth mutely like the fish they're about to consume.
And suddenly I know why he's brought me here, to this restaurant, to this room. It's a place where you can't shout in anger or cry out in pain: a place indeed for sweeting, for bonhomie, for a mild bollocking at worst, a man's kind of place. How many souls have been grilled at these tables with a smile, how many politely encouraged to step down or step aside over a surprisingly decent glass of Chablis? Now I feel as though it's Jill Cooper-Clark who's been let go and me who has to do the decent thing. Look interested, pleased even, instead of upending the table and leaving the men gaping with their napkins and their bones. Only six months dead.
♥ ..for the first time I notice what a mess Robin is: the right wing of his shirt collar is furrowed like a brow and there are commas of shaving foam in his ears. Jill would never have let him out of the house looking like that.
..I feel caved in with sadness, as I did that day at Jill's funeral. I always knew where to find Robin; he always seemed so rooted and so reliable. Looking at him now across the table, it's a shock to see a lost boy. Men without wives might as well be men without mothers; they are more orphans than widowers. Men without wives, they lose their spines, their ability to walk tall in the world, even to wipe the shaving foam from their ears. Men need women more than women need men; isn't that the untold secret of the world?
♥ "Jill always said you can get a man to do anything so long as he doesn't notice he's being made to do it."
"Did she do that to you?"
"I never noticed."
♥ Emily loves to tell him off while clearly finding him adorable. The deal between my girl and boy is that he can be naughty so she can enjoy being good. Watching them screech after each other, I wonder if that isn't a variation on the game that boys and girls have always played.
♥ When I was Emily's age, we saw a film or two a year: one at Christmas, one in the long summer holiday. For my children, the moving image will be the main vehicle of their memories.
♥ I will my children to grow up quicker and I mourn every minute I have missed of their infancy.
After I have fed them and bathed them and dried their hair and read Owl Babies and gone to fetch her a glass of water, I finally go downstairs and sit by myself in the dark and think of all the irretrievable time.
♥ Don't hate me if I stop work, will you? I know we said how we all need to keep going to prove it can be done. It's just that I used to think maybe my job was killing me and now I'm scared I died and didn't notice.
♥ Pegasus shudders forward a couple of inches, and when Winston hits the brake it sounds like a cow dying.
♥ Later, when we are making our fourth circuit of the rink, Jack says, "All you have to do is lean on me, Kate. Is that so hard??
"Yes. It's hard."
"Jesus, woman. If you just lean on me here-remember your John Donne, think of us as a pair of compasses. I'm holding still and you're sweeping around me, OK? You're not gonna fall. I've got you. Just let go."
So I just let go. We skated for an hour and I'm not sure what we wrote on the ice. You'd have to be a bird-one of my pigeons-or sitting high up in my boss's office to see what we wrote that day. Love or Goodbye or both.
♥ "Rich, do you remember when Em tried to climb into the TV to save Sleeping Beauty? I keep thinking about it."
He grins. One of the best things about having children is that it enables you to have the same loving memories as another person-you can summon the same past. Two flashbacks with but a single image. Is that as good as two hearts that beat as one?
"Daft kid. She was so upset tat she couldn't save that stupid princess, wasn't she?" Rich says, with that exasperated pride Em provokes in us.
"She'd really like you to come home."
"And you? How about you, Kate?"
The option to say something proud and defiant hangs there waiting to be picked like a ripe fruit. I leave it hanging and say, "I'd like to come home too."
♥ For a long time, Richard and I couldn't work out what was making Emily so furious; then it clicked. She wanted us to rewind the tape so that the Princess wouldn't make it to the attic, so she never would prick her finger on the old woman's spindle.
..We had a long talk-well, I talked and she listened-about how you had to let things like that happen, because even when you got to a scary bit the story knew where it was heading and it couldn't be stopped no matter how much you wanted it to be. And the good thing was you knew it would turn out happily in the end.
But she shook her head sadly and said, "No. Wind it, Mummy, wind it!" Soon after, my daughter transferred her allegiance to Barney the Dinosaur, whose Great Adventure featured no deeds of darkness that required her personal intervention.
Adults want to rewind life too. It's just that along the way we lose the capacity to shout it out loud. "Wind it, wind it."
♥ I had explained to Dad that I thought I had found some venture capital for his invention, but it would require him to pretend to be someone else and to tell some minor untruths. In almost any other father-daughter relationship, this would have been a bizarre exchange, but for us it felt like the natural culmination of years of pretense, an acknowledgement that forgery is woven into the Reddy DNA along with blue eyes and a facility with numbers.
♥ ..she asked me why I was leaving and I lied. Told her I needed to move to be nearer my mother, who was ill. Some things you can't say even to the women you love. Even to yourself.
REASONS TO GIVE UP WORK
1. Because I have got two lives and I don't have time to enjoy either of them.
2. Because twenty-four hours are not enough.
3. Because my children will be young for only a short time.
4. Because one day I caught my husband looking at me the way my mother used to look at my father.
5. Because becoming a man is the waste of a woman.
6. Because I am too tired to think of another because.
♥ He took the news of my leaving pretty badly.
..Robin called me into his office, as I knew he would.
"Is there anything I can do to persuade you to change your mind, Kate?"
Only changing your world, I thought.
♥ Robin comes round to my side of the desk and stands there with that awkwardness they call dignity.
♥ ..the maternity wing off Gower Street.
As I walk down the corridor towards them, I am returned powerfully to my memories of this place: the midwives in their blue pajamas, the gray doors behind which the great first act of life is performed over and over by small women and tall women and a woman whose waters broke one lunchtime on the escalator at Bank. Place of pain and elation. Flesh and blood. The cries of the babies raw ans astounded; their mothers' faces salty with joy. When you are in here you think you know what's important. And you are right. It's not the pethidine talking, it's God's own truth. Before long, you have to go out into the world again and pretend you have forgotten, pretend there are better tings to do. But there are no better things. Every mother knows what it felt like when that chamber of the heart opened and love flooded in. Everything else is just noise and men.
♥ Like all newborn things, Seymour Stratton seems ancient, a thousand years old. His brow is corrugated with either wisdom or perplexity. It is not yet possible to speculate on what manner of man he will grow up to be, but for now he is perfectly happy as he is, in the encircling arms of a woman.
♥ People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.
I never went to bed with Jack-a regret the size of a continent-but the bad food and the great songs in the Sinatra Inn were the best sex I never had. When you've felt that much about a man and he disappears from your life, after a while you start to think it was just some foolish illusion on your part and that the other person walked clean away, no scar tissue. But maybe the other person felt the same.
♥ Remember what you dad called Sinatra? The Patron Saint of Unrequited Love.
The great thing about unrequited love is it's the only kind that lasts.
♥ The kids love having the space to run around in and Richard is in his element. When he's not working on the arts center, he's building a dry-stone wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.
..As for [my son], his sweetness grows in direct proportion to his capacity for mischief. Recently, he discovered Lego, with which he builds a wall, and every five minutes he asks me to come and look at it.
♥ Weird, isn't it, how you want to seek out the physical place where someone is buried? If Jill is anywhere, now, she's everywhere. But I stood there anyway, in front of the neat white headstone with the soft gray lettering. At the bottom it says: SHE WAS WELL LOVED.
I didn't actually speak aloud-this was Sussex, for heaven's sake-but I thought all the things that I wanted Hill to know about. They say that women need role models and I suppose we do, but high achievement is not confined to high flyers. There is a currency we were never called upon to trade in at EMF, and in that Jill was the richest person I've ever met.
nannies and baby-sitters,