Lisa woke safe and warm inside a cocoon of sheets. Judging by the grey frame of light around the curtains, the sun—or what there was of it—had already dragged itself out of bed. Her tongue slid around the comforting shape of her mouthguard. According to the dentist, she’d been grinding her teeth at night. Lisa was pretty sure his insistence that she be fitted with a mouthguard had more to do with upgrading his Audi than her pummelling her teeth to powder. Lisa ‘teamed’ the mouthguard with a pair of ear plugs—Jake’s snoring wasn’t getting any quieter. She’d put them in the night before out of habit—and to assure herself nothing was going to change.
She quietly fished out the mouthguard and ear plugs and slid them into their boxes. Then she rolled over and reached for the familiar shape of Jake’s head. But his pillow was as vacant as the wastelands of Antarctica. Lisa curled up in the foetal position and sobbed into her pillow—quietly, so as not to disturb Maxine and Gordon or the kids. It was her favourite pillow, so old it probably harboured superbugs. She’d tried to throw it out, but always stopped at the garbage chute and carried it back to bed. Stuffed with meagre lumps of feathers and down, it was anorexic compared to Jake’s anti-snoring plank. But it was a forgiving object, snuggling into the folds of her face without any attempt to improve her posture. Now tears drained into the feathers, reducing them to a soggy swamp.
When she could cry no more, she rolled on her back and ran her hand over the chasm her left breast had once inhabited. The surgeon had offered her reconstruction at the same time as the mastectomy. The mastectomy itself would take only forty minutes to perform, while the reconstruction would drag on for seven hours or more. After hours trawling the internet and talking with friends who knew people who’d had reconstructions and those who hadn’t, she’d decided to bide her time. It wouldn’t be long before you could take a pill to grow a new breast.
Giving an excellent impersonation of a supportive husband, Jake had said he was happy to go along with whatever she wanted. She’d felt a surge of affection when he said appearances made no difference to him. And anyway, the surgeon assured them she could have the reconstruction further down the track. She’d still not got around to it and now doubted she ever would. After all, Lisa had never been burdened with vanity. Her mother, Ruby, had made sure of that. (‘Tidy yourself up, Lisa . . . Cut back on the pastries, girl. They’ll be calling you thunder thighs . . . Run a comb through your hair!’) The scar ran in a horizontal line across her torso like a ruler marking the end of a school essay.
Though Jake had claimed it didn’t worry him, he’d never expressed interest in or even curiosity about her wound. During lovemaking, he’d lavished attention on her right breast, stroking and kissing (never sucking, because that would set her on a post-coital jag about the patheticness of grown men sucking breasts). He’d avoided her left side as if it was an abandoned neighbourhood turned dangerous.
She couldn’t believe how he’d lulled her into thinking their marriage was fine. For all his talk, he was just another primitively wired male who wanted a woman with two C cups. Clearly Jake was going through some kind of man-opause. Surely it would just be a matter of time before he’d come to his senses and beg to come back.
A vacuum cleaner hummed on the other side of Lisa’s bedroom door. The thought of facing up to her guests was almost unbearable. Still, how often did she get the chance to see her kids? So after showering and dressing, she padded out into the living room.
Maxine was hoovering up the previous night’s wreckage. Ted was in the kitchen, wrangling a garbage bag. They both stopped and looked up at her as if she was a piece of crystal that might shatter at the slightest movement.
Gordon emerged from the guest room to fiddle with the coffee machine while Maxine assailed her bedroom with the vacuum cleaner. Lisa offered to help, but Maxine insisted she sit down and relax.
The black leather sofa squeaked as Lisa flopped on it. The buttons dug into her backside. Everything about the apartment reeked of Jake. He used to go along with her love of what she called ‘soul objects’. New Guinea masks and paint-peeled Buddhas took her back to the freedom of her travelling days. All that changed when he started taking banking seriously and Jake’s tastes changed. In the end it had been simpler to let him move ‘her stuff’ into her study and succumb to his obsession with ‘clean lines’. Now glass table-tops and piles of yachting magazines lent the apartment the air of a medical waiting room.
Lisa ran her eye over Jake’s collection of second-tier Fauvists. Given the choice, she’d have preferred Ted and Portia’s kindergarten daubs. Life-sized stainless-steel nudes stood in a corner, entwined in an outlandish position the sculptor had called the Lustful Leg. She’d tried to replicate the posture for Jake’s pleasure a couple of times. Flinging her leg back over her shoulder had, however, made something in her hip lock in a sharp spasm of agony. As for the white baby grand piano that only Ted knew how to play, she pretended it wasn’t there.
She wondered how she’d let herself slide into such an unlikely setting. Had she been too engrossed with the children, or working too much? She remembered feeling tired a lot of the time, perhaps even borderline depressed. She was a terrible banker’s wife, anyway. Her hair wasn’t blonde-bobbish enough, her laugh too deep and brazen.
The coffee machine hissed and farted, enveloping Gordon in a cloud of steam. It was Jake’s pride and joy, though it had never produced a decent cappuccino in its life. Gordon presented her with a pool of muddy liquid inside a mug emblazoned with a malevolent snowman. Happy Holidays curled in red letters around the rim. The mug usually lurked at the back of the top shelf. Christmas was more than two months away. Proof the dishwasher needed emptying.
To fill vacant air space, Gordon asked how her writing was going. Did people ask plumbers about their drains? Part One of her Brontë trilogy was selling okay, but she’d sunk into a boggy patch with Three Sisters: Emily, which was still not much more than a list of bullet points. She’d been a fool to sign a contract promising to have the manuscript in by March, and now the deadline was approaching with the menace of an asteroid about to collide with Earth.
Portia emerged ashen, her pale hair a mass of tangles. Lisa ached to scoop it into a tidy French plait the way she used to when Portia was six. Her own mother would’ve had no qualms about assailing her adult daughter with a comb. Lisa curled her fingers into fists. Every generation has to be an improvement on the last. If she was going to learn anything from Ruby’s mistakes it was to control the French-plait compulsion.
Maxine put on a pair of wooden earrings the size of Samoa and a gold vinyl jacket (‘You New Yorkers call this autumn?’ Ted reminded her the correct term was fall). Then she spread a map of Manhattan over the piano lid.
Lisa knew what Maxine was up to. When they were little girls lying awake at night listening to their parents yelling down the hall, Maxine would play ‘Let’s Pretend Nothing’s Happening’. As their mother’s voice rose to a series of barks through the walls, Maxine would become a princess, or Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Lisa had to be the princess’s servant, of course. Or the Scarecrow.
Tight-lipped with denial, Maxine set about organising everyone’s day. The girls would go on a retail-therapy binge while the boys walked Brooklyn Bridge.
Gordon’s face rose like the red planet from behind the coffee machine. He wasn’t sure he’d brought the right shoes. Maxine patted his wine gut and assured him she’d packed his trainers.
After a mind-numbing morning traipsing through shops, the three women stopped at a French bakery. Before sinking her teeth into a croissant, Maxine offered to cancel the cruise so she and Gordon could stay on and ‘provide support’. Lisa smiled at the image of Maxine as a giant brassiere.
When Lisa declined, Maxine’s relief was palpable. ‘I talked to Ted this morning,’ she continued, dabbing her lips. ‘He’s willing to change his flights and keep you company for a week or two.’
Lisa felt like a starving bear presented with a plate of meat. To have Ted all to herself would be . . . But his exams!
‘Never mind. I’ll be fine,’ she said, patting her daughter’s knee.
Portia stood up and flounced to the Ladies’. Heads turned as the gaunt goddess wafted past in a trail of golden hair. Lisa checked the menu for the number of calories in the three dandelion leaves Portia had chomped through (approximately seventeen). It was hard to imagine what was going through the child’s brain. Maybe she was traumatised by her parents’ behaviour.
‘Don’t worry about that one,’ Maxine said, sinking her fork into a perfectly formed strawberry tart.
Lisa guessed from Maxine’s tone that Portia had refused the opportunity to linger in New York to bathe her mother’s wounds. Maybe through some distorted logic she’d decided to side with Jake.
An unwelcome image of Jake sprang into her head. He was running his hands over Cow Belle’s buttocks while he licked her pointy Chrysler Building nipples. His hand drifted to the mound between Cow Belle’s legs, waxed bald as a newborn’s. Ostensibly, Jake had moved into a hotel in Chelsea, but everyone knew he was down in Soho asphyxiating himself between that woman’s legs.
Exhaustion washed over Lisa. She was desperate to go home, but Maxine had other ideas. With the compassion of a slave-ship captain, she urged them on to the Empire State Building and then to see the skaters at the Rockefeller Centre.
When the family finally reassembled at the apartment, Lisa imagined Jake and Cow Belle knee to knee in a darkened restaurant. He’d be ordering champagne, the real French stuff. His hand would be gliding up Belle’s thigh.
While Maxine corralled Gordon into the guest room to help squeeze Macy’s shopping bags into their already overstuffed suitcases, Ted and Portia sat on the sofa like a pair of orphans. Portia wound her hair around her fingers and crossed her skinny legs. Someone, or thing, had taken a razor to her black jeans and slashed them to pieces. Ted made urgent little stabs at his phone.
‘So when will I be seeing you two again?’ Lisa asked in as breezy a tone as she could muster.
Portia picked at a thread dangling from one of the slashes in her pants. ‘I’ve got to get home to LA,’ she said.
LA was home?
‘We’ve set up a theatre group,’ Portia continued. ‘We’re writing a play. They really need me.’
And Lisa didn’t? ‘What about Thanksgiving?’ she asked.
‘That’s close to opening night,’ Portia sighed. ‘I thought this visit could double as Thanksgiving.’
Thanks a bundle, thought Lisa. She turned to Ted. ‘So I’ll keep the spare room for you next year?’
Ted’s dark hair draped over his forehead. She’d seen a photo of her father around the same age, and with his long face and soulful eyes, Ted was almost an exact replica—apart from the darker colouring. The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘Actually, I’m thinking of staying on in Australia,’ he said.
A concrete ball settled in Lisa’s stomach. ‘Oh. I guess you’ll want to fit in a month or two’s surfing before you come back,’ she said.
Ted let his phone tumble nonchalantly out of his hand. The brown checks in his shirt brought out the colour of his eyes. ‘I’ve had a job offer,’ he said.
‘You mean you’re going to stay on selling mushroom burgers at the market?’
Ted shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s an architecture firm. They like my environmental approach.’
He was staying in Australia? ‘That’s great,’ she lied. Lisa wanted to weep at the thought of Ted stranded indefinitely on the other side of the world. Still, it was hard enough for graduates to find work anywhere these days. ‘You’ll be based in Melbourne?’
Ted nodded, his colour deepening. Lisa sensed something else going on. He’d taken out scores of girls, hundreds for all she knew, but he dumped them so quickly he was showing all the signs of being commitment phobic. Maybe he’d at last met the One. For all her disappointment about Ted’s decision to stay in Australia, Lisa’s interest was piqued.
The next morning, Lisa’s guests stood hunched against the cold, their bags scattered on the sidewalk while she tried to hail a cab. Pedro the doorman had seemed disappointed when she turned down his offer to do it. No doubt he would’ve been quicker at catching a driver’s eye, but her Australian upbringing still left her uncomfortable when people performed menial tasks on her behalf. Cab after cab sailed past. They were either busy or ignoring her.
‘Don’t worry, Mom,’ Portia said when one finally pulled in. ‘I was the only one in my friendship group whose parents were still together. We’re normal now.’ Portia always spoke of her Friendship Group with worshipful respect.
‘Look after yourself,’ Lisa said, fighting the urge to pull Portia to her chest and never let go.
Portia flicked her hair and slid into the back of the cab with the effortless ease of youth. The child-woman hadn’t heard a thing. White wires in her ears sealed her off in her own world. Inside her head Portia was already back among the hipsters of Venice Beach.
Maxine rested her hands on Lisa’s shoulders and planted a kiss on each cheek. ‘You take care,’ she said in a big-sisterly tone before climbing into the front seat next to the driver.
Gordon flashed Lisa an awkward smile. He was limping from yesterday’s walk. Brooklyn Bridge had turned out to be longer than it looked. Leaning forward, he aimed his lips at Lisa’s cheek but collided with her chin. Blushing, he retreated into the shadows of the back seat.
Saying goodbye to Ted made Lisa’s heart ache. She and he were carved from the same stone. They both had to fight the Trumperton tendency to sink into moroseness. They laughed at the same things and would finish each other’s sentences. Australia was too far away. ‘See you at Christmas?’ she asked, trying to eradicate hints of neediness.
‘Sure. Come visit,’ he replied. ‘You can sleep on our sofa.’
‘Thanks, but the CIA should hire that thing out as an instrument of torture.’ So if she had any hope of seeing him in December she’d be the one climbing on a plane.
Loaded questions circled through her head. She wondered if he’d fallen for that nice girl from architecture school. What was her name? Did she eat more than seeds gathered by endangered South American tribes? Was her pelvis the shape that produced children? But the last thing Lisa wanted was to become a sitcom mother, torturing her kids with texts and phone messages. So she kissed Ted and nudged him into the back of the cab next to Gordon.
Maxine’s window glided down. She fixed Lisa with an emerald gaze. ‘I never liked that prick,’ she said.
As the cab dissolved into the traffic, Lisa caught a glimpse of Ted’s profile in the shadows of the back seat. The unmistakable Trumperton nose. Gulping a buttery lump at the back of her throat she waved goodbye.
Back in the apartment, Lisa was sucked into a vacuum of loneliness. She turned James Taylor up loud and plunged into a frenzy of housework. The kids had left her study a mess. She dredged one of Ted’s socks out from under the sofa bed. For once it was hole-free. Someone was looking after him. As usual, Portia had stolen her shampoo and conditioner from the bathroom. Lisa wrote it off as a contribution to the starving artist of the family.
Once her study was looking half-civilised, she switched on her computer. The bullet points about Three Sisters: Emily glowered back at her. She had no hope of writing an entire book in three months. The first sentence was always the hardest. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Then, in a cruel twist of what Portia would call irony, a deliveryman arrived with a sheath of freshly ironed shirts. Lisa didn’t have the energy to refuse them. Instead, she carried them numbly to the bedroom. As she hung the shirts in Jake’s side of the closet, she wondered whether they might herald his return. Perhaps he’d realised he’d made a terrible mistake, that he loved Lisa and wanted to come home. He’d promise to never see Cow Belle again.
She dug her phone out of her handbag. ‘Yr shirts r here,’ she typed, her fingers trembling.
She made a mug of coffee. James Taylor crooned ‘How Sweet It Is To Be Loved by You’. He’d moved on to ‘Fire and Rain’ by the time her phone buzzed to life. ‘Thx. Will come over.’
Sure enough, towards evening there was a tap on the door. Lisa opened it a crack. Jake peered through like a naughty schoolboy. Why was he knocking when he had a key? They examined each other in silence. Lisa would take him back after a decent interval of punishment, of course. They had too much shared history.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘My shirts.’
‘Oh,’ she said, blood draining from her face.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’ Her voice was as cold as a surgeon’s blade. ‘Just a minute.’ She left him fidgeting in the doorway while she collected the sheath.
‘Let me know if you need anything,’ he said as she handed it to him.
What could she possibly need?
His forefinger was turning purple from the coat-hanger hooks cutting off the circulation.
Lisa knew what he wanted. If she exploded with rage again he could scurry away, confident she was a total witch. But she couldn’t do it.
Instead, she watched as the boiled egg of his bald patch disappeared down the hall towards the elevator. She noticed a white thread on his shoulder. Jake had a neurotic loathing of imperfection, and she was about to call after him. But that wasn’t her job. Not anymore. All Jake maintenance was over to Cow Belle. She could trim his ear hair, too.
The elevator doors sighed shut.
Lisa was officially and permanently alone.