BACK HOME IN THE WOODSTOCK HOUSE that had enough space for a man and his girlfriend, Joanna kept waiting for things to get back to the way they had been. It was taking her a long time to come to terms with the idea that her life had changed in some fundamental and unpleasant way, and that there was no going back – at least, for her. Jan was happier than he had been in months, the proud father cradling James in his swaddling blanket, working out where the Velcro went, regaling his mates with the story of the birth that made even Joanna turn queasily away. Thank God she hadn’t allowed him to take photos! When people who had no children asked her how the birth had gone, Joanna had no idea what to tell them. The truth was too melodramatic to squeeze into the sentences people passed among one another. There was no place for it between the chorusing Hello! How are you? and the Just fine, thank you, and yourself?
It was such an awful thought, and such a common one, the teenage bleat and the feminist curse: sometimes people just didn’t understand what it was like. Pregnancy, childbirth, raising kids were all part of some great divide. You couldn’t talk about it to someone if they hadn’t seen it done or done it themselves. Joanna remembered the things she had thought before she was pregnant. How she had judged people: her friends who sat in the car with their sleeping baby while everyone else sat down at the table for the dinner party; the couple in Teresa’s with the four-year-old who ran riot, ordering double-thick milkshakes and then refusing to eat his food when it arrived; the myriad scurrying ant-mothers whose thirteen-year-olds trailed them sulkily at Longbeach Mall, encased in designer sneakers, disdaining the bright parental patter.
Most of all, Joanna was ashamed of the way she had treated her own mother.
“You should get points just for giving birth,” Joanna moaned to Devi.
“I know,” Devi said. “I’m respecting cows in a whole new way. Calves have hooves.”
Joanna thought that Jan, although he had been in the room with her when James was born – Whoopee-twang! said Doctor Renfield – hadn’t made the cognitive leap or found the emotional kindness that would settle him firmly on the side of the parents. Somewhere, in some part of himself that he considered secret, Jan thought that he had other options.
Maybe he does, Joanna thought, changing the fourth nappy of the morning: a polonecker. Maybe that’s why he’s pissing me off so much. He does, and I don’t. She taped up the sides of the nappy and threw it into the bin. What I have is human shit under my fingernails.
Over enough time the little things added up, incrementals gathering like plaque. Joanna began to understand how women sometimes stood over their sleeping husbands and beat their brains out with a frying pan or a bottle of Coke. He drove me to it, they said in court, plain-faced and thoughtful, the years of intimacy stretching behind them like a bridal veil. I just snapped. It wasn’t The devil made me do it, Joanna thought, but it was a pretty close relative. Jan was making her crazy, that was the long and short of it. It was like dehydration: by the time you registered how thirsty you were, it was too late. He had turned her into a watcher, a counter, a keeper of scores. She hated the way that he insisted on reading the ingredients of her Rose’s Lime Cordial out to her every time she had a glass – and Joanna was drinking a lot of it, that summer. She could feel it pooling behind her eyelids and in her feet. James was probably imbibing every e-tagged colourant through her milk. But Joanna couldn’t help herself. Something in her craved the bitterness, the tang of some other, happier life that was evading them. Joanna felt herself receding, at the wrong end of the telescope, as James loomed larger. She had to repeat things before Jan paid her attention. Early on, he had told her that he didn’t often listen when people were talking. He preferred to think about other things.
“But then how do you know what to say when it’s your turn?”
“I just repeat whatever their last word was.”
Joanna was fairly sure that he was doing it to her more and more, and it made her furious. It wasn’t just that he didn’t think she was important enough to take seriously, but that he had somewhere else to send his mind away to.
And besides, didn’t she listen to every stupid thing that dropped out of his mouth? Jan, after a couple of drinks, was grandiose and affectionate, but God, he was dull! Sober Joanna, primogravida Joanna – Joanna who couldn’t make the New Year’s bash or even have a Cosmopolitan without feeling defensive – was looking for reasons to hate her husband, and she found them.
She hated his quick, light snoring, inoffensive to the last.
She hated the way that she looked at him but he didn’t look at her.
She hated the way that he swayed after three glasses of Char-donnay Pinot Noir. He would drink them in front of her when they ate supper in the brief adult hour once the baby was asleep and before Joanna followed suit (the golden hour, she said to herself, and laughed with her mouth closed). Jan had been told by the owner that if a person drank only the wine from Haute Cabrière that they would never again suffer a hangover. Joanna concentrated on the rich yellow of the redundant screw-top, feeling herself receding from him as he gesticulated with his fork and slurred a little, thinking himself charming and sober, the Man of the House. There was something frightening about seeing a man usually in such tight control of his behaviour letting loose. As he spoke about this shot or that client, she knew that the fly on his Levi’s would be unbuttoned from his last piss in the garden. He was squandering her affection – thrashing about in it like the sodden miggies that flailed in his wine glass – and he didn’t even know it.
Joanna sipped from her own glass. There was some satisfaction, bitter as lime cordial, in not telling him while he still had a chance. See? Joanna told herself, as her throat worked against the scrape of the concentrate. There are some things I can still control.
From her study, where the cot was jammed in next to the pc, the faint roar of James’s first waking reached them.