Marjorie, Grace and me. How do we recover from the spasms of terror and resentment which assail us, in our marriages and in our lives? When we lie awake in bed and know that the worst is at hand, if we do not act (and we cannot act) – the death of our children, or their removal by the State, or physical crippling, or the loss of our homes, or the ultimate loneliness of abandonment. When we cry and sob and slam doors and know we have been cheated, and are betrayed, are exploited and misunderstood, and that our lives are ruined, and we are helpless. When we walk alone in the night planning murder, suicide, adultery, revenge – and go home to bed and rise red-eyed in the morning, to continue as before.
And either the worst happens, or it doesn’t. Or one is mistreated, or one is not, the answer is never made clear. Life continues.
Marjorie recovers her spirits by getting ill. She frightens herself with palpitations, slipped discs, stomach cramp. Snaps out of anxiety and depression and into hypochondria. She sits another examination, though with hands trembling and aching head. She writes another memo. Gets another job. Life continues.
Grace takes direct action. She throws out the offending lover, has hysterics, attempts to strangle, breaks up her home, makes obscene phone calls, issues another writ, calms down. Goes to the hairdresser and demands that the manicurist does her toe nails. Life continues.
I, Chloe, move in another tradition, like my mother and Esther Songford before me. Mine is the mainstream, I suspect, of female action and reaction – in which neglected wives apply for jobs as home helps, divorcees go out cleaning, rejected mothers start playgroups, unhappy daughters leave home and take jobs abroad as au pairs.
Rub and scrub distress away, hands in soap-suds, scooping out the sink waste, wiping infants’ noses, the neck bowed beneath the yoke of unnecessary domestic drudgery, pain in the back already starting, unwilling joints seizing up with arthritis. Life continues.