On her thirtieth birthday, Laura rose early and took a shower. Afterwards, she wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and surveyed her body, which she had begun to hate. Not its shape – the reflection she was eyeing was lithe and leggy, a far cry from the chubby teenage Laura Kohn – but what it had come to represent.
Not for nothing had the expression “turn me on” entered the English language, she mused cynically. In the sense in which it was used, there could be no more apt description for the mechanical process Laura’s sex life was.
Like eating when you’re hungry, she thought, putting on the burnt-orange bathrobe that matched her pubic hair. And her transient affaires with women could be likened to a gourmand indulging in a change of diet, she said to herself dispassionately. Nothing more and nothing less.
That anyone could be bi-sexual if they allowed themselves to be had come as a shock to Laura. Not until the night she got stoned, and bedded, at an all-female party had she believed it possible. Or what certain of her feminist friends who were lesbian had told her. That for them, being so was cerebral, not instinctive; they had chosen to fulfil their sexual needs with women, rather than be what they had previously been – putty in the hands of men.
Laura had never been putty in anyone’s hands, nor did she ever intend to be, she thought, padding barefooted into her kitchen to drink the lemon juice with which she started her day.
“In a good relationship, the other person is as much at your mercy as you are at theirs,” Marianne had declared when Laura had aired that sentiment to her.
Don’t you believe it, Laura had thought. Like every other married woman, Marianne was dependent for her happiness upon her husband – and, Laura had noted, though she and Ralph still seemed devoted to each other, did not seem as happy as she had once. You couldn’t have a committed relationship without being emotionally prey to your partner which was why Laura had never entered into one – with a male or a female.
In Laura’s view, the lesbian couples she visited in their homes were kidding themselves if they thought they had retained their independence. What they had in fact done was swop conventional dependency for an unconventional kind, she ruminated, plugging in her electric coffee-percolator, and by doing so deprived themselves of a woman’s natural right – motherhood – which some of them did not deny they regretted.
Laura heard the mail land on the doormat with a heavier thud than usual but had no need to wonder why. Year in, year out, birthday cards arrived for her from everyone in the family. And nostalgia for home – which was how she still thought of Manchester – arose within her when she opened the envelopes and read all the fond messages.
How could they still think of her as one of them? she asked herself, reading the cards and propping them up on the breakfast bar. She only went home for Rosh Hashanah – and sometimes not even then if it coincided with a magazine assignment abroad. Yet every card was addressed, beneath its sentimental, or funny, verse to “our dear Laura”. As if she was, to her aged and ageing relatives, still the little girl who had been raised in their midst.
She poured herself some coffee and perched on a stool, gazing at these graphic reminders of her roots, and it was as if they had come from a different planet from the one Laura inhabited. One in which people meant what they said and, if they cared about you, did so for ever. Where life had a stability solid as rock, as opposed to Laura’s life, which by comparison was built on shifting sand.
Was it because Marianne’s flat had the stable feeling of home that Laura always felt secure there? Probably. But stability was the product of commitment – which Marianne, despite her career, had not shirked, but which Laura wanted no part of.
Her grandfather had enclosed with his card a cheque for thirty pounds, one for each of her years, he had scrawled in his customary green ink. As though Laura needed reminding that time was speeding by. In her teens and twenties, she hadn’t noticed it doing so. But there was something about being thirty that made you stop short. And take stock. Workwise, she was a success, as the blow-ups of her magazine pictures above the breakfast bar illustrated. But on a personal level?
“My niece is the family fly-by-night,” her Uncle Ronald had once joked to a friend in Laura’s presence. And his words returned to her mind as she sat sipping her coffee.
Like a moth flits by, only skimming the surface of whatever it encounters, so it had been with Laura. The people she thought of as her friends were, in truth, no more than acquaintances. Because friendship, too, demanded commitment, and cluttered your life with other people’s problems.
Laura’s life had remained as uncluttered as her heat apartment, in which other human beings were briefly allowed to linger before being despatched on their way – and on her thirtieth birthday her life seemed as coldly empty as the place she called home suddenly felt.
But her life could not be otherwise without sacrificing the total independence she had ruthlessly pursued and achieved, she reflected wryly. Without allowing the emotions that had occasionally threatened to entangle her to rise from the secret place where she kept them dormant. But only by doing so would she herself ever be a whole human being, she was thinking when the telephone rang.
“Happy birthday, Laura!” Marianne’s voice breezed over the line. “How do you intend spending it?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“On my thirtieth birthday, I was nursing Martin through chicken-pox – and Ralph had flu,” Marianne reminisced.
“Oh.”
“You sound down in the dumps, Laura.”
“Any suggestions to lift me out of ’em?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. There’s nothing like having someone else to worry about for making one forget one’s personal blues.”
Marianne must be telepathic! Laura thought. Or is it just that she knows me too well? “Why not just say I’m a self-centred bitch and have done with it?” she answered dryly.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
“But so long as you’re happy, as Bobbie Sarah would say!”
“I’m not.”
“Then do something about it – before it’s too late.”
“Too late for what, Marianne?”
“A woman’s childbearing years don’t last indefinitely.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Laura exclaimed.
“You’re as hetero as I am,” Marianne said coolly, “and you know it. So, you’ve had a few lesbian encounters, just for the hell of it. That’s not so uncommon nowadays. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“How true.”
“Look – I hate to sound like your Grandma Bessie, love. But you’ve had your fling. It’s time you found yourself a permanent man and had a child.”
“I don’t want a permanent man,” Laura declared emphatically. Her birthday ruminations, bleak though they had been, had not changed her mind in that respect!
“So, shoot me for suggesting it!” Marianne answered. “Drop in for coffee, later, if you’ve nothing better to do. You can bring the shotgun with you!”
When Laura arrived at Marianne’s flat, she found little Abraham there.
“Martin and Moira are in New York,” Marianne explained whilst building a Lego tower on the living-room rug, for her grandson.
“They’ve gone to hear my daddy’s songs at a big concert,” Abraham added with pride.
“In Carnegie Hall,” Marianne told Laura. She ruffled Abraham’s ginger curls and marvelled, as she often did, that her Hassidic grandfather’s features and colouring had been passed down to Martin’s Catholic son. Lord Kyverdale’s grandson was the image of the late Abraham Sandberg.
“I could’ve stayed at home with my fwiends, but I pwefer to stay here when Mummy and Daddy go away,” Abraham informed Laura.
“Give Laura a birthday kiss,” Marianne instructed him.
“I don’t like kissing ladies.”
“But this one has no little boy or girl of her own to kiss her.”
“You must come and stay with me sometime, Abraham,” Laura smiled after he had obligingly pecked her cheek.
“I will if I can have baked beans for bweakfast,” the child bargained. “Gwanma lets me. At home and at my other Gwanma’s, I’m only allowed them for tea.”
“You can have ice cream and chips for breakfast,” Laura laughed and was rewarded with a hug.
She spent the rest of the day with Marianne and her grandson. Before she left, Abraham allowed her to bath him and tuck him up in bed.
“This has been a most cathartic birthday,” she said pensively when Marianne walked with her to where she had parked her car.
It was a bleak February evening and Marianne wrapped the coat she had slipped on closer around herself, as she scanned Laura’s face. “In what way?”
Laura unlocked the car door and slid behind the wheel. “What you said on the phone, this morning – about it being time I found a permanent man. It wouldn’t work, Marianne.”
“How do you know when you haven’t tried it?”
“I have no desire to try it. That kind of set-up isn’t my style. One of us would end up being downtrodden. And it wouldn’t be me.”
“In that case, I wouldn’t wish you on any man.”
“Exactly,” Laura answered smiling up at the forthright woman who, it had struck her today, was the only real friend she had ever had. But even this had been a one-sided relationship, Laura thought with a pang of shame. Since her youth, Marianne had always been there for her, but Laura had taken her for granted; done nothing for her in return.
“I don’t suppose you’d wish me on a child, either,” she added.
“The two go together, don’t they?”
“Not necessarily. One-parent families are all the rage, these days.”
Marianne leaned weakly against a garden wall. What sort of shock was the clan in for now? She considered herself a modern woman, but the traditional concept of family had remained, for her, sacrosanct. If a girl became pregnant and, for one reason or another, had to raise the child without a father, so be it. But to put oneself and the baby in that situation from choice? And for Laura to have strayed so far from her Jewish conditioning, in which the sanctity of home and family was the core, seemed to Marianne inconceivable.
“I’ve decided to have a child,” Laura said confirming her fears.
“Just like that?”
“Why not?” Laura started the car engine, her voice as business-like as the manner in which she placed her capable hands on the steering wheel. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to find an obliging man.”
Marianne watched her drive away and would not have put it past her to pull up the car near Hampstead Heath, smile at the first passing male and get what she proposed to do over and done with, on the grass verge at the side of the road.
What is the world coming to? she asked herself, though she had never thought she would. Her mother and aunts were always mouthing that cliché with respect to the young end of the family. But Marianne, the “with-it” granny, had believed herself unshockable. “With-it” nothing! she thought as she returned to the flat to prepare the evening meal. Laura had just made her feel like Methuselah.