That Show What She Wanted to Be but Hasn’t Been—Yet
11:00 P.M.
EVERYONE IS IN BED, WHEN I GET HOME. AURALLY, IT’S QUIET, BUT visually, it’s loud—loud with the hundreds and hundreds of things, big and small, that aren’t in their place, or have never had a place, and so fill every countertop, cupboard, and chair. Each thing makes a tiny, high-frequency noise that you feel in an untidy room—some barely noticeable squeak, or sigh, that when taken collectively, turn into a dissonant orchestra of clutter sound, which make the spirits vexed when you return. Women, it seems, can hear this sound. Others cannot.
To run a household is to feel like a tidal wave of stuff enters the house, every day, that you, Canute-like, are constantly trying to repel, or order, or throw away—only to be buffeted by the next new wave. Socks, magazines, games, unopened post, mugs, shoes, single gloves, a pair of tights, a box of curtain rings, waiting to be opened and used for, what—three years, now? As the curtains sit in the bedroom, waiting to be hemmed, and put up, and finally used.
I MOVE FROM room to room, made newly listless by the shambles; sometimes picking something up, and meaning to do something with it—only to realize another four things would need to be done before I could do this, which is why it’s sat on top of the cupboard for so long. The door without a handle, the coat that needs relining, the record player that needs a new needle. All these things that need to be done, before I can do what I want. To be a middle-aged woman is to count the times you’ve waited to do the things you want in months or years. Sometimes, decades.
These piles work by way of archaeology: I keep finding things, buried in the strata, that show some excited idea I had, once, that got put to one side. Some plan that got shelved; some little vision that remains furloughed. This is how every middle-aged woman’s life looks, I think. Buried within the house are both all the clues of the woman she wanted to be, and the very things that prevented it.
If a teenage girl’s bedroom wall shows the woman she wants to be, a woman’s house shows you what stopped her. For now.
One day, someday, I’ll be able to take up all these stalled future lives, and finally live them. Is that what your sixties are for? Your seventies? If so, I don’t understand why the phrase old lady is so often pejorative. “Old lady—finally free to do all the things she likes” sounds like a fine thing, to me. “Old lady” is what I’m holding out for.
“Old lady” me will move to a totally empty house, and take with her only the things she actually loves. I will shed this whole house like a cocoon—every Tupperware without a lid; every pair of trousers that needs mending, broken bowl, and unread book about investments—and live in a wooden hut with a view of a mountain, with only things that fulfill William Morris’s dictum: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
I start to take an inventory, as I wander from room to room, of “All the Things I Have That Are Useless to Me Right Now, But Which One Day Might Form My Future Life”:
A box of cables from old printers, computers, video cameras, and phones long since stored in the loft. They are tangled together like a rat king—to try and separate one from the pile would be to have to separate them all—and so you cannot find, say, the charger that would allow you to, finally, rewatch the footage of your child’s first birthday, which is currently trapped in the amber of a defunct mini-DVD recorder from 2003. You presume the first chance you will have to do this will be in your seventy-seventh year. Or, maybe, your child’s. You are not a reliable chronicler of family life. You are not Nancy Mitford.
This is the adjunct to the “box of special photographs” that you meant to have framed and mounted down the hallway and up the stairs, so your family sees its glorious history of fabulous holidays, parties, and hugs, and is, therefore, reminded, on a daily basis, how wonderful it is. Perhaps, it is because they still sit in this box—without any new additions since 2013, when you started taking all your photos on your smartphone, instead—that your teenage children can so passionately shout “THIS FAMILY IS SHIT” during family arguments. You have failed to provide them with the correct visual data that proves you were a good parent, after all. It’s all on you. You are not Annie Leibovitz.
A folder of “lovely walks”—torn out of newspapers and magazines—that you’ve never gone on.
Ditto, holidays. You are not Judith Chalmers.
Ditto, “spa retreats.” You are not “regularly recharging your batteries.”
A collection of single earrings—the partners of which were all lost whilst, you know. Having a good time. Or just walking down the street. You will convince yourself you might, one day, make them into “chic brooches.” You will, absolutely, die with a tin full of single earrings, and no chic brooches. You are not “uniquely stylish.”
A daring red lipstick—the “dare” of which you repeatedly decline in favor of a trusty, old lip tint. You are not a sexy lady.
A collection of dusty, dead houseplants, still in pots, that you’ve hidden around the back of the shed. In your mind, they have the descriptor of “Hedgehogs might use?????” You are not in tune with nature.
A lovely, eco-friendly compost bin you don’t use, since you opened it and found a rat staring up at you. You are not saving the environment.
A scented candle so eye-wateringly expensive you never found an occasion “special” enough to light it, which has now lost all its scent—and so is essentially just a worthless turret of fat sitting on your mantelpiece. You do not live a well-scented life.
Very expensive face mask you’re saving for “a special occasion,” such as if you were invited at the last minute to a royal wedding, or the Oscars, and needed a face that’s ten years younger. Its sell-by date was 2013. You are not “radiant.”
A pair of smart, navy high-waisted shorts you’ve never worn but are convinced you will need if invited to a yacht at Cannes. You are not “chic and jaunty.”
A book on meditation. Never had time! Too stressed! You are not calm.
A pair of linen trousers that you bought to go on holiday—little realizing the collateral crease-damage that can happen around the crotch by midday on the first day of wearing. Although you can never wear them again—not wishing to make your genital area look like a picture of Miffy—you also can’t throw them away, as they were ninety pounds from Boden. You are not elegant.
A collection of more than one hundred pairs of suspenders, hold-up stockings, fishnets, and brightly colored tights of every denier and pattern—all stored for “a sexy weekend away.” You will never wear any of them, because you never had that sexy weekend away. Instead, all your lingerie needs have been handsomely met by four pairs of “menopause friendly” pants, and the same six faithful pairs of black sixty-denier opaque “Bottom Control” M&S tights that you use, on rotation, until their feet go all gray and crispy. You are not a sultry temptress.
The pasta maker. Oh, how you imagined the whole family making ravioli together—learning new skills and bonding like on a Ronzoni advert! Oh, how you have never even read the instructions, and just wanged a bag of dried shit in the pan and covered it with cheap pasta sauce! Another generation of your family will grow to adulthood without being able to make their own spaghetti—and that feels like a bitter failure. You are not Nigella Lawson.
A “posh coat” that you were going to wear to have cocktails with the girls. Every time you went for cocktails (cider) with the girls (three cackling hags of your age) it was raining, so you left the posh coat on the hook and just wore your anorak instead. You have never worn your posh coat. You’re beginning to suspect now that you never will. It’s always raining. You are not Carrie in Sex and the City.
Ditto, that hat. What hat? Any hat. You have never worn a hat, despite having three. They just blow off! How does anyone wear a hat? Do they use a stapler? You are not Isabella Blow.
The abdominal exerciser. Hahahahaha. No. You are not toned.
The pelvic-floor exerciser. You used it once. It went wrong. You don’t wish to talk about it. Now it’s just a weird, dusty plastic egg in your bedside cabinet—like some odd hen laid it there in secret. You are not fully continent.
A music instrument. Perhaps it’s something small scale like a recorder—you always enjoyed playing it at school, and nursed fantasies of taking it back up and playing the forbidden, funky tunes you wished you were learning in 1986, instead of “London’s Burning.” Or perhaps you went bigger—a guitar or a piano. Yours was going to be one of those houses where, when everyone had had a few drinks, there would be singsongs: With you, in the center, playing any requests by ear, whilst people murmured—in between harmonizing perfectly with each other—“God, she’s amazing. Totally self-taught. Like Prince. But better.” You casually play a honky-tonk solo. At the end of the solo, you would hear, from outside, the entire street applauding you. You would open your front door and bow. Maybe you were wearing a hat.
In reality, you learned how to play a D chord, and then your hands really hurt, and then you got pregnant again, and now the guitar is in the spare room next to the abdominal exerciser, and the piano is just the place where people dump old vases and library books, and no one knows you’re secretly Prince. And never will. You are not the life and soul of the party.
An untouched “Craftwork Box,” filled with glitter, glue, paints, wooden pegs, ribbons, and old birthday and Christmas cards. On rainy days, you were going to gather everyone around the kitchen table and spend a delightful afternoon making tiny dollies or collages, whilst listening to Frank Sinatra. In reality, on rainy days, you all just had an argument, two people went to sulk, and you ended up watching The Incredibles again. You don’t really regret that—Mr. Incredible is hot and can never be looked at too much—but if you’d known, in advance, that you’d never actually need thirty empty cotton reels and lollipop sticks, you could have just chucked them all away and used the shelf space to display fabulous objets you’d bought from flea markets instead. You are now keeping the Craftwork Box because you’ve made a decade-long emotional investment in it and are now telling yourself that “the grandchildren” will love it. You are not Martha Stewart.
Marked as absent: fabulous objets bought from flea markets. You never actually bought any of these. The one time you went to a flea market the smallest child got its finger stuck in an antique French birdcage in the first five minutes and nearly lost a fingernail, and you had to go and find ice cream to make it stop crying. By the time you got back, the flea market was closing—you initially arrived at 4 p.m. because the oldest child was busy watching The Incredibles for the ninth time. And you sat down and joined her. You are not the posh woman from Antiques Roadshow.
A favorite mug. If someone makes you a cup of tea in a mug that is not your favorite, all your happiness and gratitude is somehow crushed by a disappointment and fury that it’s not in the favorite mug. You have to go into the kitchen and secretly decant it into “the good one,” and then spend the rest of the day thinking, mournfully, No one knows the real me. No one at all. The real me is a phantom, never realized, that haunts this house from a parallel universe where all these things got used.
You are not half the women you thought you would be by now.