They were quietly feeding themselves as if they were flatmates, slipping in and out of the kitchen, polishing the benchtops, rinsing their plates, leaving behind as little evidence of their presence as possible, as if this were one of the rules of the competition. Stan appeared to be working his way through the cans of spaghetti and baked beans in the pantry. Joy mostly ate toast; sometimes she boiled an egg.
She felt fragile and shaky, exhausted and constantly on the verge of tears. It reminded her of the weeks after she’d just had a baby or lost a loved one.
Joy didn’t know how Stan was spending his days. He seemed to be doing something in his office. When she walked past she caught glimpses of him frowning over his glasses as he importantly turned the page on some paperwork, although God knew what paperwork it could have been. Joy took care of the paperwork. Divorce papers? Also, why did she call it his office? When the children were little they always called it ‘Daddy’s office’ even though Joy was the one who handled all the business of the business.
Yet they all had to maintain the pretence that because Stan was the man, whatever he was doing was automatically more important and deserved priority over any contribution from the little lady.
Well, fuck you, Stan.
The swearing in her head was a new and satisfying development. When she was thirty she’d assumed that by this time of her life nothing would matter all that much, her emotions would be muted and soft, as soft as the skin of an old lady’s face. The violence of her thoughts startled her and woke her up. She assumed these words would not make their way from her brain to her tongue, but you never knew.
Imagine if her children heard her talk like that out loud. That would show them.
She was conducting an experiment. She’d stopped calling her children. She was sick of the harried impatient way they answered her calls. She was sick of being the one to organise every family event. It had now been seven days since she had spoken to any one of her offspring. She would have assumed that her most dutiful children, Logan and/or Brooke, would have checked in by now, but no.
Hypothesis: My children don’t care.
Conclusion: My children don’t care.
Her friends were quiet and busy with their own lives too. Caro had her daughter, Petra, visiting from Copenhagen with her children. Childish laughter floated from Caro’s garden into Joy’s window. Caro shouldn’t be letting those children play outside in this smoky air. Two other friends had become first-time grandmothers: one baby boy, one baby girl. Joy had sent them Congratulations on your grandson/granddaughter! cards. She kept a stack of them in a drawer and grimly selected the correct gender each time she got the happy news.
She tried to work out what to do with her day. Her eyes traced a horrible brownish stain on the bedroom ceiling. She’d never noticed it before. It looked like blood, but she knew it was just rainwater from a long-ago storm. It hadn’t rained in forever.
She must get up. She didn’t move. Her hands clutched at the fitted sheet. Come on, Joy. Two of her fingernails were broken and kept getting caught irritatingly against the sheet. She couldn’t find the nail scissors, even though she knew she’d bought a new pair just two weeks ago. Her fingernails broke so easily now. Like elderly bones. Like her elderly heart. She was not elderly. She wasn’t even seventy. Before Christmas she’d beaten a fifty-year-old, a good player, 6–4, 6–2 but she hadn’t been back to the club this year. She didn’t seem to have the energy.
She did not feel suicidal, absolutely not, but for the first time ever she found herself thinking that maybe she’d had enough. It wasn’t worth the bother anymore. She wanted her grandparents. She wanted her mother.
She imagined their faces lighting up when she walked through the arrival gates of the afterlife. It would be nice to see them again. She would run into their arms. She’d have to wear something nice for her mother.
Today was Valentine’s Day. A day that celebrated love. She and Stan had never really taken much notice of Valentine’s Day. It was an American holiday but every year there seemed to be more fuss about it: red roses and chocolates and teddy bears. Men in suits carrying bouquets. Joy didn’t want red roses but she would like a husband who still shared her bed.
She rolled over onto her stomach and pressed her face into her pillow. If she started crying she might never stop.
‘Get up,’ she said into the pillow. ‘Get up now.’
She thought of her mother describing a morning when Joy was a baby. Beautiful, no-nonsense Pearl Becker woke up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. She could barely lift her head from her pillow. ‘It was like I had blocks of concrete tied to me,’ she told Joy. When she heard the milkman at the front door （those were the days!） she called out to him to please get help, and so the doctor came around to examine her. A doctor doing a house visit: those sure were the days. The doctor said she probably had some kind of ‘vitamin deficiency’ and told her that she needed to ‘get up and be strong for her baby’。