‘The first time I saw her,’ said Stan. He was sitting when he said this, and Joy was standing, and he grabbed her by the waist and pulled her to him so that she landed on his lap.
Joy saw their marriage through Savannah’s young, interested eyes: solid and valuable, like an antique, burnished with age and wisdom. Savannah probably coveted a relationship like theirs. A relationship that produced children and a beautiful house and a successful business and shelves full of framed photos of birthday parties, Easter lunches and Christmas mornings.
Joy stood under the shower, tilting her face up to the spray, and thought about the shameful moments that were never photographed:
her own face ugly with rage, spit flying from her contorted mouth,
the back of Stan’s head as he walked away,
sitting in a car on the side of the road, four children silent with shock in the back, while her heart thudded in rapid time with the click-click of the indicator.
She shuddered and got shampoo in her eye. Of course, they wouldn’t share the nasty secrets with Savannah. There were limits to their honesty, no matter what was going on with their elderly frontal lobes.
The shampoo stung like hell. She blinked furiously and massaged in the expensive volumising conditioner her hairdresser, Narelle, had told her to use every third day. Narelle’s recommended haircare regime was complex, but Joy got a lot of compliments for her hair and she loved Narelle like a sister, or the way that sisters should love each other. Her own daughters absolutely loved each other but one was generally offended or incensed or bewildered by the other one at any given time.
The price tag for the shampoo was still stuck on the back of the bottle. Stan would say, ‘What’s it made of? Gold dust?’ Joy peeled it off with her fingernail, rolled it between her fingers, let it fall and nudged it with her toe down the drain.
Yes, Savannah certainly did not need to know how many times Joy and Stan had fallen in and out of love over the last fifty years, how there were times when Joy hated Stan so passionately it made her sick to the stomach, how when the older three were very little they’d talked seriously and matter-of-factly, almost pleasantly, about separating, how Joy had believed it was definitely going to happen, how Brooke was a surprise baby conceived during their surprise reconciliation, how it had truly felt like a brand new relationship, how getting so close to losing each other had made them settle into something deeper and richer, but then, yet again, they’d lost their way, and all that love and happiness drained slowly, imperceptibly away, as if there was an invisible tiny leak.
Amy once told Joy that she had no idea how lonely it felt to be single. Joy had wanted to tell her that you could still be lonely when you were married, that there had been times when she had woken up day after day crushed with loneliness, and still made breakfast for four children.
She didn’t say that to Amy. She said, ‘Yes, darling, you’re right. It must be so hard.’
You couldn’t share the truth of your marriage with your adult children. They didn’t really want to know, even if they thought they did.
There was one year, the really bad year, when both her mother and Stan’s mother were sick, and then both of them died within three months of each other. As only children, Joy and Stan had to grieve alone. That was when Joy made a secret plan to leave. Her idea had been to wait until Brooke finished high school, at which point her mothering duties would be discharged. It had given her pleasure to plan it all out, even to imagine the pain of it, like a sadomasochistic fantasy.
But then: Brooke finished high school and they were good again. Maybe even better than they’d ever been. They got back into doubles and won tournament after tournament. Winning seemed to permeate everything: their sex life, the business. Joy focused on squeezing money from the tennis school. She opened the café and the pro shop, she introduced the holiday camps. That’s what happened. You had a long streak where you felt like you couldn’t lose a point, until you did.
Now here they were. She couldn’t exactly say if Savannah had caught them on an upswing or a downswing, or if they’d finally found an equilibrium that would last them until death did them part. Sometimes it felt like their relationship ebbed and flowed over a day, or even a conversation. She could feel affection followed by resentment in the space of ten minutes.
She went to rinse off her expensive conditioner and then remembered Narelle had told her to leave it on for at least three minutes. She decided to spend the three minutes doing ankle dips with her eyes closed, which was what Brooke had told her to do every day, to improve ‘ankle mobility’。 She wasn’t nearly as obedient with her daughter as she was with her hairdresser and she wanted to be able to truthfully tell Brooke today that she’d been doing her exercises. She bobbed up and down on one leg, eyes shut, hands outspread just in case she needed to save herself. （Brooke might not approve of her doing these exercises in the shower.） If Stan came in and caught her doing her wobbly naked bobbing, he would laugh and laugh.