Joy’s daughters both hated shopping. Amy began to mutter about commercialism and bright lights and ‘feeling like a rat trapped in a maze’， or some such nonsense, while Brooke was so task-focused, tapping her feet, her hand on the small of Joy’s back, hurrying her along: ‘Chop, chop, Mum, a fast shop is a good shop.’
Brooke only ever shopped online these days （‘You should try it, Mum, click, click and you’re done!’） and Amy apparently got her clothes by scrounging through charity bins, so Joy had given up suggesting shopping excursions.
But when Joy had suggested she treat Savannah to a day at a fancy shopping mall to thank her for everything she’d done while Joy was in the hospital, Savannah’s face had lit up even as she quickly said, ‘Oh, that’s not necessary.’
‘It would be my pleasure,’ Joy had said, truthfully, because today had been like rediscovering a forgotten part of herself, the part that perhaps only existed when she was with her mother, who had no interest in Joy’s tennis, or even, to be honest, Joy’s children, but did have passionate opinions about the right colours and necklines to flatter Joy’s body. Joy had assumed her daughters would at least have a passing interest in fashion, but they both found it frivolous and irrelevant, almost contemptible, like playing with dolls, which neither of them had done either. Joy had spent hours playing with dolls as a child.
‘I know exactly the right necklace to go with your shift dress,’ said Joy to Savannah. ‘A long kind of heavy chunky pendant that sits right here.’ She pointed at her collarbone. ‘Although I’ve noticed you nearly always wear that key necklace, don’t you? Is it sentimental?’
Savannah’s young face became momentarily rigid and jaded, as if she were thirty years older. ‘A friend gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday.’ She lifted the key from her neck and tapped it against her chin. ‘She said it symbolised “doors opening for a brighter future”。’ She smiled cynically at Joy. ‘I’m still waiting for those doors to open.’
‘I’m sure lots of doors are about to open for you!’ said Joy. She recognised the rousing tone she used to employ to little avail when Amy got ‘the bad feeling’。
‘Well, you opened your door to me.’ Savannah’s face softened. ‘So that’s a start! Maybe I could get a green pendant.’ She bent towards the shopping bags, pulled out a corner of the dress and pointed at the fabric. ‘To pick out the green colour of those little squares? What do you think?’
‘Perfect,’ said Joy, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears as she felt a thin, sharp, strangely pleasurable piercing of grief for her mother, who would have loved this day so much, who might have found it so much easier to bond with a granddaughter like this. Her mother had died over twenty years ago, and Joy’s grief at the time had been so complicated and strange. Her mother hadn’t been an especially good mother, and she was an even worse grandmother: she found her grandchildren too loud and too large, and so excessive in number. ‘Why would you want more?’ she’d said to Joy when she told her she was pregnant with Brooke.
When she died, just three months after Stan’s mother had died, Joy kept spinning in the opposite direction when faced with her grief, which was hers and hers alone, because she had no siblings, and her children much preferred their other grandmother, because of the secret cash hand-outs and that damned apple crumble.
It was perfectly possible to avoid grief when you have four children who all play competitive tennis, and nearly one hundred more tennis students requiring your attention, and one husband grieving his own mother and dealing with his own mid-bloody-life crisis, and when your relationship with your mother had always been entangled in disappointment and love, so Joy spun and she spun until one day her grief caught her, in the laundry, as she pulled a ruined blouse out of the washing machine, a blouse that her mother had told her to only ever wash by hand in cold water.
It was as though Joy’s subconscious had only just that moment caught up with what she rationally understood: that she truly wouldn’t see her mother again. Her mother would never again phone at an inconvenient time with an unreasonable request. She would never again tell Joy that she hated February. Or that she hated August. Or that she hated November. （She only liked April.） Pearl Becker never would find the happiness that had continually eluded her and their relationship would remain a puzzle forever unsolved. That day Joy had lowered herself to the floor with her back against the washing machine, the sodden ball of her ruined blouse dripping all over her skirt, and sobbed, violently and shockingly, and then, shamefully, she’d shouted at a tennis kid who unexpectedly opened the laundry door and caught her there. （It was a wonder she hadn’t got a complaint from that kid’s mother.）