She’s so – you promised me. These words through my teeth, as though opening my mouth again would be a mistake.
I’m going to end it. Jake mumbled this into my hands, which I knew must smell of the moisturizer I rubbed on Paddy’s eczema before bed, a bitter, chemical-rich tang.
I’m going to— He was crying now, and this was the thing that finally disgusted me, that made me jump from the chair.
I had seen my father cry once. They used to rip each other to scraps, my parents. Domestic violence, a therapist once called it. But we never talked about it like that. Even an hour later, Dad could be humming again, frying bacon for dinner, a roll-up at the side of his mouth. But that time, he was at the kitchen table with his hands over his face. And he was sobbing, loudly, nothing like a little boy or a woman. Like a man.
Sleep on the fucking sofa, I snarled at Jake, a rose bush, a tarantula, a creature endlessly thorned and sharp-toothed, something that could spring at any moment. The fucking sofa, kids in bed, husband crying on the kitchen floor – cliché after cliché – how did it happen? At that moment it was infinitely mysterious, the way we had ended up like everyone else. The mystery felt almost like God had as a child, in church – something barely present, endlessly unknown, never to be brought fully into the light.
~
When I was a child, there was a book – out of print now, expensive – about a unicorn who went into the sea and became a narwhal. The book had beautiful illustrations, dark blue seas, peach-pale evening skies. But the picture I remembered best was of the harpies: dark shadows, birds with women’s faces, who came down to torture the unicorn, to make him suffer.
I asked my mother what a harpy was; she told me that they punish men, for the things they do.
~
7
The day afterwards, we stuck to the usual, and I was grateful for it, at first. Jake brought me a cup of tea, and I sipped it in bed, watching him interact with the children, watching his normality, his smiles. Paddy was talking to him intently about some rare species of shark – a goblin shark – and they spent time looking up images of the monstrous thing online, both of them in their pyjamas. Ted was under the covers with me, still half submerged in sleep, his eyes only just visible over the duvet.
They had a friend’s birthday party that day, and we went together, sipped thin cups of coffee in the soft-play centre, chatted to the other parents about swimming clubs and the new teacher. Jake only spoke to other dads: I noticed that I felt an obscure gratitude for this, as though it was a gift to me, a bird with a mouse in its mouth. I felt a curiously strong urge to tell one of the other mums, to drag someone into the bathrooms with plywood dividers, like we were teenagers. I could have chosen Mary: she and her husband had sex on Saturday mornings, I knew that already. She let it slip during an otherwise typical comparative conversation about screen time, during which I felt I was minimizing my stats, and she was maximizing hers. We only let them on Saturday mornings, she’d said. So we can have some time.
Despite this confession, her revelations went no further. Nobody’s ever did. I had tried being candid before, at book groups and PTA socials, and it never ended well. Once, drunk on prosecco and inadequately fed on sushi, I’d asked what contraception people used. The silence was acute.
We should be so lucky, someone joked, and laughed. Everyone laughed. End of conversation.
I wondered if they all secretly had coils, jagged, effective pieces of metal in their wombs. I kept considering one but couldn’t face it, couldn’t bear the thought of someone pushing their hand right inside me. After one difficult natural birth and one caesarean, I felt that my body had closed over for gynaecological intervention, forever. I’d recently psyched myself up for weeks to get a smear test only to have it cancelled as the nurse stared into me. You’re still bleeding, she’d said, and it had sounded like an admonishment.
After the party, we all piled into the car in the industrial centre car park, a light drizzle falling outside. The boys were moaning in the back, comparing party bag spoils, wailing about any differences between them. Jake suggested – without looking at me – that we go to the supermarket, and I agreed, my voice almost lost in concrete. In the car, I closed my eyes so I could feel just how fast we were going, how much I was letting myself be carried on.
~
I knew I was meant to pity the unicorn, to feel his pain in my own skin.
Poor creature, my mother always said, turning the page.
But it was the bird-women I felt for. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like: my wings filling with air, the whole world flattening beneath me.
~
8
The feelings didn’t start all at once. They came slowly, gradually. We went to the supermarket, and I planned meals in my head, dishes that I would cook and serve to all of them, that Jake would insert into his mouth. Jake would sit there and chew my food and swallow it: I assessed this information for cracks, for gaps that I might slip through. It seemed very important that I could tolerate this exact thought: the meat tenderized by me, stirred by me, being chewed by him, digested by him, becoming part of his body.
I thought that I could tolerate it, but I noticed another feeling beginning in my belly button, or perhaps lower, in my C-section scar. The feeling spread over my abdomen, like a menstrual cramp, an early contraction. It tightened me up. When Jake came back towards me, pushing the trolley, I noticed that he was smiling, telling some joke to Ted, leaning close to the trolley, where Ted’s bottom spilled around the child seat, his plump hands paling as they gripped tightly onto the handle.
The boys were hungry, having left most of the food at the party, and as we shopped they began to throw themselves around as though their muscles were failing, becoming loose beings, grabbing things from the shelves. Jake and I presented ourselves for duty, emergency workers at the same crisis, speaking sharply to our children, replacing chocolate bars in their places. Our lack of eye contact, of touch, counted for very little. As we had been for years, we were teammates now, classmates. We were learning – or unlearning – the same things.
I was startled by how much the new reality was like the old reality: how we could still buddy up and parcel out the duties so smoothly. Jake cooked that night, making burgers with Paddy, letting him flatten them with his fists. And we did bath time, as usual, Jake sitting beside the boys, containing their wildness in the water as I scurried around finding pyjamas, tidying bedrooms, setting out reading books. I wondered if we could continue like this forever, spend a lifetime never quite looking each other in the face.
~
Sometimes I question whether anyone can know what it’s like before it happens. Marriage and motherhood are like death in this way, and others too: no one comes back unchanged.
Even now, it is hard to look at that woman (myself), at those boys (my sons), with anything like a clear lens. My sight is still coloured, infused by the blood we shared, by their journeys through my lightless body.
~
9
After dinner, while the boys played on the floor, Jake came and sat next to me. To this day, I think he was going to suggest that we watch a TV series or a film when the kids were in bed, as we had done almost every night since I was pregnant with Ted. I have often wondered what would have happened if we had done that. I can see that imaginary possibility – which surely exists in some other dimension – almost as clearly as I can see the actual events that have taken place.