‘Wait, is that the DVD player? Stan. She wouldn’t take the DVD player. No-one uses DVD players anymore.’
‘We do,’ said Stan.
‘People her age don’t watch DVDs,’ said Joy. ‘They all stream.’
‘You don’t even know what streaming means,’ said Stan.
‘I do so,’ said Joy. She went into the bathroom to clean her teeth. ‘It’s just watching Netflix on TV, isn’t it? Isn’t that what streaming means?’
He had no right to pretend he had superior knowledge about technology. He was a man who didn’t own a mobile phone, as a matter of principle and stubborn pride. He loved it when people were shocked to discover he had never owned one, never would own one. He truly believed it made him morally superior, which drove Joy bananas because, excuse me, he was not. The way he talked about his ‘stance’ on mobile phones, you would think he were the lone person in the crowd not giving the Nazi salute.
Before their retirement he told people, ‘I don’t need a phone, I’m a tennis coach, not a surgeon. There are no tennis emergencies.’ There were so tennis emergencies, and more than once over the years she’d been furious when she couldn’t contact him, and she was left in a tricky situation that would have been instantly solved if he’d owned a phone. Also, his principles didn’t prevent him from happily picking up the landline and calling Joy on her mobile when she was at the shops, to ask how much longer she’d be, or to please buy more chilli crackers, but when Stan was gone, he was gone, and if she thought about that too much and all it implied she could tap into a great well of rage, so she didn’t think about it.
That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.
She put on her nicest pyjamas seeing as there was a guest in the house and hopped into bed next to Stan. Her movements felt theatrical, as if she were being observed. They lay in silence for a few moments, flat on their backs, the quilt tucked under their elbows, like good children waiting for bedtime stories. The light was out, their lamps were on. There was a framed wedding photo on Joy’s bedside table. Most of the time she looked right through it as though it were a piece of furniture but sometimes, without warning, she could glance at it and feel the exact moment the photo was taken: the scratchy lacy neckline of her dress, Stan’s hand insistently, inappropriately low on her back, the casual expectation that this wild happiness would always be instantly available, because she’d got the boy, the boy with the deep voice and huge serve, and next would come trophies, babies, picnics and fancy restaurants on special occasions, maybe a dog. Everything at that time had rippled with sex: tennis, training, food, the very clouds in the sky.
For years she’d been so confused when people talked about knowing the day their babies were conceived. How could they possibly know? She’d blissfully, adorably believed that all couples had sex every day.
She knew the exact day that her youngest daughter was conceived.
By then she got it.
Joy waited for Stan to pick up his book or turn on the radio or turn off the light, but he didn’t do any of those things, so she decided he was up for a chat.
‘I’m glad I had that leftover chicken casserole to give her. She seemed starving.’
Savannah had eaten like a wartime refugee. Halfway through her meal she’d begun to cry – great convulsive sobs, but even as the tears streamed down her face, she’d continued to eat. It had been unsettling and distressing to watch. Then she’d eaten not one, but two bananas!
‘It wasn’t an especially good casserole. It needed more . . . flavour, I guess.’ Joy always overcooked chicken. She had a terror of salmonella. ‘I’ve still got enough left to give some to Steffi for breakfast.’
Joy preferred not to embarrass Steffi by offering her dog food as Steffi didn’t appear to know she was a dog. She chatted at length with Joy each morning after breakfast, making strange, elongated whining sounds that Joy knew were her sadly unintelligible attempts at English. The one time they’d taken her to the local dog park, Steffi had been appalled and sat at their feet with an expression of frozen hauteur on her face, as if she were a society lady at McDonald’s.
Stan punched his pillow and settled it behind his head. ‘Steffi would prefer a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald for breakfast.’
‘She makes me think of the little match girl,’ mused Joy.
‘Steffi?’
‘No, Savannah.’
After a moment Stan said, ‘Remind me who the little match girl is? What match are we talking about? Did she win?’
Joy snorted. ‘It’s a fairy tale about a little girl trying to sell matches on a freezing night. My mother used to read it to me. I think the little girl freezes to death in the end.’
‘Trust your mother to pick a fairy tale with a corpse at the end.’
‘I loved that story,’ said Joy.
Stan reached for his reading glasses and book. He wasn’t a reader, but he was trying to read this novel Amy had given him for Christmas because she kept asking, ‘What do you think of the book, Dad?’ Stan had confided to Joy that he had to keep starting again because he couldn’t make any sense of it.
‘It’s horrible to think of her boyfriend hurting her like that,’ said Joy. ‘Just horrible. Imagine if that was one of our girls.’
He didn’t answer, and she kicked herself for suggesting he imagine his own daughters in a situation like that. When Stan was fourteen, he’d witnessed his father throw his mother across the room, knocking her unconscious. It was, supposedly, the first and only time his father had done anything like that, but it must have been a terrible thing for a teenage boy to see. Stan refused to talk about his father. If the children ever asked questions about their grandfather he’d say, ‘I can’t remember.’ Eventually they’d stopped asking.
Stan said, ‘Our girls are athletes, and they grew up with brothers. They’d never put up with it.’
‘I don’t think it works like that,’ said Joy. ‘It starts out small. You put up with little things in a relationship and then . . . the little things gradually get bigger.’
He didn’t answer, and her words floated for too long above their bed. You put up with little things . . . and then the little things gradually get bigger.
‘Like the frog getting boiled to death,’ said Stan.
‘What?’ Joy heard herself sound a little screechy.
Stan kept looking at his book. He flipped a page in the wrong direction and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer her, but then he said, his eyes on the page, ‘You know that theory: if you put a frog in warm water and keep slowly turning up the heat, it doesn’t jump out because it doesn’t realise it’s slowly being boiled to death.’