At least that’s what they told me, and I ate it up like I do leftovers at three a.m alone in the dark. I will turn sixty-three tomorrow, and today there will be cake. Charlotte, the eldest grand-daughter will likely say some kind of speech as she’s been anointed the eloquent one by the family. I will smile and pretend I remember the memories she pulls from that serious head of hers while sipping on the juice with gin Jeremy will pour me on the sly. Jeremy knows a little more about how these things should go. A lot of fun, is Jeremy. I should mention Phoebe and, er, well the twins. The accidents. They’re walking now and I can’t thank them enough. It’s taken their mother quite off my hands.
When I first let Charlie in through the front door I had no idea he’d leave me in the middle of it all. I’d never have said yes if I’d even suspected such a thing. He seemed so tall, so present, so… Well I can’t think of the right word but you’ll know what I mean. He asked me to marry him on our first date. Of course I scoffed. Soon enough, though, I came to understand there was no such thing as scoffing at Charlie. He was the man who got what he wanted. I said yes to Charlie, and let myself find space in the tall shadow he cast.
He was a good husband. I was not left like so many other women I know to raise children and cook meat with three veg and bring in the washing on my own. Even when we had guests around, Charlie would make a point of helping me serve dessert in the small crystal bowls with cherries carved into them we received from my Aunt Lucille for our wedding. If James or Ruth had pestered me to within an inch of my sanity, he poured the first drink and looked the other way when I poured the rest. The next morning I would wake to find paracetamol on the bedside table next to a glass of water.
I also found an Empty Condom Wrapper in the back left pocket of his after-work jeans, the ones he changed into at the end of a long day. It was a Thursday afternoon and my first thought was that James, of age by then, doesn’t use that brand. I give full credit to the mind for trying its absolute best to juggle possibilities around like a circus clown, adding another one in every now and then to heat things up. I juggled all evening, put the offending wrapper in the bin in the laundry underneath an empty bottle of detergent, and said we’d order take-out. Charlie didn’t look up, but murmured out some kind of okay, and I think it was the way he took a sip from his glass that tipped me off. He had his little finger balancing on the bottom of the glass, as if this touch was the nuance necessary for fluid to meet tongue. It was complete bullshit and I knew I was not the one he was tipping his glass for. Perhaps it was more the Empty Condom Wrapper than the finger.
While we waited for the slop to come from down the road, I retrieved the Empty Condom Wrapper from underneath the detergent bottle and took it up to Charlie’s bedside table. I slipped a corner underneath his water glass to make sure it wouldn’t be missed. Time alternated between racing forth and retreating until I was seasick. I brushed my teeth. I changed into my pyjamas. I put anti-wrinkle cream on the corners of my eyes. I finally crawled between the sheets, our sheets, and forced myself onto my side, the one which meant I was facing away from the door. I waited.
I am looking over at James now and he is trying not to get frustrated with the twins who are taking turns at refusing to eat their mashed potato. He doesn’t have the patience Charlie did with our children, and I suspect he wonders what he got himself into. One minute he was walking into rooms with Sarah dangling from his arm, signing the bill for meals served in the centre of stark white dinner plates and the next he couldn’t even find an arm for all the junk they carried. I could tell him not to worry, that one day you find yourself again, and the children come to be more than vacuums into which you pour every useful part of yourself, but I don’t. I am not sure yet what he thinks of me; what it is like to have An Aging Mother.
I don’t know why I am thinking about these things now, with candles coming and good cheer to maintain. The weight of Charlie’s absence is filling the room, even today. Of course today. Never marry on your birthday. It happens to be one of those things you cannot undo, no matter how many times you empty the gin. It was Charlie’s idea.
I waited and waited that night. My resolve to reject anything but the truth being crunched out by the monotony of my grinding teeth. He took a long time to come upstairs but when he did I could feel the muscles in the back of his neck tense the moment the Empty Condom Wrapper came into view. When you have been married to someone long enough, you can feel their thoughts, sense them, cannot help but breathe in their awareness. I was breathing Charlie’s mind and he was breathing mine only I stopped breathing before he did, lungs bursting burning bursting.
“My sexual indiscretions are not for you to worry about, Emily,” were perhaps the least expected words I had held my breathe for an epoch to hear. His weight, the weight I had come to understand as my own after all the times he carried me naked from the hallway out of view to Somewhere More Intimate, made a depression in the bed and he turned off the lamp. I, I, well I am not sure I know what it is that I said but I know it was none of the things I had planned, so straightforward when asked for my opinion by Other People Not Like Me.
The three years which followed, I lost. I picture myself now, that mother from the movies, wayward son with track marks, my awful dye job and responsive/unresponsive/don’t look too close pupils because I did what anyone faced with Sexual Indiscretions did and still does and will continue to do. I found pharmaceuticals. Charlie, bless Charlie, Charlie put up with it all. The frantic calls to his office at eleven to say I had been found in my nightgown choking on my own vomit forcing him to apologise to the Chief Executive and take off his Harrods tie. Charlie. He made so many compromises.
The cake came and went and Charlotte did say something about a trip to Ballarat I don’t remember and James stopped fussing with his family long enough to kiss the side of my cheek and touch the part of my neck I promised him was his when he was four. Jeremy winked and poured more juice, this time with ice to take the heat off the afternoon. Charlie would have known how to pick up both the twins at one time, balancing one each on a strong shoulder. Charlie would have known I wouldn’t know whether to buy chocolate or neopolitan ice cream and put both in the trolley, turning a blind eye to the economy.
A blind eye. Blind eyes. A family. My family. Charlie, my man with the broad shoulders who asked me to marry him on our first date, me with my girlish skirt no more suited to Sunday School than sex in the cinema. I should write that thank you note to Samuel for his kind words at the funeral, though it’s been seven years. His shoulders shook shaking out Charlie’s eulogy, in broken gulps. Our Charlie.
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