Page 2 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER TWO

Anna glances around her bedroom. Her marital bedroom, so it’s their bedroom.

Their house. The house that she works so hard to keep lovely for Gary and their children.

For herself too, obviously, because she wants to have a nice home.

That’s how she was raised. Her mother did it.

Her mother’s mother did it. Probably they all did it, back down the line, and while Anna occasionally likes to question things – religious beliefs, political-party platforms, the storylines of Sons and Daughters – she has never questioned that.

Which is, no doubt, a factor in her despair as she looks at Gary’s worn shirt, socks and underpants on the floor – he never puts his clothes in the laundry basket, although somehow their children manage it – and at the shoes that need shining and the bed she needs to strip.

She thinks about the casserole she has to make for dinner.

There are just so many things that go in to keeping a nice home and while she doesn’t expect someone else to do them, she wishes Gary wouldn’t make them harder .

Does it take that much time to put a shirt in a basket?

There are also all the things she has to think about.

Thank goodness she keeps lists, otherwise she’d never remember.

Gary’s little law practice is busy – which is good for their income, but bad for their family life – and she resents the fact that he is so rarely home that he leaves her notes.

Yesterday’s asked her to buy a present for his partner’s wife’s birthday.

How is she supposed to guess what the woman would like for her birthday? She barely knows her.

She barely knows Gary these days either. He’s out the door when she’s in the shower and he comes home after she goes to bed. All she is for him is a machine to do jobs. All he is for her, for their children, is the payer of bills.

This is, she thinks – and not for the first time – no way to have a marriage. Or a family. When did they stop treating each other as lovers, as confidants, as people , and start being cohabitants, parents, washers of clothes and payers of bills?

Anna doesn’t know, and it makes her sad she didn’t notice the change, because these days when she thinks about Gary – the man she joyfully chose to marry when she was old enough to be sure of what she wanted – she pictures only an outline of the man she loved.

He’s not filled in any more; not the way she knew him to be.

Maybe she isn’t either. Maybe they’re both husks, hollowed out by the demands of adult life and unable to locate the stuffing that once made them greet each day with anticipation rather than dismay.

It’s not the kids’ fault. She and Gary chose to have them.

They discussed having them well before Anna became pregnant with Troy.

True, they’d planned on leaving at least two years between children, and Anna shouldn’t have believed the women who told her that you can’t get pregnant while breastfeeding, because that’s how Renee happened.

But they were both delighted to have a little girl.

No, the kids have been the lights of their lives.

And perhaps that’s the issue: they shifted their attention to the children and took it off each other.

Seriously, though, how was she meant to keep giving Gary the same amount of attention when she had helpless babies to look after?

She was the one whose body was needed to feed them, whose time and care were needed to tend to them.

Gary didn’t have to breastfeed. Changing a few nappies was not at all the same thing. Yet he switched off from her too.

Was it because her body didn’t look the same? She’s often wondered but never asked. Because she didn’t want to know the answer if it was ‘yes’.

His body looks the same: trim, lightly muscled, a good shape.

He hasn’t even put on weight, whereas her body changes like the tide: ballooning with babies and periods, shrinking with breastfeeding and ovulation.

It hasn’t felt as if it’s belonged to her for many years.

It hasn’t felt as if it belonged to him either.

They used to love being lovers. He would take his time with her, making it clear he found her desirable, delightful.

After spending her teens and twenties feeling as if she was the target of slightly – sometimes strongly – aggressive interest from men, Gary made her feel safe while also being clear that he wanted her.

He may not have directly understood that this was the way to elicit a worshipful response from her, so that she would want him as much as he wanted her, but it was.

Why don’t more men understand that? All the ones at the pub and the club who complain that ‘no chicks want me’ have to do is be kind, to see a woman as something to be cherished – not as a goal to be attained – and they’d have more luck.

But maybe they can’t see them that way. That might be it, yes: women are only ever targets for them, not people.

Anna was someone Gary cherished. Once. Not any more.

They stopped taking pleasure in seeing each other right around the time he opened his practice and felt the pressure of making it work.

Over time, long days at the office turned into late nights when he wouldn’t come home until she was wiping off her make-up and getting into bed.

She’d waited for him, on so many of those nights.

Waited for him to come home and see her.

He didn’t. So she started taking off the make-up after she got the kids to bed, piling up her hair and making a cup of tea to sip while she read her book.

The tea would be long gone before her husband came home.

Except it’s not home the way she wants it.

A nice home requires more than having residents.

It needs more than cooking and tidying and cleaning.

A nice home needs a heart, and theirs has long since stopped beating.

The question she now has to answer is: What am I going to do about it?

Because she is not prepared to keep going like this.

Not for one day longer. Not when she spends half the time wanting to scream at her walls with frustration that the life she thought they would be living has turned out to be an endless sequence of going through the motions, with no sense of what the goal may be other than to survive.

That’s not what she wants. It’s not what she wants for her children, either.

Sure, he’s around today. It’s Sunday. That’s the one day he doesn’t go into the office because his partner is religious and takes the Sabbath seriously.

It’s the first time in Anna’s life that she’s found religion to make sense.

Brought up Catholic, schooled by nuns, she always thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

Yet she’s convinced that she and the kids wouldn’t see Gary at all if it weren’t for the Sabbath.

He’s a local solicitor, not the attorney-general, yet somehow he needs to work six days a week.

Keeps telling her that with all the property developments going on and people moving to the Central Coast, he has his hands full with conveyancing.

This morning Gary has taken the kids jogging along Forresters Beach because that’s another thing he does: fads.

One year it was cold-water swimming. Another it was saunas.

This year he has been insisting that the kids become runners, just because he wants to enter the City to Surf in August. For the past few weekends he’s bundled them out the door early each Sunday, waking them up on a day when they should be allowed to be a little lazy.

And she’s let him, because it’s the only time they have with him, and she supposes she should be grateful he wants to do something with them given that she has friends whose husbands work a lot less than Gary and don’t even take their kids to cricket practice.

Anna thinks about this as she yanks the sheets from the bed and bundles them into her arms before stomping out the back to the laundry. She does a lot of stomping these days.

‘Wait,’ she says out loud, because another thing she does a lot of is talk to herself. That’s what happens when your kids go to bed at kid time and your husband doesn’t come home until vampire time. She inhales noisily as she shoves the sheets into the washing machine.

‘There’s something else going on,’ she mutters, then she walks back to the bedroom to pick up his dirty clothes and pulls clean sheets out of the linen cupboard and starts to make the bed.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she says to the air.

What she means is that she can’t believe she didn’t figure it out before.

She is who he doesn’t want to see. She is who he doesn’t want to be around.

He is happy to spend time with the kids, obviously, because he’s been doing things with them.

Getting them up early. Out of the house. Away from her .

That makes her feel a little sick.

She should have realised it earlier.

He’s having an affair.

That’s it. That has to be why he’s never here. Why he doesn’t want to touch her. Hasn’t touched her in months. Why he waits for her to be in the shower to leave for work. Why he comes home when she’s asleep. So he doesn’t have to see her awake.

Now she feels even sicker, to think he’s been running around with someone and she’s been too stupid to realise it. Is it his paralegal? She’s been there for a year or so. Her name is Donna. She’s at least a decade younger than him.

Oh yes, that sounds about right. It’s Donna. He’s staying at the office every night for Donna.

Do other people know?

No, she doesn’t care about that. What she cares about – what she needs to bring into effect, right now – is getting him out of the house. For good. He can leave his dirty undies on Donna’s floor. Anna is not going to keep making a home for him when he’d rather be somewhere else.