Page 23 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

As much as she doesn’t want to, Anna has to admit that Gary has made an effort. For once.

Now she’s being mean. Now she’s being mean … ha! If she’s honest with herself – and it’s hard to be that, isn’t it, a lot of the time – she’s been mean to him in the past. But only over things that have mattered to her. Like time. And effort.

In the early years of their marriage he made an effort.

With her, with the kids, with himself. He had hobbies back then.

Interests, rather. ‘Hobbies’ makes it sound like he built model-train sets or balsa-wood miniatures.

His interests included swimming and tennis.

Things that kept him fit, kept him lean – kept him attractive, to her, because he still looked like the Gary she first met.

It showed her that he cared, especially that he cared about her opinion.

In a marriage – in any long-term relationship, and she includes friendship and family in that – if you stop caring about the opinion of those you love the most, you can’t then be bewildered when they stop caring about your opinion.

If they then, indeed, disconnect from you, believing you’re no longer interested in preserving the relationship.

It may be that to be is to do – was it Aristotle who wrote that?

– but for Anna, to be is to care. The whole human enterprise falls apart if we stop caring about other people.

So she cared about Gary, and that meant she made an effort too.

While she doesn’t have her mother’s quasi-obsession with appearances – to the point where she’s not sure she’s ever seen Ingrid’s face completely bare – Anna has never believed that marriage is an opportunity to let oneself go.

One of her friends, Jeanette, likes to crow about the fact she can slob around the house in a tracksuit and no make-up and hair that hasn’t been brushed since Ronald Reagan became President and how her husband ‘loves me just the way I am’.

But that same friend also says her husband hasn’t touched her in years.

Anna wants to – but doesn’t – say that if you behave as if your husband is your brother, with the tracksuit and the unkempt hair and so on, you can’t be surprised if he treats you like his sister.

Not that Anna would ever appear that way in front of a family member either, because she respects them and she respects herself too.

It’s true she doesn’t believe in the power of the hairdresser the way her mother does but she always made sure she looked nice around Gary, just as she expected him to look nice around her, because she cared about his good opinion. Once upon a time.

Anna – and Ingrid too – doesn’t know when the belief started that we should demonstrate how much we love someone by being as lax as possible around him or her, but she doesn’t approve of it.

She loves her children more than anything, which means she wants to look nice for them.

She wants them to be proud of her, as she is proud of them.

It is inconceivable to her that she might show them how much she loves them by looking like she simply doesn’t care.

Or that she’s given up. If she gives up on herself she simply can’t take care of anyone else, and she very much wants to take care of them.

Of course, she had given up on Gary, once he pushed her to a certain point – yet now, as he pulls out the chair for her in this tiny French, or trying-to-be-French, restaurant in Gosford, she can see he hasn’t altogether given up on himself, so she feels a sprouting of respect.

Which may or may not grow into anything more.

It will require light and warmth, and those two things are in short supply in their relationship.

Is it even a relationship any more? She supposes it is, because they have the children.

It just feels more like an interaction now.

Which doesn’t explain why she accepted his invitation to dinner, so maybe it is still a relationship.

One that she needs to maintain because of the children.

The things mothers do and the things mothers tell themselves they should do for their children.

Like, ‘I’m staying for the children.’ She feels the children need a mother who stands up for what she wants and for the integrity of her person.

If that makes her a selfish bitch – and oh, she knows people think that about her, because Jeanette, among others, has told her – so be it.

‘You look lovely,’ Gary says once he’s sitting across from her, his hand halfway across the table, as if he wants her to take it.

She glances at it instead then looks away.

‘Thank you,’ she says with a tight smile.

Her hair is in a ponytail – an easy and neat way to present it – and she is wearing a purple dress with bigger shoulder pads than she usually wears, along with a pair of earrings the size of doorknockers which she likes because they feel almost like armour, even as they whack her in the cheek if she moves her head too quickly.

She did her eyes tonight – eye make-up is not something she used to attempt but since Gary left she’s been experimenting and she finds it fun.

‘Would you like wine?’ he asks, picking up the wine list that was left on the table by the ma?tre d’.

‘A glass would be nice.’ More than one and she may start to forget she doesn’t like him any more. Wine can do that to a person.

‘Red? White?’

He seems so nervous. The Gary she knew was never like this.

‘You can choose,’ she says, and he looks like he’s won a prize.

The waiter takes their drinks order and leaves them with menus.

‘I don’t know that I’ll have the escargot,’ she says, scanning the list of dishes far richer than she’s used to.

Her mother once told her that all French cooking tastes wonderful because everything has a tonne of butter in it, but butter is something Anna eats rarely.

So she’ll have the fish. That tends to be the lightest fare on a French menu.

‘Me either!’ Gary almost giggles and she stares at him.

‘Are you all right?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘You seem a little off. Are you unwell?’

‘No. What? Why?’ Now his eyes are darting around. Then he sighs loudly. ‘I’m a bit nervous,’ he confesses.

‘Why?’

‘We haven’t …’ He gestures to the table. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve been out to dinner, just the two of us.’

She runs through the calculations in her head.

Renee is seven, and she thinks the last time she and Gary had dinner alone was when she was pregnant.

After Renee was born it was harder to find someone to babysit two kids instead of one Troy, so they didn’t attempt it.

Perhaps that’s where things started to go wrong.

‘Not since Renee,’ she says softly.

He nods slowly. ‘No.’ He nods again. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘I should have tried harder.’

Their eyes meet and she’s not sure if what he said refers to dinners out or their relationship in general. She’ll take the first option to be safe.

‘It was busy, having two little ones so close together,’ she says, letting them both off the hook. ‘I guess we …’ She shrugs.

‘Forgot?’ he suggests.

He’s right – they did forget to make time for each other.

But that’s also not an acceptable excuse because she had to remember a lot more than he did.

He had to remember to go to work and mow the lawn.

She had to remember every little detail of the household and the children’s health and their teeth and their toilet habits and their haircuts and their school lunches and their uniforms and their friends and their friends’ birthdays and their friends’ mothers’ names and their teachers’ names …

Little wonder she forgot to organise a dinner out with her husband. Big wonder it should be something she’d even have to consider.

‘You mean you forgot,’ is the shorthand way she chooses to express all the resentment and loneliness that has been bubbling away inside her for years.

‘No, I … it was …’ He closes his eyes for a few seconds. ‘Yes,’ he says when he opens them again. ‘I forgot.’

He puts both his hands on the table this time and yet again she thinks he wants to take hers, but she keeps them in her lap, where they’re twisting her serviette.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he says, his brown eyes bright.

Anna weighs up her next move. She could keep drilling on this subject but there’s no more oil in this well, really, because he’s just admitted responsibility and to want more would be churlish.

The option that would ensure they both have a pleasant evening would be for her to move on.

But she doesn’t want him to get the idea that he might be in with a chance with her, so she has to consider her words carefully.

‘We often don’t mean to do things, Gary,’ she says, and she keeps her voice as soft as she can, so it doesn’t sound like censure. ‘But we do them and they have consequences.’

She feels herself becoming upset, and that surprises her, because she hasn’t been upset about him. Anger probably counts as upset, true, but there hasn’t been sadness. She hasn’t felt sad about him not being at home, likely because that started happening so long ago, in increments.

Perhaps she was sad then, when she first realised he preferred his job to her. That may be what is now rising within her, pushing itself into her chest and her throat, pricking at the backs of her eyes.

Yes, she was sad then. She remembers it now. She would sit on the couch and cry because her husband didn’t seem to want her any more.

Those memories – those experiences, for they now feel ongoing, in her body, in the turbulence of her mind – obviously still matter. Not that she wants him to know. This is her business, this sadness, and she has to work out what to do with it alone.

‘That’s in the past, though, isn’t it,’ she goes on, not believing a word of it yet seeing the relief on his face that she’s given him a pass. ‘So let’s enjoy dinner, shall we?’

He reaches further across the table with one hand but she ignores it and holds up her menu again. By the time she lowers it he’s focused on his and she doesn’t know how long he left his hand there, waiting for hers, before he withdrew it.