Page 6 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon

CHAPTER FIVE

Another day, another opportunity for Trudy to drag herself around. Except today she’s worked up the energy to go somewhere other than the salon.

She never used to be a dragger. She was a bounce-into-the-dayer. A go-getter, even. Her movement was always forward, never backward. Now she’s either living in the past or revving in neutral.

It’s not good. It’s not right for a person to be stuck in the mire for so long.

Even her cat, Diogenes, thinks she’s bad company.

He used to curl up on her lap while she watched TV; now he leaves the room when she walks in.

Not that she’s surprised: he was always Laurie’s cat more than hers.

Laurie named him after he read a book about Greek philosophers.

Diogenes was just called Kitten at that stage as they waited to find a name that fit him.

For some reason Laurie preferred Diogenes to Plato or Sophocles for his pet’s name.

It makes Trudy smile to remember it. He had his quirks, her Laurie.

Some might say that loving her was among them.

‘Isn’t that right, Dodge?’ she says as the cat passes by en route to his bowl. That’s the only way he gets close to her now: passing by. After Laurie died he was all over her, as if he was worried she would go away too. Then after a few months the ignoring phase began and has lasted ever since.

Does it count that she wants to ignore herself, too?

There are nights when she’s sitting on the couch, blanket over her knees if it’s cold, telly on and nothing registering, and she starts listing all the things she thinks are wrong with her.

All the reasons why she’s a fool for not making the most of what’s left of the rest of her life.

Except she doesn’t want to , see. Rationally, yes, she knows what she should be doing.

But her heart … oh, her heart tells her different things.

It tells her that it’s broken. That it will never be mended.

And even though she thinks that’s so dramatic, that she would never have picked herself as being a woman who let herself get carried away over a broken heart, she can’t help it.

It’s just about the most powerful emotion of her life, and it’s taken her completely by surprise.

She tried to talk to her son about it, figuring he might be feeling the same. When they spoke three weekends ago – he called her, which almost blew her socks off with the surprise of it – he asked how she was feeling, and she was honest with him when usually she jollies herself along for him.

‘Low, Dylan. I’m feeling low,’ she said.

Laurie named him too, after Dylan Thomas. Loved his poetry, did her Laurie. Except their Dylan, while economical with words the way a poet might be, has never been as eloquent.

‘Oh,’ was what he said. Then there was silence. Then he moved on to talk about his work.

At least today she has an outing, so it’s not just another Sunday spent thinking about Laurie.

She’s at the club Laurie used to frequent in Wamberal, even though technically it’s called the Terrigal Wamberal RSL.

Sub branch, actually. Not a full club. She doesn’t know what the difference is.

This club is where her friends like to meet for dinner once a month.

Them and their husbands. And she doesn’t have a husband any more.

There are things no one tells you about being a widow, Trudy thinks with a sigh as she glances around the dining room.

Such as the fact that you become aware of numbers.

Specifically, odd numbers. Everyone else she knows is in a pair and she is a one, not half of a two.

Which sounds like an odd concept but that’s how it appears to her: she used to be half of a two.

Or maybe half of a one, because she and Laurie always felt like a unit.

They knew each other so well that they didn’t have to talk all the time; they could exchange glances and understand each other.

Yet there were still mysteries between them, and she liked that.

She didn’t want him to know everything about her; for one thing, she is of the firm belief that women should have some mystery, and for another, some things are her business.

No one is entitled to know all of your business.

Some things are private, just as your thoughts are.

Not once in her marriage did she ask Laurie what he was thinking, because she respected his privacy.

He didn’t ask her either, and she was happy about that because if he had she probably would have thought twice about him.

They met in 1948, at the beach. He was a lifesaver, and she admired him from afar.

One of her friends knew him, knew his story – how he’d served in New Guinea during the war and been shot in the leg and evac’d home.

Two of his friends died next to him and he wouldn’t speak of it.

None of the men she knew who served would.

And she respected their silence because that was their business.

Besides, how do you ever start talking about such a thing?

Where do you start? What is the first sentence that leaves your mouth?

She thought about that sometimes as she lay next to him in bed, knowing he couldn’t sleep.

Or when he woke from a nightmare. Those nightmares would send him outside with his smokes, as if he needed a gear change: get out of bed, go outside, do something different.

What a pity it was the smokes that likely killed him.

Or maybe, looked at in another way, the war did kill him in the end.

‘Ginger ale, Trude?’

She looks up and sees the kind face of Peter, who is married to her friend Lois.

‘Sure, Pete, thanks.’

‘Lois is chatting to someone.’ He squints in the direction of the entrance to the club. ‘Priscilla. Do you know her?’

Trudy shakes her head. ‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Mystery woman, then. Righto – one ginger ale.’ He holds up a finger, his usual signal for ‘back in a tick’.

A minute later Lois bustles over. ‘Hello, love.’ A peck on the cheek for Trudy then she sits heavily in the seat opposite, across a Formica-covered table that has seen better days.

‘Saw Priscilla. Do you know Priscilla? No. Wasn’t sure.

Anyway …’ She exhales. ‘Pete said there’s a seafood special.

Did you see that? Or maybe it’s a fisherman’s basket.

Anyway. Chips. Prawns. Bit of fish. Sounds all right!

’ She laughs and coughs at the same time.

Another smoker. And one who doesn’t draw breath while talking if she can avoid it.

It’s partly why Trudy likes being around Lois: the woman is built-in entertainment because she talks nonstop but somehow gleans stories from others that she then tells Trudy, who decided long ago she doesn’t need to read the local newspaper because she has Lois to tell her all the neighbourhood goings-on.

Since Laurie died she’s been seeing Lois more – not for the distraction, but because Lois has been scooping her up and bringing her to the club.

Which Trudy appreciates, even if it means she’s the constant one to Lois and Peter’s two.

They never remark on it – never make her feel she’s the odd woman out – and it’s fine when it’s just the three of them, but when they meet other friends, like they will tonight, Trudy notices how uneven the gatherings are. Or how she feels they are.

Lois looks around them. ‘Do we need a bigger table? No? Yes? Hard to know how many will come. Anyway – oh, look, there’s Joyce.’ Lois waves enthusiastically in the direction of Joyce and her husband, Fred, who are walking toward them.

Trudy tries to smile but she’s not Joyce’s biggest fan.

After Laurie died Joyce didn’t call her, didn’t come to the funeral, has never said anything about it.

Once Trudy mentioned this to Lois, who went uncharacteristically quiet then said, ‘We just don’t know what goes on in people’s lives.

’ Maybe not, Trudy thought, but that had never stopped Lois trying to find out.

Except she didn’t, not with Joyce, so Trudy has stayed quietly mystified, and upset, and instead of coming out and asking Joyce about it she tries to smile each time she sees her, and acts as if everything is fine, because she doesn’t want to upset Lois.

‘G’day, Loz,’ Fred says as he kisses Lois on the cheek. He always calls her Loz – as if ‘Lois’ needs any shortening. Some people, Trudy has noticed, will do anything to get out of saying extra syllables.

‘Trude,’ he says as he grabs her arms and kisses her cheek too.

Unlike his wife, Fred has talked to her about Laurie, who was his friend.

They played golf together at Shelly Beach once a week until Laurie could no longer walk around without catching his breath every minute.

He didn’t want to use a cart. Said that as long as he had two legs he’d walk.

Stubborn, he was, her Laurie. Stubbornly clinging on to life even as its tide went out. ‘I’m not interested in leaving you,’ he kept saying. But in the end he had no choice.

‘Yoohoo, Truu-dyy.’

She snaps back to the present and Lois in front of her, waving fingers in her face.

‘Where did you go, love?’ Lois says it lightly but she looks concerned.

Trudy shrugs. ‘Somewhere over the rainbow.’

It’s what she usually says when she wanders off into the land of her memories.

It is such a comforting place to visit – so much nicer than the present day, with its familiar rhythms without Laurie in them, with nothing much to look forward to and nowhere else to be.

She could make an effort to change things, she supposes, but change requires energy and determination, and she has neither.

The one thing that would give her momentum is her son, Dylan, and his family, but he’s too busy to drive up from Sydney to see her despite his promises of school-holiday visits, and she only has Sundays off, which means she’d have to go down and back in a day and that feels impossible as Laurie used to do all the driving.

Trudy can drive but she’d rather not. Her life is lived mostly on foot, walking from the house in Terrigal where they lived most of their married days to the salon where she has worked for her entire adult life. It’s a small patch, her world, but it never felt small until he died.

Peter puts a ginger ale in front of her and she smiles her thanks.

‘What do you think about the fisherman’s basket, Joyce?’ Lois asks and there’s some murmuring between them.

Trudy doesn’t pay attention because she’s gone over the rainbow again, this time with a feeling in her chest that is stronger than the usual feeling she’s been carrying since Laurie died, but just about as strong as the one that comes upon her at home sometimes, when she’s alone and thinking about him.

It always precedes tears, and she doesn’t want to cry, not here, not with uncaring Joyce and chattering Lois present, with gentle Peter and jocular Fred.

If the tears are going to come she wants to be home on her couch with the cat, a book and a nip of Baileys.

To stop them she picks up the ginger ale and takes a slow sip and only stops sipping to put in her order for fish and chips, and attempt to hand money to Peter, who waves it away.

She keeps sipping without really taking in any liquid until the feeling in her chest subsides.

That’s when she puts down the glass and smiles vaguely in Lois’s direction, and tries to participate in the conversation about how the Terrigal bowling team were robbed at the last competition, all the while wondering how many years of her life will be lived like this, always the one, never the two again, and how many years of it she’ll be able to stand.