A Better Man (11 page)

Finally, Nick heaved a sigh and apologized, murmuring some self-blaming platitude in what seemed to Maya an obviously disingenuous tone. (He was drunk and tired; it was the end of a long week; and so on.) This had been her cue to throw in the towel, wipe the slobber off her chin and gamely laugh it off on her way upstairs to check on the twins. Yes, she should have smoothed her skirt and made some crack about Nick losing his mojo. And that’s what she would have done, if it hadn’t been for all the wine and the dancing and the disorienting regard (she wasn’t used to him paying her so much attention, not in a real way). But no, instead
of seizing her opportunity for coolness and bringing the night to a dignified close, she found herself giving in to a competing urge, one that was unfamiliar yet strangely irresistible—and that was the impulse to fall apart. Slumped on the floor beneath him, with her forehead resting on his left knee, she began to sob. Soon the tears were sliding into the crevice of her nose, where they joined a string of egg-whitey snot that descended in a humiliating string from her nostrils onto Nick’s trousers, then puddled on the floor beneath his unmoving feet. He let her cry like that for a while—whether out of mercy or disgust, she couldn’t be sure, and at the time she didn’t care. By the time he hoisted her to her feet, Maya was inwardly despairing (could she actually have moaned aloud?) that her husband didn’t want her anymore. After all, what could be
less
attractive than a drunk, insecure, sobbing, unemployed mother of two? The sniffling, convulsing blubfest continued unabated as he helped her up the stairs, unzipped her dress and encouraged her to collapse, face first, on top of the sheets. She remembers nothing Nick may have said while all this was going on, only his silence, accompanied by a grim sense of purpose. His hands firm and determined, like those of a disgruntled but competent nurse.

And now, the morning after the night before, Maya knows there is only one thing to be done. And that is to pretend it never happened.

She lies there, still and disconsolate, watching the sun creep around the edges of the blackout blinds. Yesterday she promised the twins they’d go to the park and jump in the giant piles of fall leaves left there by the city, but now she wonders if they’ll hold her to it. They’re just starting to remember promises made the day before, which means she’ll soon have to adjust her primary
parenting strategy of forever-delayed gratification. The park will be cold, the leaves wet. There could be broken glass and used syringes hidden in the piles. Not that the children will see any of that, being children. Guarding against such dangers is what it means to Maya to be a mother.

She needs to get up to pee, but the thought of the bathroom with its multiple reflective surfaces makes her dive back under the duvet. How puffy she must look, how many hormones and antibiotics she must have ingested in all that processed meat the night before. As her thoughts slip into the familiar, and not entirely unpleasant, cycle of self-criticism and plans for purification, she also becomes aware of the inevitability of the day spread out before her—a nannyless Sunday with hours of as-yet-unplanned kid-friendly activities to get through. A day in which a new precedent must be set. A day she cannot afford to waste. She shifts her head to look at the clock: 7:24 a.m. She will allow herself exactly six more minutes to wallow. Six more minutes of sulking under the covers. The seconds slip by, each one more deliciously self-pitying than the next, until the clock flashes 7:30 and she hears the sound of her mother’s voice, a tea-warmed hiss:
Pull yourself together.

Half an hour later Maya is downstairs, second batch of free-range, wheat-free French toast under way as the twins shout their favourite morning stadium chant of “Joos! Joos! Joos!” She is trying to teach them to eat at the table, to cut and chew each bite with the restrained civility of French children (though in truth she’s never actually met one).

“Isla, put that down. The maple syrup is for pouring, not drinking.”

As if to show her up, Foster grabs the syrup bottle from his sister’s hands and upends it into his milk cup, splashing the table with sticky white slime.

“No, no, sweetheart!” Maya feels the familiar flash of exasperation in her chest, the crackling fuse about to blow.

“Yes, yes, YES! Pooey bum head, Mommy!” Foster says triumphantly, smearing the mess as far as he can reach with both hands.

Maya stares at her son, his face flushed with the thrill of outright defiance, and thinks,
You are an asshole.

She banishes the thought, but it lingers in her consciousness like skywriting dissipating behind a plane. What she ought to do now is muster a tone of empathetic firmness and install Foster on the “naughty chair” in the mudroom so he can “think about what he’s done” before offering the obligatory sing-song apology (“Soo-wee, Mommee!”) and carrying on with his day unrepentant and unchanged. Maya knows she should do all this, but instead she does nothing. Foster stares back at her, waiting expectantly—almost hopefully—for his punishment. Lashes flutter over the bright whites of his eyes. How are children so poreless, so veinless? So devoid of cracks and crinkles and split ends? She can see that all the parenting experts are right—he craves boundaries, feels protected by them even when he pretends to want to smash them down—but she just can’t bring herself to follow through. Not this morning. She takes a cloth and wipes up the mess, then has a go at Foster’s filthy hands and face, an act that elicits yowls of protest. Isla is already off her chair and consumed in the project
of picking sequins off the Princess Barbie salsa costume that Maya purchased for her in a moment of weakness. Foster just sits there, snuffling in a way that slowly begins to unnerve her, his little hands balled into fists. After a little while he says, “Are you sad today, Mommy?”

“What?” Maya stops. She can’t remember another time that he’s asked about her. “No, baby. Why would I be?”

Foster shrugs. A tiny adult shrug that is funny and strange. “Maybe because Daddy’s not here.”

“But Daddy is here; he’s just gone out for a bit.”

“Not here like you, Mommy. Even when Daddy’s home, it’s like he’s away.”

“What do you mean by that, darling?”

“Nothing.”

Maya looks over at Isla, who is now plucking sequins off her tongue and pushing them up her nose.

“That’s not true, honey. Daddy’s here lots. He loves you very much. Just like I do.”

Foster rolls his eyes, an insolent, stagey gesture he must have learned from one of the older kids at playgroup. “I was just
joking,
” he says in a voice she doesn’t recognize. “Ha-ha!”

Maya tries to think back to the last family outing they had together, but all she can come up with is a chaotic Saturday trip to Ikea last spring, the highlight of which was Isla barfing up all her Swedish meatballs on the car ride home.

“Mommy and Daddy have been busy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t love you,” she says.

Foster ignores this and demands a marshmallow for “breakfast dessert.” When she refuses, he pushes his milk cup off the
side of the table and runs from the room. Maya lets her head drop into her hands.

After a minute, Isla sidles over. “Foster’s bad sometimes,” she says, half as an apology for her twin and half in comparative self-regard.

Maya tries to stop them, but her tears come anyway. Just one or two big ploppy ones at first, and then a steady trickle that has her wiping her eyes with Foster’s torn-off terry-cloth bib. She’s less self-conscious about crying in front of her daughter, mostly because Isla is so understanding about it.

“Mommy, do you want to wear my princess crown?” she says, stroking Maya’s knee gingerly.

Maya blows her nose in the bib and ruffles Isla’s curls with a watery grin. “No, sweetie. It’s okay. I’m fine. Mommy’s just tired today, okay? Why don’t you go upstairs and put on one of your very prettiest play outfits. Can you do that for me?”

Isla marches out with purpose, clearly pleased to be of service and, Maya suspects, out of her mother’s strange, emotionally volatile orbit. Maya sits for a moment, casting an eye over the newspaper, sections spread out before her like a misery buffet. There is a bloody uprising in the Middle East. Another austerity budget on the horizon. Europe is in economic turmoil. Asia’s carbon emissions are up. America’s struggling and Africa’s screwed. She turns the page and half-reads an advice column devoted to relationship dilemmas. A woman has written in to say she’s found herself caught between two men. One is a dull but kindly ex who hopes to reconcile, the other a married man with children with whom she’s hopelessly in love. What should she do? The expert, of course, cautiously advises the woman to find a way to extract herself from
both relationships, which she deems “emotionally unsatisfactory and imaginary” each in its own way, and free herself up for something more “real and right.” Maya thinks of the philosophy of Radical Honesty and the promises in
The Way.
She realizes she hasn’t spoken her deepest desire out loud because, until now, she didn’t know what it was. “I want our love back,” she hears herself say. She is surprised because she knows it’s true.

She has pulled herself together by the time Nick bursts into the room like a daddy orangutan, one child hanging off his front, the other off his back, two pairs of legs braided around his middle like a sort of writhing snake belt.

“Mwahahaha! I am a kidnapper from Mars!” he declares in his evil-supervillain voice. The children shriek with mock-terrified delight. “I have been transported through several millennia by the speed of light to find you!”

Maya sees from his outfit—a high-tech ensemble of skintight, high-visibility microfibres complete with built-in GPS and magical quick-dry properties—that he’s been out cycling again. That makes two days in a row, almost like the old days. Foster claws at his polarized, shatterproof sunglasses as Isla begins pressing the buttons on his digital heart monitor.

Maya watches this show while sipping the dregs of her coffee. The twins are keen for more horseplay, but Nick soon shakes them off, shooing them toward their piles of Lego and fixing himself some toast. He asks if he can bring her anything and Maya demurs. For a few quiet moments, they sit side by side reading the paper. Nick hums a grunge rock anthem she vaguely recognizes from their university days and drums his fingers on the countertop. Suddenly his head snaps up.

“I think we should do something fun today.” He says this as if “fun” is an exciting new lifestyle trend he’s just stumbled across in the paper.

“Okay,” she says with caution.

He looks at her, eyes flashing, chin bobbing exuberantly. “What do you think?” he says.

“Of what?”

“Of the day. The whole day we have in front of us. I mean, I obviously need a shower, but after that.”

Maya realizes he has no idea what to suggest. For Nick, “something fun” is—and almost always has been—a long day at the office followed by unaccounted-for hours she no longer bothers to ask about. His fun, for as long as she can remember, does not include her or the kids.

She senses this is foreign territory, so she decides to help him a bit. “We could go to the early learning centre and get some new puzzles.”

Nick makes a face, so she tries again.

“There’s a toddler yoga and meditation class at the gym?”

Nick is already staring at his phone, consulting the Internet. “I said FUN! How about a fall fair? According to the Interweb, there’s one just east of the city off the main highway.”

“Yaay! Falling fair! Falling fair!” the twins shout.

“Not falling fair.
Fall
fair. Have you never been to one?” Maya asks them, though she knows the answer perfectly well.

They look at each other, then back at her, stumped. Isla pops her thumb in her mouth and shrugs.

Nick starts doing a silly hip-waggling dance around the kitchen. His eyes widen and his voice gets loud and loopy. The
children react like he’s the Pied Piper, following him around the counter. “It’s a place filled with nothing but games and treats and rides and music and toys. It’s an old-fashioned kid place, like the kind of places Mommy and I used to go to when we were kids.”

Isla and Foster are dancing around his legs, howling with delight. “Can we go? Can we? Please, please,
pleeeeze
?”

Nick stops dancing and bends down so his face is level with theirs. His manner is suddenly serious. “It’s up to Mommy,” he says.

The twins turn to her. “Can we go to the fair, Mommy?” Isla asks, grabbing her fingers for emphasis. Foster just tugs on her arm and lets his sister do the talking. “Can we can we can we,
pleeeeze
? We promise we’ll be good!”

Maya shakes them off. “Of course,” she laughs. “What did you expect me to say?”

The Port Mary Fall Fair is a ragtag affair even by theme-park standards—a village of crooked games stalls and rickety rides burping polka music, all framed by a collapsing snow fence in the middle of muddy farmland. At first Nick wonders if they ought to drive back to the city and see the latest high-def computer-animated kid flick instead, but then he remembers Maya’s screen ban. If the twins register the fair’s crappiness, though, they don’t show it. When the car crests the hill and the wobbly old roller coaster soars into view, they squeal like a couple of tickled piglets, straining forward in their car seats and tipping their noses out the window to inhale the carnival smell of burnt sugar and axle grease.

Nick gears down as the Range Rover trundles along the rutted mud path through the fair’s arch, a shabby chipboard facade covered in wind-tattered streamers. “ARE YOU READY FOR FUNWORLD?” a goggle-eyed clown’s face ominously demands—as if this weren’t a carnival but a test of character. And in a way, for Nick, it is.

He considers last night’s unsuccessful sex. At first he’d worried that his performance—or lack thereof—was going to give the game away. But Maya’s drunken tears provided the perfect distraction. Where once it would have irritated him to see her break down in self-pity over something so inconsequential, he now finds himself oddly sympathetic.
I’d feel bad for myself too if I were you,
he’d found himself thinking as she wept on the floor between his knees.