The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (16 page)

“Yard, they call it,” adds Daisy, helpfully. “They call it a yard in America. Diaper, that’s a funny word, isn’t it? Faucet.”

“But she had everything—a husband, two children, one of each—what did she want to keep whining on about Paris for?” continues Alison, in what can only be described as a whiny voice. “Why didn’t she just go there for a mini-break?”

“I think that’s the whole point,” I say, though my heart’s not in it. “That they’d got
the
American dream, it just wasn’t her dream. There’s no joy in achieving someone else’s dream, is there?”

“Well, it’s a very nice dream. She should shut up and consider herself lucky.”

“She was lucky to wear such nice clothes,” says Daisy. “And drink so many martinis.”

“You so haven’t the read the book, have you?” I ask Daisy. “You just watched the film on DVD.”

She giggles. I love Daisy. She is the laziest woman I’ve ever met. She is like Lady Bertram without the staff and her standard answer to anything is “I so couldn’t be arsed.” This can include anything from applying to competitive pre-prep schools or getting a job, to wiping her children’s faces or changing an infant’s graying babygro on special occasions. “The film was good, though,” she says apologetically.

“Unbearable,” I say. “Talk about cinema verité. I thought I was trapped in my own fly-on-the-wall documentary. Next time I’m getting a nice science fiction DVD for some proper escapism.”

“But honestly,” says Alison, “didn’t you think she had it easy? It’s not like she had to work or anything. She was just a stay-at-home mother.” Alison does something very busy in the City that no one quite understands, not least because it doesn’t seem to make her millions of pounds in the manner of a banker, but merely causes her a great deal of self-important stress. Something to do with risk assessment, I think, which is ironic given that she appears to be doing everything she can to eliminate any possible risk to her children’s lives, such as banning them from kicking a ball around the park for fear that dog poo will make its way from the ball to their eyes and blind them.

“
Just
a stay-at-home mother?” asks Mitzi, bringing in a basket of multi-colored macaroons that, alongside an expensive bottle of Chablis, is her contribution to the evening’s food.

I don metaphorical body armor and wait for the grenades to get thrown.

“You’ve got four children, Mitzi,” says Alison. “And two homes. I’d hardly call you just a stay-at-home mother.”

“I’ve only got two children and one home,” pipes Daisy. “And I rarely go out. I’m a stay-at-home-and-watch-daytime-TV mother.”

“I work,” says Henrietta with the pride of a child who’s just started big school. “But I work from home. What does that make me?”

A woman who crochets lumpen jewelry to sell on an Internet craft site.

“And I only teach two days a week,” says Beth, “and only then at a private school so I can get money taken off the school fees.”

“Yeah,” cheerleads Henrietta.

“And my therapy is part of my training so it counts as work,” says Jennifer. “I’m constantly having to work through my past in order to be a better therapist. It’s exhausting, much more so than any office job.”

The other five women look at Alison expectantly and I glance from one to another as though this were a magnificent multi-player tennis match.

“Being a working mother is really tough,” says Alison, but she no longer has the fight, nor did she ever since the moment that alpha girl Mitzi nailed her colors to the mast. “I mean it is for any sort of mother, but going out, to an office, to work on top of everything else…”

“Being a mother is the hardest job of all,” says Beth.

“My friends who work say they go to the office for a break,” says Daisy. “It’s easier than being at home.”

God give me strength, when will the clichés stop?

“There’s no such thing as a non-working mother,” says Henrietta. “The work never ends for all mothers.”

I shall intervene, I think to myself, when someone mentions cupcakes. Someone always mentions cupcakes.

“Yes, true,” says Alison. “But I’m having to do all the mother
stuff you do, but also juggle stressful and complex financial negotiations. If I make a tiny mistake I could lose my firm millions. If you make a mistake, I don’t know, your cupcakes might not rise.”

Bingo. “Isn’t the reality of working and parenthood a bit less black and white than working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers?” I say. “I mean, that’s the way the media always portrays it, like there’s women in suits armed with briefcases on one side and women in pinnies throwing those bloody cupcakes on the other. In fact, it’s funny, because the more high-powered a woman’s job is the more cupcakes she actually makes anyway, because she’s over-compensating.”

“Speaking of which,” says Alison, “ta-da.” She brandishes a plate of fairy cakes with bright pink icing. Does anyone actually like cupcakes as much as a good old-fashioned bar of chocolate? It’s as if all women’s ambitions and aspirations can be boiled down to just two things: twirly-iced cupcakes and high-heeled shoes. “I picked Grace up from school, did her two math worksheets, kept up with work on my BlackBerry and made two dozen of these.”

“Alison, you’re making me feel tired just thinking about your achievements,” says Daisy.

I’m not to be deflected. “And anyway, in reality, most of us work but usually it’s part-time, and whether it’s at home or in an office, it’s a job not a career. I think it’s something like 75 percent of mothers of under fives.” I’m making up statistics. “Most of us muddle through doing neither one thing nor the other, do you know what I mean?”

They look at me blankly. Henrietta is desperately twiddling one of the earrings that she’s showcasing from her crocheted collection as if it were an earpiece through which a researcher was going to tell her what to say.

“Go on,” says Alison, waving her hand in encouragement.

“Thanks,” I say. “For instance, I work four days a week, depending on what’s in production.”

“I meant go on everyone, tuck in to my cupcakes, you know you want to.”

I stumble on, drunk on white wine and my own rhetoric. “Henrietta works at home, Alison’s four days a week and then one day from home, isn’t that right? Mitzi’s thinking of starting her own business. We’re all sort of working and sort of not working and that’s before we’ve even got onto the business of whether looking after children should accurately be called ‘not working.’ ”

“Oh my god,” says Beth. “These are amazing, Alison. You are naughty, I just can’t resist.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It just seems to me that this whole mommy wars thing is a bit of a myth, that’s all. Surely the divide is not between those who work and those who don’t, but between those who have childcare for when they’re not working. I mean, the stay-at-home mother with no time off is just as harried as the working mother. And the only relaxed women are those with spare capacity childcare, like, I don’t know, those who work three days but have a full-time nanny, or don’t work but still have an au pair.” I’m thinking Mitzi, but I don’t say it. “It should be those with no time away from the office or their children versus those with time away from them. Or nobody versus anyone, in fact—I mean, there’s more that unites us than divides us, don’t you think? In fact, let’s not fight each other, let’s fight men. Yeah!” The rabble-rousing tone of my final word fades.

There is a pause.

“More macaroons?” asks Mitzi.

It’s always like this, I think; always chitchat, never conversation. At university, I used to have those giddy, drunken
discussions about what were the limits of the universe or how we knew we weren’t in fact computers or whether it might be true that we were all living in a gigantic other being’s imagination. Now I never seem to get beyond drinks-party babble. Back in my twenties the drinks were stiff, the drugs soft and the conversation flowing. Now the medium-priced wine flows, the drugs are absent and the conversation hard. Whenever these mothers and I get together with the children, at parties or in the park, I feel like our discussions are always teetering on the edge of a precipice of interest or revelation, only to be interrupted by a child at a crucial moment. It’s as if our sentences can only come in fragments, like those fridge magnets of random words we all have to help our children read, and if only we had more time we could assemble them into interesting wholes. And yet, when we do convene without the children, I realize that those interrupted half-exchanges are actually more interesting than these completed ones, for they hold the allure of what might have been said. Our minds are too busy still multi-tasking away, uselessly spinning.

Sex: that was another thing my friends, my old pre-children friends, and I used to talk about. These conversations about sex were almost better than sex itself. Lubricated caps that pinged across strangers’ bedrooms; competitions with bananas to see who had the least sensitive gag reflex; detailed discussions about what made you good in bed. Mitzi and I were young and single when we first met. I look over to her now, gracious hostess as always, even in somebody else’s house, and I find it difficult to remember the chaotic, hilarious promiscuity of her youth. Nobody could tell as good a morning-after story as Mitzi. She was poor and scruffy then, yet even her smoky-eyed, dirty-stop-out-in-last-night’s-dress look was stylish. She made you want to leave your makeup on overnight and come into work
wearing two-day-old clothes because that wantonness was so damn cool. Her laugh was as filthy as those frocks. And those stories…“Acorn boy” who never grew a mighty oak; the pop star who liked to suck a dummy; the sitcom actor who made her watch footage of his rivals and shout “You’re the funniest, you’re the best” over and over mid-coitus; the endless meat metaphors deployed to describe the anatomy of the then lowly sous-chef, now of course a well-known restaurateur. Our present-day anecdotes about our children’s reading ages are never going to be as funny.

Everyone is playing musical sofas to avoid being stuck with Alison and her haranguing on how hard she works, combined with her ability to make you stress about whole new, hitherto unexplored areas of anxiety. She has a special trick of being able to denigrate and exalt her children and husband simultaneously. “I’m fed up with Oliver,” she’ll say of her six-year-old, “always on at me to explain cloud formations. And I bought him the unabridged
Hobbit
and he finished it in two days. Does he think I’m made of money? And as for Grace,” she sighs of the four-year-old, “I don’t think people realize that being gifted is as much a special need as being autistic or having attention deficit disorder.”

“Do you remember,” I say to Mitzi, “when we used to talk about sex?” Daisy overhears me and giggles. “Do you remember when we used to actually have sex? I really can’t be arsed anymore.”

Mitzi purses her lips into a smirking pout.

“Do I take it you can be arsed?” I ask her. “Unfortunate choice of word.”

She simpers again. Really? One way of avoiding conceiving more children, I suppose. “Don’t go all enigmatic on me now, Mitz, do tell.”

“I don’t think we need know about anybody’s sex life, thank you very much,” says Alison, while everyone else tries to ignore her.

“But we do,” I say. “Mitzi used to tell the best anecdotes when we were younger. Do you remember that time with the chef and the giant truffle? Not one of those chocolate ones covered in sprinkles, a proper one found by a pig in the woods and all that.”

“I don’t think we need to go into that now,” she says. Of course, that’s all in the past and in her present, these women only know her as the elegant lady-wife. “Let’s just say,” she murmurs to Daisy and me in an aside, “that I am finding age is not withering Michael’s and my boudoir activities.” Her bedroom bloody is a boudoir, too, all sumptuous drapes, a velvet-covered chaise longue and one of those extra-wide beds you get in boutique hotels.

“But you’ve got four children,” says Daisy. “Two of them are twins. How do you have the energy?”

“Priorities.”

“And staff,” snaps Alison, shuffling over to join in.

“But sleep. You can’t get staff to sleep for you. You can’t subcontract out everything,” Daisy says.

“Least of all sex with your husband,” I say. “Although, actually, I believe you can do that.”

“Maybe I should,” says Daisy.

“Please, do we really need to be talking about this?” says Alison. We continue to ignore her.

“Seriously, Mitzi, what grown-up mature activities do you get up to in the bedroom—sorry, boudoir?” I ask. “Go on, inspire us.”

She smiles enigmatically. In the old days, she’d have been launching into scurrilous detail, but ever since I got together with Joel she’s been all about secrets. She does that face, the one she puts on when she’s talking about my husband, that hints at
things the rest of us shall never know. “You have to use your imagination.”

An image of Michael, all alpha and hairy and imposing, pops into my head. “I’d rather not.”

“I mean,” she says, “you have to use your imagination with your own husbands. Don’t you with Joel, Mary? Honestly, there’s no reason why sex can’t get better and better with age.”

“There are a million reasons,” I say.

“Or just two in my case,” says Daisy. “Three if you include the man I married.”

“If you let them. Like I say, it’s a question of priorities and I choose to prioritize my sex life. Michael is a very powerful man and it’s important to me that I make sure that power is sated and that I am as sexually desirable to him as the day we met.”

When he was married to somebody else, I think. “Go on,” I say.

“I make sure that my behavior and my appearance is far from mumsy.”

I bet Mitzi has really nice expensive undies. Mine still include some post-partum big knickers and a couple of nursing bras. Becky is a fan of the ones that look like sports bras, those that bind rather than build. I wonder what underwear Cara wears. Is it utilitarian or silky? I think it may be quite sculptural, almost old-fashioned, a bit Rita Hayworth.

“I don’t know, Mitzi, sounds a bit surrendered wife to me,” I say. “Servicing a husband’s powerful urges and all that.”