Watermelon Read online

  “But Judy,” I wailed. “He wants a divorce.”

  Although James seemed to have forgotten one big fact. There is no divorce in Ireland. James and I had been married in Ireland. Our marriage had been blessed by the fathers of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.

  Although a fat lot of good it had obviously done us. So long, Succour.

  I was at a total loss. I felt alone and afraid. I wanted to pull the blankets over my head and die. But I couldn’t because I had a poor defenseless child to look after.

  What a start in life she was getting. Less than two days old and already she’d been deserted by her father, and her mother was on the verge of cracking up.

  For the millionth time I wondered how James could do this to me.

  “How could James do this to me?” I asked Judy.

  “You’ve asked me that about a million times,” she said.

  So I had.

  I didn’t know how James could do this to me. I just knew that he had.

  Up to now I suppose that I’d thought that life doled out the unpleasant things to me in evenly spaced bite-size pieces. That it never gave me more than I could cope with at one time.

  When I used to hear about people who had serial disasters, like having a car accident, losing a job and catching their boyfriend in bed with their sister all in one week, I used to kind of think it was their fault.

  Well, not exactly their fault. But I thought that if people behaved like victims they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.

  I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don’t volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway. It’s not their fault. It certainly wasn’t my fault that my husband thought that he’d fallen in love with someone else. I didn’t expect it to happen and I certainly didn’t want it to happen. But it had happened.

  I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn’t say “Well, I won’t give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first.” It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it.

  Now I realized that no one is immune from the serial disaster syndrome.

  Not that I thought that having a baby was a disaster, but it could certainly come under the heading of upheaval.

  Judy and I sat on the bed in silence, both trying to think of something constructive to say. Suddenly I had the answer. Well, maybe not the answer, but an answer. Something to do for the time being.

  “I know what I’ll do,” I said to Judy.

  “Oh thank God,” I could feel her thinking fervently. “Thank God.”

  And like Scarlett O’Hara in the last few lines of Gone With the Wind, I said plaintively, “I’ll go home. I’ll go home to Dublin.”

  Yes, I agree with you. “Dublin” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as

  “Tara,” but what would be the point in my going home to Tara? I knew no one there.

  two

  Judy picked me up from the hospital a couple of days later. She had booked me and my baby on a one-way flight to Dublin. She took me home to pack some things.

  I had heard nothing from James in the meantime. I was stumbling around in a grief-sodden daze.

  Sometimes I simply couldn’t believe it. Everything he’d said to me seemed like a dream. I couldn’t really remember the details, but I could remember the feeling. That sick feeling that something was very wrong.

  But sometimes the loss would make a guest appearance.

  It would invade me. It would take me over. It was like a physical force.

  It knocked the life out of me. It took my breath away. It was savage.

  It hated me.

  It had to, to hurt me so much.

  I can’t really remember how I spent those couple of days in hospital.

  I can vaguely remember being bewildered when all the other new mothers talked about how their lives had now altered forever, how it would never be just oneself ever again, the problems of having to adjust their lives to fit in with their new baby and all that.

  But I couldn’t see what the problem was. Already I couldn’t imagine life without my baby. “It’s you and me, sweetheart,” I whispered to her.

  The fact that we had both been abandoned by the man in our lives probably sped up the bonding process. Nothing like a crisis to bring people together, as they say.

  I spent a lot of time sitting very still, holding her.

  Touching her tiny, tiny little doll’s feet, her perfect pink miniature toes, her tightly curled up little fists, her velvety ears, gently stroking the delicate skin of her incredibly small little face, wondering what color her eyes were going to be.

  She was so beautiful, so perfect, such a miracle.

  I had been told to expect to feel overwhelming love for my child, God knows, no one could say that I hadn’t been warned. But nothing could have prepared me for this intensity. This feeling that I would kill anyone who so much as touched one of the blond wispy hairs on her soft little head.

  I could understand James leaving me—well, actually, I couldn’t—but I really couldn’t understand how he could leave this beautiful, perfect little child.

  She cried a lot.

  But I can’t really complain because so did I.

  I tried and tried to comfort her, but she rarely stopped.

  After she cried for about eight hours solid on the first day and I had changed her diaper a hundred and twenty times and fed her forty-nine thousand times I became slightly hysterical and demanded that a doctor look at her.

  “There must be something terribly wrong with her,” I declared to the exhausted-looking youth who was the doctor. “She can’t possibly be hungry, but she won’t stop crying.”

  “Well, I’ve examined her and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with her, so far as I can see,” he patiently explained.

  “But why is she crying?”

  “Because she’s a baby,” he said. “It’s what they do.”

  He’d studied medicine for seven years and that was the best he could come up with?

  I wasn’t convinced.

  Maybe she was crying because she somehow sensed that her dad had abandoned her.

  Or maybe—major pang of guilt—she was crying because I wasn’t breast-feeding her. Maybe she deeply resented being fed from a bottle. Yes, I know, you’re probably outraged that I didn’t breast-feed her. You probably think that I wasn’t a proper mother. But, long ago, before I had my baby, I had thought it would be permissible to have my body returned to me after I had loaned it out for nine months. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to call my soul my own now that I was a mother. But I had kind of hoped that I might be able to call my nipples my own. And I’m ashamed to say that I was afraid that, if I breast-fed, I would be a victim of “shrunken, flat, droopy tit” syndrome.

  Now that I was with my gorgeous, perfect child my breast-feeding worries seemed petty and selfish. Everything really does change when you give birth. I never thought I’d see the day when I’d put anyone else’s needs before the attractiveness of my tits.

  So if my little sweetheart didn’t stop crying soon, I was going to consider breast-feeding her. If it made her happy, I’d put up with cracked nipples, leaky tits and sniggering thirteen-year-old boys trying to get a look at my jugs on the bus.

  Judy, baby and I arrived home. I let us into our apartment and, even though James had told me he was moving out, I still wasn’t prepared for the bare spaces in the bathroom, the empty wardrobe, the gaps in the bookshelf.

  It was so awful.

  I sat down slowly on our bed. The pillow still smelled like him. And I missed him so much.

  “I can’t believe it,” I sobbed to Judy. “He’s really gone.”

  My baby started to cry also, as if she felt the emptiness too.

  And it was only abo
ut five minutes since she’d last stopped.

  Poor Judy looked helpless. She didn’t know which one of us to comfort.

  After a while I stopped crying and slowly turned my tear-streaked face to Judy. I felt exhausted with grief.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’d better pack.”

  “Fine,” she whispered, still rocking me and the baby in her arms.

  I started throwing things into a baby bag. I packed everything I thought I would need. I was all set to bring a pile of disposable diapers the size of a small South American country, but Judy made me leave them behind.

  “They do sell them in Dublin too,” she gently reminded me. I flung in baby bottles, a bottle warmer with a picture of a cow jumping over the moon on the side of it, pacifiers, toys, rattles, little socks the size of postage stamps, everything I could possibly think of for my poor fatherless child.

  As I was now a single parent I was obviously overcompensating. “I’m sorry, darling, I’ve deprived you of your father because I wasn’t smart or beautiful enough to hold on to him, but let me make it up to you by showering you with material goods.”

  Then I asked Judy to give me back a couple of diapers.

  “What for?” she demanded, holding them tightly to her.

  “In case we have an accident on the plane,” I said, trying to grab them from her.

  “Didn’t they give you any sanitary pads in the hospital?” she asked, sounding shocked.

  “Not if I have an accident, stupid. If the baby has one. Although strictly speaking, it wouldn’t really be an accident, would it?” I said thoughtfully.

  “More like an occupational hazard.”

  She doled out three diapers. But reluctantly.

  “You know, you can’t keep calling her ‘the baby,’” said Judy. “You’re going to have to give her a name.”

  “I can’t think about that just at the moment,” I said, starting to feel panicky.

  “But what have you been doing for the past nine months?” Judy sounded shocked. “You must have thought of some names.”

  “I did,” I said, my lip starting to tremble. “But I thought of them with James. And it wouldn’t feel right to call her one of those names.”

  Judy looked a bit annoyed with me. But I was on the verge of tears again, so she didn’t say anything further.

  I hardly brought anything for myself apart from a handful of baby books.

  “Why would I bother,” I thought, “now that my life is over?”

  And besides, nothing fitted me any longer.

  I opened my wardrobe and recoiled from the disgusted looks all my little dresses gave me. There was no doubt about it. They were all talking about me.

  I could almost see them elbowing each other and saying “Look at her, the size of her. Does she honestly think that dainty little size tens like us would have any dealings with that size-fourteen body she’s dragging around? Small wonder that her husband ran off with another woman.”

  I knew what they were thinking.

  “You’ve let yourself go. And you always said that you wouldn’t. You’ve let us down and you’ve let yourself down.”

  “I’m sorry,” I explained cringingly. “I’ll lose weight. I’ll be back for you, I promise. Just as soon as I’m able.”

  Their skepticism was palpable.

  I had a choice of wearing my maternity clothes or a pair of jeans that James had left behind in his haste to get going. I put on the jeans and caught sight of my revolting overweight body in the bedroom mirror. God, I was horrific! I looked as if I was wearing my big sister’s Michelin Man suit. Or worse again, I looked like I was still pregnant.

  In the few weeks before I gave birth I had been absolutely enormous.

  Completely circular. The fact that the only thing that fit me was my green wool jumper, coupled with the fact that due to continuous nausea my face was always green, gave me the appearance of a watermelon who had put on a pair of boots and a bit of lipstick.

  Now, although I was no longer green, I still looked like a watermelon in every other respect.

  What was happening to me? Where had the real me and my real life gone?

  With a heart that wasn’t the only heavy thing about me, I went to call a taxi to take us to the airport.

  When the buzzer rang, I took one last look around my living room, at the gap-toothed shelves, the shiny new unused baby intercom up on the wall (the waste!), the hillock of abandoned diapers on the floor.

  I closed the door behind me before I could start crying again.

  Firmly.

  Then I realized that I was missing something. “Oh Jesus,” I said, “my rings.” I ran back in and got my engagement and wedding rings from my bedroom. They had been on the dressing table for the past two months because my fingers were so fat and swollen that I couldn’t wear them. I jammed them onto my hand and they just about fit me.

  I caught Judy giving me a funny look.

  “He’s still my husband, you know,” I said defiantly to her. “Which means that I’m still married!”

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said, affecting an innocent expression.

  Judy and I struggled down in the elevator, juggling bags, purses, and a two-day-old child in her car seat.

  And that’s another thing they don’t tell you about having a baby! The manuals should say something like “It is imperative that your husband does not leave you in the first few months after your child’s birth, as otherwise you will have to carry everything yourself.”

  Judy was hoisting everything into the taxi when I saw, with horror, Denise’s husband coming up the sidewalk. He must have been on his way home from work.

  “Oh Christ,” I said ominously.

  “What?” asked Judy in alarm, her face red and sweaty from her exertions.

  “Denise’s husband,” I muttered.

  “So what?” she said loudly.

  I was expecting some kind of terrible emotional scene from him. As I said, he was Italian. Or I was afraid that he would suggest some kind of alliance between me and him. Something along the lines of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” I certainly didn’t want that.

  My eyes locked with his and I felt, in my guilty and fearful state, that I knew exactly what he was thinking. “It’s all your fault. If only you had been as attractive as my Denise, your husband might have stayed with you and I would still be happily married. But no, you had to go and ruin everything, you fat ugly cow.”

  “Fine,” I thought, “two can play at that game.”

  I stared back at him, returning his thought messages. “Well, if you hadn’t married a husband-stealing, home-wrecking floozy none of us would be in this mess.”

  I was probably doing the poor man a terrible injustice. He didn’t say anything to me. He just looked at me in a kind of sad and accusatory way.

  I hugged Judy good-bye. We were both crying. For once my baby wasn’t. “Heathrow, Terminal One,” I said tearfully to the taxi driver and we swept away from the curb, leaving Mr. Andrucetti staring bleakly after us.

  As I struggled down the aisle on the Aer Lingus plane, I bumped against several irate passengers with my bag of baby supplies. When I finally located my seat a man got up to help me stow my bags. As I smiled my thanks at him, I automatically wondered if he thought I was pretty.

  It was so awful. That was one of the things I’d really liked about being married. For a couple of years I’d been off that horrible merry-go-round of trying to meet the right man, finding out that he was already married, or living with another man, or pathologically stingy, or read Jeffrey Archer, or could only have an orgasm if he could call you “Mother,” or any one of the thousands of character flaws that weren’t immediately obvious the first time you shook his hand and smiled into his eyes and got a warm buzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach, and thought to yourself, “Hey, this could be the one.”

  Now I was back in the situation where every man is a pote
ntial boyfriend.

  I was back in a world where there are eight hundred exquisitely beautiful women to every one straight single man. And that is even before we start weeding out the truly hideous ones.

  I looked at the helpful man carefully. He wasn’t even that attractive. He was probably gay. Or, more likely, this being an Aer Lingus flight, he was probably a priest.

  And as for me, a deserted wife with a two-day-old baby, the self-esteem of an amoeba (that much?), forty pounds overweight, incipient postpartum depression, and a vagina stretched out to ten times its normal size, I was hardly a prize catch myself.

  The plane took off and the houses and buildings and streets of London circled away below me. I looked down as the roads got smaller and smaller.

  I was leaving behind six years of my life.

  Is this how a refugee feels? I wondered.

  My husband was down there somewhere. My apartment was down there somewhere. My friends were down there somewhere. My life was down there somewhere.

  I had been happy there.

  And then the view was obscured by cloud.

  I sat back in my seat, my baby on my lap. I suppose I must have looked just like a normal mother to all the other passengers. But—and the thought struck me quite forcibly—I wasn’t. I was now a deserted wife. I was a statistic.

  I had been lots of things in my life. I had been Claire the dutiful daughter.

  I had been Claire the scourge of a daughter. I had been Claire the student.

  I had been Claire the harlot (briefly—as I said, if we get the time, I’ll fill you in). I had been Claire the administrator. I had been Claire the wife.

  And now here I was being Claire the deserted wife. And the idea did not sit comfortably with me at all, I can tell you.

  I had always thought (in spite of my professed liberalism) that deserted wives were women whose husbands, pausing only to blacken their eyes, left with a bottle of vodka, the Christmas Club money and the children’s allowance book, leaving them behind weeping with a huge mound of un-paid utilities bills, a spurious story about walking into a door and four dysfunctional children, all under the age of six.