Borderlanders

Chapter 2

Two

Hal’s mother was finally moving to a nursing home. That was going to happen. Not merely had to happen, but everything was in place. A nursing home that she liked would take her, and she was less reluctant than she had been and …

“This is when it should’ve got easier,” said Melissa.

“Why would my mother allow such a thing?”

“I still don’t understand why she agreed to everything, signed everything, and is now distressed that you’re going to sell the house. We talked about it with her.”

“Extensively,” agreed her husband. “I must say, you handled her temper ’specially well.”

“It’s not the first time she’s blamed my health for things she doesn’t want to face. And it won’t be the last. And … what’s wrong?” she asked. Hal’s face had a look. Guarded. Troubled. Very worrying.

“I can sell things. I can tidy things. Hell, I can even dump half my childhood at the rubbish tip, but …” He paused.

“Yes?”

“I can’t deal with her emotions,” he said bluntly.

“And we have to.”

“I love that we—but I can’t. It hurts in ways I didn’t know I could hurt.”

“It’s because she’s your mother. And she’s fragile.”

“I can’t even walk out,” said Hal. “There are other family members, but I’m the only one who can do this.”

“I bet you being silenced is worse than not being able to walk out,” Melissa said thoughtfully.

“You’re right.” Hal was gloomy. “And it’s not once. It’s every day. If I make the conversations difficult or if I look emotional, we’ll never get her into the home.”

“She’s losing her whole world.” Hal looked shaken at this, so Melissa kept explaining, reasoning, talking until her help reached him. “It’s safe for her to shout at you. You need a way of dealing with all the emotions that these conversations roil up. And I think I know just what will work.” Melissa suggested that Hal go onto social media and tweet his way out of trouble. “Punning is popular on Twitter, I believe,” she said wistfully. “And tweeting your way out of trouble is so very ‘you’.”

“I have an idea.” Hal had a glint in his eye. “You tell me so often about mansplaining, yet I’ve never endured it.”

“Yes?” Melissa said cautiously.

“I want to use your name and speak as if I were you. I want to make political comments and say the things neither of us say in public.”

“Just as long as it includes puns.”

“Whenever I can, my dear. And you’ll see it all.”

“I bet there’s no mansplaining at all,” Melissa said gloomily. “I bet you find it tedious and dump it after two weeks.”

Melissa was wrong on both counts. Hal took great delight in printing out the first time he was mansplained, and the second. By the third, he had targets for his temper. Anyone who thought they were “helping” his wife, he considered fair game.

So many people had “helped” his wife, starting from high school. Hal was angry at the way, one by one, their forces had merged to destroy her life. He found safe outlets for his anger, and this was one. Hal measured his day by how much anger he diverted, just as Melissa measured hers by pain. “Spoons,” she called it, intending to imply a lack of strength or energy, but it was pain all the way. Anyone who made that pain worse, or who carried attitudes that might indirectly make that pain worse—these people were fair game.

Time passed as time does. Embedded in that time were those events that reminded Bettina of who she was and kept her secured safely within a chronology. More than clocks or watches, they were her measurements.

Her favourite was usually Sunday lunch with her honorary children. It anchored her whole fortnight. They were interested in her work, and she was interested in them and theirs, and they made a trio of contentment.

Some parts of her life were hidden from them. She’d never told them about her dreamstuff. When they entered her life, they were too young and then … there was no real opportunity. They might have believed it, they might have laughed, they might have derided—she never knew, for she’d never explained it. It wasn’t a happy secret, but it was a secret.

It wasn’t an unhappy secret either, she thought, unlike the other one. The other one was the opposite of sordid. It was odd.

Their father and she had never had a romantic relationship. They’d never even slept together. Dov was gay, but he had only come out to Bettina in a whirlwind of despair when his wife walked out.

He didn’t want to be open. He couldn’t be open. The vast extended family that surrounded him and gave so much love, that family was profoundly homophobic. He had married in a denial of who he was.

Bettina was his soulmate, he claimed, without being his bedmate. She was happy to continue believing that, despite everything.

She had just walked out on a relationship where the physical side was sporadic but was all she needed, but the bedmate was no soulmate. He had been a little child, in need of care. She was his mother and his housekeeper and the sponge that absorbed all his problems and left him emotionally stable and able to face the world and have a brilliant career. She found that she rather wanted to paint, and he had taken a knife to a painting when her exhibition was getting in the way of his career. That’s how he described it. “Getting in the way of his career.”

She’d dreamed it. That’s when the dreaming had ceased to be a series of bets with the world. Would this come true? Would that? Would the other? This time she’d taken action, in case; she’d prepared for it. She put a failure of a piece up, as if it were the critical work for the exhibition. When he slashed her painting, he didn’t ruin anything except their relationship.

That Sunday, Bettina was not looking forward to lunch at all. Dreaming hurt again. She wished she didn’t have this … thing. This superpower. This special ability. This unavoidable skill at hurting herself. Her dream last night had shown her a house littered with loss. A plate filled with favourite food, a toy from an early Christmas, a school report—all of these were strewn over the floor and a giant broom came and rid the house of her life-experience. All she had was emptiness and forlorn love.

She had to tell them, the dream said, that their father and she had never had a physical relationship. She hated this. It poisoned her whole morning.

Over lunch, she explained to her beloved honorary children. The explanation was riddled with a throat full of tears and a stomach that was about to turn nauseous. She couldn’t tell them about their father’s sexuality. It was so odd that he couldn’t tell his own children the truth. All she could say was, “Best of friends. But we never lived together.” Then she tongue-bit, severely.

The three of them created a triangle of silence at the table. Then the elder reached for more bread. This was his old trick. It gave him time to think.

“You always were our adopted mother,” the younger said cheerfully.

“Yeah, but …” said the older, and texted his father furiously. The texts were so furious that their father rang back almost immediately. Ten minutes later, he was there.

“What damn lies have you been telling the kids?” he asked, in his gentle and understanding way. He took her to the garden and read her the riot act. He wouldn’t listen to a word until he’d finished his tirade.

Bettina was so very drained. The whole emotional rollercoaster was no longer her thing.

When she was given a moment to explain and he found out that she’d been entirely honest without revealing his secret, he eased up on her. He then let her into a new secret. He was in love. Not just dating. It was serious. He would talk to his mother about it next week.

“In that case,” she said tartly, “it’s just as well the kids know we were … not the way we looked.”

“I guess,” he said. “I’m worried about the whole …”

“I know,” she said sympathetically. “I’ll be with you every inch of the way, you know that.”

“I do. But what do I tell Mum about us?”

“Tell her the truth,” she suggested.

“I’d better bring Ted round to meet you.”

“If you want,” she said hesitantly. “We can all three talk about it.”

“He thinks you’re my ex.”

“Is he unhappy about it?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I guessed,” said Bettina, for her dreams were something he’d never tolerated. “That means it’s better we talk. Maybe he’ll understand us as having been in an asexual relationship and keeping things from your family that way. Except … does he know about your family?”

“Oh god, yes. I’ve decided that if they can’t take him, I’ll still want him. No matter what the family says, I will stay with Ted.”

“How long?”

“Since we’ve been dating? Six months. We’re getting married.”

“It would’ve been nice to know earlier.”

Dov was silent and the silence showed all the emotional insecurities. No wonder he’d been furious about the talk she’d had with the children. He was putting off an even bigger one. Or had he? She thought back to the look the eldest had given her when she had explained the relationship. She smiled at Dov.

“Still, I’m glad. I love it that you’ve found someone and that you’ve got this courage.”

“You can be a witness,” he offered. “He’s not Jewish, so it’ll be basic. If I could marry under a chuppah, I’d make you a bridesmaid.”

“Your family? Will they be okay?”

“They’ll never be okay.”

“I wish they could just accept you’re gay.”

“That’s not why I had the children, you know. Why I took up with someone I couldn’t stand, but who’d be a good parent, I thought.”

“You were wrong.” Bettina was wry.

“I should never have done it. But that was the year the oldsters finally told me about their childhoods. They said that the only thing they were living for was grandchildren.”

“Inheritance?”

“More like revenge against Hitler.”

“I kinda knew that. I try to not think about what their parents went through.”

“I hate it. I hate what it did to me, to all of us. Not telling you meant I could stay a little sane, and staying a little sane meant I could share the kids with you, and that I could eventually emerge.”

“Into love.” Bettina’s voice was soft with her happiness for him.

“Exactly,” Dov said, and the two went back inside. Bettina made a big pot of coffee and they all talked all afternoon. By the time her visitors left, she was exhausted, for she was the emotional north for them all, and her youngest had needed her.

The child wasn’t at all worried about her father being gay. She was very worried that he’d kept it, as she said, “A big honking secret.”

“Well, you’re in on the secret,” he said, his businesslike self returning, now that all the impossibilities—so many of them—were finally out in the open. “And I can deal with whatever the family does as long as I have you three at my wedding. Will you? Be there? Support me?”

“I want to decorate the wedding cake,” said the older. “Since I’m great at those things and besides, I know about being gay.”

“How do you know about being gay?” his father said very quickly and somewhat suspiciously.

“Guess.”

And a whole new round of conversation began.

Eventually, Bettina was alone. Father and son were going to have a man-to-man about family secrets and there were many hugs and declarations of love and …

“I’m exhausted,” Bettina said as she shut the door behind her family. “Wiped out.” And then, “I can’t tell Zelda any of this. What the f**k do I talk to her about?”

Bettina laughed her incapacity to stop talking after such an afternoon, but didn’t laugh at the problem of chatting with Zelda. For Zelda had said to ring her that night. “Just to catch up.”

Bettina needed to calm down, pretty promptly. She grabbed a cheese and biscuit packet and sat down at the computer to check her email.

It wasn’t at all calming to check her email, but it certainly gave her something she could tell Zelda. There was a happy congratulatory message from a guy named Adam, telling her she’d won the fellowship she’d applied for months ago. He asked her to ring. She was relieved he didn’t call to tell her the news. He gave a mobile number, and in her experience people who used mobiles had a tendency to ring anyone anytime. She imagined the call coming in the middle of lunch. Or halfway through the afternoon. Late afternoon was better. She rang Adam and managed to sound delighted and to write notes about a lot of things that he said needed to be done. I’ll be pleased with it after dinner, she thought, when I’ve had time to recuperate from family. And when I’m less in shock about the amount of paperwork.

Bettina waited until evening before ringing Zelda. It was all official, and she was allowed to break the silence. And it was a nice thing to hide behind. Bettina’s life was full of hiding, and she didn’t mind at all. She toyed with the idea of writing her life down and maybe turning it into a book one day, but she preferred her words to disappear when they were finished. Coffee or phone, but not notebook. While she was thinking that, she dialled Zelda.

“Hi, it’s Bettina.”

Zelda was beyond busy. Talking to Bettina had cost her precious time. It would be a late night, but she would finish this paper, and the marking. That was a given.

The paper worried her. It was pulling her in a new direction. How prophets were embedded into the Celtic identity had fascinated her when the call for papers came out, and now it scraped her skin and made her restless.

“I need to get away from the pressure to produce papers and short pieces.” Why? Zelda took out a marker and drew possible reasons on her home whiteboard. It didn’t take long.

The book was a pressure: it had to be finished. Until then, the only friends she would talk to were on social media and occasionally on the phone. Zelda cleaned her whiteboard, made coffee, and got back to work. Her brain rattled with notes and one of them said, “Can I pair my social life with work to benefit both?”

She didn’t like these thoughts. Academia was impossible for the ambitious without them. And Zelda was ambitious.