Sorrow and Bliss(56)

Patrick was watching a ball sport on television, next to me. Some time had passed since the miscarriage, not enough that I had stopped counting it in weeks.

I pushed my foot into his thigh and said, ‘Can I do you a quiz?’

‘This only has ten minutes to go.’

‘I want to see if you have Boarding School Syndrome.’

‘Ten minutes.’

I raised my voice above the commentary and said okay, question one. ‘Do you struggle to ask for help from others?’

Patrick said no and to the rest as I read each one out, most adamantly to the question of whether he struggled with emotional attachment, on the basis that he had been emotionally attached to me since he was fourteen. I got to the end of the list and pretended I hadn’t.

‘There’s a few more.’

‘Can I just watch the penalty?’

‘Record it.’

Patrick sighed and turned it off.

‘Do you experience a violent emotional reaction to certain foods, chiefly scrambled eggs with a high water content, vegetables from the brassica family, and/or any liquid that acquires a skin when it is boiled, such as milk or custard?’

Patrick looked at me, sure but not sure I was making it up.

‘Aside from at home, do you feel most comfortable eating in the canteen at your work because your food comes on a tray? And, would you agree, or disagree, that it may be because you weren’t allowed to pick what you ate until you were eighteen that you are, as an adult, the slowest menu orderer in the world, and sometimes your wife feels like she might die in the yawning expanse of time between the waitress asking you what you would like and you actually being able to say?’

Patrick turned the television back on.

‘Until it was pointed out, by her, after you got married, did you know you ate with your head down defending your plate with one arm?’ He was turning the volume up. I shouted. ‘If you answered mostly As, you are the mental one in your relationship, not your wife as everyone has previously supposed.’

I thought he was pretending to be irritated by my stupid quiz and only realised he wasn’t when he suddenly got up and left the room without turning the television off again. I rose and followed him into the kitchen, apologising, without a specific sense of what I was apologising for. He moved from the cupboard to the sink, to the fridge like I wasn’t there. It was humiliating. I went upstairs and shut myself in the box room.

For some time, I sat in my chair and snipped off split ends with desk scissors, then turned on my computer, planning to wishlist things on The Outnet. Instead, I went to the magazine’s website and read the article again, feeling guilty and then sad, then scared. I closed it, hearing him come upstairs.

Patrick entered but didn’t say anything. I turned around, and because he remained mute I said, ‘I think we should have counselling.’ I did not mean it. I said it the way I always did – to be wounding, in retaliation for a perceived crime, and was shocked when he said so do I.

‘Why?’

‘Martha, because.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of the river incident.’

I could not look at him then and picked up the scissors again.

He said, Martha. ‘Can you please stop cutting your hair. Tell me why you think we need counselling.’

‘Because you have Boarding School Syndrome.’

*

He left the house and I went into the bathroom to find the tranquillisers I had been given by an after-hours doctor Patrick took me to at the conclusion of the river incident. I wanted to see when exactly it was that I had got up in the middle of the night and gone outside, walking, then running as fast as I could along the towpath, until Patrick caught up to me at the first cross-bridge.

I was climbing onto the side of it. He put his arms around my waist and tried to get me down. I fought him and accidentally scratched his face. His energy outlasted mine and he walked me back and drove me to the doctor, while I said sorry over and over and over again.

I picked up the pill bottle and read the date on the label. It seemed wrong. I went to bed, even though there were hours of daylight left because I felt so ashamed, I couldn’t bear to be awake.

It was a dream about the baby – the thing that woke me and told me to run along the river, because what if she was there. Two nights before.

*

We had one session with a therapist. She was white but dressed as if she had come directly from a Kwanzaa celebration and said, ‘Not to worry!’ when neither of us could articulate why we’d come.

Patrick could not say, ‘Because on a recent occasion, my wife behaved like a psychotic, and much older, Anne of Green Gables in the Lady of Shalott episode.’

I could not say, ‘Because I have lately discovered that the pillars of my husband’s personality, the qualities for which he is so broadly admired, the exceptional stoicism, emotional equanimity and never complaining, are actually just symptoms of a newly classified disorder.’

‘The point is, you have come.’ The therapist said that was a great sign and asked us to hop up, directing us to the two chairs that were in the middle of the room, already facing each other and close enough that when we sat down our knees were touching. She told us that because it was very common for partners who’d been together some time to stop looking into each other’s eyes, she always started by getting couples to do just that – stare at each other with total concentration and no talking for three minutes. She would simply observe.