The Mother-in-Law(46)
He’s already wearing an orange paper Christmas hat on his head and has a green plastic whistle around his neck, which tells me it wouldn’t be his first cracker of the day. My dad and the entire Goodwin family is jammed around our dining room table, dipping prawns into Thousand Island sauce. The table is lined with festive serviettes, paper plates and decorations made lovingly by Archie at day care.
“Pop it with me, champ,” Ollie says.
“But I promised Harriet!”
“I don’t think Harriet will mind, Arch,” I say and we both look at her in Nettie’s lap, blinking uselessly.
Our Hampton rental isn’t as small as our Port Melbourne worker’s cottage but it isn’t huge by any stretch, particularly with the Christmas tree taking up half the living room. We are short two dining chairs so Patrick and Ollie sit on bar stools at one end, looming over the rest of us. Tom looks politely befuddled by the whole thing and Nettie has said how great it all is enough times to make me wonder who she is trying to convince. In the past, Christmas has either been at Dad’s or with the Goodwins at their Brighton home, and this year it was set to do the same, until I intervened. It was time to take some control back, I’d decided.
Ollie had been surprisingly enthusiastic. (“Doing our own Christmas,” he’d said. “Being the grownups, setting new traditions.”) It was sweet, even if he’d been less than useless when it came to preparations.
“Ollie, can you give me a hand in here, please?” I ask from the kitchen. My face is unbearably hot, and I’m guessing, beet-red. I’d underestimated the effort it took to cook a turkey for seven adults and two kids, plus vegetables and gravy and plum pudding and a seafood starter. Like a fool, I’d refused when Diana and Nettie offered to bring something, saying, as I’d always yearned to, “Just bring yourselves.” (It always sounded so generous and carefree when people said that.) Unfortunately, it also meant I’d had to spend the morning in a sweat-drenched sundress, cooking up a dinner that was never designed to be eaten at a hot Australian Christmas, in a house that didn’t have air-conditioning.
“Well, Merry Christmas,” Tom says, raising his beer to knock against Diana’s wineglass. He seems amused, though not disappointed, with his can of Victoria Bitter, and Diana, to her credit, is uncomplaining about her glass of lukewarm chardonnay, in fact, she’s had more than one glass. It’s one area where I’d like to give her points—especially since last Christmas we went through several bottles of Bollinger at her place—but after hearing that Diana had refused to help Nettie pay for IVF, I’m not feeling like giving Diana any points.
“Merry Christmas,” Nettie says, chinking her wineglass with her dad’s beer can. She’d arrived with two bottles of wine and had already polished off one. I can’t say I blame her. She’d saved up and been through one round of IVF (which yielded two embryos), but neither had transferred successfully. Now, at thirty-nine, she was going to have to start saving for another round, by which point she would be nearly forty and her chances of becoming pregnant would have decreased even further. All the while her parents had more money than they could ever possibly spend. Where was the logic in that? I’d told Diana I liked her philosophy once, but there was nothing I liked about this.
Nettie had held Harriet on her lap for most of the day, refusing to put her down, even as we ate our seafood starters. Now that she was showing signs of looking a little sloshed, I wonder if I should take Harriet away. But Patrick seems to be keeping a close eye on her, and he’s only on his first beer, so I decide to leave her be.
“Reporting for duty,” Ollie says, joining me in the kitchen. I hand him a pair of oven mitts and he slides them on and disappears into the oven. “Maybe, by next Christmas,” he calls, reaching for the turkey, “there’ll be another baby around the table, huh, Nets?”
Everyone pauses, their mouths full of prawns and Thousand Island sauce.
“So what’s the plan?” Ollie continues, oblivious, setting the turkey on the counter. “Are you going to be one of those types that has the baby while answering emails on her iPhone, then heads from the hospital straight back to the office?”
I send him the death stare, but it’s wasted because he’s happily basting.
“Actually,” Nettie says, “if I was lucky enough to have a baby, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat. Take a few years out of the rat race and stay home with my kids, like Lucy has done. I really respect what you’ve done, Luce, and I think you’re a wonderful mother.”
I smile, but I’m feeling nervous.
“But,” she continues, “it’s all pretty moot since I’m not pregnant and I can’t even start another IVF cycle until we’ve saved up five thousand dollars and I’m thirty-nine and growing older every second.”
Nettie is drunker than I thought, slurring on the word “second,” making it sound more like “second.” Harriet is balanced precariously on her lap and Tom, as if reading my mind, takes Harriet from her.
Ollie has finally stopped basting the turkey and is paying attention. He shoots me a panicked look. Meanwhile Diana takes a careful sip of wine then replaces her glass on the table. “So you want to be like Lucy, do you, darling?”
“Yes,” Nettie says. There’s a trace of defiance in her voice that has me steeling myself.