Big Little Lies(54)

The vacuum cleaner stopped, and she heard a man’s voice, followed by a roar of raucous laughter. Her cleaners were a young married Korean couple. They normally worked in complete silence when Celeste was in the house, so they mustn’t have heard her come in. They only showed her their professional faces. She felt irrationally hurt, as if she wanted to be their friend. Let’s all laugh and chat while you clean my house!
There were running footsteps above her head and a peal of girlish laughter.
Stop having fun in my house. Clean.
Celeste drank her tea. The mug stung her sore lip.
She felt jealous of her cleaners.
Here she sat, in her big house, sulking.
She put down her tea, took her AmEx card out of her wallet and opened her laptop. She logged on to the World Vision website and clicked through photos of children available for sponsorship: products on a shelf for rich white women like her. She already sponsored three children, and she tried to get the boys interested. “Look! Here’s little Blessing from Zimbabwe. She has to walk miles for fresh water. You just have to walk to the tap.” “Why doesn’t she just get some money from the ATM?” said Josh. It was Perry who answered, who patiently explained, who talked to the children about gratitude and helping those less fortunate than themselves.
Celeste sponsored another four children.
Writing letters and birthday cards to them all would take hours.
Ungrateful bitch.
Deserve to be hit. Deserve it.
She pinched the flesh on her upper thighs until it brought tears to her eyes. There would be new bruises tomorrow. Bruises she’d given herself. She liked to watch them change, deepening, darkening and then slowly fading. It was a hobby. An interest of hers. Nice to have an interest.
She was losing her mind.
She trawled through charity websites representing all the pain and suffering the world has to offer: cancer, rare genetic disorders, poverty, human rights abuse, natural disasters. She gave and gave and gave. Within twenty minutes she’d donated twenty thousand dollars of Perry’s money. It gave her no satisfaction, no pride or pleasure. It sickened her. She made charitable donations while a young girl got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the grubby corners of her shower stall.
Clean your own house, then! Sack the cleaners. But that wouldn’t help them either, would it? Give more money to charity! Give until it hurts.
She spent another five thousand dollars.
Would that hurt their financial situation? She didn’t actually know. Perry took care of the money. It was his area of expertise, after all. He didn’t hide it from her. She knew that he would happily go through all their accounts and investment portfolios with her, if she so wished, but the thought of knowing the exact figures gave her vertigo.
“I opened the electricity bill today and I just wanted to cry,” Madeline had said the other day, and Celeste had wanted to offer to pay it for her, but of course, Madeline didn’t want her charity. She and Ed were perfectly comfortable. It was just that there were so many different levels of “comfortable,” and at Celeste’s level no electricity bill could make her cry. Anyway, you couldn’t just hand money over to your friends. You could pick up lunch or coffee whenever you could, but even then you had to be careful not to offend, to not do it so often that it looked like you were showing off, as if the money were part of her, when in fact the money was Perry’s, it had nothing to do with her, it was just random luck, like the way she looked. It wasn’t a decision she’d made.
Once, when she’d been at uni, she’d been in a great mood, and she’d bounced into her tutorial and sat next to a girl called Linda.
“Morning!” she’d said.
An expression of comical dismay crossed Linda’s face.
“Oh, Celeste,” she’d moaned. “I just can’t handle you today. Not when I’m feeling like shit and you waltz in here looking like . . . you know, like that.” She waved her hand at Celeste’s face, as if at something disgusting.
The girls around them had exploded with joyous laughter, as if something hilarious and subversive had finally been said out loud. They laughed and laughed, and Celeste had smiled stiffly, idiotically, because how could you possibly respond to that? It felt like a slap, but she had to respond like it was a compliment. You had to be grateful. Don’t ever look too happy, she told herself. It’s aggravating.
Grateful, grateful, grateful.
The vacuum cleaner started again upstairs.
Perry had never, in all their years together, made a comment on how she chose to spend their (his) money, except to remind her occasionally, mildly, humorously, that she could spend more if she liked. “You know we can afford to get you a new one,” he’d said once when he came upon her in the laundry, scrubbing furiously at a stain on the collar of a silk shirt.