The Displaced Nation

A note before Libby begins her journal entry: If you’re a Libby addict, check out Woodhaven Happenings, where from time to time you will find more posts from other characters. The latest is a post from Maggie, describing her side of the story of last week’s meeting with Libby. Want to remind yourself of Who’s Who in Woodhaven? Click here for the cast list!

*  *  *

The babies are in bed. They have been bathed, fed, patted, soothed, and tucked up for the night. After protesting at similar treatment at a too-early hour, Jack is also away for the night.

I sit in the gradually darkening den, watching the sun set behind the trees in the back yard, and wait for Oliver. This is the room he usually heads for when he comes through the door. The temptation to turn on the TV is great, but I resist, knowing I need to channel my thoughts and energy into the inevitable scene that lies ahead tonight, not into another episode of How I Met Your Mother. Also, if I am quiet, I will be able to hear him arrive home.

Oliver’s evening arrivals have been getting later and later. When I comment, mildly, upon this — I never question — he replies in a tone that indicates it’s hardly worth him opening his mouth. “Work,” he says. “Overtime.” “Customer with a problem.”

“What about a wife with a problem?” I want to scream. “Don’t I deserve some of your overtime too?”

But I never do. I’m my mother’s daughter, after all. After the brief interlude here when she abandoned her role as Dutiful Wife To Keith in favour of Fun-Loving Single Woman For Now, she’s back to tiptoeing around the house and fetching Dad his warmed slippers. She gave me the hint about Oliver’s parentage, but I can’t work out what I was supposed to do with the information. Silently store it and sympathise with Oliver, I think she meant.

Thankfully, I have another mother who is not afraid of sticking an oar in when necessary, even if it means breaking a promise to not interfere.

“I used to interfere,” Maggie said, after she had hauled me, the children, and Fergus back to her house earlier today. “All the time. Making that promise to your mother not to get involved nearly killed me.”

“But you decided to go ahead and get involved anyway.”

“You’re like a daughter,” Maggie said, “the daughter I haven’t had for twenty-five years. I could no more stand by and watch you fall to pieces than I was able to watch Sara.”

Maggie sat in her wooden rocking chair, gazing out of the window at the maple tree in the yard. Her eyes were open very wide, as people’s are when they are trying to make tears disobey gravity. Half of me wanted to ask more about the mysterious daughter, but the other half didn’t want to rake over old memories for Maggie.

Also — I have to be honest — I was more intent on getting my own life straightened out. Whatever happened to Maggie and her daughter twenty-five years ago has little to do with what is going on now between me and Oliver.

“What shall I do?” I asked her instead. “How do I talk to a man who won’t talk back?”

Maggie turned slightly, blinking.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “You know your own husband. At least, you thought you did. But however you do it, you have to keep telling yourself that you deserve better than this.”

I didn’t dare ask her what she meant by that.

* * *

The sun has been below the horizon for fifteen minutes now, and an occasional firefly flickers among the rhododendrons. The den is completely dark. Oliver is still not home. I curl up on the sofa without bothering to turn on the lamp beside me, and rehearse tonight’s conversation in my head. It’s difficult, of course, because in this imaginary exchange Oliver answers the way I would like him to. We have a reasoned, adult conversation, resulting in a reasoned, adult compromise. He does not mutter monosyllables, or stomp upstairs to the guest bedroom where he has taken to sleeping under the pretext of not getting enough sleep in the same room as the twins, who supposedly wake him up every time they murmur in the night.

I hear the rattle of the garage door and the hum of the car engine as it pulls into the parking bay. The back door opens, then closes again. Oliver’s uncertain footsteps into the unlit kitchen, heading into the hall, then back into the kitchen. Apart from a nightlight glowing on the landing upstairs, the house is in darkness.

Oliver’s footsteps stop. I hear the fridge door open, and the faint light from the fridge interior illuminates the hallway outside the den. Funny how a small light can make such a difference in a dark house. I am reminded of my grandfather’s stories of German air raids and belligerent blackout wardens.

The fridge door closes, the light goes off.

The pop and hiss of a Coke can top, some glugs. A stifled belch.

Another noise. Beeps — ten of them.

I stiffen, listening hard.

Then a quiet voice from the kitchen, speaking into a cellphone.

“Hey. It’s Oliver.” Silence, broken by the tossing of an empty Coke can into the recycling bin. “Change of plan. I can see you now…Yeah, no problem. She’s in bed. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

The back door opens and closes, the garage door rattles open, and the car engine hums again as Oliver reverses onto the driveway.

I stay where I am, motionless, and watch the fireflies for a long time.

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE: Oliver’s side of the story

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #54 – Opening the cocoon 

Need the 411 on characters in Libby’s Life? Click here for  Kate’s page  of Who’s Who in Woodhaven.

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of the week’s posts from The Displaced Nation. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

There’s probably a word for it in the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. An obscure word that only makes an appearance on Radio 4 intellectual game shows. Something like:

Tri-gami-matri-taci-filial (noun, Old English) — the silence of a son regarding his mother’s marriage to a serial bigamist after the father’s third marriage.

Then people like Stephen Fry and Paul Merton would make clever, rude jokes about this word, and you’d wonder why the English language possessed such an item, because such a situation was unlikely to exist.

Except the situation does exist, and consequently I’d like to know the word that has this definition:

“The pissed-off feeling after realising that your husband of nearly seven years has accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to tell you that his estranged father was a serial bigamist and didn’t run off with a local librarian like he and your mother-in-law had always led you to believe.”

I mean, it’s not as if it would have mattered, is it? If Oliver had told me on our second date, “Oh, by the way, Libs, I didn’t grow up with a father because my mum found out that he was married to a couple of other women at the same time” — I would hardly have stomped out of the restaurant before he could ask me out on a third date.

Did he really think I would have said, “God, Oliver, I’m glad you came clean with me now because obviously, there is no way I could marry the spawn of such pond slime”?

I know what you’re thinking. If it wouldn’t have been such a big deal on our second date, why am I making a fuss now?

Because it’s gone past the point of being an unfortunate fact about Oliver’s ancestry. Ten years ago, before our engagement, I could have processed the knowledge and said, “Poor Oliver. Your poor mum. What a terrible thing to happen.”

Now, although I still think that way, pity has been overtaken by hurt that Oliver couldn’t see fit to tell me.

I am being treated like the criminal, but why? The real criminal is Oliver. He has known about this all along, and in the ten years we have known each other, has never told me this story, although it’s obvious that he knew. Why did he not feel he could tell me, his girlfriend, his fiancé, his wife, his soulmate? Has he so little faith in me? I feel bereft, my faith in Oliver plundered.

But self-pity inevitably mutates into anger.

Today, I am angry, and everyone knows it.

Well, nearly everyone. Jack knows it, George knows it, and Beth knows it. The only person who is oblivious is Oliver himself, the object of my anger, and as usual he’s out, avoiding the issue. Avoiding me.

Meanwhile, rage swirls around my head and seeps out through my ears, filling the house with noxious atmosphere.

I’ve been passive too long.

I gather up the twins and strap them into the double stroller. Jack peeps cautiously at me from behind the sofa where he is quietly playing with Lego bricks.

“Put your sneakers on,” I say. “We’re going out.”

*  *  *

It’s a long time since we’ve been out.  Nursery school has finished for the summer. After the first couple of weeks when the Coffee Morning Posse delivered freezer casserole after freezer casserole, no one has been to visit — not even Maggie. I suppose they think I’ve got enough to do without catering to visitors. Even my mother has been quiet, phoning only once since she got back home. For the last few weeks, I’ve holed myself up in the house, seeing no one, ordering groceries online, too depressed and timid to put a foot outside.

But today is a beautiful, sunny day, my anger is invigorating, and I’m tired of being a hermit. I make Jack hold the handle of the stroller, loop Fergus’s leash round my wrist, and off we set, along Juniper Close.  We are walking to Main Street, to a place of busy-ness, to be with other people who will only coo at my babies and won’t see the rage and hurt in the back story.

Fergus, however, has other ideas. He crosses the street docilely enough, but as we turn right towards the road that leads to Main Street, however, he lags behind and his leash pulls on my wrist. He wants to go the other way.

I tug on the leash. He sits. I tug again. He lies down.

It’s an impasse. Fergus and I stare at each other. He usually wins these stare-down contests, but I’m in no mood for defeat. Today, I’m determined to win, so I don’t break my gaze, not even when I hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind me. Whoever it is can step onto the road and walk around us.

The footsteps slow, then stop.

“We first met,” I hear Maggie say, “when there was another drama going on between you and this dog. I haven’t seen you out with these children for weeks. Were you coming to see me?”

I continue to stare at Fergus so I don’t have to meet Maggie’s eyes. She’s right. I haven’t seen her since the twins were a couple of weeks old. How time flies when you’re having fun.

“If I hadn’t seen you today,” she goes on, “I’d have come to visit. I don’t like to intrude, but…”

“It’s been difficult,” I mutter. “The twins — they’re a lot of work.”

“I’m sure they are,” she says. “And from what I hear, so is your husband.”

She has my attention now.

“How do you know?” I demand. “What do you know?”

Maggie places a hand on my forearm and takes Fergus’s leash from my wrist. She gives the leash a gentle shake, and he gets up to stand by her, as docile as you please.

“Your mother and I became pretty good friends while she was here, you know. We made an agreement. I would be there for her daughter in America, and if the need ever arises, she will be there for mine in England.”

Mums’ Army. The Maternal Foreign Legion.

“Come on, Jack,” Maggie says, taking his hand. “Back to Granny Maggie’s house.”

With difficulty, I turn the wide stroller around to face the other direction.

“‘Granny Maggie’?” I ask. “Does that make you my mother, then?”

Maggie smiles, just a little.

“The next best thing on this side of the ocean,” she says.

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE # 55 – Dark secrets

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #53 – Preserved on tape 

Need the 411 on characters in Libby’s Life? Click here for  Kate’s page  of Who’s Who in Woodhaven.

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

STAY TUNED for Monday’s post — a Dolce Vita Slideshow!

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

I stare at the dark computer screen, wondering if my overactive imagination is misleading me.

Only one way to find out. An imagination doesn’t mislead twice. Not in the face of hard facts from a digital camera.

I hit “Play” on the screen again, and scroll through our unedited wedding footage until the time elapsed says 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Act 1:

The evening party at our wedding. To the left of the stage where the band is playing a particularly sickly version of  Stevie Wonder’s “I just called to say I love you” (look, my dad booked the band, OK?) a large clock on the wall shows the time to be 9:40.

At 9:40pm on our wedding day, Oliver and I were on the other side of London, in the bar at the Heathrow Hilton, ready for our flight to Ibiza the next morning.

This is all the stuff that happened after we left our party. It’s fascinating and morbid at the same time. Like watching your own funeral.

No one appreciates the band’s rendition of Stevie Wonder, and the only person on the dance floor is a little girl in a pink frothy frock — the daughter of Mum’s cousin. Yasmin, her name is. She  twirls around in circles, round and round and round again, until she is dizzy and falls down, laughing up at the camera. The camera zooms out, and to the right of the dance floor reveals a cluster of small, circular tables, covered with empty glasses and plates of half-eaten vol-au-vents. We were supposed to have had wait staff all night at the reception, but apparently they disappeared as soon as the Adorable Couple had left the bash.

At one of the small tables, on her own and nursing a glass of what looks like water but is most likely vodka, sits Sandra. She hunches to one side, leaning against the wall, a morose expression on her face as she swigs from the glass. She’s not happy that her little boy has another woman in his life.

The camera swings down in a jerky movement and drops its gaze to the floor. A man’s foot in a  scuffed black shoe — the videographer’s. (I’m guessing he’s had quite a bit of party bubbly and is merely filming for his own amusement, since the day’s main attractions are now propping up a different bar in a Hilton forty miles away.) Then up again, focusing on the little girl in the pink dress, who is dancing a ballet routine to the band playing a different song — a slow one by Journey, I think. A few feet behind the little girl, my mother comes into view. The mother of the bride is resplendent in a fuchsia pink wedding suit that would have been more at home at a wedding in 1987. She’s heading towards Sandra.

At the little table, Mum sits down and pushes some vol-au-vents aside. She smiles brightly at Sandra; they are related now, bonded by marriage and the mutual loss of their only offspring. Mum, though, is not as heartbroken as her counterpart, because she has not really lost a daughter. Daughters are never lost; they are merely loaned to their husbands.

Sandra, however is inconsolable. Her loss is total, and she is utterly bereft. Emotion runs deep in her veins. So does the vodka.

She says something to Mum which is inaudible above the strains of the Steve Perry wannabe. She waves her glass around, and speaks some more. I know that if I could hear her, the words would be slurred.

A look of concern crosses my mother’s face.

I recognise this look. It’s the look I used to see when I came home from school, slamming my book bag on the kitchen table and muttering dire, cryptic threats against whoever had happened to piss me off that day. A quick, sideways glance, sizing up the gravity of the situation: “Is Libby really going to slash that teacher’s tyres? Do I intervene or keep saying ‘Yes, dear’?”

Mum starts to speak, and Sandra’s face crumples. Mum takes her hand and squeezes it.

I want to know more about this little scene, but the videographer is intent upon capturing Second Cousin Yasmin  and her ballet routine whose tempo is too fast for this last-smooch-at-the-disco song.

The camera zooms in on the little dancing feet in their pink sparkly Mary Jane shoes, and the unfolding drama between my mother and Sandra is lost.

Act 2

I nearly missed this part, so intent was I upon the visual aspect of the film. My mother and Sandra do not appear on the whole of the DVD again, even though there is still another forty minutes of footage to go. My goodness, but we got our money’s worth from that videographer.

A tantrum on the dance floor.

Second Cousin Yasmin has exhausted her repertoire of dance routines but, undeterred, has dragged a chair to the middle of the floor so she can show off her barre exercises.

Battements tendus — un, deux, trois. To the side — un, deux, trois.

Pleasing, perhaps, to the eyes of fond mothers at ballet school, when set to the strains of Saint-Saens and Faure, but not so pleasing to the occupants of the dance floor who are trying to boogie to the band’s version of “Love Shack.” They keep tripping over the chair and Yasmin’s outstretched limbs.

Yasmin’s father, my mother’s cousin Ted, strides onto the wooden floor. He picks up the chair in one hand, and grabs onto TwinkleToes herself with his other.

“Bang bang, on the door baby,” sings the female vocalist in little more than a whisper.

The lull in the song is Yasmin’s cue to yell, very loudly. She calls her father a name that six-year-olds are not supposed to know, let alone use in the formal setting of a wedding reception. Uncle Ted is not impressed, and tries to haul her away. It’s well past her bedtime, anyway.

Yasmin, though, doesn’t agree with this sentiment, and sits down on the floor very suddenly, knocking her father off balance. He drops the chair, trips over his daughter’s leg, and sprawls in a most ungainly manner on the floor.

The videographer, who has been professionally quiet behind the camera until this point, lets out a huge snort of amusement and backs away, towards the cluster of tables, get a better view. The band has stopped playing; I can see them conferring on stage, wondering whether to ignore the little scene, or to play a noisy song to drown it out.

In the hush, close behind the camera, a voice.

Sandra’s voice, perfectly recorded for posterity.

“I was his third. If it hadn’t been for that car accident, when Oliver and I met his other wives in the hospital, we might still all be one big happy family.”

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #54 – Opening the cocoon

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #52 – Life: A series of hellos and goodbyes

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

STAY TUNED for Friday’s post — another Displaced Q from Tony James Slater.

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Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit

Mum kisses me. “I love you,” she says.

She’s done that quite a few times in the last couple of weeks, which is funny because she’s not really a kissy or “I love you” kind of person. When I was growing up, she displayed her affection via a surprise addition of homemade cake in my school lunch box, a Ladybird book from a trip to WH Smith, or a poster of Take That sneaked into the weekly shopping trolley.

But kisses and “I love you”s?

Never. “Show, don’t tell” was Mum’s philosophy. Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk.

So either her six weeks in America has rubbed off more vigorously than anyone could have anticipated — they’re very big on saying “I love you” at every opportunity here — or she’s unbearably worried.

When I was fourteen, I fell off my bike and hit my head on the tarmac. I was out cold, in hospital — for twenty-four hours, I’m told, although from my point of view it could have been anywhere between five seconds and an eternity. In the moments or hours before my eyelids fluttered open and Mum’s voice proclaimed “She’s awake!” I heard her saying the same thing, over and again. “Don’t go, Libby. Please don’t go. I love you. Please stay here, Libs. I love you.”

It had puzzled me at the time. I was in bed; of that much I was aware in my semi-conscious fog, so where could I go? Later, of course, I realised that Mum was speaking of a more permanent one-way trip, so I didn’t mention I’d overheard her bedside soliloquy. Saying “I love you” out loud like that was slightly embarrassing; like not being able to reach the bathroom on time, or having other bodily emissions erupt against our will.

It must be a British thing. We acquired our reputation of stiff upper lip and British reserve for a reason, I guess. The preschoolers’ moms here drop their children off at nursery with a chorus of “Mommy loves you, honey!”, while the kids run into school without a backward glance. I wonder how many of them grow up thinking that “Mommy loves you” is just another form of “Goodbye”, rendered less valuable by its daily usage.

You see, when my mum says it, I know it’s from the heart and not merely a salutation.

“I love you too,” I say, and kiss her cheek.

She could be saying it because she’s about to get in the Lincoln Town Car that takes her to Logan Airport for her flight back to Heathrow, but even lovey-dovey goodbyes aren’t Mum’s scene. A laconic “Well, I suppose I won’t be seeing you for a long time” would have been more her style.

No. She’s worried. I’m sure of it.

She’s worried that I’m descending into a pit of depression, which because of its timing could conveniently be classified as “post-natal” but in reality has been brought on by my husband’s ever-increasing distance from me, and his preoccupation with…what? I don’t know what. He’s got something on his mind, something to do with his father, but apparently his own wife is not allowed to be privy to those inner thoughts.

She never has been, I know now.

“All set?” the driver asks her.

Mum nods. She gets into the back seat of the long, black car, shuts the door, and winds down the window.

“Sandra,” she mouths. “Don’t forget.”

The car backs down our driveway, reverses onto Juniper Drive.

Mum waves. I wave back. So does Jack.

Oliver, naturally, is absent from the family scene.

I go inside, and for once, Oliver’s absence is a blessing. What I’m about to do wouldn’t be a good idea while he’s around.

This week I have learned from Mum that, at our wedding, after Oliver and I had left for our first night in a hotel as a married couple, my mother-in-law got falling-down drunk but unfortunately not speechlessly so, and started telling my own mother a few family secrets. Mum tried to shut her up but not before Sandra had released a collection of dead ancestors’ remains from a large cupboard — information which, I inferred, was relevant to the present situation. My mother had kept this information to herself for six years, but even now, she delicately skirted round the details of what Sandra had told her.

“It’s not my information to give,” she insisted. “You’ll have to get it from the horse’s mouth.”

Tantalising and unhelpful, albeit highly satisfying to hear my mother-in-law referred to as a horse.

And then, just this morning while I was helping Mum finish her packing, I remembered. Tucked away in a box in the basement is a box of our English DVDs. We don’t get them out because they’re in the wrong format for the DVD player here, but they will play on my laptop. The particular one I want, though, I’ve never actually played before.

With a flashlight in my hand, I descend the wooden stairs into the basement. It’s dark down here, and with the humidity rising as summer approaches, there’s a smell of musty damp in the air. A rustling noise, a scurry of rodent feet makes me jump — I’ve disturbed something the pest control people missed on their last visit — but even the threat of mouse attack doesn’t deter me.

I find the box of DVDs and, shining the flashlight on them, flick through until I see the one I’m looking for.

I double-check the label.

Yes. This is it.

“Libby and Oliver. Wedding footage (not in official video).”

.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #53 – Preserved on tape

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #51-On a cliff edge

Click here to read Libby’s Life from the first episode

STAY TUNED for Friday’s post — another Displaced Q from Tony James Slater.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to subscribe for email delivery of The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of the week’s posts from The Displaced Nation. Sign up for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigit