Angels (5 page)

Why did they all have to be in? Why couldn't it just have been, say, Anna? I could have told her, then slunk off to bed like a coward, leaving her to break the news to everyone else.

Then Mum spotted me at the door.

“Margaret!” she exclaimed. For years I've been telling her that my name is Maggie, but she's in denial. “Come in. Sit down. Have an ice cream.” She elbowed Dad. “Get her an ice cream.”

“Chocolate? Strawberry? Or…” Dad paused before triumphantly delivering his pièce de résistance. “Or one with M&M's? They're new!”

There is always a wonderful selection of sweets available 30 / MARIAN KEYES

at my parents' house. Unlike most houses, though, this isn't in addition to the usual foodstuffs, it's
instead
of. It wasn't so much that my mother didn't enjoy cooking meals, it was more that we didn't enjoy eating them. Some time in the early eighties she had stopped preparing meals altogether. “What's the point if you ungrateful brats never eat them?”

“I eat them,” Dad bleated, a voice in the wilderness.

But it made no difference. Convenience foods were ushered in and it made me sad. I'd always yearned for an Italian-style family who gathered for their evening meal, passing platters and bowls of steaming homemade food along the scrubbed pine table while the roundy mama beamed from the stove.

All the same, unlimited ice cream was not to be sniffed at. Graciously I accepted a cone (an M&M's one, of course), peeled off the wrapper, and watched the end of the program. I might as well, there was no way I'd get their attention until it was over. Besides, it suited me to defer the moment when I had to spill the words

“Garv and I have split up.” I was afraid that saying it out loud would mean that it had actually happened.

And then it was time.

I sighed, swallowed away the nausea, and began. “I've something to tell you all.”

“Lovely!” Mum rearranged her features into her I'm-going-to-be-a-granny-again expression.

“Garv and I have split up.”

“Ah, here!” With a sharp rustle my father promptly disappeared behind his paper.

Anna flung herself upon me—even Helen looked startled—but my poor mother…She looked as though she'd been hit on the head by a flying brick. Stunned and stricken and shocked beyond belief.

“In a minute you'll tell me you're joking,” she gasped.

“In a minute I won't,” I said stoutly. I hated doing this to her, especially because I was the second of her daughters to ANGELS / 31

have a failed marriage, but it was important not to mislead her.

False hope was worse than no hope.

“But,” she said, struggling for breath, “but you've always been the good one. Say something,” she angrily urged my father.

He appeared reluctantly from behind the newspaper shield. His eyes were petrified. “Seven-year itch,” he offered tentatively.

“
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
,” Helen countered, then elbowed Anna, who thought for a moment, then said, “
The Misfits
.”

“You're describing yourself,” Helen replied scathingly, then curled her lip at the wall of newspaper. “See, Dad? We can all name Marilyn Monroe films, but how does it help?”

“It's actually
nine
years I've been married,” I quietly told Dad's newspaper. He meant well.

“This has come as an awful shock to me,” Mum reiterated.

“I thought you'd be glad, seeing as you all hate Garv.”

“I know, but—” Abruptly Mum collected herself. “Stop that nonsense, we don't all hate him.”

But they did—all apart from Claire, who'd gotten to know him when she'd had a teenage fling with his big brother (also confusingly known as Garv). She'd always thought
my
Garv was sweet, especially since he'd fixed her tape deck for her. (You wouldn't want to get her on the subject of the elder Garv, mind.) But despite Claire's stamp of approval,
my
Garv had somehow—through no fault of his own—acquired a reputation for tightfistedness.

The stinginess allegation had raised its ugly head the first night I'd ever officially taken him out with my family. He'd been knocking around on the fringes for a good while before that, but I'd realized I was serious about him and that it was time he met my family properly. With a sense of occasion we repaired to Phelan's, the local pub, and the salient fact is that Garv didn't stand his round.

32 / MARIAN KEYES

Not Standing Your Round is a mortal sin in my family and there's always great competition to out-generosity and out-convivialize all the others. Hand-to-hand combat almost breaks out as people try to be the first to get to the bar.

On the night in question, Garv was more than willing to buy drinks for my family, but he was nervous and way too mild-mannered to stand up to them. As soon as anyone's drink had passed the halfway mark, he'd leap to his feet, fumbling for his money, asking, “Same again?” But each time he did so, the table erupted like the floor of the stock exchange, with everyone yelling at him to sit down and put his money away, that he was insulting us. Even I joined in, getting carried away in the heat of the moment.

Beaten back by a hail of words, Garv reluctantly lowered himself back onto his bar stool.

The net result of the evening was that Dad bought a round, Rachel bought a round, I bought a round, Anna bought a round, then Dad bought another round. And Garv gained a reputation as a tightwad.

Hot on the heels of that miscarriage of justice came the polo-shirt incident. A story that begins happily and ends tragically. One Saturday afternoon Garv and I were traipsing around town, halfheartedly going in and out of clothes shops. Because Garv had just bought a car, money was tight, so we were on the lookout for bargains. Free things, preferably. Then, by pure chance, we found a polo shirt in the bottom of a clearance bin. To our great surprise it had none of the characteristics you normally associate with things found in clearance bins—like three sleeves, no neck hole, and indelible, bile-colored stains. In fact, it was perfect—the right size, the right price, and a pale icy color that made his normally gray eyes look blue.

It was only when we got it home that we realized there was a small logo above the breast pocket. A tiny outline of a man swinging a golf club, which somehow in the euphoria of the garment having only two sleeves, we'd missed. Naturally enough, we were both dismayed but concluded that it was so small it was barely visible.

Besides, we were too

ANGELS / 33

poor for him not to wear it. So he wore it. And the next thing I hear is that Garv wears the same kind of sweaters as Dad. Then a rumor started that he played golf, which was not only untrue but very, very unfair.

Garv is no fool and he was aware of my family's antipathy. Well, it was hard to be
un
aware when every time he appeared at the house, Helen would bellow, “For God's sake, don't let him in!”

While he never responded to their discourtesy with rudeness of his own, he also didn't launch a charm offensive to try and win them over. And he
could
have—he had a nice, easy manner most of the time. Instead, he became very protective of me around them, which they interpreted variously as standoffishness or even downright hostility. And
responded
with standoffishness or downright hostility. All in all, it hasn't been that easy, especially at Christmases…

“You and Garv are just going through a bad patch,” Mum said, trying valiantly.

Wretchedly, I shook my head. Did she think I hadn't thought of that? Did she think that I hadn't clung to that, hoping with gritted teeth that this was all that was wrong?

“Was he, ah…?” My father was clearly trying to frame a delicate question. “Was he dipping his wick where he shouldn't have been?”

“No.” Perhaps he had been, but that wasn't the cause. It was a symptom of what was wrong.

“Things haven't been easy for you, for either of you.” Mum was off again. “You've had a couple of—”

“—setbacks,” I said quickly, before she used another word.

“Setbacks. Perhaps you need a vacation?”

“We've had a vacation, remember? It was a disaster; it did more harm than good.”

“What about going for counseling?”

“Counseling? Garv?” If I'd been capable of laughter, this would have been a good opportunity. “If he won't talk to me, he's hardly likely to talk to a total stranger.”

34 / MARIAN KEYES

“But you love each other,” she said, with desperation.

“But we're making each other miserable.”

“Love conquers all,” Mum coaxed, as if I were five.

“No. It. Doesn't,” I spelled out, an edge of hysteria to my voice.

“Do you think I'd do something as awful as leave him if it was that easy?”

That plunged her into sulky, that's-no-way-to-talk-to-your-mother silence.

“So you're not going to tell us what's going on?” Helen concluded.

“But you know everything that's happened.” Okay, not quite everything, but truffle woman was not the cause, she was simply the final nail in the coffin.

Scornfully Helen flicked her eyes upward. “This is like your driving test all over again.”

I might have known someone would bring that up. The bitterness still ran deep.

When I was twenty-one I took driving lessons, then took my test and passed it. Only then did I tell any of my family, and, instead of being delighted for me, they were hurt and confused. They felt left out, shortchanged, deprived of a drama, and they couldn't understand why I hadn't involved them.

“I could have given you a St. Christopher's medal for your test,”

Mum had protested.

“But I didn't need it, I passed anyway.”

“I could have taken you out to practice in my car,” Dad said wistfully. “I see Maurice Kilfeather takes Angela out.”

“We could have waved you off from the test center,” Claire pointed out.

Which was precisely the kind of thing I'd wanted to avoid. Doing my driving test was just something I'd wanted to do on my own.

I didn't think it was anyone else's business. And if I was being brutally honest, I'd have to acknowledge the issue of failure—if I'd failed my test, I'd never have been allowed to forget about it.

Finally Dad spoke. “How's work?”

I WAS DREADING
the first night away from Garv. (And all the subsequent nights, but first things first.) I was sure I wouldn't sleep, because wasn't that what happened to people in distress? But I needn't have worried. I slept as if I was dead and woke up in a bed and a room that I didn't recognize.
Where's this
? For a moment my curiosity was almost pleasant, then reality tumbled down onto me.

That day was one of the most dislocated of my life. With no job to show up at, my time was spent mostly in my bedroom, keeping out of Mum's way. Even though she was very vocal about how this was just a phase I was going through and that I'd be back with Garv in no time, my popularity with her was enjoying an all-time low.

Helen, on the other hand, was treating me like a visiting freak show and dropped by to torment me before she went to work.

Anna came too, in an attempt to protect me.

“God, you're still here,” Helen marveled, marching into the room.

“So you've really left him? But this is all wrong, Maggie, you don't do this sort of thing.”

I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with my sisters the previous Christmas—we were trapped in the house without even a Harrison Ford film to take our minds off things and were driven to wondering what each of us would be if we were food instead of people. It was decided that Claire was a green curry because they were both fiery, then Helen

36 / MARIAN KEYES

decreed that Rachel was a Gummi Bear, which pleased Rachel no end. “Because I'm sweet?”

“Because I like to bite your head off.”

Anna—“This is nearly too easy,” Helen had said—was some kind of nut. And I was “plain yogurt at room temperature.”

Okay, so I knew I'd never been within a shout of being, say, an After Eight (“thin and sophisticated”) or a gingersnap cookie (“hard and interesting”), but I saw nothing wrong with my being a trifle (“has hidden depths”). Instead, I was the dullest thing, the most flavorless thing anyone could think of—plain yogurt at room temperature. It cut me deep, and even when Claire said that Helen was a human durian fruit because she was offensive and banned in several countries, it wasn't enough to lift my spirits.

Back in the present, Helen continued gibing me. “You're just not the type to leave her husband.”

“No, having a broken marriage isn't the sort of thing that plain yogurt at room temperature does, is it?”

“What?” Helen sounded confused.

“I
said
, having a broken marriage isn't the sort of thing that plain yogurt at room temperature does, is it?”

She gave me a funny look, muttered something about bridesmaids who looked like the elephant man and what was she supposed to do about it, then finally left. Anna got into bed beside me and linked her arm through mine.

“Plain yogurt can be delicious,” she said quietly. “It's perfect with curry. And…” After a long, searching pause, she added, “And they say it's very good for a yeast infection.”

I languished in the house, with no real idea of what I was doing there. I let telly programs wash over me: “Smokin' crack ain't so all that”; “Girlfrien', your butt is bigger than my car.” Whenever they finished I'd find myself looking around, confused to find myself no longer in the Chicago projects, but in a flowery-curtained, befigurined, suburban Dublin house. And not just any flowery-curtained, befigurined, sub

ANGELS / 37

urban Dublin house.
How have I ended up back here? What
happened
?

I felt like such a failure that I was afraid to leave the house. And I thought about Garv and the girl—a lot. So much that I'd had to go back to using my much-hated steroid cream on my unbearably itchy arm. I was tormented by her identity. Who was she, anyway?

How long had it been going on? And—God forbid—was it serious?

The questions scurried around incessantly; even as I watched two obese girls punching each other and Jerry Springer pretending to be appalled, another part of my brain was poring over the past few months with a magnifying glass, searching for clues and discovering nothing.