SHORT STORY: for my friend, Alice.
Mavis was a survivor, everybody said so. It was a good thing. It meant she could never go back, because surviving meant you always moved forward. She comforted herself with that thought. She was a wayfarer on the periphery of things now. Walking, always walking, trying to find a way through the forest. It hadn’t always been like that. Once upon the time before she had been in the middle of things, immersed in a make-believe life that from the outside looked like nothing could go wrong. It was true though, that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.
Her mother had always said that, favouring idiomatic speech over just about everything else. “You can’t judge a book by its cover, Mavis,” she would say as she downed another glass of brandy. “Look at me, how put together I am, you’d never guess I like a bit of a tipple.” Mavis didn’t believe that quoting idioms was any type of way to live your life especially when it came to her Mother because in reality you could guess she liked a bit of a tipple. Her words ran together like they were trying to outdo one another, and in spite of the overuse of the hairspray she bought in packs of twelve from Amazon, her hair was dishevelled and falling around her face. As if she’d fallen asleep on the floor.
When her Mother drank, she would prop her head on one hand in-between swigs, leaning to the left. The stiffly coiffed hair would lean too, threatening to spill like an avalanche. Her Mother still wore Revlon foundation from the ’90s that she had bought in bulk when she had discovered it was being discontinued, claiming it was ‘her shade.’ The foundation rendered her wan, weary-eyed, clumping on her face in the summer heat, but she insisted on wearing it, anyway.
In her heyday her Mother had been a fashion buyer for the biggest Department store in town. Little Mavis had always regarded her as being hugely glamorous but not anymore, now she was just unkempt in her ill-fitting twin sets and worn down pumps almost scuffed white at the toes. She wore those pumps like they were badges of honour, while knocking back endless glasses of brandy.
She began drinking after Mavis’ father left. “He left me for a fatter, uglier woman,” she said. “I don’t understand it. She doesn’t even have a proper job. Some people just don’t know what side their bread is buttered on.” Mavis understood why her father liked the fatter, uglier woman. Veronica had a kind smile and when she hugged you, you were drawn in, cushioned by her snugness. Mavis felt safe in Veronica’s embrace. She worked in the local Italian restaurant as a sous chef and even on her days off smelled like basil, garlic and tomatoes. In Veronica’s case you could judge a book by its cover, because what you saw was what you got. Veronica felt like home.
Mavis’ mother didn’t like it when Mavis stayed with her father and Veronica three days a week, especially when she came home with trays of the lasagna and jars of pasta sauce Veronica was famous for. Mavis could tell her Mother had been drinking heavily when she was gone by the number of empty bottles of brandy she found in the cupboard under the kitchen sink and the sour smell like vomit in the bathroom. On bin night Mavis sneaked up and down the street putting the empty brandy bottles in other people’s recycling bins so the neighbours wouldn’t know how much her Mother had been drinking.
Mavis cut Veronica’s lasagna into thick squares and warmed it in the oven. The house was steeped in richness. Mavis wondered if the smell of the lasagna was the way Tuscany smelled, or Rome. It made her want to travel to places where moonlight shone on piazzas and the landscape was full of rolling hills and the bluest of waters. She’d seen that on a poster in the Travel Agency she walked past every day on her way home from school. “Come to Italia,’ it said. “Land of rolling hills and pristine, blue waters.” Mavis dreamed of seeing a place like that.
Her Mother wouldn’t eat the lasagna. “You think I’m going to eat that muck?” she said. “You think a tray of lasagna makes up for what she did? She tore our family apart, she’s barking up the wrong tree if she thinks a tray of lasagna will make things right. My heart is in pieces here, you think a bit of pasta will make me bury the hatchet?”
Mavis realised after the fact that she had married Ben to get away from her mother. She had convinced herself she loved him to make her reason for marrying him less apparent.
Mavis was studying to be a doctor at University and instead of expressing pride in her daughter’s academic achievements, her Mother bemoaned her appearance. “You’re wearing beige pants and a white shirt buttoned to the collar. To the collar. You have on no make-up and your hair is in a bun, and you wear glasses,” she said. “Can’t you get contacts, for God’s sake? You know what they say, don’t you? Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
But Ben made a pass at her, many passes. He was a Marketing major and a great talker. When Mavis first met him her Mother’s voice crept into her head straight away “He could sell ice to the Eskimos, that one,” but she pushed the voice aside, thrilled and disbelieving that a man like Ben was interested in her. “You’re different from the other girls,” he said. “You’re focused. I like how you don’t waste a lot of time on friendships. You’re very attractive in an angular kind of way.”
Mavis began to learn that much of what Ben said to her – how he liked her differences, her lack of friends, even that he had felt he had known her all of his life – was actually an indication of a controlling personality. He could control her better if she had no back up. She wasn’t stupid, she knew that, but she married him, anyway.
It was a small service in the local Registry Office. Three guests attended the wedding. Two people Mavis didn’t know who acted as the witnesses and her Mother dressed in a vintage Dior dress that Mavis suspected might be couture. It was figure-hugging and not terribly modest. It was also black. Mavis was sure it was inappropriate to wear black to a wedding, especially when it was combined with red lipstick, but she didn’t have the heart to say anything, her Mother was so overjoyed that her plain, unadorned daughter was getting married.
Ben got on very well with her mother. They drank together, with Ben replacing the brandy with cognac. “You don’t want to drink that peasant swill,” he said. “You’re too classy for that.” They drank and smoked and talked for hours, having indecorous conversations, peppered with sexual innuendoes and half-truths that oftentimes made Mavis hide in her Mother’s utility cupboard, biting her nails till her fingers were bloodied. Her Mother raved about Ben. “Marrying him was the best thing you ever did,” she said. “He is a catch. So handsome. A Prince among men.” Her Mother glowed in Ben’s presence, giggling and flirting like he was a suitor.
It wasn’t Ben’s unbefitting behaviour with her Mother that made her regret marrying him. Or his impassivity, his rigid insecurities, his jealousy when she was on a shift at the hospital with a male colleague, his constant checking of her phone, the berating and questioning that went on all night if she came home from work 5 minutes late, the refusal to let her join a yoga class or a book club, or limiting the amount of money she could spend on herself. Mavis could partly live with that, but what she hated, abhorred, could not tolerate, was physical violence.
Once, when she was 20, her Mother had slapped her across the face when Mavis had asked her to stop drinking. It was just before she met Ben. Mavis stood in front of the bathroom mirror for hours afterwards tracing the imprint of her Mother’s hand on her cheek with her finger. She wasn’t even outraged, but she knew that slap had changed everything. It was like the curtain being pulled down at the end of a play. “One day I will leave you all on your own, Mother,” she said to the mirror.
The slap had contributed to the overlooking of Ben’s shortcomings and the alacrity with which she’d married him. She didn’t regret marrying him until he slammed her head into the living room wall. She’d had to get petrol on the way home and two people crashed into each other at the Petrol Station exit, causing a massive pile up. She was stuck next to the bowser for almost an hour, waiting for the pile-up to clear. Ben called and texted her constantly as she was waiting for her turn to exit, with each call and text becoming more irrational and incensed.
When she finally got home he wouldn’t even let her explain, kicking her in the calves as she walked down the hallway. When she told him to stop he grabbed her round the throat, pushing her head against the wall, banging it so roughly she immediately developed a hematoma on the back of her head. When she pointed it out to Ben he was devastated, apologetic. He rang her Mother saying “You won’t believe what your daughter made me do.”
In that moment Mavis understood regret. The sense of it ached more than her head. She sat beside the television as Ben boasted about making her dinner. “My sorry dinner,” he said. Anyone would think something as meaningful as a ‘sorry dinner’ would have an element of largesse about it but Ben ended up serving her a bowl of canned tomato soup with the 3 day old bread rolls she’d been about to put in the compost bin. Mavis ate the soup while watching a documentary about Snow Monkeys in Japan as Ben fussed around her, getting her slippers and a blanket. Mavis went through the motions of pretending to be grateful while a voice in her head repeated “In the morning I will leave you all on your own, Ben.”
She left him the next day. Mavis came home halfway through her shift while Ben was still at work, filling her car with clothes, books, keepsakes she couldn’t part with. She rang her boss at the hospital, asked if he could transfer her out of the city metro area and within three days had another job. Ben called her over 40 times a day, casting blame, always casting blame. As she was driving out of the city to her new job she threw her phone out of the window. She saw it bounce, driven over, in her rearview mirror and laughed. It was the first time she’d laughed in years.
Now every day after work Mavis walked in the forest. A world came and went. The world before that contained everything she thought she had wanted. Now her world was lined with trees, shrubbery and birdsong at dusk. No one could see her in this world if she chose it. She could avoid anyone’s line of sight by hiding in the shadows of the trees. Even though there was no one looking to see her anymore.
Unsurprisingly, her Mother had sided with Ben, criticising her for wanting more than he was able to give. Mavis didn’t even try to argue, her Mother was so drunk these days she could barely pronounce the endings of words. Each time Mavis spoke to her she seemed to be slipping further into incoherence, unable to finish even her beloved idioms. “You’ll get a taste of your own…’ her Mother mumbled. Ben left her alone once he realised she was never coming back. The audacity of her desertion made him mute. Mavis’ Mother was right in the end, she did get a taste of her own medicine, and it tasted good.
Her Father and Veronica visited every weekend. Together they walked in the forest where layers of variegated leaves bedecked the walking trails like mosaics. There were days where they walked in silence, listening to the wind in the trees. It was their life now, in the forest with its unending hues, and ever-shifting sounds as leaves and twigs fell sometimes on stone, sometimes on moss.
When they finished their walk in the forest they went back home, drinking chianti as Veronica cooked Insalata Caprese, Calabrian chilli and lamb stracci pasta or strozzapreti with sausage, radicchio and sage. They ate and talked of their plans to travel to Tuscany in the European spring. Mavis was excited at the thought of finally seeing the rolling hills.
On one weekend Veronica asked her how she had managed to summon the courage to leave Ben. “It’s hard to leave a man like that,” she said. Mavis knew what she meant. She didn’t mean that Mavis was so desperately in love with Ben, that he was so definitely the type described as ‘one in a million,’ that she could never leave him. She meant that Ben was the type of man who had so much control over her that he would never let her leave.
“I have a line that can’t be crossed,” Mavis replied. “I got that from my Dad.” For most of her life she had viewed her Father as colourless, nondescript, but now she could see as he walked in the forest, the streaks of chestnut in his hair enhanced by sunshine, the way his eyes turned a lighter green when he caught sight of Veronica’s smile, that he was vivid, resplendent. She was grateful for lines that couldn’t be crossed that were as solid as walls that could never be scaled, and as the wind briefly parted the canopy of trees above her like a comb through hair, she caught a glimpse of blue sky. Suddenly, she knew she was safe.
