What Alice Forgot

“We were so happy.”

Elisabeth’s Homework for Jeremy 3 a.m.

Hi J. Ben drove off somewhere. I don’t know where he is.

I’m so tired.

Hey. You know how if you say a word over and over again, it starts to sound really weird?

Like, let’s say the word is, oh, I don’t know, INFERTILITY.

Infertility. Infertility. Infertility. Infertility.

It’s a twisty, curly, nasty word. Lots of syllables.

Anyway, Jeremy, my darling therapist (as Olivia would say), my point is that things become weird and pointless if you examine them for too long. I’ve thought about being a mother for so many years the whole concept has started to seem weird. I’ve wanted it, wanted it, wanted it. Now I’m not even sure if I wanted it in the first place.

Look at Alice and Nick. They were so happy before they had the children. And sure, they love their kids, but let’s be honest, they’re hard work. And it’s not like you get to keep those adorable babies. Babies disappear. They grow up. They turn into children who are not necessarily that cute at all.

Madison was the most beautiful baby. We adored her. But the Madison of today doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that baby. She’s so furious and strange and she can make you feel like an idiot. (Yes, Jeremy, a ten-year-old can make me feel inferior. That shows a lack of emotional maturity or something, doesn’t it?)

Tom used to bury his face in my neck and now he wriggles away if I try and touch him. And he tells you the plots of TV shows with a lot of unnecessary detail. It’s sort of dull. Sometimes I think of other things while he’s talking.

And Olivia is still gorgeous, but actually she can be manipulative. Sometimes it’s like she knows she’s being cute.

And the FIGHTS. You should see them fight. It’s amazing.

See. I’m a terrible auntie. I’m making bitchy remarks about those three beautiful children, whom I hardly see anymore anyway. So what sort of mother would I be? A horrible one. Maybe even an abusive one. They’d probably take my children away and give them to someone else. An infertile woman could adopt them.

You know, Jeremy, once, when Olivia was a toddler, I minded her for a whole day. Alice and Gina were out at some school function. Olivia was perfectly behaved and she was so cute, she would have won an award for the cutest baby, but you know, by the end of the day, I was BORED OUT OF MY SKULL from walking around after her and saying, no don’t touch that, ooooh yes, look at the bright light.

Bored. Tired. A bit irritable. I was relieved to hand her over when Alice came home. I felt as light as a feather.

How’s that? All this “oh, poor me” obsession with being a mother and I was bored after one day.

I’ve always secretly thought that Anne-Marie, my friend from the Infertiles, would make a terrible mother. She’s so impatient and brittle. But maybe they’re all thinking that about me, too. Maybe we’d all make terrible mothers. Ben’s mum is probably right when she says that “Nature knows best.” Nature knows that I would make a terrible mother. Each time I get pregnant, Nature says, “Actually, this kid would be better off dead than having a mother like her.”

After all, Ben’s mum couldn’t have children either and look at her, she DID make a terrible mother.

The bottom line is, we shouldn’t adopt.

I don’t want to be a mother anymore, Jeremy.

A mother. A mother. A mother. A mother.

Sounds like smother. It’s a weird word.

I don’t even know why I’m crying.

Frannie’s Letter to Phil Mr. Mustache turned up at my door this morning just as I was about to leave for Tai Chi.

I almost didn’t recognize him. He’d shaved off his mustache.

I said, “I hope you didn’t do that for me.”

His upper lip looked so naked! He seemed like an entirely different person. Softer and gentler. Although at the same time, more sophisticated and . . . masculine.

He was wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt and he said he’d been thinking he might give this “Tai whatchamacallit” a go, but he said he felt “shy” about turning up on his own.

I said, “Oh, yes, because you’re such a shy, retiring type.”

We went along to the Tai Chi, and he was utterly hopeless. I had to keep trying not to giggle like a naughty schoolchild. Afterward he looked so endearingly rumpled, I invited him back for a cup of tea and some of Alice’s banana muffins that she’d given me last week.

We had quite a chat. I told him how I’d recently become quite addicted to “Facebook” after an old student invited me to join. (Little Mattie Marks. Remember him, Phil? He’s some sort of IT big shot these days.) Mr. M was impressed. He said he used the Internet a lot but didn’t know anything about Facebook. It made me feel quite hip!

He told me about his two sons and how much he misses them. (One lives in the U.K. and the other is in Perth.) He said both his boys were adopted.

“My wife and I couldn’t have our own children,” he explained. “That’s why I felt so sorry for your granddaughter.”

(He says “granddaughter” so naturally, even though he knows I’m not really related to Elisabeth. It may be to do with his own children being adopted. Perhaps it’s not so presumptuous of him. Perhaps it’s rather nice. I can’t make up my mind.)

“It’s a very lonely feeling when all your friends are having babies,” he said. He told me he could still remember the expression on his wife’s face while they went to her niece’s baptism, even though it was over sixty years ago. “It made me want to punch a wall,” he said.

I wonder if he was reprimanding me for my “babies are not the be-all and end-all” comment. I wonder if he thinks I’m being a bit harsh about poor Elisabeth.

Do you know something, Phil? I had always secretly hoped that you and I might have our own little baby. Just the one. Boy or girl. Didn’t matter. I was thirty-eight, but I knew it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. One of the sixth-form mothers at the school had a baby at forty-one. She was almost embarrassed about it. She brought the baby to the school one day and I remember holding out my finger for the baby to clutch and suddenly thinking, I’m younger than her. I felt that sudden rush of disbelief and exhilaration you feel when your ticket number is called in a raffle. I could still be a mother, I thought, and I felt like dancing.