Big Little Lies (21 page)

M
adeline pulled open the sliding door from the backyard and saw Abigail sitting on the couch, looking at something on her laptop. “Hey there!” she said, and winced at the fake cheer in her voice.

She couldn’t speak naturally to her own daughter. Now that Abigail only came on weekends, it felt like Madeline was the host and Abigail was an important guest. She felt like she had to offer her drinks and check on her comfort. It was
ridiculous
. Whenever Madeline caught herself behaving this way, she got so angry, she went too far the other way and brusquely demanded that Abigail perform some domestic chore, like hanging out a basket of washing. The worst part was that Abigail behaved exactly like the good-mannered guest that Madeline had brought her up to be and picked up the laundry basket without comment, and then Madeline was guilty and confused. How could she ask Abigail to hang out washing when Abigail didn’t bring any washing home with her? It was like asking your guest to hang out your laundry. So then she’d rush out to help put the clothes
on the line and make stilted chitchat while all the words she couldn’t say poured through her head:
Just come back home, Abigail, come back home and stop this. He left us. He left you. You were my reward. Missing out on you was his punishment. How could you choose him?

“Whatcha doing?” Madeline plonked herself on the couch next to Abigail and peered at the laptop screen. “Is that
America’s Next Top Model
?”

She didn’t know how to
be
around Abigail anymore. It reminded her of trying to be friends with an ex-boyfriend. That studied casualness of your interactions. The fragility of your feelings, the awareness that the little quirks of your personality were no longer so adorable; they might even be just plain annoying.

Madeline had always played up to her role in the family as the comically crazy mother. She got overly excited and overly angry about things. When the children wouldn’t do as they were told, she huffed and she puffed. She sang silly songs while she stood at the pantry door: “Where, oh where, are the tinned tomatoes? Tomatoes, wherefore art thou?!” The kids and Ed loved making fun of her, teasing her about everything from her celebrity obsessions to her glittery eye shadow.

But now, when Abigail was visiting, Madeline felt like a parody of herself. She was determined not to pretend to be someone she wasn’t. She was forty! It was too late to be changing her personality. But she kept seeing herself through Abigail’s eyes and assuming that she was being compared unfavorably to Bonnie. Because she’d chosen Bonnie, hadn’t she? Bonnie was the mother Abigail would prefer. It actually had nothing to do with Nathan. The mother set the tone of the household. Every secret fear that Madeline had ever had about her own flaws (she was obviously too quick to anger, often too quick to judge, overly interested in clothes, spent far too much money on shoes, thought she was cute and funny when perhaps she was just annoying and tacky) was now at the forefront of her mind.
Grow up,
she
told herself.
Don’t take this so personally. Your daughter still loves you. She’s just chosen to live with her father. It’s no big deal.
But every interaction with Abigail was a constant battle between “This is who I am, Abigail, take it or leave it” and “Be better, Madeline, be calmer, be kinder, be more like Bonnie.”

“Did you see Eloise get kicked off last week?” asked Madeline. This is what she would normally say to Abigail, so this is what she said.

“I’m not looking at
America’s Next Top Model
,” sighed Abigail. “I’m looking at Amnesty International. I’m reading about the violation of human rights.”

“Oh,” said Madeline. “Goodness.”

“Bonnie and her mum are both members of Amnesty International,” said Abigail.

“Of course they are,” murmured Madeline.
This must be how Jennifer Aniston feels,
thought Madeline,
whenever she hears about Angelina and Brad adopting another orphan or two.

“What?”

“That’s great,” said Madeline. “I think Ed is too. We give a donation each year.”

Oh, God, listen to yourself! Stop competing!
Was it even true? Ed might have let his membership lapse.

She and Ed did their best to be good people. She bought raffle tickets for charity, gave money to street performers, and was
always
sponsoring annoying friends who were running yet another marathon for some worthy cause (even though the true cause was their own fitness). When the kids were older, she assumed she would do some sort of volunteer work like her own mother did. That was enough, wasn’t it? For a busy working mother? How dare Bonnie make her question every choice she made?

According to Abigail, Bonnie had recently decided she wasn’t having any more children (Madeline didn’t ask why, although she
wanted to know) and so she’d donated Skye’s pram, stroller, cot, change table and baby clothes to a battered women’s shelter. “Isn’t that amazing, Mum?” Abigail had sighed. “Other people would just sell that stuff.” Madeline had recently sold Chloe’s old baby dresses on eBay. Then she’d gleefully spent the money on a new pair of half-price designer boots.

“So what are you reading about?” Was it good for a fourteen-year-old girl to be learning about the atrocities of the world? It was probably wonderful for her. Bonnie was giving Abigail a social conscience, while Madeline was just encouraging poor body image. She thought about what poor Jane had said about society being obsessed with beauty. She imagined Abigail going into a hotel room with a strange man and him treating her the way that man had treated Jane. Rage ballooned. She imagined grabbing him by the hair on the back of his head and smashing his face over and over against some sort of concrete surface until it was a bloody, pulpy mess. Good God. She watched too much violent TV.

“What are you reading about, Abigail?” she said again, and hated the irritable edge in her voice. Did she have PMS again? No. It wasn’t the right time. She couldn’t even blame that. She was just permanently bad-tempered these days.

Abigail sighed. She didn’t lift her eyes from the screen. “Child marriage and sex slavery,” she said.

“That’s awful,” said Madeline. She paused. “Maybe don’t . . .”

She stopped. She wanted to say something like
Don’t let it upset you
, which was a terrible thing to say, which was just the sort of thing a privileged, frivolous, white Western woman would say, a woman who took far too much genuine pleasure in a new pair of shoes or a bottle of perfume. What would Bonnie say?
Let us meditate on this together, Abigail. Ohmmm.
See? There was her superficiality again. Making fun of meditation. How did meditating hurt anyone?

“They should be playing with dolls,” said Abigail. Her voice was thick with angry teariness. “Instead, they’re working in brothels.”

You
should be playing with dolls,
thought Madeline.
Or at least playing with makeup.

She felt a surge of righteous anger with Nathan and Bonnie, because, actually, Abigail
was
too young and sensitive to know about human trafficking. Her feelings were too fierce and uncontrolled. She had inherited Madeline’s unfortunate talent for instant outrage, but her heart was far softer than Madeline’s had ever been. She had too much empathy (although, of course, all that excessive empathy was never directed at Madeline or Ed, or Chloe and Fred).

Madeline remembered when Abigail was only about five or six and so proud of her new ability to read. She’d found her sitting at the kitchen table, her lips moving as she carefully sounded out a headline on the front page of a newspaper with an expression of pure horror and disbelief. Madeline couldn’t remember now what the article was about. Murder, death, disaster. No. Actually she did remember. It was a story about a child taken from her bed in the early eighties. Her body was never found. Abigail still believed in Santa Claus at that time. “It’s not true,” Madeline had told her quickly, snatching up the paper and vowing never to leave it anywhere accessible ever again. “It’s all made-up.”

Nathan didn’t know about that, because Nathan wasn’t there.

Chloe and Fred were such different creatures. So much more resilient. Her darling little tech-savvy, consumerist savages.

“I’m going to do something about this,” said Abigail, scrolling down the screen.

“Really?” said Madeline
. Well, you’re
not going to Pakistan, if that’s what you’re thinking. You’re
staying right here and watching
America’s Next Top Model
,
young lady.
“What do you mean? A letter?” She brightened. She had a marketing degree. She could write a better
letter than Bonnie ever could. “I could help you write a letter to our MP petitioning for an—”

“No,” interrupted Abigail scornfully. “That achieves nothing. I’ve got an idea.”

“What sort of idea?” asked Madeline.

Afterward she would wonder if Abigail might have answered her truthfully, if she could have put a stop to the madness before it even began, but there was a knock on the front door just then and Abigail snapped shut the laptop.

“That’s Dad,” she said, getting to her feet.

“But it’s only four o’clock,” protested Madeline. She stood up too. “I thought I was driving you back at five.”

“We’re going to Bonnie’s mother’s for dinner,” said Abigail.

“Bonnie’s mother,” repeated Madeline.

“Don’t make a drama of it, Mum.”

“I didn’t say a word. I didn’t say, for example, that you haven’t seen
my
mother in weeks.”

“Grandma is too busy with her social life to even notice,” Abigail said accurately.

“Abigail’s dad is here!” yelled Fred from the front of the house, meaning,
Abigail’s dad’s car is here!

“Gidday, mate!” Madeline heard Nathan say to Fred. Sometimes just the sound of Nathan’s voice could evoke a wave of visceral memory: betrayal, resentment, rage and confusion.
He just left. He
just walked out and left us, Abigail, and I couldn’t
believe it, I just could not believe it, and that
night, you cried and cried, that endless new baby cry that—

“Bye, Mum,” said Abigail, and she leaned down to kiss her compassionately on the cheek, as if Madeline were an elderly aunt she’d been visiting and now,
phew
, it was time to get out of this musty place and go back home.

Stu:
I’ll tell you something I do remember. I ran into Celeste White once. I was on the other side of Sydney doing a job and I had to go pick up some new taps because someone had stuffed up . . . anyhow, long story short, I’m walking through a Harvey Norman store where they had all the bedroom furniture on display, and there’s Celeste White, lying flat on her back in the middle of a double bed, staring at the ceiling. I did a double take and then said, “Hello, love,” and she jumped out of her skin. It was like I’d caught her robbing a bank. It just seemed strange. Why was she lying on a discount double bed so far from home? Gorgeous-looking woman, stunning, but always a bit . . . skittish, you know. Sad to think about it now. Very sad.

A
re you the new tenant?”

Celeste jumped and nearly dropped the lamp she was carrying.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” said a plumpish, forty-ish woman in gym gear, emerging from the apartment across the
corridor. She was accompanied by two little girls, who looked like they were twins about the same age as Josh and Max.

“I’m sort of the new tenant,” sad Celeste. “I mean, yes, I am. I’m not sure exactly when we’re moving in. It might be a while.”

This hadn’t been part of the plan. Talking to people. That was much too real. This whole thing was
hypothetical
. It would probably never actually come to be. She was just toying with the idea of a new life. She was doing it to impress Susi. She wanted to go back to her next appointment with her “plan” all in place. Most women probably had to be nudged along for months. Most women probably came back to their next appointment having done nothing. Not Celeste. She always did her homework.

“I’ve taken a six-month lease on a flat,” she planned to tell Susi, casually, briskly. “In McMahons Point. I could walk into North Sydney. I’ve got a friend who is a partner at a small law firm in North Sydney. She offered me a job about a year ago, and I turned it down, but I’m sure she could still find me something. Anyway, if that didn’t work out, I could get a job in the city. It’s just a short ferry ride.”

“Wow,” Susi would say. She’d raise her eyebrows. “Good job.”

Top of the class for Celeste. What a good girl. What a well-behaved battered wife.

“I’m Rose,” said the woman. “And this is Isabella and Daniella.”

Was she serious? She called her children Isabella and Daniella?

The girls smiled politely at her. One of them even said, “Hello.” Definitely twins with far better manners than Celeste’s boys.

“I’m Celeste. Nice to meet you!” Celeste turned the key as fast as she could. “I’d better—”

“Do you have kids?” said Rose hopefully, and the little girls looked at her hopefully.

“Two boys,” said Celeste. If she mentioned that she had twin boys, the amazing coincidence would create at least five more minutes of conversation she couldn’t bear.

She pushed open the door with her shoulder.

“Let me know if you need anything!” said Rose.

“Thanks! See you soon.” Celeste let the door go, and the two little girls begin to squabble over whose turn it was to push the button for the elevator. “Oh for God’s sake, girls, must we do this every single time?” said their mother in what was obviously her normal voice, as opposed to the polite social voice she’d just used for Celeste.

As soon as the door closed there was complete silence, the mother’s voice cut off midsentence. The acoustics were good.

There was a mirrored feature wall right next to the door that looked like it was left over from an ambitious decorating project in the seventies. The rest of the place was completely neutral: blank white walls, hard-wearing gray carpet. Your quintessential rental property. Perry owned rental properties that were probably just like this. Theoretically, Celeste owned them too, but she didn’t even know where they were.

If they’d saved for an investment property together, just
one
, then she would have enjoyed that. She would have helped renovate it, picked out tiles, dealt with the real estate agent, said, “Oh yes, of course!” when the tenant asked for something to be fixed.

That was the level of wealth where she would have felt comfortable. The unimaginable depths of Perry’s money sometimes made her feel nauseated. She saw it on the faces of people when they saw her house for the first time, the way their eyes traveled across the wide expanses, the soaring ceilings, the beautiful rooms set up like little museum displays of wealthy family life. Each time, she battled with equal parts pride and shame. She lived in a house where every single room silently screamed:
WE
HAVE A LOT OF MONEY. PROBABLY MORE THAN YOU.

Those beautiful rooms were just like Perry’s constant Facebook posts: stylized representations of their life. Yes, they did sometimes sit on that gloriously comfortable-looking couch and put glasses of
champagne on that coffee table and watch the sun set over the ocean. Yes, they did. And sometimes, often, it was glorious. But that was also the couch where Perry had once held her face squashed into the corner and she’d thought she might die. And that Facebook photo captioned
Fun day out with the kids
wasn’t a lie because it
was
a fun day out with the kids, and anyway, they didn’t have a photo of what happened after the kids were in bed that night. Celeste’s nose bled too easily. It always had.

She carried the lamp into the main bedroom of the apartment. It was quite a small room. She’d get a double bed. She and Perry had a king-size bed, of course. But this room would be crammed even with a queen.

She placed the lamp on the floor. It was a colorful, mushroom-shaped art deco lamp. She’d bought it because she loved it and because it was a style Perry would hate; not that he would have stopped her having it if she really wanted it, but he would have winced every time he looked at it, the way she would have winced at some of the gloomy-looking modern art pieces he pointed out in galleries. So he didn’t buy them.

Marriage was about compromise. “Honey, if you really like that girlie, antique look, I’ll get you the real thing,” he would have said tenderly. “This is just a cheap, tacky rip-off.”

When he said things like that, she heard,
You’re cheap and tacky.

She would take her time setting up this place with cheap, tacky things that she liked. She went to open one of the blinds to let in some light. She ran her fingertip along the slightly dusty windowsill. The place was pretty clean, but next time she’d bring some cleaning stuff and get it spick-and-span.

Up until now, she had never been able to leave Perry because she couldn’t imagine where she would go, how they would live. It was a mind-set. It seemed impossible. This way, she would have an entire life set up, awaiting activation. She would have beds made up for the
boys. She would have the fridge stocked. She would have toys and clothes in the cupboard. She wouldn’t even need to pack a bag. She would have an enrollment form filled out for the local school.

She would be ready.

The next time Perry hit her, she wouldn’t hit him back, or cry, or lie on her bed. She would say, “I’m leaving right now.”

She studied her knuckles.

Or she’d leave when he was out of the country. Maybe that would be better. She would tell him on the phone, “You must know we couldn’t go on like this,” she’d say. “When you come back we’ll be gone.”

It was impossible to imagine his reaction.

If she truly, actually left.

If she ended the relationship then the violence would stop too, because he would no longer have the right to hit her, just like he would no longer have the right to kiss her. Violence was a private part of their relationship, like sex. It would no longer be appropriate if she left him. She wouldn’t belong to him in the same way. She’d get back his respect. Theirs would be an amicable relationship. He’d be a courteous but cold ex-husband. She knew already that the coldness would hurt her more than his fists ever had. He’d meet someone else. It would take him about five minutes.

She left the main bedroom and walked down the tiny corridor to the room that would be for the boys. There was just enough room for two single beds, side by side. She’d get them new quilt covers. Make it look nice. She was breathing hard, trying to imagine their baffled little faces. Oh, God. Could she really do this to them?

Susi thought that Perry would try to get sole custody of the children, but she didn’t know Perry. His anger flared like a blowtorch and then died. (Unlike hers. Celeste was angrier than he was. She held grudges. Perry didn’t hold grudges, but Celeste did. She was awful. She remembered it all. She remembered every single time, every single word.) Susi had insisted that she begin documenting the “abuse,”
as she called it. “Write everything down,” she’d said. “Take photographs of your injuries. Keep doctors’ reports. It could be important in any court cases or custody hearings.” “Sure,” Celeste had said, but she had no intention of doing so. How humiliating to see their behavior written down. It would look like they were describing a children’s fight.
I snapped at him. He yelled at me. I
yelled back. He pushed me. I hit him. I got a bruise. He got a scratch.

“He wouldn’t try to take the children away from me,” Celeste had told Susi. “He’d do what was best for them.”

“He might think it was best for the children to stay with him,” Susi had told Celeste in her cool, matter-of-fact way. “Men like your husband often do go for custody. They have the resources. The money. The contacts. It’s something you need to prepare for. Your in-laws might get involved. Suddenly everyone will have an opinion.”

Her in-laws. Celeste felt a pulse of grief. She’d always loved being part of Perry’s big, extended family. She loved the fact that there were so many of them: random aunties, hordes of cousins, a trio of silver-haired, grumpy great-uncles. She loved the fact that Perry didn’t even need a list when he went duty-free shopping for perfume.
Chanel Coco Mademoiselle for Auntie Anita, Issey Miyake for Auntie Evelyn,
he’d murmur to himself. She loved seeing Perry throw his arms around a favorite male cousin, tears in his eyes because they hadn’t seen each other for so long. It seemed to prove something essentially good about her husband.

Right from day one, Perry’s family had warmly welcomed Celeste, as if they sensed that her own small, self-effacing family didn’t quite stack up next to theirs, and that they could give her something she’d never had, besides money. Perry and family offered abundance in everything.

When Celeste sat at the big, long table, eating Auntie Anita’s spanakopita, watching Perry chat patiently with the grumpy
great-uncles, while the twins ran wild with the other kids, a vision of Perry hitting her would flash in her head, and it would seem impossible, fantastical, absurd, even if it had happened the night before, and along with the disbelief would come shame, because she knew it must somehow be her fault, because this was a good, loving family and
she
was the outsider, and imagine how appalled they would be to see her hitting and scratching their beloved Perry.

No one in that big, laughing family would ever believe that Perry could be violent, and Celeste had no desire for them to know, because the Perry who bought perfumes for his aunties was not the Perry who lost his temper.

Susi didn’t know Perry. She knew examples and case studies and statistics. She didn’t know that Perry’s temper was only one part of him, it wasn’t all of him. He wasn’t just a man who hit his wife. He was a man who read bedtime stories to his children and put on funny voices, who spoke kindly to waitresses. Perry wasn’t a villain. He was a man who just sometimes behaved very badly.

Other women in this situation were afraid that their husbands would find them and kill them if they tried to leave, but Celeste was afraid she’d miss him. The pure pleasure of seeing the boys run to him when he returned from a trip, watching him drop his bags and get straight down on his knees, arms held wide. “I need to kiss Mummy now,” he’d say.

This was not simple. This was just a very strange marriage.

She walked back through the apartment, ignoring the kitchen. It was small and poky. She didn’t want to think about cooking in that kitchen. The boys whining:
I’m hungry! Me too!

Instead she went back into the main bedroom and plugged the lamp into the electrical outlet. The electricity was still on. The colors of the lamp turned rich and vibrant. She sat back and admired it. She
loved
her funny-looking lamp.

After she moved in she would have Jane and Madeline over to visit. She would show them her lamp and they’d cram onto that tiny balcony and have afternoon tea.

If she left Pirriwee, she’d miss her morning walks around the headland with Jane. For the most part they’d walked in silence. It was like a shared meditation. If Madeline had walked with them, they would have all three talked the whole time, but it was a different dynamic when it was just Jane and Celeste.

Recently, they’d both began to tentatively open up. It was interesting how you could say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table. Celeste thought of the morning when Jane had told her about Ziggy’s biological father, the repulsive man who had more or less raped her. She shuddered.

At least sex with Perry had never been violent, even when it followed violence, even when it was part of their strange, intense game of making up, of forgiving and forgetting. It was always about love, and it was always very, very good. Before she met Perry, she had never felt as powerful an attraction to a man, and she knew she never would again. It wasn’t possible. It was too specific to them.

She would miss sex. She would miss living near the beach. She would miss coffee with Madeline. She would miss staying up late and watching DVD series with Perry. She would miss Perry’s family.

When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once. Madeline had been close to Nathan’s older sister, but now they rarely saw each other. Celeste would have to give up Perry’s family as well as everything else.