Authors: Anne Tyler,Monica Mcinerney
Chapter Twenty-two
B
y the time dawn came, Bett still wasn’t asleep. It was a combination of the wine she’d drunk and the conversation with Richard, she decided. It seemed to have unleashed memories she’d kept well locked away for more than three years. Uncomfortable memories.
The motel room felt very claustrophobic. She needed to feel her limbs moving, hoped that would calm her mind. She pulled on tracksuit pants and a light windbreaker, laced on her sneakers, and crept out of her room as the sun was coming up over the gum trees on the hill across the road. She started walking out of the town, headed north past the vineyards, the early autumn colors of red and yellow appearing on the edges of the leaves, still heavy with fruit.
Walking usually soothed her. She’d been walking for an hour a day most days, since the year after she first started working on the newspaper. Lola had gotten her started, in her usual blunt way. She had come into Bett’s room one afternoon, pulled a chair beside the bed Bett was lying on, and looked very serious. “Bett, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Do you remember that Piggy in the Middle jibe that upset you so much all those years ago?”
Bett had put down the bag of chips she was eating. “Yes.”
“You might want to be careful or someone will call you that again.” She ignored Bett’s shocked expression. “I’m not the body police, but I don’t like to see someone letting herself go, and that’s what you’re doing.”
“I’ve got every right to be as fat or as thin as I like. And you can hardly talk about clothes.” Stung by Lola’s remarks, she’d wanted to hurt her back.
“I’m happy with what I wear, Bett. And if it makes you happy, you can be as big as you like and wear shapeless clothes for the rest of your life. But you’re not happy, are you?”
For a moment her temper had flared. She had started to deny it. And then she had let the defenses down, confessed all to Lola. No, she wasn’t happy. She was extremely unhappy. Everything had been getting on top of her, and the only comfort had been food. Sitting for hours studying or working at her desk, she’d consoled herself by eating biscuits and cakes and chips. And she was wearing baggy clothes because that was all that fitted her these days.
Lola had listened and then waited for the tears to pass. “You have two choices, Bett. You can do something about your weight. Or you can stay as you are and decide not to let it bother you.”
“It does bother me. Of course it does. But what do I do? I’m useless in a gym or those aerobics classes. And I really love food. I don’t want to live off cabbage soup for the rest of my life.”
“What are those two things hanging off your waist there?”
“They’re my legs.”
“And what can they do?”
“Hold me up. Walk.”
“Walk. Exactly. From today I want you walking an hour a day, in rain or shine, fog or mist. Or, more likely, seeing as it’s summer, in blazing sunshine day after day.”
“Walk?”
“Walk. The world’s best exercise. The world’s best calmer. No one ever regrets a walk, Bett. I’ll be your trainer. I’ll make you do it.”
“You’ll walk with me?”
“On these old legs? I’d collapse in a moment. No, I’ll drop you off somewhere and then I’ll drive to the end of the walking trail and pick you up an hour later. And that way I’ll know how far you’ve gone, and if you get to me any quicker I’ll also know you’ve hitched a lift. And I can sit in the car and listen to classical music, which will calm me down at the same time the walk is calming you down. Is it a deal?”
Bett shook her grandmother’s hand. “It’s a deal.”
So she had started it, walking for an hour every day, along the dusty roads at the back of the Valley. Lola would drop her off and then head off in her small white car, driving past her, sitting upright in the car like a meerkat as she went past. The girls had always laughed at Lola’s style of driving. Bett walked until she met Lola waiting some miles away, reading the paper, doing a crossword, or sometimes dozing, classical music or a tape of musical highlights playing loudly from the car. Three months later Bett had summoned up the courage to go clothes shopping. She’d dropped only a size, but her body shape was different, firmer. She wasn’t skinny—she’d never be skinny—but she was fitter and had definitely found a figure that she was comfortable with.
She’d met Matthew not long afterward. He had moved to the Valley as a junior vet, while he was studying at the nearby agricultural college. She had interviewed him on his second day for a feature on new arrivals in the town. As an interview subject, he hadn’t seemed eligible, so she hadn’t been as nervous of him as she would have been if she met him in a bar or somewhere social. When he mentioned he didn’t know anyone locally yet, she’d invited him for a drink up at the motel bar. Her father had poured him beers and asked him lots of questions, while Bett sat beside him, joining in, enjoying the fact that it was her, not Anna or Carrie for once, sitting beside a good-looking man on these bar stools. Carrie had been on her overseas trip at the time. Anna was in Sydney.
The next weekend she and Matthew met again, this time in one of the three pubs in town. Again, she’d had no nerves. She felt relaxed with him. They met the weekend after that. It had become a regular thing, so stress-free, so easy that people in the town had started calling them a couple before they had thought too much about it themselves.
He’d kissed her on their fifth date. By the seventh date it had progressed to his hands touching her body. She’d decided six weeks into the relationship that she was going to sleep with him. She had gathered early on that he was more experienced than her. He’d had a number of girlfriends in Perth, he’d told her. On a weekend away, two months after they’d met, they’d had sex for the first time. It had been nice. Not earth-shattering, not painful, not even especially passionate, but comfortable. Easy. Gentle. It had continued that way, too. She was still self-conscious, not liking to make love in full light, feeling a bit awkward in the sexy underwear he started buying her. But the relief she felt outweighed any of that.
Because the truth was she had been a virgin when she started going out with Matthew. At twenty-eight years old. There had been several near misses, one or two very close encounters, but something had stopped her each time. She hadn’t told Matthew. He hadn’t guessed either. And she’d certainly never told Anna or Carrie. To the two of them, losing their virginity had been straightforward, pleasant. Just a matter of their getting it out of the way, was how it had seemed to Bett.
After five months she and Matthew had fallen into an easygoing relationship—meeting for drinks once or twice a week, dinner one night a week, after which she would usually go back to the house he was sharing in town. Sometimes they would make love, sometimes they wouldn’t. Then one night, out of the blue, he asked her to marry him. They were on their way back from a friend’s wedding. All night long the two of them had been teased, been asked when their big day would be. “A wedding begets a wedding, you two, remember.” The speeches had been very moving, the couple talking of their love for each other, the importance of their families, how they couldn’t wait to set up a home together, start their own family.
On the way back to Clare, Matthew told her more about his own childhood, how his parents had separated when he was young, and how he’d shifted around a lot. “I don’t want the rest of my life to be like that, Bett. I want to stay in one place. Have children. Make them feel safe.”
It had moved her almost to tears at the time, thinking of him being so lonely as a child, wanting to make sure that his own kids didn’t go through what he’d been through.
“You understand, Bett, don’t you? You know exactly what I mean.”
At the back of her mind, Bett wanted to disagree. She’d quite liked all the shifting they had done as children. But that night the champagne had taken over her emotions. “Of course I understand. And I think you’d be a great dad, make a great husband and father.”
He stopped the car, took her hands. “Bett, do you want to get married? You and me?”
She felt a warm, comforting feeling. Even a sort of relief again. She wasn’t a failure, someone loved her enough to want to marry her. They drove straight to the motel to tell her parents and Lola. That night, Carrie happened to ring from her travels and they told her the news, too. Word whipped around the town. Rebecca came into work with a bottle of champagne. It was a very happy time.
But had it felt as if it was something they both were destined to do, couldn’t live without doing? No. If anything, the pressure came from people around them, their friends, who were all busily planning their weddings and buying their first houses.
They didn’t rush into any wedding planning. They set a date, booked the church for a year’s time, to be sure of a place more than anything. Bett started thinking about her wedding dress. But, mostly, life settled down—Bett with her work at the newspaper, Matthew with his work and his study, both living separately. The fact that they were engaged was a nice link between them, but nothing momentous, life-changing. Again, that thought—comforting. Which had started to feel like boring.
Bett recalled coming at the subject in a roundabout way during a phone conversation with Anna. “Did you ever have doubts about Glenn before you married him, Anna?”
Anna got to the point immediately. “Why, are you having second thoughts about Matthew?”
“No.” A pause. “But it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that you’d start to see faults in someone, especially after you’ve been going out with each other for a while?”
“You and Matthew, you mean? You’ve only been together for less than a year, though, haven’t you? I think that’s still officially known as the honeymoon period. What sort of things are you talking about?”
“Well, with Glenn, for example, do you ever, um, I don’t know, run out of things to talk about? Find yourself sitting there wondering what to say next?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Anna laughed. “If we’re not talking, we’re usually fighting about something, so communication isn’t usually the issue. Have you run out of things to say to Matthew?”
Bett had, but she’d hedged around it. “Maybe we’ve just been too tired to talk. Things have been pretty busy work-wise for both of us.”
“But you must have things in common you can talk about, even if you are tired. Do you like the same things? The same sort of books or music?”
Bett grimaced. She and Matthew couldn’t be farther apart in their musical tastes. He was strictly John Cougar Mellencamp. He listened to the rock stations; she preferred the alternative ones. He liked listening to her play piano, but now that she thought about it, only when she was playing the sing-along Top 40 ones, not the musical numbers or classical pieces Lola had taught her. Matthew didn’t read much, either, apart from veterinary magazines, whereas Bett always had two or three books on the go.
“Um, no, not really.”
“Does he make you laugh?”
She had to think. Occasionally he did. But his main party piece was his impressions of Basil Fawlty, Frank Spencer, and Elvis Presley, and the truth was she’d never found them funny. A bit embarrassing, if anything. “Sometimes,” she said to Anna.
“What about his work?”
It had been interesting enough to begin with. But she had never been that keen on animals—well, she liked cats, but she wasn’t that keen on their inner workings, not to the extent of talking about intestinal worms over dinner most nights. Carrie was the animal fiend in their house, the one who collected photos of dogs and horses and stuck them on her schoolbooks and on the wall above her bed. She’d even had an imaginary horse for a few years, called Plink for some reason, on which she would gallop around the motel carpark, to the amusement of their guests.
Bett remembered thinking that the music Matthew listened to was the same sort of music Carrie had liked. That she wasn’t a reader either. That even the way he looked was more to Carrie’s taste than Bett’s. Carrie had always liked the rugged outdoor type.
She and Anna had talked about it some more, before Bett deliberately moved the conversation on to other matters. Four days later, she got a letter from Sydney.
Dear Bett,
I’ve been thinking a lot about our phone call last night, and rather than ring again, I decided to write this to you. First up, it’s none of my business, so there’s the disclaimer out of the way—if you take my advice, I won’t be held responsible for the consequences. But what seemed to be coming loud and clear through everything you were saying is that you have serious doubts about marrying Matthew. You kept asking whether I’d had the same sorts of doubts about marrying Glenn, but as I said last night, Glenn and I are completely different from you and Matthew. It’s a different combination, a different situation. The problems we have are not the problems you and Matthew might be having or would have.
Can I ask you a very blunt question? Why are you marrying him? I’m not too sure you love him, as you’re not too sure yourself, but do you even like him all that much? It worried me when you said that you and he don’t have all that much in common. It worried me even more when you said that you weren’t getting any younger, and besides all your friends were getting married. As Lola would say, if all your friends jumped off the roof, would you do that, too?
While I’m on the subject, why does Matthew want to marry you? He sounds like the world’s greatest romantic, but has he got a sense of you? Is he interested in you, as Bett, rather than as a woman he can marry? It just sounds to me as though the pair of you have drifted into something and don’t know how to drift out of it again.
If you are still reading this, then you are probably thinking I should mind my own business. But you are my sister and I love you dearly and what you do is my business. I worry about you, worry that sometimes you stick your head in the sand, pretend everything’s okay when it patently isn’t, just to avoid confrontations. But it would be a lot less messy to get out of this engagement than it would be to get out of a marriage. It sounds as if the two of you get on okay, and maybe you would make better friends than lovers, or better acquaintances than husband and wife. You said a telling thing last night, that because Matthew was your first serious relationship, you had nothing to compare him to, so you were just assuming that being bored, being annoyed, was normal. I don’t think that’s a normal comment for someone a few months away from tripping up the aisle.