Modern Gods

“Not bad at all. I’ll give him a biscuit later.”

Judith took the bottle out of Alison’s hand, and bent down to put her face in Michael’s. He sat still strapped in his car seat on the living room floor, asleep.

“Oh, I know what my little boy needs, don’t I?”

As Alison stood up, Judith touched her arm.

“It’s not like Bill again, is it? He wouldn’t hurt you, would he?”

“Stephen wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

Alison waited for her mother to say, “It’s not flies I’m worried about,” accompanied by a steady imploring gaze that Alison would avoid meeting. But nothing happened, her mother moved away, and to cement her victory, Alison cheerfully lifted a millionaire’s shortcake and took a bite from it. She knew Judith thought her younger daughter had a history of making bad choices. But Judith herself hadn’t made many better ones. She’d married the first man who came along, and if they were still together that was part indolence and part convention. Whereas Alison had faced up and taken hard decisions and was in many ways a braver woman than her mother. No one could deny that. She’d risked things for love! She’d suffered! All of this she intimated by the brusque way she buttoned up the second and third buttons of her lemon-colored wool coat. Her mother walked past her, opened the fridge door, and rearranged various Tupperware containers.

“If you see your brother remind him he said he was coming for his dinner.”

“I wasn’t going to call into the office. I was just going to pick Isobel up.”

“Well, no rush. We’re going to be very happy here. Aren’t we?”

“Well, maybe I’ll call in at the church and check on the flowers. Just text me if you need anything, or if Mickey’s playing up.”

How Alison could christen her grandson with a lovely strong name like Michael—the name of an archangel no less—and then call him Mickey as if he were a gangster or a cartoon mouse was just beyond her. At times it seemed to Judith that her daughter held her in permanent contempt, and little decisions like these were designed purely to rile her. She knew it was irrational and unfair, but she felt it.

Kenneth came in from the funeral, plucked the tweed trilby from his head, and unwound the scarf delicately. It hurt today to lift his arms too high. Shrugging off his coat was taking some time, and Judith slipped behind him and began guiding one arm out of its sleeve. He pulled away.

“I can do it myself.”

“Just trying to—”

“But it’s not helpful. You’re getting in the way. I need to be able—”

“Calm down.”

Judith stepped back and lifted the wheaten loaf out of the bread bin. For over forty years of marriage, telling her husband to calm down was the closest Judith came to a daily mantra. Depending on the way the phrase was accented, the two words could mean almost anything—endearment, warning, threat. This “calm down” meant nothing in itself, but was designed to cut Kenneth off in his monologue; if it was allowed to continue, the trickle would turn to a torrent and carry him away into the kind of black despair it could take hours to dissipate. He had a remarkable gift for misery. The next step was to change the subject quickly, which Judith duly did.

“Big funeral? Do you want tea? A slice of wheaten?”

“I’ll have tea, yes. No bread. Not that many. A hundred maybe.”

She was surprised by how long it had taken to get used to watching this big bear of a man adapt himself to simple situations. To see him do such simple things with such tremulous care and physical trepidation. His eyes expressing fear, his fingers fiddling with a zipper. It was like the element he lived in had changed, had once been air and now was water, and the entire choreography of daily life had to be relearned. It was necessary to familiarize yourself with the actions of brushing your teeth, to study the order of the movements of getting into a car. It had been four years since the first stroke and heart surgery, but everything was still heavier, denser. For Kenneth, everything was a potential source of hurt.

Now he looked at her abdomen, at the hurt hiding in there, and asked, “You tell the kids?”

“I’ll tell them after the wedding. Sure, I’m not going to spoil everyone’s day.”

“Did you speak to Dr. Boyers?”

“I left a message.”

“You OK?”

“I’m all right.”

Kenneth watched her set the kettle on its base, the spout facing inward. When she went to the cupboard for cups, he adjusted it so it faced outwards, to let the steam vent away from the underside of the cupboards. She noticed and he watched her jaw perceptibly tighten with anger. It was not about cupboards and steam; it was about authority and submission, or men and women, or simply the ways of Kenneth and the ways of Judith. And so marriage goes, thought Judith. Everything becomes a sign and symbol of something else.

By four o’clock, Liz was awake and Alison had returned, though there was still no sign of Spencer.

In the living room Kenneth’s eyes were trained on yet another antiquing show on the TV, but in deference to the gathering of his daughters on the sofa, he voluntarily muted it.

“Mickey is a wee dote. God, those eyes.”

On cue, Michael appeared from the hallway, carrying a plastic dustpan in one hand and Kenneth’s tartan slipper in the other. Judith trailed behind, staring amorously at his blond curls.

“Cute, isn’t he? When he’s not screaming the house down.”

“Shooooooooos!” Michael tunefully declaimed, and handed his mother the slipper.

“The thing with Stephen is,” Alison said, “he’s very family orientated.”

“Is he from a big family?”

“It’s terrible actually. There was a brother in England but he’s dead now. Cancer. And his parents died years ago. He’s on his own. But he loves family, he’s so good with the kids.”

Liz played along, though she did not see why her sister was so set on selling her life to her, as if without the approval of others she could hardly bear to live it. Then it occurred to her that it was perhaps a mark of how unsure Alison was about the marriage if she was seeking even Liz’s affirmation.

In Liz’s eyes, her younger sister had always been much closer to Judith and Kenneth than she was, and if their parents didn’t always applaud Alison’s choices, there was no doubt she was the daughter they understood. After all, she stayed behind while Liz had upped and left. She shared their setting—the restaurants, doctors, local news, TV shows, all the cast and daily apparatus of their life—and Alison had the Donnelly gift of reducing something complex to a clichéd phrase, and saying it over and over, singing it almost. She had the same strange numerous compartments of expectation and orthodoxy, growing predictably outraged—like Kenneth—because a Christmas card was not returned, or a neighbor’s lawn was left to get too long, or the tip was automatically added to a bill.

If, occasionally, Judith liked to complain on the phone to Liz about Alison, it was with the understanding that Liz would not offer her own criticisms of her sister but simply listen and agree. Whatever competition there had been for their parents’ affection, Liz was certain that she’d withdrawn, honorably, from it, having accepted defeat. During the years when their parents had argued continually—when Spencer was a toddler—Judith had moved out for a night, to the flat above the estate agency, and so little did she trust Liz not to fight with Kenneth, and to look after Spencer, who was hysterical and wouldn’t leave his father, that she took Liz with her, entrusting Alison with her little brother’s care. Alison was the steady one, the responsible daughter.

Her father lifted a cork-lined, laminated coaster from the stack on the little table by his chair and lobbed it at Liz for the coffee she had in her hand. It landed on the sofa and she ignored it.

“Oh, dear,” Judith said, straightening up from looking in the cupboard under the sink, holding a can of Brasso and a cloth. “It’s so sad when a family just disappears.”

Everyone murmured in agreement. It was indeed awful when a family disappeared, though it did make your own look much more solid.

After Liz had helped her mother tidy the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels, and organize the glasses in the utility room, and clear various surfaces for the caterer to set her wares on, they found they had everything done, suddenly, at least until the caterers and marquee people started turning up the next day, and Judith announced she was “going to have a wee nap.”

“Does she often go and lie down during the day?”

Liz had never, as far as she could remember, known her mother to go to bed during the day. She’d rarely seen her sit down. Sometimes, in the late evening—after the dinner was served and the dishwasher loaded and the pots and pans washed and dried, and every surface cleared and wiped down, and the laundry done, and the piles of ironing completed—she might perch for a half hour before bed on the arm of a chair, watching TV distractedly, offering everyone tea or traybakes, always threatening to jump up again. Occasionally she’d sit properly, draw her legs up under herself, and read a paper from the rack by Kenneth’s chair—the Belfast Telegraph or the Mid-Ulster Mail—scanning it for people she knew. Sometimes she’d be working on a fat novel that one of the girls—her group of sixty-something female friends—had recommended, and would read steadily while Kenneth flicked the channels between football and golf and the news. But mostly she was vertical, industrious, quick.

“I think she’s tired,” Kenneth replied, not looking up from the quiz show.

“Has she been getting tired a lot?” Liz pushed on.

“None of us are getting younger. You want up here? You want up?”

Kenneth had been feeding Atlantic scraps from his ham sandwich, and Atlantic had found—what all dogs want—a brand-new god to worship. She stood now on her back legs, resting her front paws on the side of Kenneth’s armchair, her long foxy head propped on the little fanned paws. Animals sometimes seemed the only remaining recipients of Kenneth’s affection. Five or six years ago, home for Christmas, she’d been sitting reading in the conservatory and looked up to see him through the glass door, alone, wiping away a tear. Kenneth was sobbing, actually sobbing, as an Australian vet in Animal Hospital put down a black Labrador, whose big dumb beautiful eyes looked up at the vet and then were stilled. Her father, she realized suddenly—and wondered why she hadn’t put it in these terms before—was seriously depressed. In the intervening years, the evidence accumulated for this point of view. Several times she had tried to broach the topic with him, but he would not have it. She watched Atlantic lick his paw as her father looked at the dog with more pure affection than she could ever remember him showing his children.