The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

Steve made her want to cry was the final, incontrovertible reason why, no, there was categorically no one else. Not that she wanted there to be. She remembered watching Effie enviously at the airport, giggly and flirtatious with Ben—and just look what he had been up to behind everyone’s backs.

The memory of the wedding night and of Effie’s tears rose in her throat; she was finding Lizzie and Ben’s dishonesty hard to stomach.

Anna knew women who were raising children by themselves. There was Celia, for one, but many more at the local playgroups and libraries, and she marveled at the reserves of inner strength they must have to care for a child alone, when both she and Steve were regularly punch-drunk by the end of a day spent doing so between them.

She listened, over coffee and the heads of their adored children, to their hooted tales when they resumed dating again while thinking she would rather pull out her own teeth than make sexy small talk with a man she didn’t know, would happily set herself alight instead of offering up to someone new the wasteland she hid under her ever-baggier clothes.

Perhaps this was where she had been going wrong with Steve. Reveling in their familiarity even as it bred contempt between them. Forgetting that her husband was not, in fact, an extension of herself and Sonny but another person who might enjoy sexy small talk, who might want to visit the wasteland every so often.

She wrapped Steve—tall, thin, lovely Steve—in her arms what felt two or three times over. She wanted to bind him to her, to make them both one person. Anna felt like she was sewing a limb back on that she had temporarily lost.

“I think we need to change some stuff,” she said. “Well, I do really. I need to stop being so tense and so impatient with you.”

She breathed out. “And with Son.”

Steve took her hand, the red, raw one that had been held under the tap for the past half-hour as they’d both tried to remove a wedding ring that wasn’t her own. It had eventually squeaked off and clinked into the bottom of the vast porcelain sink in the kitchen. They reunited it with its pair—the other Bertie had found, rolled away under a chair in the Hall.

“You are a wonderful mother,” Steve told her, holding her eyes with his.

Anna started to cry again then, because it was the constant and wearying suspicion that this was not the case that lay at the heart of why she was so stressed, why she disliked herself so much, why she medicated with so many cookies.

“And I’m sorry for being so crap.” Steve rubbed his eyes so hard it made the carefully moisturized skin around her own smart in sympathy. “I’m really, really sorry for letting you down.”

“You’re not crap,” she said, soothing him, and she knew then that he wasn’t really. Whatever the wedding night’s high jinks might have looked like the next morning, it was nowhere near what her mind had turned it into. Steve was not that man; he never would be.

After Sonny’s birth, Anna had spent her maternity leave feeding and weaning, soothing and routine-ing. When she returned to work to sit at her vast desk, and to take difficult clients to lunch in dimly lit but keenly priced dim sum restaurants and City-boy steakhouses, then fight for them in court, Steve swapped in. Tapping away on his laptop at their kitchen table on one of their dilapidated dining chairs while Sonny was at nursery school, then persuading him—a trickier customer even than many of Anna’s—to eat his fish fingers and beans every evening. This was as close to equality as parenting came, except Steve was more likely than her to end up covered in tomato sauce.

Hers was a better deal than the ones most of the mothers she knew had struck with their partners. Some of them didn’t work and saw the lights go out behind their husbands’ eyes as soon as they started talking about their day at home. Some of them did and were expected to do the bulk of everything else anyway. Others relied on a complex patchwork of help from grandparents and neighbors and cleaning ladies and office juniors that cost them more in gratitude and resentment than even the most extortionate nursery fees.

Women from each of those categories exclaimed over Steve, and this, Anna thought, was really the thing she found annoying—not him. The fact that he wasn’t doing anything another woman hadn’t, and yet praise was heaped upon him for it just as surely as nobody seemed to remark on how hard she was working, how stretched thin she was.

Anna knew men—worked with men—who would talk about the mothers of their children as though they were sainted martyrs, broken on the wheel of nappy rash and BuggyFit, a zealot’s glint in their eyes at the hardships their wives faced and the sacrifices those beneficent, long-suffering women had made. Those men bought them designer handbags for Christmas and diamond rings for their VBAC—billable gestures with a value that offset how little help they actually offered at home and that Steve would never lavish on her but Anna sometimes thought she might want. But how many of those men would help clean actual worms from their child’s bumhole as he had? Steve had even sung “One Wink at a Time” by the Replacements as he’d done it.

When those men’s baby daughters got overlooked for an award or a first-class degree, started working and didn’t get the same pay or promotions, had a baby and found themselves unofficially demoted in the office—would they realize they’d had a hand in it? Probably not.

And none of this, Anna reiterated inside her own head, was Steve’s fault.

So why take it out on him?

“I’m sorry for being a cow, Stevo,” she whispered.

“You’re not a cow,” he smiled, pink-eyed, and persuaded her horizontal once more.

46. Lizzie