“And why is it guys can’t go through their drawers without screwing every single thing up in a ball? I don’t know why I bother folding them at all!”
“I’m always after Jack to fold the towels properly. I mean I’m glad that pulls them out the dryer, but he just rolls them and shoves them into the linen closet. I keep telling him: if you fold them in thirds then you can just pull them out and hang them without having to refold them. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, he just won’t do it.”
“Guys are pigs.”
“I told Paul if I have to pick up his socks one more time I’m withholding sex.”
Six manicured hands slapped down on the table, their mates clasped to mock-shock O-mouths. Six shoulder-length bobs in various shades from mahogany to peroxide swung first forward and then back as their owners tossed their heads and shrieked with laughter, kohl-rimmed eyes huge. Bruno Mars told the world about his improbable love from an overhead speaker.
Jenn widened her rictus smile by 3mm for a second and a half. She was careful not to let her face fall too far as she relaxed the smile. One free hand wound a long section of her hair into a tight spiral. A section of it caught on a ragged nail. Jenn’s wide eyes and wide eyebrows were caused not by injectable toxins but by the struggle to balance her good manners with her rising urge to glass someone. With some effort she relaxed her grip on the stem of her cocktail glass.
How did I end up here, she wondered as Marcie started in on the tried and true topic of the Interchangeable His’s inability to feed the kids if she hadn’t left him written instructions – or preferably a Tupperware.
Jenn let her head fall back and her eyes, unfocussed, gazed up at the stamped-tin ceiling. But her mind was back in the Serengeti: She and Brendan tracking the hyena pack by it spoor, laughing and flirting and planning for the future. She tried to picture Kimmie and Jen C. and Carole in the melting heat and the dust, picking their way through the desert, picking up poop. She cracked her first genuine smile of the evening.
I’m experiencing some definite Fight or Flight reactions, Jenn noted. Look how still I am, poised, like a gazelle that has just spotted a movement in the long grass.
Another wave of laughter buffeted her. Another plastic-mama mining the comic possibilities of the satorially-challenged male of the species.
But I’m not the gazelle. One eyebrow twitched upward just a hair’s breadth. I’m the lioness. Jenn bared her teeth a little more as Kimmie delivered another killer punchline about the man she had sworn to love and honor. Every muscle was tense. Poised. Ready pounce.
Why do you put up with it? Have you so little self-respect that you chose to marry – or create – an idiot-child and then breed with him? What in the hell are you doing with your one and only life?
She drew in a deep breath, her diaphragm held taut. She felt her vocal muscles tense. The glass stem was smooth and brittle in her fist.
Lips drawn back in a snarl she prepared to throw herself in against the pack, knowing it was suicide to go it alone, but unable to do anything else.
Just as she leaped, she was cursed with a vision of Matthew – her sweet, soft-eyed, brilliant, gentle Matthew. Even if she didn’t need the pack, he did. For now.
“What about you, Jenn?” said a voice from the present.
Jenn snapped to. Twelve sets of eyes locked onto hers.
“Huh?”
“You’re very quiet. Is Brendan any use?”
Jenn thought about Brendan. Whistling while he stacked the dishwasher, bounding down the stairs swinging the baby in a basket of laundry, bringing her coffee, never forgetting to say thanks for the smallest of favours. Brendan, with whom she could argue about politics and religion and talk about the news of the day, and who kept her up to date with the latest news in their field while she, in turned shared the day’s data points about their own little cross-breeding experiment. She thought about her exasperation when he didn’t want talk at the end of a long day; his frustration when he realized she had – yet again – failed to summon up the will to deal with the breakfast dishes before he came home. She smiled as she remembered her increasingly frequent mid-afternoon freak-outs about whether or not they were still ‘in love’.
“Brendan?” she said. Six lions paced, all eyes on her, waiting for her next move. But some of them, she noted, looked a little scrawny, a little ragged around the edges. Vulnerable. Yes, she needed her pack, but sometimes, she reflected, sometimes the lioness reassesses the situation: decides the pride is failing and that it’s safer to go her own way, make her own future. Build a pride of her own. One moment, poised for the attack, the next relaxed, backing up, turning away. Moving towards something new.
Jenn shrugged.
“He’s pretty awesome.” she said into a yawning silence that grew longer and louder. “Really there’s nothing he can’t do. Or won’t.” She added, talking to herself now, rather than the confused pack, circling.
“I chose well.”
The urge to go home pulled at her like a physical force.
“Well ladies, I hate to break up the party, but I really have to get home. I’m sure you’ll manage without me.”
Beaming at the women who had done her such a great service, Jenn drained her glass, stood up and stalked out of the bar, her tail flicking happily at the long grass as she padded towards her future.
