Page 49 of Lessons in Love at the Seaside Salon
That’s something else Ingrid has been saying for years. It didn’t help that Anna’s childhood ballet teacher used to admiringly say that Ingrid had legs like Cyd Charisse, hinting that Anna could have them too if she just persevered with the ballet. Genetics didn’t help her out in that instance, though, because Ingrid is several centimetres taller than her daughter.
‘Sure,’ Anna says, because agreeing is easiest. Then she stays quiet for a few seconds; there’s something else she wants to discuss with her mother and she’s working out how to start the conversation. Her mother is direct – when she wants to criticise Anna, that is. At other times she can circle around a subject. But they don’t have time for circling today, because the jazz ballet studio is only a fifteen-minute drive.
‘Did you ever want to leave Papa?’ she asks.
She hears a sharp intake of breath.
‘Why would you ask me that?’ Ingrid says sternly.
But that’s not a ‘no’, Anna thinks.
‘Why do you think?’
‘Don’t be impertinent!’
‘Don’t be obtuse.’
‘That’s a big word for you.’
The barb lands as Ingrid no doubt intended it to, and Anna didn’t deflect it in time. You’d think she’d have had enough practice, except she always wants to give her mother the benefit of the doubt. Ingrid’s own mother verged on the tyrannical and Anna long ago acknowledged that Ingrid had to make a serious effort in order to not be the same. Just as Anna has to work at not slipping into default critique mode with her children. It’shard, because you have to keep working at it, but if you love your kids you do all you can.
Anyway, Anna was never that good at English at school and Ingrid knows it, so she would thinkobtuseto be too big a word. Except she hasn’t noticed that Anna has recently taken up crosswords, partly to improve her vocabulary, and she has an Oxford Dictionary as a regular companion at home.
There’s no point going through all that now, though. Time is ticking away along with the kilometres.
‘Maybe,’ Anna concedes. Then she waits. Ingrid’s temper tends to flare and die in the space of seconds. Again, an improvement from her grandmother’s, which would flare and rage for days.
‘It wasn’t easy after your father …’ Ingrid starts. She doesn’t need to say the rest, because they lived it.
‘No.’
‘The easiest thing would have been to leave,’ Ingrid goes on. ‘My mother told me to.’
No surprises there: Anna’s grandmother didn’t like inconvenience and Ingrid’s disabled husband would definitely have fit that category.
‘But he was still my husband,’ Ingrid says quietly. ‘He was still your father. It was harder, yes. There were times …’ Her sigh is deep and long. ‘Of course I thought of leaving,’ she murmurs. ‘I’m not a saint.’
Anna is so surprised at her mother’s candour she decides to go for some of her own. ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ she says. Then she risks a sideways glance and sees Ingrid’s raised eyebrows. Then the beginning of a smile.
‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Ingrid says again but it’s soft this time. Almost loving.
‘Sometimes I can’t help it.’
The studio’s street is coming up and Anna puts on her right blinker.
‘I know it was hard for you, in particular,’ Ingrid says. ‘I relied on you so much.’
This is the biggest admission she has ever made and Anna feels something lurch inside her.
Ingrid sniffs. ‘But I needed you. I couldn’t have managed without you. You …’
Anna pulls into a parking spot and turns toward her mother with the engine still running. They stare at each other and Anna knows what her mother wants to say.
You kept me in the marriage. I couldn’t have done it without you.
She knows it because it’s what she would say to Renee in the same situation, and she and Ingrid are not so different that she has to struggle to understand.
‘I know, Mum,’ she says.
