What About Maureen?

‘You stole the stars from my eyes!’

Jeffrey Weissburger did not look up from the glue-like gravy that coated his lamb steak. ‘Aw, not this again, Maureen.’

‘Better yet, you sapped the stars from them. Over time. A long time.’

‘That’s a marriage, Maureen. You’re describing a marriage. You’ve been a wonderful wife, a fantastic mother. Is that not enough for you?’ Jeffrey said, the words trotting a familiar path across his tongue.

‘A mother. A wife. What about Maureen? Hmm? What about Maureen, Doctor Weissburger?’

The half -chewed clump of lamb turned cold behind his parted lips. Jeffrey raised the napkin to his mouth and spat the meal his wife had made for him into the confine of the patterned napkin they’d received as a wedding gift.

‘We made a deal. It was different back then. You know why.’

‘Well, what about now?’

‘Yes,’ Jeffrey said as he rounded his body in his chair to properly look at his wife. ‘What about now?’

‘Don’t you start with me. Don’t you dare start.’

The exhaustion swamped Jeffrey then. It rose like a flooding tide and threatened to drown him. He felt his shoulders drop and the skin of his cheeks sag. Every line on his face was mirrored on his wife’s. Scars of an unfulfilled life.

‘What’s stopping you now, Maureen?’ he asked.

Maureen puffed the air in and out of her cheeks, the jowls beneath her chin quivered as her body shook itself awake. Indignation pulsed so violently within her that she hopped from side to side. To Jeffrey, she looked like a child winding itself up to run through a field of long, luscious grass on a hot summer’s day.

‘What’s stopping me? Me? Your washing, Doctor Weissburger. That’s number one. I’ve never met a man who goes through so many pairs of pants! I’ve lost myself in the piles of pants and undershirts that keep you going through the week. And the cooking? What about the cooking? You haven’t spared a thought for the cooking! I do, day in and day out! Do you know how draining it is to choose a dinner every night? I’d forget my own name before I forgot I had to choose a dinner. And the dusting. The dust, Jeffrey! You wouldn’t believe the dust. I have to turn the shower up so hot I can barely stand it just to feel like the dust isn’t still on me. And then there’s the ironing because Doctor Weissburger needs the crease down the front of his trousers just as his mummy used to press them!’

Maureen paused as she drank in gasps of air, her back pressed against the sud-filled sink.

‘I’m not your mother, Jeffrey. What about me?’

‘What about you? Was this life not enough?’

The question trailed off with the passing steam of the dinner that was now teetering onto cold. Inedible.

‘No,’ Maureen finally admitted. ‘It was never enough.’

Jeffrey ate his lamb cold.

It was enough for him.