changed, the slap of Lycra against their freckled skin, past a topless woman blow-drying her glossy black hair and through the other doors to the children’s pool and the class. She stretched the thick rubber-goggles band over the back of Hannah’s head without snagging her hair, and lowered the suctioned lenses softly over her blinking eyes. The instructor reached up, arms dripping, and took the girl by the torso and flew her above his head and slowly feet first into the water. Next to Dorothy a baby began to wail, his voice piercing the white noise of the swimming pool. The baby’s mother comforted him, rubbing along the ridged gums where he was teething, while Hannah plunged face first into a starfish shape, her body slightly jack-knifed, her bottom sticking up and her feet kicking randomly, never breaking the surface of the resisting water. All around the air was thick with splashing, shouting and the smell of chlorine, and in another learners’ lane a woman of about Dorothy’s age free-styled her way up the length of the pool, her arms whaling at the skin of the water as though she was fighting it. Dorothy called to her daughter, ‘That’s great darling.’
13. Spells
Could you be in your forties and still hate your father? Did Dot really hate Frank or was this some kind of habit to keep her infantilised, a hotline to childhood? Dreams about Eve came on her unawares, the grief in them freshly ripped. Grace got a boyfriend, a sweet teenager with hair falling in his eyes and a fireworks obsession, Hannah made the transition to school, and Dot started getting more loaded than all of their friends at gatherings, so that people remarked on it, smirking as they issued invitations. ‘Party’s started!’ they’d shout on opening the door to her and she envisaged a future where she took that on herself, started dressing in fun colours and wacky shoes, became the woman with a loud voice, bumping and grinding off the table of canapés. Out of party mode, the bossy parent in her emerged and she couldn’t leave Donald or Hannah’s teachers to do their work in peace. They were called in for a meeting with the principal and a Board member, boundaries gently but firmly set. On the way home Andrew shouted at her, That was fucking humiliating. Sort yourself out.
So she went to the BetterSelf Program and gave them a lot of her money, no, it was Andrew’s money, which they couldn’t strictly spare. That’s right, Andrew was the one flecking spit from shouting, and she was the one going to a course on how to behave. His paintings had been through a black phase and now he worked on hyper-realist portraits of politicians, which surprisingly no one wanted hanging in their living rooms. By this time her father, the erstwhile hate object, was deaf over there in upstate New York, nothing more than a trench coat, a pair of spectacles, a thinned blond comb-over and a giant flesh-coloured hearing aid. ‘Hearing-assistant device’, her mother called it, her mother who could never have been the woman who’d dragged her kids to a commune in the night, that wild beast who had stood down the bottom of a deep hole in the earth in her rubber boots and kept digging. Lee’s cells had turned over what, four and a half times since then, if regeneration was a seven-year cycle, if that could explain it. No, Dorothy could not phone her father to make amends or – no, hang on, that was the other thing – but she could not make the call to apologise or, what was she supposed to do?
Could she extend her hatred to men in general? The other day she heard people on the radio talk about masculinity studies. Sorry, what? What? There must have been something in her ear. Perhaps her husband’s finger was in her ear.
The Program people had confiscated their cell phones. Red plastic-coated wire baskets at the door. They sent them out to pay phones in the street to make their life-changing calls. It was her second day in the Program and so far she hadn’t been brought up on stage, hadn’t been dismantled in front of everyone and told that her story, her life narrative, was nothing more than an illusion or a lie. But Andrew was looking after the children for the long weekend, he had stayed home from a hunting trip so she could do this, his