Julie and Romeo

Well, you cannot say that this blog does not bring you variety. After a week of spies, behold we are entering the land of retirement romance. Is there even a name for that yet? Silver passion? In any case, I am all for equal opportunities and everyone getting what they want, and it’s true that the elderly are poorly represented in fiction. And even as I typed that sentence, I wondered whether I was allowed to use the word ‘elderly’, whether it’s considered ageist and the polite thing to do is call everyone over 60 in their late middle age. Given that late middle age, by any definition, is a huge demographic, it’s a sign of our youth-obsessed times that we don’t see them around so much in books, films and television programmes. However, Jeanne Ray is here to put an end to all that, and whilst I wasn’t quite sure what I would get with this novel, it turned out to be an absolute charmer.

Julie Roseman and Romeo Cacciamani are rival florists in Boston, whose families have hated each other for many a long year. No one really knows why, but when Julie’s daughter, Sandy, and Romeo’s son, Tony, fell in love as teenagers, it couldn’t have been more West Side Story. The families kept them apart and the bad blood on either side grew steadily more toxic. But that’s old history now and decades have passed since then. Julie’s marriage broke up, Sandy married, had children, divorced and moved her small family back home, and Sandy’s sister, Nora, has grown past teenage rebellion to become a very scary real estate agent who knows not just her own mind, but everyone else’s too. Julie is content with her life, but there isn’t that much joy in it for her.

She’s at a seminar entitled ‘Making Your Small Business Thrive’ when she bumps into Romeo Cacciamani and they end up having coffee. Well, you’ll all see where this is going. The problem is not with Julie and Romeo, but with the fierce resistance to their relationship that comes from their children – all grown up now, of course, but with plenty of energy to carry the feud into the next generation. Before they’ve even reached a second date, Sandy is in tears, Nora is reading her mother the riot act, and Romeo’s sons are coming over to decapitate small pots of daffodils to get their point across. And just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, Julie’s ex-husband turns up to take a look at the accounting books and throw his fists around. Julie’s sure that if she can find out what caused the original vendetta, the families could make peace – but how is it that no one seems to know?

This could, of course, have been dreadful. But it is just so funny and entertaining, not least because it is so unsentimental. People say things like ‘I haven’t had this much time to think since I had my gallbladder out,’ and ‘I wondered what I could have been thinking of, asking a man to meet me in a store with fluorescent overhead lighting.’ Honestly, it’s a hoot. And the families are very well imagined, particularly sad Sandy and the appalling elderly matriarch Grammy Cacciamani. Jeanne Ray is very good at how badly families can behave, not just towards their enemies, but within their own clans, because there is so much less reserve employed with other family members than your average human being. Given that Julie and Romeo are the leads here and we’re supposed to be rooting for them, there wasn’t much sense of poetic justice that the ban imposed on their own children had come back to bite them, but no matter. The rivalry takes up more page space than the romance, and in no time at all we’re too busy watching roses get salted at dawn to worry too much about fine slicing the moral universe.

People, this is not Anna Karenina, or Shakespeare come to that, do not expect it. But it’s delightfully written comic entertainment, which can be hard to come by on rainy days. It is also very much a love story between two 60-year-olds, let’s be clear what you’re getting. I read it between a couple of very serious books and thoroughly enjoyed the light relief.

The Loveliest Month

It strikes me as a bit cheap on the part of the weather gods that we are only allowed one May in a calendar year. I love it so; the crisp new leaves bursting out of their buds, long, pink-tinged evenings, soft, mild light at dawn and dusk with vibrant blue skies in the bright stretch of the day. Just the right amount of heat. Yesterday was the first day that Mr Litlove and I could enjoy sitting outside in the garden. And so we did our yearly inventory, reclining on garden chairs with cups of tea, making our way around the borders plant by plant as if they were schoolchildren in class, deciding how each was coming along, whether they needed help and in what form.

the gorgeous Manteau d’Hermine

My main worry was a philadelphus, a gorgeous version called Manteau d’Hermine, which had been squeezed on either side by some rather boisterous ferns (and this is the only definition of ‘leaning in’ that I will countenance). So I had my eye on that, and on Mr Litlove generally, who sheds his gentle, mild-mannered nature to turn rogue with a pair of clippers in his hand. Anything that looks as if it might commit the crime of ‘getting beyond itself’ risks a severe scalping despite all my pleading. And for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, my goodness how incredibly middle-aged we have become. Normally, on the inside, I feel about 17, but there I was, regarding plants I had seen grow from seedlings into this mature garden, and it seemed so long since it had been just a vision in our minds.

When we first moved into the house the garden was a long, thin, isosceles triangle whose only beauty was a large cherry tree, all too near to the back windows. One dank and chilly autumn day, Mr Litlove hired a rotavator and dug all the scrubby, weedy grass up, shoulders straining against the handles, wellies sinking in the mud. Early in the afternoon there was a power cut, and when he went into the kitchen, now shrouded in darkness, the kitchen clock still read half past two. Mr Litlove then congratulated himself on having finished the job with so much of the afternoon still ahead of him, and I felt quite confirmed in my belief that he was an undiagnosed dyslexic. It’s funny to think we hadn’t been married that long then, three or four years at that point. We bought a climbing rose, the luscious Mme Alfred Carrière with clotted cream blooms that blushed charmingly pink as they burst their buds. And in the supermarket, my son – then an angel-faced toddler with white-blonde hair and dark blue eyes – picked out a red rose he liked the look of. I didn’t hold out much hope for it, but both plants grew and flourished on the sunny south-facing wall.

Mme Alfred Carriere in all her glory

Then we decided to have an extension on the house, and a garage and workshop at the far end of the plot. The garden shrank to a lop-sided square and the plants suffered. The cement mixer took up residence in the middle of a flowerbed, and bushes started to die mysteriously, until I put two and two together and stopped providing the builders with so much tea. We had to move the red rose and feared it had died, but the white fought gallantly against the chaos and flowered vigorously, scattering velvet petals over the garish headlines of The Sun that the workmen read in their breaks. Mr Litlove had his first stretch of unemployment, the difficult one, where we assured each other we would manage fine, while mentally totting up columns of figures in the restless small hours of the morning. We weren’t particularly fine at all, for I was beyond tired and working hard, both of us too aware that mine was the only incoming salary. And we didn’t like each other much, having swallowed all sorts of things we should have said in those anxious, frantic years of early parenting and new careers. Things were coming to a head, though we didn’t know it then. Instead, Mr Litlove used his time to lay a patio, and to pave the area outside the kitchen, and to construct a beautiful winding path in a herringbone pattern of grey brick.

Several years later, when Mr Litlove was made redundant for the second time, our lives had completely turned around. The crisis had passed and now I was off work too, the first of three years I would take out with chronic fatigue. I can remember the feel of the grey brick path beneath my bare feet as I ventured outside after months laid up indoors, still weak and unwell but silently comforted by the beauty of the flowers, the orange blossoms of the philadelphus, the dancing buds of the fuchsia, the bough of the white rose, heavy with unfurling flowers, that was big enough now to reach out to me from its spot on the back wall. And the red rose we feared lost was starting to grow again, its tentative feelers offering hope. This time around Mr Litlove painted the house. To the extent that I believe in past lives, I feel convinced he must once have been a Lord of the Manor. It would be such a perfect job for him, to have a whole estate to tend to, one that he would survey from the saddle of a fine black stallion, issuing grand orders about the guttering on his tenants’ cottages. He would have married a version of me, one whose nature would have led her, not to teach, but to strap on a bonnet and go visiting the sick and the poor. From whom I daresay Regency-me would have caught diptheria and died. So there is much to be said for the 21^st century and having reached the era of self-indulgent middle age.

Imagine him weatherbeaten and mossy, with a bird on his head, and you’ll have our version

The last change in our garden was the arrival of Hermes – or Mercury, I never know which to call him. He stands on one leg as if he had just bowled a googly, though one arm is raised above his head with a beckoning finger (happily, the first), while his other hand holds a strange implement the size of a very large spatula, which I believe may be the Greco-Roman prophecy of a television ariel. He came from the grand and lovely garden of Mr Litlove’s grandparents, and I vividly recall his arrival in the back of a moving truck. Two men arrived with him, papers in hand. ‘One small garden statue – Mercury,’ one of them read. ‘I’m not sure ‘e made it intact, luv. Ever since Bury we’ve ‘eard somefink rolling around in the back.’ His mate tipped me a wink. ‘Makes you wonder what dropped orf.’ I confess I held my breath as they went to unload him, fearful of the ribaldry he might unleash in the delivery men, and so I was most relieved when the loose item in question turned out to be the television ariel, which has never quite sat right in his hand ever since.

And now here we were, all these years later, with our son grown, and the university behind me, but still together and (for me) in better health than I had been in pretty much all that time. ‘I can remember planning this garden,’ Mr Litlove told me, ‘imagining what it would look like as I sat here, or stood in the kitchen at the sink. And it looks very much as I hoped it would.’ And I thought of our entwined lives that had suffered their own versions of frost and drought, disease and blight, but were still growing strongly together. I would never have imagined the road we would take to get here, but yes, our life looked pretty much like I’d hoped it would. How beautiful, how precious, how terrifying that felt.

A Letter I’ll Never Send

To my lovely son,

So, my darling, it turns out to be harder than we think to find the right words to say, and the right time to say them. So much is happening for you right now and you have no idea how much we long to be able to help you, at this point in your life when all your instincts – quite rightly – are insisting you push us away and find your own strength. But if I could, these are the things I would tell you:

Most of the truly difficult problems in life arise from personality flaws, not mistakes or unfortunate events. Or perhaps it’s better to say they arise from making the same mistakes and creating the same situations over and over again. Fear the world less than the unresolved parts of you.

We have more choices, always, than we like to admit to ourselves (because it takes a lot of courage to admit this).

Poverty, starvation, long term illness, early death, war, these are disasters worthy of the name. The rest may be called setbacks, disappointments and obstacles. Be careful to treat them accordingly.

The real key to a good life is learning to deal with those disappointments, frustrations and losses.

It is very hard to take full responsibility for oneself. Don’t allow taking responsibility for others to look like a substitute. It isn’t. And try very hard not to give your power away to people you love; this is also trickier than it seems.

Your best qualities will turn out to be, also, your worst ones. Tenacity and loyalty are also stubbornness and wilful blindness. This will trip you up.

Experience changes everything. The difference between imagining something and living it is vast, so try not to judge others or pre-judge yourself.

But remember that language stays the same. We have to make an extra effort to convey the before and after effect, which is why, for instance, the platitudes that your father and I spout still seem fresh and urgent to us. We are attaching experience to our worries that is hard to express.

We know you think you know everything. We know you know nothing. But then, we probably know a great deal less than we think we do. Humility all round would be good here.

We have to learn that our cherished memories of you are not yours, and that our hopes and dreams for you will not match those you hold for yourself. This is the final knot to untie in the long process of letting you go – giving you back your independent past, your surprising self, your unguessable desires. We will need to learn who you are all over again. This is a perennial lesson life offers, as you’ll find, this extraordinary realisation that what is inside our heads is not the same as what is outside.

We all need to ask more questions, and listen properly to the answers.

And too often the questions parents ask are simply the base promptings of our fears and insecurities. I do know that any advice I give you based on my own fears is worthless. This is our problem, and you shouldn’t have to deal with it. Believe me, I’m working on it.

I realise how inconsequential and valueless parental love appears, now you stand on the threshold of the world. But that love is completely unconditional and you can always depend on it. I know it is the part of me that will never grow old, never weaken or fail. I don’t want anything from you in return, except perhaps that you not be too proud to ask for that love, if ever you need it. Dad and I will always be here for you.

To Overshare Or Not To Overshare?

Kathryn Harrison had a succès de scandale in the late 90s with her memoir The Kiss, in which she recounted the four years of incestuous relationship she had with her father. Thinking to save that book for the program of creative non-fiction works I’m reading this year, I decided to try her out with a different memoir, The Mother Knot. It was 82 pages of dynamite that held me gripped as soon as I’d begun, and yet when I finished, I began to wonder about the last thing that should seem problematic with such a candid and upfront narrator – the truthfulness of the story.

The narrator is weaning the youngest of her three children when the memoir begins. At 26 months, her daughter is relatively grown-up for breastfeeding, but it is a wrench for her mother, and one that darkens her underlying mood. Not long after this, her 10-year-old son develops severe asthma, and in her extreme anxiety over his condition, Kathryn Harrison finds herself drawing dark and superstitious conclusions. Although she nurses him with an assiduity and attention to detail that could not be bettered, her growing belief is that somehow she is the cause of his illness:

It had been four months before my son’s hospitalisation that I’d stopped nursing, relinquished that cherished perception of myself as my children’s primal source of sustenance and love. Now the onset of my son’s asthma attack struck me as an indication of my new impotence. Worse and more irrationally, it seemed to reveal me as dangerous. I saw – felt – a black, destructive spirit, dybbuk or dervish, twisting out of my chest, a force of corruption that sprang from me and infected my son, choked and smothered him.’

Harrison is an intelligent lady, and she’s had a reasonable amount of therapy. She knows that her mindset is related to the complicated and dissatisfactory relationship she had to her own mother, who gave birth to her at 17 and then abandoned her to grandparents six years later. The pregnancy was intended to place some distance between Kathryn’s mother and her grandmother, a relationship that was itself fraught with possessiveness. Kathryn, her mother told her, was intended to be ‘a hostage’, someone to take her place and allow her the freedom she had never had. Understandably, Kathryn as a child found this reasoning hard to follow, aware only that she was unable to please her mother, despite the ballet, the Sunday school and the diets. She emerged from the relationship with an unshakeable conviction that she was bad, polluted and wrong. It didn’t take much in the way of crisis in her adult life to return her to that place of universal guilt, in which she could be responsible even for the illness of her son.

As a strategy of appeasement, she starts to starve herself again. Anorexia turns out to be the ongoing problem: ‘I admitted that anorexia was a maladaption; and I admitted, with chagrin, to more than two decades of remissions mistaken for recoveries.’ Like most anorexics, the practice has much less to do with body shape than it has to do with mental control and darkly divine sacrifice. ‘Would that it were as simple as vanity,’ she tells her husband, when he says, in an attempt at coertion, her how much less attractive she looks too thin. ‘I’d characterized my eating disorder as a shatterproof glass box. I was inside, alone and safe. I could see out, and nothing could get in.’ But a life devoted to the harshest form of self-control is taking its toll. Her doctor threatens her with hospitalisation unless she gets her eating under control, her therapist is losing patience with her, and she fears how angry her husband will be if she can’t take care of herself well enough to be the wife and mother their family needs. In extremis, she knows she must confront the ghost of her mother, dead these past seventeen years, and finally break free.

I’ve quoted the text as much as possible because Kathryn Harrison is an amazing writer. The prose is powerful, vivid, economical, the mysteries of the mind described with exquisite insight and acuity. For a brief memoir, this certainly packs an emotional punch although the touch is light. The arc of the narrative flies like a skimming stone, glancing off the most salient points of her story – her relation to her mother, the vortex of uncontrollable emotions that threaten to pull her down, the epiphany she experiences and the solution she discovers. It is all brilliantly done, and so neat and tidy, not a single word wasted.

This was, I felt, an amazing piece of storytelling. And yet everything that was so well done about it, took it further and further away from life as we live it, and crises as we actually experience them. Where was the resistance, the procrastination, the backsliding that attends every inch of fresh terrain won from the forces of negativity that run their lucrative rackets in the mind? Where were the months spent stumped and hopeless in the therapist’s chair? Deep-rooted problems are beyond stubborn to dig out, and they react poorly to just about any form of treatment. Like computers, minds have default settings, bizarre agreements that were made in the era before reason, or awareness of the true value of things, and they are the very devil to uproot.

But of course, none of this makes for good storytelling, necessarily. One of the best novels I’ve ever read about the therapeutic process is the highly autobiographical The Words To Say It by Marie Cardinal. When that book was translated into English, the translator felt justified in leaving a whole chunk of it out, on the grounds that it was repetitive. This was the point. The myths on which we base our sense of self have to be gone over again and again. And probably again. You may well ask, does it matter if we leave some of this out in the stories we end up telling about ourselves? And I think it does, because storytelling is not innocent, when it comes to the connection between identity and narrative. The tighter the story, the more beautiful it is, the less we want to unravel it. This is the way that those original stories of love and terror bind us in the first place. And then I worry that people in trouble might read this and view it as inspirational, wondering miserably why they are not capable of identifying and solving their problems as slickly. When the truth is that healing is a messy, graceless process, not an edited montage.

But… I would not be honest, either, if I denied what a well-written book this is, or how compellingly it reads, or how piercing its understanding of psychic pain. Read it for its insight and its honesty, but do not believe it is the full truth.