Chapter 85

I’d been working for the National Parks and Wildlife for three years when Baashir hosted a Swiss fondue party for his fortieth birthday.

Obviously I was aghast to be invited.

Baashir was my boss and my friend, and I was so fond of him it virtually qualified as a crush, but I would know no one at his party except him. I would not have Jack to count me in and I had no doubt every guest would be older, more glamorous, and more interesting than me. Chances were high I would embarrass myself by speaking too much or not at all.

I feel tenderly now toward my twenty-two-year-old self. So upset to be invited to a party! Poor darling.

Look: I don’t know why I’m pretending anything has changed. Just last month I was horrified to be invited to a “coffee morning” and it must have showed on my face, because the person extending the invitation felt obliged to apologize and say, “It’s not compulsory!”

Embarrassing.

(I went to the coffee morning.)

Also embarrassing: I had never heard of Swiss fondue. I thought it was a type of dance. I asked my mother if she could teach me the steps to the Swiss fondue and she and Auntie Pat laughed longer and harder than necessary. My error really made their day. Each time they stopped, one of them started up again. I don’t know how they knew about fondue, it’s not like they’d ever been to Switzerland.

By the way, I’ve been to Switzerland multiple times since then and eaten fondue in some very fancy Swiss restaurants. Just so you know.

Gosh, humiliation takes a long time to fade, doesn’t it?

I got sulky and said I wasn’t going to the party anyway.

“You will hurt your friend’s feelings,” said Auntie Pat firmly. “Be brave, Cherry.”

She’d been to war, so I could hardly complain about going to a party.

“Cherry, I see this party changing your destiny,” said my mother, and both Auntie Pat and I put our fingers to our lips and said, “Shhh.” We didn’t want to hear from Madame Mae outside of work hours. Or ever really. We both tolerated Mum’s profession.

The truth is, part of me badly wanted to go to that party. I was “in a good place” as people say now. I’d emerged from the other side of my grief. I loved my work, but my days, although very pleasant, were mostly the same and even those of us who love and need routine sometimes long to break it.

I wore a blue minidress and a matching blue headband that I had been told made my eyes look blue, with white knee-high boots. My eyeshadow was also blue, and probably too liberally applied, but I was twenty-two, so I expect I looked divine.

I found a photo of myself in my mid-fifties recently and remembered the sunny spring day it was taken, and how I felt grumpy because I wasn’t happy with my appearance: something to do with my dress or my hair, I can’t recall what exactly. When I looked at that photo, I thought, Cherry, you looked pretty good that day, not divine, of course, but good!

Perhaps ninety-year-old Cherry will say the same things about photos of me now, but it seems unlikely.

Never mind.

Baashir lived in an apartment in Newtown with purple shag carpet, red-glowing mushroom lamps, and violently patterned wallpaper. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, sweet with cannabis, and pungent with the aroma of melted Gruyère cheese. Three earthenware fondue pots were set up at intervals along a wooden table with long bench seats like church pews.

“I want you next to Eliza,” said Baashir as he handed me a Brandy Alexander and indicated a woman already seated. She had a high ponytail, eyes made up to look like cat’s eyes, and a leopard print-patterned dress with a plunging neckline. Leopard print slinks in and out of fashion, but whenever I see it I think of Eliza and her creamy cocktail dusted with nutmeg.

She held out her hand and said, “Cherry, I’ve heard all about you! Baashir tells me your mother is a fortune teller and you are a genius.”

(I’m not a genius. Baashir didn’t really think I was one. I was just good at my job.)

It was difficult to step over the long bench seat in my dress. A man with Elvis Presley sideburns in a lime-green safari suit had to help me by holding my elbow.

Well. It was a wonderful night. I don’t know if it was Eliza or the Brandy Alexander or if I was inhaling too much secondhand pot smoke, but my nerves melted instantly. I talked a lot, but not too much. I remembered to listen. “Remember to listen, Cherry,” Mum had said to me as I walked out the door. “Don’t get overexcited.” It’s terrible how people can know your flaws so well.

I laughed that night like I hadn’t laughed in years.

You are probably thinking I would have had nothing in common with Eliza—with her abundant cleavage, eye makeup, and charm—but you would be wrong. We soon discovered we had multiple shared interests, like the Bermuda Triangle and Dallas. People were excited about the Bermuda Triangle at the time because of a popular book, but Eliza and I tried to share the theory put forward by Lloyds of London: the percentage of mysterious disappearances wasn’t any greater there than in any other large area of the ocean with a high volume of air traffic and multiple shipping routes. “It’s simple probability!” we both said. Nobody wanted to hear us. Nobody ever does. They preferred to talk about mysterious shipwrecks and planes disappearing off the face of the earth.

We were also both addicted to the television series Dallas and agreed the storylines were Shakespearean. Bringing up Shakespeare is an excellent way to justify your enjoyment of lowbrow entertainment. Even if, like me, you only ever studied one play at school ( King Lear ) and didn’t especially like or understand it. People do it all the time now. Eliza and I were way ahead of the curve.

Eliza was the same age as Baashir, forty, and she was what my mother would have called, with both mild scorn and mild envy, a “career woman.”

She was working her way up the ladder in an insurance company, and corporate ladders were tricky to climb back then. She told stories about having to train baby-faced boys who completed their training and the very next day were paid more than her. There was the casual expectation that she would be the one to organize tea, coffee, and snacks, no matter how senior she became. She had to endure being regularly patted on the bottom at the photocopier and, worse, she once had a boss who literally patted her on the head in a meeting. “I was thirty years old, Cherry!”

Can you imagine being patted on the head in a work setting?

Well, it will depend on your age and gender.

“But the work, Cherry, I love the work,” she sighed, as if she were talking about a delicious food or a lover.

I had never met an unashamedly ambitious woman like Eliza, or at least not one who had ambitions to be as successful as a man in a man’s world. My mother was ambitious, although she would never have described herself that way, and she was a businesswoman too, but she was working within the framework of the world of women. It was also important to her identity to give the impression Madame Mae wasn’t a “business” like Mrs. Shaw’s cake shop, even though Mum kept a careful eye on cash flow, raised and dropped prices as appropriate, and even offered loyalty programs where, for example, your fifth reading was free.

Eliza reassured me that things were getting better for women in the workforce. She said, “Women in the 1980s won’t be enduring that kind of sexist behavior.”

If you worked in an office in the eighties, please take this moment for a hollow laugh.

I asked if Eliza was married or had children, and she said she was divorced and had never wanted children.

I was on to my third Brandy Alexander by then and I found myself leaning in close to whisper in her ear, “Eliza, I don’t think I want children either.”

Eliza wiped a smudge of cream from my lip and whispered, “You don’t have to have children, Cherry.”

I have only been attracted to a woman once in my life and this was the time.

She asked me if I’d heard Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill.”

I had not, and because there was no Spotify and she was joyously drunk, she proceeded to sing it, loud enough for the whole table to hear. She got to her feet and used a fondue fork as a microphone. She changed the lyrics to “Cherry’s got the pill.” (Cherry did not have the pill.) Loretta’s song about how the contraceptive pill had liberated women and allowed them to enjoy sex without the fear of getting pregnant was considered outrageous for the time—some radio stations refused to play it. Baashir’s guests only found the song outrageous because they disliked country music. People began pelting Eliza with bread cubes to get her to stop.

When the party finally ended, in the early hours of the morning, Eliza gave me her business card. She said I should call her about a job in her division. She said, “You can’t count kangaroos forever, Cherry, you should have a career ! You and I should be together in the boardroom, patting their stupid heads!” She patted a still-seated man’s bald head to demonstrate, and he looked up, delighted, and tried and failed to grab her wrist.

I’ve wondered over the years what would have happened if I had called Eliza the next day; if I might have bravely climbed that rickety ladder and got myself into a senior management position. She died only last year. She never remarried, never had children. There were obituaries in all the financial papers. Eliza was a pioneer for women in insurance, she broke that glass ceiling: she was the first female CEO of her company, and she mentored countless other women. The photos showed a woman with short gray hair and glasses in a smart suit. If you didn’t know her you would never have guessed she was once a gorgeous woman in a leopard-print dress singing into a fondue fork.

Although if you looked closely enough at the photo you could still see her sparkle, right there in her eyes.

Look a little closer at the next older lady you meet. You might see that sparkle.

Or you might not. Some of us are grumpy and sad. Some of us are in serious pain: our feet, our hips, our shoulders. Some of us are crazed with grief and regret for wrong decisions.

Never mind.

I didn’t call Eliza the next day. It was years before I called her.

I never climbed that corporate ladder.

This is what I did instead:

—

I married the man in the lime-green safari suit.