Happiness And Its Book Clubs

That’s how it starts; a hook. The perfect sentence that puts the reader exactly where you want them to be. It’s manipulative. It’s controlling to take them to a place that they don’t want to go. My hook was nearly two years ago. Sixteen months ago and twenty-one days, if we’re counting. And it wasn’t pretty. It, they - because I was blessed with two hooks - came after nearly thirty-six hours of labour, thirty-four hours to be precise because someone was counting and it wasn’t me. That was the start of the story when for me all it felt like was the end. 

“You’re not at all tired of book club?” 

It was me who asked it. It was a genuine question. What else brings a group of eight middle-aged women together other than boredom? Loneliness perhaps. Escape maybe. For the past few months, these women had come to my house, forming a circle around me like the steel case of the tabernacle. I was the eucharist: dry, flat, round.

 We had shared stories. We weren’t concerned with the book of Esther or Job on these Thursday nights. We read popular fiction books. We sipped cocktails and it still managed to be very Christian. 

I asked if they were tired of book club because it seemed like they should be. All good things ended, only God was eternal. Happiness and its book clubs; temporal. Of course, I never thought for a second they would tell me the truth. It was self-indulgent of me to ask because they would tell me what they wanted to hear. They would say that they loved coming and in that moment, I wouldn’t feel like some ex-post-natal depressive. For a sliver in time, I would feel normal and I would hold that shard until it became putty in my hands and disappeared for next Thursday. 

“You’re not at all tired of book club?” 

I rubbed the cover of our book. It was Hollie McNish. I had gotten the bright coloured yellow version of Nobody Told Me with the turquoise and white capital letters. It stood out to my mummy brain. In that way I felt somewhat connected to Hollie; two mums and their need to be seen. 

“Of course not, Ellie,” Judy said. She had bright red lipstick on. The only bright lipstick you could wear beyond the age of twenty-eight was red. The bright pinks or purples were reserved. 

In simply putting on that red lipstick, she told me more than she was about to. She had dressed up to be here because Thursday nights were her special thing too. If I looked around, everyone had their own metaphorical red lipstick. Heidi wore a floral dress with ditsy flowers that snaked to the crease of her elbow and crept down below her knee. She wore ankle boots without socks even though it was the middle of November. Her black leather jacket draped over the armchair. Samira wore everything tight. Her clothes carved out her bones.

Judy reassured me. That’s what she did. She was like the midwife who told us everything would be alright. I told her stories I had heard online of women having babies that left them like the walking wounded.

They’re true?

Of course not, one midwife said. I lost her name. Perhaps she never gave it. Questions about the pain and the trauma my body would go through were, in hindsight, not the ones to ask. Instead, it should have been something like, Will he be ok? She would have been confused and there would have been no reassurance there. Because she could not reassure me. He would not be ok. 

Judy gave a small chuckle and brought her hand to her glass. “You’re the only pastor’s wife that gives us gin and tonics.” 

Ex-pastor’s wife, I wanted to say but I let it slide. We all know it and I don’t think anyone is happy about it but it was this group of women who kept the moment alive. They brought the structure in the otherwise disintegration. My life was like one giant waterlogged nappy. Until he suggested that I start sharing my books with other people. 

It’ll make you happy, he said. He wound his hands around my waist. He hadn’t done that before. It was an unholy sensation. At that moment, I fully realised that he had changed but I wasn’t sad about it. I knew it would make me happy. I didn’t expect him to realise but I also think he knew it would make him happy. It would allow us to see our lives as normal again and maybe it would help us heal. 

I raised my glass as Dale walked in. His face looked lighter, the creases smoothed out. I had asked him once to come to therapy. 

It’s helping me. More than I thought. 

I don’t need it.

I have a Christian counsellor. She just gets it. I feel like God is talking to me. 

I don’t want someone to get it. 

I had looked at him. It’s not catching. This depression…

It’s not depression. We’re just adjusting. 

Oh, Dale…

I understood. We should have been the happiest we had ever been. We had not just one reason but two. Sometimes you needed help to see what you had. 

As I watched him now, one foot over the threshold into the living room, a sadness caught me. Perhaps it was the way he held his head now or the clothes that clung tightly to his fleshed out frame. Maybe it was his eyes, that I had only known with sixteen-month-old black half-moons, now bright. You could almost see the stars inside them. And he had done it all without a therapist holding his hand. He had gotten over it in a way I had not. He had assigned it less importance and it had obeyed. His sadness, just sadness, now gone. 

Suddenly books were unimportant. All of us who hadn’t turned now turned to look at Dale. A light flicker came to the corners of his mouth.

“Gin?” I was answering Judy. “That’s all that’s important here?” I didn’t mean to ask. It was self-indulgent, again. 

Tell me that it’s me. Say it’s the books. 

They didn’t turn, only Judy did. She held my gaze like she was doing so with a secondary pair of eyes. The other set was looking through the back of her skull. When she came to me after, she looked like she could have been dead. Like her head would simply fall from her shoulders. 

I laughed, watching Dale from the corner of my eye. I didn’t need to watch him but it was something that had become familiar. I looked out for him like that. It seemed as though they all looked out for him like that. Judy turned back. 

“No,” she said, using the eyes at the back of her head to watch me. “That’s not all that’s important. But it’s the reason we come back.”