The appearance of things

This morning, I’m working against the clatter of back ground
voices as my husband convenes a business meeting of sorts in our kitchen with
friends/clients whom he helps out from time to time. 
Last night he told me they wanted a nine o’clock start. 
Nine in the morning.  On
a Sunday. 
It was okay, he said. 
I could just get about as I normally do on a Sunday morning without
interruption, only the presence of strangers in the house meant I was not
comfortable staying in my dressing gown for hours. 
It meant I needed to take a fast shower and dress enough to
be respectable. Not that my dressing gown is not respectable.  It’s a little on the eccentric side or so my
daughters tell me.  Black and white
swirls.  It makes me look like a cartoon
character, especially when set off against my pale pink and white striped bed
socks. 
I made my tea before these people arrived and now it’s
already cold and I’m struck by the effect of such an intrusion on my writing
time.
It chases away my memory of last night’s dreams, and shifts
the immediacy of the moment into my head. 
The voices in the kitchen are silent for a few minutes and I
find I am distracted once more. 
During the quiet moments my husband will be reading some
document or other and the others around the table will wait in silence for the
verdict, his interpretation of what to them is otherwise double Dutch. 
My husband is knowledgeable on the nature of contracts, those
legal arrangements that people make with one another with all sorts of
conditions and caveats to protect both parties. 
My husband is a stickler for fair and reasonable contracts
wherein the needs of both parties are met. 
It applies to property and wills and all matters related to births,
deaths and marriages.
We made a contract with one another last night.
I promised him I would leave him to get himself organised in
the morning.  I would not set the alarm,
as is my custom, not on Sunday morning, the one day of the week where we sleep
in. 
He said that was fine. 
I could hide away and behave as usual. 
He would deal with his visitors.
I opened my eyes to the day at twenty to nine and woke him,
because I realised if he did not get a move on, he would be greeting his guests
in his dressing gown and although it’s not as garish as mine, I think he’d
prefer he were ready for such visitors. 
This is another thing we do; we break our contracts as the
need arises.  They are, after all, not necessarily
set in stone. 
If I had been able to fall back to sleep there and then, I
might have done, but instead I was awake, enough to get myself into readiness
to write and this ideally involves the absence of all distractions; like those
voices from the kitchen. 
The clothes I put on this morning do not match.  Dark blue jeans with a flecked pattern, a
hand me down from one of my daughters. 
She discards her clothes before they’re worn out and I can’t
bear to see them go to waste and so I wear them on weekends when it does not
matter that I wear trousers chosen by someone else for someone else. 
They clash with the orange top I chose as a contrast.  Too much of a contrast, I fear and as I type
and look down to my middle I’m assaulted by this clash. 

And because it’s cold, cold beyond my usual
expectations of winter cold, I chose my cable knit cardigan, a cardigan I only
wear when the temperatures drop below ten degrees Celsius. 
My body is inclined to cook inside this cardigan and the visible
clash worsens.
I spend a lot of time travelling through Facebook and the
number of times I see posts that emphasize appearance is alarming. 
The appearance of things. 
People visit this house and they say it’s lovely, but
immediately my thoughts streak back to the underlying disorder of this house,
the fact there are cracks in walls, it needs a repaint inside and out and there
are places in the parquetry where the dog has dug up tiles. 
My husband never quite finished lining all the floorboards
and over time, over thirty years or so, we’ve grown used to the gaps, but
they’re obvious if you look below the surface. 
The way Sherlock Holmes of the recent TV series can greet a
person for the first time and instantly from his perceptive eye pick up all
sorts of minor details about this person such that he can even know what he’s
had for breakfast. 
Most of us do not have such perceptive vision, and yet we all
see below the surface.  We see things
that are not there, too.  We reverberate
against one another.
I decide almost instantly on whether or not I like a person,
whether I want to spend more time with that person, whether that person is
simpatico. 
Most of my decision is based, not only on the appearance of
things, but also on that unspoken thing called ‘transference’, the degree to
which I superimpose my experience of significant others from my life,
especially from my childhood, onto them and they do likewise to me. 
And so it goes, we make up stories about other people in the
back of our minds and we may be completely off in real terms, but it fits our
expectations, and can influence our behaviour. 
There’s a problem here, not just in the business of ‘love at
first sight’ but also, its opposite, ‘hate at first sight’, which most often
sprouts from prejudice, from all the ’isms: racism, ageism, and our tendency to
stereotype. 
Best to reserve judgment, therefore whenever we meet new
people.  Maybe get to know them a little
before we decide.  

Arithmetic

Mother Margaret Mary stood in front of the class and handed
back our papers.  One after the other we stepped
forward onto the raised platform where she stood in front of her desk and reached
out from her pile
I knew it would take an age to come to my name.  Mother Margaret Mary went
alphabetically. 
Some kids smiled as they walked back to their desks; others
frowned. 
When she finally called for me, I scraped out from behind my
desk, one where the top was attached to the base and you slid in and out sideways. 
‘I knew you weren’t any good at mental,’ Mother Margaret Mary
said as I reached out to take my test. 
‘But not this bad.’
I had not known I was this bad either. 
I’d tried hard to figure out those numbers, those additions
and subtractions, multiplications and divisions, but my head went fuzzy and it
took me ages to get out one sum after the next.
‘Two out of ten,’ Mother Margaret Mary said. 
She said it in a way that made me feel small.  She said it in away that made me wonder
whether she enjoyed my bad mark.
This was not unusual. 
Mother Margaret had a way of triumphing over our childhood mistakes.
When one of the boys talked to his friend during class when
he should have been silent, she called him out to the front and then took a
ribbon from her desk.  She kept a
collection of ribbons there, ribbons that had fallen from the hair of some careless
girls and been lost.
She took the ribbon and lifted a piece of loose hair from the
boy’s head then tied the ribbon round it in a bow.
Then she ordered the boy to
stand outside of the classroom in the middle of an empty rubbish bin that stood
near the door.  She kept him there for hours.
‘If you act like a girl, you’ll be treated like one.’  That presumably was a reference to Mother
Margaret Mary’s choice of ribbon for his hair, but I never understood the
reference to girl’s behaviour nor the purpose of the rubbish bin, other than to
tell the boy he was nothing more than rubbish.
I didn’t know about humiliation in those days. 
I didn’t know then that some people took pleasure in making
other people who were already vulnerable by virtue of their size or some other
difficulty, feel even more vulnerable.
Years later, when I was at senior school and had grown taller
and begun to realise that maybe I could be good at other things and, although I
was still no good at arithmetic, I could at least count and measure size.
I met Mother Margaret Mary one day at my new school.  She had come with other nuns to visit when
they appointed a new reverend mother.  I saw
her at the back of the chapel.  I swear
she had shrunk.
She looked so much older that I remembered her.  And for the first time in my life it occurred
to me that people can change, and those who wield power over you one day, can
the next, become like the emperor of no clothes.
‘The queen wipes her bum, too,’ my husband once said to me
when I was approaching a meeting that terrified me.
He was trying to give me courage.  And in a strange way it helped. 
Not the sight of the queen on the toilet, but the idea that
Mother Margaret Mary might also have used the toilet and that she, too, had a
body. 
When I was a small child who failed her mental arithmetic test
I had imagined Mother Margaret Mary had no body. 
I had imagined she did not eat, or sleep, or use the toilet
like the rest of us, and that outside of the classroom and staff room she spent
her days in church.