Part 30: Mrs. Brixton

Mrs. Brixton never knew whether she was supposed to drive Hannah home or back to her own house. The girls just assumed she knew, and she was too proud to ask. So she usually just guessed, or used subtle clues, or - when her headache was particularly bad - just made an executive decision and brought Hannah where she belonged.

Of course, there was Hannah’s mother to consider as well, volatile and proud. Sometimes she would get mad when Hannah turned up after being at the Brixtons for a few days, and it was hard to tell whether she was angry that Hannah had been gone or that she had returned. Once, Mrs. Brixton had attempted to drop Hannah off and had breathed her usual sigh of relief, only to be told by Victoria five minutes later that she had to turn around and pick Hannah up again because Hannah’s mother was drunk and threatening to hit her and “how would you feel if Hannah died mom.”

Mrs. Brixton had met Hannah’s mother a handful of times and she had seemed friendly in a lower-middle-class sort of way, torn between trying to impress Mrs. Brixton and wanting to shout, “You’re not better than me!” at her.

Privately, Mrs. Brixton did think she was better than Hannah’s mother, but wanted to believe that this was about more than just class. For months now, in idle moments, she had been trying to come up with an example of a poor person she respected, to prove that the defect of Ms. Pascussi (never married to Mr. Pratt, but that didn’t count against her, either) was one of character. But all she could come up with were people who had been poor in the past, and that wasn’t going to work.

Today, though, after that lunch with Catherine, Mrs. Brixton felt herself to be in league with Victoria and Hannah and even, when she thought of it, with Hannah’s mother. Better to be ignorant and irrational than pretentious (the restaurant had been expensive, after all.) So she figured she would give the girls what they wanted and bring them both back to her house. Keep their little sisterhood intact; allow Victoria to have the female role model she had chosen, since the one Mrs. Brixton had tried to give her was such a disappointment.

Had Elizabeth been this bad when she was that age? Probably, but she couldn’t remember it; all she could think of when she thought of her eldest daughter was another ally on Christmas or Thanksgiving, someone else to argue against the claim that all holidays were celebrations of genocide.

It took just over an hour to get back to the Brixton house, a mostly silent hour. Hannah and Victoria were both listening to music through their headphones. Private music; chosen music. So different from how they used to listen to the radio on car rides. Mrs. Brixton considered turning on the radio a few times, but it seemed wrong to play music out loud while they were using their headphones. Too domineering, too out-of-touch, too old. Like she was trying to impose her music or her habits on them.

Of course, listening to music through headphones could have the same effect, as she was finding out. She drove in silence and daydreamed about lying down. Instead of a song, the image of her bed reverberated in her mind.

Since when did she care about being domineering? Or being old, for that matter? It had to be some reaction to Catherine, some way of proving that she wasn’t like that - that rigid, that inflexible. Work was one thing, but that was just a performance, wasn’t it? That wasn’t how she was in real life, even though, if you considered the matter quantitatively, work was her real life.

People always said that your children were a reflection on you and your parenting, and Mrs. Brixton found herself hoping fervently that wasn’t true. She found herself wanting to side with nature over nurture - place the blame on genetics, on the three mysterious lineages from whence her daughters derived. That’s why they were all so different. She was a scientist of a sort, after all.

But science had its limits. It couldn’t cure her headache, for one thing. But that didn’t stop her from reaching into the center console and grabbing two pills from the large, family-sized bottle she kept in there, washing them down with a swig of water from the bottle that she kept there for that purpose. Just because it hadn’t worked before didn’t mean it couldn’t work this time. 

Plus, Mrs. Brixton felt she owed it to her industry, to modernity, to capitalism to at least try the best that humanity had to offer. Someday, they’d invent a stronger pill. Presumably, that’s what some of the people in her building were working on all day. It was such a huge building with so many offices and labs and conference rooms, you couldn’t help but feel like someone there was working on everything imaginable and all of them were pushing in the direction of progress.

Maybe work was her real life, after all. It certainly felt more real than this, spending the better part of a day driving, sitting, eating. Annoyed but unable to do anything about it. She couldn’t threaten to fire Catherine; she couldn’t assign or deny her overtime (a constant challenge to determine who wanted what and when, an ever-evolving game of cat and mouse); she was powerless.

She pulled her minivan into the driveway and they all walked into the house without speaking, without looking at each other, automatically. Mrs. Brixton felt vaguely like she deserved a “thank you,” although the experience had been roundly excruciating. But at least it would have given it some closure.

Had they even thanked her for the concert? Yes, Victoria definitely had - or she was thankful for it, at least - but what about Hannah? Mrs. Brixton watched her (headphones still in, not even talking to Victoria) plop down on her couch, the couch that she had paid for, as if she owned it. As if she owned every room she entered: that was how she lived. She suddenly regretted bringing Hannah back here. But it was too late now; she was here for another night, irrevocably.

She left the girls in the living room, where Victoria had settled on the other, smaller couch, draping her legs over its arm, and went to her bedroom. There was something sad about lying on your bed in the middle of the day, but they had already commandeered the one decent sitting area in the house. Maybe a nap could salvage the day. Not an under-the-covers nap. If she fell asleep just lying fully-clothed on top of the comforter, that would mean she was really, legitimately tired. Tired enough to justify taking a nap.

Or just tired of being alive, went through her mind involuntarily, in the haze of half-sleep.