Expectation

by Anna Hope

Much of their lives is still before them. They have made mistakes, but they are not fatal. They are no longer young, but they do not feel old. Life is still malleable and full of potential. The openings to the roads not taken have not yet sealed up. They still have time to become who they are going to be.

‘The Bechdel test?’ ‘Jesus, Han, call yourself a feminist?’ Lissa steers her towards the crossing. ‘You know – does a film have two women in it? Do they both have names? Do they have a conversation about something other than a man? This American writer came up with it. Loads of films fail it. Most of them.’

But she is good at not crying – has it down to a fine art. She does not cry when woman after woman at work announces her pregnancy. As day after day she takes her temperature and marks it on a graph. As month after month she bleeds. And when her oldest friend told her she was pregnant, Hannah held her very close, so Cate would not see the expression on her face.

At first it is odd to hear her voice in a group – it has been so long since she felt she had anything to say.

Her mum closes the door softly, and it strikes Hannah, not for the first time, that her parents, whose sphere of life has always seemed so small, so constrained, have mastered the art of kindness.

Over the next days she feels herself slipping, as though happiness were a dance whose steps she has forgotten. She counts her breaths. She counts her blessings, she tries to rationalize – why should it matter what her friends are doing? Why should her happiness be indexed to theirs? But it is. Somehow, it is – she cannot help but take inventory of her life; her lack, at thirty-three years old, of any of the markers that constitute real adulthood.

All I am, thinks Lissa, is a collection of lines. There is nothing real inside.

She turns to Laurie. ‘But I’m not sure. I’m going to go away first. To make up my mind.’ ‘Where?’ ‘I don’t know.’ It is hard, hard to think of a destination that does not seem contrived – she does not want to find herself. Or perhaps she does. Perhaps that is exactly what she wants.