Deb remembered thinking about all the men with wives and girlfriends who were asked a similar question and knew without question that they would be taken care of. She envied them.
Apart from steadfastly refusing to help around the house since she’d got home from the hospital, Dan had – for years now – developed a habit of accusing her of things she hadn’t done. He was critical of the smallest things that she did. He’d shouted at her for buying the wrong colour towels and for not lining all the mugs up in the cupboard to face the same way.
Both of those times – and at various other times when Dan had been just as critical – Deb had rolled her eyes and ignored him, because that was the easiest solution. She’d found that if she just demurred, it was over faster. She didn’t care whether Dan thought he’d “won” the point; she just wanted a quiet life.
However, it bothered her. More than anything, the fact that apparently Dan didn’t appreciate the irony of him criticising the fact that she hadn’t aligned all the mugs in the cupboard to face the same way, when he hadn’t ever lifted a finger to wash a mug (or shop for new towels, or anything else that they needed for the house).
If you don’t wash up any mugs, then you don’t get to criticise where they go in the cupboard, Deb had thought at the time, angrily. It was just basic politeness.
At that moment, as Deb gripped the plate in fury, Dan walked into the kitchen, behind her. He put his used coffee cup down on the worktop, without comment, and walked out of the kitchen again.
Oh, hell, no.
Something in Deb snapped.
‘I suppose that’s your way of letting me know that my break from housework’s over?’ She followed him into the lounge. The only thing stopping her hurling the plate at his head was that she really liked that dinner service: it had belonged to her grandma. Instead, Deb put the plate down carefully on a side table.
‘What?’ He was standing in front of the TV, flicking through it with the remote control. That was another thing: since Deb was home all the time, she could see how little Dan apparently worked when he was “working from home”. Like now, for instance: she’d come down to make a cup of tea, but he’d apparently left his desk for some recreational TV time.
‘Listen, Dan. I appreciate that I’m up and about now, and I can go back to sharing the housework. But it doesn’t meanthat I’m going to go back to doing everything, and you doing nothing.’ She tried her best to be fair, and keep her voice level.
‘What are you having a go at me for? I just came down for a break. Didn’t know I was going to get nagged,’ he replied, sulkily.
Dear lord. It’s like talking to a six-year-old, Deb thought. Part of her actually marvelled at Dan’s audacity.
‘I’m not having a go at you,’ she said, patiently, although she wanted to scream. ‘I’m just saying that, if you see that there’s a pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen, and the dishwasher is empty, it would be the adult thing to fill it up and put it on. It only takes five minutes.’
‘I just don’t have the time,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’m working.’
‘Excuse me?’ Deb looked at the TV, and the remote in Dan’s hand. She wanted to laugh, it was so ridiculous. ‘I’m working too. And, might I remind you, I managed to do all the housework and the cooking and all the life admin for both of us while also running my own business, before the operation.’
‘What d’you mean, life admin?’ He looked up briefly from the TV.
‘Booking appointments, shopping, buying and wrapping birthday presents for your friends and family as well as mine, organising holidays…’ Deb listed the tasks on her fingers. She’d read an article about it in a newspaper which described all these types of activities as “life admin” and “emotional labour”. They were new terms to her, but they made sense.
‘Yeah, but you’re just better at all that stuff than me.’ Dan turned his attention back to the screen.
If Deb could have ripped his fingers off, one by one, in that moment, she would have done it. Briefly, she imagined gripping Dan by the wrist and exacting her righteous wrath upon him.
‘Better than you at… housework and booking hair appointments?’
‘Yeah. You know, women just are better at that kind of thing. Multitasking and all that.’
‘You don’t think that’s basically just a pile of horseshit someone made up to make women feel better about the fact we’re just expected to do everything? You’d be great at housework too if you’d been doing it since you were twelve. I’d probably have won the Nobel Prize by now if I’d spent as much time doing particle physics,’ she commented, raising her voice.
‘Jeez. No need to shout.’ He rolled his eyes, and that annoyed Deb even more. ‘No, I don’t think that. What are you, a feminist now?’
Deb was momentarily speechless. She’d thought that her relationship with Dan was the kind of thing that would develop into them holding hands on the beach when they were old, huddled under blankets and drinking tea out of a flask. It wasn’t hot and fiery, but she thought she could trust him.
Over the past weeks, though, Deb had realised that she couldn’t. And that knowledge was killing her. She couldn’t trust him to look after her and understand what she had been going through. She couldn’t be open with him and know that he would hear her. She couldn’t trust him to listen to her and understand how deeply disrespectful he was being right now.
‘Of course, I’m a feminist. What woman isn’t?’ Deb couldn’t believe he’d said that: as iffeministwas a dirty word – and, even more concerningly, that they had been together for two years now and he apparently didn’t know that she had always considered herself one. It was a part of who she was. She had been raised by a strong woman, raised to be independent and know she could do anything in life if she just worked hard. She was more than equal to a man, and, frankly, in this day and age, the whole idea that there was a basic inequality between the sexes seemed ridiculously outdated.
‘I didn’t know you were. Bit unnecessary, isn’t it?’ Dan shrugged. ‘Moved past the need for it, I’d have said.’
‘Then you would be wrong,’ Deb argued. ‘As this conversation is literally showing.’
‘Oh, Christ, Deb, give it a rest,’ Dan sighed wearily. ‘I can’t be doing with all this whinging. I’ve got a lot on my mind, yeah? It’s been hard, having you at home all the time, looking after the house, doing everything while you’ve been up there on your arse, watching Netflix and eating chocolates. You’ve been skiving and we both know it. Just as well you run your own business, I’d say.’
