I knew Cara would be difficult when it came to the idea of having her and Niamh over to my place for a dinner party with Kate, but I had no idea how difficult she would be, right from the suggestion.
“A dinner party at your place?” she mocked, when I brought it up in a phone call. “Your flat is tiny. You should have had it when you and Peter lived in that house. You had more than enough room then.”
It’s been almost four years since we broke up, but Peter is still a sensitive subject for me. The ending of that relationship is why I went “religious” as Cara puts it; it was very painful to realise my long-term boyfriend had no intention of ever marrying me. After the years I had invested in that romance proved to be fruitless, and Peter admitted he didn’t really love me, I was gutted. I wasn’t suicidal, but I really didn’t see the point of living after we broke up and put the house we were sharing up for sale. If it hadn’t been for that nice estate agent inviting me to her church, I don’t know what would have become of me. Finding God got me through Peter leaving. I’m not superwoman – it hurts that Peter has since moved on, marrying someone else after only a year and a half of being with her. I do miss the house we used to have, but I like my flat. And it has plenty of space for a small dinner party, I point I made to Cara.
“Still, why do you have to have a ‘dinner party’?” she asked. “Why not just to come round to our place for pizza, like you usually do?”
I clenched my teeth, something I can do now without pain. “I want to have a dinner party so my friends can get to know one another,” I explained.
“I know Kate, and Niamh is hardly your friend,” Cara said. I remembered how Kate thinks Cara is a bit shallow and giddy, too much like some of her students. But she doesn’t dislike her; she’s always encouraging me to invite Cara along to bible study.
“I’m getting to know Niamh better, and I think she would like to get to know Kate,” I pressed on. “She’s very interested in the campaign I’m doing at work, and so is Kate. I thought it would be good to get all of you together.”
“An evening of serious discussion with teacher?” Cara sneered. I winced.
“Cara, why are you being so difficult?” I was inviting her over for a meal, not invasive surgery.
“Last time we talked, you yelled at me for not doing enough for your campaign. It’s your job, not mine. You think they’re going to give you a Nobel Prize for your traffic light incantation?” Cara laughed derisively at me.
Incantation? I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I listened to my sister laugh at me, tears welling in my eyes. I was tempted to hang up and go to bed to bury my face in my pillow, but I held firm. “Is Niamh there?” I asked in a tight voice.
That surprised Cara; she stopped laughing. “Niamh? Why do you want to talk to her?”
“I’d like to invite her myself. You’re still welcome to come, but I’d like to ask Niamh directly.” I liked the way my voice sounded calm and collected, even though I felt shattered. I was lucky to have had years of experience in being Cara’s older sister – how many times had I been forced to play the reasonable adult when she was in a strop? She usually saved her venomous remarks for our mother or oldest sister, Muiread; this was the first time that she’d turned on me, and I was a bit shaken. I was stung that she used my failed relationship to hurt me, but it was fair game. It had happened; I should have listened to my dad when he advised me against moving in with Peter. He used the clichéd “why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” argument, but he never said “I told you so!” after we broke up. All my family were incredibly supportive of me, even my brother David, whose friend Peter had been. Everyone avoided the subject, and now Cara was throwing it in my face. I took a deep breath and prayed silently. Please give me strength, Lord!
“Lisa?”
Cara had given the phone to Niamh, and I was so relieved to hear her voice I laughed. I cleared my throat, knowing I must have sounded mad. “Hi Niamh, it’s Lisa.” She knew that! I giggled nervously. “I wanted to invite you over for a dinner party…just you, me, Cara and a friend of mine.” If Cara still wanted to come! “You’d like my friend Kate…she’s very knowledgeable about sex trafficking…” What did that sound like? “I mean, she gives me lots of support for Athletes Against Exploitation. She knows her facts and figures, and she has great arguments…” I sounded like an idiot.
Fortunately, Niamh understood what I was trying to do. “She sounds great,” she said encouragingly. “I have a late shift on Friday, but I have Saturday night off.” Niamh was a nurse. “Was that when you were thinking of having the party?”
Actually, I had been thinking of Friday, but Kate probably could make Saturday. I had been thinking of going swimming at the gym on Saturday, but I would do that Friday instead. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call Kate and see if she’s available.”
“Okay, great. Shall I give you back to Cara?”
I paused. Did I feel like talking to Cara? “No, I’ll talk to her when I’ve talked with Kate, and call back to set everything up.” I smiled brightly, even though I knew Niamh couldn’t see me. “Talk to you soon,” I promised, and hung up.
I felt all right when I dialled Kate’s number, but the minute I started talking, I got choked up.
“Lisa, are you all right?” Kate spoke into the silence. I’d gotten the “it’s me, Lisa” out before my voice failed me. “What’s wrong?”
I cleared my throat. “It’s Cara…she said my flat is too small for a dinner party.”
Kate was confused. “It’s not. And besides, why has that upset you so much?”
My voice was really small. “She said I should have had it in the house I shared with Peter.”
“Well, that wasn’t nice of her,” Kate declared in her teacher voice. I half-wondered if she was going to give Cara lines as punishment. 100 times, I will not mock my sister. “You’ve come a long way, but no one likes to be reminded of what we’ve lost. We all know you’re better off, but to have your sister say something like that-! Did she say nyah nyah as well?”
“I shouldn’t get so upset-“
“Yes, you should. That was mean and spiteful, Lisa. Bringing up a past hurt like a major breakup out of nowhere is a terrible thing to do. It really tears a person down – I’ve see my students do it. One girl reduced her supposed friend to tears by bringing up the time she messed her pants in primary school. You hear “that’s why your boyfriend dumped you!” a thousand times in the school corridors, and it’s horrible.” Kate clicked her tongue in annoyance, and I could tell she wanted to give Cara detention, not just lines. “Look, kids do it because they feel bad, and they think by making someone else feel worse, they’ll feel better. So what’s got Cara so angry that she’s lashing out at you?”
“She got upset that I told her she wasn’t doing enough to fight trafficking,” I admitted.
“Who is?” Kate asked. “I mean, I know you are, and maybe she’s jealous of that.”
“I guess we’re all surprised that Niamh is pretty vocal on the topic, too.”
“Niamh?” Kate asked.
“Cara’s flatmate. She and I never got on well before, but ever since they made those busts in America, she and I can talk. I had told her about the Red Light Prayer, and at the time she didn’t think much of it, but since they made those arrests in America, she’s really been into the topic. That’s why I want to have this dinner party, so you can meet her. You’re so much better with facts and figures than I am. I tried to tell her some of the things you’ve been telling me, and it came out all wrong.” I laughed at the memory.
“Oh, so Cara doesn’t like you now getting on with the flatmate you used to have problems with?” Kate concluded.
“Niamh was like Tommy’s difficult colleague,” I said. “My version, of course. She used to roll her eyes to heaven anytime I said anything about morality or God.”
Kate grunted. “And I’ll bet Cara used to love that, pitting the two of you against each other.” She really didn’t have much of a good opinion of my little sister. “So now you and Niamh get along, and she’s the odd man out, so she resorts to stone throwing. She’s not very mature, this sister of yours, is she?”
I felt defensive. “Now she’s not that bad-“
“Lisa, she practically had you in tears a minute ago! Everyone knows what a sore subject Peter is for you. You don’t pick on other people’s heartbreak.” She lowered her voice. “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but sometimes I can’t help smiling when I hear no wonder he broke up with you being thrown back at a girl who said the same thing earlier. We tell the kids what goes around comes around, but they never believe it.”
I thought of Peter and his wife. “Sometimes it doesn’t,” I said sadly.
“Justice is in God’s hands,” Kate said firmly. “It wasn’t a good relationship. God has a better plan for you.”
I hadn’t had a date in a year. “Sometimes I wonder about that,” I confessed.
“You and me both, darlin’!” There was a pause as I thought things over. “Are you feeling better?” Kate asked gently.
I was. “Yes…so can you do Saturday night? Niamh has to work on Friday, when I originally planned the dinner party.”
“I had tentative plans with some colleagues, but they usually cry off as they can’t find babysitters.” Kate sighed. “If I didn’t face kids every day, I would envy them, but when I think about facing kids in the classroom and then coming home to face your own kids, and I don’t feel so bad.”
I laughed. “No maternal instinct in you, then?”
Kate laughed too. “No…hazard of the job, I think.”
I thought about my colleagues, who were mostly a childless bunch. “I don’t think it’s teaching that turns you off…no one I know, outside my own family and some people in church, have kids. And I’m not just talking about the single people. I know plenty of people who are married and childless.”
“Have you ever noticed how people judge people who don’t have kids?” Kate asked. “I mean, it’s one thing if you’re single…I always think they suspect you’re gay. But if you’re married and don’t have children, it’s like something must be wrong…you’ve done something wrong.”
I overheard Sheila once talking about that over lunch. She pointed out how people tend to look down on women who have put their careers ahead of family plans. “My boss was talking about that. How women are judged by their fertility…they’re supposed to have kids, and when they don’t, it’s because they’re selfish or defective in some way.”
“Defective?” Kate parroted.
“Her words,” I said. “She said a woman’s personal life is always fair game…no one ever berates a man for not having children.”
“Probably because he could have children no one knows about,” Kate sniggered.
“Well, no one believes in a paternal instinct,” I pointed out.
“I do,” Kate insisted. “But you’re right. If we get married in our old age, we’re supposed to rush right out and have babies, before our biological clock tick out. No time for us to enjoy married life, just reproduce!”
I’m older than Kate. What she said stung – that was my big worry when Peter and I broke up, when I was 32. I’d wasted 5 years of my life in that relationship…would I have time to find someone else before my childbearing years were up?
“I’ve upset you again,” Kate deduced by my silence. “I can hear you fretting over being single. God has a plan for us, Lisa. My great-grandmother didn’t marry until she was forty, and that was in the 1920’s, when there weren’t a lot of men to go around in the first place, particularly in England!”
I scoffed. “But your grandmother made up for that! Wasn’t she barely 18 when she had your mother?”
“The war rushed things. But seeing her mother struggle as a widow with a child made my mother wait. She took her time, getting qualified as a teacher and moving to Ireland. She was thirty-one when she had my oldest brother, which was unheard of in the late 1960’s. My mother’s a great support for us long-term singles.” It was true – the people in Kate’s family married late, if at all. Her oldest brother was still single at 41, and her other brothers and sister had married in their thirties. “We’re still young, Lisa. And if we don’t marry, then God has something else for us. Your boss is right. Women are judged by their fertility, and it’s not fair. Every parent-teacher conference day I think about how some people weren’t meant to be parents!”
I laughed a little, but I was still worried. Worried about still not having anyone, and worried about my relationship with my sister. “Kate…what am I going to do?”
She sounded confused. “About what?”
I wasn’t so sure myself. I decided to focus on the most pressing thing on my mind. “Cara,” I decided. “What am I going to do about Cara?”
“Love her,” Kate said. “Let her know that it’s not okay to pick on you, but let her know that you love her.”
I smiled. “I have to invite her to the dinner party. Again.” I said good-bye to Kate, and dialled Cara’s number.