relaying information.
‘I have to trust that I’ll reappear again,’ the woman says, but her voice comes out husky, as if she hasn’t spoken for years. She clears her throat.
‘More than that,’ Professor Montgomery urges.
‘I have to believe in myself.’
‘Society always tells us to believe in ourselves,’ she says, dismissively. ‘Words are easy, phrases are cheap. What specifically must you believe in?’
She thinks, then realizes that this is about more than getting the answers right. What does she want to believe?
‘That I’m important, that I’m needed, relevant, useful, valid …’ She looks down at her cup. ‘Sexy.’ She breathes in and out through her nose, slowly, her confidence building. ‘That I’m worthy. That there is potential, possibility, that I can still take on new challenges. That I can contribute. That I’m interesting. That I’m not finished yet. That people know I’m here.’ Her voice cracks on her final words.
Professor Montgomery places her cup down on the glass table and reaches for the woman’s hands. ‘I know you’re here. I see you.’
In that moment the woman knows for certain that she’ll come back. That there is a way. To begin with, she is focusing on her heart. After that, everything else will follow.
It began shortly after their first date, when she was twenty-six years old, when everything was gleaming, sparkling new. She’d left work early to drive to her new lover, excited to see him, counting down the hours until their next moment together, and she’d found Ronald at home in his living room, hammering away at the wall.
‘What are you doing?’ She’d laughed at the intensity of his expression, the grease, the grime and determination of her newly DIY boyfriend. He was even more attractive to her now.
‘I’m building you a shelf.’ He’d barely paused to look at her before returning to hammering a nail in.
‘A shelf?!’
He continued hammering, then checked the shelf for balance.
‘Is this your way of telling me you want me to move in?’ she laughed, heart thudding. ‘I think you’re supposed to give me a drawer, not a shelf.’
‘Yes, of course I want you to move in. Immediately. And I want you to leave your job and sit on this shelf so that everyone can see you, so that they can admire you, see what I see: the most beautiful woman in the world. You won’t have to lift a finger. You won’t have to do anything. Just sit on this shelf and be loved.’
Her heart had swelled, her eyes filled. By the next day she was sitting on that shelf. Five feet above the floor, in the right-hand alcove of the living room, beside the fireplace. That was where she met Ronald’s family and friends for the first time. They stood around her, drinks in hand, marvelling at the wonder of the new love of Ronald’s life. They sat at the dinner table in the adjoining dining room, and though she couldn’t see everybody she could hear them, she could join in. She felt suspended above them – adored, cherished, respected by his friends, worshipped by his mother, envied by his ex-girlfriends. Ronald would look up at her proudly, that beautiful beam on his face that said it all. Mine. She sparkled with youth and desire, beside his trophy cabinet, which commemorated the football victories from his youth and his more recent golf successes. Above them was a brown trout mounted on the wall on a wooden plate with a brass plaque, the largest trout he’d ever caught, while out with his brother and father. He’d moved the trout to build the shelf, and so it was with even more respect that the men in his life viewed her. When her family and friends came to visit her they could leave feeling assured that she was safe, cocooned, idolized and, more importantly, loved.
She was the most important thing in the world to him. Everything revolved around her and her position in the home, in his life. He pandered to her, he fussed around her. He wanted her on that shelf all of the time. The only moment that came close to the feeling of being so important in his world was Dusting Day. On Dusting Day, he went through all his trophies, polishing and shining them, and of course, he’d lift her from the shelf and lay her down and they would make love. Shiny and polished, renewed with sparkle and vigour, she would climb back up to the shelf again.
They married, she quit her job, nursed her children, cuddled them, spent sleepless nights caring for them on the shelf, then watched them sleep, gurgle and grow on the rug and playpen beneath her. Ronald liked for her to be alone on the shelf, he employed childcare so that she could have her space, so that she could stay in the place he built for her, so that he wouldn’t lose a part of her to the children, or that their special relationship wouldn’t be altered. She had heard of couples who were torn apart after having families, husbands who felt left out when babies arrived. She didn’t want that to happen, she wanted to be there for him, to still feel adored. The shelf was her place. She cared deeply for everyone from there, and because of her position in the home, everyone always looked up to her. It was only later, when the children had grown up and left the house, twenty years after the day she first climbed onto the shelf, that the loneliness took hold of her.
With the suddenness of an alarm bell, in fact.
It was the angle of the TV that started it. She couldn’t see what Ronald was watching. It had never bothered her before because she was always content to see the faces of her children watching television rather than the TV itself. But the couch was now empty, the room quiet, and she needed distraction, escapism. Company. Ronald bought a new television, a flat screen that went on the wall, which meant it couldn’t be tilted, and it was suddenly out of her view, just as her children were. And then there were the gatherings Ronald organized without inviting her or telling her, that would go on around her, involving people she had never met, and some women she wasn’t sure of, right there in her own home – under her very nose, as it were.
She watched from above as his life carried on beneath her, as though she wasn’t in the room, as though she wasn’t a part of his life. Wearing a smile to hide her confusion, she would try to cling on, she would try to join in, but they couldn’t hear her up there on the shelf and they’d grown tired of looking up, of raising their voices. They’d moved on. Ronald would forget to top up her drink, to check on her, to introduce her. It was as though he’d forgotten that she was there. And then he built the extension; it took him months, but once he was finished and the kitchen extended out to the back garden, suddenly all the gatherings and dinners moved out there. The TV room that had been the formal room, the centre of their home, was now a small, comfortable den. It had lost its grandeur. She’d reached the point where she felt she wasn’t a part of his life any more.
And now it’s Saturday night, and she’s been alone all day while he’s been out golfing, while the children are busy getting on with their own lives.
‘Ronald,’ she says.
He’s on the couch, watching something that she can’t see. He makes a sound in response but doesn’t look up at her.
‘Something doesn’t feel right up here.’ She hears the tremble in her voice, feels the tightness in her chest. When you put me up here, it was for everybody to see me, to be the centre of everything, but now … now everything is carrying on without me, out of sight. I feel so disconnected. She can’t say it,
