The Sunday Key

By Swati Ravi Nain

I’m standing, key in hand, at the office door. It’s Monday. Or is it Wednesday? Who knows? When life is a series of Mondays the best you can hope for, is to start on top of the ticker tape of the to-do list and notch your way to the bottom before this mid-week Monday is done. Tomorrow, it will be Monday again.

It’s been blurring for a while now. But it’s the first time, I’ve managed getting up, bathing, coffee, breakfast, kid, the perfunctory peck on the lips of the perfunctory husband, and even the customary expletives at some lane-swapping bitch without having woken up completely. Or at all.

I know I did everything I just listed, like I know I breathed in and out through the night. I don’t have to remember having done it to know it got done. But shouldn’t I remember having left home? Or what my son’s face looked like this morning? Was it still tear-stained from accidentally locking himself in the loo last night? How did I get him out?

The last thing I remember is walking upstairs after dinner and hearing his wail from inside the bathroom. The thump of his little fists against the door. Me screaming from outside trying to get him to unlock it from within. Hearing him whimpering and uncomprehending on the other side. I knew then that he would not be able to coax the mechanism open. At this point, Hugh, the husband entered the scene, proceeded to don the ‘one sane male’ mantle and told me to calm down. I shoved him aside, lifted the bedside chair and slammed it against the lock. The husband said something about disproportionate hysteria. Everything after that is a blank. Last night, I think, I cracked something inside me.

It seems to have done something to me. I’m frozen, unable to open a door that I’ve opened every morning for a decade of grey Mondays. I desperately want to remember a moment in vivid colour before I unlock it. A greyness, like clotted cottonwool in my lungs, is wetly suffocating me from within. A cold sweat springs up to bead my upper lip. I’m afraid that if I open this door again without remembering a Sunday-afternoon moment, then I will doom myself to Mondays till I keel over at my desk. My mind tries, finds no purchase and slips.

I hear a car arrive behind me and instantly know it’s Rumi. I can see her vintage yellow Beetle in my mind without turning. She slams the door and walks towards me. I wish it weren’t her right now. I’ve spent so many years being flawless in front of her, never letting on how much I want to taste her beautiful mouth. I’m the good mentor, harmless, dependable Liz. Not paralysed, batshit crazy Liz.

“Heya Liz, this is legend! You’re not already in the office? I thought you crept out of the filing cabinets in the morning before we got here.” Her cheery tone falters, as I stand there, catatonic.

And still, I cannot remember. If I died right now would a series of job-lists flash before my eyes? I know, if I open the door and let her in, I will simply walk through another numb and blind day, before ending up opening the door on another Monday.

It’s then that I notice the new key dangling on my keychain. Like something out of a child’s imagination. A familiar key, three-lobed, thick filigreed brass. A key to unlock treasure chests, secret gardens and women locked away for life for the privilege of being rescued by self-righteous men they’ve never met. A key to unlock chastity belts or Pandora’s box loaded with a god’s vengeance and blame. Or even Blackbeard’s lair with piles of murdered wives within. This key, it thaws me.

In the moment Rumi sashays over to me, I hide it and open the door with my regular key. I must get in before her frangipani scent envelopes me. She must not see the key. It’s mine. It will save me.

I get through the day somehow. I’ve always been a wind-up doll for people’s expectations. All my life, my mother held the key to me. Till four, I would feel her fury only through her hands like vices on my arms. She wouldn’t hit me. That’s not what ladies do. She would crush my arms and speak softly right into my face, leaving red imprints of her fingers and bloody crescents from her manicured nails on my arms. I learned then, the lifecycle of a bruise - blue, then purple then yellow. You could count how often I had angered her by the different colours pressed into my skin.

Why did she switch to the cupboard I wonder? I only know that one day I spilled something and waited for the bruises. But she simply walked me to a cupboard, made me step inside and locked it. After that day, every time I walked through a prohibited door, my mother, gentile and ever smiling, would lead me or drag me to the cupboard and lock me in. An hour, a day, two days, I never knew for how long. I learned tears, blood and love could not be shaped into keys.

A year of that, and by six I learned to the see the lock in her smile. I’d see it and lock myself before she could. No one had to tell me that little girls were quiet or that good grades were the key to success. Or that girls don’t fall in love with girls.

Once when I was fifteen, she caught me touching myself to my dead father’s girlie mags from the attic. Strange for her to have kept them, I remember thinking with a thrill before hiding them under my shirt and taking them to my room. The door to my room had no lock. She walked in as I lay under the bed with one hand between the centrefold’s legs and the other between my own. For this she locked me in the closet for four days. Letting me stew in my own filth, misery, and hunger. I was big by this time, so she had to use more force, a thick rolling pin to prod me inwards like wayward dough. I had the briefest moment of satisfaction in seeing her smile falter when I pushed back. But I had not yet learnt viciousness enough to fight her. And she was unafraid to draw blood. When the door unlocked four days later, the smile was back.

No one ever had to say that I shouldn’t talk about the hot, heady bliss of a lithe, sweaty woman arched boneless beneath me. No one needed to tell me that I should wear lipstick and sway my hips in heels instead of wearing crisp, white cotton shirts, starched cuffs folded up to my forearms and thick boots to plant my feet in.

Dyke, I think. Delicious, I think. Before I wind myself up again.

Then there was the year she met a man and forgot about me. Some well-meaning counsellor at school looked at my haunted face and handed me paints and a paper when she couldn’t get me to talk. Once I started painting, I could not stop. I bought tubes of thick, creamy paint and smeared it on page after creamy page. It knew that it couldn’t last. The man dumped her, and she turned on me again. Starched apron on to clear up the mess. She’d looked at the paints and told me to come back to reality. I locked away the art books, the heady bottles of turpentine, the fistfuls of burnt umber, ochre, and in a trunk.

No one had to tell me to join and then inherit the accounting practise my uncle had managed after my father’s death. Or to marry the jock, wear virginal lace to the marital bed or to birth a boy. By then no one had needed to tell Liz how to own a Monday. I could do it in my sleep.

This day whirs and clicks turn by wind-up turn to an end.

By seven they all leave. Even the brown-nosers and stragglers with no life. The husband calls. I tell him I’ll be late. I see my son in my head. The thought of him makes me want to scream and scream. He is beautiful and he exists on the outside because I’m locked inside. I mumble something about listening to daddy and ring off.

Then I begin to look for the door that the brass key opens. My Sunday key, I think. Cabinets, closets, storerooms, boxes I try them and try them. I look at an electrical socket and imagine plunging it in. It fits nothing. I feel the greyness inching back. Then I remember the trunk of paints. It’s in my office, tucked behind a filing cabinet. The key fits perfectly, though it should not. Inside is a thick sheaf of paintings I don’t remember painting. Vermillion breasts, blue pudenda, ripe green buttocks. A forest of women, with keyholes for mouths, keyholes for navels, keyholes between their legs. And on the bottom, a painting of my mother with keyholes for eyes.

I drive to mother’s. The decaying splendour of Claustrum Manor exerts a strange gravitation pull on me as I skid into the driveway. I know she will take time after she is roused, not just because she is old, but because my mother never hurried anywhere. I ring the bell and then begin to bang on the door, frantic. Suddenly I’m locked into the cupboard again, banging on the thick oak door. I feel it envelope me, the grey leaching to black.

I knew it so well with my fingertips in the dark. My five by three by six, wooden prison. The resinous grain of the wood, slick with sweat and blood, reassuring solidity against my raw scraped fingers. Every knot, every ridge, every nail, an intimate landmark against oblivion. And the keyhole, a pinprick of brass edged light. To see snatches of her smiling and humming to herself, the good housekeeper, bustling with things put away where they belong.

I bang and kick with thirty-five years of pent-up rage until the door begins to splinter. I hear it then, the gasp that means the smile has faltered. She opens the door fumbling, yelling, Liza, this is unbecoming. She has always known I’d be on the other side of a splintering door one day.

I shove her aside and glimpse thin legs and bloomers flashing comically at me. I am overcome with a fit of giggling as I race up the stairs. There, like a portal to something sacred and profane at once, tall and unbudging is my cupboard. I stand before it, key raised. My flesh prickles, because I can hear tiny fists banging frantically from within. My hands are all thumbs as I try to insert the key. I can hear the hiccupping sobs of a child too far gone to be able to control herself. The key turns and with a click the door opens. Five-year old Liza sits there, hot and hurt and all big swollen eyes. My heart breaks as I pull her out soiled and crumpled. I cradle her in my arms and feel the tiny, satisfying solidity of her and I can suddenly remember the moment I got that door open for my son. The vital whoomp of him running out and slamming into my belly in relief.

I hear mother doddering behind me, her fury palpable. Her eyes widen as I advance towards her with a gentile smile. I shove her into the cupboard firmly, her mouth an open ‘O’, her eyes pleading. I lock it with my Sunday key and then with her favourite prod, the rolling pin, I break it in the lock.

By Swati Ravi Nain