Being Dianne

By Qarnita Loxton

For the sake of her daughters, Dianne lives next to her ex-husband, sharing a garden. Good for the girls but not ideal for moving on with her life.
Andile, her lover turned friend, and Faye, her secret Tinder date turned sometimes lover, both want more from Di but she can’t decide. Will her daughters freak out if she has a girlfriend?
When Dianne’s eldest deals with homophobia at school, she feels compelled to speak out and be honest about who she is. If she does, what will the fallout be?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Aug 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780795710377

Qarnita Loxton

Qarnita Loxton was born in Cape Town in 1974. She studied law at UCT, graduating in 1997, and worked as an attorney predominantly in the financial services industry. More recently she has trained and worked as an executive coach. Being Kari is her first novel.

Book preview

1

‘But why can’t I see you tonight? You don’t have the girls? I can drive to you if you’ve got to be at the shop tomorrow morning?’ Faye pushed. Angry. ‘It’s not like the girls are across the garden with Alan tonight. Everyone is out. No one will see me, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Her voice was loud in my ear, raised harder on the No, the phone already hot in my hand, even though we had only been talking for five minutes. Was it possible for a phone to heat up like that? It burned so much that I had to resist the impulse to throw it across my desk.

‘No, don’t drive, it’s too far, doesn’t seem really worth it,’ I said, ignoring her comment that no one would see her, wincing at my words that it wasn’t worth it. I hoped she didn’t notice. I didn’t want to go there. ‘All we would do is watch TV and eat something on our laps. And you have work tomorrow too. Besides, I know you don’t actually want to leave those doggies of yours – they’d never forgive you if you just upped and left them on Valentine’s.’ I tried to make my voice light.

Silence.

I could tell Faye was holding her breath. Deciding whether this was going to become a full-on fight. I already knew the answer.

‘God, Dianne. Why do you have to be so uptight about the whole thing?’ Her words blew out of her mouth like the gale winds that could gust in each of our hometowns. Me in Blouberg and she in Noordhoek, seaside towns an hour apart, different in so many ways but the same in ways of fighting the wind. ‘Is it because it’s flippin’ Valentine’s Day? Last week the drive wasn’t such an issue for you and we didn’t go anywhere then either. I’m tired of this thing you do, Di-anne.’ She said my name so that the two syllables were split far apart. ‘I don’t know what we are to each other. You really need to figure yourself the fuck out. It’s not like I’ve got nothing better to do than to chase you down. There are people I could hang out with. Real friends. Other Tinder dates to swipe on. You need to make up your mind,’ she said.

‘Come on, don’t be like that. It is a nightmare drive for me on a Friday night.’ I softened my voice, not to show my own irritation at her insistence. ‘And I told you Valentine’s is a bit weird for me and my friends here. It’s just something that we all want to pass. It’s got nothing to do with you.’ The minute I said it, I knew the other truth that I wasn’t telling: I didn’t want to be alone with her on Valentine’s. Just in case it meant something to her.

Just like that, Faye’s bluster died, as it always did.

‘Yeah,’ Faye said eventually, ‘you did tell me. But you are still so weird.’ She sounded tired. ‘I’ve known you now for what, a year? And you haven’t let me come to Blouberg. You always come here. Are you scared I’ll tell someone that we met on Tinder? Don’t worry – if they find out, I’ll be sure to tell them that it was a one-time hook-up when you changed your Tinder settings, that you’ve been fighting me off ever since,’ she said, an edge in the forced-out laugh.

‘Faye, just relax.’ I felt like I did when I was trying to pacify one of my girls after a tantrum, like I was trying to get to a calm that in any case wouldn’t last. Except with Faye, I’m never completely sure why I keep at it. I’m not sure why I don’t let go of this thing with her. ‘Why does everything have to end in the conversation about what we are to each other? Yes, we met on Tinder.’ I wound myself up to repeating the script I’m sure I’ve read to Faye as many times as I’ve read my girls’ favourite bedtime stories when they were little. ‘I told you that my friends here know that. I haven’t told my kids or Alan, but that’s not an abnormal thing, is it? Who tells their family when they meet someone on Tinder? I wouldn’t tell them that if you were a guy. They could hardly cope when I had a boyfriend, for heaven’s sake.

‘And we are,’ I pressed gently on the words, ‘friends. I can’t offer you more at this point. You said you were okay with that.’

‘If it is so simple,’ she asked, her voice soft, making me strain to hear her, ‘and we are friends, and I’m such a good friend that you will drive an hour to see me every other week, then why am I never allowed to visit you in Blouberg? Meet your other friends? Your kids. That would be normal, Di. That would be normal for friends. One of these days I’m going to call bullshit and stop waiting for an invitation. I’m simply going to arrive for a visit and see what happens. What do you say about that?’

‘Come on, you know nothing will happen,’ I said. ‘It’s not as big a deal as you make it out to be. It’s not about you being allowed to come here; I like getting out of the West Coast fishbowl to come and visit you. I love coming to your world. Nothing more.’

‘Yeah, nothing more. Whatever. You keep telling yourself that, Lady Di. Enjoy the Valentine’s love with your other friends,’ Faye said, the bitterness back in her voice. And with that she was gone.

I sat still for a minute, the phone in my hand, thinking about this dance that Faye and I did with each other. If I couldn’t understand my own actions, I understood Faye even less. She was nearly ten years younger than me, single and child-free; there were definitely others she could Tinder swipe right on. Why persevere with a forty-odd-year-old single mother of two who lives across the garden from her ex-husband and isn’t sure of anything? I put the phone down on my desk, plugged it into the charger without checking that it was flat. Force of habit, I’m one of those people who do things they don’t need to.

Why do I keep Faye away from my life in Blouberg? We haven’t been a couple – even the secret couple that we were – for a long time now. Surely it wouldn’t be that hard to introduce her to everyone if we were just friends. But my standard reason for doing (or not doing) everything: Alan and the girls. A boat I don’t want to rock. After the divorce, I dated Andile and they were fine with him – until he started staying over at the house. That seemed to trigger something in Alan, even though he was already engaged to Anna and she had moved in with him. Alan started popping in unannounced even more often than before. Alan and I started fighting. The girls became clingier. The school counsellor called us in as the girls started acting out. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for children to struggle more with their mother being in a new relationship than a father. I don’t know what Alan’s problem was.

I loved Andile. Still do, even if I could only admit it to myself. But I broke up with him. The girls come first.

That was a few years ago now, and somehow Andile and I have managed to stay friends, to stay a part of each other’s lives. The girls are finally okay with him – I’d go so far as to say that they like him – but I haven’t tried to have another boyfriend. The idea of introducing them to Faye who thinks she wants to be my girlfriend?

A girlfriend.

My friends – Lily, Shelley and Kari, maybe even Shireen – would be okay. But Alan and the children and my parents? My having a girlfriend would be as strange to them as if I suddenly grew an extra arm out of my forehead. Why would I do that if I’m not completely sure? Coming out sounds so simple but it’s not. How am I going to suddenly say, ‘Hey, everyone, I like women too. Here’s my girlfriend.’

If the drive to Noordhoek doesn’t feel worth it, then I know that coming out is not going to be worth it. People can judge me for that. But I know there is another reason I keep Faye away from everyone else. Sometimes I feel like I need a part – that part – of my life to be separate, for them not to know everything about me. To have something that belongs only to me. That only I am in control of. That has nothing to do with Alan or the girls. It is simply easier.

And I like it that way.

Is that so wrong?

2

‘Feel the love,’ the instructor said. Faye would’ve enjoyed that, the irony that I’d be trying to feel the love less than an hour after she’d hung up on me. I tried to focus on the instructor. She hadn’t wavered in any of the poses she’d folded her twisty body into – upward dog, downward dog, half moon, warrior. Those are just the positions I remember. I’d only half-succeeded in copying them; she’d come around to mould bits of me into place a few times. My legs were not straight when they were supposed to be, my back never curved at the right time. I was in cat when others were in cow; I got the breathing all wrong. It was hard. I was as sweaty as if I were outside sunbathing in the midday sun. But, according to Kari, body and mind needed to be taken care of in this year of 2020 – ‘Twenty Plenty,’ as she had been saying – and yoga was apparently a good place to start. And if it got me sweaty, it was supposedly all the better. I’d mentioned seeing the lunchtime classes advertised at the studio across from the office and Kari had seized on it, deciding that Valentine’s yoga – a ‘Galentine’s’ lunch – was just what we needed.

Like any of us needed to do something on Valentine’s.

Got to give it to Kari. Of all of us, her Valentine’s memories are the worst, but still she is the one to find a way to get us together and make it not so bad. I do love Kari. Everyone does. She got us out of our routines and into a lunchtime yoga class, a Valentine’s edition at that.

On an ordinary Friday lunch, Lily would be in her rooms listening to local gossip and squeezing Botox into a bored woman’s brow. Shelley would be at the mall hustling sales in Coffee & Cream, the shop we started together but that she is now eighty per cent owner of. Kari would be getting ready to fetch Adam at school, eagerly getting feedback on every minute of his grade R day. I would be eating at my desk here at Beach View Development Office. Instead, today, we lay flat on our backs in the final pose, eyes closed, side by side on the wooden floor of Goa Yoga Studio. Lily in head-to-toe Under Armour, Shelley bright in fuchsia Lululemon, Kari in her trademark Nike ‘Just Do It’. Me in my no-name brand black leggings and t-shirt, my work clothes (also all black) hung up in Owen’s office across the passage.

Shelley had chirped me when she saw me: ‘You look like you work for Doves.’ She had meant the funeral parlour. But Lily gave me her nod of approval. She had styled me after the divorce, told me that anything black finished with a red lip looked amazing on me. I liked the look, plus it didn’t cost a fortune, so I’ve stuck with it; for yoga I just left off the red lip. Shireen, Kari’s sister-in-law and our newest friend, was the only one missing. Kari had invited her on our HELP WhatsApp group, even though she knew it was impossible; Shireen would be thirty-five kilometres away in the thick of serving lunch after Friday prayers in Walmer Estate. Shelley had created the HELP group after the thing with her and her crush on surfer Wade: it started as her doing a last-minute ‘Am I doing something stupid?’ check, and it’s grown to a general hotline for the five of us. Mostly for Shelley, though, ’cause after Wade she still feels like the one most likely to do something stupid.

We do talk on our old ABS group but not as much; having Shireen around adds something to us, takes us out of our West Coast bubble. She has a realness that regularly makes her say to us, ‘You girls are mos mad, you are worrying for nothing.’ I think we do the same for her, take her out of her Walmer Estate bubble; sometimes Shelley will say, ‘No, Shireen, you can’t just let that go.’ We make her less accepting. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I think Kari likes having her sister-in-law close. It’s as if having Shireen with us means Kari’s past and present are less colliding and more gently mixing. Shireen is so funny in WhatsApp; she hates texting and sends mostly short voice notes that end abruptly with her saying, ‘Ja, okay, bye, I must go now, I’m talking too much, the children are going to hear.’

After the yoga invite, she’d sent a voice note saying, ‘Karima, tell the girls they must try salah, tell them for real the movements are just like yoga and it’s five times a day. It’s free, they don’t even need to go to a special class. Oh wait, here comes Alia, she’s going to hear, okay, bye, I must go before she thinks she can yoga instead of salah.’ We had laughed hard at that.

I wondered if the others were listening to the instructor. Did their minds wander like mine? Were they stuck in their memories? More words from the instructor. I listened harder. They floated like butterflies around me.

‘Feel the strength of love all around you, supporting you as solidly as the earth beneath you. Accept the love that the universe has to offer.’

My eyes pricked. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was all the deep breathing that I got wrong? Maybe it was the fight with Faye. That always brought up stuff for me. I was glad no one else could see. Di doesn’t cry, they’d say, but here I was soaking tears into a lentil-stuffed eye cushion at the airy-fairy words of a pretzel of a girl. I imagined what she saw of me lying on the mat. Long stretched-out body. Short dark hair. Chest rising and falling calmly. Palms open in misleading surrender. Eye cushion hiding my feelings.

‘Accept the love that is for you,’ she finished. How do I know what love is for me? I thought of my daughters. Of Andile. Of Faye. Alan. Salt in the back of my throat as I swallowed my tears and followed her last instructions to move into a foetal position, then an awkward legs-crossed fold, palms together.

Namaste.

I found Kari’s eyes, then Lily’s, Shelley’s furthest from me. All of us quiet. I saw that my eyes were not the only ones a little wet. It must be this stupid day of reminders for the four of us.

That first disastrous Valentine’s was when Kari’s granny died and Dirk, her ever-adored husband, was having an affair.

On another Valentine’s, Alan and I were split up, and he’d proposed to Anna.

The Valentine’s after that, Shelley met Wade and nearly sank her marriage.

Last year Kari had given in to superstition and tried to convince us that bad things happened in threes, and we were all safe having had our allocated number of bad things. Lily had dug deep and pushed aside her scientific doctor brain to agree with Kari, using the evidence that she and Owen had got together on Valentine’s as proof that not only bad things happened to us on Valentine’s. Still; every year we held our breath.

‘Namaste.’ We bowed our heads to our teacher, hands together in the middle of our foreheads.

Everyone got up off their mats. I did too, though I could’ve sat there for longer. I wiped my eyes on the back of my hands. What would be in store for us today? For me? It felt like everyone but me was making plans and moving forward. I’m same old, same old. Reliable Di. Working for Owen in a job I can do in my sleep. Enough money to keep us going, but not enough to take us anywhere. Love? It’s too complicated. Faye doesn’t understand that. Thankfully Andile does; he is constant. Unflappable.

And it’s Valentine’s. Again.

3

‘That was nice, hey? Not our regular Friday,’ Kari said, smiling at us, looking for our approval as we stood gathered outside Goa Studio. ‘I feel all chilled. Okay, fine, first I felt emo and then I felt chilled.’ She laughed, shaking her head. ‘Maybe I’m just supposed to cry on Valentine’s? Remember last year we went to a kickboxing class and I hurt my foot – I cried then too.’

‘Yes, no injuries today. It was good; I finally got to see what goes on behind all those frosted doors,’ I said, the quietness brought on by the yoga still sitting in me. ‘I’ve been watching people come and go since that studio opened but never made the effort to try it out. The emo part took me by surprise, but thank you for organising it, Kari,’ I said. Kari beamed at me.

‘It’s normal – the crying – I think? I’ve heard that sometimes yoga can release emotions and make you feel like that,’ added Lily, rummaging in her bag; I guessed it was to fish her phone out since the device was usually never out of her hand. ‘I need to do something besides run, and that yoga class was slow and stretchy. I might keep going. I didn’t cry too much to be honest; I was concentrating on my pants at that point ’cause they are so tight I had to pinch my bum cheeks together in case my relaxing arse made them split. I shouldn’t have bought those pants in medium but I couldn’t bear to get them in the large.’ She squinted her eyes into what could best be described as a ‘poo face’.

‘Well, I feel bladdy comatose,’ said Shelley when we stopped laughing at Lily. ‘Like I need two coffees to wake the hell up. How am I going to sell anything at the shop today? And I spent so much time in that recovery pose, I feel like I’ve sniffed a whole mat up my nose.’ Kari’s face fell.

‘But it was good,’ Shelley added quickly, changing tone. ‘Nice to do something together. I enjoyed it. Plus, I got to wear my new Lululemon that Jerry gave me for Valentine’s so he’ll be happy. Plenty stretch in mine, so it’s a thank you from both of us.’ That was Shelley all right, quick off the mark but never aiming to hurt anyone. I knew that yoga was so not Shelley’s thing – no form of exercise is – but she would never bail on anything we did together. What was Jerry thinking with exercise gear as a gift for his wife? Surely he knew her better than that? At least he got her size right.

‘We still doing lunch?’ asked Lily, peering at her phone. ‘I’ve got time today, no appointments booked because no one does treatments on Valentine’s Day. Only last-minute gift vouchers from husbands who are in the shit, and Helen can take care of that.’ Helen is a new doctor who has joined Lily’s practice. She’s a bit scary-looking because she lets the reps try all the treatments on her face, but Lily loves her – she’s a proper work horse and all the ladies like her too. Helen is endearingly honest about the tweakments she’s had done.

‘I can’t. Owen is out with a developer for the afternoon and I’ve already had the office closed for an hour,’ I said, thinking of the ‘Be back at 2’ note I’d left on the door next to the Beach View Development Estates