My life had steadily been disintegrating, but now it seemed as if the last remnants of my it were being torn apart, and I had to keep reminding myself of who I was, else I'd have gone mad.
I was the younger of two sisters, and my parents must have had some sixth sense of what we'd turn out to be when they named us. I was Jane, Plain Jane as they called me at school, which would have hurt even more if it hadn't been true. I'm not ugly, but my face isn't quite symmetrical, and it is, well, uninteresting. My hair has always been a dull brown, neither straight nor curled, and it has steadfastly resisted any attempts to style it. My body is trim enough, but my breasts never really grew much, leaving me more an A- than a B-cup, and neither did the rest of my body develop the sort of curved contours that men find attractive.
My older sister, Felicity, was just the opposite. Everyone always said what a beautiful child she was, with her wavy, dark blonde hair, and her face that seemed to be always smiling, but when her hormones kicked in, they took her to another level. Her breasts ballooned out to being D-cup, but never looked out of proportion, not least because the rest of her body developed with them, making her the girl that all the boys chased after. And of course, she just encouraged them. Flirty Felicity, her class used to call her.
I wasn't surprised when she married someone a few years older than her, as soon as she'd graduated, but I don't think anyone expected such a fantastic catch. Ted wasn't just an Adonis to look at, but his family were wealthy, and he was already on the path to becoming the high-flying, sought-after corporate lawyer he is now. No, I was much more surprised when Felicity became a teacher, but it was at an expensive, private school that only the richest families could afford, which Ted's family had some ownership in.
At least we had that in common, as I became a teacher as well, but in my case, it was in one of the poor areas of the city, doing remedial English classes for late teenagers who sometimes could still barely read or write. The kids were coarse and ignorant, but I somehow found that I could get through to them, and convince them that what I was trying to teach them would be in their own best interest. At least the ones that turned up, as many skipped school, going off in gangs or getting into other sorts of trouble. For the first time in my life, I felt that I was doing something useful, something I was good at.
It was through the school that I met my husband, Ryan, who was the sports master. In a school like this, being good at sport was one way that the kids could escape their backgrounds, so he had an easier ride than most of the teachers. Goodness knows what he saw in me, unless it was something he saw in my teaching. I'd never paid much attention to sex, as my sex drive seemed to stop developing at the same time as my breasts stopped growing, but Ryan somehow managed to get what few hormones I had going, and we married.
When I look back now, that was the pinnacle of my life, from which everything started to go downhill. By that time, Felicity had already had one baby girl, Hilary, as predictably adorable as you'd imagine with such glamourous parents, and was pregnant with another. I guess I'd always imagined having a family myself, although maybe it was the lack of hormones that stopped it ever becoming a compulsion. That wasn't true of Ryan, though. He'd been an only child, and not only was he desperate to have a family, but he wanted it to be a big one.
We embarked on a campaign, because that's really what it was, to start a family, making love far more often than I had any real inclination to do. The problem was that nothing happened.
I supposed I must have enjoyed sex at the start, at least a bit, but it increasingly became more and more like a chore. I saw a whole string of doctors, who poked around and looked inside me, then made me keep a temperature record and an intense schedule where Ryan tried to impregnate me several times a day on certain days, all without avail. It was absolutely humiliating. I'd always been ashamed of my body, and I just wanted to curl up and die every time a stranger started touching and probing me. Not only that, but although I seemed to have the necessary equipment between my legs, I couldn't even manage the most basic womanly function: to get pregnant.
They tested Ryan's sperm, and put me under to get hold of some of my eggs to check them out. Both tests came back positive, so Ryan threw himself back into an even more regular schedule of trying to fertilise the eggs that the doctors had said I was producing. If that wasn't bad enough, my father disappeared off with his secretary, and before I'd had enough time to bond again with Mom, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, and was dead within weeks.
By the time that I was sent to see yet another specialist, sex had become something that I dreaded, and each time we were unsuccessful, I felt more and more like a failure. And I was. The verdict was that my womb was just incapable of hosting a fertilised egg. At least it made some sense, because I'd always had very light periods, but it meant that even IVF would be a waste of time.
Well, Ryan wanted to try IVF, only using a surrogate mother who would be implanted with one of my eggs fertilised by him, and then give birth. That was the last straw. It might be my genetics, but the thought of having a child I knew had grown inside another woman appalled me, and I knew I'd never be able to regard such a child as my own. No, I just couldn't do it. No way.
And that was the end of my marriage. Ryan divorced me, and went off with some wide-hipped sporting woman who fell pregnant within weeks. Actually, I was more relieved than anything, as I wouldn't have to keep putting up with Ryan pumping away in me on every possible occasion, and I threw myself back into my teaching.
I thought that life was fine again, but then the bigwigs in City Hall came up with a new project to transform the rough area the school was in, building new homes, and a brand-new high school to replace the beaten up one I worked in. It took a year to get it through, but then it happened. The school closed, and I watched in tears as the bulldozers tore it down, my life along with it.
I stayed at home for weeks, barely going out, speaking to no one, not bothering to seek another teaching post, not really caring if I lived or died.
Over the years, I'd mostly lost touch with Felicity and Ted, as their lives seemed to get ever more exciting. Her elder daughter, Hilary, becoming a skilled cellist, and leaving home to join a travelling orchestra, in the expectation of a later position in one of the big orchestras like the Chicago or Philadelphia Symphony. Her younger, Cathy, was now a star pupil in her final year at her mother's school. Even at Mom's funeral, we'd barely spoken, so Felicity was probably the last person I'd have expected to see when, reluctantly, I answered a persistent ringing at my door bell.
"Shit, Jane, they told me you were in a bad way, but I never expected you to look so awful. You can't carry on like this. A vacancy for a teacher has come up unexpectedly at my school, so get your things together, you're coming back with me. Now Hilary has gone we've got plenty of room, so you can live with us while you sell this dump and find somewhere new."
There was no mistaking Felicity. She looked even more glamourous than I'd remembered. Her hair seemed to shine in the sunlight, and her scarlet lipstick and nails were a perfect match for her unbelievably high-heeled stilettos. Her white blouse had enough buttons open at the top to give me, or anyone else for that matter, a shamefully good view of her cleavage, and her tight black skirt made it impossible to ignore her smooth, rounded butt. She was everything I wasn't, and part of me hated her for it.
I must have been in an even worse state than I'd realised, because rather than the sharp put-down I wished I had ready, I just threw my arms around her, and burst into tears. Damn, she not only looked good, but she was wearing a delightful scent that I couldn't quite place, and I found my body enjoying the touch of another human being, something I'd lacked since Ryan had gone.
It had been so long ago that I'd visited, that I'd forgotten just how big and impressive Felicity's house was, set in grounds screened by thick hedges, with a large swimming pool with a sliding roof, so that it could still be used in winter, which was now pushed back, the water sparkling in the rays of the setting sun. Felicity helped me carry my few bags upstairs, and showed me to the bedroom, which was huge compared to mine at home.
"This was Hilary's, but she can have the spare if she comes home for the weekend or any when. Make yourself at home, Jane, because from now on this is your home. Cathy will be back home tomorrow - she's at a sleepover tonight - but Ted won't be back for over a week, so tonight it is just us. Maybe we can get to know each other again a bit more."
When I'd put my few things away, I went back downstairs, and volunteered to help my sister get us something to eat. It was just a simple pasta, but where I'd have done it from a jar, Felicity used wine, cream, chopped tomatoes and fresh herbs to create something that looked the same, but tasted so much better, especially with the fresh Italian white wine she opened for us.
"I'm so glad you came, Jane. I didn't think you would. You seemed to hate me so much the last few years at home, and you stopped even sending me a Christmas or Birthday card."
"I didn't ..." I started to say, but when I looked at her face, I knew that she wouldn't believe the lie, and I ought at least to try to make a new relationship with my only sister, actually my only close relative, especially given that she'd been the one to reach out to me. "Actually, it was more that I was jealous, Felicity. You had all the looks and figure, a film star husband, and I was just plain Jane with a boy's body."
