Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (51 page)

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Authors: Regina Barreca

Tags: #Women and Literature, #England, #History, #20th Century, #Literary Criticism, #General, #European, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Women Authors, #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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what we are told must go no further: "Should you come across her, when you travel Skyways, should the little lace half-glove on the hand of the girl who brings your coffee, tongs out the hot towels (Club Class only), slip back to reveal the macho stamp of the dragon, please keep it to yourself. I wouldn't want her to think a confidence had been betrayed" (p. 16). But of course the entire story is a confidence betrayed, showing us an intimate portrait of an "unbiddable" young woman who will do what she wishes despite a mother's hopes and plans, despite a mother's rules and expectations. A flight with her mother to the isle of Lesbos backfires, and when Romula decides to be an "air hostess, her mother just said, 'Okay. If that's what you really want. Do what you can and be what you are, and good luck to you" (p. 23).
Most of Weldon's narrators simply can't wait to tell us about themselves. Their level of intimacy resembles that of a person in a checkout lane who confides his distrust of the media, the government, the in-laws. One would ordinarily avoid such a narrator, but in Weldon's stories the fascination holds us on: "Sir, you have a nice face. I reckon I can talk to you. Tell you about myself? Why not! That's what you're there for, after all," the narrator of "The Year of the Green Pudding" tells us, and we realize she is right. We learn that she is a country person, a middling sort of person, "Did I mention I was a vegetarian?" (p. 26). She tells us she was once a vegan, revealing a pattern of close reasoning that typifies the Weldon narrator: "(that's someone who doesn't eat any dairy foods, never mind just the cow itself, both on health grounds and because if eating the cow is murder, drinking the milk is theft)" (p. 26). The ''Pudding" narrator is unusual because not only is she aware of our presence, she imagines our questions. In a sense, just as some writers use the rhetorical question expecting no answer, the "Pudding" narrator employs the rhetorical answer, expecting no question. But of course in some instances the implied question is clear: "
Concorde
? I was working on the Liver Paté Account. They were serving it on
Concorde,
on little pieces of toast, with free champagne cocktails. The client offered me a free flight. Why are you so interested in
Concorde
?" (p. 27). Part of the reason for our interest is that just before, parenthetically, she told us her best friend Cynthia's eyes were "the blue you see when you look out of
Concorde
's window. (I have been in
Concorde
: I am full of surprises)" (p. 27). Indeed, she is full of surprises, this narrator who calmly tells us of Cynthia, who returning with her newborn from the hospital discovers the narrator in bed with her husband, Crocus. The narrator describes the resulting depression as if she had no responsibility: "Crocus went out to her, but she didn't stay, she just handed him the baby and left. And by the time I'd got myself togetherI never
 
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was a fast dresserand he'd handed the baby to me and was gone after her, it was too late. She went down the Underground and threw herself under a train. The poor driver. I think of the poor drivers when anything like that happens" (p. 28). She worked it out by explaining "that [Cynthia'd] been on antidepressants and had threatened suicide in the past. Neither of them had told me that. So what sort of friendship was that? Do you think they were ashamed or something? Shouldn't you be frank, with friends?" (p. 29).
In her zeal to do penance, she avoided married men only to meet Martin, whose wife (wanting a divorce) gave her the go ahead: "Martin cured me of every sad, negative feeling I ever had. It's been a wonderful year, a whole year of happiness. We became proper vegans" (p. 30). But disaster struck. She was responsible for the Christmas pudding recipe for the Fresh Ginger Account "read by tens of millions" and left the sugar out because she didn't double checkshe was too lovestruck with Martin. "Green. Mould. Inedible. Green puddings by the million, sir, and my fault. A million family Christmases spoiled, because I was in love" (p. 31).
The narrator is a femme fatale. Her opening words to the listener are "It must be possible to live on this earth without doing anyone any damage. It must be. I try to be good. I really try." We realize why she is a vegan, why she saves wasps from glasses of cider, why she tries to avoid walking on snails, and why she ends her monologue warning her listener not to move his arm for fear of harming the nearby spider. She does her best: "I do try to get by doing as little damage as I can. And I make a very good onion and potato pie" (p. 26).
We are much more cheered by the narrator of "Ind Aff," also a femme fatale, who frees herself from a hopeless situation in Sarajevo, revealing all the while the first-class mind of the storyteller. She has run off with her professor, aptly named Peter Piper, hoping that it is true love. But while waiting for the wild boar and reflecting on the coincidences that brought Princip to the café where, after having taken one shot at the Archduke Ferdinand, he rested with a cup of coffee only to have the Archduke's chauffeur bring the car to that spot to wait for instructions. His next shot missed, the next killed the wife"(never forget the wife), and the third got the Archduke and a whole generation, and their children, and their children's children" (p. 43). However, this femme fatale decides to take fate into her own hands, having learned from Princip's lesson. As she reasons, maybe Princip had a second chance in missing the Archduke the first time, and maybe he should have sat there drinking his coffee and then gone home to mother.
As she rises to leave the aging Peter Piper, their dinner of wild boar
 
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(should she have ordered vegetarian?) passes her on its way to her table and she suddenly realizes "It was a sad and silly thing to do, in the first place, to confuse mere passing academic ambition with love.... A silly sad episode, which I regret. As silly and sad as Princip, poor young man, with his feverish mind.... If he'd just hung on a bit, there in Sarajevo that August day, he might have come to his senses. People do, sometimes quite quickly" (p. 43). Homme fatale or femme fatale, most of the time we have a range of choices. This narrator's monologue shows us that we need not always cause harm, that sometimes we can come to our senses.
Then again, the slightly paranoid transvestite narrator of "Down the Clinical Disco" ("I've talked too much") has not only come to her senses, but must keep on the lookout to make sure no one from the staff at the Broadmoor hospital for the criminal insane is poking about in the pub where she is talking. She wants to be sure she and Eddie look normal. Linda, whom she's just met, listens as the narrator worries over details: "Are you sure that man's not watching? Is there something wrong with us? Eddie? You're not wearing your earring, are you? Turn your head. No, that's all right. We look just like everyone else. Don't we? Is my lipstick smudged? Christ, I hate wearing it. It makes my eyes look small" (p. 78). She tells us how she met Eddie in Broadmoor, where one's behavior must veer toward normal if one ever hopes to be released. "And the men have to act interested, but not too interested. Eddie and I met at the clinical disco, acting just gently interested. Eddie felt up my titties, and I rubbed myself against him and the staff watched.... We were both out in three months." ''Sorry. When we're our side of our front door I scrub off the make-up and get into jeans and he gets into drag, and we're ourselves, and we just hope no one comes knocking on the door to say, hey that's not normal, back to Broadmoor, but I reckon love's a talisman. If we hold on to that we'll be okay" (p. 79).
The narrator of "Pumpkin Pie" tells us a moral social tale comparing the pies of the poor to the pies of the rich. After a harrowing case of near arsona specialty of Weldon's monologic narratorsthe Thanksgiving pie is served to Honey Marvin, whose high standards insist on cholesterol-free pumpkin pie. "'That was a very good pumpkin pie,' said Honey Marvin at ten o'clock that evening, when she came in to lock the fridge and Antoinette was on her hands and knees cleaning the kitchen floor" (p. 87). Obviously, Honey Marvin is oblivious to the unfairness of her standards, and the Cassandralike narrator has to end the story with a moral: "The rich do what they can to make the poor
mind
being poor to keep the differential going. And the poor do mind, and they consent to being poor less and less, and there are more and more of them about. Had you noticed?
 
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And they begin to know that the pumpkin pies of the poor taste as good if not better than the pumpkin pies of the rich; so if you can't make your own, do without, and let the hired help stay home for a change. Or you'll find cholesterol in your pie and a knife in your back, and a good thing too" (p. 88).
Monologic narration develops with a few minor twists into a marvel of revelations in the "As Told to Miss Jacobs" stories, the unilateral "conversations" with Miss Jacobs, the psychotherapist. In "A Gentle Tonic Effect," the speaker is identified as Morna Casey, a woman with nightmares who has "very little time for people who go to therapists" (p. 147) and who is suspicious of those who can listen to others for an hour and be paid exorbitantly. All Miss Jacobs says to her is that the first hour is free and that if Morna Casey would lie on the couch she would not be disturbed by her writing things down. Meanwhile, the nightmare-ridden Morna Casey tells us that she is a PR person with a special task in restoring public confidence in Artefax, ''a new vitamin-derivative drug hailed as a wonder cure for addictions of all kinds ... considered by some to be responsible for a recent spate of monstrous births" (p. 152). She is sure that if she "changed [her] job the dreams would stop," but when she thinks about shifting careers, she tells Miss Jacobs that "I think I'd feel quite at home with radioactivity: it's like nicotine and Artefaxin reasonable quantities it has this gentle tonic effect" (p. 152).
A conventional authorial narrator intervenes with a few paragraphs of description, telling us that Morna Casey "was a willowy blonde in her late thirties: elegantly turned out, executive style" (p. 148) and that she worked with her husband in "Maltman Ltd, a firm which originally sold whisky but had lately diversified into pharmaceuticals" (p. 148). But the story is Morna's, speaking almost without interruption. She resembles other Weldon narrators in not needing to be prodded, not needing encouragement. Indeed, she observes that Miss Jacobs reminds her of "the owl in
Squirrel Nutkin,
" silent, wise, and somewhat threatening, "But you won't get to gobble me up: I'm too quick and fast for the likes of you" (p. 148). She tells Miss Jacobs that she met Hector in a pub: "Who's that man with the big nose?" (p. 149). Hector followed Morna and her husband home, effectively replacing him because Hector's forte is "A word too crude for your ears, Miss Jacobs." The result of his forte is their son Rider, born on a toilet seat and fished out of the water by Hector, and "Now Rider climbs about in potholeshe actually likes being spreadeagled flat against slimy rock faces, holding on with his fingertips" (p. 150). This Calibanlike image may be a clue to the inner poet: "No one knows how poetic I am," she tells Miss Jacobs, and it may also be a clue to the nightmare that haunts Morna
 
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Casey. Her dream comes in two parts: Rider "about twenty inches longand he's clinging on by his fingertips to the inside of the toilet, and crying, so I lean on the handle and flush him away" (p. 150). In the second half of the dream, deformed people rise out of the toilet and "loom over me and that's the bit I don't like" (p. 150). The poetic Miss Casey has lent her talents to an industry that produces monstrous birthsand among them are the monsters of her own imagination.
Rosamund, the narrator in search of "moral and mental health" (p. 161) in "Moon Over Minneapolis," rushes from the agony of twinship at home to the potential delights of the twin cities. Her first-class ticket to Tom seems designed to provide her release from competition with her twin Minnie. But she realizes it is a trap: that she was headed for yet another success, another proof of her preferredness, her "good luck." So she has decided to return Club Class and give up her good fortune. She always "loses'' the competition to Minnie because she is more beautiful, more successful, luckier. When Rosamund's husband Peter died, Minnie accused her of wearing black because she looks good in it. As she tells Miss Jacobs, "To those that hath shall be given; difficult to hand it back, saying I don't deserve this. But that's what I did, Miss Jacobs. That's why I lie here: a corpse in mourning for itself" (p. 161). When she met Tom's family she "tried not to think of Minnie. They asked me if I had brothers and sisters. I denied her. I said I was an only child. It was my new view of myself" (p. 161).
But she could not go through with the wedding. She saw the inequities as too great. Her children, "both born bright and beautiful," went to good schools and got a good education. Minnie's husband Horace was a socialist who "didn't believe in doctors," so their son Andrew grew up "dragging a leg behind him" and developed "personality problems." Their daughter Lois "is just hopeless," a plain girl Minnie called "Uglymug," of whom she said, "'Just my luck!' As if it was her misfortune, not poor little Lois's" (p. 160).
With all the burden of success, Rosamund describes herself walking next to the Mississippi with Tom. "To the left rose the elegant new towers of Minneapolis outlined in blocks and spires of light: symbols of wealth, aspiration and progress. To the right, across the river, huddled the brooding clutter of St. Paul. Unequal twins, growing more unequal day by day. St. Paul has the problems: race riots, poverty, squalor" (p. 162). She tells Tom she won't marry because "the moon's not full." It is a half moon, neither waxing nor waning, "unsatisfactory as half-moons are." When she returned home, "Minnie just said, 'Oh, you're back. Made a mess of it for once, did you!'" (p. 162)

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