Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (52 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Page 169
Like all Weldon's monologic narrators, Rosamund feels a world of relief having disburdened herself, even with the suspicion that Miss Jacobs had fallen asleep: "I can hear you snoring; little snores or little sniffs" (p. 163). Miss Jacobs has been a perfect audiencevirtually silent. In the process of remaining silent, she has helped Rosamund develop her own insight about that evening with "a half-moon over Minneapolis, catching its skyscrapers in miraculous light, while St Paul lay low, dark and brooding. And it wasn't fair. God makes nothing fair. It is up to us to render it fair" (p. 163). Rosamund, a Dantean/Yeatsian rose of the world, does what she can to make the world fair.
No one could appear more reasonable than the narrator of "Un Crime Maternel," the wifenow widowof Peter (a teacher who was frequently awaycould it be Peter Piper?) whose failings as a father included a sex drive that drove him, with the narrator's understanding, to other women. The narrator's passion for her children, Janet and Harvey, was such that she could not share them with Peter and his girlfriend, a junk-food addict, who took Janet and Harvey to the zoo, "can you imagine, a
zoo?
the torment of those wild creatures" (p. 168). She did not begrudge Peter his girlfriends, nor was he a bad father. "It wasn't Peter's
fault
that this was what he was. Blame God, if you must blame anyone, for creating parents and children whose emotional interests overlap but do not coincide" (p. 169). Something had to be done, and since divorce "is so crippling to the child's psyche" she "could see no other way out'' (p. 69).
Like most of Weldon's monologic narrators, this one, too, is a "vegetarian and I never let the children eat beef because of the possibility of mad cow disease" (p. 169). The narrator's beef casserolebrewed for Peter and the girlfriendincludes a death cap mushroom picked during their country walk. "It proved as fatal as the books said" (p. 169). But the children "witnessed nothing nasty": the narrator got Peter and his girlfriend to the hospital where they died. Spare the children. They need a good home and a good mother. It only stands to reason that the courts "won't be so stupid as not to understand that" (p. 169). The logic may be insane, but it is insistent and strangely coherent. In "Un Crime Maternel" Miss Jacobs makes a house callto Holloway prisonand once in "the horrid little airless green room smelling of cabbage" (p. 165) she never stirs. The narrator is surprised to hear Miss Jacobs is a psychiatrist: "What did they call you?" she asks, opening the story. In her passion to explain herself and clarify her motives, she does her best to convince Miss Jacobsand usthat she did what any concerned mother would do. Like the narrator in "Down the Clinical Disco," she is almost convincing.
"Mother Mary," the sometimes insightful narrator of "A Pattern of
 
Page 170
Cats," offers Miss Jacobs a clear-sighted analysis of neurosis worthy of Freud: "The human situation is at fault, Miss Jacobs. If only men gave birth to girl babies, and women restricted their output to boys, and each suckled offspring of the opposite sex, why then I imagine girls would be as cheerful and confident and positive as boys. They wouldn't have to creep around trying to please, forever looking for the satisfaction that men naturally have; of once having controlled, owned, taken total nourishment from a creature of the opposite sex, and then, loftily, discarded it" (p. 174). The problem of raising children is related to raising catsthere is a pattern. Holly is now the family cat, one hundred and five years old in human terms, now listless in its dirt bed waiting to die. Holly is related to Don's "vaguely Siamese" former cat called The Cat, the black familiar who made Mary think of witches and who now exists only as a spirit in memory.
Mary's daughter Jenny had gone the way of neglect and drugs "and nearly killed me with the distress of it" (p. 177). She blamed herself, but so did everyone else: "Poor little Jenny, all her mother Mary's fault, all of it. Mary was irresponsible, said everyone, Mary stayed out, went to parties, drank too much, took a job, had a career even after she married Don and settled down (so-called)" (p. 177). "I longed for Jenny to reflect credit on to me, be the proud child of love and sexual freedom, of kindness and cuddles: not this angry skinny devil who shot up heroin and would steal and borrow money from my friends to do it. This laughing buoyant child of the family photograph" (p. 177). Mary's insights are those of the middle class, aware, concerned, analytical, and totally astonished at the waywardness of its children. Is it possible the parents gave too much love? Was it a matter of too much freedom, too much privilege, too much concern? And who is to blame: "It was not my fault that she took to the dogs: it is to my credit that she survived'' (p. 178).
Jenny survived through "Intervention by cat." Lying on a dirty mattress in a "squat," she felt a cat, a black cat, jump on her chest"A very flat chest, Miss Jacobs"and when it stared at her, Jenny thought it was The Cat, but The Cat was dead. And when she went out of the room into the air to stare after The Cat, somehow "instinct," not "reason," saved her and pointed her in the direction of Narcotics Anon. "Intervention by cat happened on a second occasion.... It's why I've come to see you" (p. 180). Jenny had picked up a boy she met at Narcotics Anon, and in her morning-after guilt, she lay in bed when suddenly a catHollythudded on her chest, and then went to sleep between her and the boy. This intervention saved them both: "And between them they worked it all out, and neither went back to the needles, which had been in the air" (p. 180). But, of
 
Page 171
course, it could not have been Holly, who was safe home in Hampstead. It must have been one of her relatives, a look-alike, part of a pattern of cats.
Mary had worried for ten years that Jenny would die, but now she would live. "Like something good I once did, once upon a time, just fed back into the pattern of events and worked out okay, and came back to rescue me. Us. Pow! So that phone call never came. Forget the cats. What are cats?" (p. 180). And for that matter, what are mothers? What are children? Is it reason or instinct that saves them all? In the case of catswho gets run over and replacedit is instinct. Mother Mary tells us the same about Jenny who by instinct and the intervention of cats saves herself, and about Carl the younger child who by instinct never was any trouble.
Weldon's monologic narrators are by instinct arresting, revealing, relentless. That their Coleridgean narratives are often told to Miss Jacobs is deliciously up to date, since the modern marriage guest may preside over the marriage of true minds in the manner of the psychiatric specialist. And when Miss Jacobs is not available, any reader will do.
Works Cited
Bair, Deirdre.
Samuel Beckett
. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
Weldon, Fay.
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "Down the Clinical Disco." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "A Gentle Tonic Effect." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "Ind, Aff." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "A Pattern of Cats." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "Pumpkin Pie." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "The Year of the Green Pudding." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.
. "Un Crime Maternel." In Fay Weldon,
Moon Over Minneapolis
. New York: Viking Penguin, 1992.

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