The Fat Woman's Joke (5 page)

“Juliet,” said Esther, “you'll never get a good shine if you don't sweep properly first. You'll just rub the dirt in and ruin the surface.”

Juliet put down her cloth and straightened up. She was thirty and short, with an hourglass figure and a tendency to backache with which she excused her bad temper.

“Why aren't you in the kitchen?” Juliet's voice was accusing. “You're always in the kitchen while I polish, cooking.”

“We are on a diet, and there's nothing to cook.”

“Well, don't take it out on me,” said Juliet, resuming her crouching position and the flailing of her arms.

“I'm not taking anything out on anybody. I'm just observing that if you rub grit into a parquet floor you spoil the surface.”

“The Hoover needs mending,” said Juliet. “It doesn't take anything up any more. I told you about it weeks ago.”

“Well, you can sweep, can't you? Brooms were made before Hoovers.”

Juliet put down her cloth. “What did you have for breakfast? Did you go without, or something?”

“I had a very good breakfast, thank you. I had eggs. And it's eggs for lunch, and eggs for dinner, and in two weeks I'll have lost a stone and a half.”

“You be careful. You can go too far. A friend of mine went on a diet and lost all appetite for food. They took her to the hospital, but it was too late, she died. Her stomach had shrunk to a dried pea—or was it walnut? One or the other, I do remember that.”

“This is a very well-tried diet, and very sensible. One should be able to control one's size, if one is going to control one's life.”

“What do you want to do it for? You're all right as you are. You've got a husband and a son and a house, even if it is filled up with all this junk, and someone to do your dirty work for you. What else do you want?”

“It's healthier to be thin.”

“Dieting ruins the health. Men like women nice and cozy. Their wives, anyway.”

“To tell you the truth I am really going through with it for my husband's sake. For my own part, I don't really worry. But it's easier for him if I do it too. You know what men are. They haven't got all that much will power.”

“What you need is physical exercise. You ought to get down on your hands and knees more often, instead of just standing about.”

“When you have gone home, Juliet,” said Esther clearly, “I often find I have to.”

She walked with determination into the kitchen, as if there was something there to busy her. Juliet peered after her, with an expression of quite serious malevolence on her face.

“You'll go too far,” said Juliet. “One day you'll go too far.”

And she continued her manic, useless polishing.

The Wells kitchen was full of herbs, spices, pestles and mortars and strings of onion and garlic, and jars of olive oil and cut-outs from early editions of Mrs. Beeton. There scarcely seemed room in it for human beings, but that evening there they were, the two of them, Alan and Esther, their flesh squeezed between table and cabinet, studying their diet sheet, and both bad-tempered.

“At least we can put herbs in the omelette,” said Alan. “An omelette aux fines herbes. Delicious.

Esther reached out for eggs and started breaking them into a bowl. “Oh, big deal,” she said.

“Someone else said that to me today. I can't remember who.”

“Your secretary, I dare say. Since she spends so much time with you.”

“I think it was, now you come to mention it.”

Esther was suspicious. It did not suit her. Her eyes, usually luminous globes of expression, became smaller and mean. “What were you and she talking about?”

“This diet, I think,” said Alan, allowing a certain weariness at Esther's bad behavior to creep into his tone. “I really can't remember. I've got to talk to somebody, haven't I?”

“This Susan seems to be quite your confidante. Do you discuss all your personal life with her?”

“Not particularly.”

“Do you discuss me?” She used her little-girl voice.

He used his angry one. “As much, I daresay, as you discuss me with your window cleaner.”

“My window cleaner appears to be quite a randy man, for your information.”

“So, if you want to know, does my secretary.”

“What, a randy man?”

“No, a randy girl. Now you know.”

She chose not to believe him. She thought she had simply made him angrier than she had meant.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm being silly. It's because I'm hungry.”

“Yes, you are being silly. Why are you dividing the whites from the yolks?”

“I'm making a fluffy omelette. It will go further.”

Esther's head, all of a sudden, felt very full and unpleasant. “I feel awful.”

“I feel fine,” said Alan, with memories of Susan's forwardness and hugging to himself the knowledge of his agent's enthusiasm, which he felt Esther did not yet deserve to know about. “Lighter and emptier. I think this is what it felt like ten years ago.” He looked down at his paunch. It seemed to him to have shrunk.

“I've got a headache. I don't think I can face this omelette.” She laid her hands on her stomach. It was full and flabby. She was depressed.

“It says you must not on any account go without any of the food items mentioned. You just wait until spinach day!” He quoted from the diet sheet.
“The diet depends for its efficiency on a chemical process the body undergoes during the diet's course.
They may be good doctors, but they're bloody awful writers of the King's English.”

“Queen's.”

“Why do you have this urge to find fault all the time?”

“That's very unfair.”

“What are you doing with that butter?” Alan's hand shot out to restrain Esther's. They both stared at their touching flesh, as if at something strange. Alan dropped her hand, quickly.

“You've got to have butter to make an omelette, silly.”

“It says on the diet sheet no dairy products whatsoever.”

“Don't be stupid.” She sneered quite visibly, her top lip curling over her tiny sharp teeth. “How can you make an omelette without butter?”

“I don't know, but you've got to!”

“Then
you
do it!” She shouted at him. A glass mobile trembled, and the noise of its tinkling shamed her and pleased him. He seized the omelette mixture and poured it straight into the unbuttered pan. He took up the wooden spoon and scraped it off the bottom. It looked more like scrambled egg than omelette.

“There, you see!” she cried, vindicated. “You've made a mess of it the way you make a mess of everything.”

Alan decided it was time to bring the situation back under his control. “Esther,” he said, “either we do this diet or we don't. I think it is important that we should. We would both benefit by losing weight.”

“You mean
I
would. You don't find me attractive any more. You're ashamed to be seen out with me because I'm fat and horrible, and you think people will be sorry for you because you're married to me.”

Alan still held the frying pan in his hand. The whites of his eyes glinted in the light from the oil lamp. It seemed for a moment that he was going to throw the omelette full in his wife's face, but at that moment his son, Peter, came into the room, and he lowered the pan and rearranged his face into a less manic pattern. Esther, for her part, stopped cowering, straightened up and smiled maternally.

Peter was six feet two, some six inches taller than his father, and was proportionately broader across the shoulders. He was pink-faced, blonde, and gave an immediate impression of health and cheerfulness. The school uniform he was obliged to wear did not succeed in making him look like a child.

“You two squabbling?” He strode to the refrigerator, plucked it open, and peered inside. “Can I make myself some sausages and bacon? And fried bread?”

“You'll get fat,” said his mother.

“Not me. I've got youth on my side.”

“Your heredity's working against you, don't forget that,” said Alan, meaning Esther.

“You should learn dietary discipline now,” she said, “so in the future you will be able to control your weight at will.”

“Hark who's talking. Really, Mum!”

“I'm sure I hope my children will be better than I. Because I am morally frail and weak-willed, this is no reason for you to be content to be the same. There is no possible point in procreation if one's children do not out-strip one in every respect. Put the bread away. Fried bread is going too far.”

“Why don't you two sit down and eat that omelette? You'd feel much better.”

They obeyed.

“Why is it,” he asked, as the smell of frying bacon filled the room, “that people who are quite willfully spoiling their own enjoyment cannot rest there but are also obsessively anxious to spoil other people's? ‘Put the bread away,' indeed!”

“Stop trying to talk like your mother,” said Alan. Scraping the last scrap of egg from his plate, he added, “There's a very odd smell in here.”

“I can smell it, too.” Esther had already finished and now sat, desolately, with her knife and fork neatly together on her bare plate. She turned her head like a questing dog, sniffing.

“It's the bacon,” said Peter. “Incidentally, it is very thinly cut bacon. Why can't we get it thicker?”

“Because thin bacon is an excellent economy. It is the one economy I have. It's not the smell of bacon, I can assure you.”

“Oh, of course,” said Peter. “I forgot. It's aniseed.”

“Aniseed?”

“Aniseed?”

“From the buns. We're filling buns with aniseed. Then you throw them at the patrol dogs and they go after the buns, and not you.”

“Patrol dogs?”

“I could do with some more sausages.”

“Patrol dogs?” Alan's normally pale face was pink. As his color heightened, the resemblance between him and his son became even more apparent.

“Down at Frampton. There's a biological warfare place down there. We're going down for a sit-in.”

“We?”

“Stephanie and me.”

“Stephanie?”

“You know Stephanie.” Another mouthful, and another bacon rasher disappeared. His parents watched.

“The one with the hair?”

“It's easier to look after like that. Cropped.”

“She could shave it right off and polish the skin,” said Esther. “Then she could seal it, to preserve the shine.”

“That was not worthy of you, Mother.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, humbly, “I am not at my best when hungry, and your father keeps getting at me”—Alan took out his cigarettes and failed to offer her one—“but she's a very nice girl, I know, and extremely bright. I like her. I understand she is very popular.”

“It is true,” said Peter nobly, “that she does sometimes get mistaken for a boy, by the older generation. Never our own, however, and that is the most important thing. I do realize it is hard for people of your age to adjust yourselves to current values, and I appreciate the effort you both make. I mean really.”

“Tell me more about the patrol dogs,” said Alan.

“Just a sit-down. I don't like people who organize diseases for the benefit of humanity. I mean, do you? The least I feel I can do is register my protest. So I shall sit down on the ground in a field along with a couple of hundred others, until shifted by some force other than my own.”

“Oh youth, youth!” said Alan, not altogether displeased. “What good do you think it will do?”

“I don't know. None, probably. I don't much care. It will make me feel better.” Peter rose and cut himself a thick slice of bread. He spread it with butter, and covered it with apricot jam in which the apricots lay sugary and whole. “Well, I mean,” he went on, as his teeth slipped through the soft slice, “you two went on marches once, didn't you? And left-wing meetings? You waved banners along with the rest. You helped to save the world. The world's the same as it always was, but what happened to you when you stopped trying to alter it?”

“All that was a long time ago,” said Alan. “Thank God.”

“We grew up,” said Esther. “We gained a sense of reality.”

“You grew fat and cozy and comfortable, you mean,” said Peter. “You changed sides, that's what happened to you!”

Esther jumped to her feet; she all but shouted, “I am not fat and cozy and comfortable. Neither is Alan.”

“Oh, Mum!” he said reproachfully, from his great rosy height. “Oh, Dad! Look at yourselves.”

Esther sat down again. Her heavy breasts drooped over the table. His paunch swelled beneath its top.

“I'm sorry I tried to cook that omelette in butter,” she said presently. “It was stupid of me.”

“Oh, forget it,” said her husband, who had no intention of doing so. “Cigarette?”

P
HYLLIS, LISTENING TO ESTHER'S
account of the first day of the diet, was beginning to feel hungry herself. She drank a cup of coffee and accepted a biscuit. “You'll have to go on a diet again, Esther,” she said, nibbling.

“But what's the point? What's the point?” Esther had stopped eating for the moment, and despair now rose up her gullet. “There is only one virtue these days, and that is to be young. Everything is forgiven to the young—even fatness, and that is saying something. And I am no longer young. Nothing will be forgiven me. All I can hope is not to be noticed any more.”

“You're talking nonsense,” said Phyllis. “You're just depressed. I know some very pretty and very elegant elderly ladies indeed. Most charming.”

“Har, har, har,” said Esther. “And men laugh at them behind their backs, because they're old, in just the same spirit as men will laugh at girls with no ankles, and girls with spots, and girls with bad breath, because for all their efforts they fail to please. There's more dignity, if one is neither young nor beautiful, in simply giving up. Which is what, being middle-aged, I am finally allowed to do.”