Vertigo (5 page)

I had neglected my husband.

Now I wanted him back.

So I tried to be as witty and charming as the women my husband had met online.

I tried to take an interest.

At breakfast, I said to him, “How is your breakfast?”

He said to me, “Fine, thanks.”

I said to him, “What do you like for breakfast?”

(Having lived with him for a number of years, I already know what my husband likes for breakfast, and this is where the women online have the advantage of me: they do not yet know what my husband likes for breakfast and so they can ask him what he likes for breakfast and, in that way, begin a conversation.)

He did not answer my question.

So I tried to take an interest in what my husband was doing. I asked him, “What are you going to do today?”

He said, “I will strip old paint from the shed.”

(I already knew he planned to do this. But, again, that is where the women online have the advantage.)

I said, “That’s nice. Have a good strip.”

He did not respond to my jokey sexual innuendo.

Instead, my husband went outside to strip paint from the shed.

When he had gone I thought:

His women are the sum of all their qualities, not several but complete,
massive, many-breasted, many-legged, multifaceted, and I participate in these women. Some of his women have been chosen because they are a bit like me, some because they are unlike. He likes them. And he likes me. He likes me for being both unlike but like them. He likes them for being both like and unlike me. If I met them, I know I would like them, most of them, as we are all a little alike. Or at least I would not dislike them for being like, but unlike, me, and for him liking them not better but—although, and because, they are different—exactly the same amount as he likes me. We are all trapped behind the same glass. He can make us spin for his amusement and turn us to view any side. He is greater than the sum of our parts, though each part of them competes with me: their qualifications, and their legs, and their hairdos, and their cup sizes. And I compete with them, and some of my parts even outshine some of theirs, which are occasionally mediocre. But I cannot outshine them when they are added together.

After some time I went outside into the garden where my husband was stripping paint from the shed, and said,

“Why didn’t you tell me about the women online?” And he said, “I did, when you asked me,” and I said, “Why did you lie about how long you’d been talking to them?” and he said, “I didn’t.” And I said, “I saw your emails and it’s been going on for months. And I don’t care what you’ve done,” I said, “I just don’t want you to lie to me about it,” and he said, “I can’t take this from you again. You have to let it go. You fucked someone. All I did was send a few messages. You have to let it go.”

And I said, “I didn’t lie about that. You lied about it. Just tell me you lied about it and I’ll let it go.”

And he said,

“No.”

In the evenings, my husband listens to old vinyl. My husband says to his women, “I
like
old vinyl,” and so they listen to some old vinyl for him.

“You remind me of Debbie Harry,” he tells one of his women, “and you look like Belinda Carlisle. You make me think of Debbi Peterson (from The Bangles), and you look like Dale Bozzio.” My husband has a line and he follows it.

The line is flat. It is a line of enclosed screaming women. They are stretched into an eternity of dental floss you could wrap round the world a thousand times. It’s not their breasts I can’t cope with, nor their qualifications. It’s not their Debbie Harry legs, their Dale Bozzio
voices, it’s the way they multiply, each by each other, exponentially: it’s the digits.

My husband is a god, many headed.

Because he has multiple women, he may have multiple aspects.

I want the same thing.

So I have practiced myself by writing to him, although we live together. I have somehow assembled some words that, when seen through a glass screen, might look something like it could begin to be somebody. Now that I can read over what I might be, I think I know which parts are me and which belong to my husband’s other women. I have become, perhaps, almost one complete person who could, perhaps, have a conversation.

And if I were to use these words to write to my husband while he, simultaneously, communicated with his other women, or while I communicated with other men, would the words we said to each other lose meaning, or would this render what he says to them just more of what he says to me, and what I say to them just more of what I say to him?

Are there only two sides of the glass to be on? And if I were able to skip over to the other side, would the view back look like old vinyl, his
women, their voices trapped on a flat plane, damaged, heard underwater?

I think all this while standing in the doorway of our house, looking out into the garden at my husband stripping paint from the shed.

I say to him, “Are you having a good strip?”

And he ignores my lame joke, so I say,

“How’s it going?”

And he says, “Fine.”

And I say, “Can I get you a coffee?”

And he says, “Yes.

Thanks.”

In the house of women, everyone is losing it.

First my daughter’s piano teacher. Then my mother.

Then her cleaner.

There’s something about our uncontrol, no men to watch over us.

What if it never stops?

The air, both inside and outside my mother’s house, smells of fried meat. There is nothing we can do to get rid of it.

My mother returns to the kitchen, feels herself extend backwards into her house. “The yogurts,” she says. “Someone has stacked them.

Who has eaten one?” she says, to me, as though I should know—for, after her, am I not the woman here?

“Did you not grate any cheese at all?” she says to the empty grater, which is so clean. The grater does not answer. She means me. She had left the kitchen to me, while shopping, and I have made lunch for my brothers’ wives and their daughters.

My mother says, “We can have dinner for lunch, or dinner for dinner. What would you like?” If I eat dinner now, I won’t have to eat it later. But I might. I
must
stop eating. But will I ever dare eat enough to want to stop? From the side I begin to look boxlike: a shelf of breasts, lifted by some contraption, then—down!—a waterfall. Since I’ve been here, I eat more, stealing spoons of cream, olives from the fridge, though she has so much and gives it freely. And I drink, though no one notices the evenings spent furious with alcohol. I buy the wine, that’s not her department. She doesn’t see how quick the bright ring creeps down the bottle. A pop of a cork the answer: dinner for lunch it is. Meanwhile, she is swearing because something has gone wrong with the soup, like it was life. And death.

My mother tidies the food away into her son’s wife and their children, her long years’ job of loading things into people. While my daughter cheerfully kicks me under the table, my mother helps my third brother’s daughter to concentrate on what is in front of her, to stop concentrating on anything that is not in front of her, until there is only what is in front of her, and then there is not.

“It’s nice,” my mother says.

The girl says, “It doesn’t
taste
nice.”

“There’s lots more in there,” she says to my second sister-in-law’s first child, who hands back her milk.

She means drink up. Nothing means what she says.

“It’ll go to waste.”

I, meanwhile, cannot drink, my nose filled up with something. I can’t drink but I can’t breathe in either. Something rushes in to fill the gaps before the air.

My mother brings the cake out of the tin, measures it, knife hovering, turns to me.

“Would he like a larger slice?”

“Mom, I am not married anymore.”

My mother takes off her wedding ring to do the washing up. She does not take her apron off to eat. She washes; I dry. It occurs to me that I would perform this task so much better if I were not here while performing it. My mother, washing beside me, perhaps feels the same. The washing up liquid smells of sweeties. It tells me that it is ginger and peach. It smells of something we should still be eating. This seems wrong: it should smell of something after, whatever it is that comes after. The dishwasher crunches like someone larruped in some half-hearted S&M session. The time spent cleaning up outweighs the time consuming. Then there is the cooking, the shopping …

My mother likes to keep things in. I prefer the feeling I have when the full fridge is relieved. I am anxious that we eat every bit (perhaps not the preserves, the condiments) before restocking. When called on by my mother to cook for her guests (which I am called-upon to do as, after her, am I not the woman here?), I am anxious to redistribute—especially—food I know diners have previously rejected: leftovers, anomalous items: boiled carrots, a spoonful of hot sauce, a single tinned apricot. I do this by introducing them into stews, pâtés, and other dishes. These additions are not in the original recipes and sometimes they ruin a meal, though in ways the eaters can scarcely identify.

I am aware that I spoil things mostly for the sake of geometry.

“A vegetable marrow,” my mother says, already, “for supper? Would you like it roasted and stuffed with nuts?” This is not a question.

I am a vegetarian; there is only ever one choice.

There is no answer to this, none expected. There is no “no.”

But I am glad enough to be here, in the clean house where there is always the smell of food, in the midst of someone else’s. Home is a rehearsal, by which I mean a
repetition
like in French: both what’s behind the curtain and in front of it
,
a cherry cake studded with the same surprise on repeat. It confirms itself; it must confirm itself.

Returning, the house is still full of useful things she does not use: an antique hairbrush (that hair in it is probably Grandma’s). What have we bought her, we, her children, her grandchildren? She has no more use for most things, but she likes the presents’ outsides and, momentarily, what is inside.

There she is (the picture of my mother, young): what’s to fault her? Me without the wide nose, without the unwieldy female fat. When I lived with her, I was fat, both times: as a teen, and then later. That way, she knew I could not move.

Upstairs my mother has hundreds of outfits. She has bought some new for the occasion. But will she wear them?

“You should wear what you want, Mom.”

“It’s different if you have to go out with him saying ‘that old thing again.’”

My father’s pills are on his bedside table. Round, brown, shiny. At first I think: a jar of chocolate buttons, delicious in their sugar shells. I eat a square of chocolate just to keep from feeling hungry later. Here even for a weekend, I am getting fatter. I can feel it in my legs.

My father’s pajamas are on the bed, himself flattened, a steamroller joke. The scented sticks on the nightstand breathe urine and candy. The ceilings are low. If I take a breath, the air will be solid. My mother’s magazines are on her nightstand. In them are women who had cancer but did not die. Now they are wearing sparkly dresses and frosted lipstick. They are interviewed, their faces shining. It is Christmas (although it is not Christmas).

“I was just saying,” my mother says, though what she says is something I do not remember her having said before, or not to me.

But, Mother, you’re copying me: you got that new pair of shoes didn’t you? Here you are on your eightieth birthday, shelling again your former self. Don’t you know how hard I worked not to be the same as you?

Why do I sit here, paralyzed on your made bed? I could walk. This is the country, and that’s what you do in it. But there are no pavements on the bare road, no footpaths across the fields, just ragged unofficial tracks past signs for trespass. In the village, the fruit dropping from the trees in every garden, the summer owners no longer in residence. My mother doesn’t notice, lives inside, double-glazed, while outside everything is dying for our pleasure: the wheat, the birds, the lambs—and new birds, and wheat, and lambs will replace them soon for our delight. But not the trees, which live longer. Maybe we are their entertainment.

The night before the party, I cannot sleep in the house. Not being able to breathe is to do with a room where there are no corners. It happens at night when I wake up again in the white room in the white bed with the memory-foam mattress and white shutters over the window, if there is a window, for, if there is, it is too far away. It recedes, shows only a patch of sky, is barred with white metal across its center. The shutter latch will not un-jam, however much it’s shaken. The door has shrunk to its keyhole. I must keep still if it’s not to shrink further. If I take a breath in here, the air will be solid. It’s not that I can’t breathe, it’s just I have to make the choice: expand my chest, contract it. In or out—what should I decide? If I make no decision I might die here. I must keep calm if I’m to get out. I am unconvinced things will be better outside but I put on a jacket, jeans, open the door. It is 2:18AM. It is quiet, and I am in the country. I can breathe, but only just.

“Did you speak to me then?” She asks me, even here. “Did you say something?”

Heaven will be one of those shows where everyone from your childhood appears to replay the best time. You’ll have to guess who they are, from their voices, or from their description of an incident, before they appear. There will be continuous anxiety. When you see them, they will have changed, though maybe not enough. I, for instance, am no longer fat. I forgot to stay fat. Now, my family cannot solve me. Meanwhile, my mother has grown round. It is as though her body had been added to my body, and then we were divided. If I’d had any courage I’d have been a fat woman for longer.