Vertigo (6 page)

My sisters-in-law are here for the party, which I must not call a party. We meet from time to time to notice how each other has aged: that’s family. I keep on rising up to you, but you preserve your distance: the years are like that. There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I’d grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics—bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills.

Now that I am thin you admire me, though you no longer like me. I am old, nearly as old as you are, and I know now that a woman is not her clothes: she’s the body under the dress, or what someone could imagine her body to be. A man doesn’t care about a dress’s size or its designer, or whether it’s real silk or not, though I guess these all go to make up something. I have learned that even underneath I am replaceable. You could employ someone to be me and get just the same thing, maybe even better, if you had the money.

My sisters-in-law, you have all come, hungry, for my father’s last show and, notwithstanding, I admire each one of you. My difficulty is in admiring your mother-in-law. She’s nice but she’s not my type.

“Did you see that show with the dog?” the sisters-in-law say to one another. “When it …” “Oh my!” Depleted enough to show sympathy only for animals, they are eating chocolates from a bag decorated with anthropomorphized sweeties. Crunch. They take off their heavy bracelets before going to the buffet: clack.

It doesn’t seem like a party without men. But here’s my father, wheeled in on a kind of catering trolley! He is in a box, surrounded by something piped, perhaps cream, or duchesse potatoes, though it could be carnations. Silent as always, he is wearing a dark suit and looks almost as if he is still warm. Like a whole cooked salmon for Christmas or a wedding, his last helplessness is just one more thing. The sisters-in-law are delighted by this culinary feat. But—don’t worry!—this is not the sort of food to consume, only to admire. Like a cardboard cake, the point is it looks like something might jump out at any minute. The sisters-in-law wait. They know very well that the box is not food, only cardboard and icing, but it is polite to act as though it were.

I think at one point I stopped breathing, or had my breath taken away. And I can’t remember what happened to the box. After, there was no sign of the carnations. Helping my mother clear up, there was a stack of paper plates, of plastic forks, smeared with something dark and crumbly, and the residue of marshmallow, or was it mayonnaise?

Whatever happened, we put it under our belts. Perhaps they ate him, after all.

“I’m glad we went to the sea today,” you say, before we get there. You can see the sea from the car, but we have not got to it yet, and you are glad. Perhaps later you will not be glad, though maybe setting the seal of gladness on your first glimpse of the sea will have been enough to make you glad later, or to make your later lack of gladness hardly count.

When we get to the sea, it is flat, a continuation with the land that moves only a little. There is no breeze. From the sea to the land come yachters, fresh from practicing a sport that takes up money and time. Some of them even need assistants who must be paid to have fun with them. I had thought the yachters would be beautiful but, no, they are old. It has taken them so long to pile up enough money and time to go yachting. The yachts are white and clean but their owners’ faces are creased. The women wear jaunty breton tops whose stripes are youthful. But up close one would see they are really quite old, with blonded hair and pinked lips, a fine joke.

So this is our last morning: such a relief to get over the final hump of our time together. Coming back to land I find I have forgotten parts of my body, not having had the leisure or the solitude to examine them. I do not know, for instance, if my legs are hairy, or whether my eyebrows need plucking. I do not know what my legs look like at all, there having been no mirror where we stayed this last weekend, except for the small mirror at head level fixed above the basin in the bathroom. There was no need even to have a mirror there. It’s perfectly possible to brush your teeth or wash your face without a mirror, but imagine day after day going on with no knowledge of what you are cleaning, or whether anything ever gets clean.

When you made partner, mother said to me,
you must be proud
. How could I be proud of something that was not my achievement but its inverse? Unless I am such a secondary part of you that when you eat, I taste it; when you urinate, I am empty. I’ve seen my father do this. I’ve heard him shout at her to pick up the telephone, as though she were his extra hand.

Something goes round and round in my head. I am frightened I will change my mind again, and it will be too late. I won’t be able to go back. Although I can think of no reason I shouldn’t change my mind, I know there is a rule somewhere that says I am not allowed.

I am frightened it is not worth the risk.

Nevertheless, this is our last morning.

And when I came back from the funeral, I woke in the night not knowing if I were here or there, the white box of my mother’s spare room overlaying my own bedroom, laying heavy on it, and on me, heavy with her, and with my father (though you’d think he’d have been the weightier) hardly at all.

Now I am working in my kitchen. The children are somewhere about, perhaps in the living room. They bump about the house; blind lumps of my flesh, detached. They will crawl into the larder and eat sugar, they will watch too much television. They carry out my most slovenly impulses, as though I had never educated myself out of them. There are noises on the other side of the wall: people having a sing-song, tinkering on the piano. It sounds like a party, or perhaps like someone listening to a party on TV. Sometimes there are noises: a woman shouting “no!” and moaning, over the sound of a news broadcast. And that’s when I hope it’s TV, but I can’t really tell. What I like about home now is the sound of all the machines going at once: the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer. White noise. That’s why I work here, sitting in the kitchen, though I have a study. It helps if there’s rain.

Despite the machines, or perhaps because of them, I feel some discontent. What will shift it? Would I like a drink of water, a cup of tea, a whisky. Would I like something to eat? The mother in me offers to self-satisfy, but is never self-satisfied.

Mothers do not ask questions. Mine did not ask me anything except to verify: do you have (what I told you to bring: your raincoat, the sugar, the sewing machine)? Would you like (what you know I have in mind already: an Irish stew, a visit to a stately home, a sugar bun)? I never said,
no, I would prefer a steak, to go to a club, a wafer biscuit, or really, nothing, nothing at all
. I seldom said,
no
,
I have brought: a sunhat, the pepper, a paper shredder.
I usually brought what I knew she would ask for, because she had already told me to bring it, and it was the object, not the question, that had to be met.

What would have happened if, one day, I had not?

I get the tin out of the cupboard, open it, and cut myself a slice of chocolate cake. My mother had a lifetime of making cake, and I have learned from her. She always asked me if I wanted cakes. “I live on my own now,” I said. She made them anyway. They sat in my cupboard for weeks before I scraped them into the bin. This cake is rich and dark. It crumbles like soil. It tastes a little like soil.

And here she is, surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, unearthly, less substantial than she ever was, being the one who made the cakes but seldom ate them: a minute on the lips, a lifetime on … well that hardly matters any more. Mother is where we put things we don’t like. I
must
remember, I think, as always, to judge her less harshly this time.

But I am looking at her buttons, not her eyes. She has been talking for a while and it has been difficult for me to look at her eyes all that time. I’m not sure what she’s saying. She might be talking about baking. Her buttons are white with a gold rim. There are five of them. This gives me more to look at. Her buttons glint but they do not look back.

Wait, Mom, I have a question.

I raise my hand.

What was I going to say again?

There is no bottom to the cake. I’m digging through the kind of soil that supports rhododendrons: it’s that dark. There’s a little ice-cream spoon shaped like a spade. I remember one from when I was a kid, when a sundae looked like a mountain (though only, always, for the first time).

I cannot button her eyes.

I think we eat what we need. I could eat the whole earth if you broke it down into pieces, if the pieces were small enough. I read one woman ate the wall of her house: she didn’t know why. “My body calls for it,” she said.

We saw it under the road, in a ditch beneath the road that stretched under the road from one side to the other. The road was not really a road; it was more of a path. The path was so narrow that it was more of a bridge. The ditch under the bridge was so shallow that perhaps it was only a hollow. The snake was in the hollow, thick and black as a bicycle tire. We could not see its beginning, we could not see its end.

Its head was hidden in some grass or a hole on one side of the hollow, and its tail was hidden in a hole or some grass at the other side. The path stretched over the hollow, and it stretched over the snake. There were four of us. We were all together. We could not decide which was the front end of the snake, and which was the back.

The snake did not move, and we did not move. The sun was hot. We wanted to move out of the sun, to the other side of the hollow, but we did not want to cross the snake. We knew that there were poisonous snakes in this area, and we saw that the snake was so very big and black that it could only be one of the poisonous snakes. We knew all these things all together.

Nevertheless we crossed the hollow.

When we returned in the evening the woman who met us told us that the poisonous snakes in this area are thin and green, and that they will come upon you without your knowing, and that they do not lie in ditches in the sun, the size and color of a thick bicycle tire.

And we knew that this thing about the snake that we had known all together was wrong, even though we had known it all together, and it was one time that we had known something all together, all four of us at once, the same thing. Though perhaps we had also known at the same time that what we knew was most likely unlikely, and that we had also known that even a poisonous snake would most likely not be disturbed if we crossed the hollow, and we had known that the snake, being so big, was most likely the kind that did not rise up. But it had been important that we agreed about the snake, and it had been important that we did not have to say this, but that we had known it at that moment, each and all of us, the same thing. Or it had been important, at that moment, to think we did. And maybe that was what it was all about, after all.

Let it be autumn.

Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly colored metal bars at waist height to steady the entering infirm.

Let the branches of chain stores in the high street be too small to carry the full range. Let their sales be undermined by charity shops selling just as good as new. Let there be other shops stocking nothing useful: handicrafts; overpriced children’s clothes; holidays on window cards, faded; homemade homewares. Let these shops be unvisited and kept by old women still peering from doorways expecting their ideal customer. Let fashion be something heard of somewhere else.

Let there be backalleys for cycles hungover with brambles, with cidercans in ditches. Let these backways be quicker ways but let no one question the cars. Let these ways snake along the back of allotments and supermarkets and h-block schools on the ring road. Let the ways snake under the ring road. Let dogwalkers use them: let anglers use them, and junkies. Let these ways be deserted when the children are in school, except for the odd dogwalker or angler or junkie. Let each wear his particular uniform. Let no angler or dogwalker be mistaken for a junkie: let no junkie be mistaken for a dogwalker or angler. Let anglers only occasionally walk dogs.

Let there be children and old people but few whose occupation is neither hope nor memory. Let there have been immigration at some point: enough to fill the convenience stores, the foreign restaurants, but let it be forgotten. Let the children be all in school, a breath held in, released at 3 o’clock across the park. Let the town’s rhythm be unquestioned. Let me be single: no children, no family. Let me not fit in.

Let there be a college where art students dream of cities they do not leave for.

Let art for the old people be something colorful and, for the young people, something black. Let their art be always things. Let the colorful things appear sometimes in the windows of the shops that sell homemade homewares. Let the art students sometimes fill an empty shop lot with black things. Let the old people go right up to the windows of the empty shop lot and squint and frown.

Let there be a coffee shop next to a head shop where the art students hang out. Let the coffee shop serve bad coffee. Let it have only yesterday’s news and the local papers (let small crimes occur, and let occasional larger crimes, on the outskirts of town beyond the ring road, be personally motivated, down to nothing more than bad marriages, bad upbringings). Let me sit in the coffee shop and, while drinking bad coffee, hear the rumor that someone famous was to come to town but that the visit was cancelled. Let the woman behind the counter shake her head, her toweled hand continuing to spiral in the persistently streaked glass.