Fay Weldon Omnibus: Collected Works of Fay Weldon

by Weldon, Fay

  So there would be no day off for Antoinette. Antoinette knew better than to ask: asking would be spoiling the spirit of the occasion. It wasn’t all bad – she would be allowed to take home the leftovers and there would be plenty, twice as much as anyone could possibly need because Honey Marvin was like that. Well, not exactly ‘allowed to take home’ – she would be presented with a basket of prettily wrapped cold turkey legs (Texas the guard dog was hand-fed the white meat) and cold sweet-potato patties.

  ‘Oh thank you, ma’am. Isn’t that real pretty!’

  ‘But we’re so obliged to you, Antoinette. What would we do without you? You’re part of the family. Here, you’re forgetting the chocolate-chip cookies. Don’t dream of leaving the chocolate-chip cookies behind!’

  Ma’am was always desperate to get the cookies out of the house: otherwise she might succumb and eat them and then she’d have to do an extra couple of hours’ workout penance. She was as thin as a praying mantis; hold up her mean little hand to the light and you could see right through it; if she ate anything not Pritikin the whole meaning of her life was gone. She’d have hysterics if there was a drop of oil in the lemon dressing on the spinach salad, yet sometimes whole walnut cakes would vanish from the fridge overnight, and that couldn’t be John Junior because since his operation John Junior only got about in a wheelchair and anyway since John Junior Marvin’s operation the fridge was a special new make with a lock on it and Honey Marvin had the key. Honey Marvin just threw the old fridge out: Antoinette would have liked it but she wasn’t going to ask. It would have been too tall for her kitchen, of course, but she could have put it on its side, or in the yard. Mr Junior had had a triple bypass three months back and now finally Honey had him eating the way she did, though sometimes John Junior fought back, as well as a man in a wheelchair can fight back. Antoinette was sorry for him but not all that sorry.

  Antoinette took out the family silver for Thanksgiving and hand-polished it as Honey Marvin wanted her to do, though it had been done when she put it away after the summer party, and wrapped in tissue since then, but there you were, that was Honey Marvin for you. Things had to be done just right. Honey Marvin spent $500 on an all-white table centrepiece, then decided she hated it, threw it in pieces round the room, changed decorators, and got in a centrepiece which cost $1,250. She didn’t like that one either but said she wasn’t going to waste any more money on stupid things like centrepieces when bits of old tree would do.

  ‘What do you think, Antoinette? You must have thoughts.’

  ‘I think it’s real pretty, ma’am.’

  ‘It’s certainly very bright, if that’s what you mean. Well, they’re the in decorators. God knows why.’

  And then everything in the dining room had to be changed; the pale furniture moved out to the rumpus room: the strong-coloured pieces from the covered patio brought in to match the centrepiece, and still it wasn’t right. Hired movers and cleaners came and went. Then Claire called the day before Thanksgiving to say she was sick and was fired on the spot for lack of loyalty and love: she’d posted a doctor’s certificate from Honey’s own physician – crawled to the post with it, or so she said – but it was Claire’s manner on the phone which really upset Honey. Which meant Antoinette had to do all the cooking, even the cranberry sauce because Honey’s hand developed neuralgia, she was under such a strain; and at Thanksgiving you really can’t use caterers. Apart from anything else, they’d cheat. They wouldn’t keep everything cholesterol-free. Especially the pumpkin pie. For cholesterol-free pumpkin pie you use a fat-free crust and the filling’s made with white of egg, not whole of egg.

  And meanwhile, at home, Cheri, Antoinette’s nineteen-year-old married daughter, the one who’d just had a C-section baby, had turned up weeping with a black eye. Her husband’s parents had said she should go back to work straight away and she’d said she couldn’t, she was weak from the operation, and the debts were mounting up; but they were so young, the pair of them. Antoinette knew if she could just talk to them – but she had to be at work by six to get the turkey in the oven so it could be cold enough for supper because one of Honey’s friends had read you should never chill a turkey in the fridge, only at room temperature. Fortunately Honey Marvin didn’t have many friends. Antoinette had noticed this. She’d have guests, but they weren’t what Antoinette would call friends. Honey gave them a lot of presents, tiny little things, silver or gold, cute, beautifully wrapped. Antoinette had at one time saved the paper and smoothed it and taken it home for the kids to make collages with, but she’d had a memo from Mr Marvin’s office to all staff saying ‘no domestic accoutrements, even when apparently discarded, were to be removed from the dwelling’, which she and Juanita next door had finally deciphered as meaning Honey didn’t like her taking the paper home and she’d better stop or else. Honey never raised her voice or got mad at you; she was the sweetest thing. Everyone said so, especially John Junior. Well, he had to. He was trapped. He didn’t speak too well, either. Antoinette reckoned he’d had a stroke as well as a bypass but no one was saying. Sometimes Honey flipped and someone got fired, and stayed fired, but mostly she spoke soft and memos got sent from the office.

  That’s enough of that. You get the picture? Whose side are you on, I wonder? The employers or the hired help? The rich or the poor? Have I loaded the scales? No. You wish I had, but I haven’t. Who are you identifying with? Honey Marvin, Antoinette, Cheri’s husband, or John Junior? A bit of all of them? I hope so. That way progress lies. If it hurts, it heals.

  Anyway, this Thanksgiving there was Antoinette working a sixteen-hour day worried stiff about Cheri – though at least Juanita was helping with the baby, her first grandchild – and the two boys still at home – thirteen and fourteen – would have to move over and share a bed and she was not there to handle any of it, keep things smooth, she even wondered if she should call off sick too, but if she was fired, then what? They stuck together, the ladies who lived in big houses, the kind which had steel doors to let you into the property, remotely controlled from the house. They’d call Honey and Honey would say, ‘She just wasn’t into the spirit of the household. She let me down when I needed her most,’ and then what could Antoinette do? A dumpy 45-year-old Latino with a scar down the side of her face, so she needed to keep to the kitchen, wasn’t right for opening doors and smiling? If she had time she’d get herself to college and learn English properly, but with seven kids and Honey Marvin what could she do? And now Cheri was back with baby Gerry, who was cute; and if they wanted to stay they’d have to stay. Who could afford housing?

  Antoinette had the turkey in the slow oven – basted in yoghurt, not oil – and the cholesterol-free pumpkin pie in the fast oven. She gave the stripped turkey skin (the fat in poultry is always just beneath the skin) to Texas the guard dog to calm him down: if he got hungry he was likely to bite: she’d had to have stitches twice and was now known as ‘not good with Texas’. Honey Marvin liked a spotless kitchen whenever she walked into it, so Antoinette kept the pots and pans cleaned up as she went.

  Honey Marvin walked in and said, ‘You are a treasure, Antoinette, coping with thirteen single-handed; why have you taken your shoes off? We have to be so careful about hygiene, what with Mr Marvin’s special requirements. Please put them on again.’ So Antoinette did, though they hurt in a way that soft leather shoes don’t; and just as well, because Texas squatted and crapped there and then, as he often did when Honey Marvin came in. Honey Marvin needed Texas to protect her at night in her great big house on many levels – now that John Junior slept soundly at last, on sleeping pills – but she’d have done without him if she could. She just ignored him and walked out, so Antoinette cleared it up.

  Honey Marvin came back presently and said, ‘I remember now. There’s a phone call for you on the rumpus-room extension. Don’t be too long. It’s Thanksgiving, after all, and John Junior and I are calling all our friends and family and the lines are busy,’ though the red light on the extension in the kitchen w
hich meant the phones were in use hadn’t shown all morning. Antoinette went to the rumpus-room phone and Juanita said, ‘I thought you’d never come. Get home quick, Antoinette, your Cheri’s husband is banging on the door and she’s in here crying and he’s going to murder us all.’

  So Antoinette gave Texas the bowl of six left-over egg yolks to keep him quiet and just ran from the big house, out the back door, through the garage with the ten cars so squashed in that no one could ever get any but two of them out, and she squeezed through the hole in the fence everyone but the Marvins knew about, and ran for ten minutes solid to get home, and when she did found Cheri and her husband sobbing and smiling and sighing in each other’s arms, and she was glad because she liked the young man, he was just so young, and a baby needs two parents, and the smell of a pumpkin pie which the boys were making was rich and strong in the house, and there was Juanita saying she was sorry, she was sorry, she’d got frightened, and Antoinette grabbed the hot pumpkin pie out of the oven because she knew the one at the Marvins’ would be burned, she’d forgotten to turn the oven down, and the boys said that’s okay, that’s okay, because they were good kids, and she borrowed six eggs from Juanita who, what with the bangings and crashings, hadn’t got round to making her own, and ran back to the house, and she was in through the hole in the fence and sure enough the kitchen was full of the smell of burnt, fat-free, egg-yolk-free pumpkin pie but she switched on all the extractor fans, of which there were many, and whisked the ruined pie out of the oven, burning her fingers so she dropped it on the floor and it skidded under the table and Texas ate it, as she knew he would, scalding his mouth but he didn’t care.

  ‘That’s a good-looking pumpkin pie,’ said Honey Marvin, staring at the one Antoinette had brought from home, one second after the evidence had been eaten, ‘but what’s that funny smell? It didn’t burn, did it?’ If there was anything Honey Marvin hated it was the waste of burned food, of food caught on the bottoms of the very best pans.

  ‘Don’t look like burned to me, ma’am,’ said Antoinette, and though Honey Marvin peered and peered she couldn’t see a speck of burned pastry, and one pumpkin pie looks much like another, whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor.

  ‘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. (You can only clean a floor properly on your hands and knees, as Honey Marvin’s friends declared.) ‘You didn’t put egg yolk in it, did you? Because, as you know, egg yolk can kill my husband.’

  ‘Why, ma’am, here’s the proof no egg yolk went into that pumpkin pie,’ said Antoinette, showing Honey Marvin a bowl with six of Juanita’s egg yolks in it – Texas had turned up his nose at the whites, as she knew he would, but there was no harm trying. So she’d put them down the waste.

  ‘Antoinette,’ said Honey Marvin, ‘I know you’re loyal and true to us, and here’s a little Thanksgiving gift to prove it,’ and gave her a little silver salt-cellar one of her friends had upset her by not accepting because these days the rich can’t eat salt, it’s so full of sodium; the friend had actually stamped and left in a fury, crying ‘Honey Marvin, you’re nothing but a murdering bitch’ but then Thanksgiving is like that sometimes, everyone knows.

  ‘Thank you kindly, ma’am,’ said fat Antoinette, podgy Antoinette, scarred Antoinette, good Antoinette, who salted her food and ate real pumpkin pie and didn’t care one bit whether Honey Marvin’s husband lived or died, and would you? And she went home to her family at last, barefoot, because her feet hurt, and they’d all given up waiting and gone to sleep. And she was glad. She put her head on her pillow and slept too.

  The moral of this Thanksgiving story is not that the poor are happier than the rich. They’re not. But that the only point in being rich, as the palate of the wealthy gets jaded, lies in not being poor. 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? 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.

  See the drop of blood upon the page? That’s mine. That’s just the beginning.

  Sharon Loves Darren

  ‘Sharon,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, patiently, ‘now, Sharon, if you don’t swallow this tube, you will die.’

  ‘Want to die,’ said Sharon. And then she called her lover’s name aloud, so that the sound bounced back from pale-green walls, up and down the casualty cubicles, softened by stacked cardboard boxes (labelled ‘Cardiac Infibulation’, or ‘Tracheotomy’, or ‘Paediatric Artery’ or whatever) but sharpened by racks of stainless steel, upon which were stacked instruments for the cutting and closing of human flesh.

  ‘Darren! Oh Darren, save me!’

  ‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, who wore a badge claiming ‘a legend in her time’ on her tidy uniform, and whose face was neat and intelligent and composed – she was all of twenty-four – ‘Look Sharon, just swallow this tube or you’ll go into liver failure and die. Do you understand?’ But all Sharon did was shriek for Darren again and then clamp her mouth shut against the intrusive poking pale-yellow tube. Sharon was seventeen. She wore laddered black tights and a bra. They’d stripped her of everything else. She’d drunk a bottle of sherry, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine during the course of the evening, and taken twenty-five paracetamol tablets, a whole bottleful, for love of Darren, who had taken Debbie to the cinema instead of her.

  Darren was nineteen, and sitting out in the waiting room, reading the sports page of last Saturday’s Sun. I’d noticed him earlier when I took my turn to wait for attention. He had acne and cropped pale-reddish hair. What he thought it was impossible to tell. He did not stir. If Sharon’s voice had reached him he was deaf to it. Or perhaps it just bored him. He’d heard it too often.

  ‘Sharon,’ said Nurse Fitt, ‘we want to help you but if you don’t make an effort yourself we can’t.’

  I lay in the next cubicle, in no urgent medical need, and listened. The curtains between us were open. Sharon went into fits of bitter weeping. ‘Oh Darren, Darren, my heart is breaking.’ I believed her. I’d cried like that myself, in my time.

  Sister Radice, all bosom and big dark eyes, fetched me a cup of tea. I was privileged. I had responded to medical treatment and could now be sent home. I was waiting to be fetched. ‘These girls,’ she murmured, ‘they don’t know how dangerous paracetamol is. They take it by the handful. We do our best but sometimes they don’t make it. I blame the drug companies.’

  ‘Oh, Darren, Darren,’ cried Sharon, lovesick Sharon, and tears came to my own eyes.

  ‘I want to go to the loo,’ yelled Sharon, suddenly, furiously, like the spoilt and naughty child she was.

  ‘Not yet, not yet,’ said she who was a legend in her own time, ‘it can wait. Just swallow the tube.’

  ‘It can’t wait,’ said her patient nastily. ‘What am I supposed to do, wet my pants?’

  ‘Better than dying,’ said Nurse Emily, but Sharon didn’t agree.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Sharon begged, ‘leave me to die.’

  ‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily, who was little more than a child herself, but at least was sensible, ‘if you die your parents will go mad.’

  ‘They’re mad already,’ said Sharon, cunningly. ‘They hate Darren anyway.’

  ‘Not surprised,’ muttered Emily Fitt. ‘So do I.’

  Sharon’s sick soaked into a newspaper on the floor. They’d made her vomit when the ambulance came in; given her an emetic before she’d had time to protest. The young doctor (Dr Angus Love, according to his lapel badge, but how could one be sure? Perhaps they made their names up?) had poked through the mess,
fish and chips swirling round in sherry, whisky and wine, but only found four paracetamol tablets, half-disintegrated, which meant there were another twenty-one left inside her. She’d have to be stomach-pumped, but a conscious patient, when it comes to it, is more difficult than one in a coma. He’d left the job to Emily. He was busy. Everyone was.

  ‘I say,’ said Sharon, plaintively, between shrieks and sobs. ‘I feel rather sick.’

  ‘I expect you do,’ said Emily Fitt. ‘Sick to death. Swallow the tube!’

  ‘You want to hurt me.’

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you. Why should we want to hurt you?’

  ‘Because you don’t like me,’ said Sharon, acutely. ‘Because I love Darren! Darren, save me! Let me see Darren. Please, let me see Darren.’

  ‘No,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and the department filled again with the sound of Sharon’s noisy distress, and Sharon’s furious little laddered and holed foot banged against the partition wall and saline drips everywhere trembled and faltered, and heart monitors, over-sensitive, gave perfectly absurd readings.

  ‘I love Darren. I want to die for Darren!’ cried Sharon.

  ‘Just shut up, will you,’ said Nurse Emily. ‘If you think I haven’t better things to do than look after you, you’re mistaken. There are children in casualty. You’re scaring them to death carrying on like this. You don’t want to frighten little children, do you?’

  ‘I love Darren,’ shrieked Sharon. ‘Fetch me Darren, you bitch!’