The ABCs of Love

by Sarah Salway

  See also Endings; True Romance; Utopia

  routines

  Only six months passed between my mother dying and my father getting ill. It wasn’t a coincidence. He always had a strong will. The way he got through my mother’s death was by developing a rigid pattern that held him up, even when he collapsed.

  He ate the same things each day, wore particular clothes on particular days, and he devised this amazing chart that contained lots and lots of boxes he had to tick off every half hour. In fact, he became so busy with the chart that it was difficult for him to find the time to speak to me toward the end.

  John came to see me the other day when I wasn’t expecting him. I was pleased, of course, but I kept watching the television over his shoulder because my favorite program is on on Wednesdays, and it had got to an exciting part.

  “I thought you’d be happy to see me,” he said eventually, “but you don’t want me here.”

  He was right. The funny thing was that it was only when he was getting ready to go that I realized what was happening. I asked him when he was coming next. I begged him to stay. Once he was going, I’d have done anything to get him to stay.

  See also Money; Utopia; Zeitgeist

  rude

  Farting is rude. Passing wind is something that just happens.

  Stealing another woman’s husband is unforgivable. Falling in love is something that just happens.

  Until you’re old enough to start doing it, just even talking about sex is so rude, it makes you giggle.

  Sometimes I think John has never had sex before. He gets so excited just because I tell him we can be completely free and honest with each other. He says he thanks God for the modern woman. One night he asked me to tell him my deepest fantasy.

  “I’ll have to think about that,” I said. I wanted to tell him one that would make me seem daring and sexy but not too dirty.

  But then he told me his.

  He said he wanted to walk down a street late at night. A few houses would still have their lights on, but there was one that wouldn’t have the curtains drawn. He’d be able to see right in. As he walked by, he would hear the cry of Take me! coming from the open window. There would be an attractive couple standing there, he said, making love. The woman would see John, watch him over the man’s shifting shoulder, but then the man would notice too. He’d pull out of the woman, turn, and move aside. Then the woman would move over to the window and gesture for John to come inside the house. She’d not even pull her skirt down. She’d stand there, staring at John as he opened the front gate, as the man watched too. Then John would step over the threshold, unzipping himself as he did so.

  He stopped talking then. He was breathing oddly, so I patted his shoulder and said it was okay, that I didn’t mind. He looked a bit surprised, but when we made love later, I didn’t move. Just lay there on my back like a virgin. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was curled up in a fetal position and I had a sick feeling in my stomach that I didn’t recognize for a while. Then I remembered. It was jealousy.

  Falling in love can happen to anyone. It is very different from lusting after an unknown woman.

  See also Glenda G-spot; Jealousy; Lesbians; Vexed

  S

  sculpture

  Sally has taken up lots of different hobbies so she won’t get too preoccupied with Colin. She is studying the Spanish language and desktop publishing, and she’s taking two exercise classes at the local sports club. What she likes best, though, is the sculpture course she takes at night school.

  She’s making lots of little nude figures out of clay. She makes them for Colin, but of course he can’t take them home, so they litter their flat. She says she is making their very own orgy.

  Sally told me that one of the models who came into the studio had worn a wig and that this had made all the students feel more comfortable, as if they weren’t looking at a real nude body after all. Apparently, they mold their pieces of clay on stands that are set up in a circle around the model, and after ten minutes, they move on to the next place, like a clock. You are allowed to sculpt only exactly what you see, and Sally started at the back. She said it was a big shock when she came round to the front and realized that her sculpture had a big hole there. Although it had a perfectly formed back.

  Sally thought that was a metaphor for her life. She said that it was the same for me, too, and that we should both think hard about what we were doing. All I could think about was what color the model’s wig was and how I’d never really asked John whether he preferred blondes or brunettes.

  See also Hair; Sex; Worst-Case Scenario; Zzzz

  sex

  After she’d spent the hours looking at the nude model, Sally cut off some of her pubic hair and sent it to Colin through the post so he would think of her at work. She pretends she’s so independent, but I can tell she’s worried about him. He’s not been around to the flat for a week.

  She told me that she’s been meeting up with the girls again and that they’ve been talking about me.

  “Let them,” I said.

  “They’re worried about you,” she said. “Trust me. You can’t ignore your friends. Learn from my experience if nothing else.”

  I can’t tell her the truth. That my experience could not be more completely different from hers if we tried.

  “John’s the real thing,” I pointed out, and she touched my arm sympathetically.

  “No man can be enough on his own. You have to make your own life,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her how sending Colin perverted things like pubic hair is being independent. But when I got home, I started thinking. Would it work with John? I thought I’d give it a go, but as soon as I cut some off, tied the hairs in red ribbon, and put them in an envelope, I felt so dirty that I wanted to be physically sick.

  Sally will never understand how different we are.

  See also Friends; The Queen II; True Romance

  sounds

  There are now some nights when John can stay over with me. He tells Kate that he works at the main factory in Birmingham those days. When we lie in bed before dawn, we sometimes hear a bird outside. The bird never sings when John’s not there. Then all I hear are cars and the running footsteps of commuters and, in the distance, the sound of the station announcers and the trains going to London.

  I found a list of the “Sounds of Earth” from the two Voyager spacecraft, which were sent into space in 1977, the year I was born. I e-mailed them to John:

  If I were to make a record of John and me, I would include that bird singing in the morning. I’d put in the sound of him pouring boiling water into coffee mugs while I just lie in bed waiting for him to come back, the little hum John makes in his sleep, the way he laughs out loud sometimes, shocking even himself, and the gasp he makes every time I touch him down there.

  See also Ears; Property; Utopia

  stalking

  Sally told me the other day that she hadn’t seen Colin for a while. She said she didn’t really mind because she’s so busy, but it got me thinking. I hadn’t walked up his road for a while, so I did last night.

  The lights in his house were off, and when I looked into his garden, there were no toys or swings or anything. I think Colin must be a very cold person. Perhaps they are on holiday and he hadn’t told her.

  The funny thing is that it isn’t that far from Colin’s house to John’s, but I couldn’t bring myself to go down his road this time. I normally go later at night, when no one’s on the streets and there’s no chance he will see me. Once, it was terrible. I was standing there trying to work out which room was which when I heard Kate come home. She was with a friend, and they were laughing, holding on to each other. I had to run onto their front lawn and hide in their hedge to avoid being seen. Luckily, it was pitch black. Kate kept saying what a good night she’d had and how good it had been to talk, and then they’d start laughing all over again. It took her a long time to get in the house. And then when she did, she started shouting
that she was home. She must have woken up everyone.

  I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of John and his children, waiting for Kate to come back. Their house had a very lonely atmosphere, but Kate seemed so happy. She was singing when she was looking for her keys, when she was yelling out that she was home.

  See also Colin; Lesbians; Yard; Youth

  star quality

  Brian has developed a habit of holding up his hands at cross angles to each other and looking at me through them as if he was making a frame.

  It’s annoying, but of course I eventually had to ask him what he was doing. He said he thought I might be of film-star material. Although I’d need a lot of work on my accent to make it appealing to the ear. Flat vowels apparently don’t do it for men.

  I wasn’t taken in. I knew from looking at his computer that he has been writing a film script. It is about a man from Yorkshire who is not appreciated by his family but who makes friends with a little Vietnamese orphan who lives with a rich and beautiful widow in the village. This orphan is initially the only one to see the man’s true qualities, but when the little girl introduces him to the widow, they fall in love with each other. The film ends with the three of them living out the rest of their days in luxury in a big house with a large wall around it to keep out everyone who has been scared of their “otherness.”

  Brian leaves copies of the screenplay lying around because he wants me to ask him about it. He writes notes in the margins in large red type, saying things like More sex? and God, how true!!!

  See also Mistaken Identity; Unfit

  start-rite sandals

  John can’t understand why I need so many shoes. I have just bought a pair of loafers made of turquoise leather that looks like snakeskin. I wish I could show them to Sally. They’d make her laugh. Or they would if she could manage to stop talking about John and how I’m best rid of him for two minutes.

  I still feel cheated when I buy shoes now because it’s almost too easy. When I was a child, it was such a procedure to buy shoes for kids that the store would give us a lollipop afterward. Just for surviving it. There was a special machine, and we had to stick our feet into black boxes to have X rays taken of how the bones were growing. It worries me how it really seemed to matter when you were a child whether you were a C or an E fitting, and now all shoes come in the same width. You just take them down from the shelf and squeeze into them somehow.

  Because my feet were so wide, my mother used to make me have Start-rite sandals long after everyone else had given them up. I had big feet, and my shoes would flap when I walked, like a clown’s. At school, the other girls would tease me and ask why I didn’t just wear the shoe boxes. Or they would make rowing motions and say I was wearing boats.

  I didn’t have any friends at school, so I’d spend break times posting little pebbles through the holes in the leather of my Start-rites. The nuns kept coming over to make me join in other people’s games, so I learned to run round and round the playground very fast so it would look as if I were involved in a complicated game and wasn’t just playing on my own.

  See also Fashion; Outcast; Velvet; Vendetta

  stationery

  The only shop I would be perfectly happy to be locked in overnight is a stationery shop. After John, stationery is possibly my most favorite thing in the world. I can spend hours looking at all the different notebooks I can find, the colors of the pens, the way they feel in my hand, putting my fingers out to touch the softness of the paper, the fibers in the homemade papers, the shapes of paper clips, the solidness of staplers, Sellotape dispensers, hole punchers.

  I make mental plans about how much better organized I would be if only I had a shelf full of home organizers, box files, and see-through plastic envelopes. How I would pin up “Things to Do” lists on the notice boards, write telephone messages and personal reminders on those little sticky pads. Keep a Biro on a piece of string by the telephone so that I’ve always got one near and am not struggling to find one with one hand or pretending I’m writing a complicated message down when I’m not.

  I think it’s a female thing. John says he’s never even thought about what pen he uses, just if it works. I set him a challenge one day. Just before he left me, I asked him to buy me one of those colored pens that smell of different scents—raspberry, mint, chocolate, popcorn, bubble gum. Whatever flavor he brought back, I thought to myself, would tell me what he really felt about me.

  I guessed he’d forget, but he rang me up the next day. He said that when he was going into the shop in the precinct to buy me my pen, a black cat walked in with him as if they were going shopping together. He pointed this out to the shop assistant, who looked up briefly and said, “Oh, not again.”

  When I asked John about the pen, he said that he’d been so shaken by the cat and the man’s sanguine reaction to it that he’d started looking at the cookery books on the bargain-book table instead. The first one he’d picked up had a whole section about this special fruit pie his mother used to cook him. He then started telling me about his mother and what she had meant to him. He said he’d never really talked about her to anyone before.

  I have noticed that John talks about himself a lot. We laugh about it sometimes, and I say, “And back to you,” but it’s something I can see might get annoying.

  In fact, I dreamed about his mother one night soon after the pen debacle. She was teaching me how to make banana pie with goldfish baked through it, and when we took it out of the oven together, she handed me her white apron. Interestingly, the goldfish were still jumping up and down in the pie. I told John this, but he said only that he couldn’t imagine his mother sharing a kitchen with anyone, let alone the woman who broke up his son’s family. I think this is just sour grapes. John has never dreamed about his mother. I think sometimes he is just not as sensitive as me. The good thing about being in love is that I can recognize John’s faults in an adult fashion. I do not always want to change him.

  See also Nursing; Teaching; Vexed; Women’s Laughter

  stepmothers

  There was an interesting program on the radio the other night about stepmothers. How much they can bring to a child’s life, how the relationship can actually be positive because both sides get better at communicating their emotions.

  This is exactly what I feel. I look out of the bus sometimes and see all these mothers and daughters shopping, and I think what fun they are having. I have started to keep a list of the best shops for teenagers in London. I think the important thing is not to be a mother substitute, but to be a best friend. If you think this way, there is so much you can offer a child, particularly if they look up to you and model themselves on your behavior. The ideal stepmother is someone a child can aspire to.

  See also Best Friends; Endings; Relatives; Ultimatum; Underwear

  surnames

  I told John on the telephone last night how much it mattered what surname you have. I said I’d never liked my surname. Being able to change it was one of the main reasons I wanted to get married. He laughed and said he could think of better ones.

  He never takes me seriously these days.

  Once he rang me from a public telephone box to tell me he’d just read about a party Oscar Wilde had hosted. He’d invited lots of strangers who couldn’t think why they were there, until in the middle of dinner, Oscar Wilde left the room and didn’t come back. After a while, the strangers started talking and realized that what they had in common was that they all had surnames with bottomin them: Longbottom, Sidebottom, Greybottom. John seemed to think this was very funny, but I couldn’t see the point.

  It reminded me of when children at school used to boast about ringing up people in the telephone book who had silly names. I have a feeling John would do something like that. He was probably rifling through the book in the phone box looking for people with funny surnames at the same time as he was speaking to me.

  I, on the other hand, was busy practicing my new signature. Verity Hutchinson. I have this feeling
that if I write it enough times, it might just come true. I’ve started to underline my name now too. It makes it look much more solid.

  See also Telephone Boxes; Ultimatum

  T

  teaching

  I have learned so many things since I’ve been with John. We stayed in a hotel together for the first time the other night, and he pointed out that I don’t get out of the bath in the right way.

  The funny thing is that I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve always just got out without thinking, all dripping wet, and wound myself up in towels. Sometimes I don’t even bother to dry myself, just walk around like that until the water evaporates. I like the feeling of air on my skin. But this means that the bathroom is unpleasant for other people. Now I towel-dry myself standing up in the bath as the water drains out. It’s a bit uncomfortable and cramped, but that way, I’m dry when I finally step out and John doesn’t have to step in any unpleasant damp patches.

  The other thing I have learned to do is to hold my knife and fork properly. John had to point this out several times before I got the hang of it. I haven’t yet managed to blink without making the little clicking noise that drives John mad, but the other night I did sleep all through the night without dribbling because I told myself again and again so many times to keep my mouth shut that I think I was still saying this when I fell asleep.

  I had no idea I had so many faults. It makes me embarrassed at how I behaved in public before I met John. He is so well mannered. I tried to thank him, but he just told me I was silly and that I worried too much about myself. He’s right. John makes me feel large and clumsy, as if I’m always about to fall over my own feet. I have also noticed that when I am with John, I tend to sweat a bit more, my nose runs, and my feet sometimes have an unpleasant odor.