Vertigo

by Joanna Walsh

  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.”

  CLAUSTROPHOBIA

  MINUS 1 YEAR

  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?

  MINUS 4 YEARS

  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.

  MINUS 3 YEARS

  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?”

  MINUS 2 YEARS

  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.

  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.

  MINUS 5 YEARS

  “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.

  0 YEARS/MONTHS/SECONDS

  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 th
e 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.