A Tale of Two Sisters

by Anna Maxted

  Not that evening, though.

  Being stabbed feels just like a punch, apparently. You don’t feel the knife going in, you just get a vague sense of the pain. You see the blood, and then you realise just how seriously you’ve been hurt. It took me a good few minutes to realise, she’s had time to think about the baby and she isn’t happy for me.

  I didn’t feel cold fear, I felt confused, and then I felt another emotion altogether.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can’t eat anything spicy. Thai is out, because I’d want the pad thai and they put peanuts in it – I can’t risk increasing the chances of the baby having a peanut allergy. And I can’t eat meat, obviously, just in case it’s not thoroughly cooked. Toxoplasmosis. We could go to Pizza Express, but I wouldn’t be able to have the Fiorentina – I’m not allowed to eat soft-boiled egg – so that kind of defeats the object. I suppose I could have the quadro – the quarto – the four-cheese one. Although I’d have to ask them if all four cheeses were pasturised.’

  I heard my voice, unfamiliar with its hard edge, and I thought, look at this, me being the difficult one for a change. Then I glanced at Cassie. Her face was like flint and a wave of cowardice swept over me. I’m brilliant at facing down the supermarket if a chicken’s off, or haranguing Barclaycard if they’ve charged me twenty quid for a letter, but I’d rather cut off my own toe than pick a fight with my sister.

  ‘Let’s go to Bella Italia,’ I said, in a chirpier tone.

  We went and it was like trying to make conversation with a Trappist monk.

  ‘I think I’ll just have spaghetti with tomato sauce,’ I said. I considered adding, ‘Although pasta is just flour and water, empty calories, as George once informed me. Ideally, I’d prefer a potato, you know, something nutritious for the baby.’ But I had the curious feeling that if I did she might actually rise from her seat and hit me. So I didn’t.

  ‘What are you having?’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘This really isn’t my sort of thing.’

  ‘What,’ I said briskly. ‘Pasta isn’t?’ Wasn’t that like saying, ‘Food isn’t my sort of thing’?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, equally briskly. ‘Pasta isn’t my sort of thing. It’s just flour and water. Empty calories.’

  I stared at her. Maybe she was pregnant too! That would explain the huff. She did not like to share the limelight. (I once showed her a photo of these girls we’d been at school with, in the local paper. They were twins, marrying twins, on the same day. Cassie had looked at the picture and said, ‘I really cannot think of anything worse than a double wedding. Thank Christ we’re not Mormons.’) I held my breath – was she going to announce it?

  ‘What I actually feel like is . . .’

  I leaned forward in my chair, with an encouraging smile.

  ‘. . . Cervella alla Caprese.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, well, that sounds nice.’

  Cassie leaned forward in her chair, and said, ‘Calves’ brains.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Calves’ brains in butter, capers, and garlic.’

  ‘I hate capers.’

  ‘Calves’ brains—’

  ‘Stop saying calves’ brains,’ I whispered.

  ‘Calves’ brains are real food!’ said Cassie, snapping the Bella Italia menu shut, and groping for her cigarettes. ‘Food that tastes interesting. Food for grown-ups. Some days you wake up, and you think, I’m in an offal mood.’

  ‘I agree, you’re in a horrible mood, but why would that make you want to eat something revolting?’

  Cassie gave me a death look.

  ‘Poor little calf,’ I added. ‘It’s only a baby. A poor little baby with rickety legs. You want to eat the brains of a poor little baby.’ I gulped. There was a lump in my throat and if I didn’t watch out I was going to burst out crying in Bella Italia.

  Cassie took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke through clenched teeth. Flick to ‘Steaming with rage’ in the illustrated dictionary, and there was my sister.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she said, taking my hand and squeezing it.

  I smiled, uncertain. Maybe I was wrong. It was a loving gesture, except the cigarette was now bang in front of my face. I fanned the smoke with my free hand. She gave me a pitying look, and raised her forearm in a quick, sharp gesture so the cigarette was level with her left ear, and for a second I thought she was giving me a Nazi salute.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she said again, ‘you go through life being so afraid. You should extend your gastronomic experience. I’ve had chicken hearts cooked on a skewer in a Japanese restaurant and I swear it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘I—’

  ‘But calves’ brains are divine. Beefy tasting with a soft creamy texture . . .’

  As I ran to the toilet to throw up my own innards, I could hear Cassie making her order, her voice as clear and pure as a church bell: ‘Yes, I have made a decision. The cheese and spinach tortellini with tomato sauce. As long as it’s not too spicy. It isn’t, is it?’

  Chapter 5

  Everyone else, though, was lovely. Even the boys at work made a fuss.

  ‘Ah, Baby, that’s so sweet!’ said my boss, Fletch, the deputy editor. ‘You clever girl! I’d love a baby! I’m so broody!’

  ‘Really?’ I said. Fletch was ‘dating’ a porn star (C-list). His previous girlfriend was a lesbian. And the one before that, a very nice girl from the home counties. And her husband.

  Toby, the editor, had his PA order me a bouquet of white roses. Toby was professionally charming. He didn’t care one jot. All wit and warmth was activated in view of a higher purpose: management. I compared a chat with Toby to eating cheap sweets – nice with a nasty aftertaste. (Tim did a fine impression of what he imagined Toby was like in a features meeting: ‘I want ya to think of sports ya can do wearin’ ya suit!’)

  Even the rest of the staff – a group of men who at some point every day converged on the light box to squint at a thousand pictures of naked breasts – dredged up shreds of memory from their long-discarded middle-class upbringings and politely declared, ‘We thought your tits had grown!’

  I accepted the compliment. I was one of three women in an office of twelve men and sometimes you fought the urge to gun down the lot of them for the sake of civilisation. It was the honesty that made you wish you were deaf. They were brutal. Mariella, the fashion director, had, in error, slept with a freelance writer, Bill Marks, and the boys were so vile about it, no one was surprised when she fled to a job in the more refined surrounds of Nutz. As Fletch said, ‘It wasn’t enough that she suffered the experience once, she had to relive it every day.’

  While as individuals they were delightful, as a group they were savages. While Toby schmoozed advertisers in expensive restaurants, his staff set each other’s hair on fire, read porn in the toilets on company time, and relieved themselves down the back of Toby’s suede sofa (he’d refused them pay rises). I did dream of suing for distress, discrimination, everything, and retiring to a five-bedroom villa in Sandy Lane, but I was fond of them. Once, a reader wrote in from prison complaining he’d spotted a pubic hair on the bikini line of a model, and they printed his letter and ridiculed it. ‘Women do have pubic hair, you mutt.’

  I felt grateful, which was, I suppose, wrong.

  I saw my job as an education. I was like an early explorer, treading uncharted territories. As assistant to the deputy editor I arranged interviews with ‘stars’. One pouty little soap star bypassed her agent to insist that we pay her. Fletch: ‘How about we pay you what we paid Robert De Niro?’

  Her: ‘Yes, ok.’

  Fletch: ‘Great! I’ll make out a cheque for zero pence!’

  I also researched orgy etiquette, sports watches, interesting wounds, and strange facts. Toby urged us to ‘Think aspirational!’ although the back pages told a different story: ‘Combat Hair Loss, Fast Fone Fun! Karen’s Escorts’ . . .

  I frequently amused myself by watching the staff’s breathless efforts to s
leep with the models. As Fletch said, ‘If a model agrees to sleep with you, it’s like God giving you a present!’ And I spent a lot of time saying ‘No’ when anyone but Fletch asked me to nip out for coffee, biscuits, or haemorrhoid cream. Now, of course, I had an effective weapon with which to discourage impertinent requests: gynaecological detail. ‘I went for tests, and the speculum was . . .’ I’d begin, and they’d shrink away like slugs from salt. Those men could stare at vaginas on a porn site all day. Show them one in a medical textbook and they’d be gagging over the bin.

  I learned that men will joke about anything. They live to offend; they see it as proof of masculinity (as opposed to stupidity). Once, hunters mounted moose heads as trophies. In our office, furious letters from Christian groups were pinned on the walls. My co-workers talked endlessly about how tiny their penises were (I think they preferred to mock themselves than be mocked). They were casually violent, yet dreadful at fighting. Even though they loved to throw things – balls, darts, computers – they couldn’t throw a punch.

  But what I liked about men? While they were dirty, lazy, shallow, spoiled, vain, selfish, rude, unreasonable, demanding and piggish – I’m speaking of the intelligent ones here – if a bloke was angry with another bloke, there was no mystery about it.

  The day after Cassie spent two hours in my company without congratulating me on the baby – even a mention would have been nice – I felt the frustration of someone who is being manipulated. If she was angry, why didn’t she say?

  Normally, I let the bad behaviours of relatives pass through me like ghosts. Unless you’re from one of those dysfunctional families where the father steals the son’s girlfriend and everyone’s slightly surprised, my attitude is: these people love you, and where there’s love there’s always a bit of hate. You accept the bad with the good.

  I couldn’t. It felt like a betrayal of the baby.

  ‘Speak to her,’ said Tim, like it was the simplest thing.

  I considered this option and rejected it. I didn’t want to speak to her. I wanted to punish her.

  I waited till Friday Night.

  The Jewish Sabbath lasts from sunset to sunset, Friday to Saturday. ‘Work’ is forbidden although, interestingly, driving is considered work, so religious Jews walk everywhere. (Personally, I’d have it the other way round.) Traditionally, families attend synagogue, then return home for further prayers and the Friday Night meal. They light candles, break bread, drink wine. That said, every family has its own variation on tradition, and our family variation was to dispense with the religious bits and cut to the food.

  ‘Shabbat shalom!’ said my father with relief, after struggling through the Hebrew prayers for the sake of George’s parents, who were more correct about these things.

  ‘Shabbat shalom!’ cried Tim’s parents, who were also more correct about these things, despite being Church of England.

  The whole scenario was my mother’s worst nightmare, as she was expected to cook. Also, George’s mother was a fabulous cook. The poor woman, she loved to see you eat, and yet George was maintaining the charade of being vegan, an insult comparable to roasting a pig on a spit in the front room. Ever hopeful that it was a fad, his mother would prepare fish fried in matzo meal whenever he and Cassie visited. George would sniff the air, unzip his coolbag, and extract a jar of blackstrap molasses, a bottle of almond milk, a plastic bag of organic porridge oats, a box of three dried apricots and seven raspberries, all of which he’d assemble into a meal and eat at the table, daring anyone to comment. Mrs Hershlag would beg him at least to cook the oats – ‘Who eats raw porridge?’ George would ignore her. I tried to see what Cassie saw in this man, but I just couldn’t. He was clever, amusing, yes, but like the Joker, he didn’t use his intellect for the greater good. Hey, even the lesser good would have been something. And Cassie became more abrasive in his presence.

  Tim’s mother wasn’t such a direct threat as, whatever she thought of Vivica’s cooking, she knew her place and was programmed to murmur, ‘This is wonderful, Vivica.’ I don’t think our mother considered that the men might have an opinion on her food, but if they did, she didn’t care to hear it. Year in, year out, our father never uttered a word – I think, on the principle, if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all.

  I thought I detected a small element of resentment in the way our mother crashed the soup bowls onto the table. However, the big element of resentment turned out to be contained in the soup itself, an enterprising mixture of vegetable soup and Campbell’s Cream of Chicken.

  I saw George’s mother glance at George’s father and put down her spoon. Our father stood up and removed their bowls in a quick, quiet movement.

  ‘Can I cut you some more chhhollah?’ he said, sounding like radio static. He was really trying. Usually he pronounced it ‘holler’. Actually, I lie. Usually, he pronounced it ‘bread’.

  I squeezed my knees together in embarrassment. Even half-arsed Jews like us didn’t tend to eat meat and dairy produce in the same meal. Even our parents’ neighbour, Letty Jackson, who kept a kosher home but ate bacon sandwiches in her car (it was a Saab, I think she thought it neutral territory, like Sweden), drew the line at adding butter. For my mother to serve cream of chicken soup to the Hershlags, who, if not observant, were fairly traditional, she might as well have spat in their faces.

  Normally, Cassie and I would have exchanged complicit glances. Look what she’s done now. That evening, we avoided eye contact. I willed our father to apologise. He never reprimanded Vivica, he knew it would be like starting a fight with America. I observed our mother and saw that her thoughts were concentrated solely on her next cigarette. There was no trace of regret on her face, just a faint aura of irritation. She smoked Vogue Super-Slim Menthol, nasty thin cigarettes. When I first moved out she gave me a box of linen she wanted to get rid of. As I pulled out a green and blue bedsheet, a Vogue stub fell to the floor, and I noticed a brown singe hole in the centre of the material.

  It was Cassie who spoke.

  ‘Mummy.’

  Cassie went to Cambridge University (she studied Law at Magdalene, I mean, she didn’t just go there on a day trip) and we all noticed that her voice was a great deal smarter upon her return. Only posh people call their mother ‘Mummy’ beyond the age of ten, and I think Cassie presumed we all knew this.

  Our mother jumped and refocused.

  ‘Ivan and Sheila can’t eat this, Mummy. It’s milk and meat.’ I noticed that she didn’t bother to maintain the pretence that we couldn’t eat it. I supposed the Hershlags already knew that we were Jews Lite. They did now. I held my breath for our mother’s reaction. Cassie’s tone held a frisson of annoyance, enough to suggest to our mother that it was just possible she might have made a huge, grotesque and offensive error, but that everyone was prepared to be friendly and forgiving about it.

  I didn’t think our mother had done this on purpose. The mistake was a consequence of her complete disinterest in serving a Friday Night meal to relatives. She was egocentric. Other people bored her. Her internal narrative would be something like: it’s boring, why can’t they do it? She was like a three-year-old in her inability to perform a task convincingly that she didn’t enjoy. She was also like a three-year-old in her extreme and violent dislike of being told off.

  Our mother’s look of shock changed to displeasure. ‘It can’t be,’ she said. ‘The tin says, “Cream of Chicken”. It all comes from the chicken!’

  ‘What – cream?’ said George – a trifle rudely, I thought.

  Yes, his parents had borne the brunt of the insult, but he was a hypocrite. Whenever George took Tim to the David Lloyd Club (George’s way of trying to make Tim more Jewish – a Lloyd membership being pretty much the equivalent to converting), they’d play tennis for five minutes, then George would beeline to the nearest McDonald’s and order a hamburger with extra cheese. He practised the Letty Jackson form of veganism.

  ‘George, it doesn’t matter!’ said his mother.
r />   ‘What are you talking about, it doesn’t matter – it matters!’ said Mr Hershlag. He dabbed his face with his napkin. He was breathing heavily, and his kipah – ‘kipper’ as our father would say – attached to his thinning hair with a girl’s pink hairslide, had slipped and was flapping off the side of his head.

  ‘I thought the soup was lovely,’ whispered Tim’s mother.

  ‘Yes, dear, but it was traife,’ said Tim’s father. ‘Not kosher,’ he added, for my mother’s benefit.

  ‘I’ll serve the main,’ said our mother, with a face like slate. She did. No one spoke. You could cut the tension with a knife. (The same could not be said for the lentil bake, which had chunks of carrot in it the size of bolts.)

  My heart began to race, and not in a good way. I cleared my throat. My announcement was no longer to punish Cassie. I didn’t want to hurt her, I wanted to make things right. I grasped Tim’s hand under the table.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘would anyone here – er, except you, Mr and Mrs Hershlag – like to be grandparents?’

  Chapter 6

  All of a sudden, I knew how it felt to be David Hasselhoff, who, by his own admission, once brought a child out of a coma. I had no idea – luckily, or I’d have got pregnant aged fourteen. There was a sparkle in people’s eyes when they looked at me. A reverence.

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth!’ said Tim’s mother. ‘To have a baby in the family again!’ And she held my hand with the lightest touch, as if it were the hand of God. Our mother leaped to her feet, and cried, ‘I’m going to be a grandmother! Oh, what fun! I can take him to the opera! We can go to the Ritz for tea! He’ll be my little friend! This is so exciting, and Ralph does such cute baby clothes!’

  The baby’s diary all worked out, I glanced at our father, and I saw with a jolt that he looked close to tears. He walked around the table, shook Tim’s hand, and pecked me on the temple. Then he said into my hair, ‘Well done. Your mother and I are very proud.’