Sweet Desserts

by Lucy Ellmann

  Rod however had no respect for such artificial divisions between one’s work and personal life. An article called ‘Mauling the Material: Auto-Destructive Art and Artists’, appeared in D.K. Magazine (short for ‘Dependable Kerchief’) a few weeks later, under the name of Roderick J. J. McMead.

  Fairly deep drawers are more useful than shallow ones. It is essential that the bench be very rigidly constructed. It need not necessarily be fixed to the floor, but it should be supported against the wall at the back. Its structure should be braced so that it does not yield under the pressure of heavy filing or chipping, or other strenuous operations. It is better not to make the bench too low, to avoid stooping. A firm, solid work-bench is a necessity, as well as a comfort, when working.

  When I told Franny I was pregnant, she said, ‘You idiot!’ No one could believe I wanted it, and of course the thought had only just occurred to me too: I had considered it perfectly natural that the lovelessness of adolescence would be followed by the childlessness of contemporary adulthood. But my father offered to support me and the baby and, to my surprise, seemed to consider this new development of greater importance than my Ph. D.

  If I was going to commit suicide as the result of an abortion, I would have to have the baby, it was decided by Jeremy. And seeing as how we loved each other so much, he asked me to marry him – I agreed to both plans. I was no longer of this world. My mind focused on the huge will to exist of the tiny bunch of cells multiplying inside me every day.

  For fear of people thinking we were only getting married because I was pregnant, I wanted the wedding to be as soon as possible. We were therefore married about six months before my condition became at all noticeable – within three weeks of the diagnosis. While Saskia stifled a tear, Franny silently fretted, and a crowd of Jeremy’s diffident brothers shuffled a crowd of feet, he and I declared some kind of eternal togetherness.

  We drove out of Oxford for our honeymoon: a night in Woodstock. We stayed at an old inn which seemed unnecessarily fancy. The fridge was stuffed with the rudiments of a cocktail party which did not occur during our occupancy. We were summoned into a fairy-tale parlor for supper, everything lavishly encumbered with flowery cloth and crepe paper, as if serious attention had been given to the dampening of acoustics, or the possibility of our slopping the soup. The other hotel guests, already seated and wearing party hats, watched us come in. We all got two crackers each. It was New Year’s Eve.

  The meal was elaborate. I wasn’t hungry. Jeremy finished my profiteroles. We went for a stroll afterwards, and got cold. Neither of us admitted to feeling observed, on show, on honeymoon. We went back to our room and sat on the bed. Jeremy taught me how to play poker with the tiny cards I’d gotten in a cracker. Then we consummated the business of the day. I went to sleep. Jeremy lay awake, contemplating minor faux-pas he’d committed.

  The next morning, we took a walk through the grounds of Blenheim Palace, right past a dead body that wasn’t discovered until a few days later.

  Health and Social Security

  Is your partner away from home at the moment?

  Why is your partner away from home?

  Have you got a partner living with you?

  What is your relationship to your partner?

  What is your marital status?

  If you are not sure what to tick, please explain here:

  Tendresse

  If individual molds are used, place one teaspoon clear jelly in bottom of each. When nearly firm, place on it one tablespoon mayonnaise. When this is firm fill molds with salad mixture. Chill until firm.

  For the first time since my efforts to get hold of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in childhood, I saw in pregnancy a chance to feel Normal. I went to ante-natal clinics and had blood tests and urine analyses, I was asked questions about myself, I was scanned with ultra-sound and saw my child’s back through technological mists. My body could do this incredible thing, just like everybody else.

  I talked with strangers about pregnancy and discovered that I had physical and emotional experiences in common with other women. I exploited the fact that one need only say one is pregnant to get a seat on a tube, or access to a loo. A now queenly vessel, in my own opinion, I was affronted when people didn’t shift themselves in order to accommodate me. My comfort was suddenly of universal importance: my womb gave me rights on this earth.

  I loved going to the Breathing Classes, where birth was seen as emotionally stupendous, and everyday – simultaneously. I couldn’t get enough of it. In fact I enrolled for an extra and rather inferior private class in Pregnancy, in which we did little exercises and were ordered never to stand with our legs straight and knees locked – they should always be a little bent, as if one is about to pounce.

  Baby-care was of course never mentioned. No one had the audacity to suggest the practicalities surrounding pregnancy’s product (not because it would all be easy after that, but where would the advice end – toilet-training, adolescence, UCCA forms?). Everything but our breathing was left to us, or to chance. I never even mastered the breathing. It was pregnancy alone that was the issue, and we were all excited about it (mothers of previous children perhaps less so). It was a pleasure only appropriate to share with other pregnant people, and yet I wanted Jeremy to come to the classes to learn how to be a Labor Partner (he didn’t). I wanted to have a Natural Birth (I didn’t). I wanted the baby to come (she did).

  The woman we’d all cheerfully encircled, each holding a plastic cup of free tea, had told us, ‘We don’t call them “pains” any more, we call them “contractions”.’

  The pain was unbearable. I wanted my Mommy. I was all alone in a strange cruel country with an alien being tearing around inside me (what was I doing having a baby in England anyway?). No one seemed to consider my predicament disturbing or unfortunate. No one even believed I was in labor. Jeremy was sent home – ‘false alarm’ – while I clenched my teeth in a prenatal ward, wrecking the goodnight’s-sleep of six-months’ pregnant women fearing miscarriages or still-births or feet-first deliveries.

  The nurse who gave me an internal examination during a contraction said, ‘Don’t cry – it’ll just tire you out.’ I cried. Another nurse suggested a bath, another told me to walk around. Extremely clean, I toured the fourth floor of the dark hospital in agony, clinging to walls and window-sills. I returned to the nurses who, having agreed that I was in labor, arranged for me to go down to the Labor Ward for an epidural. The lift wasn’t working. The lift-man said, ‘Lucky it’s not an emergency.’ I informed him that it was. Two floors down, I writhed on a bed for ten minutes, and then froze effortfully while an anaesthetist inserted a needle into my spine. I no longer feared paralysis, only pain. When the epidural took effect, I was plunged into an ecstasy of non-pain. At this point Jeremy turned up. It was clear to all present that he was not needed, so he went off to have a sleep in the waiting-room while I dilated.

  My only sense of communion with the outside world during labor came from Hieronymus Bosch, for having imagined obstetrical hell before me. When the baby’s head lodged in my vagina, I assumed rather pessimistically that we would remain like that forever. The midwife urged me to be slow and gentle, but I secretly(?) pushed. Jeremy watched. A huge object – a tiny human body – slowly emerged from mine, and was placed on the belly that had kept it safe. She looked at me with dark, alert eyes. A distinctive face of her own, but dark hair like my mother’s. I loved this person, for such she suddenly seemed to be. I held her to me, I fondled the new little legs and arms, and the back that I already knew. At last I could touch her – at last I could love someone. A ferocious summer storm raged outside the already darkened room, as if the gods (or goddesses) acknowledged the significance of this birth. I said ‘Hello’.

  My intense thirst for cherry juice proved a tall order for Jeremy, who kept turning up with substitutes, and in-laws. Daddy thought the sign on the door of the Maternity Ward – ‘Fathers not allowed after 7.30’ – was meant for him. So he came
during the day-time, repeatedly, to see the baby he alone had encouraged me to have, and asked me how I knew which one was mine. He lay down on my bed and slept.

  Nurses and porters brought cups of tea. I was taught how to change a nappy. The mothers talked, took frequent salt baths, used soft sanitary pads, ate numerous eggs and vegetables, and commiserated with those who’d had Caesarians. The room was full of babies, and I was overwhelmed with love for them all.

  After a week of this Jeremy took me home. In a burst of hormonally inspired energy a few months before, I had found our house after tramping through about fifty others (Irving didn’t want any miniature tenants). It had been the only one Jeremy liked, so with my father’s help we’d bought it. As we approached it now, Jeremy spoke proudly of the achievements of a carpenter he’d hired during my absence: a few of the floor-boards I’d machine-sanded and lacquered while heavily pregnant had been removed and replaced by somewhat better floor-boards which had yet to be sanded and lacquered but would of course look great if we ever got around to it.

  Tricycle …

  We’d become a family. Jeremy at once forbade me to have Lily in bed with us, so I slept a good deal on cushions on the floor of the junk-room to which she’d been banished. It spared me having to completely wake up and get cold in order to feed her during the night. And I didn’t like to part with her: I missed her when she slept.

  Jeremy kept his contact with Lily down to a minimum – he said this kept him refreshed, and made him more careful when he was with her. Sometimes he gave her a bath, allowing me to get refreshed for a few minutes, but he always needed help finding the tub and a towel and the soap and dry clothes and a nappy for afterwards, and some more help when getting her out of the water, since at such times she was very slippery. Yet, when I accused him of behaving like an uncle, he was offended. He was carrying out the most important parental duty, after all: taking photographs.

  Within three weeks of Lily’s birth, I was again considering leaving Jeremy. I mentioned this to him. He said, ‘Nobody’s leaving anybody,’ and I was cowed.

  I became subdued: suddenly released from the former concerns of my life and exposed to unexpected vistas of deep love, I wanted everything to be perfect, and this was hard to arrange.

  I dressed my baby in stripy outfits and fed her almost continually. She had accepted me, and her capacity to tolerate my love was a revelation.

  When Lily became quite spherical, Jeremy began to worry about her weight. I began to worry about her father, as he sat there calculating Lily’s chances of finding a mate in later life, on the basis of plumpness in early infancy.

  Top it with an aigrette of spun sugar. Decorate with preserved cherries glazed in sugar cooked to crack stage.

  I’m breast-feeding Lily. We’re surrounded by nappy-changing apparatus and general domestic chaos. Jeremy comes downstairs. He asks: ‘Is it all right if I take out the things in the washing-machine so I can wash my clothes?’

  I shrug.

  When I get up to the bathroom later, I find my failed heap of towels and baby-clothes lying on the floor beneath the machine which gently sudses Jeremy’s duds.

  A Health Visitor comes. I welcome her warmly, so happy to see a living person who wants to see me and talk about babies. I’m amazed when she tells me that some people slam the door in her face. I ask her every baby question I can think of, just to keep her there as long as possible.

  Jeremy comes downstairs briefly and meets her. Plays the father. Goes back upstairs. Later he asks me what she came for. I act blank.

  Everything was going well for Suzy, Fran thought: Married, With A Baby. Jeremy was not perhaps ideal, but still, Married, With A Baby. Fran managed to get a year off to teach at an American art school – she felt a need for Twinkies, Oreos, Pop-Tarts, hamburgers, bagels, lobster, ice-cream, frozen yoghurt, movies, sun, snow, slang, and friendly people.

  All the men turned out to be married, all the women single. Her students were indifferent to Art History and, after the first week or so, the food was just food. Fran got a lot of work done. She sent Suzy a nice green cushion shaped like a fish, and insisted that Suzy make a $50 bet with her that Fran would not meet an interesting, interested man within the next five years.

  … Thorns …

  It takes a minimum of three months to regain your figure. Yet the Princess of Wales had to make her first public appearance at the Falklands Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s Cathedral, only a month later. In an off-the-peg dress, tightly belted to emphasize her returning – but not quite returned – waistline, she did not look her best.

  When Lily was just beginning to walk, we decided to go to Jeremy’s grandmother’s old place in Cornwall for a long weekend. We were getting ready to depart. Jeremy was in the bathroom for a long time. I ironed his shirts, and a dress for Lily. I fed her. I dressed her and myself, and packed nappies and a changing-mat and baby lotion and Drapolene and nappy liners and extra baby clothes for mishaps during the drive and anything else I could remember. I hoovered the dining-room, washed the stinking dishes, threw out suspect things in the fridge, cleaned the counters, fed Lily, fed the cat, wrote a note for the cat-sitter and located three cans of cat-food, cleaned out the cat-litter, found a bottle of wine to take (I’d need it), put water in the car radiator while holding Lily (not easy), returned to the house, locked all the windows, turned off the heat, collected packets of crisps for Jeremy to eat on the journey and some bananas for Lily, and fed her again.

  At last Jeremy was ready to go. I carried Lily out to the car in her carry-cot and fastened it into the harness while Jeremy positioned his legs and arms in the front seat. He consulted a map briefly and then unfolded his newspaper as I started driving. I informed him of the presence of the crisps.

  He said nothing until Liverpool Street, when he asked if I’d double-locked the front door. We drove back and I got out and checked the front door. It was double-locked. We were off, once again. Half-way to Andover, when Lily stirred in her sleep, Jeremy asked me, ‘Did you bring any toys for Lily?’

  ‘No. Did you?’ I dared to reply.

  We broke the journey at Longleat. Between the Victorian Kitchen and the School-Girl Uniform exhibition, we found a health-food store where we bought some lemon cheese, handmade in Kent. We experienced the Safari boat-ride: a glide across a small brown lake on a pleasure boat notable for the massive dugong it sported as a mast-head. She took us past some lukewarm seals, a hippo, and three thirty-year-old gorillas stranded on an island.

  We paused for a drink at the Longleat arms, where wasps attacked my sandwich and Jeremy’s cigar after he and Lily had gone off to check out the penguin and the guinea pigs in the Pet’s Pagoda. I took the remaining Guinness, the cigar and the pushchair with its load of health-food to the Ladies’. There was a crush of women and children at various stages of relieving themselves. The ones on the outside of the booths stared at me with my Guinness, cigar, and empty pushchair, with a touch of disgust, I thought. I joined Lily and Jeremy for a ride on the toy-town train, First Class. Surrounded by Oxbridge entrants enamoured with the marijuana they’d smoked at lunchtime, we caught a last glimpse of the gorillas on their island.

  We arrived in Mousehole late that night. The self-sacrifices of Jeremy’s late grandmother and the morose wood-carvings of his late grandfather filled the place with guilt and gloom. I transferred Lily from the car to the old cot, carefully preserving her unconscious state, and soon went to bed myself. A bad picture of Christ, heavily crowned with one of the grandfather’s elaborate frames, hung over our bed. I remembered reading Portnoy’s Complaint in that bumpy bed, and afterwards trying to give Jeremy a blow-job. As ever, my lust had been inconvenient.

  Early the next morning, I stomped out of the house, convinced that I didn’t care if I lived or died, I forget why. I headed upwards, and found a coastal footpath. I stumbled and skitted along it in thin shoes, more conscious of the layout of the pebbles underfoot than of the enviable proximity of the invisible sea.
I thought about drowning myself though, and more and more and more, I needed to shit. It was a cloudy day. It would always be cloudy.

  At last I saw a little shed beside the path, hidden behind a lot of foliage. For some reason, I felt it had once been a pigpen. The perfect place for my purposes. Once inside the pen, I decided the hut itself would make an even better loo. I pulled open what was left of the gate and crouched to get into the shelter. A large piece of tarpaulin lying along the ground inside gave me a funny feeling. The realization that its contours bore some relation to a human form made me want to depart rapidly, but then I thought I ought to check if the person were dead. Suddenly the whole expanse of tarpaulin jerked and I took off, scrambling through vines and twigs and thorns to get away from what I assumed to be a runaway murderer. I didn’t feel safe until the path back towards Mousehole had taken several turns, thereby making my flagging but still running body invisible, even if still followable. I returned to the house, feeling how dearly I valued my life.

  … Bicycle

  Dear Ms Schwarz,

  Thank you for your letter of 7 February. I was very sorry that one of our conductors treated you in the way that you describe when you tried to board a bus at Piccadilly. It is true that people are not allowed to bring unfolded pushchairs onto buses, but the conductor should have waited whilst you folded it. I am also sorry to hear that you subsequently had to hold your rather hefty offspring for over twenty minutes before another appropriate bus turned up. Please accept these chocolate-covered Brazil nuts as a token of our sincere regret that these experiences were ever experienced by you.

  My father told me a joke:

  Guy knocks on the door. Old woman answers. Guy says, ‘Hello! I’m collecting money for the Kingston Bagpuize/Stoke Poges Annual Rugby Team Benefit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Um, I’m collecting money for the Kingston Bagpuize/Stoke Poges Annual Rugby Team Benefit!’