by Lucy Ellmann
I turned on the radio, tuning into my favorite program. There was a woman on it who hadn’t had sex with her husband for fifteen years. He was impotent. The two doctors in the studio decided this was all her fault, for having wanted sex in the first place. Undaunted, the woman mentioned that every six weeks or so, she still wants it. The doctors cautioned her, saying that it was the Relationship, not Sex, that was important, especially as one gets older. What do they know?
I turned on the TV after this to watch an old film featuring Norma Shearer and What’s-his-name. I couldn’t face going out to phone Mrs Kennedy at this point. People were falling in love all over the place. I cried a bit when What’s-his-name’s bride gets shot on the altar by the jilted lover. In the middle of all this, my phone rang. It was the External Engineer. Giving me no explanation for the weeks of telephonic torment, he told me my phone was now working, and thus wrecked my plans of calling Mrs Kennedy to complain.
You have substituted one source of frustration for another, Sir, or Madam, and ought to be ashamed.
Yours (since you have a monopoly),
Susan Schwarz
Artificial Flavors
Goldberg’s a private in the army. His mother dies, and his superior officers don’t know how to break the news to him. His sergeant volunteers to do it. He calls the whole platoon out, makes them all stand to attention, and then says,
‘All those with mothers still living, step forward!’
They all step forward.
‘Not so fast, Goldberg!’
My father was the great joke-teller, and now he was having trouble talking and moving his head. I went to see his doctor. I’d assumed he wasn’t taking my father’s ailments seriously, when in fact they were by now affecting his ability to drive.
The doctor told me my father was dying.
Goldstein’s two partners are appalled when Goldstein kicks the bucket during the course of the working day. After some discussion, the more tactful of the two goes to tell Goldstein’s wife. Knocks on the door. Woman answers.
‘Widow Goldstein?’
‘I’m Mrs Goldstein. I’m not a widow!’
‘Wanna bet?’
When his doctor finally called my father into the surgery to tell him, Daddy was furious with me for having known and done nothing. I hadn’t even looked the disease up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I now realized. He did.
He telephoned me when he’d had the diagnosis confirmed by a neurologist. I didn’t know what to say.
‘When I told Fran, she cried,’ he said reproachfully.
‘We’ll no more meet, no more see one another;
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter;
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine: thou art a boil,
A plague-sore, an embossed carbuncle,
In my corrupted blood.’
I sit in the car, in the quiet square, facing the building in question. I get out and lock the door. I walk into the foyer and ask where to go. Through some swinging doors I find Franny and Daddy, the one solicitous, the other merely glum. Franny has on a violently violet sweater and snazzy black-and-white shoes. Daddy’s wearing his neck-brace. I sit down. We wait.
We’re ushered in. We all sit in a row in front of the doctor. He confirms that Daddy is dying. Daddy has a series of queries he’s prepared for this moment. He has the neurologist write down his answers in the spaces provided. Franny and I ask a few questions too. We all troop out. We have had the Second Opinion.
What will a neurologist do once the
disease is identified?
Try to manage the progress of the disease.
We go to Bloom’s afterwards to eat kosher food. Slabs of salt beef and two long pale pickles (indivisible between three) await us. I park the car much too far away. Using up what muscles Daddy’s got left, we start walking up Brick Lane. Franny remembers something she’s left in my car and goes back for it. Daddy keeps turning around to look for her, all the way to Bloom’s: she’d always had a tendency to get lost.
Wind
What’s the Matter With the American Stomach?
Evidently something is the matter. We are known the world over as a nation of dyspeptics. ‘Uncle Sam’ as pictured, has a lean and hungry look. The United States has half as many doctors as all the rest of the world.
The average American is anemic. He has only four-fifths as much blood as he should have – only four-fifths alive. Millions are less than half alive.
As my father wasted away, I ate. Once I knew he was dying, I ate and ate for two weeks solid, until I felt as solid as he’d once seemed. I ate so much my throat felt bruised and my body ached. My shoulders, lower back, the skin across my ribs, were all sore in different ways. I could feel the fat on my shins wiggle as I walked. I didn’t want to talk to anyone in case they sensed how pathetic I was, even without clear indications like breadcrumbs on my cheeks.
I didn’t want to talk about the situation. Holding my tender breasts and stomach in my arms like a bundle of babies, I made a world for myself which only I inhabited. I dreaded the telephone, I wanted to hibernate. In my private world I ate all day and stayed up late at night merely in order to eat some more. I had no use for friends – my life centered around the fridge, the bread-box and a few of the kitchen cupboards.
I dreaded having a bath, I did not want to think about my mortal frame. I didn’t touch myself more than I could help. And I had no time within all this indigestible inner turmoil to consider my father much at all. I told myself I was such a mess I could not concern myself with anyone. I wanted to owe no one anything. I kept thinking, with some sadness, but also some satisfaction, nobody knows what I’m up to.
The newspaper headlines lining the length of the long carriage spoke of the Big Chill, just as one summer they’d dwelt on the ‘Phew!’ hot spells. But it was already over: the snow was slushy. Unbelievable anyway that there could ever be snow in Slough.
All I wanted was to get off that train, buy some bread, get into the loo in our house in Oxford, and eat it. I didn’t want love or sex or beauty – the thing I wanted to get my hands on was bread. Wearing the shapeless coat I’d recently bought to hide inside, I hobbled down the streets of Oxford like an old woman, bent by my shameful quest, and the slipperiness of my boots. Oxford was cold and dark, as per usual.
I passed trees knocked down by the recent winds. They looked like beached whales in the gloom. Big and strong, but with the life knocked out of them. The death of an old man, not so old even. The dignity of a lifetime, crumbling into the air. Like a cat faltering in its steps from old age: so alone. My father is still trying to do what everyone expects to be able to do: move, talk, eat, breathe. Not so fast, Goldberg.
The shop I’d pinned my hopes on was still open. They only had brown pitta bread. But even this made my heart race in anticipation.
I buy him pills. Daddy goes upstairs and chokes and calls me. I don’t hear him. So he comes downstairs, choking and half-naked, determined not to die up there alone. I suggest calling a doctor: he can hardly breathe. In between coughs he manages to blame the pills I got him.
I get the emergency number and the doctor’s wife and then the doctor. Daddy calls me back. I hang up quickly and go to him. He tells me to call a doctor. I call the doctor again.
I comfort my father as he chokes. I say, ‘Poor Daddy, poor Daddy.’ I think of Lily’s indignation when a pain won’t go away – a rationality we have lost. I’m moved to touch him, I do care about this poor guy who’s my father but seems all alone. I pat his shoulder. He pushes me away. I’m no help to him, we’re both thinking.
‘Hold your hand in benediction over me.’
Guy goes to the psychiatrist, jerking and twisting all over.
Patient: Doctor, Doctor! You gotta help me!
Doctor: Well, what seems to be the trouble?
Patient (hands frantically flicking at himself): Oh, Doctor, I feel, I feel like, I feel li
ke I got all these LITTLE GREEN MEN RUNNING ALL OVER ME!
Doctor (recoiling with alarm): Well, don’t brush ’em off on ME!
He might die at any time, I thought after the choking incident. I want to be here all the time, to be with him. On second thought, I don’t want to be here at all. I leave him to his dying and drive back to London. He calls me up almost as soon as I get home: having heard that the roads were icy, he’s been worrying about me.
My Vegetable Love
Jumping may stop if Beans are kept cold or dark for one month.
Jeremy began to take care of Lily most of the weekends when I went to Oxford. I couldn’t deal with her, as well as my father, there. One day, when I was trying to arrange this, I got a wrong number.
‘Oh, is this 249 6254?’ I asked, surprised.
‘No, it’s 249 6259,’ said quite a friendly, low, male voice.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Close!’
‘Well, I know this is the Age of Communication, but try telling that to British Telecom.’
‘The phones are lousy in this country. Yeah, I think I’ll blame it on British Telecom. Sorry to have disturbed you.’
‘Not at all.’
We said goodbye and hung up. Then I thought about it. Then I geared myself up – a process that took about half an hour. Then I called 249 6259 again. I was too late. I got the answering machine of a shop I’d seen once in Camden Passage, that sold only old newspapers. I left a message: ‘Hello, I called a minute ago, and you sounded a lot more interesting than the person I was trying to get. I was wondering if you’d like to meet for a drink. You can phone me back on 249 8062. Uh, my name’s Suzy.’
When sea-turtles meet up, they fuck for
hours, shell clacking against shell.
He held my neck in his hand. He held me as if I were a motionless, feather-ruffled bird hunched chilly in his palm. I lowered my head onto his shoulder, as his fingers moved up between my legs. He seemed to know my stillness, to know it sprang from passion, not passivity – ‘Love, and be silent.’
I wanted to change the nature of the world, turn anatomy inside out in order to consume him completely.
‘Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Happily, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.’
I held octopus tentacles to his mouth and he ate them. I offered him the oily blossom of an artichoke, and he put pepper on my strawberries.
The house was full of azaleas and freesias.
DON’T find a place in your garden for any plant because it has a neat habit of growth, or because it bears a showy flower.
‘We fit together like two wandering continents,’ he told me, fitting us together.
Some men are so delicate (intentionally so). He was strong and tough and patient and passionate. He was also married, but having been married myself, I approved of adultery. My friends dubbed him Mr Wednesday, though his visits were much less predictable than that. He whipped me up into a constant state of lust and longing, punctuated (with commas, and exclamation points) by his presence. He was good at Erotic Torment: I retained my solitude, and was often too drunk to pick up the phone when he did manage to take his dog for a walk. But my fears of rejection fed my passion.
We never mentioned love. What use have birds and bears for words? He brought me champagne, a selection of old newspapers, and adornments in cerulean blue. I made him tiny naked female figures, suffering from surfeits of passion, out of fibrous clay that didn’t need to be fired, that could be passed on to him without delay.
Looking at the spread I’ve laid out on the table, I begin to feel wary of the competition. I go back to the bathroom and dab on more perfume and inspect my face for spots with increasing dismay.
But later I’m reassured by the thought of the bite-size filo-pastry pouches filled with camembert and cranberries, the spinach and salmon mousse, the tomato I found almost ready to burst that now reclines, in slices, on a bed of fresh marjoram lapped by raspberry vinegar, the apple tarts with slices spread open like legs and the champagne, all left hardly touched as we fuck, bare and forked, on the floor.
He cups my cunt in his hand like a bread-roll, nudges the halves apart, and fills me.
Hull, pod, shell, bone, fillet.
He wanted the whole of me: there was some romance in junk after all. In orgies of counselling, so thorough it felt almost like I’d talked to a woman, he talked me until I was all talked out, and I’d sink contentedly to the only remaining task in life, to wrap myself around him until he left no room in me for thought.
THE STERNUM WAS APPROXIMATED WITH FOUR INTERRUPTED MERSILENE SUTURES. THE REMAINDER OF THE CLOSURE WAS DONE IN THE USUAL FASHION. THE SKIN WAS CLOSED WITH A 5-O SUBCUTICULAR CATGUT AND A CONTINUOUS PARALLEL MATTRESS DERMALON SUTURE. THE CHILD TOLERATED THE PROCEDURE WELL AND LEFT THE OPERATING ROOM IN GOOD CONDITION. SPONGE COUNT WAS REPORTED CORRECT.
Not so Fast
Dear Frances and Susan,
We are all working on finding a solution to present worries, and your whole-hearted participation is also needed if we are to win. The stakes are undoubtedly against us.
When you were both little girls your mother and father looked after you. Now your dad needs just such devotion from you.
We’re all counting on you.
Uncle Samuel
Saskia is always telling me about all the things she’s done, all the New York doctors she’s talked to in order to try to find a cure for Daddy’s incurable illness, and she’s always badgering me to do the same. Everybody wants me here to absolve their conscience – and they go about it by plaguing mine. They can’t understand why I’ve not moved to Oxford so I can have a ringside seat for this death, day in and day out. Though not even Saskia can take that. Instead, she hires housekeepers so that she can go to London in search of miracle drugs.
It’s the old Cézanne’s-wife syndrome: ‘What was she doing farting off to Paris to buy clothes when she could have been posing for the great man all the time?’ What was she supposed to do, sit around in rags in Aix, waiting to be painted by a guy who couldn’t bear to touch her? Her every move is seen only in terms of how it affected Cézanne’s life, when in fact it was the legitimate result of her acting out her own. People are so quick to decide who to throw overboard.
In The Archers on the other hand, no one leaves the ‘m’ off ‘whom’. Everyone treats each other with respect and understanding, as if they’ve all been listening on secret wirelesses to the last couple of episodes so as not to tread unwittingly on someone’s sore spot. No one’s bad day is allowed to last too long: the script writers can’t hack it, the fact that human behavior is on the whole base, crass, tragic.
What my father’s friends fail to notice is that he himself is loath to see me sacrifice my life for his death. This therefore has to be done with some delicacy. A warm puddle of guilt spreads before us all.
I watch as my father becomes a tiny but perceptible bit worse every week. We struggle to communicate with him – the things he wants to say seem more complicated than they used to be, as if he weren’t willing to compromise on what are after all his last utterances. His speech is laced with puns and other flourishes, now out of place like flowers in gravel. Sometimes, after several attempts to understand him, my only reward is the realization that what he’s just said is, ‘Call this living?’ or some such quip.
Comforting sturdy keys of this typewriter that used to be his.
Two guys working in a factory, constantly pushing heavy metal beams around, above their heads.
First guy says, ‘Hey, Jakey, where ya been lately anyway?’
Jakey: ‘Took a vacation.’
Pause to thrust beams around.
‘Yeah, Jakey? Where’d ya go?’
‘Africa.’
‘Africa! Well, what’d ya do there?’
They hoist some beams.
‘Wen
t on a safari.’
‘Wow, how was it?’
‘Got eaten by a lion.’
‘What do you mean? Why, here you are. You’re alive!’
‘Call this living?’
Saskia complains to me of Daddy’s independence – he won’t let her baby him.
‘My mother was like that too,’ I say, just to get her to shut up for the three seconds I desperately need her to shut up for.
… formed and assembled, to create a flower of astonishing beauty and realism. From the simplicity of the pristine Rosa Alba to the luxuriant fullness of the Mme Pierre Oger … these lovely sculptures provide a diversity – and a unity – a dazzling display of beauty and colour that will bloom forever in your home.
I try to avoid going to Oxford when Franny is there. She bustles around and then leaves, disappearing completely – once her phone was even cut off and John turned up in Oxford to meet her when she was in Wivenhoe. We tried to entertain him. I found him rather handsome.
Franny astonishes me when we do meet up. There’s a weird cheeriness about her – she sings as she prepares Daddy’s supper. While she spoke to him of far-fetched cures one day, I noticed his attention was diverted by the glob of salad dip on the end of her celery stalk, which was in danger of being catapulted on to his trousers when she made her next point.
She fills this dying household with her junk, her multifarious purchases, her personal effects, links with the outside world which I envy her. There are disposable razors, blusher, dental floss, tampax and moisturizing cream left in the bathroom. By her bed I find perfume, a half-drunk glass of wine, an Afro comb, and Vidal Sassoon Hair Mousse. She even uses a kind of paper-clip I’ve seen all my life but never realized was a paper-clip. She’s part of the world. I blow my nose on a bit of toilet paper and borrow the comb.
Shell Clacking Against Shell
I take him, in the Saab he can no longer drive, to his acupuncture appointment. I come back for him early, and the acupuncturist invites me in to the tropically hot room where my father lies, his flagging flesh pierced with a few needles. I’m appalled by Daddy’s Ethiopian-style emaciation. His body before me wavers between being familiar, and lost already.