A Selfie as Big as the Ritz
Page 5
Ignore the prickling pain when he says he doesn’t like skinny girls. This is flattery. You are being flattered.
Split the bill. It is the twenty-first century. Now, come on.
Punctuate the evening with an insouciant punch on the arm, and some pally name, like buddy or cowboy; tell him you’ll just get a cab.
Return home. Flip open your laptop. Microwave something to eat. Take up space. Consider why you are even trying to meet someone if you are happiest when left alone.
Treats
It was nearly fifteen years ago Elaine had stood peering toward the harlequin bustle of the fourteenth floor, doped by the static September heat, watching the glass paneling refract and scythe. It was one of those sneaky summer days, one that lounges around a chilled August, making a wild and unpredictable cameo, hoodwinking you into knits, swindling you out of sandals. She’d already taken to whispering “you get to a certain age,” to no one in particular; the tiny bones in her hand creaking like viola, shopping bags cutting into the skin of her wrists; whispering it beneath her breath, the words a smooth tonic.
You get to a certain age.
She was thirty-five.
Joan met her at reception, dressed head-to-toe in black, like some sort of devastating widow; her lips a woozy red, her foundation a flawless white facade. They took the lift, staring silently ahead, slim parallel lines, a vertical Hays Code, counting off the floors.
“Hot, isn’t it?” Elaine ventured.
“Not especially,” Joan replied, buttoning her cardigan with a pointed elegance.
The office was a mess; a scatter of half-opened boxes, the cavalier architecture of a child’s fort; the ceiling fan flickering off and on, the paint drying in patches. But Elaine saw its potential, the order in the olio, feeling the compact thrill of a nice meal or good art. Her thoughts had slowed to a plod in the heat, circling slowly, like the fish in the bowl her husband had gifted her. She grappled for half-formed ideas; wispy responses dispatched into the air, floating away like dandelions huffed into the wind. To her surprise, Joan offered her the job—Personal Assistant—and she rose to her feet, not quite knowing how to accept the offer, announcing, “Shall I just get us a cup of coffee?”; a conspicuous affirmation.
She was Office Manager now, but still retained a few PA duties, picking up dry-cleaning here and there, swirling stevia into coffee. Everyone needed a bit of looking after. Even Joan.
* * *
Elaine liked to look out for people. She was a tall woman, and as a tall woman, she suspected she was made for it; made to protect, to watch over. Everything about her seemed to accommodate her height; her airy, echoing vowels, the swooning lumber with which she moved. But then she hit fifty, felt the uteral twangs, the telling hot flushes and fluctuations of mood, and realized her body wasn’t made for height, for elevation; it was made, and had always been made, for menopause. She gained a little weight; developing a pleasing paunch she’d rub admiringly. She’d sit at the kitchen table breaking off squares of cooking chocolate. She rang her sister to say she wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, and while she was at it, could she stop being such a goddamn tramp her whole life. She had crème-de-menthe with dinner. She listened to Cher. She booked a trip to the Peak District alone.
Her husband wondered what the hell had gotten into her. He’d curse and rumble, rolling his eyes at her elasticated waistbands, ask her why she’d stopped wearing makeup. But it didn’t bother her; things were looking up for old Elaine!
“You want to take an old girl to the cinema?” she asked.
“Not especially,” he replied. “But I will.”
“Old woman,” he said, after a pause. “Old woman.”
* * *
Elaine got in early to leave a plastic pot of maraschino cherries, and a small bottle of vodka, on Joan’s desk. Performing secret good deeds was a guilty pleasure for Elaine; a covert joy, a sort of private joke, really, shared only with herself. She would perform secret good deeds, flush with joy, made glad by the baffled delight they’d bring. She’d slip ten-pound notes into charity buckets. She’d pay for drinks. She’d order slices of cake, have them presented to young couples, watching them across the café. She occasionally imagined secret good deeds were being performed for her; imagining the world fluent in a silent language of kindness. Upon finding an apple on her car bonnet, a Pink Lady, as yellow and red as the sun, beaming a smiling curve of white light, she thought: Who left this for me? What lovely person left me this? before noticing the rest of the car, a punnet of raspberries smeared across the windscreen, an orange squelched into the numberplate, and a note, tucked and fluttering, beneath the wipers.
Can you keep your fucking car out of the loading bay?
But the slow drag of disappointment had grown numb, hard, like a frozen waterfall, it barely registered. There were things to get excited about in this life. Things to thrill for. Like Zumba and sugared almonds. Water aerobics and flavored liqueur. Cher.
At three she popped out to get Joan some lunch. She selected a smoked salmon bagel and an iced tea. At the till, John The Sandwich Guy, literally the name of his business, slipped a French tart into her bag. Elaine smiled. A big screwball smile. As big and sinking as the Titanic.
“Thanks, John,” she said. “You’re a good egg.”
“You’re a good egg!” he replied, chuckling floridly. “An Ananov egg! A Fabergé egg! Eggs Benedict!”
She left giggling, letting the door click softly behind her, and the thought suddenly struck her, as occasionally it did; that she didn’t have a single true friend in all the world.
* * *
She got home to the smell of pizza, the sound of the seaside tinkering from the television. She located the pizza box, a paper white square, balanced on top of the kitchen table; promising slicks of grease and steam marbling the lid. She teased it open, knowing already there would be none left, and made instead for the fridge compiling a plate of leftovers. She ate at the kitchen table, watching the fish circle its bowl, the seventh fish, she thought, Moby Dick the seventh. She set down her fork to sprinkle fish food onto the water, pink and orange flakes, that had the texture and smell of chicken stock. She felt subversive, transgressive; radicalizing the food chain like that. The fish wriggled hurriedly to the waterline, its orange mouth nipping sweetly at the surface, its big black eyes, frozen in a kind of permanent disbelief, a doubtful and necessary trust.
Once, she had wanted kids. And then she wanted a kid. Then she wanted a cat. But now she was fully committed to this; a solitary goldfish, eternally circling the left hand corner of their kitchen table. She looked at the goldfish, swimming and flickering, the little hinges of its jaw, chomping up and down. She loved it, she thought, in the smallest, saddest way. She wanted to fish it out, to feel it in her palm, to stroke its slick, twitching body and feel its satin soft fins.
She finished her food, depositing her plate into the sink, and made her husband a cup of tea. She placed it on the carpet next to his feet, on the flattened pale ring of shag, kissing his head as she went to bed.
“Wait,” he called. “What do you want for your birthday?”
She paused between the top and the bottom, stasis on the stairs, fingering the covered buttons of her jersey.
“Just your health and happiness,” she replied. She thought he’d forgot.
“And a million dollars.”
“How about that trip to the cinema?” he said.
“Well that would be nice,” she replied, thinking she wouldn’t be able to sleep with all this excitement flip-flopping in her heart.
* * *
She worked on her birthday. She always worked on her birthday. There were things to be done!—papers to file, phone calls to make. Plus Joan needed looking after; at eleven she would deliver her morning cappuccino, at one she’d remove the cherry tomatoes from her salad, at four she’d make her lemon and ginger tea, past seven, she needed to be told to go home. There was a catharsis in it. There was a ceremony. It w
as a full-time job. It was literally a full-time job! Elaine made time to treat herself too; treats could save a person, she thought. “Treat yourself every day,” her mother had told her, and she did; taking herself on little walks, an expensive haircut here and there. Once, her husband had treated her, courted her; whisked her off to restaurants, showed her off to his friends. Now her treats were reserved for her birthday; and even then, they didn’t always manifest.
At the end of the day, Joan called her in, asking if she’d shut the door behind her. “Don’t think I forgot,” she said, beckoning Elaine over. She thought Joan looked more pale, more delicate in the milky evening light. She wondered if she was getting enough iron. Joan gestured at a brown parcel, tied with string, propped among the scattered jetsam of admin on her desk. “That’s for you,” she said, and Elaine began unwrapping the parcel, pulling back the folds. “What are you doing?” Joan said. “That needs couriering. Tonight.” Elaine blushed, a hot pink hue, arching her nose and cheekbones. She resealed the package and tucked it beneath her arm. She could drop it off on the way to the pictures.
She removed her coat from the back of her chair, swinging her bag across her shoulder, noticing her phone flashing, a staccato red reminder. Voicemail. Her husband. Delivering a flimsy excuse for canceling their plans. She returned the phone to its cradle, sat back in her chair and thought about her life. It was like the time she went to an art gallery, expecting something grandiose, something moving, something, perhaps, profound; swampy colors, powdery paintings of girls in profile. Instead she found hokey sculptures, marble penises extending from the corners. “Where’s the art?” she’d said. “Is that the art?” Being given salt when you wanted sugar. An olive not a grape. That was it, she thought. That was her life all over.
* * *
She waited in line at the cinema, she’d decided to go alone; though her irritation lingered, like a stubborn base note of leather or sage. She looked at the people queuing around her; couples, mostly, but a few people on their own, also. At the front desk she asked for a ticket for herself and another for the young girl behind her, a fellow solo cinema goer, nervously thumbing the lapel of her coat. She asked that they just give her the ticket; no fuss made, no details given. She left the desk, her own ticket printed and folded in the palm of her hand. She thought about the young girl, thought about how surprised she might be, about how nice it was to be treated.
She thought about all the nice things people had done for her, from historic dates with her husband to the brief moment she saw that apple, perched on her car; how her heart had skipped a beat like it might leap out of her chest. She thought she’d treat herself to some popcorn, and a hot dog too, taking up the space around her, stretching out her arms and legs, and enjoying the film. She thought about how it was her birthday, and not a bad one at that, and her heart did a little leap on its own; you could do that, to your heart, you could be so kind to yourself you could make your own heart leap.
After all, she thought; what goes around comes around.
Taxidermy
At twenty-eight Neala lost her boyfriend. At twenty-nine she lost her job. At thirty she lost her full head of hair.
Her boyfriend left one Sunday afternoon, an otherwise ordinary Sunday; and so the breakup felt like something rather perfunctory, some chore he felt obliged to complete, like taking out the bins or finishing the washing up. “I’m leaving you,” he said, as they sat on separate sofas, reading the papers, coffee cooling in their laps. Neala tore a page from the food and drink supplement, wafting it in his general direction; a coterie of croissants and cake, of biscuits and brioche; the hoodwinking and hairspray; the nulling, gratifying trickery of broadsheet food photography. “Chocolate nut cookies,” she said. “This is what I’m going to bake today.” She put on a coat and went to the shops to buy ingredients; eggs and butter, white chocolate and macadamias, saying nothing else. When she got back he’d started packing, the flat partially autopsied, cardboard boxes and gym bags littering the floor. She ignored them, busying herself in the kitchen, melting butter to a sunshine sizzle, swirling eddies of melted chocolate into the mix. She put them in the oven, set the timer for fifteen minutes, then went to the bathroom to be sick. By the time the cookies were ready, he was leaving. “Aren’t you going to have a cookie?” she said. “Well I suppose I’ll have one,” he replied, taking one, taking the biggest one, eating it, eating the whole thing standing there in front of her, staring at the gradually pooling tears in the corners of her eyes. “Don’t cry,” he said. “One day you will see that this was for the best.”
The job followed. She started turning up late, tired, and one time, drunk. Still drunk from the night before, wearing an outfit that could only be the sartorial judgment of the still inebriated. “We need to talk,” her boss said. “About your performance.”
“I’m sorry,” Neala replied. “But I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck.”
And then it was the hair; when the hair started falling out, it seemed almost inevitable, the big reveal, the punchline, the showstopper. Was she even surprised? More perplexed as to why it hadn’t happened sooner. After one thing ejected itself from you, the rest, she found, followed.
The hair was, in many ways, the greater loss; at least on a day-to-day level. It was her only indulgence; a single source of vanity; buoyant loops twirling giddily around her shoulders, glossy tendrils hanging like fat noodles. For a time, she wore a wig, but couldn’t stand removing it, removing her hair, along with her makeup at night, to slip under the sheets like a big, bald baby. And so she would wrap her head in a silk scarf, sometimes tying it in a knot above her forehead, like a turban, other times fastening it at the nape of her neck, like a low ponytail. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of herself and think she looked almost elegant, but the thought was fleeting, like a fleck of dust that hangs in the air, impossible to catch.
On her mother’s advice, she took up a hobby; taxidermy, enrolling in a course at her local college. Making dead things look nice, there was a poignancy in that, there was a catharsis. She learned to prepare, to stuff, to treat and mount small birds and rodents, wiring their wings into celestial spans, positioning their feet into stances. Her friends would collect roadkill, wrapping them in plastic bags, passing them to her furtively, in artisanal coffee shops. Her freezer was full of them; mice, finches, on a few occasions, hamsters, gifted from her friend Stacie, a primary school teacher tasked with keeping alive the school pet. She loved her new hobby, it made her feel artistic and wild; unburdened with work, she felt like a true bohemian, with her bald head and coarse, chemical calloused fingers. She felt like she had shed layers of herself and gotten to her core.
She felt great.
On her tutor’s suggestion, she started teaching taxidermy, facilitating workshops at a school for marginalized teenagers; their eyes luminescent. “Look!” they would call over to her, giddily displaying their wares; voles in sunglasses, house sparrows in top hats.
She decided to move, wanting somewhere cheaper, somewhere more humble, more manageable, and started renting a room from an elderly couple, on the outskirts of town. It was a small room but it was comfortable; she’d leave the window open at night, feeling the crisp breeze on her naked scalp, the broth-y scent of Terry and Margaret’s cooked chicken carrying from the kitchen. She stopped wearing headscarves. This is me, she thought. And I have nothing to hide.
Her ex-boyfriend called. He wanted to check up on her, to make sure she was doing okay. He felt bad, he said, about how things had ended. “Oh, but I am great,” she said. “You were right. About it being for the best.” But the exchange left her cold, wheedling into her heart and head, and she started thinking it might actually be nice. It might be nice to have somebody again. To have somebody to care about. To have somebody to call. “Would you ever get back together with him?” Stacie asked. “Would I?” she replied, considering it, turning it over, flipping it upside down like a pancake with a hideous underside.
She backed up and drove off, watching him reflected in her wing mirror; he was tall and dark, dapper in a maroon checkered shirt, and pointed, brown leather brogues.
He leaned against his car and lit a cigarette; watching her, in silhouette, disappear down the road. He thought about what pretty eyes she had. What a lovely voice she had. How cool it was that she taught taxidermy. Thinking what a shame, such a damn shame, it was, that she had no hair.
Penguins
She finds herself single, twenty-nine, partially employed and about a half a stone overweight. Roller dexter of eligible friends rattling thin. Thirties breathing down her neck like an inappropriate uncle. She jogs. Looks good in turquoise. Finds herself punctuating gas “better out than in!” patting her stomach like a department store Santa.
She mopes, watches television, develops a taste for medjool dates, shoving handfuls into her mouth, sticking to her gums like toffee. This is who I am, she thinks. Mouth full of brown. Cackling into the night.
She starts making people uncomfortable. The sarcasm, the cynicism, the general aura of malaise, heck even the gas, were alright on somebody engaged, cute even, but on a single woman who it must be said is not getting any younger. Well.