The Fat Woman's Joke

by Fay Weldon Weldon

  “Did he like Alan?”

  “He liked him at first. When Alan refused to keep me or make a home or do anything but paint. I think he admired him for being so strong. I liked Alan most then, too, except my mother went on and on so about him using up all my money, and saying that he was behaving like a woman, not a man, that I began to wonder if she wasn’t right. Then Peter was born, anyway, and everything changed. And Father became ill with his heart, because of the rheumatic fever, and then he died, so I don’t know what he was thinking, in the end. I had a feeling he turned against Alan when Alan went respectable, and that’s another reason I felt allowed, that time, to leave. This time I have no one’s judgment but my own to go by. I used to be terrified I would end up like my mother. Many women do. They turn into their mothers far more easily than sons turn into their fathers.”

  “You take these little holidays from your husband, all the same, the way your mother did from your father. Perhaps if you were seven stone lighter you would be more like her than you imagine.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—”

  “I am not as young as all that. I am thirty. That’s a terrible age to be. There are wrinkles beginning to show around my eyes. And as for breast-feeding, it fills me with horror, the very thought of it. I don’t want to be like a cow, with a baby draining away my strength. That’s another reason I don’t have a baby. I’ve never dared to tell anyone that before. Don’t let Gerry know.”

  “You can always give them bottles.”

  “But that’s not right. That’s failure. Babies should be breast-fed. They force you to, in hospitals.”

  “That is only the latest revenge of the doctors. A more subtle torment than just any old birth pains, which have too short a duration for their liking. You are right to fear maternity wards. All the resentments against the fecund female grow rampant there, like weeds, strangling common sense and kindness. Any hospital is a place of myths and legends, and a maternity one is worst of all. When Peter was born, bottles were considered more hygienic than dugs and breast-feeding a damaging habit; but then to compensate one was obliged to underfeed one’s child, to keep it perpetually thin and pale and crying, if it was not too weak to cry. You must never pick your child up and cuddle it, was what they said then, that’s spoiling, and interrupts its routine. But what they meant was, you shall not enjoy this baby you have had the presumption to have. We shall never, ever, let you.”

  “Peter’s not thin and weak now. He’s a well-built boy. He takes after his father.”

  “I took no notice of them. I fed him when I wanted and when he wanted. We were happy. Then my father died. I have been in mourning ever since. He seemed more like Peter’s father to me than Alan ever did.”

  “You still have not told me why you left Alan. The apples are cooked. Will you try them?”

  “Thank you. With sugar and cream. I begin to feel a little better. I hope Peter is all right. But why should he not be? He has his compensations, he does not need me. He is more like Alan than he thinks.”

  “I think you should be worrying about your husband.”

  “My husband is an attractive man. There will always be women to look after him. He will use them while it suits his purpose, then he will damage them and send them away.”

  “He is not like that at all. You wrong him.”

  “You seem very possessive of my husband, Phyllis, all of a sudden, and to know a great deal about him. Do you fancy him?”

  “What a thing to say.”

  “Because you’re welcome.”

  Phyllis blushed crimson and spilled the sugar.

  Esther watched her sweeping up the elusive grains with pleasure.

  “Your trousers are too tight,” Esther said, “you’re getting fat. Gerry won’t like it. He likes his wives to be small and his women to be fat, like me.”

  When Phyllis straightened up, there was a look of depression on her face.

  “You are awful,” she said, “I just don’t know what to think or what to feel any more. There aren’t any rules left.”

  “Calm down, and I’ll go on with this story, which you so rashly wanted to hear. Peter came to visit me a couple of days ago. I was more pleased to see him than I was to see my mother.”

  14

  “OH, MUM,” SAID PETER, “I wish you would come home. It is very upsetting. Just because I leave home, doesn’t mean you have to, too. It is very embarrassing explaining to people, and it’s not very nice in this room, is it? Everything is usually so tidy at home, how can you bear to live like this? It makes me think you must be depressed. It is very worrying for me—I shouldn’t be hindered with worries at my age. It is bad enough being captain of a cricket team, and having duties and responsibilities toward Stephanie, without having to feel responsible for a miserable mother, too. That should be Father’s business. He’s taken to cooking. Recipe books everywhere.

  “‘Hi there, Mrs. Wells, I presume,’ I said to him the other day, when I was home for the weekend, ‘slaving away over a hot stove again, I see,’ but he didn’t think it was funny. He doesn’t think anything is funny, nowadays. Oh Mum, come home. It is all so dreary like this.”

  “But you have your own home now, Peter. Choose to use your former home as a weekend hotel, by all means, but kindly do not insist on cheerful chambermaids. Or indeed on resident ones. This is where I live. You live somewhere else. Your father lives in yet another place. How you and your father choose to behave is now entirely your affair. Thank God I am not around to witness it.”

  “Mother, you begrudge me any sex life. It isn’t fair.”

  “I most certainly do not. Have it off with all and sundry, male, female, bald-headed as you will. The pair of you.”

  “Dad behaved very foolishly, I know, but don’t take it out on me. She is a female fatale, Mother. He couldn’t help it. There are these women about, you know. Insatiable and irresistible. It was just bad luck he happened to encounter her when both your spirits were so low. You should never have stopped eating, either of you. In middle-age, food is far less troublesome than sex. There is something terrible, tragic, monumental, in thinking of Father with that beautiful, beautiful girl—”

  “Have you seen her, then? Where? How?”

  “She called to visit me. To apologize for breaking up my home. I was trying to get on with my homework and waiting for Stephanie to come back from work when there was this knock at the door, and there she was. This vision. So unhappy, so distressed. I think there is a kind of kinship between us. She understands so much. She has so very, very much feeling. Women with feeling are very rare, Mother. But it is all over between them now. She has grown out of the stage of liking older men. She prefers her own generation. That is maturity.”

  “I see. What does Stephanie think about this?”

  “One of the nice things about Stephanie is that she doesn’t really think at all—after school it is such a relief, all this non-thinking. As a schoolboy one has to use one’s brain all day; even playing cricket demands great mental concentration. I really do need you at home to talk to, you know. I am fairly grown up for my age, but every now and then I become confused. If girls didn’t like me I can see I would lead a narrower life, but it would be more a peaceful one, wouldn’t it, and not so alarming. I mean, see how it confused Dad’s life, simply fancying a girl as one could fancy a dish of strawberries and cream. Because that is how it was with Dad and her—he saw her as a symbol of delight, not a person. It was most distressing for her. Mother, somebody has to look after her. She is not good at looking after herself.”

  “She’s older than you. You’re the one who needs looking after.”

  “You are perfectly right,” he was triumphant. “That is exactly what I have been trying to say. Oh, Mother, come home.”

  “There he was, you see,” said Esther to Phyllis, “playing with fire and frightened of getting burned. All set for an affair with suburban Susan, coming to me to be protected from himself, hoping that my outrage
would be strong enough to turn his back from the incestuous paths to which he had set his face. Going to bed with Daddy’s mistress; it’s far too near for comfort to going to bed with Daddy’s wife. I used to fancy my mother’s rich lover, I remember, being too scared to actually fancy my Dad. But now I refuse to be outraged. I had given him the eighteen years a mother has to give a son. Now he was on his own. I wanted to save my outrage for myself. Not waste it on a child who had youth on his side to save him from the direr penalties of obsessive fornication. I was older than him, and needed my outrage if I was to escape my husband.”

  “Perhaps your mother was right, Esther. Please try and think rationally about things. When you talk like this I get upset. Nothing is as I thought it was; you make my whole world rock. You should see a doctor. A real one, I mean, not like mine. Things have gone too far with you. You can have your frontal lobes cut, do you know, and then you never worry about a thing. You’re just happy all the time. All the time.”

  “Poor Phyllis. Is that next for you? If cutting your breasts open and stuffing them doesn’t work, try cutting open the brain? You don’t half pursue happiness to extremes. You’ll corner it somewhere, won’t you? In a little dark corner of your coffin, finally, you’ll corner happiness.”

  “I assure you I am very happy. It is you I worry about, Esther. You shouldn’t think of that lonely boy Peter in those terms, much less reject his pleas for help. He wanted to be saved from Susan Pierce. It was your duty as a mother to save him. You should have packed and gone home there and then.”

  “Well, I didn’t. If Alan doesn’t ask me to return I never will. And even if he does, I won’t. I have my pride. Did I tell you Susan Pierce has just been to see me? She brought me a flower-pot.”

  “What an odd thing to do.”

  “It was a present Alan had given her. She said she couldn’t make things grow, but she thought I could, and she couldn’t bear to leave that lily to wither up and die. It was just an excuse to see me. It was as if she wanted the entire family. Not content with the father, and then the son, I really think she would have welcomed a Lesbian relationship with me.”

  “Oh really, Esther! She’s no dyke. She’s just sex mad.”

  “You mean I have been talking to you all this time and you still see human relationships in terms of sex? It had nothing to do with sex. The sexual urge is concerned with the reproduction of the species. She just wanted to wriggle back, somehow, into a family situation. That she chose a genital method of doing so was merely coincidental. She could have done it more simply by doing our charring for us. It was a great misfortune that Alan had his family pictures on his desk. It was me she had been reaching out for all the time. I realized it when she handed me that flowerpot full of dried-up earth. It was Mummy’s and Daddy’s bed she wanted to be in. She wanted to know what happened there. She wanted to be included in the mysteries. A pity that the mysteries, when at last discovered, should prove so trivial. A matter of plungings and positions. And yet the very dark that shrouds all sexual intercourse, the dark of spirit and emotion, and the black cloak of love that makes one decent, leads one always to believe that there is something yet to be discovered. It is very aggravating, and responsible for a good deal of domestic confusion.”

  “What are you talking about? You are a pagan. You are not decent. You are obscene!”

  “Now what have I said to upset you so? I am telling you what you were curious about. About why Susan came to see me.”

  “I felt so nervous about coming here,” said Susan to Esther. “But I thought I ought to try and explain things, and make them better. I wouldn’t wish you to have hard feelings about me, or about your husband. He is an artist, you see. And artists are not like other people. The ordinary rules of morality do not apply to them.”

  “Their immorality appears to me to be as dull and sordid as any ordinary person’s. Alan is not, in fact, an artist, he is an advertising man, by profession, and by paucity of soul. That is to say he is talented, and intelligent, plausible and attractive, trivial to the bottom of his heart, and pathetic in his aspirations to a different way of life. That, however, is as may be. I may take a more jaundiced view of my husband, by virtue of my years with him, those chaste and temperate years, than you do by virtue of the couple of weeks, and the varied and various shaggings which no doubt you have shared with him.”

  “You are not,” said Susan, sitting down, “what I expected at all. For a wife you are very vocal.”

  “I am sure it is most admirable of you, to come visiting to explain things to me. People ought to do it more often. What a coming and going there would be, week in, week out. What a knocking on doors, day and night, up and down the land. But there’d never be a woman at home when the knock came. She’d be out on the town herself—explaining.

  “You are taking advantage of me. I have been very upset by your husband.”

  “Well, don’t come complaining to me.”

  “And I am afraid he is unhappy, and it is my fault. And you are unhappy, and it is my fault. And Peter is unhappy because you two aren’t together. It is very upsetting for him. Please, Mrs. Wells, go home to your husband. We have all behaved so badly, I know. But there is only one person who can put things right, and that is you, by going home.”

  “I would like to make something clear. My leaving Alan is nothing to do with you. You are welcome to him, I promise you. Anyone is. And probably are. When Alan embarked on his manic association with you, he was in a sad psychic state. You were a symptom, not a cause. A chicken-pox spot, if you like, but not the virus. You itched him, so he scratched. Now the spots have subsided, but the virus, I am afraid, remains. It is the unhappiness and discontent attendant on having too much leisure, too much choice, too little pain. And none of it is anything to do with you. Kindly stop indulging yourself, and go away.”

  “You are making things very difficult for me. It is not easy, I know, for a non-artist like yourself, to understand and forgive. It must all seem strange to you, if you cannot comprehend the suddenness, the awfulness, of love when it strikes. The helplessness which overcomes one, the misery when it all goes wrong, when one offers so much and is turned away.”

  Her face had changed. She looked younger and uglier. She cried. Esther began to feel more kindly toward her. “Mrs. Wells, he didn’t want me at all. He wanted you.”

  “He didn’t have to want either of us, did he? He might have wanted the moon, or the Pope, or the Queen. I am afraid the intensity of your rivalry with me prevented you from noticing anything of the kind. This knowledge might, perhaps, make you feel better. It is not that I have vanquished you. It is that we have both been wounded in a battle which we should never have embarked upon. What is it that you are carrying in your hand and watering, so sweetly, with your tears?”

  “A present.”

  “A pot of earth. For me? How delightful.”

  “Don’t laugh at me. It is not a pot of earth. It is a pot plant. There is a lily down there. Alan gave it to me.”

  “How sweet!” Esther peered at it elaborately. “Alan’s and your baby, as it were. It’s not very advanced for its age, though, is it?”

  “Stop being so nasty. You were being nice before. I wish we could be friends. There is so much I don’t know about things, and the more that happens to me the less I know. I only want to love someone and be loved back. Nothing I do goes right. It’s like the lily; it won’t grow for me. That’s why I brought it to you. I thought you could make it grow. Something has to come out of all this. It must. If only a bloody pot plant.”

  “Peter quite fancies you.”

  A look of horror appeared on Susan’s face.

  “You know about that? I don’t know how it happened, I really don’t.”

  “He wants to look after you.”

  “Does he really? You don’t mind?”

  “Stop behaving like a little girl. You go all to pieces in the face of your elders, don’t you? You become infantile at once. If I was you I should go
and throw myself on Peter’s mercy and ask him to explain everything. He has a very neat version of the world, my son, far placider and tidier than mine. You can sop up his little-boy helplessness when the dregs of it trickle out of his ears. And he can sop up your little-girlishness when it flows and pours out of your every orifice. Play at mummies and daddies and daughters and sons and in every conceivable combination you can imagine, but just leave me in peace.”

  “I had no idea you were so clever. I wish my mother had been like you.”

  Esther heaved herself out of her chair and turned Susan out, first snatching the flower-pot. She watered it tenderly with lukewarm water from a milk bottle and sang it a little lullaby. But the earth didn’t stir.

  15

  “THAT TERRIBLE WOMAN,” said Susan, ungratefully, to Brenda. “She more or less pushed me into bed with her son. Any decent woman would have been shocked and scandalized at the very idea. She is very, very odd. No wonder Alan looked elsewhere.”

  “Perhaps,” said Brenda, “she wanted to be revenged on Alan. I mean to say, what an uncomfortable position for him. Supposing you and Peter got married. You having a former lover for a father-in-law. He a mistress for a daughter-in-law, and everyone knowing.”

  “It would all be rather cozy,” said Susan. “And companionable. I think I should like that. I’ll walk down with you to the pub, and while you lie in wait for that silent man I’ll go and call on Peter. It’s Wednesday, and crop-haired Stephanie has a boyfriend she visits on Wednesdays.”

  16

  “WHAT ARE THOSE BRUISES on your neck?” Phyllis asked Esther. Esther, having told Phyllis about Susan’s visit, had been violently sick into the lavatory. She returned to lie upon her bed and opened her collar so that the old yellowing bruises on her neck could be seen.

  “It’s where Alan tried to strangle me.”