Moon Over Minneapolis

by Fay Weldon

  ‘Don’t look like burned to me, ma’am,’ said Antoinette, and though Honey Marvin peered and peered she couldn’t see a speck of burned pastry, and one pumpkin pie looks much like another, whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor.

  ‘That was a very good pumpkin pie,’ said Honey Marvin at ten o’clock that evening, when she came in to lock the fridge and Antoinette was on her hands and knees cleaning the kitchen floor. (You can only clean a floor properly on your hands and knees, as Honey Marvin’s friends declared.)

  ‘You didn’t put egg yolk in it, did you? Because, as you know, egg yolk can kill my husband.’

  ‘Why, ma’am, here’s the proof no egg yolk went into that pumpkin pie,’ said Antoinette, showing Honey Marvin a bowl with six of Juanita’s egg yolks in it—Texas had turned up his nose at the whites, as she knew he would, but there was no harm trying. So she’d put them down the waste.

  ‘Antoinette,’ said Honey Marvin, ‘I know you’re loyal and true to us, and here’s a little Thanksgiving gift to prove it,’ and gave her a little silver salt-cellar one of her friends had upset her by not accepting because these days the rich can’t eat salt, it’s so full of sodium; the friend had actually stamped and left in a fury, crying ‘Honey Marvin, you’re nothing but a murdering bitch’ but then Thanksgiving is like that sometimes, everyone knows.

  ‘Thank you kindly, ma’am,’ said fat Antoinette, podgy Antoinette, scarred Antoinette, good Antoinette, who salted her food and ate real pumpkin pie and didn’t care one bit whether Honey Marvin’s husband lived or died, and would you? And she went home to her family at last, barefoot, because her feet hurt, and they’d all given up waiting and gone to sleep. And she was glad. She put her head on her pillow and slept too.

  The moral of this Thanksgiving story is not that the poor are happier than the rich. They’re not. But that the only point in being rich, as the palate of the wealthy gets jaded, lies in not being poor. The rich do what they can to make the poor mind being poor to keep the differential going. And the poor do mind, and they consent to being poor less and less, and there are more and more of them about. Had you noticed? And they begin to know that the pumpkin pies of the poor taste as good if not better than the pumpkin pies of the rich; so if you can’t make your own, do without, and let the hired help stay home for a change. Or you’ll find cholesterol in your pie and a knife in your back, and a good thing too.

  See the drop of blood upon the page? That’s mine. That’s just the beginning.

  Sharon Loves Darren

  ‘SHARON,’ SAID NURSE EMILY Fitt, patiently, ‘now, Sharon, if you don’t swallow this tube, you will die.’

  ‘Want to die,’ said Sharon. And then she called her lover’s name aloud, so that the sound bounced back from pale-green walls, up and down the casualty cubicles, softened by stacked cardboard boxes (labelled ‘Cardiac Infibulation’, or ‘Tracheotomy’, or ‘Paediatric Artery’ or whatever) but sharpened by racks of stain- less steel, upon which were stacked instruments for the cutting and closing of human flesh. ‘Darren! Oh Darren, save me!’

  ‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, who wore a badge claiming ‘a legend in her time’ on her tidy uniform, and whose face was neat and intelligent and composed—she was all of twenty-four—‘Look Sharon, just swallow this tube or you’ll go into liver failure and die. Do you understand?’ But all Sharon did was shriek for Darren again and then clamp her mouth shut against the intrusive poking pale-yellow tube. Sharon was seventeen. She wore laddered black tights and a bra. They’d stripped her of everything else. She’d drunk a bottle of sherry, a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine during the course of the evening, and taken twenty-five paracetamol tablets, a whole bottleful, for love of Darren, who had taken Debbie to the cinema instead of her.

  Darren was nineteen, and sitting out in the waiting room, reading the sports page of last Saturday’s Sun. I’d noticed him earlier when I took my turn to wait for attention. He had acne and cropped pale-reddish hair. What he thought it was impossible to tell. He did not stir. If Sharon’s voice had reached him he was deaf to it. Or perhaps it just bored him. He’d heard it too often.

  ‘Sharon,’ said Nurse Fitt, ‘we want to help you but if you don’t make an effort yourself we can’t.’

  I lay in the next cubicle, in no urgent medical need, and listened. The curtains between us were open. Sharon went into fits of bitter weeping.

  ‘Oh Darren, Darren, my heart is breaking.’ I believed her. I’d cried like that myself, in my time.

  Sister Radice, all bosom and big dark eyes, fetched me a cup of tea. I was privileged. I had responded to medical treatment and could now be sent home. I was waiting to be fetched. ‘These girls,’ she murmured, ‘they don’t know how dangerous paracetamol is. They take it by the handful. We do our best but sometimes they don’t make it. I blame the drug companies.’

  ‘Oh, Darren, Darren,’ cried Sharon, lovesick Sharon, and tears came to my own eyes.

  ‘I want to go to the loo,’ yelled Sharon, suddenly, furiously, like the spoilt and naughty child she was.

  ‘Not yet, not yet,’ said she who was a legend in her own time, ‘it can wait. Just swallow the tube.’

  ‘It can’t, wait,’ said her patient nastily. ‘What am I supposed to do, wet my pants?’

  ‘Better than dying,’ said Nurse Emily, but Sharon didn’t agree.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ Sharon begged, ‘leave me to die.’

  ‘Look,’ said Nurse Emily, who was little more than a child herself, but at least was sensible, ‘if you die your parents will go mad.’

  ‘They’re mad already,’ said Sharon, cunningly. ‘They hate Darren anyway.’

  ‘Not surprised,’ muttered Emily Fitt. ‘So do I.’

  Sharon’s sick soaked into a newspaper on the floor. They’d made her vomit when the ambulance came in; given her an emetic before she’d had time to protest. The young doctor (Dr Angus Love, according to his lapel badge, but how could one be sure? Perhaps they made their names up?) had poked through the mess, fish and chips swirling round in sherry, whisky and wine, but only found four paracetamol tablets, half-disintegrated, which meant there were another twenty-one left inside her. She’d have to be stomach-pumped, but a conscious patient, when it comes to it, is more difficult than one in a coma. He’d left the job to Emily. He was busy. Everyone was.

  ‘I say,’ said Sharon, plaintively, between shrieks and sobs. ‘I feel rather sick.’

  ‘I expect you do,’ said Emily Fitt. ‘Sick to death. Swallow the tube!’

  ‘You want to hurt me.’

  ‘We don’t want to hurt you. Why should we want to hurt you?’

  ‘Because you don’t like me,’ said Sharon, acutely. ‘Because I love Darren! Darren, save me! Let me see Darren. Please, let me see Darren.’

  ‘No,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and the department filled again with the sound of Sharon’s noisy distress, and Sharon’s furious little laddered and holed foot banged against the partition wall and saline drips everywhere trembled and faltered, and heart monitors, over-sensitive, gave perfectly absurd readings.

  ‘I love Darren. I want to die for Darren!’ cried Sharon.

  ‘Just shut up, will you,’ said Nurse Emily. ‘If you think I haven’t better things to do than look after you, you’re mistaken. There are children in casualty. You’re scaring them to death carrying on like this. You don’t want to frighten little children, do you?’

  ‘I love Darren,’ shrieked Sharon. ‘Fetch me Darren, you bitch!’

  ‘Swallow the tube.’

  ‘No. Wont.’

  ‘Die then,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, and she went off to attend to a heart attack (or so he feared) and a young woman with an abscess on her Fallopian tube (or so she said, and she was certainly grim and white with pain and would swallow anything at all, even poison, to put a stop to it). I was formally discharged.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Nurse Emily Fitt, cheerfully, escorting me to the door.

  ‘Look,�
� I said, ‘tell her if she dies Debbie will get Darren.’

  ‘That’s an idea,’ said Nurse Emily, but I didn’t think she was going to go back and say any such thing. I had a feeling that if young Dr Love didn’t return quite promptly from the broken back (I’d heard them. Mother of three, drunk, backwards out of a first-floor window. The doctor, slowly and clearly: ‘Mrs Able, do you understand? Try to listen. You are in hospital. You fell out of a window and have broken your back. We are admitting you’) to look in on Sharon, she would simply go into liver failure and die, and Nurse Emily would be busy elsewhere, and Sister Radice would break the news to Darren, who would look up from the sports page and be quite astonished, if so strong an emotion were available to him, which I rather doubted, at what could happen if you took Debbie to the cinema one Sunday night, instead of Sharon.

  STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS

  Who Goes Where?

  A CHRISTMAS TALE

  ‘NO!’ SAID ADRIENNE. YOU know how some children are when they’re four?

  ‘Put on your nice new coat, please?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Look, a spoonful of this lovely apple mousse?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Adrienne, darling, please.’

  ‘No!’

  Little arms stiff, little mouth clamped shut against the world, exercising the power of the much-loved over the one who loves and is thus humiliated. Except that Adrienne was thirty-four, not four, and still doing it, as only the really beautiful can, but nearer to running out of people who loved her than she knew. Or perhaps she didn’t care.

  She’d always been like that. Sometimes people forgot, and asked,

  ‘Adrienne, can I borrow your pink shoes to go to the ball?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Adrienne, could you give me a job to help me out?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Adrienne, your grandma’s ill, will you visit her?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Adrienne, will you please stop sleeping with Cynthia’s husband?’

  ‘No!’

  What Adrienne had—beautiful clothes—Adrienne didn’t share. What Adrienne had won—worldly success—Adrienne took care to keep. What Adrienne didn’t want—like grandmothers—Adrienne abandoned. What Adrienne wanted, like Cynthia’s husband Tyro, she got. Though quite what Adrienne saw in Tyro, whom Cynthia until then had thought was rather ordinary, indeed if anything rather incompetent and messy, Cynthia couldn’t at first work out. Perhaps Cynthia’s opinion of Tyro, in those early days, and her impatience with him, were why Tyro became obsessed with Adrienne, why Adrienne could just pluck him, twist him off the family branch, and there he was, in her hand, ripe and ready, smartened up and polished and writing music for major feature films, no longer just a struggling session hack. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone and once Tyro had gone Cynthia and the three children wept and wept.

  ‘No!’ said Adrienne when, five years after her marriage to Tyro, Cynthia asked if Adrienne could take the children, Alec aged ten, Alison aged eight, and Edward aged six, for Christmas Day. They wanted to have their Christmas presents at home and go to their father for Christmas dinner. And she, Cynthia, had been asked out somewhere special…

  ‘No,’ said Adrienne.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Tyro, mildly. He had a gentle face and wrinkled clothes, no matter how new and expensive they were. But he was a genius, everyone said so these days, so it didn’t matter as much as it otherwise would. Adrienne liked everything perfect. The whole apartment was white, white, white, and frequently photographed in smart magazines. Adrienne was an interior designer: very expensive, in every way.

  ‘No; because I love you,’ said Adrienne. ‘And Christmas Day is so very special for us.’ (It was, too. It was seven Christmas Eves ago that Cynthia had told Tyro she was pregnant again and Tyro, in panic and despair, had spent the next day with Adrienne and never come home; so Christmas was, as it were, the anniversary of their getting together, the dawn of their great love.)

  ‘But if the children want to come—’

  ‘No! Tyro, we have a child of our own now.’

  And so they did. Tommy: three months old. The last six months had, for Adrienne, been perfectly dreadful, though Tommy had rather liked them. Adrienne had had no idea, or she’d never have got pregnant. She was just coming out of the nightmare.

  ‘That doesn’t mean the other three don’t exist.’ Tyro was being unusually obstinate. ‘We could manage. I’d cook.’

  ‘No,’ said Adrienne. ‘It’s impossible. Bloody Nanny’s got the weekend off.’ It was their joke—Bloody Nanny like Bloody Mary—or rather Adrienne’s joke. Neither Tyro nor Nanny thought it was all that funny.

  When Tyro was out of the room, Adrienne picked up the phone and called Cynthia and said, ‘Just you leave us alone. Stop whining and pestering. Live your own life, look after your own kids. They ought to be with you at Christmas anyway.’ And she was going to go on about how Tyro was not going to pay Cynthia’s telephone bill any more, it was time Cynthia tried standing on her own two feet, not sponging all the time, and her voice was beginning to rise and crack as it did when she was cross and sounding rather less like Fergie’s and rather more like Janet Street-Porter’s than she cared for it to be, when Tyro came back into the room, so she said instead, in her best lightly modulated voice, ‘Cynthia, the children are all at school now, full time. Surely it’s time you got a job? Then you could be more independent. You can’t wallow in the past for ever. Tell you what, Tyro could take them all out for lunch on New Year’s Day. I think he’s free then. Wouldn’t that be sort of symbolic and lovely?’ Then, putting down the phone, she said to Tyro, ‘How did you ever come to marry that woman? Were you depressed, or something?’

  ‘We’re giving a party New Year’s Eve,’ said Tyro. ‘I won’t be up to much on New Year’s Day.’

  ‘The children will hardly notice,’ said Adrienne. ‘Certainly not those three. They’ll be too busy spreading the walls with tomato sauce. You’d think for the money we pay her your first wife would manage to bring them up halfway decently. What does she do all day?’

  Adrienne was astonishingly lovely. Her lips were pink and clearly defined, her teeth little and white and even: so people tended to watch her mouth while she spoke, rather than listening to the words which came out. Perhaps that was part of her trouble: she’d never learned. And she was clever, and competent, and Tommy, even when Bloody Nanny took her bloody days off, lay quiet and good and beaming, perfectly tucked in, designer mobiles swinging about his crib just so. Perhaps Adrienne was just lucky, or perhaps if you deal with babies firmly and decisively that’s how they are—who knows?

  But now Adrienne saw Tyro standing there looking at her rather oddly, so she moved towards him and put her arms around him to put out of his head any wrong thoughts he might have and lured him into the bedroom, and pushed back the white-satin-layered-over-cream-suede coverlet on to the white carpet—and let him make love to her but afterwards he still said, ‘All the same, if Cynthia wants Christmas Day off, and has somewhere to go—’

  ‘No!’ said Adrienne.

  ‘Because if Cynthia found someone, and was happy, why then—’

  ‘No!’ said Adrienne, who found herself wanting Cynthia not to be happy even more than she wanted herself to be happy. ‘No, no, no!’

  Tommy would be properly brought up and would play in the nursery, as designed by Adrienne Charles—she was trying to patent it but it’s oddly hard to patent nurseries—where there was everything a child could want and every surface could be wiped clean and there was a vacuum vent which you switched on overnight gently to extract dust and with the dust, germs, and there was a filter system which removed lead from the city air—and the fact of the matter was Adrienne did not want Tommy to think Alec, Alison and Edward were anything to do with him at all, just because they shared a father. Cynthia’s children were plain, noisy and clingy: Alec whined, Alison sniffed, and Edward threw things.

  S
ometimes she’d join them for a meal when Tyro took them out but only on Tyro’s insistence. Edward would spend the time under the table, not at it, and nobody did anything to stop it and once when she tried to get up she found he’d tied the laces of her little cream eelskin shoes together. Everyone had laughed. She didn’t let them come to the apartment. They’d hate it, just as much as she’d hate having them. At home they had Arsenal paper on their bedroom wall, or so Tyro said. How come Tyro knew? Adrienne wondered. He didn’t surely visit Cynthia? No, of course not. The children must have told him: Arsenal wallpaper! She, Adrienne, felt and behaved as if her life started the day she met Tyro: why couldn’t he do the same for her? Men and women were equal now: Cynthia had had the children more or less against Tyro’s wishes, which made them hers, not Tyro’s. Cynthia hadn’t understood how Tyro needed space in which to work, to develop his talent. How could he do that, with three little children crawling round his feet? Cynthia had been selfish: had let herself go: got fat: couldn’t help Tyro in his profession: had no friends in meaningful places: what had Cynthia expected? All their friends agreed. Most fathers just faded away after a divorce: she’d assumed Tyro would do the same. It wasn’t even as if the children were charming or attractive. They were horrid.

  So that was that. No! Tyro could take Cynthia’s children out on New Year’s Day when Adrienne would be busy cleaning up after the party. Bloody Nanny was taking Tommy home with her over the holiday weekend, which was a help. It was an important party.

  Six days before Christmas Tyro went and brought home a Christmas tree, a real one, of a hopeless shape, and insisted on putting it up with Woolworth’s decorations placed just anywhere, anyhow, instead of the elegant silver one she’d planned for the party: and the expensive crystal balls she’d just been and bought were altogether wasted. What was the point? She avoided making love with him for five full nights; she assumed he’d make the connection. And in the meantime she made lists and organized; all kinds of important and influential people were coming along. The green Christmas tree continued to look ludicrous in its setting, but she reckoned she’d persuade Tyro to take it down on Boxing Day. No one kept to the Twelfth Night ritual any more. They couldn’t or the whole country would be awash with dead pine needles.