Cake or Death

by Heather Mallick

  But back to the bigger problem.

  When was the last time you saw a truly stunningly beautiful person? Or even a strikingly attractive one? Those women can walk around wearing anything, without makeup, and their smile is like a light bulb for their face. I know. I’ve seen about two of them.

  We humans are not beautiful. Or else we are, so we developed impossible standards for beauty just to make life more spiky and difficult. What the woman journalist’s sad article reveals is that only those born beautiful can be genuinely beautiful. For the rest of us, it is not going to happen. I think we should just aim for hygiene, a scalp not layered with sebum, an ear not sprouting sticky hair. One honest plastic surgeon told the journalist that the first thousand pounds should go on a good haircut and a makeup session. He’s right.

  There’s really nothing that can be done if you aren’t born with that magic mix on your face that equals beauty. Intelligence and wit enhances it. Good bones really do matter. In fact, good bones can do it all. You’ll be interestingly gorgeous at eighty.

  But women have been trained not to want that. They’ve been trained to want artificial beauty. They cannot have it.

  I never wanted it, and I can’t quite understand the reason. Perhaps I knew it was impossible. I do groom myself excessively. It’s work, work, work, talk about your Magdalen Laundries, just washing, exfoliating, moisturizing, facializing, cutting, conditioning, self-tanning, removing hair, filing, ridge-filling, painting/lining/blending and spending countless thousands on a fine wardrobe appropriate to my own odd little body of which I am fond.

  But when, in my early twenties, I saw a plastic surgeon about a deviated septum that was causing me to breathe out of just one nostril, he said, “I’m not supposed to say this to patients, but do you want your nose fixed while I’m in there?” I did not. I have a prominent hooked nose. But I knew even then that I wasn’t going to be beautiful. I was aiming more for interesting, because that might be achievable. It had been achievable thus far.

  He ran the burns unit. I always imagined him caring for third-degree burns patients, crusted and weeping salt tears that worsened the pain, knowing they would be forever hideous if they lived. Did he not rather despise silly people like me with my little breathing problem, as he arrived an hour late after treating a freshly barbecued patient, to pull what looked like 20 metres of bloody gauze out of my left nostril like a clown hauling endless handkerchiefs from his sleeve?

  I had thought he might, but I changed my mind in the recovery room where a young woman had had her breasts enlarged at his hands. “Are you in pain?” he asked her. “Remember, you have to suffer pain for beauty.”

  But you don’t, Doctor. You have to be born with beauty. What’s more, with the kind of beauty that will last: a strong jaw, good cheekbones, interesting eyes that are never vacant of interest or knowledge, a face that radiates strength and kindness.

  The woman writer has snake poison in her face now. Where do women draw the line at what can enter through a needle? Offal? The bane of the pork industry, the pale reddish “exudate” that leaks from mushy pig meat? The sweat of a jogging George Clooney or a huntin’ Dick Cheney, free-flowing and slightly yellowed? I wouldn’t want to kiss a face full of that.

  She says the frown groove between her eyebrows is gone, but despite rumours, she can still frown although the lines are scant. So why struggle to frown? It’s not as though the salesperson who sold you the wrong ink cartridge for your printer is going to notice or care. So she will now have to rely on her eloquence the next time her editor asks her to invite a million people to laugh at her. She won’t be able to do what I do: frown, lift one eyebrow and slant the lip so as to create a full-face sneer that remains dignified yet dismissive to a perfect chisel-end of contempt.

  I remember once sitting in the office of a newspaper editor I normally got along with. I was furious. I bubbled and seethed, I popped and frothed. Eventually he extracted the problem from between my locked teeth; it was not fair that the designer of my page, a really talented woman, was being paid less than someone brought in from outside.

  You’re one of those people who can radiate intense feeling from your face and body without saying a word, he said calmly. It’s rare.

  It’s useful to be able to do that. It gets you ten grand in salary that a merely pretty face wouldn’t get you. The journalist began her article describing her face in the morning. Every part of her face sags. Her mouth is turned down.

  Didn’t anyone tell her the Nancy Mitford secret from Love in a Cold Climate? Before entering a room, say the word “brush.” One will appear before the crowd with a mouth that looks as one would wish.

  There is no need for snaky liquids.

  You are not beautiful. Almost no one is. We start with the race already halfway run and then we age to boot, so get used to it.

  Try to be interesting, and work on the content of your character, not the pallor of your skin. Oh, and wash your hair.

  The Triangle of Death

  Every garden has one

  There’s a corner of my garden where things go to die. No, that’s not right. Plants spread but they don’t actually travel. What I mean is that when I prepare the soil—a huge hole with compost, top-soil and some peat, properly mixed—and place the plant in it, it dies, sometimes within weeks or even days.

  (Don’t worry; this isn’t an essay about gardening.)

  Now I know that plants placed up against a stone wall live in dry grey conditions that cause death. And one side of the death triangle is indeed a stone wall. I amend that soil. I water with care and attention. So it’s not that. Few plants can cope with the speckled shade of that corner. It has a lilac tree hanging over it that also conceals the detritus of the neighbour behind us, as well as the orange plastic sheeting that covers his trucks in all seasons.

  I choose plants that prefer almost total darkness. Still, they turn yellow, limp, brown, sometimes blackish. Even hardy shrubs like weigela, and euonymus for fuckety’s sake, get skint and thin. They turn pale. They fail to thrive, like the children of overly attentive parents.

  How does a pine tree die? Right now, I’ve shaved the trunk of every protruding failed stick. On top there’s a sort of shag bit. I give the thing a bucket of water a day in a hollowed-out circle around its central stick—you can hardly call it a trunk—and after ten years, the thing is, oh, five feet high.

  What survives in that corner is a brushed steel obelisk and a huge round Dutch-blue ceramic pot that is, needless to say, empty. For this corner is not for the living. Were it not for my hatred of tweeness, I’d shove more dead objects in there—a little red wagon, a stuffed meerkat, anything at all that can’t die because it’s already dead.

  You can see the metaphor coming, can’t you. The death triangle, easily visible from my bedroom window, is the corner of the garden on which I lavish the most care and worry. It was only when I gave up on the fern corner that it began to flourish and now the borders are filling in with a lavishness not commensurate with the care I took with them. I don’t believe in harsh pruning, as S. does, and the garden is dotted with a circle of little green sticks that he feels certain are about to explode into foliage. I remain calm. Foliage will not there be. If you’re going to nurture false hopes, why don’t you stick with the non-flowering peony, now aged seven, or the trumpet vine that has never squawked, much less trumpeted. As for the honeysuckle, it’s just a green thing that snakes up the pergola for no purpose that I can see. I have grown to love twining it around itself.

  S. sneers. No flowers, he says. Yes, I say, but it has foliage. All I ask of a plant is a little greeny bit.

  The fact is that life on this planet has been so sour for years now that I have lost my sense of humour. I gaze out my window at my marvellous corner collection of failures and it seems appropriate somehow. For I have stopped trying. I just order blinds online from Ikea, which the website informs me will result in confirmation within twenty-four hours. It doesn’t, of course. When
I call them, I realize that the blinds Ikea has decided to offer me are not the size I ordered, which is moot since they are not available online. But they are, I protest. I clicked on the bit that said “only view items available online.” There were two items. I chose one.

  That’s why we confirm. We’re changing our site and those blinds are not for sale.

  So Ikea failed to call me, to register the correct size and to tell the truth on its website. That’s three failures for one little $12 window blind that I only bought online so I wouldn’t have to go into one of their dreadful stores where things are no longer “out of stock” but “oversold,” which makes it the customer’s fault.

  Ikea is like my Triangle of Death. Nothing grows there, nothing flourishes.

  What you do with Triangles of Death is, I think, pave them. Give up. It’s only this year that I realized, all by my lonesome, that it was possible to give up, that there was no shame in doing so, and that in fact it was often the only sensible course. Drop that thang. Let it go. There comes a point when you cease to care. It is no longer a defeat but an amusing fact one can scarcely bring oneself to dwell on. It recedes startlingly quickly, contradicting every claim one’s parents ever made about stick-to-it-iveness and grim determination. Quit.

  S. and I used to debate this. The plant would be so dead its blackened leaves would emit an actual odour. Of rotting. And he’d be saying, Not dead yet! We used to exchange this role over the years, back and forth.

  And then I had this editor. She was so awful I learned to laugh at her. I didn’t want to complain about her. She was such good copy, you see. And S. said one day, I think you’ll have to leave. You can’t tolerate this treatment.

  Sure I can, I said. She’s giving me great quotes. Not dead yet!

  How did this happen? To this day, I am the great thrower-outer. Few things give me more pleasure than disposal. I’m hoping as you read this that McDonald’s, well, sit ’n’ shits, you can hardly call them restaurants, will be receding from the landscape. To my mind, the worst thing about Happy Meals is not the grotesque McFood but the plastic toys they hand out to greedy, chemically dazed children. We had crates of these things. I used to wait for a garbage day when I was alone at home and quietly turf them. Even the most acquisitive of children can’t keep track of McDonald’s’ crapulent little figures derived from fossil fuel, dye and Chinese fingers. They live in landfill now and will for hundreds of years after I am gone. Not dead yet!

  But they are out of sight.

  Therapists seem so magical. You tell them your problems, desperately hunting for a solution. And the therapist suggests quite calmly that perhaps there isn’t one. Your husband will always be this way. Your mother is too old to change. Your siblings are odd and will become odder. This plant has been dead for years. Put a rock in that spot or an obelisk, something inert.

  There are Chinese women, newly wealthy, who want to be taller and actually undergo surgery to lengthen their legs. You can imagine what that entails: breaking the bones, inserting a whole new metal crankshaft and lying on a bed of pain for months until you can hobble about with no one except other shortish Chinese even noticing. And they’re noticing the limp, not your extra 6 centimetres.

  There’s an actress I adore, Kristin Scott Thomas or Resse Witherspoon or someone. She’s 5 foot 3 inches. And why shouldn’t she be? She’s magnificent. She radiates such life force that no one suggests she shatter her shins and assemble something totteringly taller. That plant is dead. Enjoy the statuary corner. It faces facts, it does.

  Easily the greatest insight I was handed about abstract art was that it was all landscapes. So now I look at the landscape and see the dead zone and the ferny territory and the tangled place in transition and it all works somehow. We don’t give up on enough things. Republicans, neocons, Bushes, most Americans, magical realism, Swedish efficiency, British cleanliness, Philip Roth, arrogant young white males, people and their failed hair—just give up on it, they’re finished, they’re over. Abandon hope.

  I greatly enjoyed my youth when everything, and I mean the totality of what crossed or could possibly eventually cross my path, was of interest to me. But it’s over. Place it in the Triangle of Death, the place where things go to dry up and become stationary. This is as it should be.

  It is a necessary zone. The gnawed bones of the 1973 victims of the Andes crash who were eaten by their starving fellow passengers were buried in one grave, piled with as many rocks as the clean-up crew could muster, and marked with an iron cross. Even then, that grave’s no match for an avalanche or a rock slide or a glacial melt caused by climate change.

  Say goodbye. It is polite and sensible. It is reasonable. It is good.

  An Open Letter to My Writer’s Block

  What did I ever do to you?

  Yes, I stole this idea from that section in McSweeney’s which I never read because I’m too busy not writing this book. I was primed not to like McSweeney’s, but those open letters to people or things that are unlikely to respond are pretty funny. I’ll go read some more of them now.

  Yes, the letters to Louis XIV and to the birds nesting in people’s air conditioners are hilarious while poignant, and this letter isn’t going to be either of those things. But I feel strong emotions coming on and I don’t appear to be able to drink enough cold white wine to even start the original essay, which was supposed to be about the U.S. House of Representatives who disgrace the very idea of white men, or to bindweed which I can’t exterminate in my front garden by hand (back garden, yes, because nobody’s watching me) because it’s too weird.

  It’s not as weird as standing beside the brick exterior of my house and picking off the little five-pointed dried white suckers that used to attach the Virginia creeper that ebbs and flows on the walls as the decades pass. You see, dear Writer’s Block, this is what I’m reduced to doing after hours in my office trying to find the inspiration, the sheer drive, that old sense of humour that used to swing my hips and set my fingers a-typing, anything that would make the river flow. I really used to write like that before I met you, WB. I had the passion. I had that pleasure gland that made me want to win the reader over with that concise yet stippled effect that worked for, well, some people. But you took that away from me.

  What am I going to tell Knopf, WB? I used to laugh at word counts, knowing I’d only surpass them, and tell even untrustworthy editors to hack away. I always had more columns in there somewhere, and always too long. But do you know what you have made me into, WB? You have turned me into a Russell Hokes.

  You know that name. It’s famous in Blocked circles. Also known as Amy Sedaris–Paul Dinello–Stephen Colbert who wrote the novel Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not, Hokes was the fictional writer contracted to write a book about America’s vanishing small towns. Woefully unqualified to write even a letter of complaint to his cable dealer, Russell Hokes hit upon Wigfield, a town about to have its dam demolished (even though it had no river to block and thereby flood the place, thus destroying the town and making the citizens eligible for huge federal grants). The entire book, consisting of transcribed interviews with the town’s three mayors, strippers, and plastic surgeons operating out of trailers next to the Tit Time, was written with 50,000 things in mind.

  They were words, WB. How I laughed when I first read Wigfield, written by a man who lived in terror that he couldn’t come up with the fifty grand needed to earn his advance. Books by Folks Whut Cant Rite. It was funny then, WB.

  It’s not funny now. Something happened. I need another 10,000 to 20,000 words. You took them from me, Writer’s Block. All I think about now is how you managed it. How did you turn someone who thought of writing as finger exercise, someone who typed while her “A Dozen Rosas” or even “Buy-Buy Tokyo” nails (OPI nail polish) were still drying, could end up sitting in front of a computer for six hours and not think of a single thing to say, how did you do this to me, WB? I’m Russell Hokes, stealing articles from the Wigfield Sporadic to up his word
count.

  Look, I’ve had therapy. She was great. But she can’t crack the writer’s block. She doesn’t even say what a cowardly therapist would say: “Only you can understand your writer’s block.” No, she tries. I mean, she tried. I could kill you, WB.

  Is it self-esteem? Do I hate myself? No. I think I’m rather nice, actually. I’m kind to children. The mistreatment of other people drives me to rage and I don’t just seethe, I take action. I’m tidy, I have a nice wardrobe and I wear makeup even on days when I don’t go out. I donate to Amnesty International and subscribe to union-run feminist magazines. I even send money to reptile shelters and I hate snakes. Apparently they’re part of the bug-eating cycle and we need that or something. I vote for the underdog even when I suspect that my income nudges me into the overdog area and not just because I used to be something of an underdog myself (but I was only poor because I was living off my parents) but because it’s right. I watch out for tiny abandoned children in malls just to stay level with the child molesters and, look, basically I am okay.

  Is it that I suspect the manuscript I am due to hand in in twenty-two days, a month past deadline—and I have never missed a deadline in my life, WB—is a mess? No, because my editor is smart and I can fix the mess lickety-split as long as I have 65,000 words to goddamn rearrange. I was raised a girl. I aim to please. That’s not the problem.

  Does it have something to do with having written a political column for eighteen months, worse, a syndicated column that runs around the world (I picture it in jogging gear, all sweaty and disgusting) in many languages? I have to censor myself in this column because no wisecrack survives seven languages, yes. I worry about offending my U.S. editor with my constant spew over George W. Bush and his fractured mind. I can’t say what I really think about the Dutch turning racist because maybe I’m published there. There are some countries they mention on my royalty statement that I can’t identify. They may be Baltic.