“The black dress,” said Isabel, down in the kitchen. “The blouse makes you look like a schoolmarm.”
“This is a trendy blouse,” Tasha said. “I saw a blouse just like this in a magazine. I got it on Queen Street. I don’t think schoolmarms shop on Queen Street.”
Schoolmarm was another of Isabel’s favourite words.
“You go out on a date in that white schoolmarm blouse, and I guarantee you—I guarantee—this man will not be falling all over you at the end of the night. What’s more, the black dress is slimming.”
Tasha started gathering up her things loudly. She was opening cupboard doors and banging them shut, looking for her water bottle, although part of her remembered she had left that upstairs.
“You break the hinges, you’re fixing them,” Isabel pointed out.
“Your fashion sense is outdated,” Tasha said.
“You asked me what I thought. I’m giving you my objective opinion. Who can be honest with you if not your own mother?”
Tasha had no sibling to commiserate with her. What she had was her mother.
LATER, TASHA TOLD Isabel about the date anyway. She told her about how the man—his name was Alan—had a double chin even though he wasn’t fat and how a remnant of Parmesan cheese had taken up residence on his bottom lip and stayed there all through dinner. She knew Isabel would like that. Isabel kept saying, “So it just wouldn’t come off?” and she double-checked different scenarios, as if she couldn’t believe Tasha hadn’t made up this story expressly to please her.
“Didn’t he take a drink? Didn’t it come off then?”
No, it stayed.
“He never used his napkin?”
“He never licked his lips?”
Tasha delivered the best part: that he went to the bathroom, and when he returned, the piece of cheese was still sitting there.
What Tasha didn’t deliver was the news that she went back to his apartment anyway. She had continually been afraid, since she started having sex in university, that she might never find another man inclined to have sex with her. She was terribly undiscriminating, and as a result, somewhat promiscuous. This was one thing her mother did not know. Isabel had approved of the fact that, at the age of sixteen, Tasha had still not kissed a boy. She applauded Tasha’s decision not to get mixed up with boys because participation meant submission, and submission meant the disabling of one’s own mind. How many people respected you—not how many people liked you—was Isabel’s measure of how well you had done in the world. In fact, she thought respect and liking were incompatible. The truth was that the only reason Tasha hadn’t kissed a boy by the age of sixteen was that no boy had tried. She had attempted, on several dates, to look pitiable and open, but no boy had shown willingness. Sex, to her then, was a world of ribaldry and optimism, a place to which she would have paid, if she could, to gain entry. She had envied men the seeming ease with which they could buy prostitutes. Fifteen years later, Tasha was having sex, but her essential position hadn’t changed. She didn’t care about being respected; she cared supremely and only about being liked.
Isabel had presented sex as an initiation into worriedly counting calendar days, a leaky place full of openings and fluids. Tears, discharge, semen? What was the difference? All would combine to haunt you once you experienced that elevated back arch, the spread and manipulation of legs, the digit that couldn’t possibly be a finger poking you in the back in the morning. This was a situation into which no bright girl would willingly put herself. Isabel warned that you never knew what kind of penis you were going to encounter. It might be circumcised or not. It might be alarmingly large or alarmingly small. It might fork. She reported that she had once seen in a French movie a penis that was covered in a large brown birthmark shaped like a beluga whale.
So Tasha didn’t tell her mother that she had been in the man’s bed all night. Isabel asked her what ended up happening with the cheese. Tasha had lost track of it somewhere between the restaurant and the car.
“I wonder if it fell off or if he ate it,” Isabel said.
This man Alan had a voice that made her do unlikely things. It was strong and tenacious, like a heavy oar through choppy waves. It cut through things. “Lift your leg.” “Turn over.” He wanted her to describe in detail how certain things felt. “Be specific,” he ordered. Saying, “It feels good,” wasn’t enough for him. He wanted staggering and explosive. He willed illuminating and haunting. Like a thousand angels are fluttering their wings in my vagina.
“He probably ate it,” Isabel concluded.
Then she asked if he wanted to see Tasha again, and Tasha said that he did.
“There you go,” Isabel said. “I guess he agreed with me that the black dress was slimming.”
ISABEL WANTED HER to lose weight. Did Tasha want this for herself? She couldn’t tell.
She did compare herself unfavourably to other women, a habit that was not as common as people seemed to think. A good number of the women she knew believed they were much prettier than they were. They didn’t suffer from fits of great ill will towards their faces, as she did. They complimented themselves without restraint, and they passed on compliments other people had given them. Her friend Patricia, especially, was enchanted by her own unobjectionable but ordinary looks. She had tested out the word beautiful many times around Tasha, put it in the mouths of numerous strangers and acquaintances. Reports had come in from all across the city, apparently, alleging her resemblance to a number of movie stars. If Patricia didn’t approve of the movie star, she became offended. She pretended to prefer Tasha’s coarse, frizzy hair to her own flat blonde hair. “My hair looks the same all the time,” she cried once when they had sought refuge in a bar during a rainstorm. Tasha was trying to tame her hair in the bathroom. “Your hair has so much body. You can work with the weather to find different styles. It must be so exciting never to know how your hair will look!” Tasha hadn’t spoken to her in several months.
Tasha mostly felt friendly towards her own looks, unless someone was looking at her. When she was alone with herself in front of the mirror, she liked her full, pale lips, her round, milky cheeks. She thought that her mess of curly reddish-brown hair made her look interesting. But she could access that satisfaction only when she was alone. For four years after university, she had half-heartedly tried to become an actress, and she had finally abandoned it when she realized how much she hated the way she looked after every audition. No matter how cheerful and obliging the auditioners seemed, she felt herself growing to beastly proportions before their eyes. She became lumbering and dowdy, and she suspected that her attempts to look more attractive had the opposite outcome. On one of her last auditions, for a minor part in an obscure show at a poor downtown theatre, she had attempted glamour by applying red lipstick and by playing up the wild shrub of her hair. The effect was garish and aging, almost deranged. She knew it. On the bus later, the other passengers gave her a wide berth, especially when she began swearing quietly as she realized she had lost her directions. After that, she stopped trying. In high school, she had been pacified by the idea that she was persecuted and misunderstood. At twenty-eight, she no longer saw the romance in being reviled.
If she had known how, she would have dressed to look deliberately ugly, stylishly ugly, and darkly, splendidly lit with contempt. Because she didn’t, her everyday clothes had an unflattering shapelessness about them, and as Isabel pointed out, they made her look possibly larger than she was. She wasn’t so very large. She was five feet, five inches, and she weighed 152 pounds. The trouble was a lack of division between waist and hips, sturdy farm stock legs. There was insipidness in the bulk of her, a matronly complacence that Isabel felt she encouraged by dressing unwisely. After she quit acting, Tasha had decided to consider herself pleasant-looking, like a good neighbour. Isabel often told her she looked sulky.
“Let’s be objective” had always been Isabel’s rallying cry. Accordingly, she tried to provide an example of objectivity. Isabel was n
ot one of those women who give birth to beautiful babies. Tasha had been an ugly baby, and Isabel said so. For all Tasha’s life, it was important to Isabel that people should understand that, no matter what, she was still objective, that her judgement had not been made common by doting. In the delivery room, when the doctor passed her the baby, Isabel had looked at her from a sensible emotional distance and said to the nurses and to Ron, “Isn’t she ugly?”— because she was, after all. Bruised and red, with wrinkled, simian fingers, Tasha gave no aesthetic pleasure to her gazers, and Isabel wanted everyone to understand that she could recognize that.
She had wanted a boy, but because she was superstitious, she had tried reverse psychology on her body and wished for a girl. When she and Tasha fought, she often expressed regret that she hadn’t had more confidence in her magical abilities. This, she believed, was her single concession to self-delusion: her ability to consider herself improbably possessed of the power to bring key desires, and key fears, into reality through her focus on them. To compensate for this lapse of objectivity, she widely acknowledged her awareness of it—to be led by irrational ideas and subjective opinions was only truly harmful when one did not realize what was happening.
Isabel felt her objectivity was most marvellously put on display when Tasha was a baby. Her favourite story told of one afternoon when Tasha was about a year old. Tasha’s nap dependably lasted three hours, and she had been sleeping for just an hour. Heaps of laundry cluttered the narrow hallway and dirty dishes were piled around the house. It occurred to Isabel that she hadn’t had sex in eight weeks—she knew this because she marked each encounter with a red dot on the calendar. She stood at the calendar with two food-encrusted sleepers in her hand and stared at that expanse of weeks, the absence of red dots on two consecutive pages of the calendar, then promptly dropped the sleepers on a mound of other dirty baby clothes and headed for her room, realizing that she could do for herself what her husband was failing to do.
She left the curtains open as the afternoon light streamed through the wide windows, and she stripped, kicking her shorts joyfully off the tip of her toe. The sun, the open windows, the full nudity—these elements combined to make her feel decadent and young. They renewed her sense of daring, which had suffered badly since Tasha’s birth. She felt that she was doing something wrong, possibly in full view of a neighbour sitting innocently in a window seat looking out at the trees. Even more, she realized that she was not in the mood for hasty satisfaction, that she meant to take her time. She nestled down under the covers and enjoyed the coolness of the sheets. Then, just as she was beginning, Tasha awoke two hours ahead of schedule and started screaming. In the privacy of her mind, Isabel cursed Tasha and cursed her life, then stretched one arm out to the nightstand and turned the radio on and the volume up. She proceeded to enjoy herself for the next twenty minutes until she was filled with benevolent mirth, so that when she finally fetched Tasha, she felt only the most minor twinge of guilt when she saw the baby’s drenched red face and her hands twisted up in her curls.
As a teenager and as an adult, Tasha had begged her mother not to tell this story to her friends, lest they think she shared her mother’s masturbatory gusto, but Isabel loved to be unpredictable. She told the story because it highlighted the things she most enjoyed about herself: her capricious sexuality, her resolve in the face of opposition, her maternal irreverence. She would no more stop telling that story than she would wake up at six o’clock in the morning to bake fresh blueberry muffins. When Tasha had been quite young, Isabel would be full of fiery maternal impulses at one moment, and at the next, cool withdrawal. She might fall into a fever of stifling affection, reading Tasha her favourite fairy tales, “Snow White and Rose Red,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “The Princess and the Pea,” and she often read Tasha the original Grimm’s fairy tales because they had more literary merit (another instance of objectivity triumphing over maternal coddling). Just half an hour after reading fondly to Tasha, she might be preparing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for Tasha’s lunch in a fit of resentment and boredom. She felt it was all part of her return to objectivity.
“Be objective,” Isabel said to Tasha one day when Tasha stopped by after an audition. “Don’t you think you’d like to wear short skirts?”
“Yes, yes,” Tasha would say. “Yes, yes.”
She had perfected her yeses: the string of them, round and simple and same, like a string of pearls, ending at the same place they had begun. Really, she preferred to be soft on herself. It seemed to her that, as in sex, a certain amount of subjectivity could facilitate a life. Certainly, it made things more pleasant.
“AS A YOUNG MAN,” Isabel said, presenting Tasha with an exercise regime, “your father dated a woman named Shelley who loved French fries. Loved them like even you could never imagine. She ate them every day at lunch and dinner. Both meals, if you can believe that. Well, her arteries hardened, of course, as arteries will when you treat them like that, and one day your father let himself into her apartment and she was dead on the floor in front of the television. Dead at twenty-three. Dead on the floor with ketchup on her chin. Is that how you want to end up? If you don’t lose the weight, you’ll attract a chubby chaser like your father and you’ll sit at home eating fried foods until you both have coronaries. Objectively speaking, I think that’s the future you have to look forward to if you don’t get the weight off as soon as possible.”
Isabel never felt more useful than when she was able to exercise someone. She had done it to Ron at the beginning of their courtship. He had been chubby and had liked his women chubby until Isabel came along and exercised him to a fifteen-pound loss. In old photograph albums were picture upon picture of Ron with a mop of curly hair and an agreeable roundness everywhere, especially his stomach, where he tended to rest his arms. The plump, smiling amiability of Ron seemed to contradict Isabel’s report of Ron as a fat unhappy teenager, a chubby chaser whose idea of a perfect date was a shared banana split at an ice cream parlour. It was plain with the turn of one album page: Ron’s transformation from portly good-times guy to strict measurer of portion size and butter intake, Ron the strategic eater, the stamp of Isabel on his life. Isabel looked much the same then as she did now: dark, ironed hair and long, muscular limbs, hawkish but pretty, severe and elegant, with a surprise glint in her eye that signalled her streak of rowdiness, that impulse towards upheaval.
Tasha’s small apartment near Harbord Street was not far from Isabel’s house in the Annex, and Isabel began arriving at Tasha’s at half past six in the morning to rouse her for exercise. She opened Tasha’s curtains and turned on the overhead light. (When Isabel was twenty-one, she had quit smoking cold turkey and she scorned people unable to do the same, people who wallowed in comfort zones and couldn’t get to the business of being honest with themselves. Other than her fondness for the word portly, she had no inclination for euphemisms of any kind.)
The light allowed for no euphemisms anyway. Because she didn’t trust Tasha not to turn out the light and climb back into bed, Isabel stood at the door with her back turned while Tasha got dressed. Tasha moaned and complained, but she allowed it. At half past six, she would have needed more strength not to allow it. Under the thorough glare of the overhead, its brightness made stronger by the dark grey sky of the autumn morning, Tasha was offered a view of her body that she would rather have done without. This pleased Isabel. She felt Tasha would be spurred to action.
The first morning of the new regime, Isabel arrived with Rita. Rita usually worked out by herself at a gym, and Tasha suspected that Rita had been brought along as a motivating force. Overweight for most of her life, Rita had been known to pillage many a fridge until she was thirty-five and started counting all her calories, including quarters of apples and bites of cookies and the half-spoon of sugar in her tea. For ten years, she had exercised vigilantly and kept off the weight. Isabel presented her proudly as a good example. Rita was wearing a red one-piece leotard and bright white running sho
es, and her blonde hair was tied back into a tight bun that accentuated her long, slender nose and her prim mouth. Tasha wore an extra-large grey sweatshirt and black sweatpants.
As they walked to the track, Isabel called out, “Let’s make it a race. Let’s make it a walking race.” When they arrived at the high school, they set up camp in the bleachers. Isabel came well supplied, with bottles of water, which everyone drank, and towels, which were also ostensibly for everyone but were understood to be for Tasha since she was the only one who sweated.
“Where will you work out when the cold weather comes?” Rita asked. “Do you plan to join a gym and really tackle this thing at full force?”
“By winter I won’t need to jog,” Tasha said. “I’ll get off the weight by then.”
She did not really believe this was true. She didn’t see herself as very likely to experience a revolution of body and mind, that coveted leap from portly to svelte. Svelte, not thin, was the word Isabel used to describe Tasha’s desired state. She loved its curt, smooth sound.
Isabel frowned at the track as if trying to see through fog. “That’s not the talk of a convert. In fact, that’s the talk of a quitter. A portly quitter. That’s a pretty bad attitude. Look at Rita. She only weighs 110, and see how keen she is. Isn’t that what you want? You’ve said as much before.”
As they warmed up, Tasha thought that she might already be sweating, and as their jog hit full speed, she tried to delay the drips threatening to stream down her face by holding her arm across her forehead. Isabel wouldn’t have it.
“If you’d wear a leotard like Rita, you’d be much, much cooler!” she said.
The Virgin Spy Page 19