Bed Rest

by Sarah Bilston

  10 A.M.

  There will be an unexpected guest at my party. I’ve just had another phone call from Alison.

  “Q darling, I promised I’d come to help you out while you’re on bed rest, and help you out I shall,” she said, with an infuriating air of self-conscious self-sacrifice. “Of course, the children will miss me. Gregory will miss me. And, yes, I will miss a reception for ‘women sculptors of life’ hosted by the Arts Council. But My Sister Comes First. I’ve just bought a ticket to New York, Q; I land Friday lunchtime.”

  She was somewhat dismayed to hear about the party and hinted that I might like to cancel it, but she backed down when I suggested some of the things she might like to do to herself if she thought I was going to cancel my first social engagement in four and a half weeks. “No really, Q, how delightful,” she said at last, through gritted teeth. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting—ah—Mike and Laura and—er—Bryony, is it? and all your other New York chums. It’ll be delightful. And I’m so pleased to hear you’re still socializing,” she added with unmistakeable chagrin in her voice. “I thought you’d be bored and lonely all by yourself, in a foreign country. Obviously not.”

  I decided not to give Alison the lonesomeness spiel and instead let her think that New York society more or less revolves around me. I rattled on shamelessly about Fay and Julia the camerawoman from L.A. to give the impression that I’m living an episode of Sex and the City, although this was probably a mistake, since my sister will be able to see on Friday for herself what a sad set of saps our friends really are. I painted Fay—a short workaholic with flat feet and round shoulders—as the sort of luscious lipsticked lesbian straight women swoon over, and (getting increasingly carried away) morphed Brianna (poor, feckless Brianna) into a Homeric Siren. It’ll be just my luck if Alison was actually listening to me this time.

  I can’t quite believe she’s coming. Why is she coming? Is it so she can tell herself (and everyone else) what a sweet generous soul she is, the sort of sister who’ll drop everything and travel halfway round the world to minister to an afflicted sibling? Or is it so she can remind me that she’s a much better mother? I virtually burped my children out, Q, I can’t imagine why you’re having so much trouble. Perhaps you’re not built for child rearing—hahahahahahaha….

  32

  My first memory of Alison is from the day my mother brought her home from the hospital. I was only two and a half, but I still recall staring in disbelief at her squished face, dark eyes, and ugly purple puffy hands. My mother looked at me over Alison’s impossibly tiny body and told me I wasn’t the baby anymore. From now on, she said, my job was to help look after the new baby (“I can’t expect much from your father, dear”). I concluded, rightly, that my childhood was over. It hadn’t lasted long.

  My therapist asked me to bring in a photograph of Alison for one of our sessions. I chose a snapshot of us on a family holiday to Brittany in about 1979. We’re standing on the beach, our arms around each other’s waists, dressed in matching purple bathing suits with gold rings at the collarbone. Jeanie is slumped on the ground at our feet, distractedly playing with a pair of pink flip-flops. My mother is just out of the frame, although you can see her long shadow stretching across the sand in the late-afternoon sunshine. My father was taking the photograph. There’s a fuzziness in the top right corner because his index finger is over the lens.

  The therapist asked me why I chose this particular photograph. I told him it was because Alison looked good in the suit and I looked terrible, and that I was angry at my mother for making us buy the same one (she couldn’t be bothered to wait for me to try on a second suit, although she pretended she was giving me a character-building lesson. “Really, I’m surprised you’re so concerned about how you look. Women have been defined by their looks for generations, dear. Nowadays we must strive to be defined by our brains, our achievements in the workplace.” Fine, I said, I’ll strive for that in about fifteen years, but now can I have that red suit with the ra-ra skirt and the white polka dots?).

  In fact, that was only part of the truth. I didn’t feel like pointing out to the therapist—it was his job to notice, surely—that Alison was pinching the flesh at my waist very hard with her right thumb and forefinger. “Come on you two,” my father had said to us, “get a bit closer, can’t you? Let’s have a nice photo of the sisters.” Alison and I glanced at each other with covert expressions of dislike, but we shuffled closer to each other obediently (we generally did what my father asked, I don’t know why; perhaps we felt sorry for him). I felt Alison’s arm snaking around my waist, and I slipped mine around hers in response—only then did I feel her deliberately take a fold of my skin just above my hip bone and squeeze. It really hurt. The second after the photograph was taken I thumped her, and my parents stopped my pocket money for two weeks as punishment. Which meant that I didn’t have enough to buy the stripy Breton sweater I coveted, or the set of rainbow-colored pastels in a wooden box. So you see, the consequences of that pinch were far-reaching indeed.

  I keep the photo on the bookcase, and so far the only person to detect Alison’s malevolence was Tom. (There’s a reason I married him.) He picked it up one day, stared at it with a frown deepening on his face, and then said, “She’s got you good, hasn’t she? Little bitch!” The therapist only glanced at the photograph and said something nonsensical about how cute I looked in the hated suit. I stopped visiting him after that.

  33

  I remember reading, in a class on feminist theory at university, a book about why women seem so much more involved with other women than men are with other men. Children are raised by their mothers in most Western societies, the author said, and mothers tend to experience themselves as like their daughters and unlike their sons. So boys grow up thinking of themselves as different, separate, autonomous, whereas girls think of themselves as like, connected, reliant. This early child-parent dynamic colors our relationships with friends, lovers, and family members throughout our lives.

  My mother didn’t think I was like her. Frankly, I wish she had. For most of my childhood she made it perfectly clear I was not like her. At your age, dear, she’d say, I was a trend setter, not a trend follower. The girls at school looked up to me, heck, they wanted to be me. What’s wrong with you?

  Alison, meanwhile, was elected school president in the biggest landslide in the history of our school, and within a few terms of arriving at Oxford she was a widely recognized “it” girl. My mother must be the only parent in history who took a sneaking delight in her daughter’s cigarette addiction. She thought Alison looked tremendously cool in her black turtlenecks, the smoke of a glowing Camel curling up through her long eyelashes into her tousled dirty-blond hair. I heard them once having a conversation about magic mushrooms. As long as you quit before your midtwenties, or before you have children, I don’t see the harm dear, my mother said, seriously. Youth is so fleeting. Grab the opportunities while they’re there. Really, I wish I had.

  Alison might have been number two daughter, but she made up the ground pretty fast. She’s already got most of the boxes on the Modern Woman’s List of Things to Do Before Hitting Thirty checked, and she’s only just turned twenty-six.

  34

  Friday 7 P.M.

  My party starts in an hour. The caterers are in the sitting room at this very moment. And my sister is in the spare room snoozing. She arrived an hour ago looking irritatingly cool and together. When I step off a plane I have a lank center parting, bloodshot eyes, and peeling dry skin. Alison is the kind of person who packs herself an elegant pouch with cosmetics to delight a magpie’s eye: an azure water spritz bottle, an ice-pink pot of lip salve flavored with champagne rhubarb, an iridescent tube of mango-and-guava moisturizing cream.

  Tom—who came home early from work to help oversee the party preparations, miracle of miracles—showed her into the sitting room. She kissed my cheek, kicked off her Italian leather flat-heeled shoes, and curled up cross-legged on the floor by my
sofa. How was your flight? I asked, with the air of one who didn’t give a damn.

  Alison glanced at my sour expression out of the corner of her eye, paused, then turned on her most charming smile. “Q, lovely, be nice to me,” she said, rubbing my hands with expensively manicured fingers. “I’m really happy to be here, and I’m so pleased to see you looking so well. Let’s make a real effort to get on, okay?”

  Which is typical of her. She always has to be the good guy.

  “I don’t know quite what you mean,” I countered. “I only asked how your flight was.”

  Advantage Q.

  Alison laughed her delicate laugh, the new one she’s evolved since marrying the Honorable Gregory Farquhar and becoming a Faine Laidy. “Ah, Q—always the same, and that’s why we love her,” she said, with an incredibly irritating air of indulgent condescension. “Your sister’s come halfway round the world to see you, and you’re still in the glums, huh? Come on, sweetie, hopefully a few gifties will help pull you out of your funk. Here’s a little something from Gregory and me, and this is from Mummy.” She handed me two packages, one covered with stiff, boldly designed wrapping paper, the other with a wrinkled brown paper bag. Inside the first I found a Kate Spade makeup bag, inside the second a wheat-germ and lavender pillow. No prizes for guessing who sent what.

  “Oh—Kate Spade,” I said, airily. “Yes, this is one of her prettier designs, isn’t it? She’s a touch 1990s now, don’t you think? But this little bag is charming, really charming,” I added, brimming with insincere sincerity. I was determined to show her that I can afford my own designer accessories, thank you very much.

  Alison blinked rapidly, two or three times. “Don’t keep it if you don’t want it,” she said, mortification evident in the catch at the back of her throat (a hit! A palpable hit!). “I wanted to buy you something pretty, Q, and I know how frustrating it is when people either give you clothes that look like tents, or things you won’t be able to wear for at least a year. I thought a little makeup bag was a good compromise.” She paused and sniffed pathetically.

  I looked at her pretty, flushed, down-turned face and felt like an absolute heel. I know when I’m being outplayed. “It was a very nice idea,” I said reluctantly, conceding defeat. “Much better than this ridiculous wheat-germ pillow. What does Mummy think I am, a pregnant gerbil or something?” I said, playing (not very successfully, I’ll admit) for laughs. Alison’s face cleared immediately and she giggled dutifully, secure in her victory. “That’s better, Q,” she said, giving my knee a condescending pat. “That’s much better, dear.” I smiled tightly at her and moved my knee three millimeters to the left.

  Now she’s sleeping next door. And I’m wondering how I’m going to get through this evening, let alone the next week. I’m exhausted. Spending time with Alison drains me. As for parties—I hate throwing parties. Why did I do this? I hate feeling responsible for other people’s pleasure.

  35

  Saturday 5 P.M.

  The party was quite an event. My failures were numerous and varied. The first three that come to mind, in no particular order, are as follows:

  Paola was completely uninterested in Fay. Instead, she took a real shine to Alison; they bonded fiercely over Art. At about ten o’clock, after Alison and Paola had been holed up for nearly two hours discussing the finalists for last year’s Turner prize, I forced Tom to go and get Fay and introduce her into the conversation. Paola and Fay talked for all of seven minutes, at which point Fay realized that she was de trop and excused herself. She sat in the corner looking pathetic and lonely for a quarter of an hour, then left without saying good-bye. Paola and Alison, meanwhile, parted with promises of eternal friendship.

  Brianna and Alexis didn’t actually meet, because Brianna left the party five minutes before he walked in. She walked out because she obviously couldn’t handle being in the same room as Mark. As soon as he entered with Lara on his arm, she turned an extraordinary grayish green, hid in the bathroom for ten minutes, then bolted, leaving the unmistakeable stench of vomit behind her. I felt as if I’d just murdered a litter of orphaned kittens.

  Alison said over breakfast, with a sparkle in her eye that jetlag could not extinguish, “My goodness, Q, I got the impression from talking to you that your friends were terribly—well—degenerate, if not absolutely debauched. But really, they’re a very sober group, aren’t they? Half of them didn’t even drink! Dear me, when I think of how much alcohol Gregory’s friends get through at our little dinner parties, and how naughty they become…”

  She was right, I’m afraid. My party was desperately staid. I am no grand Victorian hostess, no Ottoline Morrell. I cannot claim to have united extravagant patrons and poets half-wild with hunger. Great Things were not said, opium was conspicuously absent, and I seriously doubt whether anyone left my halls last night and committed suicide. (I don’t know if any of these things happened at Ottoline Morrell’s parties, but I doubt she’d have been so famous if her guests had chomped their way stolidly through a few bags of pretzels and compared notes on their amicus briefs.)

  And finally, more disastrous than any of the above, Tom and I had a huge row in the early hours of this morning. At midnight I heaved myself off the sofa and vanished into the bedroom, rubbing my eyes and pleading my belly; two hours later I was woken by “Bridge over Troubled Waters” frothily rendered through a mouthful of toothpaste. Too much Lagavulin, I thought to myself as I watched Tom solemnly drop his tooth-brush into the laundry basket and his underwear into the trash. The party was staid all right, but that didn’t stop my overworked husband from polishing off three-quarters of a bottle of double-distilled scotch.

  He stumbled heavily into the bedroom from the master bathroom a few moments later, blinking in the darkness. I propped myself up on my elbow and shook my head at him.

  “You’re drunk,” I said, severely.

  He peered at me. “Oh, there you are—dahling,” he said, in the faux English accent he tends to adopt when he’s three times over the legal driving limit; and then, face twisted into a clown grin, “Aw-right, whassup guv?” he hiccupped tipsily.

  My husband labors under the terrible misapprehension that his English accents are (a) good and (b) charming. They are, of course, face-smashingly irritating.

  “For god’s sake, get into bed and go to sleep, will you?” I snapped crossly, lying down again. “I need my rest.” I yawned ostentatiously.

  Abashed, Tom came and perched on the edge of the bed, looking earnestly down into my face. “You mad at me? Why mad at me? Please don’t be…” He tailed off, rumpling his curly hair with a tragic expression. I took pity on him.

  “All right,” I said with a heavy sigh, rolling over to make more room for him under the covers. “I’m not mad, okay? Just get into bed, and tell me about the party. Who did you talk to?” He grinned happily, pulled back the comforter, and elbowed his way into bed, pulling my ass toward him and cupping my body in “spoons.”

  “Okay party, nice people, Mark happy, don’t know ’bout Lara, think Patty’s annoying…” he tailed off again, his breathing steadied, and for a moment I thought he was asleep, but then—

  “That Alexis is an ’diot,” he said, suddenly.

  I opened my eyes in the darkness. “What?” I asked, surprised.

  “Alexis, that his name? Pretty boy, blondey hair, floppy bangs? ’Diot,” he repeated himself solemnly. “Total ’diot.”

  “But—why?” I asked.

  He snuggled deeper into my neck. I could feel his breath, warm and smoky, on my skin. “You looked so good tonight, Q, sorta regal on your couch, and I love how shiny your hair is these days. Mmmmm, smells good too…What was I talkin’ about—oh, yeah, Alexis. He told me about the building over the road, demolish—demolish—demolishment. Whassit. You know. Said they’re going to stop it. Stupid. Not going to happen. Fucking stupid, actually,” he said with the air of one who was just beginning to fathom the reality of the situation. “Old people have to get their asses
outta there. Big money on the line. Rent control a thing otha past. Told him so. Told him he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” I stiffened, but Tom didn’t seem to notice; instead he yawned hugely and slipped his hand comfortably over my right breast. “Anyway, I told him Randalls is a huge company, lotsa connections, good legal representation, no chance. Actually”—he chuckled—“I didn’t tell him this, but we represent their development interests, think Smyth and Westlon do their eviction stuff, Phil put me on their development por—por’folio jus’ last week—”

  His fingers were lazily circling my nipple. I firmly prized them off and sat bolt upright.

  “You what?” I said. “You what?”

  He looked up at me through heavy eyes. “We—what?” he repeated, stupidly. “Whaddya mean?”

  “You represent Randalls?” I asked accusingly, staring down into his face, blurred by the drink and the darkness.

  “Yeah,” he replied, “’Course, we’re, like, the best real estate firm in the city, whasso—I mean, so what?”

  “So what? Christ, Tom, for your information, I happen to know that Randalls are total bastards, they’re trying to force out a bunch of old people who’ve lived there for, like, forty years. Maybe rent control is a thing of the past, but these people are going to lose their homes, an entire community will be broken up—wait, you think that’s funny?”