Food Fight

by Anne Penketh

  “Now, Jasmine, what would you like to share?” Jenny asked the only black woman in the room. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out. She began sobbing, her eyes fixed on the carpet. Another woman began to cry too, as her own memories resurfaced. Then they all struggled to stop their lips trembling.

  “It’s alright,” said Jenny. She took in the others with her gaze, while Jasmine recomposed herself. “But, you are allowed to laugh too, you know. And you shouldn’t feel guilty when you do. You’ve all got the right to a life after death.”

  Another woman, an outwardly buoyant blonde in a dark trouser suit and heels, told the group how she was struggling so much with grief herself that she was neglecting her two young children who had fallen behind with their homework.

  “The school has been great but nobody has a clue how a child is supposed to grieve.”

  Susan remembered from university that if a child wasn’t able to take the necessary time to grieve, emotional problems and learning difficulties could show up years later. If she and Serge had had a child, the brother or sister he had wanted for Mimi, they would have been school age now. But it had never happened, and by the time she reached forty they both knew it never would. It hadn’t mattered that much to her because they had each other.

  Jasmine was talking about Facebook. She was disturbed by her husband’s profile, which was still on the site along with his comments and photos of their last holiday in Orlando. Another said that friends had turned her spouse’s page into a shrine, with pictures of candles and recollections. Jasmine had written to Facebook which had offered to ‘memorialise’ the page, effectively freezing it in time. “But it gives me the heebie jeebies to see Terrance’s picture. I can’t handle it.”

  “You can ask them to delete it altogether, if that’s what you’d prefer,” Jenny said.

  Serge wasn’t on Facebook, thank goodness. That was one less problem to deal with. Like most of the mothers she knew, Susan had joined the site to monitor what Mimi was up to, but her daughter had refused to ‘friend’ her.

  She lingered beneath the cherry blossom on Logan Circle on her way back to her apartment. I’m normal. So that’s okay. For some reason, her thoughts turned to her mother. How well did she really know her? She’d suffered the double blow of a divorce from Susan’s father, followed by his horrendous death in that motorway accident, but she never talked about her feelings. In fact, had Serge not died, she would never have known about her mother’s recourse to bereavement counselling.

  Mimi had always called her grandmother the ‘Merry Widow’, but now Susan realised nothing could be further from the truth. She was only just beginning to understand.

  As she neared home, she had a sudden craving for chocolate. Luckily, she had exactly what she needed in the fridge.

  She logged onto the computer while licking some Delight chocolate ice cream from a spoon. Her mind was on the lessons of the widows’ group. She wanted to talk to Mimi. To her surprise, she answered her Skype call. Susan screwed up her eyes to look into the ill-lit flat. Was Josh around?

  “Actually, he is.”

  A figure moved out of the shadows and waved at the screen. She waved back. He seemed open and friendly, not prickly like Mimi. He had a shaved head, a long neck, big round eyes and a pointed chin, a bit like a meerkat. He wore a dark woolly V neck jumper over a T-shirt, although she couldn’t make out the colour. At least the pair of them weren’t running up electricity bills.

  She wasn’t used to being introduced to Mimi’s boyfriends. But the unemployed librarian had an easy manner. They had scarcely had time for the introductions before Mimi announced that time was up.

  “By the way,” she said, as her pixelated image vanished, “Josh knows all about Serge and Camus.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “So, looking for love, are we?”

  It was Barney.

  “Everyone’s looking for love,” she said coolly. He had stepped inside her office and shut the door. “What’s up, Barney? Do you want to talk turkey? Or salt?”

  She stood up and moved round her desk to open the door. That was a mistake. Her boss blocked her path, smiling. He was treating this as a game. But she was increasingly nervous.

  Susan cleared her throat. This was America in 2010 after all. “Look Barney, I think there must be some misunderstanding.”

  He reached for her. She could feel his hot breath close to her cheek. His hand made its way down to her waist to her bottom and he was pulling her towards him. She managed to sit on the edge of her desk and was trying to grab something with which to deter him. She felt a biro between her fingers. Could she stab him with that? Then a picture frame came within her grasp. But her squirming had only increased his ardour. Finally, she managed to push him away with her knees, and he stumbled backwards. She stood up to her full height and glared at him in silence.

  “This is just between you and me, isn’t it, Susie? Consenting adults. You’re not going to go running to HR now, are you?” At least he was aware of the risk.

  She walked to the door, opening it with a flourish. She summoned up her most clipped British accent to say, “Of course not. Carry on.”

  And with that, he smirked and was gone.

  Only a few seconds had passed but Susan was panting from stress. She picked up her phone and ran down the six flights of stairs to the street, pushing through the revolving doors.

  “He did what?” came Lily’s reaction. She’d just finished a performance at a music circle in Cheltenham.

  “Just bear with me,” she said as she moved to a quieter spot. “You must go straight to your personnel department and complain. This is utterly inappropriate behaviour.”

  “But what can I do? I promised I wouldn’t go to HR. Even though he’s such a sleazebag, he’s got hiring and firing power over me, and it would be his word against mine. And actually, nothing really happened.”

  “Eew, Susie. What you don’t know is that maybe he’s got a reputation. He’s obviously a predatory male and you might not be the only victim.”

  “What did he mean by ‘looking for love’?”

  “Come on. He’s on your dating site. He saw your profile.”

  It made sense. “Oh my God. Miss Peek-a-boo! I could die from shame. But he’s married. What’s he doing on a singles’ site?”

  “Predatory male, you see,” Lily said.

  Susan was aware that people who complained about discrimination or harassment in the office invariably lost their job – not always directly, but eventually they’d enter a kind of unspoken professional quarantine. Having ascended to within sight of the corporate summit at DeKripps, why should she jump now?

  But Lily was baffled: Why would Barney be so rash as to make a pass at her in the office? “What is he smoking?”

  She agreed that had they been in a bar or restaurant she might have less of a case. Then it could be argued presumably that through her membership of an online dating site she had put herself in a situation where he may have legitimately surmised that she might fancy him.

  “It’s so reckless. Anyone might have walked in.”

  “I know. I really think that’s the end of it, though.”

  “Are you going to be alright?”

  “Don’t worry about me.” She switched off the phone and returned to work. It struck her that she was the one who had been looking for a partner online. Was Barney really the guilty party after all?

  *

  She tried to maintain a brisk professional exterior in her dealings with him in the days that followed. DeKripps was preparing a re-launch of a popular yoghurt, which had a picture of a fat but contented bear on the pot. But she was starting to have misgivings about the promise contained in its ‘new improved flavour’ which could not reasonably include any more sugar. She went to see Barney with the results of a comparative survey on the sweetness of yoghurts. He took his feet off the desk when she walked in, put on his reading glasses and skimmed the conclusions.

  “S
ugar, HFCS, salt, we’ve got to get ahead of this, Susie, before the regulators start a witch-hunt.”

  Barney had made things easier for her by showing no outward sign whatsoever that he had the slightest recollection of groping her in her office. He must think he’s untouchable.

  “Of course,” she said. “By the way, did you see that Michelle Obama doesn’t want her kids to eat HFCS?”

  He raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said nothing. Susan had already guessed he wasn’t a Democrat. But at the moment he was actively cultivating a senior Democratic senator in hopes of leading him into a policy U-turn. “Everyone has their price,” he predicted. It wouldn’t take long for the senator to lose his scruples and drop like a ripe, genetically modified tomato into his outstretched hand. She couldn’t help noticing the size of his hands before turning on her heel. She’d felt the warmth of one of them splayed on her buttock. She shuddered inwardly at the memory.

  She’d checked Lily’s theory about Barney. Back on Partners 4 U she looked up 50-year-old men looking for 40-year-old women. A picture of him appeared straight away. He was ‘Silverado’ from Georgetown, aged 51, and single. How many other men were cheating on their wives on this site?

  Susan’s phone rang. It was Frank calling from London.

  “How’s the flame-haired temptress?” She smiled at the reference from Private Eye, and Frank had always prided himself on his cultural onions after so many years in England. “Are you dating?”

  If only you knew, she thought. But she couldn’t help launching into a description of her experiences online.

  “As you can imagine, men are falling over themselves,” she said, hearing him laugh. She told him about one email exchange which had led to a drink with an architect named Bill, who had convinced himself that he’d be more attractive if he joked about his other dates. “I mean he was telling me about this stunningly beautiful girl who left via the bathroom of his hotel. Can you believe it?”

  Frank was tut-tutting in the background. She told him about Scott, an estate agent who forgot to set a date on the phone because he was so busy talking about his personal influence on the property prices in downtown DC.

  “I’ve actually arranged a meeting with a management consultant from Virginia, but to be quite honest it feels too much like work. You know what, Frank, I’m far too busy to think about dating,” she added. “But if Mister Right comes along, I wouldn’t say no. Although in this heat, I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to step out of the aircon and actually meet him. I’m wilting.”

  “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. Plenty more fish in the sea, Susie.”

  “Isn’t that a dating site? You mean I should try that one?”

  They laughed again and their conversation returned to work. Susan told Frank about the results of her yoghurt study. “The other thing I’m wondering about is bread,” she said.

  “You want to put sugar in baguettes? Good luck with that. That effeminate French poser would have us shot.” She was reminded that for people like Frank and Barney, all European men were ‘effeminate’.

  As though reading her thoughts, he asked, “How’s Barney?”

  She told him he was busy with the Guilty Secrets launch, which by all accounts was going extremely well. She didn’t mention the incident in her office.

  “But you know Barney. He’s terrorizing everyone.” She recounted a recent meeting between him and a Congressman from Nebraska. “He actually told the poor man, ‘I own you’.”

  “Well, I guess he does,” Frank said, “DeKripps donates enough to keep those guys on the campaign trail in the Midwest. He did good in the Scrutineer, by the way.”

  The Barbara Miles story had led to an editorial in the New York Scrutineer praising DeKripps for reducing HFCS in soda. “There’s been the usual whining on Twitter, of course,” Frank added.

  She didn’t mention that she’d gone to see Kramer, the devil himself, in Washington.

  “Barney’s calmed down a bit now. He knows it’s all publicity. People remember the brand,” she said. “Thing is, where do we go from here?”

  “Actually, here in the UK, salt’s gotten bigger than sugar right now,” he said. “We might have to make some gesture on that before too long.”

  “Anyway, keep cool,” were his parting words. “We miss you.”

  “Miss you all too.”

  *

  She was standing under the shower, rubbing herself down with a body scrub, keeping an eye on the laptop on her bed in case Mimi called.

  She found herself thinking about Barney and his ominous threat about Kramer at the end of the strategy meeting. Could DeKripps really ruin his life? In the light of the incident in the office, she saw a man who felt he was above the law. Look at Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; lies, blustering and denial, in the face of unprecedented scrutiny and public censure.

  In the case of Barney, he might just get away with it. What was it he had said to her? ‘Consenting adults.’ There went her defence. At least he hadn’t called her Peek-a-boo. Imagine that being mentioned in court.

  Susan recalled a guy in the London office who managed to escape sexual harassment charges not long after she joined DeKripps. He would grope women at the Christmas party, and because of his senior position was quite open about it. One day, he was walking through the office, plopped himself down on the corner of one of the secretaries’ desks and said, “Have I fucked you yet?”

  Susan would never forget the woman’s reply. She had looked up and said matter-of-factly, “I can’t remember.” Both had since left the company.

  She stepped out of the shower and studied her thickening waist in the mirror. Time to get back into a fitness routine. She should ring Jessica and join her for a workout.

  She was in her dressing gown, emptying the dishwasher, when her laptop brayed. She ran into the living room, and there was Mimi, her face distorted by her proximity to the computer screen.

  “Hi Ma, what are you doing today? It’s 11 o’clock and you’re not dressed.”

  “Well, it’s Saturday, I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to. In any case,” she added, “it’s mosquito season. And they seem to have my address.”

  She said she’d be staying in the cool, either at home or at a movie. In fact she had no plans for the entire weekend.

  “No hot date on a Saturday night?”

  “Give me a break. What’s happening in Wandsworth? Are books back in fashion?”

  “At least Josh doesn’t kill people in his profession,” said Mimi. “But to answer your question, yes, he’s still job hunting.”

  “And maybe now you could tell me what exactly Josh knows about Serge and Camus?” Her voice was cold. How could there be something new about someone she and Mimi had known so intimately?

  “Well, he looked him up the Internet. And loads of links came up to articles about Camus he’d written. He was also on panels with top French academics.”

  “Fascinating,” Susan said, relieved. “You know, Serge was at a conference on Camus the day we met?”

  Mimi went on, “Anyway, it turns out that Serge was one of key figures who helped rehabilitate Camus. That was the word. Rehabilitate.”

  “You’re kidding. Fancy that, he never mentioned it.”

  She felt a pang of guilt for not having shown more interest in her husband’s academic activities.

  “But why did he need rehabilitating? Serge always said he was a better writer than Sartre.”

  “He suffered from negative comparisons with Sartre, mainly put about by Sartre himself, according to Serge. He told me that himself when I was doing my A levels.”

  Susan recalled coming home from work to find her daughter deep in conversation with Serge - their ‘messes basses’ as the French say - at the kitchen table, where he would sit smoking a cigarette to unwind from school before preparing dinner for the three of them. She, the ‘Madame workaholic’, was always the last to arrive home on a weekday.

  “It’s funny
, I was thinking quite a lot about L’Etranger after he died. I’d fallen into a bottomless pit but I felt nothing at the same time.”

  “Yes. Well you might find La Peste even more relevant then, in your new life,” Mimi said. It had only taken a few minutes and she was twisting the knife again. Susan hadn’t read the book she was referring to, but her daughter was obviously about to remind her that she was responsible for an epidemic.

  “Speaking of my new life, are you ever going to come over and see for yourself?”

  She heard a door slam shut.

  “It’s Josh,” Mimi said. “Got to go. By the way, did you know you’re putting on weight?” And she disappeared from sight.

  Susan sat staring at the darkened screen while she calmed down. So Mimi was interested in Camus too. The connection was intriguing. A French Algerian and a young English activist born decades after he was writing about alienation and the absurd. Was that what had attracted her to Josh? Was that Serge’s legacy?

  It began to make sense, in a Mimi kind of way.

  For the rest of the weekend she brooded about Mimi’s throwaway comment. Having savoured haute cuisine in France and left her long expense account lunches behind in London, good eating had been replaced by comfort food. It was hard to resist the delights of her fridge—a box of Guilty Secrets might as well have been glued to her fingers. She polished off the last few while standing in the kitchen. I’m bereaved after all, she thought.

  On Monday morning, she made an appointment with her doctor. A nurse checked her blood pressure – 120 over 80 – and weight. One hundred and sixty pounds. A little on the heavy side for someone measuring 5 feet 8. Susan looked peevishly at the nurse.

  “I can’t even blame my shoes,” she said, having taken them off before stepping onto the machine. She had put on nearly a stone in the year since she had arrived in DC. But she suspected that most of it had been in the last few weeks.

  She sat in the surgery while Doctor Osborn peppered her with questions. Did she smoke? No. Drink? Five glasses a week, she said, cutting her real alcohol consumption by half. Large or small? Large, she admitted.