Marian was reassured. That was what she herself would have said. But if she was so normal, why had this thing chosen to attack
“Something’s been happening to me lately,” she said. “I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Oh, what’s that? No, you little pig, that’s mummy’s.”
“I can’t eat certain things; I get this awful feeling.” She wondered whether Clara was paying as much attention as she ought to.
“I know what you mean,” said Clara, “I’ve always felt that way about liver.”
“But these are things I used to be able to eat. It isn’t that I don’t like the taste; it’s the whole…” It was difficult to explain.
“I expect it’s bridal nerves,” Clara said; “I threw up every morning for a week before my wedding. So did Joe,” she added. “You’ll get over it. Did you want to know anything about… sex?” she asked, with a delicacy Marian found ludicrous, coming from Clara.
“No, not really thanks,” she had said. Though she was sure Clara’s explanation wasn’t the right one she had felt better.
The record had begun to play from the middle again. She opened her eyes; from where she was lying she could see a green plastic aircraft carrier floating in the circle of light from Peter’s desk lamp. Peter had a new hobby, putting together model ships from model ship kits. He said he found it relaxing. She herself had helped with that one, reading the directions out loud and handing him the pieces.
She turned her head on the pillow and smiled at Peter. He smiled back at her, his eyes shining in the semi- darkness.
“Peter,” she said, “am I normal?”
He laughed and patted her on the rump. “I’d say from my limited experience that you’re marvellously normal, darling.” She sighed; she didn’t mean it that way.
“I could use another drink,” Peter said; it was his way of asking her to get him one. The ashtray was removed from her back. She turned over and sat up, pulling the top sheet off the bed and wrapping it around her. “And while you’re up, flip over the record, that’s a good girl.”
Marian turned the record, feeling naked in the open expanse of the living room in spite of the sheet and the venetian blinds; then she went into the kitchen and measured out Peter’s drink. She was hungry – she hadn’t had much for dinner – so she unboxed the cake she had bought that afternoon on the way back from Clara’s. The day before had been Valentine’s Day and Peter had sent her a dozen roses. She had felt guilty, thinking she ought to have given him something but not knowing what. The cake wasn’t a real gift, only a token. It was a heart with pink icing and probably stale, but it was the shape that mattered.
She got out two of Peter’s plates and two forks and two paper napkins, then she cut into the cake. She was surprised to find that it was pink in the inside too. She put a forkful into her mouth and chewed it slowly; it felt spongy and cellular against her tongue, like the bursting of thousands of tiny lungs. She shuddered and spat the cake out into her napkin and scraped her plate into the garbage; after that she wiped her mouth off with the edge of the sheet.
She walked into the bedroom, carrying Peter’s drink and the plate. “I’ve brought you some cake,” she said. It would be a test, not of Peter but of herself. If he couldn’t eat his either then she was normal.
“Aren’t you nice.” He took the plate and the glass from her and set them on the floor.
“Aren’t you going to eat it?” For a moment she was hopeful.
“Later,” he said, “later.” He was unwinding her from the sheet. “You’re a bit chilly, darling; come here and be warmed up.” His mouth tasted of scotch and cigarettes. He pulled her down on top of him, the sheet rustling whitely around them, his clean familiar soap-smell enfolding her; in her ears the light cocktail music went on and on.
Later, Marian was resting on her stomach with an ashtray balanced in the hollow of her back; this time her eyes were open. She was watching Peter eat. “I really worked up an appetite,” he had said, grinning at her. He didn’t seem to notice anything odd about the cake: he hadn’t even winced.
24
All at once it was the day of Peter’s final party. Marian had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s: Peter had suggested that she might have something done with her hair. He had also hinted that perhaps she should buy a dress that was, as he put it, “not quite so mousy” as any she already owned, and she had duly bought one. It was short, red, and sequinned. She didn’t think it was really her, but the saleslady did. “It’s you, dear,” she had said, her voice positive.
It had needed an alteration so she had picked it up when she came from the hairdresser’s and was carrying it now in its pink and silver cardboard box as she walked towards the house across the slippery road, balancing her head on her neck as though she was a juggler with a fragile golden bubble. Even outside in the cold late-afternoon air she could smell the sweetly artificial perfume of the hairspray he had used to glue each strand in place. Though she’d asked him not to put on too much; but they never did what you wanted them to. They treated your head like a cake: something to be carefully iced and ornamented.
She usually did her hair herself, so she had got the name of the establishment from Lucy, thinking she would know about such places; but perhaps that had been a mistake. Lucy had a face and shape that almost demanded the artificial: nail polish and makeup and elaborate arrangements of hair blended into her, became part of her. Surely she would look peeled or amputated without them; whereas Marian had always thought that on her own body these things looked extra, stuck to her surface like patches or posters.
As soon as she had walked into the large pink room – everything had been pink and mauve, it was amazing how such frivolously feminine decorations could look at the same time so functional – she had felt as passive as though she was being admitted to a hospital to have an operation. She had checked her appointment with a mauve-haired young woman who despite her false eyelashes and iridescent talons was disturbingly nurse-like and efficient; then she had been delivered over to the waiting staff.
The shampoo girl wore a pink smock and had sweaty armpits and strong professional hands. Marian had closed her eyes, leaning back against the operating table, while her scalp was soaped and scraped and rinsed. She thought it would be a good idea if they would give anaesthetics to the patients, just put them to sleep while all these necessary physical details were taken care of; she didn’t enjoy feeling like a slab of flesh, an object.
Then they had strapped her into the chair – not really strapped in, but she couldn’t get up and go running out into the winter street with wet hair and a surgical cloth around her neck – and the doctor had set to work. A young man in a white smock who smelled of cologne and had deft spindly fingers and shoes with pointed toes. She had sat motionless, handing him the clamps, fascinated by the draped figure prisoned in the filigreed gold oval of the mirror and by the rack of gleaming instruments and bottled medicines on the counter in front of her. She couldn’t see what he was doing behind her back. Her whole body felt curiously paralysed.
When at last all the clamps and rollers and clips and pins were in place, and her head resembled a mutant hedgehog with a covering of rounded hairy appendages instead of spikes, she was led away and installed under a dryer and switched on. She looked sideways down the assembly line of women seated in identical mauve chairs under identical whirring mushroom-shaped machines. All that was visible was a row of strange creatures with legs of various shapes and hands that held magazines and heads that were metal domes. Inert; totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this compound of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical? An electric mushroom.
She resigned herself to the necessity of endurance, and picked up a movie-star magazine from the stack at her elbow. A blonde woman with enormous breasts spoke to her from the back cover: “Girls! Be Successful! If you want to really Go Places, Develop Your Bust…”
After one of the nurses had pronounced her dry she was returned to the doctor’s chair to have the stitches taken out; she found it rather incongruous that they weren’t wheeling her back on a table. She passed along the gently frying line of those who were not yet done, and soon her head was being unwound and brushed and combed; then the doctor was smiling and holding a hand mirror at an angle so that she could see the back of her head. She looked. He had built her usually straight hair up into a peculiar shape embellished with many intricate stiff curved
