Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

Francine was Frank and Maxine’s only child, and they had united their names as well as their bodies to form her. The experiment had certainly been a success; almost too great a success, in fact, for their hazy understanding of their own union made its exotic and turbulent fruit the object of a slightly fearful contemplation. Frank and Maxine hadn’t really known one another for very long when they’d got married — Frank had proposed to Maxine over the telephone from Maidstone, and had been away on business in Leicester right up to the wedding — and Francine had arrived so rapidly that they had straight away been sent into inescapable orbit around her and never really got the chance to catch up with each other. The fact that Francine resembled neither of them gave their grouping a somewhat alien atmosphere, and although any two of them could conjure a certain intimacy on the common ground of the third’s absence, seated around the dinner table in the evenings things were often awkward.

Francine’s sex and her fast-developing loveliness eventually swung the tide of affiliation in her mother’s favour, and Frank became an increasingly extraneous presence in the house. The forces of femininity were, he soon realized, inward-looking and indifferent to his conquest, and he was not even required to do the slavish work of offsetting them. Francine’s vanity had been tended at the roots by her mother’s determination to witness and enshrine every new development, and Frank was relegated to the position of a patron observing with a slight, helpless horror the spectacle his generosity has permitted to be enacted.

Maxine’s devotion to Francine’s physical triumphs and the social victories which the future would undoubtedly bring permitted her time only to give herself attention of a somewhat indifferent and secondary nature. She was not an attractive woman, made from small bones which easily accrued quantities of bluish, intractable fat in their own defence. She found it hard to see herself clearly in the glare of Francine’s superiority, and she grew detached and confused in matters of her own upkeep. At the hairdresser’s she never really knew what she wanted, and would allow the woman to run free with her uncertain creative powers, manufacturing whimsical, ill-realized styles which didn’t seem to belong to her. She would occasionally look at herself in the mirror and would feel a mild perturbation, dutifully applying blocks of make-up to all the recognized places. The apparently meaningless reservoirs of flesh around her body she regarded rather more fearfully, and took to palliating them with the consumption of brightly coloured milkshakes instead of food. As this cruel practice became more frequent, it eventually replaced all the memories of varied and seductive forms of nourishment she had accrued during her life with the simpler image of a tall glass filled with brown, pink, or cream liquid — colours which she came to associate with the meals they represented, preferring the brown one, for example, for the evening meal — and as she shrank Maxine wondered if there would come a day when she wouldn’t be there at all.

Frank, although slightly fearful of the vacancy in his wife’s eyes, approved of her diminution. They had long since set up twin beds in their room, but even so he liked the idea that his wife would be seen as a woman who could control herself. It suggested that she cared what he, and other people, thought. He did find her means somewhat repellent, and although she still made his usual breakfast and cooked the evening meal, the fact that she insisted on drinking those revolting things while he was eating was, for Frank, too public an expression of her problem. He would have liked to be able to tell his friends that his wife ate like a bird, but the shaming nature of her diet led him to keep it to himself.

Since she had left home, however, Francine had several times entertained the suspicion that her parents had united in her absence, flowing together over the space she had once occupied until their surface was so smooth that she might never have been there at all. Her mother’s interest, of course, could always be recruited with a telephone call, but there was something masculine in her interrogations now, a desire for more substantial evidence of progress than had previously been required, behind which Francine detected the conspiring hand of Frank. It irritated Francine to hear how Maxine had blossomed in the wake of her desertion, dyeing her hair blonde, wearing gold jewellery, her face fashioned by a make-over.

‘You should see your mother,’ Frank would boom, picking up the extension in the sitting-room while Maxine regaled Francine with her improvements from the kitchen. ‘She’s a corker.’

She had even given up her milkshakes, she said, in favour of a local exercise club which she had joined, where she had made new friends. The emergence of features in Maxine’s life meant that she expected to be able to talk, and even answer questions, about them.

‘You haven’t asked me how Body Conditioning went,’ she would complain to Francine at the end of a call.

The consequence of this trend was that Francine called less often, and felt a vague and disturbing insecurity at her exclusion which, although it coincided with her desire to pare down her connection with her parents, removed from her hands all the pleasure of doing so. She had disappointed them, she knew, in her last year or so at home: they had safeguarded her through school and secretarial college, beneath the assumption that a lucrative deal would subsequently take her off their hands; but she had frittered herself, in their view, on flashy types with few intentions, getting herself a flighty reputation and probably scaring off any chance of a decent prospect into the bargain.

Francine’s long life before the mirror, however, had given her different ideas about her own destiny. When it came, she felt sure that she would recognize it as clearly as she did her own face and that it would be a similarly pleasurable vision. She was so careless of her parents’ qualms that it was an effort to remember them at all in her schemes, and she would always feel mildly surprised when their judgements rose up in the dust of her activities. None of it was serious, in any case. She was merely awaiting the opportunity, sure that it would come to her, to move on to greater, if unspecified, things.

It was in this mood of scornful assurance that she had allowed herself to be flattered by the attentions of the manager of a local software company, where she had been stationed for three weeks’ secretarial work. He was young and rather attractive, and when his wife came into the office one lunch-time Francine was surprised and somewhat dismayed to notice that she was quite beautiful and that David behaved like a silly, devoted dog around her. If she was honest, Francine had to admit that up until then David had done a good job of concealing his interest in her. She hadn’t really intended to do any harm, but she was always interested in testing her powers, and she perceived in this situation perhaps the greatest challenge they had yet received. After his wife had gone, she had lingered around his desk with the pretence of activity, wondering what effect her mere physical proximity would have. When nothing happened, she launched a more deliberate offensive, subjecting David to amplified versions of several devices tested and found to be successful in other trials. One night she stayed late, offering to help him with his work, until it grew dark outside and they were alone in the office. They had talked, and Francine had cleverly steered the conversation towards the personal. David had revealed that his wife ran a local advertising agency and often didn’t get home until late herself. In answer to Francine’s questions, he admitted that he did often have to make his own dinner and occasionally even iron his shirts, and she gave him her utmost sympathy. The next day, she had made sure to meet his eye frequently and they had shared several intimate glances. Eventually, after more than a week, he became flustered and tried angrily to grab her behind a filing cabinet when no one else was looking. She waited for a few days before she gave in, and one lunch-time he took her to a hotel. He must have told his wife what he’d done the same evening, because she appeared at the office the next day with a red, ruined face and started shouting that she wanted to know which one it was. Francine had fortunately retreated to the toilets as soon as she caught sight of her, but one of the other girls had told her that David had had to ask his wife to leave the office. He barely spoke to Francine during her last couple of days at the company, and remembering his rudeness at the hotel and the fact that he hadn’t even bought her lunch, she felt that he had behaved quite badly.