Joanna Walsh: Vertigo

“I was just saying,” my mother says, though what she says is something I do not remember her having said before, or not to me.

But, Mother, you’re copying me: you got that new pair of shoes didn’t you? Here you are on your eightieth birthday, shelling again your former self. Don’t you know how hard I worked not to be the same as you?

Why do I sit here, paralyzed on your made bed? I could walk. This is the country, and that’s what you do in it. But there are no pavements on the bare road, no footpaths across the fields, just ragged unofficial tracks past signs for trespass. In the village, the fruit dropping from the trees in every garden, the summer owners no longer in residence. My mother doesn’t notice, lives inside, double-glazed, while outside everything is dying for our pleasure: the wheat, the birds, the lambs — and new birds, and wheat, and lambs will replace them soon for our delight. But not the trees, which live longer. Maybe we are their entertainment.

The night before the party, I cannot sleep in the house. Not being able to breathe is to do with a room where there are no corners. It happens at night when I wake up again in the white room in the white bed with the memory-foam mattress and white shutters over the window, if there is a window, for, if there is, it is too far away. It recedes, shows only a patch of sky, is barred with white metal across its center. The shutter latch will not un-jam, however much it’s shaken. The door has shrunk to its keyhole. I must keep still if it’s not to shrink further. If I take a breath in here, the air will be solid. It’s not that I can’t breathe, it’s just I have to make the choice: expand my chest, contract it. In or out — what should I decide? If I make no decision I might die here. I must keep calm if I’m to get out. I am unconvinced things will be better outside but I put on a jacket, jeans, open the door. It is 2:18AM. It is quiet, and I am in the country. I can breathe, but only just.

“Did you speak to me then?” She asks me, even here. “Did you say something?”

MINUS 2 YEARS

Heaven will be one of those shows where everyone from your childhood appears to replay the best time. You’ll have to guess who they are, from their voices, or from their description of an incident, before they appear. There will be continuous anxiety. When you see them, they will have changed, though maybe not enough. I, for instance, am no longer fat. I forgot to stay fat. Now, my family cannot solve me. Meanwhile, my mother has grown round. It is as though her body had been added to my body, and then we were divided. If I’d had any courage I’d have been a fat woman for longer.

My sisters-in-law are here for the party, which I must not call a party. We meet from time to time to notice how each other has aged: that’s family. I keep on rising up to you, but you preserve your distance: the years are like that. There are so many of you, and you are still just the way I thought I’d grow up, with all that was enviably grown-up about you: the lace tops with modesty inserts, and the spangles as if for nights out, the stiff hair, the cardigans grown over with a fungus of secondary sexual characteristics — bristling with embroidery and drooping with labial frills.

Now that I am thin you admire me, though you no longer like me. I am old, nearly as old as you are, and I know now that a woman is not her clothes: she’s the body under the dress, or what someone could imagine her body to be. A man doesn’t care about a dress’s size or its designer, or whether it’s real silk or not, though I guess these all go to make up something. I have learned that even underneath I am replaceable. You could employ someone to be me and get just the same thing, maybe even better, if you had the money.

My sisters-in-law, you have all come, hungry, for my father’s last show and, notwithstanding, I admire each one of you. My difficulty is in admiring your mother-in-law. She’s nice but she’s not my type.

“Did you see that show with the dog?” the sisters-in-law say to one another. “When it …” “Oh my!” Depleted enough to show sympathy only for animals, they are eating chocolates from a bag decorated with anthropomorphized sweeties. Crunch. They take off their heavy bracelets before going to the buffet: clack.

It doesn’t seem like a party without men. But here’s my father, wheeled in on a kind of catering trolley! He is in a box, surrounded by something piped, perhaps cream, or duchesse potatoes, though it could be carnations. Silent as always, he is wearing a dark suit and looks almost as if he is still warm. Like a whole cooked salmon for Christmas or a wedding, his last helplessness is just one more thing. The sisters-in-law are delighted by this culinary feat. But — don’t worry! — this is not the sort of food to consume, only to admire. Like a cardboard cake, the point is it looks like something might jump out at any minute. The sisters-in-law wait. They know very well that the box is not food, only cardboard and icing, but it is polite to act as though it were.

I think at one point I stopped breathing, or had my breath taken away. And I can’t remember what happened to the box. After, there was no sign of the carnations. Helping my mother clear up, there was a stack of paper plates, of plastic forks, smeared with something dark and crumbly, and the residue of marshmallow, or was it mayonnaise?

Whatever happened, we put it under our belts. Perhaps they ate him, after all.

MINUS 5 YEARS

“I’m glad we went to the sea today,” you say, before we get there. You can see the sea from the car, but we have not got to it yet, and you are glad. Perhaps later you will not be glad, though maybe setting the seal of gladness on your first glimpse of the sea will have been enough to make you glad later, or to make your later lack of gladness hardly count.

When we get to the sea, it is flat, a continuation with the land that moves only a little. There is no breeze. From the sea to the land come yachters, fresh from practicing a sport that takes up money and time. Some of them even need assistants who must be paid to have fun with them. I had thought the yachters would be beautiful but, no, they are old. It has taken them so long to pile up enough money and time to go yachting. The yachts are white and clean but their owners’ faces are creased. The women wear jaunty breton tops whose stripes are youthful. But up close one would see they are really quite old, with blonded hair and pinked lips, a fine joke.

So this is our last morning: such a relief to get over the final hump of our time together. Coming back to land I find I have forgotten parts of my body, not having had the leisure or the solitude to examine them. I do not know, for instance, if my legs are hairy, or whether my eyebrows need plucking. I do not know what my legs look like at all, there having been no mirror where we stayed this last weekend, except for the small mirror at head level fixed above the basin in the bathroom. There was no need even to have a mirror there. It’s perfectly possible to brush your teeth or wash your face without a mirror, but imagine day after day going on with no knowledge of what you are cleaning, or whether anything ever gets clean.

When you made partner, mother said to me, you must be proud . How could I be proud of something that was not my achievement but its inverse? Unless I am such a secondary part of you that when you eat, I taste it; when you urinate, I am empty. I’ve seen my father do this. I’ve heard him shout at her to pick up the telephone, as though she were his extra hand.

Something goes round and round in my head. I am frightened I will change my mind again, and it will be too late. I won’t be able to go back. Although I can think of no reason I shouldn’t change my mind, I know there is a rule somewhere that says I am not allowed.