Wallflowers (22 page)

 

 

HINTS ON FECUNDITY

 

Warm the womb. Draw a bath prior to intercourse or drape a tepid cloth over your pelvic area.

Simmer two teaspoons of snakeroot in one pint of water. Swallow three tablespoons of the tea six times a day.

In four quarts of water, boil seventy chrysanthemums. Steep twenty minutes, strain, and serve with honey.

Massage belly with mint oil.

 

I feel love in the backs of my eyes. A warmth that tickles my retinas like goose feathers slid under my eyelids, that raises the hairs from my forearms. It blooms a grin from my throat before I can think to smile. I feel love when his chin dimples. When the pulse of his wrist beats hot and gentle against my chest.

 

 

STAINS: TIPS AND CLUES

 

For bloodstains it's either molasses or peppermint oil. I try molasses first. I spoon it onto his waistcoat in the shape of a heart. For good luck I try peppermint too. But then I worry the oil will leave a stain. I know the quickest grease reliever is melted wax, so I light a candle from the tree.

I'm dripping wax pearls along the left ventricle of my molasses, when I see him in the door frame. His lips are sucked in, his cheeks pointy, and a lilac vein worms up his neck from his collar. When he throws his briefcase, I duck behind the butcher block, and it lands on the counter behind me, on the fruit bowl. The figs sail plummy arcs above our heads and land with bruised plops on the floor. I stay crouched. As I breathe, my back knocks the cupboard door. His soles clack along the linoleum. I look to see him above me with the candle. He steps forward onto a fig, then drops or throws the candlestick. The brass clangs onto the floor. When he stalks from the room, the fig is still suctioned to his heel.

 

 

STAINS: TIPS AND CLUES (CONT'D)

 

To wipe burns from linoleum, rub steel wool in the direction of the grain. Soak your garments in buttermilk to remove fruit stains. Clean the white rings from water glasses &c with a paste of cigarette ash and vegetable oil. Paint the paste onto the mark, let stand thirty minutes, then rub with a wet cloth. Shrink the puffy patches beneath your eyes with lightly beaten egg white. Let dry and rinse.

 

 

KITCHENS AND COOKERY

 

His mother cooked his father figgy pudding. She shelled her own hazelnuts, grated her own nutmeg. She steeped dried currants in brandy, beat yolks into custard. She knew that butter the size of an egg was four tablespoons.

To thicken cream, cover your bowl with a muslin cloth and leave overnight. Heat milk with a pinch of bicarbonate to prevent curdling. An apple in your brown sugar keeps the sugar moist. A bay leaf in your flour keeps the flour dry. Store nutmeg away from children. Ingestion in excess of one seed can cause hallucinations and stop the heart.

Combine in a bowl, one cup sultanas and half that red currants, steamed figs, and pitted dates. Pour in half a mickey of brandy. Soak six hours, or until the fruit glistens and the sultanas bloat into waterlogged toes. In a different bowl, cream brown sugar, two eggs, and four eggs of butter. Add buttermilk. Then shell your hazelnuts. Grind them with pestle and pour over fruit. Add flour. Add sodium bicarbonate. Add wet ingredients and a spoonful of cinnamon. Stir mixture well. Pour into a Bundt pan. Bake sixty minutes.

A husband can gauge his wife's temper by the quality of her cooking. Foul moods are betrayed by too much spice, by the sour lumps of baking powder in her scones. Conversely, a wife's sweetness raises the height of her soufflé, harmonizes the nutmeg and cloves in her buttered rum.

 

 

ON FLOWERS

 

A dining table without a floral arrangement is Paris without the Eiffel Tower. Is a petticoat without the gown. Is a peacock with crow feathers. Don't: combine multiple colour schemes, add greenery as filler. Do: snip the stems on a slant, sweeten the water with sugar cubes, match flowers to season. Only work with odd numbers of stems and ensure the height of your bouquet is three times the width.

I choose snowberries over poinsettias because poinsettias are too easy. Because as a girl I wound a branch of the former into a crown and coronated myself snow queen. Because when I press the berries under water, they spit bubbles like baby lips.

 

 

SPIRITS, &C

 

On Thursdays my husband drinks whisky with colleagues at the Astor House, and our anniversary is no exception. He will arrive home late with spider-legged eyes and require a buttered rum
tout de suite
. A ready wife plans ahead, works ahead. Softens the butter. Measures the rum. Grates the nutmeg.

I haven't eaten because it's Bernard's day off. Because a wife must watch her hips, particularly if she expects to be expectant. The four nutmeg seeds sit taut as knuckles on the saucer. Their outer crusts snaked with hairy ridges, though smooth between my fingers. I stroke a seed slowly down the grater until I have whittled it in half. Then I clean the underside. I slide my fingers down the grater and collect the shavings on my thumb.

The second nutmeg grates as easy, blooms through the eyelets in oily flakes. Then the third seed, and the fourth. I rub the last in quick strokes, grate it to nothing. Past nothing, and this time I feel it sting. Five red lines carve my thumb and seep together. Serves me right for cooking without a thimble.

The trick is to melt enough butter and brown sugar to temper four seeds of nutmeg. It forms a thick sludge. I add water. I add a cinnamon stick and a pinch of dried cloves. I let it simmer for four hours, or until my husband returns for a fifth anniversary peck on the cheek and an after-cocktail cocktail.

 

 

THE LADY'S TOILET

 

I choose a lilac gown to bring out the blue in my bosom. The lace collar mollifies my neck. I hold my face in a hand-held mirror: my cheeks lightened by powdered lead, my curls wound taut from pins. My girlhood doll sits beside me at the vanity. I paint my mouth like hers, into a cupid's bow. Then I rub my palms with almond oil. Last step is nightshade. A drop of nightshade in each eye will dilate the pupils to illuminate my gaze.

 

 

FEMININE TOILS

 

I wait for him in the kitchen. The butcher block is still lumped with flour from the morning's baking, but I lie on it, on my stomach, grey satin pumps dangling off my heels. I wipe the flour into the corner of the block, into a soft mound. I dip my hand in it. The backs of my fingers. I wear the powder like a glove. Never put on gloves in public. Never remove them for handshakes or dancing or kisses on the back of your wrist. As a girl I wrote a code: Lay a glove on your lap to ask for an introduction. Drag it around your ear to request a dance. Drop the left to say I Love You. Drop both to say We're Being Watched.

When the front door opens, I hear the wind tumble in, and the rustle of the hydrangeas in the hall, the springs of his armchair as he sits.

“Darling?” he calls.

I fetch the rum from the cabinet and pour it all in the pot. I bring the liquid to a gentle boil. There isn't a glass large enough to contain it all, but three-quarters fit into a beer stein. I garnish with a cinnamon stick and glide through the sitting room doors.

His pelvis is thrust to the edge of the seat cushion, and he's trying to remove his shoe.

“Darling,” he repeats.

“Happy Anniversary,” I say, and cross the salon to kneel by his chair. “I've cooked you a buttered rum.”

“How charming,” he says. Then: “It's gargantuan.”

“I considered a smaller glass, but realized it must be particularly cold outside.” I tug the shoe from his foot. “Given the colour of your nose.”

He grabs the stein and tips it into his mouth. He lurches forward as if to gag, squeezes his lips together and swallows.

“It's repulsive.” He peers into the mug. “What rum did you use?”

“Spiced.”

He swirls the liquid. “The bottle from the Jeffreys?”

“Oh, yes.”

“From the Indies?”

“That's right. It's very fine.”

“It's vile.”

“And so fashionable.”

He swallows another gulp and winces. “How much sugar is in here?”

“I know your sweet tooth.”

“Darling,” he says.

“Yes?”

“Your hand is covered with powder.”

I slip off his second shoe, the heel still stained from the fig.

He sips again. “I think it's growing on me.” He raises the stein. “Here's to the mud in your eye.”

 

 

ON SERVING DESSERT

 

Five hours post-rum, recumbent in bed and drifting between dreams, cocooned under layers of candy-striped eiderdown, legs butterflied, knees pointed out, the hot water pig clamped between the soles of my feet, I remember the figgy pudding. I go downstairs, where I had left it on the kitchen counter to cool. I loosen the dough from the Bundt pan and plop it onto a plate. We're out of rum, so I pour brandy on the top. Upstairs, I strike a match and light it. My husband does not answer when I say his name, but his door is unlocked. The bed is tousled and empty, and there are wheezes from the bathroom. He's on the tile. I see him in flashes, by the blue flames that flutter over my pudding. His body is wedged between the radiator and bathtub, and his eyes have rolled so far into their sockets they quiver. His tongue is raw and fat, slumping out of his jaw. He grunts with my entrance, rocks his body to the side, chipping the paint on the tub with his teeth. The fire shrinks as I draw the plate over his body, his shins crumpled through the loops of the radiator, his big toe flapping against the wall.

 

 

FOR THE EXPECTANT MOTHER

 

I paper the walls of his room with white cranes. Then I make a mobile. I fold foil into stars and string them to the canopy with floss—flat tin suns to dangle above her chin. I crochet bonnets and booties: white wool for newborns, cerise and pale green after six months. I collect pussy willows in champagne bottles and keep them on the floor. I like mazes, like to wind through green glass and down-tipped branches in order to reach my window.

She will adopt my doll. Bisque cheeks and mohair curls, cotton torso stuffed with straw. I stitch silk ribbon to the hem of Dainty Dorothy's crinoline and patch the chips on her mouth with paint. If my daughter wants curls like hers, I will show her how to roll her hair in pins. How to sew ribbons. How to tint her lips with cupid bows and how not to let them crack.

Good for the Bones

Sharing the window seat with a gentleman and nothing under her nightgown. Adele doesn’t notice him until now. He’s got a few years on her—skin everywhere the same iridescent pink. New, fresh-out-of-the-womb luminous like an albino, like if her finger grazed his cheek it would break out in rash. The girl perches across from them on the windowsill. She’s young, red hair. Every time she leans over the food tray her braid dips into the bottom of Adele’s fruit cup. A small pot of yogurt sits on the tray too. It is unclear to her whether it is breakfast or lunch.

“Uncle Rog?” the girl says. “Yogurt?” She ticks the plastic container back and forth. The man shakes his head.

The yogurt is a sickly flavour at room temperature. Good for the bones, the girl says, but what are her bones good for? Sitting, folding neat like a hand-held fan. Good bones rich in calcium and phosphorus, fine for planting bulbs. With hers she would like to grow snowdrops. Commit her body to the ground—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dirt to February blooms. A cheering sight for the winter weary.

=

A man sits next to her at the window. Her thighs and kneecaps look bare and she can’t think where in this room she keeps her pantyhose. She can feel something against her neck. It scratches every time she moves her head, so she leans forward and asks if the man can see. His fingers warm the base of her hairline. It feels like he is untying a string.

“There,” he says.

She sits up and a vinyl bib drifts down her chest.

She’s perhaps at one of her agent’s retreats. A centre for healing, for rehabilitation and excavating the nostrils. Never checked herself in, but had she ever? Outside her window, a man-made pond: telltale sign. The pump burbling in the centre like a plastic sphincter in a tub with nothing to hide. Next to the pond, a cherry tree with bronchiole branches, and under the tree an uncomfortable-looking bench. The man beside her wears terry-cloth slippers fit for kicking buckets. Patches of brown on the heels, and he himself positively macabre. Skin like pink sidewalk chalk—aglow in the way of transparent spiders
sous terre
.