Magnetism E-Book

Ruth Figgest

• Herausgeber: Myriad Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Mother and daughter Caroline and Erica are best of friends and worst of enemies. Set in the American mid- and south-west, their story unfolds over more than 50 years against a backdrop of sweeping social change. Feisty and argumentative, they roll with the punches, surviving car crashes, awkward family gatherings, relationship disasters—and plastic surgery. Sharply observed and darkly comic, Magnetism notches a riveting new path through this most fundamental of family ties.

Leseprobe

Praise for Ruth Figgest

‘Ruth Figgest demonstrates how to make a story about more than one thing at once. Her astute young heroine faces the prospect of plastic surgery to render her looks more pleasing to her lovingly fault-finding mother but simultaneously arrives at a new understanding of the state of her parents’ marriage and the ambivalent purpose she has to serve within it.’

Patrick Gale

‘Ruth Figgest has a deep understanding of the human condition in all its many guises and depicts it with razorsharp accuracy. Her characters are emotionally vulnerable, self-sabotaging, and prone to exhilaratingly outrageous behaviour, but they somehow never lose our sympathy. This is psychologically acute, perceptive and witty writing that can make you laugh out loud and wince with discomfort at the same time.’

Umi Sinha

‘A thoroughly compelling read: pointed yet subtle, it skewers middle-class American foibles with biting humour and authentic compassion. Figgest’s voices are so real and tangible they leap off the page into your ears and into your bones.’

Martin Spinelli

‘Ruth Figgest has as firm and careful a grasp on the delicate texture of relationships as any writer since Henry James. This painful—and often, disconcertingly, funny—exploration of a mother and daughter’s growing apart, growing up, growing old, growing together, peels back layers of time and accretions of expectation to bare a connection harder than love and more complex than distance. It is a compelling novel.’

Claudia Gould

Magnetism

Ruth Figgest

This book is dedicated to Cara Bentham, Kate Crouch, and Valerie’s daughter, Jane Olsen. With love.

Contents

Title PageDedication1976:The Quickening2013:The Tornado2011:The Blind Sentinel2007:The Cockatoo2005:The Wind1999:The Weasel1999:The Mutt1995:On Becoming a Fish1994:Butterflies1991:Fireworks1988:Fireflies1985:The Seahorse1983:The Egg1981:The Idea of Sushi1980:The Kokopelli1979:The Cockerel1977:Big Bird1976:Silk Worms1975:Whispering Pines1974:Magnetism1973:The Armadillo1971:The Foetal Pig1970:Baby Bird1969:The Wattle1968:Wonder Woman1964:The Stone1961:In and Out1959:The Lamb2013:An Angel2014:Prince Poopy2015:The BearAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

1976

The Quickening

Carl says, ‘My money’s on failed suicide.’ He rocks his chair back to lift up the front legs and balance on the back ones, just like you’re told not to do at school. I recognise that this is a skill that has taken a lot of practice to perfect. He is self-contained and whenever he speaks his voice is surprising. It’s very gentle and soothing, almost a whisper. There’s something familiar about his speech: I recognise a bit of a drawl; maybe he’s not always been from around here.

He is talking to Wilbur and they’re talking about me. Both sexes mix together in this ward and right now the three of us are sitting at the edge of the communal area. I got here first when I finished my cereal and when they finished breakfast too they came to sit either side of me. No one sits on the sofas in the morning; we will do that later. You have to make some changes just to break up the day and in the morning you need the hard seats to make you realise that yes, you are awake and yes, you are here. You are still here in this place, and you can’t leave. No one knows when they’ll be able to go home.

Wilbur scoots his chair even closer to mine and turns to study me. Wilbur has gorgeous hair, like David Cassidy. I notice how it swings forward when he moves close to me and imagine how soft it must feel when it tickles his neck. I don’t move a muscle and I do not blink as he studies my face, and his eyes drift down to my breasts, my stomach, my legs. He looks at my arms and my wrists, my hands.

He looks right in my eyes. His voice is a hiss. ‘That is by far the largest cat-e-gor-y – ’ he spaces this word out, every one of its syllables distinct and clear, his mouth movement large, as if he thinks I might possibly be deaf ‘ – and there’s nothing wrong with that, honey,’ he says. I’m keeping still as the red-hot tip of the cigarette he holds between his fingers comes closer. He strokes my face with his thumb and then he withdraws and settles back in his chair again. I can feel the trace of his hand on my skin as if it has come up in a welt.

Now Wilbur takes a deep drag of his Virginia Slim and blows the smoke out. The smoke floats up above us and it is mesmerising. He waves his hand about to shoo it away from his hair. I tip my head to watch it all disappear near the ceiling and I realise how much I need to lie down. I am as heavy as the smoke is light. The weight of my head is too much, the muscles of my lower back cannot hold my spine erect, I ache with the effort of sitting here, of being here. Of being.

Carl laughs loudly and all the tension I feel is momentarily broken. I know that he is not laughing at me, nor is he laughing at Wilbur, he is just laughing. The place is crazy and the sound he makes is deep and unbroken – not a chuckle, a real laugh – and it must be contagious because Wilbur laughs a high-pitched squeal, and I know I would like to as well, but I don’t know how to move my face to make it laugh and I cannot make a sound. I am still as the two of them laugh either side of me as if the funniest thing was on TV or something.

I’ve been told that the mirror mirror on the wall is a one-way window into the nurses’ office, but Florence, a big black woman, one of the nursing assistants, still pops her head right out of the door to see what the commotion is. She smiles when she sees the two of them laughing and Wilbur reaches around me and slaps Carl’s back. He points back to Florence and now she waves and laughs as well and goes back inside the office.

We are not allowed in our rooms during the day. On this, the fifth floor, we have to be in the communal area from six in the morning until eight in the evening and no one is ever allowed to lie down on the sofas. Everyone says it’s okay to do nothing but sit, but no one seems to understand that it’s too much even to do nothing. I want to sleep. Actually, I’ve thought about this a lot. Mashed potato is served every day for dinner and I feel like mashed potato: heavy and gloppy and inert. You have to eat something at each meal. The nurses make notes all day long and what you eat goes down on your records. You also have to stay in plain sight for at least two hours after meals. Wilbur explained to me that no one is allowed to use the bathroom for a while after eating because some people are here because they make themselves sick after meals. He told me that when I first got transferred to this floor, even though I didn’t ask, didn’t want to know and it wasn’t something I’d ever done. He said it can be quite effective but it ruins your teeth. ‘Not my bag,’ he said. He opened his mouth to run the tip of his tongue across his own teeth, so that I could see that they were white and perfect and evenly spaced, like a movie star’s. I wondered if he’d had braces.

As long as you stay on this floor, if you eat then you are allowed to wear your own clothes, and this means whatever you want, apparently. There’s a man who dresses like a woman and that’s still okay. Since I’ve been here I’ve eaten every meal, but for the last three weeks I’ve been wearing these corduroy pants and this pale yellow top, which is what I was wearing when I was admitted. Mom brought in some underwear and new jeans and T-shirts for me, but I’m happy with what I’ve got on. I change my panties but the rest can be my hospital uniform, now that I’m on this floor and am allowed to wear clothes.

Mom has been here every day since I arrived, even though they wouldn’t allow her to see me for the first week when I was upstairs. My father hasn’t come. She says it upsets him too much, to think about this, that Dad has always been the sort of person to shy away from difficult things; she should know, she said. She was sorry that this was a disappointment for me, but he didn’t mean anything by it, it’s who he is, she said. That’s all, just the sort of person he is. ‘A person who finds it difficult to change,’ she said.

The new things she’s brought for me remain in the pink overnight bag under the bed in my room, along with some books she thought I might like to read: Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution: The High Calorie Way to Stay Thin Forever; Yoga 28 Day Exercise Plan; and How to Live with Yourself. That last book has a bright red cover with a white border, like a big stop sign. I’ve put it at the bottom of the pile.

Wilbur gripes every day that all the stodge they serve up for our meals is ruining his figure. The first time he said that to me he untucked and lifted his dress shirt and stroked the flattest belly I have ever seen on anyone, man or woman. He must do a hundred sit-ups a day. ‘You know,’ he says to me now, ‘you might as well smoke. I think it’s real good that you don’t, but you might as well. You’re allowed, so I say, why ever not? Why not?’ he repeats. ‘Do you want one?’ He offers me his pack.

I don’t take it. I don’t move. I shut my eyes. I am not here.

‘She doesn’t smoke,’ Carl says. ‘Leave the kid alone.’

Now the ward door buzzer goes off and I look at the clock. It’s seven-thirty. I’ve been awake for nearly two hours. It’s half an hour since breakfast finished.

‘They’re back,’ Wilbur says. ‘Right on time. They run this place like a bus terminal. Coming and going. No peace.’

Dolly, Florence and Leanne come out of the nurses’ room. Florence starts putting out bowls and spoons and laying the places at the smallest of the three breakfast tables and then Henry comes in first, with his big clipboard, followed by four patients wearing hospital pyjamas. I don’t know the names of the two old men in the group and in fact I’ve never seen one of them before, but I know the two women: Franny and Alice.

Alice’s husband comes to see her most days. She has a beautiful face and lovely blonde hair and he sits next to her stroking it all the time he’s visiting. Wilbur says that her baby died and she killed it. I think he’s lying – they’d have put her in prison if she killed a baby – but she doesn’t stop crying even all the time her husband plays with her hair, as if she’s done something terrible, so maybe she did.

The four of them stop in a line and Leanne and Dolly go forward to guide them to the tables. Leanne is a scrawny white woman and Dolly is dark brown and plump like her name. They’re nursing assistants like Florence, but Henry is a registered nurse. I’m not sure about the others that come on duty now and then, and especially the night staff, because not everyone wears a badge, or they wear it clipped in an awkward place you don’t want to look, like on their belts dangling above their groin, or else upside down. No one has a last name on display.

The four in blue pyjamas trickle over to the tables where they sit down like obedient first graders. Florence is waiting and glops oatmeal into metal bowls from a tray and puts one in front of each of them. They’re asleep, really, even as they lift the spoons into their gaping mouths, but they chomp and chew and suck their way back to being awake.

They look like zombies and there’s something terrifying about it, but I can’t help watching. Outside, staring at other people is rude. Inside, there’s usually nothing else to do and it’s all we do at times even when there is something we could do. The open areas are littered with puzzles, magazines, decks of cards and board games, but here we kill time watching everyone else killing time.

Wilbur is watching them too. He’s pretending not to be scared by it. He says, ‘You know, almost everyone gets the ECT, in the end. Not me, mind, but I am a complicated diagnosis. Until they straighten that out, I am not going down that road. No, sir-ree. No. Don’t you think?’

Carl’s expression in return is beautifully, defiantly blank. No one could know what he was thinking and I’m pleased he doesn’t answer, but the lack of acknowledgement or agreement annoys Wilbur. He must have been a terrible gossip in normal life. Wilbur says to Carl, ‘Well, fuck you. Excuse me for trying to have a conversation,’ but he’s not really angry, he’s just desperate for something – so he wants to know what’s wrong with everyone here, but in a way that’s all, now, that any of us have to ourselves. We’re both holding out; Carl won’t tell and neither will I.

I haven’t spoken a word for at least eight weeks.

‘Fried brains or not, Franny will at least talk to me,’ Wilbur says. ‘You watch.’ He goes over to the table, squats next to her chair and strokes her head.

Franny is old, about sixty, and her grey hair is long and very frizzy. Franny and Wilbur are always so close that I wonder if they were friends from before here, or maybe they’re just good friends because they’ve both been here longer than anyone else. I wonder why she’s here, and why she’s on the list for ECT twice a week, every week, and then I wonder how long until I’ll get out, or if I’ll end up like her. I don’t know what will happen but, even though I don’t want to be like her, I don’t think I’ll ever want to leave. I can’t imagine being that old. It’s a creepy thought, she must have been my age once.

When Franny turns to look at Wilbur, she appears surprised then a couple of seconds later recognition flickers over her face. Then she smiles at him broadly, cleanly and honestly, just like a two-year-old. Wilbur turns back to us to see if we’re watching. He wants to know that we’ve registered the power that he has. He has woken Franny from sleep – brought his friend back from the dead.

‘He’s like some fairytale faggot prince,’ Carl says now, which makes me jump because I didn’t realise he might be able to read my mind.

2013

The Tornado

I am at work when the phone call comes and it takes me a minute to understand who is speaking. I finally grasp that it’s Gus, who is this ancient guy who goes to Mom’s old church and takes care of her yard. He’s phoning from Phoenix.

‘Gus,’ I say. ‘How are you?’

His voice wavers. ‘Your mother, honey. It’s bad news.’ I sit down.

When I get off the phone I go to tell my boss that I have to leave. Jerry is the head of public information and marketing. I explain that just now I had a call to say my mother has died. I tell him that my work is right up to date. I can provide him a quick handover for events and where we’ve got so far and he’ll be able to pick up on anything that might be coming up. ‘I can email you anything you need to know in my absence. But,’ I say, ‘I think I really have to get on a plane.’ I start to shake and he gets up from behind his desk and takes my arm and leads me to sit down in the space he’s vacated.

Just as I am sitting down, his secretary interrupts us. She appears surprised to see me sitting in his place behind his desk. Candy, a massive middle-aged woman – my sort of age – is wearing a sticky-out brown A-line skirt below a baggy blue turtleneck, and brown penny loafers. She is as different from spun sugar as a cactus from a dandelion and therefore, of course, her nickname is Cotton. Jerry asks Cotton to get us a coffee. He takes her to the door and intends a whisper but I can hear him tell her that my mother has passed.

By the time Cotton returns with two mugs of steaming black coffee I am unable to stop my legs from jerking up and down. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know why I’m shaking.’

‘It’s the shock. Have a sip and take a bite of a cookie.’ She passes me a box of animal crackers. ‘Shock can kill a person,’ Cotton says, ‘And you’re way too skinny.’

Her definition of skinny is warped, so this is not true, but I probably do weigh near a hundred pounds less than she does. I say, ‘I’ve got reserves enough, but there’ll be stuff to do. I don’t know what to do.’

Jerry is reliably definite. ‘Yellow Pages, or the internet. Find a funeral director and he’ll walk you through it. It’s their job. They’ll know what to do and how. You don’t have to decide anything. They’re professionals. Let them do what they need to do and let it happen. Keep your head low and go with the flow.’

I’d expect nothing less from Jerry. He is what people call a born leader, a very likeable guy. This is exactly why he got this job. He sounds decisive and confident but he never makes a decision he can be held accountable for and everyone else does everything. He doesn’t actually do a thing.

I thank him for the advice and then Cotton kindly arranges the tickets and a cab and I phone Gus back to tell him when I’ll be arriving.

I go to the airport via my apartment and I collect spare contact lenses, a pair of glasses, and a change of clothes. I don’t have to take much. I can’t really think about what to pack anyway. The driver waits for me and, though there is traffic, we get to the airport in time for me to check in and sit and wait until it’s time to board.

I look around at the people waiting, like me, at the airline gate. There are people travelling in pairs talking to each other, others travelling alone, reading magazines or staring out the window at the parked planes. Perhaps some are afraid of flying, some are tired and going home to see their families, instead of going somewhere they don’t live and facing something unexpected. There’s a woman who is around my mother’s age. She looks perfectly healthy, and, the last time I saw her, Mom did as well. People in their seventies probably die all the time, but plenty of them don’t. I’d put money on this woman living at least another ten years. She is holding a magazine. Her reading glasses are propped on her nose but she’s not looking at the Reader’s Digest, she’s looking around her at the other passengers. Our eyes meet momentarily until I look away.

It is now that my mother’s death hits me. That not only will there be things that have to be done, but it’ll be up to me to do everything – but now, no one to tell me I’m doing it wrong. She always wanted me to move to live near her and I didn’t want to. We spent a lot of time together anyway, and I won’t consider that she might not have died if I’d been nearer.

When we’re called to stand in line in order of boarding assignment, I watch the same woman struggle with her carry-on bag until a young guy helps her. I’m a ‘D’ – two letters behind – so she boards before me and I pass her aisle seat on the way to find my own near the back of the plane. She is settling herself in and I see that she’s looking at her magazine again.

This is a direct flight, less than three hours. They probably won’t even bother with snacks. I find my seat and, though I’m squashed between two big college students, no one bothers me. I pretend to read the paper and cry silently.

My old lady has left the plane and is gone before I get off. Gus meets me, we hug awkwardly and he drives me straight to Mom’s house. When we get out of his car he apologises about the yard; the grass is overgrown. He explains that he didn’t get round to doing it in the morning as he’d planned. When there was no reply to the doorbell, he went around the back and looked in the windows because the dog was barking like crazy. He saw her in the den, on the floor. ‘I had to break a window and climb through. But it’s okay, I’ve secured it with some wood. You’ll be safe. When the paramedics got here they went in the front door.’

‘But it was too late?’

‘Yes,’ he says, and I imagine this elderly man peering in, and then having to climb through my mother’s ranch house window, finding her dead and then phoning for an ambulance. It must have been awful.

‘I’m glad it was you. She likes you.’

‘Well, your mom is something else.’ Then he corrects this. ‘Was,’ he says, ‘Terrible stuff when she was a kid, but God, she sure rose above it and had quite a life, didn’t she? She sure was something else.’

‘Sure,’ I echo. I don’t really know what he’s talking about, but it’s nice that he liked her so much.

We are at the front door. He pulls out her meagre bunch of keys with the rabbit foot keychain. The sight of the keys starts me off crying again, but Gus doesn’t notice. I follow him into the house. The lights are off. He switches them on and the house lights up. Everything is dingy and dirty; she can’t have dusted for months. It wasn’t like this when I was last here.

‘There’s no real mess,’ he says as I continue to follow him past the open door to the living room and through to the den. ‘It was all … well, no mess. Oh, and I took the dog to be boarded. They’ll keep it there until you decide what you want to do. Poor thing was barking and barking like mad, real upset he was, but I know you’re allergic. I didn’t want you ill, so I got them to come and collect it. Phone number is in the kitchen. She’d used them before. She told me.’ He points and I look around the room. ‘See, there’s no real mess. That’s a blessing.’

The allergy is a falsehood and his comments about this room, too, are untrue. There is no blood on the carpet, but the room is far from clean – there are used mugs and plates, and piles of papers on the surfaces. It is a total mess.

It turns out that I don’t have to decide on the funeral director. While he puts on some water for coffee Gus tells me he’s taken care of that as well. ‘I used this guy for the wife on a recommendation, and he’ll do you proud too, don’t you worry,’ he says. ‘Your mom,’ he says, ‘has already been moved to their premises.’

Although I’m grateful, I seem to have lost the power of speech. I keep expecting Mom to arrive home any moment and ask what the hell we’re doing because my mother is like a tornado – the biggest person in any situation. All my life she’s whipped in without warning and changed the landscape and I’ve repeatedly been swept up and along in whatever unpredictable direction she takes. Surely she wouldn’t leave me and little old Gus in charge. She never lets anyone else deal with the big stuff. This is some sort of mistake, or joke. ‘I can’t believe it,’ I say. ‘What is she thinking?’

‘I know.’ He nods slowly, then again more slowly, and finally, almost imperceptibly, he moves his head once more.

After another few minutes of sitting in silence completely still and looking at the space on the floor where the small couch and coffee table have been shoved aside – presumably where they attended to her – Gus leans forward to drag himself up to standing. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says softly, ‘Well, I’ll be getting on, and let you get some rest.’

I’m suddenly terrified at being here in her house alone. I try to sound conversational. I remember he’s a widower and that his wife’s name was Nora. ‘How long has Nora been gone? Tell me about her. I’m sorry I don’t know much about you, Gus.’

‘We were married for forty-three years. The Lord works in mysterious ways and he decided to take her before me.’ He pauses. ‘Listen, honey, do you want me to pray with you?’ He is asking me tentatively and when I shake my head he appears relieved. Then he says, ‘I can send my pastor around, if you like. Maybe tomorrow?’

‘Thanks,’ I say. He passes me the bent-up card from the funeral director and suggests I phone them in the morning to arrange an appointment. ‘Hard,’ he says, ‘being an only child. But at least there won’t be any arguments. Lots of stuff gets thrown up at these times. My kids were hardly speaking to each other after Nora passed. I had to referee.’

I desperately want him to stay. ‘I didn’t even know you had children.’

‘Not nearby. One in Maine and the other, the girl, in California.’

‘I should have lived closer to Mom.’

‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was always saying that kids doing their own thing was the best way, and your mom agreed.’ Now he says, again, that he’s really got to be going.

I try, ‘I guess you must miss your wife a lot? It must be lonely at times.’ Gus doesn’t bother to respond, and thinking of attempting to seduce this nice old man just to keep him in my dead mother’s house is as ridiculous an idea as any I’ve had this year. I should be ashamed of myself.

Finally, I decide I can’t kidnap him so there’s no avoiding it. I’ve got to let him go. I see him to the front door and we say goodbye and then I go down along the corridor to the room that she told me, whenever I came to visit, was mine. I don’t want to look into any of the other rooms. I don’t want to see this place without her in it because I will see her everywhere and she is nowhere now.

‘My’ room appears to have become Mom’s store room – there are stacks of boxes against the walls. The sheets on the bed seem clean. Even if they weren’t I wouldn’t care. I don’t wash. I don’t unpack anything. I strip off my clothes and climb beneath the covers, exhausted.

It’s still pitch black outside when I wake, just gone four a.m. Perhaps the time difference accounts for some of the sudden, dreadful surge of energy that sweeps through me now, but not for all of it. I have to do something. What I really need to be is Superman, flying around and around the world, turning back time to before she went and died.

2011

The Blind Sentinel

My mother has been broken in a car crash – a leg and ribs – and the two of us are in the guest bedroom where there is room for a mattress on the floor beside the bed. This is where I’m lying now, listening to the steady snoring above me and wondering when she will drive again, and whether she should drive again. I’ve told her she’ll feel better in the morning, but that’s probably a lie.

I think about the road kill I see by the side of the highway back home. ‘No one plans accidents,’ someone in the waiting area at the hospital said earlier. ‘They wouldn’t be accidents if they were planned.’

Dan, her neighbour opposite, was a big help. I could never have moved this mattress from ‘my room’ in here on my own. He was the one who suggested we sleep in the guest room, once he’d had a look at her overcrowded bedroom. Her last boyfriend supposedly slept in here when he was with her, but I won’t think about that now – I’ll never sleep if I think about Philip.