The Yummy Mummy (6 page)

“What’s that in your hand?” Mum asks, an octave above casual inquiry. “Writing shopping lists now? There I was thinking you were a lost cause.”

“Very funny.” I quickly shove the list into my jeans pocket.

“Where have you been?”

“Oh, a bit of shopping, a walk.”

Mum sweeps me up and down, eyes like dusters. “Well, that can only be a good thing.” She peers into the pram and tickles Evie under the chin. Evie looks up adoringly, blue eyes unblinking.

Thud, thud.
Joe, looking harassed. “Did you meet the girls? Too early for Alice to get you drunk, I suppose?”

“Hilarious,” I say.

Mum scans our conversation for a window. Finding none, she dissolves over Evie. “Can I?”

“Of course.” It’s only because Joe is in the room that she asks for permission to pick up Evie. Mum hugs her granddaughter over her shoulder, sinks her nose into the folds of her fat damp neck, and inhales deeply. Evie’s womb-fresh skin makes my mother look ancient, the tendons in her neck like violin strings, hands meat-red and rough. Old person’s hands. They remind me of the unimaginable, Mum dying, lying still on a slab. I try to shake the image from my mind. But it sticks.

“You all right, love?”

“A bit tired.”

“And what about Evie? Coocchi!” She tickles Evie under her chin. “My little sugarplum, are you tired yet? Being so little in this big wide world?”

I roll my eyes at Joe, who daren’t roll his back in case Mum catches him. He still has that polite new-boyfriend thing going on, even though we’ve been together almost two years. He makes Mum tea. He drives her home. He listens to her talk about garden centers and the problems of growing foxglove in clay soil. He commiserates with her that her two sons hardly ever phone and they live in Australia and it’s very difficult to get the timing right on the phone calls because they surf such a lot and the weather is better and the flights are expensive but still she wishes they’d make more journeys over and what a shame it is that flying doesn’t agree with her. Or surfing. She tried it once but found it terrifying, convinced she’d end up in the jaws of a great white and doesn’t understand the hold it has over her baby boys. She suspects marijuana might have something to do with it.

Joe goes into the kitchen to make tea. Reassuring domestic clatter: tap running, the click of a kettle lid, thud of Joe’s feet. I check the answering machine—any contact from the parallel universe?—when Mum’s distinctive odor (Estee Lauder’s Beautiful, bathroom cleaner) announces itself behind me.

“Amy,” she whispers sharply. “Your hair.”

“What about my hair?”

“It looks like it hasn’t encountered a hairbrush for five years.”

Five days actually. “Rushed off my feet.”

“That’s what it’s like with a baby,” she sermonizes slowly. “That’s what it’s going to be like for the rest of your
life
.” Christ. “I know you found her birth hard, love.” Thanks for that gentle reminder. “Admittedly, all the hormones can make a woman a bit loopy for a while, nothing to be ashamed of. But Evie is . . . how old is she? Yes, six months now. So it’s time for you to start pulling yourself together.” She pats me on the hand and gives me a solemn look. “Think about Joe.”

“Joe? Mum, what
are
you talking about?”

“Men expect certain . . . standards.” She looks at Evie—ally in waiting—for approval. “They need reassurance.”

“Reassurance? What has that got to do with my hair?”

“They need to know that the mother of their child isn’t turning into a . . .” Here it comes. “. . . what’s the word?” I steel myself. “A frump.”

A frump!

“We don’t live in Greece, where it’s acceptable for girls to start out so pretty and then get married and eat all that feta and before you know it they’re walking around in all that black, size eighteens.”

“The women in black are widows, Mum.”

“Comfort-eating, obviously.”

“Oh Mum . . .” Sometimes I find it astonishing that we share genetic material.

“Just make yourself a bit more presentable, that’s all I’m saying. A bit of red lipstick, a good dab of rouge . . .”

“So unless I make up like Zsa Zsa Gabor, he’s off, is he?”

“Don’t be smart. And don’t take Joe for granted, because even the good ones go off the boil a bit if they’re not looked after.”

He’s already boiled over! I want to scream. It’s happened, the worst has already happened! So there is no point in trying. Not for him, anyway. I compose myself and play the well-rehearsed bickering-daughter role. “This is like some awful
Victorian Good Wives Handbook.
Will you please get off my case?”

“Case? What case? That’s such a silly expression.”

“Mum!”
I shout, exasperated.

Silenced, wondering whether she’s gone too far, Mum sits heavily down on the sofa, releasing a puff of cushion-trapped air. She dangles Evie on her knee for solace. For the first time this year, she’s not wearing stockings. Varicose veins root up her legs into the two dark tunnels of her neat, pressed, wide-legged beige slacks, the kind that sit too high on the waist. It’s a shame. She always had such fabulous legs.

One of my favorite things is a black-and-white photograph of Mum, taken in 1962, Ilfracombe, Devon. Her normally neat brown waves are being blown all round her face by the wind. She’s trying to smooth them with her hands and is laughing at my dad (who is behind the camera) because she’s losing the battle. Her floral dress is pressed against her body by the wind so that you can see her pointy bra, her tummy, her pubis bone, the gap between her thighs. She’s never liked the picture, thinks she looks too messy. But Dad always loved it. He once told me, when I was about eight, “This is the Jean that I love the most.” Hearing him call her Jean, not “your mother,” felt almost rudely intimate and rather puzzling. Were there many Jeans hidden inside Mummy, like Russian dolls? For me there was always just one Mummy, sometimes short-tempered, often too intense, but always loving, and who, when I hid under her skirt and grabbed her legs or curled into her lap, smelled unlike anyone else, yeasty and salty, like Marmite.

“Euch!” Evie’s body ricochets with the force of her burp. Mum looks at her in rapture and strokes the curve of her cheek. Is that how she stroked me? Hard to imagine now. It seems we love our children with the most ferocity when they are most vulnerable. Over the years that intense love must dilute like an overdunked tea bag.

“Wheee!” She bounces Evie up and down on her knee, freezing me out now. I am about to say something conciliatory when
whooom!
I get one of those disturbing thoughts that flap into my head like dirty low-flying pigeons. Me . . . traveling down the red slimy tunnel of Mum’s vagina, my head crowning, my nose, ears, screwed-up eyes, sliding into the forty-watt light of my parents’ bedroom. Ugh. Hard to believe in the stork now.

Mum looks up and stares at me, eyes pinkish and watery. She looks like she might be about to cry. “I don’t mean to make you angry.”

It’s worse when she apologizes. I am crucified with guilt. “It’s fine.”

“I worry. You know why, don’t you?”

“That was different.”

“Perhaps. But he did leave.”

Silently. I saw him before I went to bed. “Good night, doll,” Dad said, and kissed me on my forehead, in between the eyes. I imagined there would be a kiss imprint there forever afterward, like one of those spots the Indian lady who ran the corner shop had. The next morning he was gone. Not just gone to work. But gone, gone. The hardware of Daddy’s existence—his four good suits, cracked brown brogues, and drill kit—went, too. I was nine. Mum served up our breakfast the next morning without saying much. It looked like she’d lined her eyes with red crayon. Later, while I was at school, she had all her long brown hair butchered off by Julie at A Cut Above. I’d never seen her with short hair before. Soon, the weight began to drop off, too. She started wearing red-rose lipstick. She looked like someone else, thinner, smarter, not my mummy. And for some time she acted like someone else, quieter and more distant. Another Jean.

We didn’t see Dad again for three months. A wet Tuesday in March. Mum took us to the swings, unable to take her eyes away from the familiar figure in the long gray coat who strode toward us, always so sure of himself. He hugged me into the damp scratchiness of the coat’s flannel. Then he looked at Mum and said, Jean? Like he was asking a secret question only adults could understand. Mum shook her head and walked quickly away, leaving us careering giddily round and round the perilous seventies playground. We didn’t know then but that “Dad time” had to keep us going for a while.

“He did leave. But you cannot blame yourself, Mum. He was sleeping with that woman in the ukulele group . . .”

“She couldn’t even play properly.” This still gives her a sly kick of triumph.

“And she had terrible hair. Like a Brillo pad.”

Mum laughs, crow’s feet folding like a fan. “One thing I never slacked on. My mother, bless her, taught me to brush it a hundred times before bed. It’s a miracle I didn’t brush it all out, looking back. But still . . .” Long pause. “It’s easy to get complacent.”

“Yes, let’s not forget those nighties.” Huge voluminous floral winceyette marquees with lacy Jane Austen necklines. She wears washable “satin” now.

“Ooo, Amy! My nighties were lovely!” She laughs, slaps me playfully on the knee. “One day
you
will discover the joys of wearing a nice loose nightie.”

“Then Joe really will have good reason to leave.”

Joe appears with tea and chocolate biscuits. “And what will be good reason to leave?” he asks, smiling.

Six

I LIKE TELEPHONES BECAUSE THE PERSON ON THE OTHER
end can’t see what you look like. “Alice, it’s me.”

“Who’s me?”

“Sorry, Amy.”

“Amy! Hi! How’s it going?” Alice sounds a bit distracted, like she might be watching telly or painting her nails.

“Not that great, actually. Alice . . .” I take a deep breath and unintentionally blow it out loudly into the telephone receiver. “Alice, I was wondering. Do you remember what you said about um . . . you called it Project Amy or something?” This is embarrassing.

“Project what?”

“Er, Amy. We chatted about it after the night-of-the-breast-pad.”

Silence for a few painful moments. Then rustling. It sounds like she’s shooing someone away. “Ah! Project Amy! Of course. I knew you’d come round.”

“My mother’s just accused me of being a frump.” There is a shocked silence. Perhaps not everyone has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother.

Alice, rather more hesitant than I’d hoped, says, “Er, you’re not a frump.”

I breathe a sigh of relief and feel myself sinking back into the comfort zone of drawstring waists. “But, well, put it like this.” Alice pauses, choosing her words carefully. “You don’t exactly make the best of yourself.”

“No?”

“No,” she says firmly. “You really don’t, Amy.”

“But I have no time, Alice. When am I meant to beautify myself? Between feeds? At four A.M. when she’s roaring in the dawn chorus? It’s hard enough to take a shower, for God’s sake.”

“It’s a question of priorities.”

“Exactly. Which is why, well, I’ve let things slide. I always imagined feeding Evie was more important.”

“Oh rubbish!” laughs Alice. “What could be more important than liking what you see in the mirror?”

I laugh nervously and hope she’s joking. “Er, Alice, at the risk of appearing like a complete twit, I’ve written a list.”

“A list? What sort of list?” I hear her swallow a scoff.

“A list of everything that is wrong with me. Well, not everything. The main bits, hair, belly . . . I know, I sound like a neurotic freak.”

Alice snorts with laughter. “Only you would write a list!”

“Unfortunately, it’s not a short list.”

“No?” I can hear her voice shaking with suppressed laughter. I’m sure there’s someone else there.

“No, Alice, I suspect I need a whole body transplant, but I’m unsure where to start.”

“This phone call is a good place.”

“Because you know what? I’ve had enough of being invisible.”

“Invisible? Silly. Of course I’ll help. I’d love to. Project Amy! We’ll turn you from downtrodden mother into a glamazon. Promise!” She bites into something loud and crunchy. It sounds like a locust eating crops on a wildlife documentary.

“I don’t care about being a glamazon, I just want to look a bit less crappy, a little more like how I used to, a bit less budget retailer discount bin, if you know what I mean.”

A pause. More distracted crunching. “Hey, you know what? There’s no point doing this halfheartedly. We’re going to turn you into a sexpot! We’ll need some money, though. . . .”

“We haven’t got much spare cash at the moment,” I say. Alice sighs, disappointed. I want to appease her. And my thigh is stretching the orange stitching on my jeans. “But I’m sure I can dig into a few savings.”

“New jeans, new hair,” chirps Alice. “Oh, we’re going to have such fun.”

“It’s more than that.”

“Gosh, you do sound serious.”

“I need to sort myself out.”

“O-kay.” Alice knows I mean much more than a haircut. She’s already guessed I’m unhappy.

“I need a plan, my confidence back.” No, I won’t let the past crush me down into frumpdom. If Joe wants a safe dowdy hausfrau, he’s not going to get it. And if he did ever leave, which he probably will, like Dad, like most men, then at least if I’m a bit less of a fright I’d have a minute chance of finding someone else, one day, perhaps.

“Great, Amy. We’re moving forward. You around next week?” she asks slightly impatiently, like she needs to clear the phone.

“I think so.” I’m always around. Alice dictates where and when our meetings take place. They invariably mean me coming to her. This would irritate me more if she weren’t quite so beautiful. She’s somehow exempt from normal social rules.

“We’ll draw up an action plan!” She munches again. “Bye, honey.”

“Bye, Alice.”

I put down the phone and skim through the
B
s—banks, builders, and breast-feeding helplines—in my ancient Filofax for a beauty salon number. The future starts here! Time to harvest the legs. Ah, Klass Beauty. I dial, but just as I’m about to book, Evie explodes, the scream tunneling into my ears, then screeching through my entire body like a braking train on a track. I tell the receptionist I’ll phone back. Evie has needs that must be met. Like right now. Legs must wait. My life is ruled by someone weighing twenty pounds with no teeth.