Sweet Desserts Read online

  FOR MY FATHER.

  When sea-turtles manage to meet up,

  maybe once a year, they fuck for hours,

  shell clacking against shell on the sand.

  Contents

  Wanderlust

  The Heart Operation

  Fran

  Out went the Candle, and we were Left Darkling

  Suzy

  Reason not the Need

  Suspended Animation

  Eros vs. Thanatos

  Gwendoline and Gertrude

  Banana Split

  A Winter Wedding

  Tendresse

  Tricycle …

  … Thorns …

  … Bicycle

  Wine, A Record-Player, and Lily

  The Struggle

  Satellite Connection

  Continental Drift

  My New Found Land

  Found Objects

  Artificial Flavors

  Wind

  My Vegetable Love

  Not so Fast

  Shell Clacking Against Shell

  The Dull, Stale, Tired Bed

  Marzipan Fruits

  The Oldest Hath Borne Most

  Nothing will Come of Nothing: Speak Again

  Christmas Mourning

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Wanderlust

  Champaign-Urbana, Illinois 1956

  A gray wooden house with diamond window-panes in some places stands amid an endless array of suburban dwellings, each unique in its way but conforming to certain common principles: porches, backyards, front-yards, attics, basements, buttercups. The sidewalks wind around old oak trees, and there is room between the houses and their foundations for the occasional raccoon to live, and die. It is 92° Fahrenheit.

  In the shade of this particular porch, a heavily pregnant woman lies sweating on a swinging seat. A little girl with four dimples on each hand clambers up from the floor to stand beside the woman’s belly.

  ‘What’s you doing?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m trying to sleep,’ says her mother. The little girl sits down again, encircled by nonplussed toys, and crosses her legs. Minutes pass, and a few bugs. With a glance towards the prostrate form, the girl gets up and opens the screen door. Her black-and-white saddle shoes negotiate the wooden steps one at a time, and she is warmly embraced by the sun.

  All through that summer before her sister’s birth, as if she could take a hint, Franny was continually getting lost. She would march in straight lines through neighbors’ backyards, or sneak guiltily through their back-doors. She returned, or was returned, clutching dubious trophies of her wanderings – a toy or cookie of some kind.

  In the upstairs bathroom of the big white house across the street, Franny located the medicine cabinet. She dumped all of its pills into the bathtub, to watch the colors collide, and was taken to the hospital to have her empty stomach pumped.

  Another time, Franny walked right past a large woman gabbing on the phone and went upstairs to a child’s room where she discovered a doll’s house that contained elaborate imitation food. Franny propelled all the hors d’oeuvres from one tray into the thick white carpet, and even managed to hide a tiny bucket of watermelon-on-ice in her pocket before being firmly escorted home.

  A household on the next block found its collection of dolls’ shoes suddenly depleted one day – thirty-six pairs gone – while another family noticed strange footprints around their paddling pool and never saw their son’s spinning beeno hat again.

  Hot, pregnant and shy, Franny’s mother trudged down the back alley, hoping that Franny hadn’t crossed a street. She asked stunning, sunning women if they’d seen her plumpety child go by, and received cool, blank looks administered from behind dark glasses. Through the combined effects of heat and humiliation, she began to view Franny with some bitterness, and when she awoke one day to the sound of Franny rummaging around in the refrigerator, she decided to lock her in her room at nap-time. The two wept in their separate enclaves, absorbing the fact that Franny had become an enemy.

  So it was with some dismay that Franny witnessed in mid-October the arrival on this scene of a sibling notable for her placidity. Franny’s mother abruptly deserted the battle-ground they’d created together and devoted herself to the stranger, whose curly hair won her Honorable Mention in a baby contest for which Franny hadn’t even been entered. Suzy’s door was left open at nap-time.

  Franny stopped talking. With Suzy satisfyingly ignored in Franny’s old baby carriage, the whole family trooped off to consult doctors about Fran’s Retarded Speech Development. As a result, her father started reading to her and talking to her more. Fran wet the bed almost every night. Her father told her he too had wet the bed as a child; his mother hung the stained sheets out of his window so the neighbors would know (an old-world cure). Fran sat on his lap, and he confided in this small, wet, troubled person.

  The following list refers to recent reports which we hope you have found interesting. How interesting have you found, or do you expect to find, each report?

  The Heart Operation

  Suzy was a sickly child (in whom the family doctor eventually noticed an operable heart defect), a quality which endeared her to her mother while further alienating Fran. Suzy had to rest on the short trip to the grocery store: first, she would start to drop behind, then she would have to sit down on the curb, panting. She rode in her stroller as long as she could still fit into it.

  She also rode a tricycle until peer-group pressure (Fran’s scorn) forced her to abandon it. Suzy learned to ride a bike at lunchtime every day for two weeks, when no other children were outdoors. When her efforts landed her in a rose-bush, her mother plucked the thorns from her thigh.

  Where physical stamina wasn’t involved, Suzy proved to be extremely conservative. She held tentative WASPish prejudices common in the neighborhood, such as her deep ignorance of the working class and other races (did they too love?). She envied TV children their gentile names, toys, foods, their inevitable glasses of milk and geometrical hunks of chocolate cake after school. Melissa from two doors down was in this mould: not only did her mother sport the most perpetual tan on the block, but her father was in advertizing. Melissa always had a sample of whatever toy or soft drink he was currently popularizing.

  It was Melissa who explained politics to Suzy early on: the Republicans like trees and animals and the countryside, the Democrats like cities and factories and pollution. Melissa was a Republican, and a Presbyterian – both unusually long words in her vocabulary. Inspired by her, though without Melissa’s knowledge, Suzy stole a silver St Christopher pendant from Melissa’s sister’s jewelry-box, and thus equipped, pursued a phase of clandestine Christian fervor. She prayed in bed every night that the Lord should take her soul if she died before she awoke (an odd bargain, she always thought). But Fran managed to find the weak spot in Suzy’s piety. When Fran yelled once, ‘Goddam you, Suzy!’, Suzy replied in kind and promptly excommunicated herself.

  The Schwarz family’s only official Sunday ritual was making pancakes. They followed Irma Rombauer’s instructions, except that Fran and Suzy always fought over who got to make the well in the sifted ingredients. Their father poured the egg mixture into this well (he called eggs ‘aigues’ for some reason). Then Fran and/or Suzy stirred it up, neverminding the lumps. Suzy’s only complaint on Sundays was that the orange juice had lumps in it too, being freshly squeezed.

  Suzy liked to be bored by TV shows, first by Mr Green Jeans and Captain Kangaroo in the morning before school, and then by Bozo the Clown when she came home for lunch. The lunch itself left something to be desired. They always had Chicken Noodle Soup (Fran’s favorite) and Tuna Fish sandwiches (ditto). Suzy would have preferred more Kool-Aid, or Haw
aiian Punch, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. But she didn’t care what other children got after ice-skating – she and Fran always had hot chocolate with marshmallows floating on top, while Samson et Dalila crackled on the record-player.

  Dalila:

  Réponds, réponds à ma tendresse!

  Verse-moi, verse-moi l’ivresse!

  Samson:

  Dalila! Dalila! je t’aime!

  At such times, Suzy would refrain from asking her mother to put on Petula Clark singing ‘Downtown’, and concentrate instead on the melting process taking place in her marshmallows.

  The mixture should be of medium stiff consistency, and flavoured with lemon. Pipe out on wafer paper oval shapes, dust over with sugar, make an impression down centre and bake.

  Fran taught Suzy how to balance a book on her head, masturbate, scramble eggs, and bite her toenails. She despised Suzy’s choice in friends, and despised her for tagging along with hers, but usually let her in the end. Suzy in turn was secretly protective of Fran, passionately resenting all ill treatment of her older sister. But Fran was the most noble: when Suzy spent her eighth Halloween in the hospital having the hole in her heart repaired, Fran collected an extra bag of candy for her, explaining the sorrowful situation at every doorway, and didn’t eat Suzy’s even when she’d finished her own.

  Fran was good at reading, while Suzy fell behind and had to be coached by her father on Saturday afternoons, tears blurring one Aesop’s fable after another – ‘Hard work brings prosperity.’ Fran had a guinea pig, Suzy had mice: she had to have more than one, since guinea pigs are bigger than mice. Many of Fran’s clothes were red; an equivalent number of Suzy’s were blue, their mother’s favorite color.

  Fran always won their arguments, by physical force if necessary, unless Suzy tattle-taled, a habit Fran despised. Fran also decided on their activities, which included picnics, bike-hikes, and dramatizations of their dreams. They formed a secretive anarchistic organization called the T.N.T. Club with Melissa, and published a neighborhood newspaper at least twice.

  They memorized subversive poetry:

  Boodleheimer, boodleheimer,

  CLAP, CLAP, CLAP!

  Boodleheimer, boodleheimer,

  CLAP, CLAP, CLAP!

  The more you boodle, the less you heimer.

  The more you heimer, the less you boodle.

  Boodleheimer, boodleheimer,

  CLAP, CLAP, CLAP!

  When they wrote a book together about a practical, well-behaved sister, and a flamboyant, extravagant one, Fran wanted to draw all the pictures of the dull specimen, having observed one for so long. Suzy was supposed to draw the fun one. Likewise, the dull sister’s possessions, and the fun one’s.

  Gwendoline is an impractical child. An impractical child is a child who does not always choose the best thing for his or her health. Sometimes the thing he or she does is silly or not good and sometimes the results are expensive. But sometimes as you will find out in this book, the impractical child does the right thing.

  Gertrude is a practical child. She usually tries to be good and inexpensive. She tries to do the right thing for her health, minds her manners and tries not to be silly. She wears plain clothes and does not dress up as fancily as Gwendoline. But sometimes, as you will find out in this book, Gertrude does the wrong thing.

  They sent Gwendoline and Gertrude to a publisher who returned it with a note that Fran found offensive and Suzy considered reasonable.

  One day when they were all sitting on the front porch, Fran and a friend of hers asked Suzy how babies are made – they said they wanted to make sure she had it right. Suzy knew by now that the version offered by Melissa’s mother, that babies are conceived somehow while the parents are asleep, wouldn’t do, but she remained somewhat hazy on the subject.

  ‘The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina,’ she ventured, immediately embarrassed by her own choice of latinate words.

  ‘Yeah, and then what?’

  ‘Well, then, then he pees in her?’

  Fran and Co. laughed and laughed, but didn’t suggest any alternative.

  PROBLEM:

  Fran’s Chinese spoon, red flowers winding all along its stem, sits broken in a kitchen drawer for over a year.

  Suzy finds it, glues it together, and calls it hers.

  Fran reclaims it and eats Chicken Noodle Soup with it.

  QUESTION:

  Whose spoon is it?

  Dear Mommy,

  I am running

  away. I hope

  you don’t mind

  me taking a sandwich.

  love, Suzy

  P.S. Please

  take care

  of my mice.

  Fran found her four blocks away, holding her weekend bag with its pyjamas and sandwich, wondering where to go, since she had already reached the boundary of her usual zone.

  Fran

  Bone two large eels, fill them with diced truffles. Wrap in a piece of muslin and tie with string. Cook in wine and well-flavoured fish stock. Drain, unwrap, and cool under a press.

  Wivenhoe, Essex, England 1983

  ‘Why am I wasting my time with this person?’ thought Fran, as she surveyed the floral arrangement Rod had made of the beer coasters around the central tin ashtray. He was presenting his entranced look and recounting once again his experience of seeing a bear in the Rocky Mountains one Christmas day. His eyes focused momentarily on obscure corners of the room.

  ‘Christmas morning! and there I was, after a night holed up in the snow, just crawling onto my feet when suddenly, out of nowhere, or so it seemed –’

  ‘Came a bear,’ assisted Fran.

  ‘Yeah!’ Pause for an attractive bout of wistful eye-sparkling.

  ‘You want another drink?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Oh sure, hon.’

  Apart from the pressing fact that the guy resembled a Greek – or at least an American – god, with his brown locks, reddish stubble, and hamburger-fed flesh, what the hell was she doing with Rod McMead? Fran got up before he could start another sentence, and went to order the drinks, distracting herself with thoughts of peanuts and sex. The peanuts they shared out immediately. These stirred in Rod a memory of the trip he’d taken with his ex-wife to the Pyramids, where they’d eaten honeyed peanut pastries, ridden on camels, and avoided lettuce. This in turn led him on to fishing in the Lake District, a story Fran hadn’t actually heard before, but she didn’t encourage him to tell it: she felt a need to conserve fresh data for the sake of future evenings.

  At last, the requisite drinks and anecdotes swallowed, they headed back to Fran’s flat, with its unusually full-sized fridge, its defunct greenhouse, and its lack of Central Heating. Fran threw two new brown envelopes onto the window-sill with all the other unopened business mail, and Rod began his exercise regime: fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, twenty-five wall-jumps. Wall-jumps were supposedly good for the bad back which periodically laid Rod flat (a mysterious injury dating from the time of his first marriage). Late at night, in pleasanter weather, Rod liked to run very fast up and down the hill outside, imagining a confirmatory trail of steam following him as he sped this way and that.

  After his work-out, Rod poked his head around her bedroom door, in order to display the enticing juxtaposition of his glittering muscles and his nonchalance – before tripping off to have a bath. Fran had once been impressed by all this.

  Reluctant to be so thoroughly on show herself, she was in bed by the time he returned, soil-free. Then, craving the final physical challenge of the day, Rod plopped down on top of her, crushing her ribs in the now familiar way. He then pursued his method of fucking which involved no foot or eye contact (for different impenetrable reasons). As she fingered the perfectly indented buttocks, Fran once again acknowledged that he was a great catch.

  What thing do you think Gwendoline likes best and what thing do you think Gertrude likes best?

  What thing do you like best?

  She struggled out from under a he
avy arm at 5.58, by Rod’s watch, which had glowed in her face all night. She made strong coffee in her espresso machine, cappucinoed some milk with the somewhat intimidating milk-steamer Suzy had given her, dolloped morello cherry jam and Philadelphia Cream Cheese on a toasted blueberry muffin, and had breakfast in the dining section of her living-room. She added this plate and cup to the accumulated chaos in the sink, went to the bathroom, threw up, brushed her teeth, washed her hair, and fuddled around looking for something to wear.

  Guy goes to the doctor. ‘Doc, you gotta help me. I ain’t feelin’ so good. Somehow ain’t got no energy.’

  The doctor examines him but doesn’t find anything obviously wrong, so he says, ‘Suppose you tell me exactly what you do, from the minute you get up in the morning to when you go to bed at night.’

  ‘Sure thing, doc. Well, let’s see. I get outa bed, put on some slippers, go into the bathroom, have a pee, throw up, wash my face, brush my –’

  ‘Wait a minute there! Could you just repeat that for me please?’

  ‘Okay. Well, I get up, I get my slippers on, I go have a pee, I throw up, I –’

  ‘You throw up?! Every morning?!’

  ‘Sure. Doesn’t everybody?’

  Fran had more coffee with Rod later, as she watched him shave his big American jaw. His inane self-confidence thrilled her in the mornings. She imagined him standing beside a big hot car on a sunset strip, the predominant colors purple and tan with a dash of bright yellow. A HoJo, or maybe a jojoba, in the background. And a bee-hived blonde or red-head just visible behind the windscreen.

  He always left for work early: with or without back trouble, Rod had an American’s attitude to the rigors of academic life. He’d taught classes at 8.00 a.m. in Texas. And at Essex, he’d once lectured from a stretcher on Piranesi. His students, initially delighted, soon collapsed with him into a torpor which was not dispelled by the slides of dizzying prison chambers Rod had selected.

  Fran wasn’t going into the university that day. She had to work on an article about signs of violence in art, for D.K. Magazine (short for ‘Deliberate Kaprice’). She got down to it as soon as Rod had left, typing fast. Once engrossed, Fran was in another world, full of a sense of her own power. She wanted her readers to have to hold on to their seats, and their hats. She began by quoting King Lear at them: