by
Deborah Levy
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Mary Berry tastes a sponge cake. Paul Hollywood is breaking a slice apart with his big hands to test it is moist and feather-light. It seems the South African child is happy to concentrate on the pleasures of baking. Her middle-aged self watches this child warily. She does not want her to make trouble for her daughters and tell them to get some real problems when they complain about not having the right brand of trainers for school. She has never wanted her own children to have to be brave. Brave like the children on leaking boats fleeing wars. How many medals does a child need pinned on to her pyjamas? Nothing had taught her that having to summon an abundance of courage, far more than anyone should have to bear, is healthy for a child. She had witnessed the courage of the African children in her country of birth who lost their parents in the struggle for human rights like other children lost their milk teeth.
I had no regrets about not swimming back to the Big Silver, but I did regret not finding the white Egyptian cotton tablecloth on Christmas Day the year before. In the end I’d had to use a white paper tablecloth. It didn’t look that good, though I had suggested to my daughters that our table looked like the sort of French brasserie where the waiter writes our order on the corners of the paper cloth and then comes round later to add up the bill. They did not recall the sort of brasserie I had in mind and asked if I was going to charge our guests for Christmas lunch. This year the white Egyptian cotton cloth would be adorned with candles, red berries, holly and mistletoe. Their father would join us and I would invite the man who cried at the funeral and his new lover to join the table. And Celia, obviously, if she could fit me into her busy schedule. We decided to make cranberry as well as bread sauce, and swapped tips on how to make both. There was no way we could console each other for the undisclosed hurt that had contributed to sinking the boat, or for our lack of desire to swim back to it. Yet it was true that the societal mask of husband and wife, which we had worn for so long, had slipped, and we could see each other again. Perhaps what we saw was too human to bear. We stood up, put on our coats and kissed each other goodbye.
<3
(This is a family tradition that filters through the generations. We hate things, so we drink. We love things, so we drink. We have bad luck, so we drink. We fear good luck, so we drink. It has to do with a kind of sadness that is blood-born. My mother keeps a scrap of paper taped to her diary, a quote from Yeats that reads: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy,” and the first time I read that line it hummed over my mind like a diviner’s stick.)
lmao
My mother has told me a hundred times about the boy who sold his blood to buy her flowers. “He had a motorcycle,” she says. “He had no money, but he wanted to take me on a date so he went out and sold pints of his blood so he could do it.”
Pints.
“He was woozy at dinner,” she says. “He couldn’t eat at all. He seemed like he was going to faint. But he’d bought me flowers. Lilies. Isn’t that romantic?”
This story bothers me. It intrudes upon my father, and that’s part of it, but it’s also the way my mother wields those flowers as some false barometer of love.
As if her generation were worthy of blood and mine only backstage corn syrup.
My mother has asked me on every Valentine’s Day since I was fourteen, “Did he buy you flowers?”
“I told him not to,” I say.
“Why would you do that?” she says. “What kind of standards are you setting?”
“I don’t want that kind of relationship,” I say. “I don’t want flowers.”
I want to say: Stop pretending that the point is the lilies and not the blood.
“Have you talked to Goca Igrić? I think she’s who you’re looking for.”
Goca is also a journalist. She is Serb and chain-smokes Marlboro Reds and drinks several pots of Turkish coffee a day and was, at the time, under threat of death from all manner of political and criminal organizations after spending the war years defiantly speaking out against Slobodan Milošević.
I once asked my uncle when he fell in love with Goca.
Though they didn’t start dating till ages later, he said perhaps it was that first time they met, in a café, when he told her what he wanted to do and asked her to be his fixer. He said Goca paused after he’d described his batshit-crazy, terrible, likely lethal idea. She exhaled all the smoke from her lungs and said, “I don’t think I can not do this.”
“Maybe that was when I knew,” my uncle said.
It was the first thing my family ever taught me about love that felt as honest as blood. I can’t not do this.
Frank led me downstairs and as he took off my shirt I said, “Wait!”
I’d spotted a giant sepia photograph of two people holding a baby, framed over the fireplace, and I asked who those people were, because they were beautiful.
He said that they were his parents, and that the baby was him, but that when his parents got divorced his parents hated each other so much that neither of them could stand to look at the picture anymore, and were going throw it away, so he took it.
I put my shirt back on, because maybe everything just winds up terrible in the end and there’s no point at all and we couldn’t possibly fuck with all that tragedy watching over us, could we?
Frank took my shirt back off, but not unkindly.
My relationship with Bob lasted a full year longer than it should have because Barack Obama was running for president and had so raised our expectations of what redemptive things were possible that we thought perhaps he could save us from the petty, insidious ways we’d been hurting each other. We, too, could change.
Thanks, Obama.
chuckled at this
A year later you were both invited to the same wedding in a vineyard. You were smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon and he had quit everything, which, no matter what had passed between you, you acknowledged as a very good and impressive thing. The two of you walked down rows of grapevines and he asked you to let him make amends. You said amends were made. Check it off the list. Consider it done. You crushed a cigarette under your boot and ground it into the soil. You kissed the boy on the cheek when he drove you back to your shitty motel and you thought that was a pretty good way to say goodbye to someone forever.
The next morning the woman at the front desk said a man had come looking for you in the middle of the night, around four a.m., and she’d told him there was no one by your name staying there. You gave her back your key on its plastic ring and thanked her. You realized that this generous woman working the night shift at the goddamn Sea Breeze motel had more sense than you, and she’d met him for only two minutes.
ahhh dating the joy of dating a 12-stepper
You visit your hometown. You are driving aimlessly when you see the wall. You stop and slowly back up to the right-hand turn. It is built. There it is, all real and caked together with stones, and you feel a pang. You can get rid of everything else, the phone numbers and the photos, and still you will have these stories banging around inside you.
This is the first time you understand that, when people talk about moving on, they don’t mean that you won’t remember or bleed anymore. Just that you’ll go on to do other things. Meet other people. And yet, in the middle of a normal day, something as simple as a stone wall can still suddenly and invisibly destroy you. And because it’s too much to explain, most days, when this happens, you’ll just keep driving along. You won’t mention the wall or what it summons to anyone. And it’s this silence, more than anything else, that defines moving on.
What was most compelling to me was the way the movie allowed the three men to pitch Tracy versions of her future by pitching her versions of herself. My friend Olivia once perfectly described The PS as: “Men explain Katharine Hepburn to Katharine Hepburn,” and, indeed, this is the whole bag. She is described as a goddess, a queen, and a golden girl over the course of the movie, and we come to understand that if Tracy chooses one man over another, she will not only have a different life, she will be a different version of herself. She will become a different person. And so, in this way, Tracy can choose who she wants to be…insomuch as she can choose her husband. The range of options for her identity is limited to those presented by the men. And as a result, the options are less than ideal.
To conflate the choice of a romantic partner with the choice of one’s own identity might strike you as retrograde, but as a fourteen-year-old girl trying on various identities of my own, it made total sense. Who was I, anyway? I was looking for someone to tell me. I was used to a limited range of accessible identities being presented to me—this was how the other teen-girl things I liked worked: mood ring shades and astrology signs and nail-polish colors and birthstone earrings and personality quizzes. I accepted these cheap placeholders for any kind of realer, deeper understanding of who I was or might be. You never got to choose freely. All you could do was pick from the options presented to you. Why should love be any different?