Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [73]
I am very pleased to see her. ‘I thought I’d get the washing done before you got here,’ is her very first line.
It is just what I would say myself.
Ann knows about my life. I sent her the DVD of Oranges as a kind of ‘This is what happened while you were out’. She feels distress at Winterson-world and my other mother’s flamboyant craziness upsets her. ‘I’m sorry I left you. I didn’t want to, you know that, don’t you? I had no money and nowhere to go and Pierre wouldn’t bring up another man’s child.’
I had thought as much … but I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem fair to Gary for his new half-sister just-arrived to start laying into his deceased dad.
I don’t want her to be upset. ‘I don’t mind,’ I said.
Later, when I relay this to Susie, she decides, when she can stop laughing, that this is the world’s most inadequate response. ‘I don’t mind? Just put me on the step until the van with the Gospel Tent comes by. I don’t mind!’
But, it’s true … I don’t mind. I certainly don’t blame her. I think she did the only thing she could do. I was her message in a bottle thrown overboard.
And I do know, really know, that Mrs W gave me what she could too – it was a dark gift but not a useless one.
My mother is straightforward and kind. This feels odd to me. A female parent is meant to be labyrinth-like and vengeful. I have been worried about declaring the girlfriend because Ann has already asked me about a husband and children. But the girlfriend must be declared.
‘Do you mean you don’t go with men?’ she says.
And I suppose that is what I mean.
‘I have no problem with that,’ says Ann.
‘Me neither,’ says Gary.
Hold on … that’s not what’s supposed to happen … what’s supposed to happen is as follows:
I am determined to tell Mrs Winterson that I am in love. I am no longer living at home but I would like her to understand how it is for me. I will be going to Oxford soon and enough time has passed from the happy/normal moment. That’s what I think, but I am learning that time is unreliable. Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. As Mrs Winterson lives in End Time, ordinary time doesn’t mean much to her. She is still indignant about the wrong crib.
She is polishing the coal scuttle with Brasso. She has already polished the flying ducks over the mantelpiece and the crocodile nutcracker. I have no idea how to begin so I open my mouth and I say, ‘I think I am always going to love women in the way that I do …’
At that instant her varicose vein in the top of her leg bursts. It goes up like a geezer and hits the ceiling in a crimson splash. I grab the Brasso cloths and I am trying to stem the flow … ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you …’ Then her leg erupts again.
By now she is lying backwards in the chair with her leg up on the half-polished coal scuttle. She is looking at the ceiling. She doesn’t say anything.
‘Mum … are you all right?’
‘We’ve just had that ceiling decorated.’
What would my life have been like if she had said, ‘Oh, your dad and I don’t have a problem with that’?
What would my life have been like if I had been with Ann? Would I have had a girlfriend? And what if I hadn’t had to fight for a girlfriend, fight for myself? I am not a big believer in the gay gene. Maybe I would have got married, had the kids, and then gone off to get the spray tan, etc.
I must have fallen silent, thinking about all this.
Ann says, ‘Was Mrs Winterson a latent lesbian?’
I choke on my tea. That is like Burn a Koran Day. There are some things you can’t even suggest. But now that it has been suggested I am overwhelmed by the awful thought. I am pretty sure she wasn’t a latent anything – it might have been better if some of her tendencies could have been latent. I suppose she might have been a latent murderer, what with the revolver in the duster drawer, etc., but I think it was all on the surface with her, just hopelessly scrambled. She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.
‘I just wondered,’ said Ann, ‘what with her saying,