Cake or Death (2 page)

But the slogans don’t work any more. Stephen Fry once wrote that just as they have laugh tracks on television comedies, so should they have weeping tracks on the news. And he wrote that during the
first
Gulf War and he hadn’t even had his nervous breakdown, which culminated in him sitting in a car in Bruges contemplating the other use for an exhaust pipe.

There isn’t anything on the news to cheer anyone. One response would be to stop watching it, but look what happened to the United States when the citizens of that huge once-rich-now-debtful-I-just-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself country stopped paying attention. The place exploded, then imploded, and bits started falling off, like New Orleans soon followed by the rest of Louisiana. In 2004, the nadir was reached after George W. Bush’s second alleged election. An American student was reduced to setting up a website called
sorryeverybody.com
and stacks of smart Americans rigid with shock and coated with pessimism sent in pictures of themselves holding up signs apologizing to the world.

I cried as I watched it online, but by 2004 I was crying pretty easily.

The trough of melancholy in which we live now is a shallow grave. My husband, whom we shall call S., is British and doesn’t understand the concept of depression. Every day spent outside his homeland is a holiday, according to him. When I tell him how sad I am, he asks why. Foolishly, I tell him. There’s an awful phrase about how you have to “take things on board,” meaning hear them and live with them. Clearly, I cannot take things on
board. Because I tell S. that these men called the Janjaweed are kidnapping children in the Sudan and …

S. is humane. He understands the wrongness of the Janjaweed but does not grasp why I am devastated by the wrongdoing of mad people in a faraway country not only of which I know nothing but that I can’t even pick out of an atlas. We know this because he has brought an atlas into the bedroom where I am curled.

“You know that song ‘Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic’?” he says. I nod, but don’t rise to this as I know he hates Sting. Presumably because Sting is a Brit who still finds a reason to live in Britain and is a prat and poseur. “If you were writing that song,” he says, “it would go,
‘Every little thing you do is rubbish.’”

He laughs. I don’t.

I think I know why we are still conjoined. We couldn’t be more different. I like this. I wish I were him. We were watching the Springsteen tribute to Pete Seeger the other day and he, who loathes hip hop, said, “The progress of American music—from Hoedown to Down, ho.” And he sat there grinning at his own cleverness. I wish I could come up with lines like that. But I am gloomy, and somehow I admire the fact that my deep gloom is a source of amusement to him. (On the other hand, he doesn’t understand North American ethical laxity. The other day in a seafood restaurant, he actually said to me, “Why did you order that if you weren’t going to finish it?” Seriously. “I guess it just worked out that way,” I said.)

Anything can set me off. In 2004, I felt so desperately sorry for Blue State Americans, those nice people, a credit
to a nation that was about to go all excremental. And there’s no going back, they realized that, and on that website, they sent out telegrams of shame and sorrow, a student dorm arranging their apology in the form of track shoes, people’s babies holding up signs (I normally disapprove of this—your baby has no opinions on stem cells, lady—but those babies were going to grow up with the consequences). You poor kid. Some blue-eyed Democrat guy in Texas looked grim, saying he had voted behind enemy lines, and he might as well have been a Resistance fighter in France in the Second World War, sending a coded message on his little radio hidden in a baguette.

An American tourist in Canada visiting what looked like Lake Louise wrote “I’m sorry you have to live next door to us” and my face got all crumply and wet, like a sodden piece of paper towel. Then Canadians accidentally voted a bit too right-wingly and I felt sorry for that young woman in retrospect. She no longer had us as her hideout. We were Narnia full of goofballs, and suddenly we were mean goofballs with bellies crawling with complaints.

You really do need a sound FX machine for the news now. The soundtrack for
Deliverance
could play whenever an Abu Ghraib story came up. Now those toothless backwoods boys had jobs. Cue a needle-like scream for Madeleine Albright smugging about how the deaths of half a million Iraqi children under UN sanctions were fine with her, and a chunky spew for any Scientologist. Cue the nightmare zither from
The Third Man
while watching Tony Blair’s crusty little teeth growing down to
his toes as he told his lies from the pulpit. Or maybe everyone would be automatically naked and you could comfort yourself with how bad all forked animals looked compared to the pelted ones they were driving out of existence.

But these would be panaceas, mere toys. I didn’t need that. I needed something stronger than religion. It was a craving for order. Now I know what you’re thinking—this is where Germany ran into trouble in the 1930s—but I didn’t mean public order. I meant personal order. Something much more benign and mine own.

I became Mrs. Tittlemouse. Beatrix Potter doesn’t rate highly as literature by people who judge such things, but they are wrong. She is heaven in a sponge mop. I read her as a child and to this day love her paintings, her stories, her home-boiling of squirrels so her watercolours could be anatomically exact. Beatrix Potter made domesticity desirable.

All right, she didn’t, but she domesticated me. Personal order has become my badge and the only thing that really works for depression.

I’m not saying it makes you un-depressed. You’re still hideously depressed but you’re a hideously depressed person who has ironed all her sheets and made a fine bed with hospital corners and highly placed blankets with a generous chin of linen. It’s nothing to sneer at. It’s an accomplishment and depressed people don’t have many of those.

Neither do cheerful people these days (or is that just me and my green unhealthy glow of gloom?).

My side of the street has been cleared of litter by my own hands, and I don’t care if it looks odd. I think it looks … tidy. I would have said it looked Dutch, but the Dutch went a bit racist recently so the Keukenhof will have to bloom this spring without me. Very few places on the planet left to visit with a clear conscience, I note.

Tidiness didn’t register with me when I was young. It doesn’t register with adults now. For instance, I doubt smokers can be trained to think of cigarette butts as litter even though the orange stubs lie stained, flattened and oddly curled outside the bus shelter like a covey of maggots. The butts, I mean. In a smoker’s mind, the ciggie is over and the butt does not rate as an object.

I understand this. I leave the butts where they lie. But when I walk up my street to the Chinese restaurant with its excellent free wings with orders over $30 or to the pharmacy with those nice sensible people in their white smocks giving me pretty little pills for what ails me, I pick up litter for the bin at the end of the road. Not for houses with Conservative signs—they will rely on market forces—but everyone else can wonder where that rotting pack of McDonald’s fries that sat in the front lavender bed for a month disappeared to. Not down their dog’s throat but into the garbage.

I vacuum with my German-made Miele. It has a HEPA filter which means that what goes in stays in. I use it for dusting too, although I sometimes forget to turn the suckage down and the thing eats badly chosen paint from the radiator covers (you need a primer if you use latex over oil, Dodgy Bros. Painters). Then I look at the carpet
and it is fleckless. I am not fleckless. I am depressed. But you can’t quarrel with a blank-faced expanse of carpet. One part of it is like any other. There’s something lovely, something reliable, about that.

Should the worst happen, a bad oyster perhaps, you can lie on that carpet and think, as I have, that it’s not the worst place in the world to die slowly. I’ve vomited in Moscow subway toilets and Paris department stores and I’ve gotten to know the bogs quite well, their shapes, their reliable coldness, their antiseptic smell. But the floors on which I knelt have been as a stranger to me. You don’t know who they’ve had as guests. Why the bogs should be so clean is a pleasant mystery. Of course they’re only surface-clean. I remember my high school biology teacher, Mr. Liptak, sending us with petri dishes and agar into corners of our high school, including the washrooms, to let the dishes do nothing more than sit. We’d bring the empty glass containers back and watch the stuff starting to grow, beige eternal matter that looked ineradicable. How could you scrub every corner of every room so that nothing would sprout? Despite our complaints, we know doctors are not wrong nowadays to eject us from hospitals the day after the operation. Without a private room and utterly manic cleanliness from personnel in white impermeable suits, the beige stuff is coming for us.

I regard my last Moving Day with disbelief. It’s part of the reason why I have sunk money into this small house. I cannot contemplate a moving day again. That day was a sinkhole, and it’s my fault. I picked out of the Yellow Pages the worst moving company in existence. By the end of
moving day, they had broken so much furniture that they owed me money.

But the worst thing was the chunky guy who went into the bathroom and began, how can I put this, a good clear-out. He must have been in there for a half-hour. It was a brass band of wind-breaking, a prolonged trumpeting of such volume that eventually none of us could pretend it wasn’t happening because it was drowning out the conversation. Even his workmates were embarrassed and told him enough was enough. “Hey, I gotta go,” he shouted back. It sounded like the Grade Four class at your kid’s school doing a tuba version of “God Save the Queen.”

A week later, at the freshly renovated house, I opened the box containing my vacuum cleaner. A foul odour rose out of it, like liquefied hyena. Somehow that man’s inner atmosphere had been packed and moved. I didn’t know you could transport air in an unsealed box, and this has changed my attitude to a lot of things.

Every evening now I light a Lampe Berger, a catalytic converter that burns scented “ozoalcohol,” killing bacteria and making the house smell like gardenias. It’s pleasant, and no one asks me why I do it. Which is lucky as I’d have to explain that I have never recovered from the revelation of the packaging possibilities of hell smells.

A house will always be a beacon for bacteria. I will never forget that news story out of Japan headlined “Underwear a nest for ringworms.” Doctors were warning citizens about their national habit of wearing underpants to bed. Air, sunlight, cleanliness! What can I do to regulate this mad microscopic world?

Here come the stripes.

Over the years I have straightened out in the decorating sense. I look at my living room now, with the broad yellow-and-white striped Roman blinds, the radiators, bleached parallel oak stair rails, the indents on the white-painted wood of the fireplace surround, the evenly loaded and staggered bookcases, and I realize with both pleasure and embarrassment that the theme of my house is stripes. Straight lines. Yes, there are blots of colour like the Julia McNeely painting of the red rooster and the mini-explosion of book dust jackets, but anyone with an eye could come into this house and see a regimented, possibly disturbed mind.

Okay, so it’s not normal. (But how I hated that designer who suggested removing all dust jackets so that books would be a uniform beige and thence a calming silent witness to a sand-coloured life? What an attractive red splatter her blood would make against my library.)

I like things in rows. It comforts me. It’s not necessarily wrong to be comforted by order. But rows? You know what the ultimate row is? The bars of a jail cell. I have muntin bars, those internal faux grilles that make the windows easy to clean. My house is filled with racks and levels, stairs and shelves; with linage, both perpendicular and horizontal. It is choked with symmetry. And outside, garden trellis—that’s magnificent.

No, it is not normal. I rarely have anyone over unless they’re understanding types.

Also there’s a lot of softness in the house, velvet, brushed cotton, fringes, cushions. Am I just shoving this
fact in to hide something Teutonic, not a passion for order and straight lines, but a mania? Why am I never on time for appointments but always ten minutes early? Since I often hear from lunatics and frequently get drunken e-mails and phone calls from my odd bosses or readers, I have to keep records. I keep a hard copy and place it in a file labelled Loonies. These crazies are filed, they’re under control, even though they’re still out there with their little brains boiling.

And it isn’t superficial. It goes to the core. I was as horrified as anyone when Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover at one of those franchised Jolly Maid Services and discovered that they tidy and make everything look sparkling, but they don’t really clean. They don’t even have Miele vacuums. The microscopic flakes of human skin that make up dust, they just disperse. To where? Imagine oiling the kitchen sink to make it gleam without having Vim-ed the thing first.

There was a time when this wouldn’t have bothered me, but the world wasn’t so chaotic then. What would Mrs. Tittlemouse have said?

We can check, thanks to Beatrix Potter.

Mrs. Tittlemouse was a woodmouse and she lived in a bank under a hedge. Cozy doesn’t begin to describe it. There she is at her tiny door (not quite tiny enough as we shall discover when Mr. Toad squeezes in) in a pink and white striped dress (stripes again) under a large white apron. She’s quite a stout fireplug of a person. I am slender, nay bony, but I think stoutness should be more prized, the way it was at the turn of the century when a
certain roundness implied prosperity and a level of jollity. Such a funny little house! thinks Mrs. Tittlemouse. It’s full of nooks and crannies. Speaking as someone who despises John Pawson—the minimalist king who brought us grey rooms furnished with armless grey chairs, grey stone coffee tables with an oddly shaped grey bowl sitting on them, and little else (he doesn’t “do” bookshelves, too frolicsome)—I like the Tittlemouse look, oh I do. She has a kitchen, parlour, pantry, larder, and a bedroom with a little box bed. One day I’ll sleep in a box bed.