Lady Oracle (11 page)

When we’d had our snack Aunt Lou would pour herself a drink, slip off her shoes, settle into one of her podgy chairs, and ask me questions in her rasping voice. She actually seemed interested in what I had to say, and she didn’t laugh when I told her I wanted to be an opera singer.

One of my mother’s ways of dismissing Aunt Lou was to say that she was bitter and frustrated because she didn’t have a husband, but if this was true Aunt Lou kept it well hidden. To me she seemed a lot less bitter and frustrated than my mother, who, now that she’d achieved and furnished her ultimate house, was concentrating more and more of her energy on forcing me to reduce. She really did try everything. When I refused to take the pills or stick to the diets – neatly drawn up by her, with menus for every day of the week listing the number of calories – she sent me to a psychiatrist.

“I like being fat,” I told him, and burst into tears. He sat looking at me with the tips of his fingers together, smiling benevolently but with trace of disgust as I gasped and puffed.

“Don’t you want to get married?” he asked when I had subsided. This started me off afresh, but the next time I saw Aunt Lou I asked her, “Didn’t you want to get married?”

She gave one of her raucous laughs. She was sitting in her overstuffed easy chair, drinking a martini. “Oh, I was married, dear,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

I’d always assumed Aunt Lou was an old maid because her last name was the same as my father’s, Delacourt, pronounced
Delacore
. “French nobility, no doubt,” said Aunt Lou. Her great-grandfather had been a farmer, before he decided to improve himself. He got into the railroad, she said, on the ground floor, sold the farm to do it; that was how the family made its money. “They were all crooks, of course,” Aunt Lou said, sipping at her drink, “but nobody called it that.”

It turned out Aunt Lou had been married at nineteen, to a man eight years her senior, of good social standing and approved by the family. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler. “In one pocket and out the other,” she wheezed, “but what did I know? I was madly in love with him, dear, he was tall, dark and handsome.” I began to see why she liked the kind of movies she did: they were a lot like her own life. “I tried, dear, I really did, but it was no use. He would be gone for days on end, and it wasn’t as though I knew anything about running a house or managing money. I’d never shopped for food in my life; all I knew was you picked up the phone and someone brought it to your house in a box. The first week I was married I ordered a pound of everything: one pound of flour, one pound of salt, one pound of pepper, one pound of sugar. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. The pepper lasted years.” Aunt Lou’s laugh sounded like an enraged walrus. She liked telling jokes on
herself, but sometimes it made her choke. “Then he’d come back and if he’d lost he’d tell me how much he loved me, if he’d won he’d complain about being tied down. It was very sad, really. One day he just never came back. Maybe they shot him for not paying. I wonder if he’s still alive; if he is, I suppose I’m still married to him.”

I found out even later that Aunt Lou had a boyfriend of sorts. His name was Robert, he was an accountant, he had a wife and children, and he came to her apartment on Sunday evenings for dinner. “Don’t tell your mother, dear,” Aunt Lou said. “I’m not sure she’d understand.”

“Wouldn’t you like to marry him?” I asked her when she told me about him.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” said Aunt Lou. “Besides, I never got a divorce, what was the point? I just took back my own name, that way I don’t have to answer so many questions. Take my advice and don’t get married until you’re at least twenty-five.”

She assumed there would be suitors clamoring at my heels; she didn’t even acknowledge the possibility that no one would ask me. My mother’s version was that nobody who looked like me could ever accomplish anything, but Aunt Lou was all for dismissing handicaps or treating them as obstacles to be overcome. Crippled opera singers could do it if they would only try. Gross as I was, something might be expected of me after all. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

After her bad experience with the gambler Aunt Lou had gone out and gotten herself a job. “I couldn’t type, dear,” she said, “I couldn’t do anything, the way I was brought up; but it was the Depression, you know. The family didn’t have money any more. So I had to, didn’t I? I worked my way up.”

When I was younger my father and mother were vague about Aunt Lou’s job, and so was she. All they would say was that she worked in an office for a company and she was head of a department. I found out what she actually did when I was thirteen.

“I like being fat,” I told him, and burst into tears. He sat looking at me with the tips of his fingers together, smiling benevolently but with a trace of disgust as I gasped and puffed.

“Don’t you want to get married?” he asked when I had subsided. This started me off afresh, but the next time I saw Aunt Lou I asked her, “Didn’t you want to get married?”

She gave one of her raucous laughs. She was sitting in her overstuffed easy chair, drinking a martini. “Oh, I was married, dear,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you?”

I’d always assumed Aunt Lou was an old maid because her last name was the same as my father’s, Delacourt, pronounced
Delacore
. “French nobility, no doubt,” said Aunt Lou. Her great-grandfather had been a farmer, before he decided to improve himself. He got into the railroad, she said, on the ground floor, sold the farm to do it; that was how the family made its money. “They were all crooks, of course,” Aunt Lou said, sipping at her drink, “but nobody called it that.”

It turned out Aunt Lou had been married at nineteen, to a man eight years her senior, of good social standing and approved by the family. Unfortunately he was a compulsive gambler. “In one pocket and out the other,” she wheezed, “but what did I know? I was madly in love with him, dear, he was tall, dark and handsome.” I began to see why she liked the kind of movies she did: they were a lot like her own life. “I tried, dear, I really did, but it was no use. He would be gone for days on end, and it wasn’t as though I knew anything about running a house or managing money. I’d never shopped for food in my life; all I knew was you picked up the phone and someone brought it to your house in a box. The first week I was married I ordered a pound of everything: one pound of flour, one pound of salt, one pound of pepper, one pound of sugar. I thought that was what you were supposed to do. The pepper lasted years.” Aunt Lou’s laugh sounded like an enraged walrus. She liked telling jokes on
herself, but sometimes it made her choke. “Then he’d come back and if he’d lost he’d tell me how much he loved me, if he’d won he’d complain about being tied down. It was very sad, really. One day he just never came back. Maybe they shot him for not paying. I wonder if he’s still alive; if he is, I suppose I’m still married to him.”

I found out even later that Aunt Lou had a boyfriend of sorts. His name was Robert, he was an accountant, he had a wife and children, and he came to her apartment on Sunday evenings for dinner. “Don’t tell your mother, dear,” Aunt Lou said. “I’m not sure she’d understand.”

“Wouldn’t you like to marry him?” I asked her when she told me about him.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” said Aunt Lou. “Besides, I never got a divorce, what was the point? I just took back my own name, that way I don’t have to answer so many questions. Take my advice and don’t get married until you’re at least twenty-five.”

She assumed there would be suitors clamoring at my heels; she didn’t even acknowledge the possibility that no one would ask me. My mother’s version was that nobody who looked like me could ever accomplish anything, but Aunt Lou was all for dismissing handicaps or treating them as obstacles to be overcome. Crippled opera singers could do it if they would only try. Gross as I was, something might be expected of me after all. I wasn’t sure I was up to it.

After her bad experience with the gambler Aunt Lou had gone out and gotten herself a job. “I couldn’t type, dear,” she said, “I couldn’t do anything, the way I was brought up; but it was the Depression, you know. The family didn’t have money any more. So I had to, didn’t I? I worked my way up.”

When I was younger my father and mother were vague about Aunt Lou’s job, and so was she. All they would say was that she worked in an office for a company and she was head of a department. I found out what she actually did when I was thirteen.

“Here,” said my mother, “I suppose it’s time you read this,” and she put into my hands a pink booklet with a wreath of flowers festooning the front.
You’re Growing Up
, the cover said. On the inside page was a letter, which began, “Growing up can be fun. But there are also some things about it which can be puzzling. One of them is menstruation.…” At the bottom of this page was a picture of Aunt Lou, smiling maternally but professionally, taken before her jowls were quite so large. Around her neck was a single strand of pearls. Although she did wear pearls in real life, it was never just one strand. Underneath the letter was her signature: “Sincerely yours, Louisa K. Delacourt.” I studied the diagrams in the pink booklet with interest; I read the etiquette hints for tennis games and high-school proms, the wardrobe suggestions, the advice on washing your hair; but I was even more impressed by Aunt Lou’s picture and signature – like a movie star, sort of. My Aunt Lou was famous, in a way.

I asked her about it the next time I saw her. “I’m head of Public Relations, dear,” she said. “Just for Canada. But I didn’t really write that booklet, you know. That was written by Advertising.”

“Then what do you do?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I go to a lot of meetings, and I advise on the ads. And I answer the letters. My secretary helps me, of course.”

“What kind of letters?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Complaints about the product, requests for advice, that sort of thing. You’d think they’d all be from young girls, and a lot of them are. Girls wanting to know where their vagina is and things like that. We have a form letter for those. But some of them are from people who really need help, and those are the ones I answer personally. When they’re afraid to go to the doctor or something, they write me. Half the time I don’t know what to say.” Aunt Lou finished her martini and went to pour herself another one. “I got one just the other day from a woman who thought she’d been impregnated by an incubus.”

“An incubus?” I asked. It sounded like some sort of medical appliance. “What’s that?”

“I looked it up in the dictionary,” said Aunt Lou. “It’s a sort of demon.”

“What did you tell her?” I asked, horrified. What if the woman was right?

“I told her,” said Aunt Lou reflectively, “to get a pregnancy test, and if it came out positive it wouldn’t be an incubus. If it’s negative, then she won’t have to worry, will she?”

“Louisa is beyond the pale,” my mother said when she was explaining to my father why she didn’t have Aunt Lou to dinner more often. “People are sure to ask her what she does, and she always tells them. I can’t have her using those words at the dinner table. I know she’s good-hearted but she just doesn’t care what kind of an impression she makes.”

“Count your blessings,” Aunt Lou said to me with a chuckle. “They pay well and it’s a friendly office. I’ve got nothing to complain about.”

The psychiatrist gave up on me after three sessions of tears and silence. I resented the implication that there were yet more things wrong with me in addition to being fat, and he resented my resentment. He told my mother it was a family problem which couldn’t be resolved by treating me alone, and she was indignant. “He has his nerve,” she said to my father. “He just wants to get more money out of me. They’re all quacks, if you ask me.”

After that she entered her laxative phase. I think by this time she was frantic; certainly she was obsessed with my bulk. Like most people she probably thought in images, and her image of me then must have been a one-holed object, like an inner tube, that took things in at one end but didn’t let them out at the other: if she could somehow uncork me I would deflate, all at once, like a dirigible. She started to buy patent medicines, disguising her attempts to get me to
take them – “It’ll be good for your complexion” – and occasionally slipping them into the food. Once she even iced a chocolate cake with melted Ex-Lax, leaving it on the kitchen counter where I found and devoured it. It made me wretched but it didn’t make me thin.

By this time I was in high school. I resisted my mother’s plan to send me to a private girls’ school, where the pupils wore kilts and little plaid ties. Ever since Brownies I’d been wary of any group composed entirely of women, especially women in uniforms. So instead I went to the nearest high school, which was second-best in my mother’s opinion but not as bad as it might have been, since by now we were living in a respectable neighborhood. The catch was that the children of the families my mother viewed as her peers and models were sent to the kind of private school she wanted to send me to, so the high school got mostly the leftovers, from the smaller houses around the fringes of the area, the brash new apartment building which had been opposed by the established residents, and even worse, the flats above the stores on the commercial streets. Some of my classmates were not at all what she had in mind, though I didn’t tell her this as I didn’t want to be forced into uniform.

At this time my mother gave me a clothing allowance, as an incentive to reduce. She thought I should buy clothes that would make me less conspicuous, the dark dresses with tiny polka-dots and vertical stripes favored by designers for the fat. Instead I sought out clothes of a peculiar and offensive hideousness, violently colored, horizontally striped. Some of them I got in maternity shops, others at cut-rate discount stores; I was especially pleased with a red felt skirt, cut in a circle, with a black telephone appliquéd onto it. The brighter the colors, the more rotund the effect, the more certain I was to buy. I wasn’t going to let myself be diminished, neutralized, by a navy-blue polka-dot sack.