The ABCs of Love (13 page)

Because my feet were so wide, my mother used to make me have Start-rite sandals long after everyone else had given them up. I had big feet, and my shoes would flap when I walked, like a clown’s. At school, the other girls would tease me and ask why I didn’t just wear the shoe boxes. Or they would make rowing motions and say I was wearing boats.

I didn’t have any friends at school, so I’d spend break times posting little pebbles through the holes in the leather of my Start-rites. The nuns kept coming over to make me join in other people’s games, so I learned to run round and round the playground very fast so it would look as if I were involved in a complicated game and wasn’t just playing on my own.

See also Fashion; Outcast; Velvet; Vendetta

stationery

The only shop I would be perfectly happy to be locked in overnight is a stationery shop. After John, stationery is possibly my most favorite thing in the world. I can spend hours looking at all the different notebooks I can find, the colors of the pens, the way they feel in my hand, putting my fingers out to touch the softness of the paper, the fibers in the homemade papers, the shapes of paper clips, the solidness of staplers, Sellotape dispensers, hole punchers.

I make mental plans about how much better organized I would be if only I had a shelf full of home organizers, box files, and see-through plastic envelopes. How I would pin up “Things to Do” lists on the notice boards, write telephone messages and personal reminders on those little sticky pads. Keep a Biro on a piece of string by the telephone so that I’ve always got one near and am not struggling to find one with one hand or pretending I’m writing a complicated message down when I’m not.

I think it’s a female thing. John says he’s never even thought about what pen he uses, just if it works. I set him a challenge one day. Just before he left me, I asked him to buy me one of those colored pens that smell of different scents—raspberry, mint, chocolate, popcorn, bubble gum. Whatever flavor he brought back, I thought to myself, would tell me what he really felt about me.

I guessed he’d forget, but he rang me up the next day. He said that when he was going into the shop in the precinct to buy me my pen, a black cat walked in with him as if they were going shopping together. He pointed this out to the shop assistant, who looked up briefly and said, “Oh, not again.”

When I asked John about the pen, he said that he’d been so shaken by the cat and the man’s sanguine reaction to it that he’d started looking at the cookery books on the bargain-book table instead. The first one he’d picked up had a whole section about this special fruit pie his mother used to cook him. He then started telling me about his mother and what she had meant to him. He said he’d never really talked about her to anyone before.

I have noticed that John talks about himself a lot. We laugh about it sometimes, and I say, “And back to you,” but it’s something I can see might get annoying.

In fact, I dreamed about his mother one night soon after the pen debacle. She was teaching me how to make banana pie with goldfish baked through it, and when we took it out of the oven together, she handed me her white apron. Interestingly, the goldfish were still jumping up and down in the pie. I told John this, but he said only that he couldn’t imagine his mother sharing a kitchen with anyone, let alone the woman who broke up his son’s family. I think this is just sour grapes. John has never dreamed about his mother. I think sometimes he is just not as sensitive as me. The good thing about being in love is that I can recognize John’s faults in an adult fashion. I do not always want to change him.

See also Nursing; Teaching; Vexed; Women’s Laughter

stepmothers

There was an interesting program on the radio the other night about stepmothers. How much they can bring to a child’s life, how the relationship can actually be positive because both sides get better at communicating their emotions.

This is exactly what I feel. I look out of the bus sometimes and see all these mothers and daughters shopping, and I think what fun they are having. I have started to keep a list of the best shops for teenagers in London. I think the important thing is not to be a mother substitute, but to be a best friend. If you think this way, there is so much you can offer a child, particularly if they look up to you and model themselves on your behavior. The ideal stepmother is someone a child can aspire to.

See also Best Friends; Endings; Relatives; Ultimatum;
Underwear

surnames

I told John on the telephone last night how much it mattered what surname you have. I said I’d never liked my surname. Being able to change it was one of the main reasons I wanted to get married. He laughed and said he could think of better ones.

He never takes me seriously these days.

Once he rang me from a public telephone box to tell me he’d just read about a party Oscar Wilde had hosted. He’d invited lots of strangers who couldn’t think why they were there, until in the middle of dinner, Oscar Wilde left the room and didn’t come back. After a while, the strangers started talking and realized that what they had in common was that they all had surnames with
bottom
in them: Longbottom, Sidebottom, Greybottom. John seemed to think this was very funny, but I couldn’t see the point.

It reminded me of when children at school used to boast about ringing up people in the telephone book who had silly names. I have a feeling John would do something like that. He was probably rifling through the book in the phone box looking for people with funny surnames at the same time as he was speaking to me.

I, on the other hand, was busy practicing my new signature.
Verity Hutchinson.
I have this feeling that if I write it enough times, it might just come true. I’ve started to underline my name now too. It makes it look much more solid.

See also Telephone Boxes; Ultimatum

T

teaching

I have learned so many things since I’ve been with John. We stayed in a hotel together for the first time the other night, and he pointed out that I don’t get out of the bath in the right way.

The funny thing is that I’ve never thought about it before. I’ve always just got out without thinking, all dripping wet, and wound myself up in towels. Sometimes I don’t even bother to dry myself, just walk around like that until the water evaporates. I like the feeling of air on my skin. But this means that the bathroom is unpleasant for other people. Now I towel-dry myself standing up in the bath as the water drains out. It’s a bit uncomfortable and cramped, but that way, I’m dry when I finally step out and John doesn’t have to step in any unpleasant damp patches.

The other thing I have learned to do is to hold my knife and fork properly. John had to point this out several times before I got the hang of it. I haven’t yet managed to blink without making the little clicking noise that drives John mad, but the other night I did sleep all through the night without dribbling because I told myself again and again so many times to keep my mouth shut that I think I was still saying this when I fell asleep.

I had no idea I had so many faults. It makes me embarrassed at how I behaved in public before I met John. He is so well mannered. I tried to thank him, but he just told me I was silly and that I worried too much about myself. He’s right. John makes me feel large and clumsy, as if I’m always about to fall over my own feet. I have also noticed that when I am with John, I tend to sweat a bit more, my nose runs, and my feet sometimes have an unpleasant odor.

See also Captains; Imposter Syndrome; Zest

telephone boxes (three true stories)

The telephone box that John sometimes calls me from is being pulled down because, apparently, more and more people are using mobile phones. I can’t help feeling as if bits of our relationship are being cut off one by one. I’m scared that soon we will disappear completely, so I suggested John should buy it and keep it as a historic monument, like Tom Jones did for the one he used to ring his wife from in Wales, but he just laughed. Still, it has made me think more seriously about telephone boxes. I keep finding out stories about them to tell John.

1. An engineer was out on his rounds in a very rural part of seaside Britain when he decided to stop for his sandwich lunch. He sat down by a telephone box perched on a cliff edge overlooking the sea. After about five minutes, the telephone started to ring, so he went into the box to answer it. It was the secretary from work, who started telling him about his next job.

“How did you know I was here?” he asked.

It turned out she had dialed him on his mobile but got the wrong number. The fact that she’d reached the telephone box he’d stopped to have his lunch next to was a complete coincidence.

2. During the great storm of 1987, a man was driving to work early in the morning when he realized the hurricane was brewing. He decided to ring his wife from a telephone box to tell her to lock all the windows and doors, but as he was talking to her, the telephone box was lifted by the wind and transported into a nearby field, where he found himself in the middle of a herd of cows.

The man’s wife wasn’t interested in this at all because she was still so cross about the fact that he’d woken her up and then hung up on her without saying good-bye.

3. My first French kiss was in a telephone box during a school dance. My favorite teacher, Mr. Shepherd, pretended I had a call and then followed me into the box. I had to hold on to the sides in order to stop my knees shaking. In retrospect, it wasn’t the most private place to snog your teacher because of all the glass sides. When we went back into the dance, everybody started singing “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”

See also Influences; Worst-Case Scenario

thomas the tank engine

John and I were in bed the other night, and he rolled me over on top of him and lifted me up and down.

“Chuff, chuff,” he said. “This is hard work for the fat controller.”

I wish he wouldn’t bring his children into everything.

See also Toys

thrush

Recently when going to the loo, I have noticed a smell like freshly baked bread. I thought it was because I was getting ready to settle down. That I was finally becoming domesticated. It made me feel like nesting.

But then John told me that he wondered whether I was infecting him. He said he hadn’t known how to tell me before but that he’d developed a rash that came up after we made love. I went to the doctor, and even though it was quickly cleared up, it was still possibly the most embarassing thing I’ve ever had to do. And then to cap it all, John was cross with me. He said he didn’t know how he was going to bring the subject up with Kate.

I felt so guilty, I said I was sorry. But, of course, he doesn’t need to tell her anything. They haven’t had any relations like that for a long time.

See also Friends; Horror Movies; Old; Reasons . . . ; Rude

tornadoes

John was supposed to be spending Sunday with me, but Kate was ill, so he had to take his children to the National History Museum. I was so cross about this that he bought me a pet tornado from the shop there as a joke.

It’s just a little plastic tube filled with water and glitter, but if you turn it quickly backward and forward, you can watch your own little twister develop. John and I can’t stop playing with it. He says other people can keep their dogs, we have a tornado. He even got a book about them for me so we could find out more.

He’s taken to calling me “F-5” as a nickname. This level of tornado reaches wind speeds of more than 300 miles per hour. The devastation is total. It causes homes to disintegrate, foundations to be left bare, possessions to be scattered. It has been known to wreak considerable damage even to steel-reinforced structures.

When John’s not there, I hide the tornado in a drawer. It upsets me.

See also Dogs; Names; Revenge; Vacuuming

toys

Apparently, vibrators have been around much longer than you would imagine. They were invented by doctors who were bored with men bringing their hysterical wives to them for treatment. To begin with, the doctors used to relieve the women by bringing them to climax manually, but then someone had the clever idea of inventing a machine to do the same job.

Much less messy and healthier all round. How those men must have congratulated themselves. They didn’t realize what they had unleashed.

Monica asked me whether I remembered Jean from the sex party, and I couldn’t think who she meant until she called her Cathy Come.

Evidently, Cathy had bought some of those little balls you put up yourself at the party and decided to wear them the next time she went to the supermarket. It was fine at first, rather nice and tingly, but then the sensation got worse, and by the time she got to frozen foods, Cathy couldn’t stop coming. Eventually, she had to abandon her shopping cart at the checkout and try to walk home. She’d got only about a hundred yards when she found herself clinging to a lamppost, unable to move without groaning.

The funny thing was that no one who walked past her gave her a second look. She had become invisible.

See also Codes; Glenda G-spot; Glitter; Weight

true romance

I have just remembered one of my mother’s stories. At the time, I thought it was a disgusting tale and couldn’t think why she’d told it. Who wanted to hear about old people in love?

My mother said she’d heard about a woman who had been married for forty years. Her husband loved her almost obsessively, and they had one of those particularly close relationships you’re supposed to get with couples who don’t have children.

But this woman had a secret. When she was younger and first married, she had fallen in love with an architect. He begged her to leave her husband and move in with him, but she refused. This woman and the architect tried many times to leave each other, but they were always drawn back—sometimes by an argument; sometimes by a smell, a memory, that made it impossible not to get in contact; sometimes by a bit of good or bad luck that they could share only with each other. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that their connection was stronger than them, that to sever this would be at the cost of cutting out a bit of themselves that would make it impossible to live.