Wicked Women by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780871137371
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Published: 1999-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

VALEDICTION

“SOME THINGS ARE HELD in common by all of us,” I tell Ed. “Like what?” he asks.

“The way a young woman looks in a mirror,” I say, “and pats her hair as she passes. A tilt of the chin, a twisting of profile. Love me, love me, how loveable I am! How perfect!”

The way a man straightens his tie, takes a breath and squares his jaw before going into a room full of strangers who make him nervous: gestures held in common, I say; species behaviour, no matter how individual we believe them to be: your Aunt Sally, my nephew Bill; you name them, they do it: or did it when young. And indeed these are gestures which can trigger love, if observed at the right time, at the right place, and thereby work to the furtherance of the species. Women are more fertile when they love their partners, did you know that? Orgasm—researchers equate orgasm with love, for some reason—enables women to retain sperm. That’s what all that excitement’s about, apparently. It would be easy enough for Ed to agree with me: he does. He nods. I am accustomed to sweeping a generalisation or so through his head; he not too resisting. The “men do this; women do that” stuff goes on sounding reasonable enough, but the times catch up with us and overwhelm us, and what I could once say now turns out to be, when I think about it a little longer—how can I put it?—gender deceptive.

That is to say, these days a young man will pat his hair as he passes a mirror, with an equal tilt of his chin, a misting of exhaled breath, just as if he were Marilyn Monroe, and a career woman will pause and square her shoulder-pads before going into her meeting to convince and impress the foe. Nor will either activity be indicative of any dilution of—and here I search for the new language and come up with—“appropriate gender energy.” The man who admires his hair in the mirror is as likely to relate to the “opposite” sex as his own, or as likely as he ever was: and it’s the same for women. You can be as female as you like or don’t like, in your big clumping boots; as male as you like in your crushed velvet trews. Or at least in the great cities of the world this is so; in country areas the sexes remain “opposite” in their forced polarity, the better to reproduce the species.

These thoughts come to me as we wait for the next batch of prospective house-buyers to come up the drive. We sit in the front garden in the sun and watch for a car to turn in from the main road, down the dip, past the duck pond, and up the drive to the yard. This is an old farmhouse; the yard is still partly cobbled. City drivers hate it: they fear for their suspension. Naively, I once believed a partly cobbled yard would be a selling point.

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