But Rosie, don’t give up. I’ll keep looking for an agent/publisher. And did you mean it when you said you could come to New York? I’ll be there for the Antiquarian Show in early June. Any chance you could make it then? The schedule’s hectic already, but I could cancel the first morning and show you a few favourite scenes. Manhattan’s not like Dublin – you have to get up very early to catch a good look at it.
It is a big thrill to be in touch with you again. Come if you can.
3
Tessa and Peg and I went for ice cream after the movie even though the skirt of the pink suit I was wearing was already showing some strain. ‘You wear that to the pictures?’ Tessa had said incredulously. All very well for her, she’s a foot taller than me and stick-thin and has successfully modelled herself on Jackie Kennedy, little A-line frocks and all.
‘I have to wear it sometime,’ I said defensively, ‘or I’ll get no value out of it at all.’
I’d had no luck with that suit. Min, who was with me the day I bought it, informed the sales assistant that I must be off my head, that anyone with any sense picked a colour that didn’t show the dirt. I remarked that I’d seen nomadic women in the desert near Isfahan who wear lots of pink and are covered in dirt and still look wonderful, and Min gave me her what-a-pain-in-the-arse-you-can-be look. I can’t say I blamed her. Still, as I said to her, I did happen to have lived in all kinds of places and to have seen all kinds of things; and I could hardly stop them coming into my head just to be nice to a person who’d hardly been anywhere.
Min laughed heartily. ‘Miss Hoity-Toity,’ she said.
The ice cream at least stopped me sniffing: I’d cried so hard at Babe that Tessa moved to the row behind us on the grounds that she was getting wet. She looked attractively fit in grey leggings and a white singlet under a thick fleece with her legs strong on bouncy trainers. She never mentioned her exact age, but she must be nearly sixty-two, preparing for the old-age pension, though you’d never think it. A lock of pure silver, like a badge of honesty, swept back through her generally salt-and-pepper hair that I thought was natural but which Peg said might be a clever dye job.
‘Four miles on the treadmill this morning,’ Tessa said. ‘How about that?’
‘How do you not go crazy from boredom?’ I asked. ‘But it sure pays off. You look like a sexy games mistress.’
‘The games mistress at my school was a fat nun,’ Tessa said. ‘Have you got the bridge book? Did you do your homework? Bridge is going to save us from Alzheimer’s. And you’re lucky, you have nothing to do all day.’
‘No it won’t,’ Peg said sharply. ‘If you’re going to develop Alzheimer’s you’re going to develop it.’
Meaning, of course, the fact that her mother had had Alzheimer’s before she died had nothing to do with the fact her mother had never read as much as a newspaper, much less played a complicated card game. Peg always got defensive about her parents.
‘I do not have nothing to do!’ I protested. ‘I have an ambition. I’m thinking about writing a little book, a self-help book, you know like you find at the front of bookshops – ten ways to win your man or the four infallible tips for making a million? I bought a few self-help things for Min about depression and that’s where I got the idea. I mean, I’ve written booklets and articles and publicity handouts. I can do it. So I’m going over to New York in June to see can I break in to the market. I mean, America is where they love those kind of books. By Irish people. Markey Cuffe is going to help me.’
The two of them stared at me. Words, apparently, failed them.
‘Did you say you’re writing a book about depression?’ Peg eventually asked. ‘With Flo Cuffe’s son that sent her all the money?’
‘Not depression.’
‘Well, on what?’ Tess asked.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I was wondering about growing old. I don’t mean old like old people, I mean how about the changes people like us face, who aren’t old at all but aren’t young either? Don’t people need help with that? Even a small thing, like the brown spots that come out on the backs of your hands – that comes as a shock. You wait for them to go away but they’re never going to. And do you know what I saw in The Irish Times today?’ I took the cutting out of my pocket.’ “The average Irishwoman aged forty and over wants to weigh less than she did at twenty. Most women aged forty and over hate their naked body, according to a new survey, scoring it three-and-a-half out of ten compared with seven out of ten for the body of their youth.” Isn’t that terrible, girls? Hate!’
But Peg, who wore the same chain-store clothes since she was a girl, having moved maybe three sizes up over the decades, just smiled in an absent-minded way. Today she had blue jeans on her stocky, competent bottom-half and a blouse with a little frilly collar and puff sleeves on her top. Still, she was pushing it with a blouse as tweetie-pie as that.
‘I wouldn’t call it terrible, Rosie,’ she said mildly. ‘There’s a lot of things I’d call terrible before I called that terrible.’
‘What, like?’
‘Well, cruelty, say. Cruelty to children, say. Or to animals, even.’
‘Oh sure,’ I said. ‘But if hating ourselves is ruining our lives there’s cruelty here, too. Women are being cruel to themselves on behalf of whoever hates women so badly that they can’t accept their bodies whatever way their bodies happen to be.’
I was breaking an unwritten rule. The three of us never talked to each other about our physical selves. Weight, we talked about, nothing else. Though when we were young Tessa and I would sigh and giggle and lift our eyes to heaven and shake our heads at the goings-on of men; and Peg did the same, later, before she settled down with Monty; all this as if we understood each other so perfectly that we didn’t need to use words. But the truth was that we would not use them. Our intimacy was based on reserve.
And so I’d brought along the cutting on purpose, to see whether we could move closer than that. How was it that the passage of time, all-destructive in so many other ways, didn’t lessen the powerful ideal of being thin? The women in the study, after all, were older women; they weren’t out there on display looking for a mate. Was it a modern woman’s fate, to turn against her own body? Did my friends look with pain and astonishment at the signs of ageing, the same as I did?
‘C’mon Peg,’ Tessa said without taking her eyes off me – as if I were dangerous. ‘Ask me a question.’
Peg opened the book. ‘In calculating the value of a hand,’ she read out, ‘what points are given for the ten of spades in a hand where Ace, King, Queen, Jack of spades are the only honours?’
‘Do you count it at all?’ Tessa said anxiously after a pause.
You do not. Good girl. Now, Rosie. What does an opening bid of one club signify?’
‘That must be further on than page five,’ I said, ‘I’m only at page five.’
‘We have to learn while we’re still in our prime,’ Tessa said. ‘It’ll be too late afterwards.’
‘I hate those words, “too late”,’ I said vehemently. ‘Too late for what? If I do manage to write something, it won’t be in the shops till I’m nearly sixty, but what will that be too late for?’
‘What shops?’ Tessa said.
‘What?’
‘What shops?’
‘All the shops. Everywhere.’
‘Like – like How to Win Friends and Influence People?’ Peg asked.
‘Like Sex and the Single Woman?’ Tessa asked.
‘Well,