A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
Simone Clermont stood in the larder of her mother’s house, the door ajar a crack to let light in. Marcel had sucked her dry and he was now sleeping, dazed on the laudanum of her breast milk. She overheard her mother and Cecile, the kitchen girl, making supper for the boarders, pots clanging, the grumble and murmur of their voices, the chop-chop of knife against cutting board. In the dim light, she could make out the bags of flour and sugar, the jars of preserves—apple, raspberry, quince. The tub of butter. Supper was three hours away, and she was starving. She would have been perfectly within her rights to march into the kitchen, make straight for the icebox, help herself to the remains of last night’s beef stew or the leftover trifle. Her mother might cluck and fuss, though she was in Simone’s debt. But like a naughty child, she had sneaked into the larder. She wanted to leap up and pull the ham down from its ceiling hook, gnaw hunks free with her incisors: eat and eat and eat until billows of flesh hung from her. Nature, that old hag, wanted to have her way with Simone. She was like the goose being fattened up for Christmas dinner, who came waddling across the yard, honking with delight as gruel was slopped into its trough, past the tree stump that served as a chopping block with its faded sepia stains of blood that had pulsed from the necks of chickens, ducks, this goose’s progenitors. What was in store for Simone? She had as little sense as that wambling goose, only a premonition that nature was up to no good.
If she were to eat the entire jar of raspberry jam she was holding in her hand, she wouldn’t be satisfied. She shoved it back on the shelf. Stalking out of the pantry, she called, “I’m going out for a walk.”
Her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, the blade glistening with the membranes of the rabbit they would dine on that evening, calling out to Simone’s retreating back, “Oh, don’t take the child out in this wind.”
Simone turned on her heel. “I’m not taking Marcel. He’s asleep.”
“And if he wakes up?”
“He wakes up. You can pick him up. Or let him cry.”
Her mother regarded her daughter’s broad rump with satisfaction. Simone was no longer a slim-hipped wraith floating through life. Her thickened hips were ballast, weighing her down, steadying her passage.
Her mother blamed her daughter’s restlessness on the scirocco, the hot wind that began in the heart of Africa, swept across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, bending the heads of the royal palms along the Boulevard du Littoral in Cap d’Antibes so they resembled a line of giraffes with necks curved downwards to munch on low leaves.
Simone had to shove hard against the wind to open the door. A determined foe, the wind caught her skirts of pale blue, threatening to lift them up over her head. Simone, grabbing her skirt, let go of the door, which slammed with a resounding crack, echoing throughout the house.
Later, there will be a row:
—Just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed, you needn’t slam the door and give us all headaches.
—I didn’t slam it. Why must you always think the worst of me?
The cat, lurking at the corner of the house, startled by the sound, leapt. The cat was in love with Simone, with her smell of breast milk and yeast, with her disregard for the gifts of sparrows and field mice left for her on the stone doorstep every morning. The cat was not a pet, it had simply taken up residence in the barn. A good mouser, as its belly gave evidence.
Simone’s frock was not just out of fashion but ungainly. Sick of the maternity chemise in which she’d lumbered through the last months of pregnancy, the months since Marcel’s birth, but unable to fit into her regular clothes, she’d rummaged through the closet of her old bedroom, and pulled out this dress, which had belonged to her dead sister Elise, moving the buttons over on the sleeves, hitching up the excess fabric with its belt. The sleeves flopped about her arms like deflated balloons, the skirts worked their way free of the sash, threatening to trip her up, so her locomotion was almost Chaplinesque: she took a few steps, then hitched the skirt up on the left side, a few more steps, then gave a yank to the right. It was so hot she had dispensed with undergarments, save for the fortified nursing brassiere.
Marcel, cast out of the nirvana of sleep by the door’s bang, mewled twice and then drew in a deep breath, preparing to let loose with a wail.
Simone, pausing at the back door, scanned the road for the bicycle of the postman, M. duPont. He was a kilometer distant, pausing at the crest of a hill, ready to savor the moment when gravity would reverse its effects, no longer a force to be struggled against but one which would send him gliding down.
He will have a letter for me, Simone told herself. She had finally, after laboring over many drafts, told her husband, Luc, how the birth of their son had shaken the foundations of her being. She could not bring herself to write, My cunt throbs when Marcel nurses, while my mind is filled with unwholesome fantasies. I have come close to stimulating myself for relief while nursing. I am becoming a monster. You must come to me. Or let me come back to you, even if there are fevers in Turkey that put our child’s life at risk. Instead, she had written: “I fear for my emotional balance. I cannot tell you how desperately I long for you, need to be with you.”