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This dutiful sex on fertile days was agonising. The pain made me thrash and cry and bite my fist, but I begged Tony to carry on. “Please, for Christ’s sake, just get on with it!”, croaked through tears, hardly counts as amongst the sexiest, most stimulating lines to encourage a man to come, but he duly closed his eyes and thought of England or something. He might as well have pumped semen onto the White Cliffs of Dover. He hated himself for what he did to me. I hated me too. I was damaged, broken, unwhole, unwholesome, unwomanly, an unworthy, fraudulent wife instead of a happy homemaker, a barren creature rather than a mother, a crippled, sexless, tortured virgin rather than even a happy whore. I had handed sex and reproduction over to the doctors. My work was self-destructing despite my best efforts. My discontented home and marriage responded to nothing that I seemed able to do. It seemed to me that there was just one thing that I could control: my eating.
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When I was alone, I did not eat at all. When I was with other people, I picked at my food and played with it and left the room with the plate more dishevelled than violated. No, I did not, thank God, ever develop an eating disorder to add to my list of deficiencies and woes. I understood, however, how other people with a similar sense of purposelessness and impotence might attempt to seize fictitious control by that means. Food, like sex or shit, is a medium whereby the desperate non-artist feels that she can externalise otherwise inexpressible emotions or internalise anger. Even on days when I ate little or nothing, I was very careful to get enough vitamins and minerals, but my new, initially excessive diet served drastically to reduce my weight and to introduce me to controlled eating at regular times. Feeling better about my body in turn enhanced my confidence in my ability to take on additional responsibilities and no doubt made my flirtation with Paul and Sally possible.
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