Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger Page A

normal again. ‘I wanted this room to be like the red room of Jane Eyre’s childhood. Where she goes as a little girl – or rather, where she gets locked inside. There she has visions. She has hysteria. Hysteria is the corralling of women’s natural jouissance under patriarchy.’
    â€˜Yeah, I met this guy,’ I said, excitedly. ‘In the restaurant last night—’
    â€˜ Yes ,’ she hissed. ‘ Yes . That is where I saw you.’
    I reddened.
    â€˜The restaurant that serves the delicious rabbit,’ she said. ‘That is where you read Fifty Shades ?’
    I nodded. ‘I didn’t want to say I saw you there. In case you thought … I was stalking you. I took this.’ I pulled her book out of my handbag. ‘It was meant for your friend?’
    We were sitting on the bed.
    â€˜Oh. Marge.’ Stephanie rolled her eyes. ‘Marge has been through a very bad divorce. Her ex-husband is English, of Chilean descent. And you know what Latin men are like, notoriously.’ She leaned back and rested on her elbows. ‘Luckily I have exorcised all the superstition out of myself, Ann-Marie. Otherwise I would think that you and I meeting was a perfect instance of fate.’
    Now she led me to the landing on the third floor. The lamp above was a Chinese paper dragon. There was a stone sculpture – a woman sitting in a rocking chair.
    â€˜This,’ said Steph. ‘Is Penelope.’
    The stone woman was gripping a stone garment. She was knitting.
    â€˜Don’t you know who Penelope is?’ said Steph.
    â€˜I can’t remember.’ I blushed.
    â€˜She is the lover of Odysseus!! She waits for him for years and years!! She waits by the window!’ Stephanie gripped the stone woman’s shoulder. ‘She wove and wove to put off her suitors because she believed in her heart of hearts against all common sense that Odysseus would come back for her . If she finished the thing she was weaving, if she ever dared to complete her labour, she would have to betray him . To complete her own work was to betray her man. Do you know what that means?’ Steph bowed her head. ‘So she unravelled every night what she had done every day. She never owned it.’
    â€˜What happened?’
    â€˜He came back. They were happy. Then there were other complications – you know, people turning into animals, sleeping with their mothers.’
    â€˜I’m sorry.’ I blushed again. ‘I never had a classical education. I went to a comprehensive.’
    Stephanie’s eyes glimmered. ‘Me too! They were called secondary moderns in those days!!’ Now she was twirling me round and round on the landing.
    We had returned to the swimming pool.
    Steph was slipping into a bright red bikini. She had tossed me a bright green bikini.
    I was hoping that she would point me in the direction of a changing room. To ask for privacy now would be tantamount to a mythological betrayal.
    â€˜Oh, screw it,’ she said, and ripped off her bikini. Her body was smooth. I could detect some incisions under her arms and around her buttocks. She dived into the pool.
    I was hoping she would stay underwater for a minute and let me change, but she bobbed, staring at me. I took off my clothes and put on the bikini.
    I eased myself into the water.
    Steph swam towards me.
    â€˜Every woman who wants to come into consciousness of her being must become a mythographer,’ she was saying. ‘Every woman who wants to understand why she does what she does. Why she is so fucked up.’
    â€˜I’m not fucked up,’ I said.
    She laughed.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘I’m really not.’
    â€˜How could you not be?’ She kept laughing. ‘You are subject to normative femininity, which is a perversion. You are a perversion.’ She ducked underwater.
    When she resurfaced, she said: ‘The antidote to the snakebite is.’ She ducked