Free Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by Ruth Rendell Page A

the rest, a banana with a brown bruise and squashy tip. He turned his eyes away, remembering to keep them lowered. “I don’t think I want any strawberries today.”
    “I know you don’t, darling, and no pears or peaches.”
    Michelle didn’t say, Because they bruise easily, they decay fast. She knew that he knew that she knew. They moved on past milk and cream and cheese, she helping herself surreptitiously while he looked the other way. She dared not buy meat or fish; she’d go to the local corner supermarket for that on her own. Once he’d actually vomited. It was the only time they’d ventured together into the meat section and she’d never risk it again. Among the cakes and biscuits, she grabbed the things she knew she shouldn’t eat but had to. To distract herself, to distance herself, to console herself.
    “Those,” he said, pointing.
    He wouldn’t say “butter puffs.” “Butter” was among the words, along with “cheese” and “mayonnaise” and “cream,” he hadn’t uttered for years. He’d be sick. She took two packets of the dry, flaky biscuits. His face had become even paler than usual. In a surge of love for him she wondered just how much torment being in a food store brought him. He insisted on coming. It was one of the courage-testing tasks he set himself. One of the challenges. Looking at a magazine was another, turning the pages and forcing himself not to skip the ones with the color shots of soufflés and pasta and roast beef. Talking to people who didn’t know, watching them eat, watching
her
eat. They came to fruit juices. She took a carton of pineapple juice, looked at him, raising her eyebrows. He nodded, managed a death’s-head smile, all skull and teeth. She laid her hand on his arm.
    “What would I do without you, my darling?” he said.
    “You don’t have to do without me. I’m always here for you, you know that.”
    There was no one near to hear them. “My sweetheart,” he said. “My love.”

    She had fallen in love with him at first sight. Because it wasn’t the first time she’d felt like that—though her love had never been returned—she expected, with anticipatory bitterness, that once again her feeling would be unrequited. But he had been the same and loved her back with a like ardor. He was a teacher and had two degrees, while she was just a nursery nurse, but he loved her, she didn’t know why, couldn’t account for it. They weren’t very young; both of them were in their late twenties. Passion overtook them. They made love the second time they met, moved in together after a week, got married two months after their first meeting.
    Michelle was—well—not thin then, but not plump either, just a normal size. “A perfect figure,” Matthew said. If anyone had asked her the secret of their love and their successful marriage she’d have said it was because they were so kind to one another. He’d have said it was because no one else had ever mattered much to either of them once they’d met.
    He was funny about his food even then (Michelle’s way of putting it) but she’d always thought men quite different from women in their attitudes to eating. Really, it was just that, like most men, there were a lot of things he didn’t like. Red meat was on his poison list and all kinds of offal, shellfish, and any fish that wasn’t white—in those days, when she could joke about it, she called him a “fish racist”—sauces and mayonnaise and custards, anything “sloppy.” He was faddy, that was all. But he began to get worse, though she never put it like that. Eating disorders as real illness were just beginning to be recognized, but everyone thought they only applied to young girls who wanted to stay thin. Because they talked about everything, they sometimes discussed, in depth, his problem. How he couldn’t eat things that looked like other things. An example was rice; he’d just got it into his head that rice looked like maggots. Soon he couldn’t