A Stitch in Time A Novel

by Lette, Kathy

• ISBN13: 9780743273244
• ISBN10: 0743273249
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-02
• Publisher: Washington Square Press

Summary

It's brains versus BotoxLizzie's life is so perfect she has to lookdownto see cloud nine...until she realizes she's about to hit the dreaded four-oh. For most women, turning forty is more dangerous than wearing a bikini thong in a big surf. Not Lizzie. Until, that is, she loses her job to a younger, more telegenic journalist -- and her husband to a sex goddess who keeps fit by doing step aerobics off her ego. That's when she starts to wonder about brains versus Botox. For Lizzie's sister, beauty is one of the most natural and lovely things money can buy. But must Lizzie go under the knife to win back the man she loves? The answer is as obvious as a pre-1990s nose job. This book will have you in stitches...literally!Love, adultery, death, and a disastrous bikini wax

Author Biography

Kathy Lette first achieved literary success as a teenager with Puberty Blues, now a major motion picture, and then worked for years as a newspaper columnist and as a television sitcom writer. Her novels Girls' Night Out, The Llama Parlour, Foetal Attraction, Mad Cows, Altar Ego, and Dead Sexy became international bestsellers which have been translated into seventeen foreign languages and are now published in more than one hundred countries. She has also written four plays. She lives in London with her husband and two children.

Excerpts

Chapter One

Introduction: The Pitter Pitter Pat of Tiny Crow's-Feet

Let me introduce myselves.

First there's the me who is often found flirting with lettuce leaves on my front tooth. The me who doesn't use hair conditioner because it takes too long. The me who, only this morning, got my antihistamine and spermicide sprays confused. I now have a vagina that can breathe more freely and nostrils I can safely have sex in for at least six hours.

This is the me whose idea of "working out" is a good, energetic nap. (There is growing medical evidence, you know, that jogging can make you hot and sweaty.) The me who understands that if shop mannequins were real women, they'd be too thin to menstruate. (I mean,hello?There are three billion women in the world whodon'tlook like supermodels. And only six whodo.)Hey, if you're feeling fat, just make sure you always stand next to a heavily pregnant woman -- take one with you everywhere. That's my advice. And wear pantyhose that control your excesses the way Rupert Murdoch controls the media.

It's the me who only shaves my legs to the hemline in summer. In winter I'm too lazy to shave atall.I wear thick tights and hope nobody notices the spikes porcupining through my Lycra. As for holes? I simply paint my leg in black felt pen. Even when Idoshear, I always miss a bit and end up sporting a hirsute median strip down the back of one leg. And you could use a curling wand on those pubes. I like my bikini line, goddamn it. It's like having a chia pet in my pants. Which is why I favor, at the beach, the silent-movie neck-to-knee circa 1922 look. Nothing better than a sturdy, orthopedic bathing suit.

My other sartorial preference is warm-up clothes. My motto is: If it fits,don't wear it.I like to wear clothes baggy enough to cover an aircraft carrier; teamed with voluminous knickers -- yes, my panty line is always visible. I have a positive allergy to G-strings. Hey, if I need dental floss I'll bloody well go to the drugstore and get some.

The same me who's always thought of beauty as a case of mind over matter -- if you don't mind, it don't matter. The me who allows all that aging angst to fly right under my anxiety radar. The me who doesn't think age is relevant, unless you're like, you know, a Stilton. You never see Cheddar cheeses undergoing Dermagen soft-tissue augmentation, now, do you?

This me mouths off tipsily at dinner parties that makeup generates more money than armaments. "And when you think about it, that's exactly what all those beautification products are, really -- ammunition in the sex war." (My girlfriends are usually making "Who lit the fuse onyourtampon?" taunts by now.) "Most cosmetic manufacturers areFrench.What does that tell you? That they're full of bullshit and LOUD about it.That'swhat." (You're starting to be amazed that Ihaveany friends, right?)

But honestly. "TheScienceof Beauty"...puh-lease. If these so-called beauty scientists are so bloody brilliant, why aren't they off fixing the hole in the ozone layer? Given the choice between an episiotomy and listening to a beauty therapist, I'd say, "Get the scalpel." It's nothing but protein-enriched witchcraft. The only reason a moisturizer is called a miracle cream is because it's such a bloody miracle that anyone would fork out fifty frigging quid for it.

That's the me who thinks "free radical" refers to Nelson Mandela. The me who hears myself described as a "lady" -- and reels around looking for the Duchess of Kent. Despite the fact that I'm a presenter for the BBC'sThe World News Today,I'm obviously just impersonating an adult. Actually, I'm immaturing with age. At work, after I've boiled down the day's events into digestible yet nourishing news bites, I waste entire afternoons thinking up profoundly puerile nicknames for my superiors. After I've reported on the latest volcanic eruption or political corruption, I am often to be found alone in my office, miming along to Destiny's Child using my deodorant as a microphone, or hanging out with the makeup girls, making prank phone calls to the prime minister's office and Xeroxing our labial regions.

That's the me I like -- the one who's been known to drink huge amounts of vodka and wake up stark naked in an unfamiliar nation with nipple jewelry. The me who only leaves a cocktail party when abducted. At knifepoint. The low-maintenance, high-value, worldly me who can say in sixteen languages, "Hey, buddy, I've got an extremely contagious STD I'd be only too happy to give you."

But then there's thatOtherMe.

ThatOther Merecently rear-ended a police car because I was scrutinizing my face in the rearview mirror for signs of photo-aging. ThisOther Me'sbody is coated in creams thick enough to trap small domestic creatures -- cats, squirrels, passing pet mice, they're all to be found stranded and struggling on my nether regions. Honestly, of late I've been dousing myself in a potion quotient to rival the petrochemical output of Texas. My husband, Hugo Frazer, M.D., could develop Gulf War syndrome from just one kiss. Actually, I'm terrified I'll start some toxic chain reaction by accidentally using a Revlon décolletage softener with a Clarins abdominal cellulite gel and just EXPLODE! There'll be bits of me all over the bloody room. Well, at leastthosebeauty products will live up to their claims to "stop aging in its tracks."

ThisOther Mefeels trapped in a body that is no longer mine...which is why I'm wheezing and panting my way to an early death on the hamster wheel of self-improvement...And why I've given up theNew York Review of Booksin favor of magazine articles entitled "Ten Tips for Toning Thunder Thighs."

ThisOther Meis backstroking up and down the pool of Narcissus, at torpedo speed...ThisOther Mefeels so ugly that I worry if people so much as glance at me they'll need a cornea transplant, pronto.

What on earth is wrong with this woman? I hear you ask. If her brain were a toy the box would read "Batteries not included"; produced by a company called Morons R' Us. I mean, why the schizophrenia?

Why?

Because I'm thirty-nine.

That'swhy.

At thirty-nine, you go to bed one night as usual, your normal, scuzzy old self, in your husband's faded Arsenal football shirt, with a smudge of toothpaste on your chin and a bit of dental floss still wedged between your fangs, encased in your favorite pair of moth-eaten cottontails, the ones with the hole, the stain and the erratic elastic (just in case you get your period) -- only to wake up a Spandex-wearing gym junkie with pores in need of constant rehydration, a personal trainer, a Jungian analyst, a car shaped like a sex aid, a nail technician, a toy-boy fixation and having whole conversations about seaweed facials and tantric clitoral lavage.

Beautification techniques to which you've never given a moment's thought suddenly take up more of your brain space than third-world debt. If I had to choose between starting a new diet and eradicating world hunger, I'd have to ask, "Um...Slimfast or Jenny Craig?"

El Niño and the ensuing environmental destruction are less worrying than the discovery of a new wrinkle.Wrinkle?Who am I kidding? I've got enough crow's-feet to start a bird sanctuary. Actually, they're not crow's-feet, they're bloody great ostrich prints...Who let the pterodactyls loose? Apparently they've been stomping all over my face and I didn't notice.

It's as if UFO rays from some outer galaxy have been beamed into your brain making you agonize over, of all things, inner thigh elasticity. Just as quickly all the money in your purse evaporates, teleporting itself into the bank vaults of cosmetic companies. And for what? Some "wonder cream" that they can't tell you exactly how they make -- but, put it this way, two hundred ferrets wentintothe laboratory, and only two hobbled out, andthosehad grown a couple of extra heads and undergone some mysterious sex change.

But who cares? You buy it anyway. You seem to have developed a chronic inability to say "No" to Harrods beauty assistants. Puréed pig erections? Yes, please. Ground sheep embryos in a handy, handbag-size dispenser? Hell, yes. Good God, if beauty experts told me to eat pedicure shavings for an invigorated complexion, I'd damn well do it.

All of a sudden, sunlight, late nights, alcohol, coffee and everything else that makes life worth living are not D.C. -- Dermatologically Correct. With no prior warning, I find myself unexpectedly wanting to put a cosmetic surgeon's kids through private school. Out of the blue, I'm comparing my butt buoyancy to women on ten-foot billboards and making lists of all the females I know who are younger and more slender of thigh than I.

Me, Lizzie McPhee, the woman who could put a construction worker in a headlock as soon as his lips so much as pursed toward a wolf whistle. Me, Lizzie McPhee, the mouthy brunette who has been known to kick-start her own vibrator.

At least I'm not the only one making such a moron of herself. It seems to meallwomen over thirty-nine -- from the double agent who smashed terrorist cabals to the aviatrix who crash-landed on a Himalayan peak -- find themselves, contrary to all expectations, transmogrified into demented Barbie wannabes, desperate for an elixir to combat the terrible, incurable disease afflicting females -- age. It's not racial but facial prejudice -- a discrimination only suffered by women. (I mean, Woody Allen still gets laid, right?) For females, wordplay is foreplay. But for blokes? Well, if manners maketh man, makeup maketh woman. And we don't need a phalanx of behavioral scientists to explain why men judge women by their looks. Because theyseebetter than theythink.

Is it any wonder that once you hit thirty-nine a woman's I.Q. halves when she's within the vicinity of a new beauty product? Why we huddle around the latest antiaging cosmetic like an underground movement in touch with the free world?

For females, turning forty is more dangerous than a beach-thong in a big surf.

I blame Mother Nature (two-faced bitch!) and Father Time (bloody bastard!). Yep, those misogynistic killjoys have cut off my pocket money and left me grounded. With those two authoritarian heavyweights ganging up, what chance does a woman have, I ask you?...Which is how I ended up here, halfway through my thirty-ninth year, in a pastel-wallpapered, Muzak-saturated hospital recovery room, pulverized, puking and punch-drunk on painkillers. Mummified in bandages, I'm like a Christmas present waiting to be oohed and aahed over at my own unwrapping.

But will I "ooh" and will I "aah"? Or will this be the day I'm going to wake up, look at the algae wrapped around my abdomen and the raspberry enema pipe stuck up my bum and say to myself, "You fucking idiot"?

Bristling with needles and woozy from the anesthetic, I try to swim back up into consciousness, but am weighted down by the enormity of what I've done. So much has happened over the past year to propel me here -- adultery, incest, death, divorce...an accident with a do-it-yourself Brazilian Bikini Home Waxing Kit...The facts keep toppling down on me. I dimly recall that it all began last June, on my birthday. That's when I first felt that my age was forcing me to hitchhike on the hard shoulder. And Life was the truck that had just zoomed by...

Copyright © 2005 by Kathy Lette

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Excerpted from A Stitch in Time: A Novel by Kathy Lette
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