Piglet

by Lottie Hazell

Piglet was not shocked to find she looked like a woman with a head full of pins and glue: falling apart, stitched together.

Piglet’s body moved involuntarily as her mother pulled, straightening her, and there was a comfort in being clipped into place by a parent, as if she were six, her coat being zipped up around her.

“Oh, Pig,” he said. “What have you done?” She did not know how to answer, but he did not need her input. He continued: “This is three thousand pounds of dress, Duck.”

and she saw his frustration with her, she saw his disgust. “You couldn’t have waited, could you?” he said, closing his eyes. “You couldn’t just control yourself, for once?” He shook his head. “You—this dress—greed,” he said, his words failing him in his displeasure. She wondered, as he spluttered, whether his anger had been prompted by the gown’s price or her overspilling body. “You’ve already got so much: Kit, your new job.”

“You don’t get everything you want just because you want it. You have to work hard for things. You have to behave like a grown-up. If you’re offered a promotion, you do everything you can to get it. If your partner gets himself into trouble, you do everything you can to fix it. And if you’ve been bought a dress worth more money than my car, you do whatever it takes to fit into it.”

“It’s just greed,” he said, his eyes averted to the ceiling. “What is it about you and more, more, more?”

Did he know, more so than she, what was best for her, what she wanted? They had never walked like this before: so slowly, side by side, as if sewn along the seams of their clothing. His pride was hot as it radiated from his skin.

Beneath the meshed lace, her skin was puckered, hair follicles swollen by cold and by the realisation that she was married, that she had made a mistake. Because shouldn’t she be full now? Shouldn’t she be satisfied? Despite everything, she was hollow. She was hungry.

Piglet understood how it was, how it would always be: they, the family; her, the imposter—still, always.

Being in it together, she thought, being over it, was like eating a birthday cake that wasn’t yours. You began with good, manageable intentions, but when things started to go wrong, spin out of control, you couldn’t stop yourself. Instead of taking a step back, putting the fork down, wiping your hands, you kept going. Eating away until there was nothing left.

Piglet let herself sink into the food. Bourguignon would not let you down like a lover. Confit garlic would not abandon you like a friend.

seemed that anyone who came too close to her would also suffer the flying shrapnel of her discontent.

She found herself looking at them as she passed, assessing the calligraphy and the miniature boxes of pastel-coloured sugared almonds, and recognized them for what they were: a farce.

It had been mouth-watering to be legitimate, discerning, to be a woman to which all worldly pleasures were available and her indulgence encouraged. Now the recollection was bittered, the experience poisoned.

Her skin crawled with the reality, her breath catching in her throat, and she felt herself, then, slipping away.

She was raising a toast—“To us”—lifting her glass higher and higher, when she felt her dress give, a sick ripping snagging through the speakers. It was the seams, not even the buttons,

And Piglet was running, speeding, from one life to another. She was in the margins of her decisions, inhabiting the space in between. It felt oddly lonely, she noticed—or spacious, maybe—when there was enough room to spread out.

She had failed to become the person she had craved to be.

How to say that she had built a life that relied on the mirrors of others? How to tell Margot that she had carefully crafted her personhood on a lie—and not Kit’s, even, but the fallacy of their bliss, the superficiality and shallowness of it all.

they had made their vows in the pursuit of living a life that looked good rather than felt good.

Piglet tried to finish speaking, to ask how she was, if she was in pain, but she could not stop. She sounded like a child, her breath coming in jagged gasps, tears falling down her face, cutting tracks through thick wedding makeup, and it was not lost on her that, in this moment, she was asking Margot to mother her too. Her friend reached a hand across the table, and Piglet’s breathing steadied, her tears slowed. She looked up at Margot, this woman who was someone between friend and family.

“Go and smash it. Do it in the garden. Why not?” “Traditionally—” Piglet started. “Traditionally, you’re supposed to hang around for your reception and not just do one after the lunch,” Margot said. Piglet laughed, and then she cried.

She hadn’t planned to take the microphone. She hadn’t planned, really, to do any of this. When he had told her, two weeks ago, she had seen no other route forward than the one they had already laid. Marriage, still, to him, had been the best thing for her. It was absurd to think that she could tell people, share how he had failed, how she had. She could not disclose how her fiancé, her house, her life, were not so delicious after all.

But her wants, her desires, she had come to realise, were untrustworthy allies. Since he had told her, revealed how he had indulged his pleasures, she had decided to follow her own. She did not entertain the idea of hurting him back, and instead she permitted herself the kind of revenge that she could stomach. A revenge on him, a revenge on herself. With every mouthful, she let herself believe that everything, still, was fine. It would be fine because she could make it so, imbibe it, consume it until it was true. She had eaten her heart out. It had not changed a thing.

The attention from their guests, their wedding-day admiration, had not filled her up. Her father’s pride, wrested from him, had been bitter; her in-laws’ approval soured. She had plumbed the depths of this shallow life they had constructed and found there was nothing left to do but leave it. She had felt guilty. She was killing them, she knew, as she drew the bat down. But he would survive. People like him always did.

What did she want, she wondered afresh, and did it matter, as long as she could choose?

For a moment she was shocked, scared at the sight of her creation destroyed, desecrated on the lawn, before she remembered that she had chosen this ruin over the one she had been living. It would take her a while, she knew, for this choice to settle into her brain as fact, her decision like the death of a loved one: easy to forget, terrible to realize over again.

The images of them all made her stomach ache as if she were hungover. But it was done now, for better, for worse.

Previously, her trips here had been about Kit, about whoever they were hosting for dinner, and she had picked up ingredients she knew they would like, had made dishes that would make their eyes round, their mouths water. But what did she want? She

Kit held his hand over her father’s, and the two men looked at each other, exchanging the closed-lipped smiles of funeral mourners.

“You wanted to talk?” he asked, and she remembered that they couldn’t reverse anything: she had already tried.

Was this happiness: this rawness, this uncertainty, this promise of something new, something without him, something for herself?

In the kitchen, she turned on the radio and pressed the volume dial until sound filled the room, the house, her head. She started to sing, started to shout, and continued to push at the volume until she could not hear herself over the music, until it thundered between her ears.

Piglet started life as the creative component of a PhD and I am grateful to Loughborough University for giving me the opportunity to research and write.

I am grateful to every cookery writer that has kept me company and kept me fed. Laurie Colwin was right when she said that a cook is never alone in the kitchen. Nor is a writer, I’ve found, when among books.

Thank you to my family for instilling in me a singular and unwavering dedication to serve a minimum of three desserts at any gathering. And to my acquired family—the Hazells, the Heaths, the Lingards—for your encouragement and group-chat cheerleading. And finally, to my boys at home, to my tiny but mighty team: thank you for everything.