Wearing Paper Dresses

by Anne Brinsden

  Marjorie’s eyes flashed at Jesse. ‘I have moved on, Jesse. I am making a life for myself. A good one. You need to find out how you can do the same.’

  ‘Do I? So I can have a life just like yours? I don’t think so.’ Jesse shook his head.

  ‘You need to stop writing those letters.’

  Jesse stopped shaking his head. He swapped to nodding slowly instead and said nothing for a while. Then he leant forward, put his elbows on his knees. ‘And just what would make you think I haven’t already?’ he said.

  Marjorie’s head jerked. She folded and tried hard not to crumple. Because despite what she was saying to Jesse, and despite what she told herself, and especially because of what she had been doing for all of that morning until nearly lunchtime, what Jesse had now said was just about the last thing she needed to hear. His letters – even when they were unread – kept her away from the edge of the salt lake. They kept her on solid ground. But Marjorie had a job to do so she wasn’t going to answer that. ‘What do you reckon it is about mothers and everyone always having to run away, Jesse?’ Marjorie asked instead. Even though she had known for years the reasons for mothers and everybody’s running. Even though she already knew what Jesse might say. Because when she had arrived home after the night out with Jesse, she got out all Jesse’s letters and she read them. She smoothed them out and stroked them gently then she started with the first one and didn’t stop until she had read right through to the very last. She had spent hours looking at all Jesse Mitchell’s words about mothers and running. ‘What do you reckon it is?’ Marjorie asked.

  Jesse winced. ‘You tell me, Marjorie,’ he said.

  ‘I have already told you what I think about that, Jesse. Many times.’ Marjorie settled herself. She clasped her arms and fixed her eyes on Jesse so he could not turn away. ‘I read every one of your letters last night,’ she told him. ‘So. Now it’s your turn. You tell me.’

  It was the middle of the afternoon, but the two of them could have been back in the Mallee in the middle of a night sitting around a campfire. Marjorie sat as she had once done before – she did not stir, she did not intrude, while Jesse talked to her as he had done one time before about a mother and a father. This time, though, Jesse talked until he had no words left, until he ran out of things to say.

  Once, in those long-ago campfire times, Marjorie could have put an arm around Jesse, and that was all she would have needed to do. Words would not have been necessary. But the two sitting there in the shade of the apple tree were no longer Jimmy Waghorn campfire night-time friends. They were different people now. She couldn’t do that anymore. So Marjorie spoke. ‘I am so sorry, Jesse,’ she said.

  Jesse stared at Marjorie. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What for?’ Then he shook his head and turned away and neither of them spoke for a long time.

  It was Jesse who talked first. ‘I need to tell you something else, Marjorie,’ he said to the back fence he was staring at. ‘I didn’t just take a glorious tiny plasticine horse. I have taken something else as well.’

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘What else?’

  ‘The old blue bench,’ said Jesse, his eyes leaving the fence and turning now to stare across at Marjorie. ‘I took the bench. I’ve got Jimmy’s old blue bench.’

  Marjorie’s lungs sucked in a huge mouthful of air.

  ‘Where is it?’ she asked.

  ‘At my place.’

  ‘Where at your place?’

  ‘Out the back.’

  ‘Where out the back?’

  ‘Under a tree.’

  ‘Do you light a fire?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is the tree a peppercorn tree?’

  ‘You’ll probably have to find that out for yourself.’

  Marjorie’s eyes were tired. She hadn’t had much sleep. And now here she was with some sort of a Jesse Mitchell again. And he was talking to her again. And now Jimmy Waghorn’s old blue bench was somewhere here as well. It was too much. She sat there looking at Jesse as her eyes gave up the battle. As two pearls tipped over their edges. The pearls clung for a bit on her eyelashes before starting down her face. She sat there, as the late-afternoon light bickered with the early dusk. ‘I would like to see that. I would like to sit on that bench again one day,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jesse. ‘I reckon you would.’

  Neither spoke for another while. Marjorie was thinking about an old blue bench. Jesse wasn’t, though. He was thinking about something else. He looked across at Marjorie. It could have been another one of those Jesse Mitchell sizing-up looks, but it had too much sadness soldered onto it to be just that. ‘You’re still running, aren’t you?’ he said.

  And again, he’d caught her off guard. She took a long time to answer. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes I am. Sometimes. It helps.’ There are no blazing, jostling stars now, though; no sentinel frosts, she thought. And if she had thought some more while she was staring right at Jesse she would have thought that running is not always about leaving. It is not always about getting away. And she might have said, Running can be about finding your way, you know. But she didn’t. She said, ‘And I always make sure I am home before sun-up.’

  ‘Me too,’ was all Jesse said.

  The sun was trying hard not to leave them in darkness because it knew Marjorie had something else to say this day about running: ‘I’m going home for a while,’ she said.

  ‘Why? I thought you never wanted to go back.’

  ‘I’m not going to up stumps and move back there, Jesse. I know I said I would never go back but now I need to. For Mum. I’m just going to go for a few days. My life is here now. And I happen to think my life these days is alright.’ Marjorie watched Jesse as she said this, her eyes skimming his face, looking for signs of quarrel, daring him to disagree. But all she could see were confused eyes: eyes that didn’t know if they were supposed to be the colour of gum leaves or the colour of wheat bags; eyes that were uncertain. So Marjorie said something else: ‘But I have been worried for a while that my mother might be not very well right now. Like that time with the bees. And those awful plastic bloody flowers.’ Marjorie stopped. ‘And now you turn up,’ she went on. ‘And you talk about the concert and you talk about the plastic.’ Marjorie stopped again because she didn’t want to talk about the other times – with the tablets, and the fires.

  Jesse nodded. ‘Is it the drought fundraiser, do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Who knows?’ Marjorie shrugged. ‘Yes. Probably. But who ever really knows? Anyway, I can tell that Dad is worried, so I’ve told him I’ll come home for a while and give him a hand. I thought that might have been why you finally stepped up and spoke to me instead of running off like a squib into the crowd. I thought maybe you knew something and were worried about my mother.’ Marjorie smiled a raggedy smile in Jesse’s direction.

  Jesse’s face reddened. ‘I could come with you,’ he said suddenly. ‘I could give you a hand.’

  ‘How exactly would you give me a hand, Jesse?’

  ‘I might give your mother a hand. Sing in her concert.’

  ‘You can’t do that, Jesse.’

  ‘Why can’t I?’

  ‘You can’t even sing.’

  ‘And how would you know that, Marjorie?’

  And the sun, which had already stretched itself as far as it could go across the yard, was at last overcome by the talk of those two under the tree – and by the night shadows. The shadows were hard pushing at it now, and the sun was stumbling and trembling towards the back fence. Marjorie and Jesse sat as the sun, red-faced and worn weary, was shoved, and fell over the fence into the shadows of the vacant block behind.

  *

  Jesse wasn’t the only one who, over the years, had been tiptoeing around the perimeter of Marjorie, hiding behind sandhills and silos, lugging their own burdens of things that needed to be said, dredging patterns and ciphers in t
he sand as they passed, like stumpy-tailed lizards in the night. A gauntlet of womenfolk was piled up on the crushed-quartz platform that day, waiting for Marjorie. They pushed ahead of her father, who had come into town to collect her while Pa waited back at the house with Elise. Those women hunched together there, each with a hand as an awning against the glare, their hankies flapping at flies, as Marjorie stepped down from the carriage into a brutal Mallee summer day.

  Marjorie looked at the small, boiling bunch of them in the heat. She was taken aback, but she nodded at them. Not to say hello, as they might have assumed, but because she didn’t think she had any other choice. Because even though it had been a lifetime ago, she recognised this group straight away; she could see it as plain as day. It was sitting there on all their hot faces and suspended there in those waiting eyes: floating either plaintive or hopeful. Anybody else might think it a strange place for them to gather, these shuffling women, their shoes trundling in the sun. But it was not strange. It was the certain and right place. Because these women were a mending party, a sewing guild. They were all of them in the business of mutual darning and patching. They were there because they had for a long time accepted the collective benefits of everybody getting around everybody else, gathering quietly in their clusters with their Birch Quick Unpicks and their darning mushrooms – giving a person a hand when there was a great deal of individual unpicking and redoing that needed to be done in life.

  ‘Marjorie, love,’ said Aunty Thelma as she kissed her on the cheek. ‘Thank goodness.’

  ‘I’ve missed you, dear,’ said Mrs Cameron. ‘Let me look at you,’ she said as her ample arms surrounded Marjorie.

  ‘Shirlene Doherty is organising the supper for your mother’s concert. She volunteered,’ said Aunty Kathleen. ‘She has also offered to drive you out to the cemetery. Daylight or dark.’

  Marjorie looked across at Shirlene Doherty’s face nodding away in an effort to dislodge its weight of apprehension. ‘I’m making your mother’s meringues. That’s what I’ll be bringing for the supper,’ said Shirlene. Her nodding head was working hard.

  Marjorie had used such a lot of words over the past couple of days with Jesse Mitchell. She looked around at the women bundling around her. She opened her mouth but no words would come out, so Marjorie realised she must have used all of them up and now she had no words left. But she thought something. Marjorie’s eyes turned to Shirlene Doherty. Thank you, Shirlene Doherty. Thank you, thought Marjorie as her father stepped forward.

  *

  And now Marjorie was back in that house again. Bill had transported Marjorie and her fine city suitcase with its brass hinges and triangular corner guards and fleur-de-lis pattern down the dusty miles and through all the slumping wire gates to the farmhouse. So here she was. In the kitchen once more.

  She was scanning her mother’s face as the two of them sat there at the old kitchen table. The north wind was rattling and slapping on the other side of the closed back door. It was tormenting the place: thumping roundabout; skidding against the bedroom window where she had dumped her suitcase; clouting the tin on the roof.

  A fan moved in the kitchen – dull and despondent in its failing efforts to battle the day. The cocky divided his time between spreading his wings before its spiritless efforts and eyeing Marjorie out of his side-on head. Elise was talking and talking as her hands fluttered through the air. ‘I am putting on a concert recital,’ she was saying.

  And Marjorie sat stiff with fright as bits of her mother’s glitter hovered and piled around the room. ‘I know. You have told me all this before. Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘These are unhappy times. Everyone here is struggling. We all need this concert, Marjorie.’

  ‘Why do you need it? What is it going to give you, Mother, that you need?’ Marjorie asked.

  Elise’s hands cut short their fluttering. They stopped in front of Elise’s face and she peered through their spread fingers at her daughter. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Marjorie,’ she said. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying: Are you alright? I am saying: What are you going to do if they give you more of those plastic bloody flowers?’

  Elise smiled then. She flicked her stilled fingers back into life. Flicking them in Marjorie’s direction. ‘You don’t have to worry, Marjorie. You know I do not commune with those flowers anymore. They refused to provide any solace for all those months at the hospital and I don’t expect them to start now. I am dead to them, Marjorie,’ she said. ‘And that language is uncalled for. You are not a filthy little guttersnipe. I am so glad you have come back, Marjorie. This concert will be much more marvellous than those recitals I performed in my wrought-iron-emblazoned mental institution. Those newspaper reporters will have another think coming after they have seen this.’

  ‘Who is looking after you? Are you taking enough care of yourself?’ asked Marjorie as she watched the glitter of her mother’s mind swaggering in the weary waft of the fan.

  ‘Oh. I don’t have time for that sort of thing now. I have a drought relief opera in the Mallee to produce.’ Elise smiled gaily and patted Marjorie on the arm. ‘That boy Jesse Mitchell is going to come back. He is thinking about singing in my production. He might come up from the city on the train. Or drive a car. I don’t know which.’

  ‘He can’t do that!’ said Marjorie.

  ‘Do what?’ asked Elise, momentarily mystified. ‘Drive a car? I think he can.’

  ‘Sing in your concert.’

  ‘Sing? Of course Jesse can sing if he wishes. And I really don’t think it is any business of yours, Marjorie, who sings in my recital. And I don’t appreciate that tone, young lady!’

  ‘Why would he do that? Why would you let him? He can’t even sing!’ said Marjorie, ignoring her mother.

  But it seems that answering Marjorie’s questions was another thing that Elise didn’t have any time for at the moment. ‘His mother, who is very devoted to my work, told me he might be interested,’ Elise continued, her words getting faster and faster. Elise was in a hurry now because the words were jamming and piling and anxious to get out of her mouth. ‘I am hoping Jesse will have a tenor voice. I need one of those. He will be untrained, of course, but so is everyone out here in the dusty middle of nowhere. And we don’t ever let that stop us.’

  Marjorie had another go. ‘Jesse can’t just turn up in town again out of nowhere and think he can butt in on your concert, just like that.’

  Elise stopped. She was taken aback. But only for a moment. ‘Well of course he can, you silly girl. Why could he not?’ she said.

  ‘Because I said so. Because you don’t even know if he can sing. You have already admitted that.’

  Elise wasn’t heeding her, though. ‘And his mother has quite a nice little voice too. You could take a leaf out of their book as far as devotion goes.’ Elise was nodding enthusiastically at Marjorie. ‘I will teach Jesse how to sing – if I need to,’ Elise said, almost as an afterthought.

  Marjorie turned away from the singing lessons and devotion. ‘There will always be droughts, Mother,’ she said. ‘They are as eternal in this place as the salt and the sand. You don’t have to do this if it’s too much for you.’

  But Elise had forgotten for a moment about the perpetually returning droughts. ‘It is a terrible thing that happened to Jesse’s father – that accident. It is a wonder his mother can sing a note at all after that.’ The glitter jostled and crowded. ‘Why are people not more careful, Marjorie? Farming is a perilous thing.’

  ‘Jesse told me about it,’ said Marjorie. She might have sounded dismissive, but she really wasn’t. It was just that she was concentrating on her mother, wanting to grab Elise and swat at that simpering glitter floating all around her. ‘You need to look after yourself. There will be no concert if you don’t look after yourself.’

  Elise pulled away from Marjorie. Her beautiful hands danced aga
in in the air between them. ‘I am looking after myself in an appropriate manner, Marjorie,’ she said. ‘Considering the circumstances. Any decent person could expect no more of me than I am so far managing in heat such as this. Could they?’

  ‘No! You’re not looking after yourself! And you damn well should be. And yes, I can. I expect so much more,’ said Marjorie. Her chair toppled as she reached and grabbed to hem in the cavorting hands.

  *

  Marjorie was shivering in the heat by teatime. They ate: Pa at one end of the table, Bill at the other end. Elise was sitting in her seat with her back to the stove. And Marjorie, shivering, sat alone on the other side of the table.

  ‘Where are your tablets?’ Marjorie asked as she handed her mother a cup of coffee.

  ‘They’re on the mantelpiece,’ said Pa, watching Elise over the top of his saucer of tea.

  ‘They are not necessary,’ said Elise.

  ‘I am waiting to see you swallow one,’ said Bill, clearing the dishes from the table, keeping an eye on Elise as Marjorie reached for the tablets.

  It was a summer night. They might have finished their tea, but it would be a while before it got dark. The north wind had gone home for the night, though. Bill and Marjorie and Pa glanced away and noticed, and glanced away and held their breath, and slurped their tea and clattered the dishes in the slowing light of the kitchen as Elise put a tablet in her mouth and swallowed her coffee.

  ‘I’ve got some traps to check down by the shearing shed,’ said Pa to Marjorie as the last of the dishes were put away with the last of the daylight and they were as sure as they could be that the tablet was gone.

  ‘I’ll help your mother in the lounge room with the piano practice. You two go and check on me traps,’ said Pa, nodding in the direction of the back door. Marjorie’s eyes widened. She was about to say something about Pa and classical piano and operatic competence but he saw her look. ‘Go on, you two, don’t just stand there,’ he said. ‘You think I don’t know about how a bloody piano works after all this bloody time?’