Gracious Living

by Andrea Goldsmith

  She heard his voice, he was returning, he was at the bottom of the stairs, the others were right behind, they were coming this way. Ginnie stood, her chair fell, she called to him over the top of the terminal. He looked in her direction, he must have seen her, must have heard her, but seconds later he and his friends were gone and the library was quiet once more.

  She picked up her sticks, left the chair lying on its side. There was pain with each step but it was only the adrenalin pumping fear into her and dragging her energy away. She walked to the women’s toilets, went into one of the cubicles, sat down and cried. And the thought that wrung the tears from her was that he would have noticed her if she were not disabled, he would have.

  On the way home, after asking Elizabeth a few questions about her meeting with the curator, Ginnie slumped into silence. She was tired, she explained, it had been a long day, and when they arrived home she went straight to her room. An hour later she joined Elizabeth in the lounge.

  ‘Better?’ Elizabeth asked, looking up from the newspaper.

  ‘Much.’

  ‘Good, because you still haven’t told me everything.’

  Ginnie raised her eyebrows, to her mind she had left nothing out.

  ‘The library, how did it go at the library?’

  ‘Perfectly.’ Ginnie flopped on to the couch. ‘Perfectly,’ she said again.

  ‘And you can manage everything?’

  ‘Everything – except the card catalogue.’ Anticipating Elizabeth’s next question, she continued, ‘There are plenty of people to help, in fact, I met one of them today – she’s one of the librarians and a graduate student of Vivienne’s.’

  ‘And so everything was all right?’

  ‘Absolutely. Will you please stop worrying, I’ll be fine. Perfectly fine.’

  Ginnie looked at her watch and stood up. ‘I feel like a walk, I’ll wander down to Kate’s and tell her about my day.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s home.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, I’m happy for the walk. Won’t be long.’

  Elizabeth made herself a drink and went outside to the verandah. She sat down and gazed across the garden. Ginnie was walking near the tennis court and Elizabeth watched her. She saw her daughter from a distance, saw her as a stranger, as if the space had somehow erased her familiarity. She saw a young woman for whom every step was toil, she saw the sticks and the stooped posture, she saw the disability before anything else. She saw her daughter in a way she had not for a long time and it caused a peculiar ache as if she were once again back in the wrenching, grinding days of the baby years. Then, Elizabeth had wondered whether her daughter would ever achieve anything. In those years as a young mother manacled to a handicapped baby in an empty kitchen at an empty table, with time and its passing the only movement in her young life, the child had been her bondage. She had spent a lifetime in that place with the baby who would not eat.

  At the kitchen table Elizabeth Dadswell watched the ant glide over the laminex to the bowl. Up the side it went, right to the rim. It paused, head raised, front limbs waving, sniffing. The creature smelled boiled vegetables, it smelled stale boiled water. The creature was not tempted, it slid down the bowl, across the table and out of sight.

  Intelligent little thing, Elizabeth thought as she entered the second hour of Ginnie’s lunchtime feed. She stared at the patch of table where the ant had disappeared, willing its return, but it was gone and the child slithered into view. The child and its clumsy mouth far too close. Elizabeth tried to escape, extricate herself, set her hands to automatic, spooning the slops and catching the mess, while she, a person after all, slipped away to a grassy knoll deep in the country, or to her old studio where a lump of fresh clay beckoned from the bench. But it was too late to save herself, her imagination was spoiled by the rusted smell of boiled cabbage: the grass would yellow and the clay would dry and Elizabeth and the child would remain together day after day and year after year from 1971 to the end of time.

  So this is how people go mad, she said aloud.

  The baby, startled by the noise, gagged, and a bolus of pureed vegetables doused in dark, dank stomach juices toppled over the tiny chin. Elizabeth began to cry, cold tears for the loss of the largest mouthful of the meal, resentful tears over boiled vegetables trapped forever in her nostrils, and all the while the spoon scoops more of the slops and carries them through the loose lips to the tongue snaking within. How Elizabeth hated the tongue, that writhing bunch of muscles with its taunts and tricks and jousts. The spoon must sneak around it, neatly, stealthily, the slightest hesitation and the tongue would thrust at the metal, heaving food out of the mouth heavy and ominous as a mud slide. Hump and roll and the food spewed over the slack lips and slithered down the chin. Elizabeth left the green muck clinging to the infant skin, even though the only person she punished was herself.

  Time passed, dragging its minutes. Elizabeth glanced at the clock. After one and a half hours only half the vegetables were gone, and most of this was caught rubbery and wet in the weave of the nappy she used as a bib.

  ‘Damn this,’ she said, flat and quiet, ‘and damn you,’ she said to the child. The child looked back at its mother, the eyes large and dark and pretty above a face slick with green slime. In the long empty pause that followed, the baby’s head dropped back and the mouth gathered into a scream; an exquisite piercing scream. The noise continued, punctured only by deep breaths, mere splinters of silence when Elizabeth felt the child watching her. Elizabeth preferred to avoid those eyes, they saw too much. Elizabeth could stand before the world without shame, a patient, suffering, ill-fated mother, but before the eyes of the infant she was condemned.

  She turned away. She knew what to do and immediately felt herself relax. She removed the teat from the baby’s bottle, tipped the vegetables in with the milk, replaced the teat and shook the bottle. The contents sloshed up and down in the glass, thud plop, thud plop, like a brain rattling in its skull. She watched the mixture turn a pale khaki and settle into the consistency of diluted mud. She smiled with satisfaction. She took a fork and wrenched at the teat until the hole was a gaping angry gutter. She tightened her jaw, clenching her lips as she tipped the child well back in her lap and poured the food in. The speech therapist, the woman in charge of all oral functions – eating, screaming, and if luck prevailed, talking – would be aghast at such apostasy; but mothers were not fools and Elizabeth would not be accused of starving her child.

  Ginnie swallowed in strong irregular gulps and the level of food in the bottle decreased. The glugging sound, just on the verge of choking, was oddly comforting. It was all very well for the speech therapist to forbid liquid foods and reclining postures and gaping teat holes, all very well for her to mutter that Ginnie was not nearly as handicapped as other children she knew, she only saw the child once each week, mid-afternoon, cleaned and smelling of baby powder, no longer hungry and eager to sleep. ‘Such a gorgeous little poppet,’ the therapist said, taking the child on her lap, ‘such a pretty little girl.’ And there Ginnie would sit for the entire session silent, compliant, gurgling to the speech therapist and ignoring her mother. No, the speech therapist did not have to sit for hours every day nagged by aching muscles and taunted by a future clotted with the odour of regurgitated food. She did not sit spooning in time with the passing hours, her life dribbling down the baby’s chin. Neither the speech therapist, the physiotherapist, the social worker nor the paediatrician had to live with this child.

  And neither, they were quick to remind her, did she.

  The bottle was emptying quickly. Elizabeth stood it on the table and watched the khaki sludge sink to the bottom. She wiped the child’s mouth a little too roughly and saw the infant skin glow. Without the dribble and the green slime, she was a pretty baby; even Elizabeth could see that. Strangers would peer under the bonnet of the pram, ‘What a pretty little thing,’ they would say, ‘and how old?’ And Elizabeth always reduced the eighteen months to ten, so that all the mothers could no
d sagely: they thought as much. But what would happen when the child outgrew her pram and burst through her pusher, how could Elizabeth conceal the truth then? It was not so much that she was embarrassed by the handicap, rather, any association with this child was a reminder of her own damaged life. And it would go on forever, a life sentence – despite her innocence.

  She replaced the teat in the child’s mouth. Thought of the future sickened her, not merely the sight of meals stretching to the end of the century, nor the clumsy intrusion of a wheelchair, nor even the start of Ginnie’s menstruation. The question that lingered over tortuous feeds and disturbed her early morning sleep was whether the child would be retarded, whether she would have the capacity of thought.

  Elizabeth had seen what she most feared at an institution for handicapped people: children with larval bodies, children rocking, banging heads, others with scarcely any movement at all, their wizened bodies and twisted limbs knotted on the floor, their haggard faces staring at the ceiling. Ginnie’s paediatrician had advised the visit. ‘To acquaint yourself with the child’s future,’ he had said, ‘and to make sensible decisions,’ with a warning emphasis on ‘sensible’. It was difficult for Elizabeth now, he had said, but she would thank him for his uncompromising attitude when all this – he waved his hand at the infant – was behind her. He had wanted Elizabeth to see what Ginnie could become, what she might look like, he had wanted Elizabeth to look at the little creatures and find menace and disgust in their bodies. But instead of menace, she saw stark neglect in their deformities and wretched deprivation in the strangely colourless skin. She saw cruel yellow walls with neither pictures nor toys to please the eye, she saw thirty-five metal cots with hospital-issue white bedding placed in straight rows like packets of flour on a supermarket shelf. She saw two nurses chatting above the freckled contortions of a naked child as if he were a stale discarded dinner. The paediatrician had meant her to envisage a life with Ginnie; but it had been impossible for Elizabeth to glimpse her own weary future while the poor neglected creatures were crowding her vision and snorting in her ears from their vast empty cages.

  So the institution fixed the child to her, by an unnatural bond that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with duty. If Elizabeth had not seen those children managing to survive an environment intent on wearing them away she might have given Ginnie up. But she had seen, and a remnant of justice, worn thin and ragged by the months with the baby, pulled the child tight to her chest and held her there while she spooned and washed and wiped her own young life away.

  The baby gurgled and gulped and gagged. The tiny body, usually limp like a stick of tired celery, stiffened, and for a moment Elizabeth felt the touch of a normal infant, a small quick joy before the body slackened once more. Even when you know how it is, hope is embarrassingly tenacious. Bloody lurking hope.

  She tipped the baby further back, too defeated to think about its choking, besides if it should happen, which was unlikely, the speech therapist had shown her what to do. So many helpful hints these smiling therapists handed out, but there were times when Elizabeth wished she did not know, times when she acknowledged the iniquity of it all, that while the child had never really lived, her own life had finished at the age of twenty-three. The baby was a murderer, the flaccid lump of flesh had killed as surely as any assassin; all that remained were a few memories of how it was before and how it should have been now. But as the days rolled on, even the memories, now so shrivelled with guilt, became as fragile as the summer grass. Elizabeth had expected to jostle for happiness in her turn at life, but what she had received was really too mean: trampled, bruised and sinking, she no longer aspired to happiness.

  The bottle slipped as Elizabeth raised a hand to her forehead. The skin was cold as clay. She jammed the teat more tightly into the child’s mouth and idly turned the pages of the newspaper. ‘Read the paper,’ Adrian would say, ‘take your mind off things. No sense in becoming morbid, that never changed anything. Besides, you’re letting yourself go. You can’t give in to this, you’ve got to fight Elizabeth.’ And with that, he would peck her pallid cheek and leave the house.

  Elizabeth turned the pages, looking but not seeing. It was not even the daily newspaper – too large to handle while she fed the child – only the local tabloid, full of council news, baby contests, the benefits of a proposed freeway, an article by concerned citizens for a freeway-free suburb, local shopping bargains, lawns mowed, handymen for whom no job was too small. The child’s gulping was only occasional now. She removed the bottle and rolled the baby on to its stomach and started patting, hoping it might sleep. Elizabeth arched her aching back and turned another page.

  She was not reading but saw the small box advertisement anyway. In the same way one always sees one’s name on a crowded page, so this advertisement, no different in style to all the others, stood out. HANDICAPPED CHILD? it asked in shameless capitals. Going crazy? it continued on the next line. I am, it stated bluntly on the third, and I cannot believe I’m the only one in the entire southern suburbs. If I’m not please contact me on . . . A post office box was given and the name Penelope Roscoe.

  Elizabeth stood up and walked to the nursery. She put the child stinking of cabbage and dirty pants into the cot. The child awoke and the screaming began. Elizabeth left the room and closed the door; she walked down the hall and shut the door; she entered Adrian’s office and shut that door too. She stood near the desk and listened. The wail was still audible. She turned on the radio, sat at the desk, wrote briefly, sealed the letter, added a stamp. At the front door she called out to Mrs Cox that she wouldn’t be long, walked to the comer and posted the letter.

  When she returned, Ginnie was still screaming. ‘She seems a trifle upset,’ old Mrs Cox said from the door of the nursery. Elizabeth took up the soft screaming mass, held it to her and quietened it. ‘I don’t expect to love you, I only want to tolerate you.’ She rocked the baby quieter and quieter. Pacing and rocking and thinking. She wanted peace, clouds of heavy still peace. The baby slept and Elizabeth walked gently up and down, back and forward, her marble face determined to be calm, her body cushioned by a cloud of peaceful avoidance. Rocking and walking at twenty-three.

  A week later, Elizabeth Dadswell stood in front of Penelope Roscoe’s house, a small but stylish Victorian cottage in a row of five. Two of the others were garnished with the latest fashions, a third was littered with builders’ rubble and the last, still in its original state, was strangling in lavish tangles of rose and ivy and wisteria. Elizabeth knew the area well. It was in the throes of being gentrified. Young couples, the honeymoon still fresh and the university degree newly framed, had filled the dilapidated houses with modern touches and youthful verve. Their eagerness, like fresh pungent varnish, adorned the little homes, gently, lovingly, glossing all visible surfaces. The hawthorn brick was painted cream or white, the window frames and Victorian lacework were in contrasting chocolate brown or dark blue; toilets were brought inside and placed in brightly tiled bathrooms, while in the kitchens, old Kookas were replaced with modern stoves and bench space appeared as if by divine inspiration. In other parts of the house windows were widened to propel light into the tawny Victorian interiors and creaking floorboards were muffled by deep carpet pile. Outside, in the front sliver of garden, was an Australian native, a blue gum or a wattle, and, a foot or two further on, a high front fence crawling with a vicious ivy. The little gardens were planted for now, for this year or the next; the new owner-renovators expected to move to larger premises before the gums towered over the houses and clogged the guttering. In this suburb, the people and the trees were on the move. Upwards.

  The Roscoes appeared to be typical inhabitants. The house had been painted cream with chocolate trim, the fence was high and swarming green, and the blue gum, already at guttering height, suggested an occupancy of three to four years. Prevailing taste would judge it an attractive house, one that, in the words of the realtors, combined modern convenience with old-world cha
rm. And yet who could know whether current fashion and eager realtors were right? Who has the vision to see their own times? Not Penelope and Andrew Roscoe, and certainly not the younger Elizabeth Dadswell. Elizabeth liked the house, liked it very much: the blue gum, the high fence, the cream and chocolate paint all met with her approval. She and Adrian had looked at many such houses prior to their marriage, but in the end her parents, who were paying for the property after all, had the final say, and Elizabeth had been forced to forfeit the picturesque and atmospheric for pragmatics: a large, Edwardian-style family home a brisk ten-minute walk from the Bainbridges. Adrian was delighted: the house was an excellent pulley for his ambitions.

  Ginnie stirred in the carry-cot. Elizabeth pleaded with her not to wake and moved smoothly down the path to the front door. ‘I ask nothing of you,’ she murmured to the child in a lullaby voice, ‘only sleep, just this once, for a few hours. Let me have this time.’

  It was not that she believed her life would be changed by the meeting, rather she longed for the solace of knowing others like her. She wanted to feel less alone and less guilty. She wanted, too, to feel less of a failure, but the experts said that would only occur if she were to have another child. And she wanted to talk, talk once, twice, a hundred times and ask a thousand questions about the child and the future and getting through each day. Even the brief phone call with Penelope Roscoe had made her feel better. Penelope had telephoned three days ago, Monday, and suggested morning tea for the Thursday. ‘I think there’ll be four of us,’ she had said, ‘a good number. Any more and I think we’d drown in a flood of words.’