Grace's Table

by Sally Piper

  His birthday gift to her sat now at one end of the kitchen bench in a pretty ceramic pot. It was an orchid, a beautiful one. Its small white flowers were so intricate that Grace had held a magnifying glass to a number of them to fully appreciate their detail. Their tiny throats were frilled with cream, which gave way to a lower petal that curled up like a friendly dog’s tongue.

  It was an unusual gift to receive from a man who rarely gave any. It had stirred that memory of Filip and his long-ago gift of a mango. Today Grace was thrilled to discover that she could still be courted with the exotic.

  Susan, however, had ignored the orchid since she’d arrived, knowing where it had come from. What a shame even beautiful things were perceived by some to have an ugly underbelly. Grace tried to think lightly of it. Thirteen at the table would have been considered unlucky.

  Mother and daughter stood side by side at the bench, crystal bowl between them. In silence they sliced cheeks from the mangoes, Grace with her old knife, Susan with the new. Susan was brisk and efficient in the way she worked. She peeled the skin from each then sliced the flesh into long even strips on a chopping board. Grace’s actions were slow and less measured. The skin of hers fell away in irregular pieces and the slices varied in thickness and shape. Each took it in turns to scrape the sliced fruit from their boards into the crystal bowl.

  ‘You’re dreamy today,’ Susan said, after a while.

  Grace selected another mango from the bench. ‘Lost in the past … I’m quite enjoying it.’

  ‘I’ve not known you to spend so much time there.’

  Grace shrugged. ‘Turning seventy must have made me sentimental. Lamb. Mangoes. They’re all bringing back old memories.’

  ‘You? Sentimental?’

  ‘Yes, today it’s the emotion du jour.’ Grace smiled.

  ‘Sounds like a soup menu.’

  ‘Ah, you see, just the word soup makes me nostalgic today.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it takes me back to Mother relaxing her rules.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If it was cold and Mother had made soup, I was given a treat.’ Grace dropped her voice to a whisper and leaned in towards Susan. ‘I was allowed to sit on the floor to eat it.’

  Susan laughed. ‘Sitting on the floor was a treat?’

  ‘Uh-huh. With Mother it was. She’d let me sit on an old cushion with my back pressed up against the warm bricks around the wood stove and a big mug of soup wrapped in a tea towel on my lap. I was even allowed to blow across the top of it to cool it.’

  ‘Wow – that’s really living it up.’

  Grace laughed with Susan. ‘As they say, sometimes it’s the small things.’

  Susan cleared another mango from her board into the bowl.

  ‘Pa would come home and say, Look, Grace’s a hearth rug. Let’s bring the dog in too and they can both lie in front of the stove.’

  ‘I bet Nan drew the line at that.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  Grace couldn’t remember a more flagrant disregard of manners allowed by Mother at meal times than sitting cross-legged on the floor to eat – no bowl, no napkin.

  There had come a morning long ago when Grace had wanted to show her own children the same freedom soup had sometimes brought her as a child. She’d woken with the coldest feet she could remember having since moving to the hot north from Harvest. As she got up from her bed, she said the word soup without any prior thought or reckoning.

  The cold snap would be short-lived – they always were – but Grace was determined to celebrate its arrival all the same. Just as Mother had, when the first frosts came in hard and they lingered in the shade, even at midday. Out would come the heavy cast-iron pot. Mother would chop and dice anything to hand, then leave the brew to simmer and thicken on the old wood stove for the best part of the day. Grace’s cold snap hadn’t brought any frost but if she cooked soup she could pretend it was there. She saw it as a way of restoring a gentleness to the often hard memories of her mother.

  A mean south-westerly pummelled Grace’s windows as she boiled the soup bones that day. She cooked them until the meat fell away as tender morsels and the marrow had all but disappeared, the surface of the liquid glossy with it. The hard little pellets of barley became soft and plump at the bottom of the pot and the small squares of vegetables obligingly kept their shape.

  But that evening, as the soup simmered gently on the stove, Des came in the back door in front of a cold draught: ‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked, before his jacket had even reached the coat hook on the back of the kitchen door.

  ‘Soup.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, there’s bread and dessert, of course. But the soup’s a meal on its own.’

  ‘You know I don’t like soup. I like chewin’ me food. I can take it from a spoon when I’m old and lost all me teeth.’

  ‘But it’s so cold.’

  ‘And why are those kids eatin’ on the sofa?’

  ‘Mum said we could play hearth rugs,’ Claire called from the adjoining room. The music to Gilligan’s Island jangled in the background.

  Grace suddenly felt foolish, for imagining Des would be as easygoing as Pa.

  He went to the fridge looking for leftovers, but there were none.

  Then he slammed the fridge door shut and wrenched open the freezer door. He crashed frozen bundles about inside, eventually pulling out a plastic bag that held a slab of beef fillet. There for a special occasion, Grace remembered he had said when he brought it home from work.

  Frozen meat in hand, Des went out the back door. Grace saw the light from his shed flicker on through the kitchen window. Fleetingly she thought how cold it must be outside, no jacket and a two-pound slab of frozen beef in your hands. Above the wind she heard the bandsaw start up.

  A few minutes later Des came back in, a slightly less than two-pound piece of beef in one hand and a frozen slice of steak in the other.

  He dropped the larger piece back in the freezer and threw the steak on the bench in front of Grace.

  ‘I’ll have it with mash and fried onion,’ he said, and headed towards the bathroom. ‘And there’ll be hell to pay if you kids make a mess in there!’

  Grace stopped peeling the mango and looked at a spot on the kitchen wall, as though the memory was projected onto it. ‘There were so many rules.’

  Susan shrugged. ‘She was an old-fashioned woman, I suppose.’

  ‘And your father’s excuse?’

  Susan stopped cutting the mango she was working on and looked at Grace. ‘He was old-fashioned too. It’s not fair to blame the person. Blame the era.’ She went back to her slicing but with more force than was necessary for the delicate fruit.

  It disappointed Grace to think Susan could justify Des’s shortcomings in this way. With this thin excuse for bad choices. And Des had often chosen badly.

  ‘All things considered,’ Susan added, clearing the last of her mango, ‘he was a good man.’

  Grace took her board to the sink and turned on the tap, pretended not to hear. She rinsed board and knife under running water then made a show of seeing every orange fibre washed down the plughole.

  4

  The temperature in the kitchen rose incrementally with the level of activity needed to prepare a meal for twelve. Grace opened the window to move some of the hot air.

  A soft Sunday hum drifted in. It was her favourite day of the week; the closest she got to her childhood quiet. She could hear insects going about their business among the star jasmine flowers on her back patio; birds making friendly conversation from the jacaranda’s branches. Somewhere, a few backyards away, she picked up the rhythmic pop of someone hitting what might be a ball in a game of totem tennis. On the second-floor balcony of the unit next door, a woman was hanging washing over a clotheshorse. Grace watched as she snapped creases fro
m a pillow case, shorts, a towel. Each action cut the air like a pistol crack.

  On weekdays these sounds were lost. The city swallowed them up in its wakefulness, its business: wheels turning, braking; car engines accelerating, decelerating; clip-clopping shoes and conversations on the move. There were the sounds of progress too: drills, hammers, angle grinders. And those of harm or danger: sirens, alarms, unknown crashes and bangs.

  The smaller fibres of sound – those Grace could hear today – were the ones she liked best because they were the ones that revealed the true fabric of people’s lives. It was odd to think that on weekdays they were mute. At Harvest, she remembered such noises – wind-cracked sheets drying on the line, the distant thunk, thunk of a fence-post driver – as the defining sounds of any given day of the week.

  The eleven o’clock news broadcast came on the radio. Grace already knew what the headline would be – the same as it had been for close to three weeks now. But habit forced her hand to reach across the kitchen bench and turn up the volume anyway.

  ‘Still no change to the state of residents’ footpaths overnight,’ the reporter began. One look out the window that morning had told her that. ‘With waste reported to be chest-high in some areas …’

  Chest-high? Grace tried to imagine it. It could be fairly called thigh-high in parts of her street, and that seemed bad enough. Still, leave ten or a hundred bags stacked long enough in the February heat and the smell was terrible.

  ‘Union officials and local government members have been in crisis meetings overnight but there’s still no sign of a resolution to the dispute.’

  ‘Nothing new there then,’ Susan said, and turned the volume back down.

  Grace went to the fridge, took a cauliflower and bag of parsnips from inside and sat each on the bench.

  ‘Kath will hate having to come here today.’ Grace thought of her old friend on the outskirts of the city, as she started cutting the cauliflower into florets.

  ‘It’ll do her good to get off her mountain. See what’s happening in the real world.’ Susan took the second pot of potatoes from the stove. ‘Not too small,’ she said to Grace on her way past to the sink.

  Grace ignored her. ‘The world’s as real as she likes it where she is.’

  ‘Each to her own, I suppose. But I couldn’t stand it.’ Susan started opening cupboards under the sink.

  Mother had always said something similar about Harvest – that it was as close to the real world as she liked and that the far-away city could stay just that, far away. At the time Grace too had thought each to her own, desperate to be shot of Harvest, desperate to be nothing like her mother, as Susan probably felt now.

  ‘She was always so outgoing,’ Susan said to the inside of a cupboard. ‘I never understood why she took herself so far off the social map in the first place … Where’s the colander?’

  ‘The other potatoes are in it. I’ll get something to put them in.’ Grace took a plastic bowl from inside a cupboard and emptied the first batch of cooled potatoes into it. She then took the other pot from the sink and upended it into the colander, tilting her head back from the steam. ‘Maybe after living a busy life she decided simplicity was the ticket.’

  ‘Taken a ticket to sit and wait beside her grave more like. She’s given in to it.’ Susan moved in on the cauliflower, took over from Grace.

  Grace knew the it Susan referred to was age.

  ‘She never struck me as the type,’ Susan said.

  ‘There’s no type. Ageing happens to everybody.’

  ‘But she was always so out there. As a girl I wanted to be just like her when I was her age. Remember the zany-hat stage I went through? That was Kath. Just as my failed attempts at smoking were. Remember that tin Dad used for his rollies, the one you always kept full for him? Certainly came in handy during that particular phase.’

  Grace remembered the tin because she had given it to Des. She still held the image in her mind of the male peacock that was pressed into its gold metal lid, tail feathers on full display. Bev had found her filling it with fresh rollies once. Grace was sitting alone at the kitchen table the day her friend came by, unannounced, to the back door. Not that an announcement was necessary, but if Grace had known Bev was calling in, then she might have found her doing something different.

  ‘Are you doing it to keep busy?’ Bev had asked, hand resting gently on Grace’s shoulder.

  Her friend’s voice was anxious but Grace was in no state to soothe. She didn’t look up from the cigarette she was crafting. Instead, she ran the tip of her tongue carefully along the gummed edge of the Tally-Ho paper and sealed it. She picked up a match and poked the hairy tobacco ends inside, then put the completed cigarette in the tin. She pulled another paper from the packet and started over again. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Keeping busy.’

  ‘Oh, Grace,’ Bev said softly.

  As Grace remembered it her friend had remained at her side, arm round her thinning shoulders, until she’d fitted the last one she could into the tin.

  She got the rolling of Des’s cigarettes down to a fine art – the tobacco tight, but not so tight that you couldn’t move the air easily through it, and not so loose either that it burnt down too quickly. He never thanked her for keeping the tin full, but neither did she stop doing it.

  ‘Kath was my idol,’ Susan said, ‘and now I have trouble remembering why.’

  Who could deny Susan her feelings of betrayal: to have imagined a future for yourself, only to discover it wasn’t the right one.

  Grace looked up from the potatoes, quite drained in the sink now, and watched Susan as she worked the knife through the cauliflower. She remained a tall woman, and attractive in an unadorned way. Peter’s Jane had always needed trimmings to create such a look; Susan could still pull it off with the assets she’d been given from birth.

  Yes, she’s carried herself well, Grace thought, admiring her straight back and long neck. Des had taught her not to round her shoulders on her height. Pull yourself up tall, Susie. Let the world see what my girl’s made of, he’d say. And Susan would press her shoulders back and lift her chin in a way that made her look more proud than confident. Either way, Des was always pleased with the result.

  But changes were at play with Susan, Grace had noticed, and age was the umpire. Her daughter’s upper arms were going the way of an older woman’s, a little saggy, and the V of her neck showed the tell-tale lines of the child who’d always enjoyed the sun. Her dark hair, a feature Des had admired from the moment he’d laid eyes on the tiny damp mop at birth, remained thick and shiny but Grace knew she’d been colouring it for a while to hold back the grey.

  Grace felt a pang for her daughter’s lost youth. And a greater pang for Susan’s fear. No matter how hard people tried to run, age would always take hostages.

  For Grace, the regrets had long passed. She’d come to accept that when she stood naked in front of a mirror now, features of her elderly mother looked back at her. There was the same short white hair and cartography of lines to her face. Her breasts hung lower than they once had and her abdomen was no longer flat. The once thick, springy pubic hair was sparse and wiry; a diminished crown above withered rose petal folds. Her legs were more bone than meat.

  The image was an irony. Just as Susan had strived to be like Kath when she was younger, Grace had reached out, eagerly, for her future too – years ticked off by quarters; declared almost five, nearly ten, finally sixteen. Now, she wished she’d preoccupied herself more with remaining a child.

  ‘Maybe you’ll want to be like her again one day,’ Grace suggested. ‘Live a simple life on a quiet mountain.’

  ‘Not likely.’ Susan brought the knife down to cleave the last floret, a large one. ‘There’ll be no quiet mountains for me when I’m old.’

  Susan started on the parsnips, left them long and quartered, just as she liked them.

  Grace enjo
yed making bus journeys within and to the edges of the city. She liked the way the cumbersome vehicle settled gracefully with a whoosh of air at each stop and floated off again like a hovercraft. The rhythm of the movement soothed her.

  The previous week Grace had taken the bus to visit Kath and her mountain.

  ‘I need some fresh air,’ she’d said to her friend on the phone.

  Kath had laughed her raspy smoker’s laugh and said, ‘And you’re calling me?’

  Ada made the trip with her – round, reliable Ada – a friend who’d been ticking the years off with Grace longer even than Kath had. They were a quartet once, with Bev, but she was gone now. As one of a long line of lopsided, breast-less women in her family, Bev had received her cancer as though it was a long-awaited visitor finally come knocking. It had escorted her out the door a dozen years ago now. Grace missed her as though it was only yesterday. Her friend’s gentle hand had rarely been far from Grace when she needed it.

  She and Ada sat in the middle of the bus where experience had shown them a smooth ride. Grace imagined how they looked to others: both white-haired and each dressed similarly for comfort, not high fashion, with permanent press and cautious hemlines. Short-legged Ada sat at the window, knees apart due to anatomy not choice, tips of her sensible shoes struggling to touch the floor, and the hem of her skirt pulled down decorously. She clutched her handbag to her lap with both hands, rarely relaxing her grip – but neither would she hesitate to lift it and use it as a weapon if required – and leant in to Grace a little to listen each time she spoke. Grace was a head and neck taller than her friend, with her long legs either stretched out in front or pulled back under her seat, ankles crossed one behind the other. Like Ada she had both hands on her handbag, but more for comfort than protection, and the top hand lifted from time to time to add emphasis to what she said.

  The two friends talked for most of their journey to the city’s north-western fringe. Much of their conversation was about the garbage strike – it consumed most conversations – but to a younger person’s ear, Grace supposed they covered it in ways that were predictable.