by Sally Piper
As Susan turned to Grace with the dish in her hand, the donkey’s legs clipped the edge of the bench. Grace saw a colourful flash – and the dish dropped from hand to floor and smashed on the hard tiles.
‘Oops,’ Susan said. ‘Looks like the donkey’s carried its last load.’
‘Oops? Is that all you can say?’ Grace bent down to the shattered pieces and started gathering the larger ones in her cupped hand. She longed fleetingly for the cheap old lino back; it might have saved the breakage.
‘Who was it saying having special crockery out was worth the risk?’
‘But you don’t even sound sorry!’
‘I am sorry. But it was an accident. I’ll get the dustpan and brush and help clean it up.’
Grace gathered up the donkey’s sad ears. Remarkably they were still attached to the top of its head, like Goofy’s ears on a Disneyland baseball cap. Its solemn face and handy cart – save one wheel – were in smithereens. She recognised one of its little pink nostrils, now cleaved in two. Its sway back was a mosaic of jagged pieces. She could only find one eye.
‘Fifty years I’ve been looking at your sad little face.’
‘At least you acknowledge it was a miserable-looking thing,’ Susan said, coming back from the laundry with the dustpan.
‘I loved it,’ Grace snapped.
‘It’s only a dish, Mum.’
‘Which once carried an important message.’ Grace scouted around the floor looking for far-flung pieces. It was important to her that all its broken parts should be disposed of as a whole. To do otherwise seemed like a betrayal. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
Susan said nothing. Instead, she held the dustpan out for the pieces Grace held.
Grace watched as Susan swept the smaller fragments up from the floor then dumped the lot in the bin.
‘My poor little burro,’ she said. ‘The rest of your time spent as landfill.’
Susan slammed the bin lid down. ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mum, you didn’t go on half as much when Claire broke your favourite serving platter of Nan’s that time.’
Grace looked at Susan, stunned. She tried to recall the incident. She remembered the platter and remembered its absence but not so much its breaking.
‘She was a child,’ Grace said, not knowing what else to say.
‘A spoilt one,’ Susan mumbled, then blushed and turned away.
Grace wished she’d misheard the words.
She’d always thought Claire too hard to pin down to spoil. Even her conception had proved elusive. She was born four years after Susan – who’d come along back-to-back with Peter – and only then when Des’s clever hand had mixed more sherry than lemonade in Grace’s drinks one night.
From the day Claire crawled, she revealed herself as a child whose inquisitiveness would allow trouble to find her. It sought her in stair tumbles and bee stings, stuck high up in trees and lost down lanes. It found her in sibling squabbles and daredevil cycling, in errant cricket balls and wayward pogo sticks. It never caught her around dolls or tea parties or dress-up, because she did none of those things. She was the bright full stop to Grace’s three children and the one who made Grace laugh and cry in equal measure at her antics and escapades.
In comparison, Peter and Susan had been serious for their tender years, and each had a preoccupation with themselves.
Daddy, Daddy, look at me! they’d call from their safe positions on low branches. Do you think I’m clever, Daddy? Do you? they’d demand from their stable bikes. But where her two older children worked their father for favours and praise, Claire showed no desire to have either. She was happy to find her accolades within herself, by achieving clever deeds and brave acts.
Come and give your old man a hug, Des would say to her, arms outstretched.
In a minute, Claire would say, but that minute never came. She’d forget or he’d tire of waiting.
Sometimes I wonder whose kid she is, he’d say to Grace, despairing of this third child, the one who didn’t seek out his lap or come running at the first call. He’d shake his head at her aloofness but there was always one of the other two at his elbow to take his mind off the one who chose to be elsewhere. And when she proved shrewd enough to spot his mean streak, and comment on it, he was less interested in encouraging her around him much at all.
So for Susan to say Claire was spoilt … did she not see the reckless free spirit and energy of her younger sister, the difference.
‘How can you say such a thing?’ Grace was more hurt now than by seeing her treasured burro in pieces.
Crimson crept to the neckline of Susan’s pale silk blouse. ‘Forget I said anything!’ Hurriedly she left the room to take the dustpan back to the laundry.
But there were some things Grace didn’t think age would allow her to forget.
The air remained tense after this exchange.
Grace tried hard to hide her disappointment and Susan fussed over broccoli florets, leaving the stems long the way her mother liked them.
Right or wrong, Grace took this small gesture to mean more: it was Susan’s penance. The day could yet be salvaged by long broccoli stalks.
7
Susan was the wearer of masks. She had a number she could draw on, depending on the occasion. The one she’d worn with Grace most of the morning was that of efficient helper. This mask was almost flawless: no frown, lips passive and her chin kept in a kind line in relation to her neck, not jutting forward in angular defiance. This mask had slipped momentarily when she slammed the lid on the remains of the donkey, and Grace had seen the viper-face that sometimes emerged from the surface of her daughter’s skin.
Now, as the doorbell rang for the second time that day, Susan applied a new mask. This one was Mother, all teeth and big, interested eyes directed towards her children, saying, Look, I’ve noticed you, now notice me. Except, why would they? Most children, Grace had learnt, failed to notice much beyond their own shadow, especially when adolescence was forcing them to apply so many masks of their own.
Just as a big-busted girl rounded her shoulders or a tall one stooped, Grace’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter hid her insecurities and faltering confidence behind a long fringe that swept across half her face. The Western girl’s veil. Among close family the fringe might be swept to one side and Jorja would look out with her sharp green eyes, surveying the people she was forced to live with. At other times – hormonal highs and lows or enforced gatherings – the veil of hair would be dropped across her face again, letting everyone know there would be no engaging today.
Grace would read her granddaughter’s moods like an astronomer read the stars: join the dots and a complete constellation could be drawn. Starting with Jorja’s fringe, the trail led from lips to jaw, shoulders to arms either folded across her developing chest or dangling free and open at her slim hips. Today the veil was drawn, the lips were thin, shoulders rolled in on themselves, and those growing buds were compressed by the weight of her arms. Enforced family gathering, Grace decided, and gathered her granddaughter into an embrace.
‘Thanks for coming, Jorja. It’s lovely to see you.’ Grace felt her girl soften a little and was grateful.
‘Grace,’ Richard said, holding his arms out wide in a look-at-you way.
‘Richard,’ Grace replied, drawing out his name as he had hers.
‘Well, what can I say? Congratulations.’
Not Happy Birthday or You don’t look a day over sixty-nine, just Congratulations as though she’d achieved some unexpected milestone, like graduating with distinction or getting a mention in the Australia Day honours list. Grace couldn’t help but laugh, ‘Yes, Richard, looks as though I’ve made it. And everything pretty much still in working order,’ she said, slapping her sides.
‘Come in off the porch,’ Susan, the hostess, ushered. ‘It smells good inside. Jaxon, turn that off, sweetie, and wish your grandma h
appy birthday.’
‘Happy birthday, Grandma,’ Jaxon said to his electronic game.
Jorja sniffed the air like a lioness. ‘Roast meat,’ she said, top lip curled.
‘Yes, lovely lamb but there’s plenty of vegetables to go with it. Jaxon, she needs a hug too. Come on, love. Turn it off.’
‘I can’t. I’ll die. And I’ve just got to the next level.’
‘It’s all right, Susan. I’ll get my hug later.’
‘That’s not the point. Come on, Jaxon, you know you’ll get to whatever level you’re at again.’
‘But I’ve never got this far before.’
‘Are the vegetables cooked with the meat?’
‘No, they’re not. Richard, will you please get him off that thing.’
‘Sure.’ Richard reached over his son’s shoulder and took the gadget from his hand, mid-game.
‘Da-ad! Why’d you do that?’
‘I didn’t mean like that,’ Susan said, exasperated. ‘I’d hoped you’d reason with him.’
‘That’s how we reason at work – give the boss any grief and you lose privileges.’
Susan looked to the ceiling and placated the now tearful Jaxon with an arm round his shoulder. ‘He’s not on a board yet, for God’s sake.’
‘I just know the potatoes will be cooked with the meat and I love roasted potatoes.’
‘Jorja, we’re roasting them separately. Okay?’
Grace watched as Susan transformed her face to suit one person then the other. She remembered the tediousness of diplomacy, of being the mediator, the negotiator, the fall guy. The funny thing was Susan – or any child – would never recall just how easily she’d been able to unhinge a moment in the family’s life by a simple act or statement, sometimes with devastating consequences.
It takes a lot to raise kids these days. You can’t imagine, Susan would say to her. Grace thought her imagination had only improved with age. That aside, Do you think I bought you fully grown off a supermarket shelf? she’d say, and Susan would splutter some reply like, Things were easier in your day. Grace never could see the ease in a mangle over a spin cycle.
Grace often thought of her mother’s masks. There were three, each perfectly crafted from the roles she served. One was simply called Mother: thin-lipped, lecturing and stern. Then came The Boss: lofty, dominating and forceful. And finally there was the mask called Cook. This was the one Grace remembered most fondly, as it made Mother gentle.
It was this face that toiled over delicate and airy sponge squares, holding each carefully between two forks and dipping them in chocolate sauce before rolling each in coconut to become lamingtons.
‘They’re the devil to make!’ Mother would cuss, but her cook’s face would look on pleased as they devoured them.
Over time, her Christian name became lost, to Mother, The Boss and Cook. Even Pa would say, Better ask The Boss or What’s in the pot, Cook? Sometimes Grace had to stop and think what her mother’s real name had been. Then she’d remember – Mary – and feel relieved that not all of her mother had been lost to a role.
Not only could Mother change her face three different ways, she could split her personality too. She had a personality for home and another for town. The damns, bloodys and belches that Joe got away with in the house provoked a twisted ear or a pinch if he let slip in the street. Her perpetually red and chaffed hands – from the old laundry copper, the kitchen sink, the sponge bucket used to wash the shit and mud from a cow’s udder – didn’t cause shame at home. But in town, she’d hide these working-class hands beneath pristine white gloves and wouldn’t take them off until the brown paper bags of groceries were sitting on the kitchen table. Then Mother whistled while she put those groceries in the pantry – though her town lips had been pressed together, except when she exchanged pleasantries with other women using her town accent.
Grace never saw her parents kiss or embrace but with her own coming of age assumed they once had, and possibly still did long after she was an adult and had left home. The slim-spined romance novels Mother bought on mail order and kept hidden in a box at the back of her wardrobe were testimony to that. Grace would sneak into her parents’ bedroom and take one at a time, reading it on the sly in the bush or with her back against a sun-warmed barn wall. It seemed a brash thing for a girl to do, to read of snatched kisses and startled gasps by women who always got their man.
In middle age Grace read them purely for the happy endings they offered and assumed her ageing mother did the same. Why else would one have been on Mother’s bedside table the night she forgot to wake up, a page marked somewhere near the end with an old shopping docket? At least her last thoughts that night she died would have been of the happy ending only pages away.
So Grace grew into two different people as well. One who longed to coax some feminine camaraderie from her distant mother, and another who was more irreverent than a follower of the family party line. She could switch either on or off depending on what she hoped for. And Filip eventually provided her with the perfect arena in which to practise.
‘You’re too young for a boyfriend,’ Mother said.
‘But I’m seventeen.’
‘Exactly. Too young. And he’s too old. And your teacher. It isn’t proper.’
‘Was my teacher. School’s finished now. Remember?’
‘Don’t get smart with me, young lady. Besides I don’t care if you’ve finished school or not. It’s still not proper.’ Meaning tongues would wag, the country woman’s dread. ‘There are plenty of nice local boys for you to see. That man isn’t like us.’
On that point her mother was right. He wasn’t bigoted.
Grace didn’t want any of her mother’s nice local boys. She was attracted to Filip because he was different. He didn’t have farm stuck to the soles of his shoes or have a vision limited to his father’s boundary fence. He was dark, but not outdoors-swarthy like the boys who hung around the front of the picture theatre or dance halls on Saturday nights. His darkness ran ancestrally deep. He kept his hair cut short because that’s what suited his European legacy. He didn’t bother with the James Dean sideburns or the teddy boys’ ducktails the way the others did. It was as though in accepting his difference he decided he might as well live it.
And neither did Filip seem too old at twenty-six nor Grace too young at seventeen. Initially he was the teacher, she the student, but eventually they taught each other. In class he taught science, guided her through the workings of a plant or chemical reactions and the way a magnet could attract metal. Once classes were over, the science was more experimental and grounded in life.
Their extra-curricula learning started over mating ladybirds. Grace was sitting out of the sun under the eaves of a school building. She had one of her mother’s novels open in front of her. From the centre of the rickety wooden table, a plaque naming the donor had long been prised, but a rectangular dent remained in the timber. Grace was absentmindedly running her finger around this depression as she read – the ladybirds only catching her attention when one of them travelled across her hand.
She put the book face down then carefully removed the orange-and-black speckled insect with her finger, placed it back alongside the other. She watched as the two small domed bodies bumped against one another like fairground dodgem cars. Eventually the male, its legs grappling for a stronghold on the female’s shiny back, mounted its mate. Grace had seen farm dogs locked together in an awkward sexual frenzy often enough, and Pa’s bull mounting the backs of cows, leaving Grace to wonder how the cow’s legs didn’t buckle under the bull’s weight. But with these dainty ladybirds, it seemed a quaint affair; small, discreet, tidy, the way Mother would like it, Grace imagined.
She was in the shade and didn’t notice it deepen with his approach.
‘Nature in action,’ he said, sitting on the seat beside Grace and watching the tiny spectacle before them.<
br />
More than fifty years on Grace would still feel the heat in her cheeks.
‘Their spots are like fingerprints,’ he said, ‘no two are the same.’
Grace tried to appear indifferent to what the ladybirds were actually doing, to be worldly, confident, mature, like the heroine in her novel, despite the heroine’s likely swoon and knee-crumpling submission by the story’s end.
‘They’d never get away with a crime then,’ she said.
He laughed – something he rarely did, she thought, but this proved to be true only in the classroom.
‘Unless you consider passion to be a crime,’ he said, ‘in which case we have caught them red-handed.’
Grace must have felt brave that day, buoyed by the novel’s anticipated happy ending, perhaps.
‘I don’t think passion’s a crime,’ she said. ‘It’s just another kind of science.’
He nodded his approval. ‘Life science?’ he offered.
‘Hmm, I guess so.’ Her books had never showed how to look deeply into the controls and reasons behind passion, only that it was something every girl should seek.
The 1960s were still around the corner, so they couldn’t blame the freedom of that decade for the ease with which they sat together and observed ladybirds mating. She was tall like her father, and slim, stretching out of her school dress; and he’d seen that Grace, unlike most people in their small town, didn’t look sideways at his differences.
Soon after, Grace stopped reading her mother’s romance novels.
Girls, Grace suspected now, learnt the foolishness of expecting too much from love earlier these days. Where it had taken Grace twelve months with a lover and years with a husband, Jorja, at the age of fourteen, was probably well on the way to knowing it already. Cosmopolitan magazine or Cleo might tell her the truth, where Grace’s romance novels had only told lies and given girls a false sense of reality. But what was worse, she wondered, going into love believing it would be perfect or going into it a young cynic?
Unlike Jorja, Jaxon kept his face so open that every sorrow, delight or victory could be read as easily as if the emotion was tattooed on his forehead. He was uncomplicated, honest and consistent – just like Claire – so Grace always knew what to expect from him. Grace had known where the scene over the electronic game would lead even before the tears started, just as she knew the tears would stop soon after his mother put her arm round his shoulders. Grace knew her birthday hug would come, voluntarily, once things were right for him. And she knew, also, that he wouldn’t hold a grudge for any of it. Her eleven-year-old grandson never dwelt on the past, not while the future was unfurling so rapidly before him. He came over to her now, reached up his thin arms and wrapped them round her.
