by Sally Piper
‘Happy birthday, Grandma. Did you know you’re the oldest person I know?’
And with a child’s innocence the events in the hallway were forgotten and faces relaxed again.
Grace had worn masks to hide difficult truths from her friends, back in a time when marriages were only allowed to be sound. Her children had witnessed her happy mask often enough, snapped on as they came into the house when the air was heavy with unspoken accusations. Others she’d worn to appease Des. There’d been those that disguised her anger – the jaunty smile to stop the spit and crackle of thoughts from bursting to the surface – and those that disguised her deceit. Some concealed hurt, others worry or regret. And another had helped her manufacture grief: a special one required just to get her through Des’s funeral.
Grace’s eyes that day had proved as dry as Father Donnelly’s consecrated bread. She was grateful for the dark glasses she wore, slipped on even before she’d left the house. Her mother would have stared Grace down with pursed lips until she’d removed them, if she had been alive to share the day. Solitary grief, Mother always said, was a selfish act. Grace didn’t dare think what she might have said about her daughter’s inability to show any grief at all.
Peter had sat on Grace’s left, watching his hands and blinking fast; Susan to her right, tears running freely down her cheeks and onto her collar. Grace wished, with a kind of crazed desperation, that she could squeeze out tears of her own.
She wore dark clothes, as was expected. Navy though, not black. Black had never suited her so there was little in her wardrobe appropriate for the day. And Des would have thought it a folly to buy something new, just for a funeral – his or anyone’s. Grace buried him in the suit they’d married in, which would have pleased him. He always maintained he’d barely changed from when he was a young man, and to his thinking this would have proved it. For all his fry-ups and sugar and beer, he carried most of his extra weight on the inside, around his heart. But not all. She’d had to out-stare the undertaker when he pointed out that the trousers’ waist button failed to meet the button hole.
‘Would Mrs Baker have a better suited pair of trousers?’ he asked.
Grace looked round for this third person before deciding to claim her. ‘No, Mrs Baker does not.’
She’d felt a kind of thrill at the time at not being cowed by the man. Remembering the feeling in the church later, she’d smiled. So there was some aspect of their marriage that both she and Des would have still agreed upon, even laughed over: practical frugality.
The coffin was one of the few unmoving things in the church. Those seated behind her fidgeted with quiet respect. Grace could hear the soft rustle of pages as hymn books and readings were flicked through and the squeaking of pews as people adjusted skirts and jackets. Occasionally there was a stifled cough or a delicate blowing of a lady’s nose. The men, she noticed, tended to go for short, sharp sniffs.
The minister, a fresh-faced young man who made Father Donnelly of Grace’s Catholic youth look like a decaying scholar, steadied his papers and spent a moment scanning those present. Des, the lucky bastard, reclined and oblivious to the waiting discomfort of those gathered to see him off, would have been pleased to know that time had stood still, just for him, for a moment. Finally, the minister’s eyes rested on Grace, where he inclined his head ever so slightly as if the one had shared a pact with the other in acknowledging when the show would begin. Grace felt tempted to nod back but was conscious she had a role to play. Dropping the starting flag wasn’t part of it.
‘We come together today …’
Grace stared straight ahead through her dark glasses, neither listening nor caring to. She just wished the show would end so that she could go home and get on with her life.
For years afterwards she believed she’d got away with her charade that day. But Susan, it seemed, had noticed.
‘Why didn’t you cry at Dad’s funeral?’ her daughter asked out of the blue one day while they were preparing another meal, another time.
‘I cried!’
‘No, you didn’t. Ada said it was because you were shell-shocked, him dying relatively young. I believed it at the time, but I’m not so sure now. I remember looking at you at one stage during his funeral and you were smiling.’
Not trusting herself to turn to Susan, Grace had focused instead on the circular motion of the electric beaters as they wove their way round the bowl, whipping cream.
‘I cried later,’ she finally said to Susan, when the cream was thicker than she liked and the weight of the question still lay uncomfortably between them.
‘I never heard or saw you cry.’
‘Jesus, Susan. What did you want, a flood?’
‘I don’t know what I wanted. Some display of grief, I suppose.’
‘I’d been grieving for years. Did you notice that?’ Grace left the kitchen forcefully, with the bowl of whipped cream. She was angry, not so much with Susan and her close-to-the-bone questioning, but at the realisation she’d been impaled on her own deceit, after having thought she’d got away with it.
Luckily she’d been able to disguise her anger from her other guests by the thickness of the cream: she’d had to bang the sides of each of their bowls to get it to leave the serving spoon. Wearing this mask, she spoke in a falsely cheery voice to everyone – jollying along, her mother would have called it – while Susan looked on bewildered.
And the question was never raised again.
Susan’s husband, to his credit, didn’t do jollying along or any other false emotional state. What Richard displayed on the surface come from his core. If he was angry or bored, he showed it; tired or happy, the same. Grace liked this about her son-in-law, and his boy Jaxon: you knew what to expect just by looking at them. Today Richard looked ebullient. He liked Grace’s cooking – reminded him of his own mother’s, he’d said more than once. Susan would say, And what’s wrong with mine? to which he’d reply, Generally nothing.
If there was one fault to be found in Richard’s chemistry it was that he was a perfectionist. His polo shirts were always buttoned to the top, shoes polished to a glassy finish. No hair was permitted to grow awry, from anywhere that it should choose to sprout, and his nails were always clipped to a millimetre-neat, white line across the tips of his fingers. Susan had been sacked from ironing his shirts a few years back, for the misdemeanour of leaving dual iron lines down the sleeves. Grace thought her daughter should have felt thankful, not demoted; Des had demanded Grace try harder.
But people who insisted on perfection were hard work, Grace knew. They only ever commented on shortcomings; things done well were considered mandatory anyway, so didn’t warrant a mention. Consequently, Grace had observed, Susan spent much of her time aiming to please and looked for compliments, much as a dog watched a table for scraps. What riled Grace most about this type of man who believed he had a right to demand perfection from others was that he rarely recognised his own lack of it. In Richard’s case, this usually presented itself through bluntness.
‘Is it a good leg of lamb, Grace?’ Richard asked, following his nose to the kitchen.
This translated to butcher-bought, not supermarket – a joint recommended over another, not randomly selected – and its cooking timed just so, not left to luck or chance.
‘The best, Richard,’ Grace said.
And her son-in-law, who reminded her of Des in this one particular way, opened the oven door to be sure.
8
Pa would often come home from the dump with more in the trailer than he’d taken away. He’d bring back busted sets of drawers, old machinery parts – cogs, wheels, brackets – and lengths of rusty wire, with comments like Never know when you might need ’em or Should be able to fix this up a treat. Once an old meat safe, despite the fridge they’d had for a couple of years. The girl Grace assumed fandangled appliances, as Pa called new technology, were still something to be mis
trusted, so best to have a back-up.
At those country dumps, people backed their trailer to the edge of what was once a great hole and tossed the contents over the edge. There was no benefit of sorting or separation. Broken chairs tumbled on top of old letters or long-ago Christmas cards. Garden waste mixed with car batteries, broken toys with Playboy magazines. There was the odd dead animal too – a calf or cat – which riled Pa; he was a man who took careful responsibility for his dead. Papers were lifted from the top by the wind and strung out in a wide radius, caught in branches, fences or skewered on tussock grass.
These dumps could be a scavenger’s paradise or a child’s treasure chest, opening windows into otherwise private lives. Grace had read of those other lives on the backs of postcards she’d found there, postmarked from places she’d never heard of; small cameos from unknown coastlines and mountain ranges that were no less exotic for the stains and pungent aroma that marked them.
Once he brought back three boxes of sewing patterns for Mother. Corners of the delicate tissue paper poked out from the openings of the Simplicity and Butterick envelopes like the handkerchief from a fancy man’s jacket. Mother had looked through the various packets muttering, Pattern’s one thing, money for fabric’s another, but had kept them all anyway. Grace took them back to the dump years later when she returned to clear out the house after her mother’s death. Finding them at the back of a hallway cupboard had caused Grace deep regret on her mother’s behalf, as sorting through her clothes hadn’t revealed any of the pretty frocks or skirts or blouses pictured on the patterns’ envelopes. She had to assume her mother never did get to feel any of the recommended fabrics glide under the foot of her old Singer machine.
The chooks got Mother’s vegetable scraps; the dogs cleaned up the meat ones, and the slow combustion stove was fed anything that burnt. It made Grace wonder now, what it was Pa actually took to the dump. Maybe very little – broken china, tin cans, farm equipment or furniture so clapped out even he couldn’t repair it. Perhaps this explained why the dump from Grace’s youth never grew much larger in the eighteen years she lived up the road from it. There was a balance.
Grace still tried to maintain something of this balance. She kept hens – a mixture of Isa Browns and Rhode Island reds – which she’d recently increased to four; tiny compared to Mother’s large flock. She composted as well, and kept a good-sized vegetable garden. She’d come down now to pick baby carrots, but felt inclined to take her time. Susan was in the kitchen reassuring Jorja of the vegetarian elements of their meal. Grace imagined Richard standing over her, questioning again the sense in removing a whole protein group from a developing girl’s diet. Jorja would be hiding behind her fringe while this debate went on, and Jaxon, Grace expected, would be trying to get back the life he’d lost. Grace dawdled, pulled a few weeds while she was there. She found a caterpillar on the basil, tossed it to Ruth who was fossicking in the grass nearby. The hen spotted it with her flinty eyes and snapped it up in her beak.
It was hot outside – but then again, so was the kitchen, so Grace didn’t mind.
In the city, the bricks, tiles and concrete absorbed the day’s warmth, holding it for days. In Harvest the heat had pressed against timber buildings but the timber was never as obliging as concrete: it didn’t allow the heat to embed itself within the grain for long periods of time. Grace placed a hand on the timber sleepers that formed the garden’s retaining wall, bent down and placed the other on the cracked concrete path that led down the back garden. One surface burned more. She removed her hand from the path and kept the other on the sleeper. She knew in winter the concrete would sting with trapped cold. She’d observed this simple difference soon after she arrived in the city to live. She took this as a good sign: it proved she was far from the static landscape she’d left. But some days – the bad ones – she’d longed for more timber.
The screen door slapped shut. The noise startled Ruth enough to stop her foraging. She swivelled her head in jerky movements assessing the danger, red cone joggling with the motion. Grace looked towards the house and saw Jorja picking her way down the path. Ruth relaxed, returned to scratching and pecking at the ground.
Grace watched the way her granddaughter avoided stepping on the cracks in the cement, putting one foot cautiously in front of the other like a funambulist. It reminded her that beneath all the posturing and deep sighs Jorja was still really just a child.
‘Do you need a hand?’ she asked, coming up to Grace.
‘I’m not doing much. Just wasting time, really!’
Jorja sat on the wall of the vegetable garden. She picked up a broken bamboo stake and started to poke it into the mounded straw mulching the plants.
‘Did you like the knives?’ she asked.
Grace sat alongside Jorja, tomato bushes to their backs. ‘Yes, they’re very – sharp,’ she said.
‘Sharp.’ Jorja laughed. ‘I told Mum it was bad luck to give knives as a present.’
‘Your mother’s always been more practical than superstitious. Besides, I thought they were only unlucky if given as a wedding gift.’
Jorja shrugged. ‘I read once that you should never give a present to someone that could hurt them. I reckon knives have to be near the top of the list.’
‘I’ll be extra careful when I use them. And if I cut myself on one I won’t hold a grudge. How’s that sound?’
‘Forgiving, as always.’
Forgiving, Grace mused, as always. But was she – had she been – always? Was it possible for anybody to forgive all past grievances, and should they be filed away under headings like Resolved or Atoned or Forgotten?
Des had wanted her to forgive, and forget. ‘Let it go, Grace,’ he said. ‘Move on.’
What had provoked him? Grace wondered now. One place too many set at the dinner table? Five bowls on the bench, not four?
What she did recall was that she’d been enraged by the way he’d reduced Claire to it.
‘Let it go? Just like that?’ she said.
Des nodded. ‘Why not?’
Why not? she wanted to scream. Because it would let him off, spare his conscience, put things back as they were before. But nothing was as it used to be and neither would it ever be again.
She said nothing.
Instead, she turned her back on Des, started serving dessert – apple pie, the top golden and grainy with sugar. She shifted the knife to the left; cut him a large wedge, the sweetened apple oozing from its sides. She added lashings of cream and put the bowl in front of him without care.
Grace went back to pulling weeds, Jorja to poking at the mulch, Ruth to the far end of the yard. Jorja had news she wanted to share, Grace could tell. Her granddaughter wasn’t one to seek out company then sit in silence. Grace waited with the patience of the aged.
‘Guess what?’ Jorja finally said, barely able to conceal her pride.
Grace looked up expectantly.
‘I finally got my period.’
‘Congratulations!’ Grace was genuinely pleased. To date, her granddaughter’s body seemed to have put so much energy into her intellectual development that her physical development had been overlooked.
‘Mum only said Sorry.’
‘Well, I suppose she’s still living them. I stopped years ago now, so I forget that some days they can be a pain.’ Deep down, the real question for Grace was why Susan hadn’t mentioned it.
‘There’s a lot about them not to like,’ Jorja conceded.
‘Yes, there is.’
‘And Mum won’t let me use tampons.’
‘Ah. Tampons.’
When Grace first started to bleed, Mother silently passed her a neatly folded pile of soft rags.
‘Don’t know how I’m s’posed to swim. All the other girls use tampons.’
‘I’m sure she’ll let you try them soon enough.’
‘Could you talk
to her? She’ll listen to you.’
Jorja occasionally sought Grace for this go-between role; it wasn’t one she enjoyed. To Jorja, her grandmother might appear the matriarch, but Grace knew there were careful lines drawn over what she could and couldn’t say to Susan. And Grace felt duty bound to respect those boundaries.
‘Your mum probably has very good reasons for not wanting you to use them just yet.’
‘She reckons I’ll die from some infection. You were a nurse. You could tell her that’s not true.’
‘But what if it is true? I haven’t been a nurse for a while and they’re learning new things all the time.’
Jorja poked her stick more forcefully. Grace felt sorry for her granddaughter’s frustration; neither of the two generations ahead of her seemed prepared or able to give her what she wanted.
‘You and your mum are still new to it all,’ Grace soothed. ‘Give it a bit more time and she’ll change her mind. You’ll see. She was a girl once too, wanting to do all the same sorts of things as you, swimming included.’
Jorja poked a little less aggressively.
Grace picked two ripe cherry tomatoes. ‘Here, let’s celebrate you officially becoming a woman.’ She passed one of the small fruits to Jorja and put the other in her mouth. ‘Not quite champagne,’ Grace said, ‘but I do love the way they go bang in your mouth.’
