by Sally Piper
Grace’s party rules were one guest for each year celebrated. Susan had been reminding her all week she’d broken her own rule.
‘I wasn’t to know they’d all be able to make it,’ Grace had said again and again.
‘It’s not fair. You should’ve sent out only six invitations.’
‘Come on, you’ll get to play the games and eat the party food as well. You can be my big helper.’
‘I won’t play any of their stupid games – they’re babies.’
And now the sulkiness continued into the party.
Susan didn’t move from the day bed, where she lay in a knot of skinny arms and legs, as Grace went in and out from kitchen to backyard with snacks and drinks. She knew her eldest daughter was only pretending to read the comic book in front of her; mostly her eyes strayed over it to the backyard. But if the younger children were noisy when they came inside the house, she’d make a great show of lowering the magazine to her chest in order to scowl at them. Once, she even yelled Get outta there to one little girl, who mistook the closed door to the girls’ bedroom for the one to the toilet. As if this wasn’t enough, Des had bellowed from his shed more than once for them to Keep that damn noise down, because he couldn’t hear the races being called on his radio. Grace imagined Claire’s young party guests quivering with relief when their mothers finally came to collect them.
Claire, fortunately, was oblivious to her sulking sister and cantankerous father. She led her gaggle of friends confidently through one party game after another, making sure the parcel stopped fairly along with the music and that blindfolds were secure when each girl faced the donkey.
‘Chocolate brownies, as requested.’ Bev had placed a square Tupperware container on the kitchen bench when she arrived.
‘You’ve put the recipe inside, of course?’ Grace now removed the container’s lid to reveal a perfect display of brown squares dusted with icing sugar.
‘Can’t a girl have her secrets?’
‘Not one this tasty. I could eat them every day.’ Grace took a square and bit it in half.
‘Which is why I won’t give you the recipe. If you could make them for yourself they wouldn’t be special when I made them for you.’
Bev’s brownies were gooey and rich; seamed with caramel and studded with walnuts. Grace had been trying to get the recipe from her friend since she’d first had one. The only clue she’d been able to extract from Bev was that she’d been sent the recipe from a Canadian penfriend. They were dark as a cave and not so much crumbled in the mouth as dissolved. Some of the ingredients Grace could guess, but any attempt to copy the brownies had produced nothing but a poor second cousin. They were destined to be loved by all but made by no one but Bev.
‘Chocolate brownie?’ Bev called to the still supine Susan.
‘Are they your brownies?’ Susan asked.
‘The one and only.’
Susan’s eyes lit up.
‘If you want one, though, you’ll have to come and get it.’
With some eye-rolling and much huffing and puffing, the comic book was dropped to the floor and Susan levered herself up from the day bed. She came over to Bev and took a piece from the container offered.
Bev winked at Grace.
‘Now, I’ll put two more pieces aside just for you, but only if you take these out to the others.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘I’d like you to,’ Bev said.
‘I’m not playing their stupid games though.’
‘No one’s asking you to. But I know Aunty Ada would appreciate you helping her to organise them, you being the older girl.’
Grace kept cutting oranges into quarters, trying not to look at Susan. If her elder daughter thought the request came from anybody but Bev, then she’d be back on the day bed quick-smart.
‘All right then.’
Bev took two brownies from the container and put them on a small plate. ‘Yours for later.’ She passed what was left to Susan.
Grace noticed Susan’s slow journey outdoors was fortified by another brownie. Once among the hungry revellers, though, and she heard her snap at a child, ‘Just one, you greedy girl.’
‘She got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,’ Bev said.
‘She does most mornings.’
Bev rested her hands on the kitchen bench and pushed her spine up like an angry cat’s. ‘Ah, that feels good.’ She swung her sizeable belly from side to side. ‘So what’s triggered today’s humph?’
‘Ten guests when there should have been six.’ Grace arranged the quartered oranges on a plate.
‘So why are there ten? I thought you had some rule.’
Grace shrugged. ‘I do. But it just didn’t work out. All the girls here invited Claire to their parties earlier in the year but I didn’t expect them all to accept in return. So Susan’s feeling hard done by.’
‘She’s a sensitive girl.’
‘Too sensitive some days.’ Grace started to peel and quarter apples.
‘So what will you do next year?’
‘Hope Claire’s got it down to seven friends.’
‘And if she hasn’t?’
Grace shrugged again.
Claire burst into the kitchen, breathless and with her conical hat tipped to one side like a dunce’s cap on a drunk. ‘We’re one piece short,’ she panted.
‘How can you be short?’ Grace asked. ‘There were plenty there.’
‘Well, all my friends had a piece, so that’s ten. Then Ada had one, and Dad took two … and so did Susan, because she said she had to carry them out so she deserved them. So that makes … how many? And I haven’t had any yet.’
‘Here, have these.’ Grace passed Claire the plate with the two pieces put aside.
Claire took one and ate it in two bites, then scuttled to the back door again.
‘Do you want the other piece?’ Grace called after her.
‘You have it,’ Claire said, and disappeared.
‘Here.’ Grace pushed the plate across the bench to Bev. ‘You seem to be the only one who’s missed out.’
‘No, keep it for Susan.’
‘It doesn’t sound as though she’s gone without.’
‘Still, a deal’s a deal.’ Bev pushed the plate to one side.
‘Look at you, having to help me along like I’m a frail old woman,’ Ada said.
‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘Feels like it.’
‘Your confidence has taken a battering, that’s all. It’ll come back.’
‘Do you think confidence is something that continues to grow at our age?’ Ada stopped walking to look at Grace. ‘It might do for children – they can only get stronger, more knowing. But with us, confidence eventually has to hit the ceiling and from there the only place left for it to go is down.’
Grace looked into her friend’s troubled face and saw the plea coming from those sore eyes, begging her to help find that distance from the ceiling she needed.
‘There is no ceiling, Ada. We’ll always live with the stars above our heads.’
Ada looked up. ‘I see a ceiling,’ she said.
Grace refused to follow her friend’s gaze. ‘Then we need to spend more time outdoors.’
Ada patted the top of Grace’s hand and the pair moved on.
Grace didn’t know how long she could help and protect her friends. Those years she had on them, years that had made no difference in their middle age, did now that they were all in their seventies. For Ada to be struck by a truck’s mirror regardless of whether Grace was there or not showed that the benefit of those few years was finite.
The two friends moved past the lounge and along to the dining room, where Ada stopped and looked in. ‘Table looks nice,’ she said. ‘You’ve used the plate Jimmy and I gave you.’
The
plate, at one end of the table, was busy with English cottage garden blooms. It had been a gift from Ada and her husband to Grace and Des for their twentieth wedding anniversary. It had come decorated with an assortment of dainty petit fours Ada had made. She’d wrapped the plate in clear cellophane and tied off the top with colourful curling ribbon. Grace had admired the plate and its contents, told Ada it looked like a piece of art, too good to eat. Des had said, Might look pretty, but let’s see how they taste. He’d got to the bow with a pair of scissors and tossed the cellophane to one side. The petit fours obviously tasted as good as they looked because he consumed the lion’s share, taking each in a single mouthful.
‘Yes, some of the old favourites out.’
‘The church plate. Bev’s.’ Ada knew many of the stories behind Grace’s plates. ‘And the commemorative one from Moreville. Sixty years, wasn’t it?’ Ada craned her neck to see.
‘Yes. Sixty.’
By the time Grace retired, Moreville was celebrating more than sixty-five years of caring for the aged. She found she couldn’t eat off that particular plate, though she valued it. It reminded her too much of the puréed food she’d fed to people, homogenised blobs of grey or green or brown that were rejected more often than swallowed. She’d set the plate at Meg’s place, the youngest member of her family, and therefore furthest from needing such a diet.
Ada looked round the table, nodded, almost imperceptibly, at each plate as she passed it. Grace knew she was counting the places. ‘Only twelve, then?’
‘Only twelve.’
‘Shame.’
The word shame was one of those with disparate meanings. The first, as Ada used it now, expressed sympathy, the other, as Susan and Peter would have it, expressed disgrace.
‘Just the thought gives me the creeps,’ Peter had said, after learning of Jack. Grace remembered how he’d visibly shivered.
Susan must have phoned him that morning. She had called in early and unannounced to find Grace and Jack sharing breakfast in their pyjamas. Unfortunately Susan hadn’t seen the quiet intimacy of the moment – the sectioned newspaper shared between them, teapot handle turned for the other’s ease, the casual touch of one foot against the other’s under the table. Instead, she’d looked at Grace as if to say, How could you? Grace had felt dirty under her gaze.
‘I don’t ever want the kids to know about this. It’s not how they see you.’ Susan left at once and Grace never did find out why she’d called in.
Jack left soon after Susan that morning – believing, Grace guessed, that he’d contributed to the filth.
But eventually he returned, and Grace received him keenly.
Ada limped slightly on her left leg as Grace moved them on to the kitchen.
‘Ada,’ Richard said, as the two women entered the room, ‘tell me who it was and I’ll get my best men onto him right away.’
‘Whoa!’ said Jaxon.
Jorja leant up against a kitchen bench, flicking through a magazine. She half-saw Ada’s face from behind her fringe, and winced at the sight.
‘Oh, Ada. I had no idea how bruised and swollen you were. You poor thing.’ Susan fussed with a kitchen chair for Ada. ‘Come. Sit. Sit.’ She gestured towards the seat. ‘Or maybe you’d rather lie on the sofa? We can take you in the lounge, if you like.’ Susan looked torn between pushing the chair back in and steering Ada out the way she’d just come in. ‘I could prop you up with some pillows. Bring you in a drink – a nice cup of tea, maybe.’
‘Stop fussing. She’s fine.’ Grace manoeuvred Ada towards the chair. ‘I’ve got a good bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. How does that grab you?’
‘Perfectly.’ Ada accepted the chair.
Grace hoped no one else noticed the soft tremor in her friend’s hand as she gripped the chair back and the cautious way she lowered herself into the seat.
Grace took the wine from the fridge and passed it to Richard. ‘Would you mind doing the honours?’
Richard cracked the seal on the bottle. He poured three glasses and passed one each to Grace, Ada and Susan; Susan’s was three-quarters full, Grace’s and Ada’s less than half.
Grace held hers up and inspected it. ‘Tide’s out a bit, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, sorry, do you want more? I thought you’d want to take it easy.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know – Ada already being a bit wobbly on her feet.’
‘She’s not on her feet now,’ Grace said, ‘and mine are rock solid.’ She worked the hinges of her knee joints up and down. ‘Do I look like a well-sprung grandma to you, kids?’
Jorja grinned.
‘You look as springy as a slinky to me, Grandma,’ Jaxon said.
With wine glasses topped up, Grace raised hers to Ada. ‘To the stars,’ she said.
‘Yes, the stars.’
Susan and Richard looked at one another.
‘Stars?’ Grace said, encouraging Susan to raise her glass as well.
‘Ye-es – stars.’
‘Celebrity stars?’ Jorja asked. ‘Which one?’ She held up her magazine to show Grace a page covered in women with scant parts of their skin covered by glittering sequins.
‘No. The real ones. Above us.’ Grace lifted her glass to the ceiling. ‘More inspiring.’
Richard looked troubled as he went to the laundry to get a beer from the tub of ice. Was it the ambiguity of the toast that had unsettled him, suggesting the start of dementia, perhaps, or concern about their alcohol consumption? Either notion annoyed Grace.
The empty wine bottles at Grace’s house now were insignificant compared to the number of beer bottles that once accumulated against the back wall of Des’s shed. They were stacked almost a metre high. Get me half a dozen tallies, Des would say to Grace if he knew she was going to the shops. Once he started brewing his own, an obsession that kept him in his shed for hours at the weekends, a balance was struck between those he emptied and those he filled with home brew. Sometimes during the week, Grace would hear one of the bottles explode in his shed. It would remind her to check how many there were in the fridge. She always restocked it if there were less than four.
But perhaps she was being unfair on Richard, perhaps he didn’t think they were going senile or drinking too much. What if he considered himself their protector, just as Grace saw herself as one to her friends? Her toast might have set off a small blip on his radar; nothing more than a note-to-self moment alerting him to keep up surveillance.
If Bev had been here today, she might have stirred Grace’s conscience again: reminded her that careless comments or actions didn’t necessarily mean there was a lack of care, so much as a lack of understanding. There were many such things Grace would like to talk to Bev about, to have her wisdom again.
The last thing Bev had given Grace had been the recipe for her chocolate brownies. In some ways, Grace would rather not have had it.
Bev wrote it for Grace in a shaky hand on a square of hospital paper towel. Bev’s eldest daughter, the one who had been the large bump under her dress at Claire’s sixth birthday party, had not long left the room. She had just changed the coloured scarf covering her bald head, taking the old one home to wash.
Bev wrote the title Bev’s Brownies on the yellowed paper.
‘No, keep it a secret,’ Grace said.
But Bev ignored her, added a subheading, Ingredients.
Grace watched her friend’s once neat hand – the neatest of any nurse she’d worked with – struggle to grip the pen.
Under Ingredients she wrote ½ cup dark chocolate, chopped, then ¼ cup chopped walnuts. At this point she rested a moment.
Grace watched without willing the tears to stop; they embarrassed neither of them.
Next, Bev wrote ½ cup chopped soft caramels, followed by 1 chocolate brownie packet mix. Under a heading of Method she wrote Follow packet, add choppe
d ingredients to mix.
Grace laughed when she read it, filled the room with the first sound of humour in ages.
‘No wonder you never told me. A packet – you cheat. You said it was a secret recipe from a Canadian penfriend!’
‘It was – once. Then brownie packet mixes came in so I changed to those. None of you noticed.’ Bev was weak but smiled still. ‘A girl has to have her secrets.’
The brownies never tasted the same, though, not even when Grace bought the most expensive chocolate and caramels.
Bev had been right, without her hand beating the mix they were no longer special. And neither were they as sweet. Grace still protected that recipe, written on its original paper and tucked safely away in a plastic sleeve, as much to protect the memory of Bev as to safeguard those secret ingredients. She looked at it from time to time, had even memorised every letter of every word that had a quiver to it – the vertical line to the ‘l’ in caramels; the horizontal bar to the ‘t’ in packet.
She used to make them from time to time, just to pretend Bev was there in her kitchen. She’d even ask her friend’s advice as she chopped ingredients or beat the batter, questions posed out loud. But the silence was cruel, so she stopped doing it.
10
A deep voice called, ‘Hey,’ from the back door. Grace looked up to see Nick clattering through the kitchen screen, esky in one hand and a bunch of carnations in the other.
‘I’m here,’ he announced, as if there was any need.
Grace still struggled to associate her first-born grandchild with the young man who stood in front of her now, a full head taller than anybody else, pressing pink blooms towards her. But she struggled even more with the fact he was Peter’s. Peter, the methodical accountant, the one who ruminated over his columns of numbers just as his father had ruminated over the careful weighing of meat, each taking great care to ensure the balance ended up just right. Nick, on the other hand, breezed into Grace’s kitchen in all his scruffy, clumsy, loud recklessness, esky banging against doorframe and cupboards, and sporting a new piece of silverware to his eyebrow and a t-shirt with an Andy Warhol nude on the front, the black and red claws of something tattooed on his skin showing just below the sleeve. His whole chaotic and colourful arrival seemed like a one-man carnival entering.
