Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  The daughter was called Tracy and she was almost exactly Meg’s age, but she was not the sort of girl who took piano lessons. Rather, she went to jazz and tap-dance classes, wore her slippery fair hair in complicated plaits, and had the kind of cheekbones that Meg thought looked excellent when studded with stick-on diamantes. Meg’s mother disapproved of jazz and tap, not only because of the quantities of sequins involved, but also because of the make-up and the posing. Meg would not normally have been encouraged to strike up a friendship with Tracy, but Meg’s mother seemed willing to tolerate a modicum of bad influence in return for such titbits of information as Meg could, subtly, be encouraged to divulge: Tracy’s mother (whose name was Joy) had once won a beauty contest and kept a cut-off plait of her childhood hair in the bottom compartment of a jewellery box; she was a secretary and had painted toenails; she had once been pregnant with a baby that she didn’t want so she had it, Meg reported, ‘abornted’.

  Meg’s mother was pleasurably shocked by the fact that Joy obviously confided inappropriately in her young daughter, but was genuinely annoyed by some of the language that Meg was bringing home. For all of her life, Meg had been successfully sheltered from particular words, but since she had been playing jobs with Tracy she had started saying ‘agenda’ and ‘minutes’—words which Meg’s mother believed had the power to shape a destiny of deskbound female servitude. These were the days when there was a lot of talk about girls becoming engineers, and Meg’s mother was all for that.

  On the Sunday morning of the incident, Meg got up much earlier than her parents and decided—still in her pyjamas—to invite herself over the road to play. Tracy in her short nightie opened the door and led Meg into the living room, where Cattanooga Cats was on the television. The volume was up very loud. In the bedroom beyond the hall, Tracy’s mother sounded as if she were being strangled, but the spaniel man appeared to be suffering equally.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Meg asked.

  ‘Come here,’ Tracy said, and took Meg by the hand into the kitchen.

  Tracy opened the pantry in which there were, Meg quickly noted, no ingredients. There was not a labelled Tupperware vat of SR Flour in sight, only packets and boxes and jars and tins of ready-made stuff. Meg couldn’t believe Tracy’s luck.

  ‘Do you like Orange Slices?’ Tracy asked, grinning.

  Meg thought of that white blot, seeping away at its edges into expensive Persian silk.

  ‘I love them,’ she said.

  Tracy grabbed a packet and Meg followed her out the back door into the yard where the dogs leapt and yapped against diamonds of wire. Their runs were strewn with chewed bedding and sloppy whorls of poo, but the smell didn’t stop Tracy from kneeling down on the concrete pathway beside the wire and tearing open the cylinder of biscuits. Meg took an Orange Slice from the packet while Tracy picked up the one that had fallen on the ground and shoved it through the wire of the cage. The dogs snuffled and bickered and soon all evidence was gone.

  ‘Are you allowed to do this?’

  Tracy shrugged.

  ‘Won’t your mum notice?’

  ‘Not if you take a whole packet,’ she said.

  Meg bit through all the layers of her biscuit (it was nice, although not as nice as a Venetian), but Tracy did something different. She twisted the sandwiched biscuits against each other until they separated. One came off with the disc of cream still firmly attached, while the other one was left plain. Tracy poked the plain one into the muzzle of the nearest dog, and then ate the cream, using her teeth to scrape it off the second biscuit. When she’d finished, the biscuit was soggy and marked with serrated tracks from Tracy’s still fairly new incisors. She fed it to the dogs.

  ‘Go on. Try it,’ Tracy said.

  Meg didn’t know Joy very well, so she could only set her level of fear at getting caught on what she knew her own mother would do if she sprang Meg in such a flagrant act of . . . of what? Meg couldn’t have said what exactly it was that was so profoundly bad about eating only the cream out of a biscuit, but she knew that it was worse than just the waste.

  ‘I don’t really think . . .’ Meg started, but Tracy had already given up on her, separated another Orange Slice and begun toothing it clean of its soft centre.

  Tracy then proceeded to eat the cream out of the best part of a packet of Orange Slices, while Meg limited her part in the crime to eating three more whole biscuits and feeding some of Tracy’s discards through the wire to the dogs. There were, however, no repercussions. Tracy buried the empty Orange Slice wrapper deep in the kitchen bin and, when her mother finally came out of the bedroom with her hair all fuzzed up at the back, it was as if nothing had ever happened.

  ‘Should you be here, Meg?’ Joy asked. ‘It’s very early.’

  So Meg went home feeling slightly sick and with her hands smelling of dog, and it wasn’t long after this that Joy took up with the spaniel man’s brother and they all (except the spaniel man) moved interstate. Tracy and Meg exchanged a few childish letters but their correspondence soon fizzled out. Meg might have forgotten Tracy altogether if it hadn’t been for the incident with the Orange Slices, which remained an anomaly in her understanding of the universe.

  In the cosmology of Meg, every action had an equal and opposite reaction. Any great good fortune ought to be approached with caution because of the great misfortune that would surely be along at any moment to balance things up. Vegetables were eaten before ice-cream; especially beautiful people were not especially clever, and vice versa; wealth came at the price of creative fulfilment, and the reverse was true, too; women could have big breasts or slender hips, but not both. And Orange Slices entailed the biscuits as well as the cream. Which was why Meg was so affected—Meg more than any of the others—by the woman who did the thing with the lettuce.

  There were eleven of them and they were called Meg, Cathie, Kathy, Liz and Libby, Georgie, Lou, Jen, Jo, Mel and Angie because thirty years earlier their mothers had been women of a similar age from the same small town who had understood it as their duty to give their girls sensible and serviceable names with a short form for everyday and a longer form for certificates and special occasions.

  In part, it was conscientiousness that brought them together. They were determined to tick every box, to get every part of the experience just right. But perhaps even more than that they were desperate for something to do with all that expectant energy—something more active than foreswearing alcohol, avoiding soft cheeses and marking off the passing weeks on the calendar. For most of them, it would be the only time in their lives they would practice yoga.

  Their classes were to be held on Saturday mornings at Roseneath, a mansion on a hillside on the outskirts of their small town. In its day the old home would have had a circular driveway and gardens cascading all the way down the slope to the rivulet, and women would have rustled their skirts as they stood at the well-positioned bay windows looking out over the city streets to the harbour. But the view had been built out decades earlier and the old home’s lacy façade despoiled by the oddly placed metal ramps and stairways that came along in the years when Roseneath was a maternity hospital.

  When Meg learned that the classes were to be held here, she had to admit there was a certain sort of logic to it. Without its solid Federation foundations ever moving an inch, Roseneath had nevertheless managed to follow her around for her whole life. Meg, along with about half the others, had been born there. In deck chairs on the upstairs verandas, their mothers had sat—like passengers on a cruise liner—knitting booties and nursing their newborns.

  After the hospital was closed down, Roseneath was broken up into tenancies and a group of women started a playgroup and a toy library in a couple of the downstairs rooms. Meg had gone to that playgroup and she remembered a photograph of a bunch of mothers and toddlers—Meg and her mother among them—all sitting together on the broad sandstone steps out the front. Everyone was overdressed for the unexpected warmth of the day, the women flushed in their Viyella
dresses and boots, the children slap-cheeked and paint-smeared in turtleneck skivvies and corduroy, with haircuts all shaped by the same unisex pudding bowl.

  Meg thought of them as she went up the front steps on the day of the first yoga class: those young mothers in the photograph, their hair still vivid shades of red, gold and brown, faces as yet unlined, handmade patchwork nappy bags at their feet. The picture had been taken just before Mother’s Day, on an afternoon when the mothers had stayed after playgroup to stretch out a length of canvas on one of Roseneath’s downstairs verandas. They had let the children help as they painted a colourful slogan to march behind. Rights, not roses, it had said.

  In the years since then, Roseneath had housed a succession of fringe causes and services. It had been home to various brands of greenie and peacenik, a theatre company wardrobe, grassroots political candidates and a refugee support centre, among other things. Once, not long after Meg had met Justin, she had slunk into an upstairs tenancy with a jar of her own wee in her handbag. There was so much she hadn’t known. For one thing, she’d filled a bulk-sized Vegemite jar for a test that took one or two drops. And she’d been stupid enough to take the words ‘Pregnancy Support Service’ at face value, not knowing she would be delivering herself for a free anti-abortion lecture. The woman who dispensed the lecture looked at Meg sternly and handed her the negative test strip as a cautionary souvenir.

  ‘What would you have done?’ the woman had asked, and as usual Meg had said nothing as clever or memorable as she would later wish.

  Now, in the hallway of Roseneath, there were posters exhorting Meg to give up smoking, use condoms and be aware of bowel cancer; wire stands bristled with flyers for the building’s current crop of fledgling businesses and not-for-profits. The yoga room was at the end of a dog-legged passageway. It was painted in a muddy shade of saffron and had evidently once been half of a larger space: one of its walls bisected a beautiful plaster ceiling rose. There was a sign on the door that said SHOES OFF PLE ASE, even though it was clear there was little hope left for the carpet, which was fraying in parts and not especially clean. Upon it a circle had been set, neat as a clock-face, for thirteen.

  Each place had its own bolster cushion and tightly rolled mat, and Meg wondered why she hadn’t thought, until now, about what the yoga would actually involve. She knew better than to go to fitness classes, where she could never follow the moves and where she always felt oversized in comparison to the jumpy little instructors. But before she could retreat, her friends Cathie and Jen arrived.

  This was Cathie’s second pregnancy but for all the others it was the first time, and early days at that. As they arrived, in their twos and threes, Meg noticed they shared the habit of fluttering their hands bashfully around their middles. Not that any of their pregnancies was at all scandalous or even secret. Each of the women was married or partnered, although of course it would have been completely fine if they hadn’t been. They were modern girls, tolerant and inclusive, and as the weeks went by the straight girls in the group would become increasingly proud of just how proud they were of Georgie and Lou, the gay girls who got themselves knocked up virtually simultaneously after they decided—for better or for worse—to do the whole thing together.

  The teacher came through the door and took her place in the circle, and then they were twelve. Meg was momentarily surprised that the teacher was not the least bit Indian, but copper-haired and freckled, perhaps about ten years older than her students. The teacher smiled around the room maternally. Observing one remaining empty place, she frowned mildly and checked her watch.

  ‘Let’s just wait a moment or two, shall we?’ she said. Then she closed her eyes and affected some graceful movements with her hands and wrists. And so they waited—Meg, Cathie and Kathy, Liz and Libby, Georgie, Lou, Jen, Jo, Mel and Angie—and regarded one another, doing their best despite their curiosity to keep their gazes at shoulder level or above.

  Meg knew even those of the others that she did not precisely know. It was the same for them all: they had either gone to school together or played netball against each other; nicked each other’s boyfriends; processed each other’s bank loans; booked each other’s package holidays; gelled each other’s nails; or fitted little foam moulds full of fluoride to each other’s teeth and wiped the dribble afterwards. Meg recognised Mel from behind the desk at her health insurance fund, although today’s Mel’s ringlets were loose to her shoulders rather than plastered back against her scalp. And opposite Meg was Kathy, whose elbows Meg had known intimately on the high school hockey pitch, but Kathy only sent a cheery little wave across the circle as if everything between them was different now. Which in some ways it was.

  If they had not been so already, then they were truly bound together now: a cohort. In six months’ time, they would all be wrapped in fluffy dressing gowns and stopping to talk to each other in hospital corridors. Some would be assigned to the same mothers’ groups which the health department trusted would cohere sufficiently well that their members would move on from clinic meetings to perambulating together through parks and gardens, and having coffee mornings in each other’s homes. But even those who ended up in different groups would now forever more smile at each other over banks of supermarket fruit and vegetables and, on the basis of quick glances, calculate ruthless comparisons of their offspring. Perhaps, as they discreetly checked each other out that day, they had a sense of their shared future, of those distant chilly Saturday mornings when they would be standing on the same, or opposite, sides of a soccer pitch.

  She, on the other hand, was nobody they knew. She arrived a good five minutes after the teacher had given up waiting and started the class, by which time the women were sitting with their eyes closed, breathing deliberately.

  ‘In through the nose,’ their teacher said. ‘And out through the mouth.’

  After only a few breaths, Meg began to feel unusual. The breathing lowered her shoulders, loosened the tension in her chest, and now she felt as precarious as a wine barrel with its hoops unbound.

  ‘Take a moment,’ the teacher said, her voice making a gentle circumnavigation of the circle, ‘to connect with that little life within you.’

  The sun was at the window. It fell full on Meg’s face so she could see blurred veins on the insides of her eyelids. As she breathed, oxygen poured into her blood and she worried that she might cry.

  ‘Imagine that tiny spine, curled within your womb. Those little fingers, those little toes.’

  Who are you? Meg asked of her baby, but instead of any kind of answer she heard the sounds of the door opening, of shoes being slipped off. There was the light scuff of bare feet on the outside of the circle.

  Still as a sphinx, Meg opened her eyes to slits and watched a woman take the thirteenth place in the circle. She did it without so much as a mouthed sorry to the teacher, or a sheepish glance around the room, and, observing this, Meg felt a disturbance, just a small one, somewhere deep in her own private universe.

  Meg studied the latecomer, wondering if the disturbance had been caused by the woman’s full breasts and slender hips. Or by Meg’s knowledge that, even without the practical limits imposed by time and money, she herself would still have lacked the imagination to invent herself so perfectly as this woman. She wouldn’t even have been able to think up the white and low-slung yoga pants the woman wore, delicately frilled at their calf-length cuffs. Or the pale green crop top she’d tied under her bust, leaving her belly bare despite the wintry weather. Meg had worn black leggings and pulled a purple t-shirt down over her fattening stomach, but this woman had exposed the whole of her middle, the slight curve of which was taut and lightly browned, an advertisement of what was to come. Watch this space.

  There was a word for her but, although Meg could sense it, she couldn’t quite pin it down. It had something to do with the woman’s lightly bronzed skin, the moonstone on her finger, the silver ring in the shallow swirl of her navel, her long plaits pinned up into a dark-gold crown. The w
oman stretched her neck and blew an escaping tendril of hair out of her face, and the word hovered at the edges of Meg’s mind like an almost-remembered name, its consonants vaguely suggesting themselves. It took Meg a good while to coax the word into focus, but at last she got it and her lips silently secured its shape.

  Treasured.

  That was it. She had a treasured look about her.

  Meg thought about the man who would stroke that stretch of belly, and how proud he would be of himself, firstly for having earned the love of such a beautiful woman, and now for having further staked his claim by impregnating her. Not that he would be a husband, this man—that much was clear. He’d be a partner. And Meg knew this not because the ring finger of the woman’s left hand was conspicuously bare, but because such a woman would need neither to insist on marriage, nor submit to it.

  Treasure, he would whisper. My Treasure.

  Fat guts. That’s what Justin had taken to calling Meg as her hips adjusted and her breasts inflated. Or else, Porky. They were terms of endearment, though. Often the words went along with a squeeze around her waist, or a bristly kiss on the cheek.