Mothers Grimm

by Danielle Wood

  Meg suspected that when Justin had chosen her for his life partner, he had applied much the same logic as he did when he bought a brush-cutter or a ute. He liked things to be solid, well-built, reliable and low maintenance, so much the better if they were cheap into the bargain. Meg had emerged from high school with a low opinion of her solid physique but without any actual eating disorder. At university she had discovered bushwalking and sea kayaking, whereupon she learned to appreciate being taller, stronger and less prone to preciousness than most other girls, although it continued to irk her when petite women strolled through doors ahead of her as if expecting she would defer to them, or worse, hold the door open.

  Meg and Justin met on a paddling weekend and, even in their earliest days, she’d taken a certain pride in being an undemanding girlfriend to him. They had married, and opened a plant nursery together, but both as wife and business partner she had never been the sort to ask him to lift a bag of soil or take the garbage out. She couldn’t remember ever handing him a jar with a too-tight lid. Meg wasn’t sure she would want Justin to suddenly start calling her Treasure or Dearest, but she wouldn’t have minded him noticing the crushing tiredness that was now routinely coming over her late in the day after she’d been on her feet in the nursery since dawn.

  One afternoon during the last week, she’d been so exhausted that she hid out in the nursery office where she could shuffle around on a wheelie chair, redistributing unsorted piles of crap. The air in the small room was thick with a meaty smell from the pie Justin had eaten for lunch and there was an overheated whiff coming off the PC. Meg thought she might be sick but shoved the last three squares of a chocolate block into her mouth anyway. Justin put his head around the door.

  ‘You right?’ he said. Justin never sat down on the job.

  There was a smear of dirt across his chin, which hadn’t seen a razor in a week or more. This wasn’t bad for business, though. The nursery’s main clientele was well-heeled women from the pricey suburb in which Meg and Justin had strategically located their business. They came in—gym-trim in their Levi’s 501s and spotless rubber gardening clogs—to fill up their baskets with punnets of pansies and parsley, and Meg saw how much they wanted to take to Justin’s grubby, boyish face with a licked corner of a hankie.

  ‘I’ve ripped out the display garden. Do you reckon you could do it back up again today?’ he said.

  Meg swallowed. ‘Today?’

  ‘Yeah, today. Can’t leave it bare. I thought lettuces. Bigger varieties up the back. Pretty, colourful ones down the front. Got to get everyone thinking of spring.’

  ‘But it’s only July.’

  ‘Nearly August,’ Justin said.

  He levered off a gumboot and emptied its mix of sand and pine bark into the wastepaper bin that was right by the door. Odours of ripe sock and warm rubber reached Meg’s nose and unhinged her stomach. She caught her chocolately vomit in the nearest empty plant pot, but some dripped out of the drainage holes and onto her lap.

  ‘Shit, you right?’ said Justin, rushing at her with the bin.

  Meg gulped a few times, tried to normalise her breathing. She wished someone would get her a bowl of stewed apricots.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘Oh, it’s the . . . ah, thing,’ he said, pointing to his stomach.

  One boot on, one boot off, he strode away and a minute was back with a roll of paper towel from the front counter. He held the bin while Meg wiped her face and her trousers.

  ‘You right now?’ he said.

  She wanted to lie down, even if it was on the grimy office lino with the phone book for a pillow.

  ‘Yep.’

  He mussed her hair affectionately, then said: ‘There’s a bunch of extra lettuce seedlings up in the top potting shed.’

  The second yoga class began as the first had done, with a single empty space in their circle. This time, though, the teacher did not ask the others to wait, but invited them to close their eyes, set aside their thoughts and be present within their bodies.

  ‘Feeling your breath’s flow, allow yourselves now to be still,’ the teacher said. She inhaled strenuously, nostril-wise, and her students did the same.

  Then Treasure arrived, her hair loose this time. It was even longer than Meg had imagined, curling all the way down to her lower back in a state of artful dishevelment. The dress she wore over matching leggings was grey-green and stretchy, clinging so closely to the tiny curve of her pregnant belly that Meg could make out the outline of her navel ring beneath. The dress had a wide boat neck that stretched almost shoulder to shoulder and, as Treasure sat down, Meg glimpsed a strap of pistachio-coloured lace and cream velvet.

  She knew that bra. She knew the brand, and the cut of the matching panties, and the price, because there was only one boutique in their small town that specialised in maternity wear, and she had gone there one afternoon, against her better judgement, when she had slipped out of the nursery to do the banking. The boutique was housed in a converted cottage that was painted in shades of oatmeal and had rooms smelling of vanilla. In the lingerie room there was nothing but a velvet-curtained change room and a two-tiered carousel which had reminded Meg of a cake stand at high tea. The garments were like pastries in their shades of cream, mocha, raspberry and chocolate—iced with embroidery, piped with narrow velvet, cased in lace—and Meg became uncomfortably aware that her nipples had tightened as if reaching out to them.

  As Meg lifted out a confection of pistachio lace and velvety cream, the sales lady came into the room and put on a show of searching the change room for unwanted items, as if she were not really checking up on Meg and the big fat handbag she had wedged in her armpit like a goose.

  ‘Pop that in the change room for you, love?’ she said, holding out a hand, and the hint of accusation was enough to give Meg—who never even thought of stealing anything—a little rush of guilt. Meekly, she handed over the bra.

  In the change room were posters, and in the posters were women with hair pinned up and loose curls straying, their mouths half-open, eyes half-closed. Full cream breasts strained against ribbon and lace, pretty panties underlined bellies as big and round as steamed puddings. Meg tried on the bra and she didn’t even need to look in the mirror to know that she wanted to own the way the firm green cups smoothed her breast flesh, and the way the lace embellished her cleavage. When she leafed over the price tag, the staggering figure made her feel sick, so she had dressed back in her own clothes and handed over the bra to the sales lady, who was not in the least deceived by her promise to think on it.

  ‘As you breathe in . . . put one hand on your heart . . . and breathe out. Rest your other hand on your belly,’ the teacher said. ‘Each time you breathe in, you are taking in the oxygen that sustains your baby’s life. Remember you are breathing not for one, but for two.’

  Meg, glancing across the circle, made note that the moonstone was gone from Treasure’s middle finger, replaced by a princess-cut diamond in a proud vintage silver setting. Meg imagined the jewellery box that Treasure would have in her wardrobe, or perhaps on a dressing table in front of a big oval mirror. She imagined its antique tangle of silver and rose gold and white gold and pretty stones, and Meg knew that Treasure’s partner would never say ‘What for?’ when asked, over the breakfast bar one morning, if he would like to put the eleven-week ultrasound appointment date in his diary. Treasure would never need to press him, so he would have no cause to slap her lightly on the haunch and say, ‘Come on, Pork Chop, don’t go getting all pathetic on me.’

  It occurred to Meg, after Justin had said that, to tell him that she didn’t so much want him to come to the appointment as she wanted him to want to come. But when she tried that out in words, it sounded like the kind of manipulative manoeuvre that a truly pathetic woman might make. Was she pathetic? The word had stung. And, to make matters worse, Meg remembered reading—in a magazine, probably, or else one of those best-selling books for women that Meg’s mother-in-law bought for herself and th
en passed on to Meg—that the criticisms which hurt the most were those that you believed, deep down, to be valid.

  ‘Pathetic’ had long been one of Meg’s mother’s favourite words. It was for women who too obviously enjoyed breastfeeding and who fussed over children’s bruised knees instead of saying ‘up you get and rub it better’. It was for mothers who indulged in teary goodbyes at the school gate, and pregnant women who expected to have their feet up all the time and people bringing them cups of milky tea.

  ‘Keep running with the tribe,’ Meg’s mother was fond of saying, especially now that Meg was pregnant.

  This exhortation was the text of a telegram that Meg’s mother had got from her father, Meg’s grandfather, right after Meg’s birth. It had to do with the supposed facts relating to women of unspecified nomadic tribes, and what they did if they had to give birth during a long, migratory march. According to Meg’s grandfather, these women would duck off behind a rock and squeeze out their babies with no more fuss than if they were having a bush wee. Therefore, post-partum women who malingered in hospital were, in Meg’s mother’s view, ‘pathetic’.

  Was there anything pathetic, though, about wanting the father of your child to come along to the first ultrasound of your pregnancy? It was only an ordinary miracle, but it was theirs, and Meg had thought that Justin might want to witness it. It wasn’t as if she expected to be congratulated, or thanked. Meg had heard of men being grateful, even buying emerald rings and diamond necklaces for the women who had borne their children. But Meg thought it unlikely that such a thing happened any more. Except perhaps to women who had jewellery boxes and oval mirrors and golden hair tumbling down past their beautiful breasts to the tops of their slender thighs. Ordinary women, she thought, were probably just thankful if they could find a man who was happy enough to inject the raw materials and live with the consequences. Because children, as Justin’s mates who were already fathers had pointed out to him, and as he in turn had pointed out to Meg—and this was after Meg had conceived—were completely pointless. They were expensive, tied you down, kept you up, and then never left home.

  Meg had thought about all this as she sat, alone, in the waiting room at the imaging centre. She had thought about it while she lay on the narrow stretcher bed and while, on the screen, in place of her miracle, a creature waggled its oversized skull and fleshless limbs like something rubbery and fluorescent you might hang in your doorway at Halloween. By the time she stood at the reception desk with her credit card in hand, she couldn’t remember why she was pregnant in the first place.

  ‘Actually—’ said Cathie, leaning in confidentially. Then she fell silent as the waiter arrived with their drinks.

  Cathie and Meg had gone out for coffee after yoga. They still called it that—‘coffee’—although they wouldn’t have dreamed of consuming caffeine in public. Meg had gone straight to the café while Cathie had gone via her mother’s to collect the baby. It was a small, popular eatery that had sprung up quite unexpectedly on a suburban street which had little else to recommend it. Even though it was winter, they took a seat outside, where—at regular intervals along the pavement—white-trunked saplings seemed to sprout directly out of the concrete.

  They chose an outside table in part because of the pram—which reminded Meg of a spaceship with its lime-green escape pod and its clever, lightweight frame—and in part because the café was busy indoors and they didn’t want to lower their voices the way you have to in a small town. Meg and Cathie had begun by agreeing it was a shame Jen couldn’t come this day. She had an appointment with her dietician, apparently, and Cathie and Meg spent some time wondering if it was really for the best that Jen was still following her strict vegan regime while pregnant. With this item covered off, their talk turned to Treasure.

  Towards the end of the class, the teacher had asked the women to form pairs for a pose called the One Foot Prayer. It had been important to find someone roughly your own height, and Meg had been in equal parts relieved, envious and unsurprised that it was Cathie who had found Treasure.

  Meg and Cathie had known each other for a very long time. In early primary school their class had gone on a bus to another school that was out in the bush and where the children had chickens in pens and tended vegetable plots which had leeks and kale and other vegetables little Meg had never heard of. They were to pair up—one child from the city, one from the country—and the country children would teach the city children to bake bread. It was left to the children to find their own partners: boys wanted boys and girls wanted girls, but Cathie had wanted one particular girl, the prettiest one. This girl had been pretty after a simple storybook fashion: fair plaits and large blue eyes and pink cheeks and Cathie had lunged with indecent speed to claim her, grabbing her and holding on tightly so that nobody else could get her. Meg remembered there had been a big fuss when the girl cried out in pain and showed the teachers the livid crescent moons made on her wrist by Cathie’s fingernails.

  While Cathie and Treasure had balanced and stretched, Cathie had deployed her Girl Scout smile and kept up a flow of effortless chat and Meg had been dying to know what they were saying.

  ‘So, actually—’ said Cathie, beginning again.

  ‘Yes?’ said Meg.

  ‘She’s single,’ Cathie said.

  ‘What?’ Meg’s question came out with a derisive little snort that she had not intended.

  ‘Uh-huh. Not married. Not in a relationship. Single. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course,’ Cathie said.

  Meg tried to remember how to spell that German word. Was it with a fraud for fake, or a freud for Sigmund?

  A small noise came from within the pram. The baby, a girl, was not yet a year old, but it was typical of Cathie that she was already onto her second, which of course would be a boy. Pigeon pair. Done and dusted. Cathie had already booked in to have her tubes tied straight after the birth.

  ‘So, she just came out and told you that?’ Meg said.

  The noise escalated and Cathie made a shushing sound as she shunted the pram back and forth over the pavement. Meg didn’t doubt for a second the baby would go back to sleep and stay that way until Cathie was ready for her to wake up. Meg could picture what Cathie would be like with her children when they were older; she could already hear the lovingly bossy register that Cathie would specialise in but that Meg would never be able to find.

  ‘I only asked her if her partner was happy about the baby,’ said Cathie, expertly adjusting the blanket she had draped over the front of the pram. ‘And I said “partner”. I didn’t say “husband” or “bloke”. And she said she was on her own.’ ‘Then who is the father?’ Meg blurted. She blushed, realising she had sounded almost angry.

  ‘Jesus, Meg,’ said Cathie. ‘I’m good, but I’m not that good.’

  It was a struggle for Meg to let go of Treasure’s partner. To replace him she had thought up a few different options. Perhaps an unscrupulous married colleague who had knocked up Treasure in a lunchtime hotel room. Or had it been a muscle-shirted youth dragged unwittingly home from the pub? Or, perhaps more likely, a long-time friend and sensitive guitar-playing poet who had always wanted more from their relationship and had nobly agreed to come to the party. Each Saturday at yoga class, Meg watched carefully for clues to which one of them had done the deed, but if pushed she would have had to admit that she was never convinced by any of them.

  Meanwhile, in the nursery, spring came, bringing with it the part-time and first-time gardeners, their legs bright winter white in the stretch between khaki shorts and elastic-sided boots. They bought basket-loads of vegetable seedlings, or a whole driveway’s worth of lavender and box. Young couples would struggle up to the counter with a heavy potted tree between them and Meg would almost be able to see, in the air above their heads, their shared visions of that tree’s branches shading their daughter’s wedding day, holding a cubby house for their grandchildren, shedding its crispy golden leaves over their ruby wedding anniversary celebra
tions.

  In Meg’s display garden the icebergs were building their own hearts, inner leaves folding like pale green hands around a secret. The deep green leaves of the winter density were beginning to scrunch up and look brainy, while the lamb’s ear proliferated in small, furry lobes. Buttercrunches bloomed in soft, open roses and speckles freckled the shiny flanks of the flashy trout back. Meg watched over her lettuces, plucking off slugs and snails, searching beneath the spreading crinolines of the oakleaf, and the blood-brown lace of the mignonette, for weeds. She would yank these out and fling them aside along with their webs of thread-thin roots.

  Meg and Justin always saw a spike in sales of the plants they featured in their display garden, but this spring their lettuce sales were unprecedented, and it brought up one of Meg’s old chestnuts—the one about the morality of the nursery business. She wondered if it were honest to charge people so much for lettuce seedlings they could easily—with the investment of a week or two—have grown themselves from seed. It troubled her, too, the amount that people would spend on plants for which they had not the right soil, nor the expertise to nurture, nor the dedication to water, and she wondered if it were right to profit so handsomely from their cycle of ambition and failure. On a good day in spring, the queue to the checkout ran the full length of the display garden, and Meg at the cash register took people’s money and tried not to think too much about the fate of the plants going out the door all green and glossy and hopeful.

  ‘Standing up, if you wouldn’t mind, ladies,’ the teacher said.

  By now the women had grown quite a bit larger and, as they stood up in their circle, Meg heard the faint sounds of knees and hip joints cracking.

  ‘And find yourself a partner.’

  Meg searched the room and located Treasure, her hair in low, loose pigtails that came forward over each shoulder. If Cathie could do it, then surely so could she, although Cathie would just know what to say and how to say it without having to think it all out first the way Meg did now. She thought she could probably ask, When’s your due date? That was a safe question. Do you know what you’re having? Nosier, but Meg would have thought acceptable under the circumstances. Have you chosen a name? That was probably off-limits.