Down Under

by Sonia Taitz

  “Well, people change, right? I mean, my dad changed. It was her turn, I guess. And now it’s mine, too. And yours.”

  “I’m hungry,” says Davey. “Wanna go to my house for dinner? My mom is making my favorite—turkey burgers, fries, and peas.”

  “Sure,” says Delaney. “Thank God I can eat normal food for a change.”

  Dinner is different that night at the Ewington table. For the first time, Davey mixes his peas and his fries, sipping water between bites of his food.

  His mother stares at him in disbelief.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Ms. Ewington,” says Delaney. “You’re wondering whether Davey and I have ‘done it,’ but we haven’t, not yet, but we want to and we’re going to and nothing can stop us.”

  “Actually, that wasn’t what I was thinking at all.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Never mind. Don’t you think Davey might be a little young?” She does not mean only that he is young, but that he is young for his age. Davey blushes all the way to the collar of his red-and-white rugby shirt.

  “Oh, come on,” says Delaney. “We’re totally committed to each other. Surely you’re no prude?” Delaney knows that many of her classmates in the creative writing class have written in great detail about their sex lives. Ms. Ewington has seen it all, she is sure.

  “Plus,” she continues eagerly, “you’re my role model, did you know that? You have kids, and you teach, but you’re even cool enough to have this thing with some crazy rabbi, which is beyond—”

  “Davey, that was extremely private! Does the whole town know?”

  “Delaney’s not the whole town. She may have written about it in her online journal, but that’s it.”

  “I did write about it extensively. I’ve often imagined your private life, Ms. E. Since I met you, I’ve wondered how a woman with your passions experienced the total loss of youth and beauty. I saw how you channeled those frustrations into being a gossipy and somewhat malicious wife who told on me to my mother—that’s OK, I forgive you. But I knew that this life you led would not be enough for you. Your losses came from the soul, and a little fun making mommy-wars in the suburbs was not going to do it.”

  Jude is still mulling over the words “total loss of youth and beauty.”

  “It won’t be so hard for me to get old,” Delaney continues, “I’m not that pretty even now, but Davey showed me pictures of you from long, long ago, and you were drop-dead gorgeous. So how do you deal, I wondered.”

  “Well, I—”

  “No, don’t explain. I know the answer now,” says the young girl. “You found an outlet for your deepest desires—and kept your female soul alive. Not to mention your sacred pubic flower. I’m just beginning that journey, and I can’t tell you how inspiring you are.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. May I ask you for your opinion, though?”

  “Sure.”

  “As you know, Davey and I are in love. My mom is apparently gone-zo, and my dad’s been orbiting earth for almost a year. It’s a good thing we have money. My mother’s family, the Dorcases? Loaded. She only made food for a pastime, you know? To keep herself from going crazy. She certainly did not want to sit around all the time with my father.

  “But I want to be around Davey all the time. And I don’t mean treated platonically, like so many of you middle-aged women seem to live. Our sex life is progressing really well. Davey is ready to be my mate in every sense of the word. So it might also be good timing for Davey and me to get our own little place somewhere. Don’t worry about the money; I can pay. And Davey can make some extra at the ranch on weekends, if he wants to chip in on the utilities, right?”

  “You mean a place here, nearby?”

  “Anywhere. We’d still go to school, of course. But I’m just so sick of my perfect room and those creepy dolls I could never play with and the idiotic outfits that hang in my closet on padded pink hangers. I mean, if I had my own place, I’d paint the walls a kind of indigo—what do you think, Davey?”

  “Indigo—it’s definitely a nice color,” he replies. Delaney is going so fast, he thinks. He is only just beginning to enjoy the accidental taste of ketchup on his peas. Does he have to pack up all his things, too? Would he have to share a bathroom with her? He would hate that.

  Jude says kindly to Delaney, “I don’t want to be too bossy, like you think your mother was. But I do have one thing to say, with all my old-lady wisdom:

  “The time for running is over.”

  Davey and Delaney stare at her, he with relief, and she with the willingness to learn something new.

  “Love doesn’t come like a thief in the night,” Jude continues. “A pogrom comes like a thief in the night.” The lesson went quickly and well from there.

  Delaney says: “What’s a pogrom?”

  Jude says: “Davey, tell her. Show her you know a little something.”

  Davey says: “Pogrom?”

  Jude: “You know, when the people in the villages—”

  Delaney: “The people? In the villages?”

  Davey and Delaney giggle together. It sounds like Frankenstein and the mob with pitchforks.

  Jude: “It’s not a joke. There is real cruelty in this world.”

  Delaney: “And this is relevant, because . . . ?”

  Davey: “Not sure. Mom?”

  Jude: “This is relevant, because, as I am trying to say, love is not terroristic, and it does not come like a pogrom in the night and make you choose YES or NO and then make you run wildly amok. It is a kind of softer thing, and you feel it over time and you relax.”

  She isn’t sure about the kids, but Jude herself is absorbing something new. “West, east, north, south. Over, under, inside, around—everywhere you go, it’s the same thing, see, Davey?”

  He can’t, not really, but then again, he is very young.

  Jude thinks back to her own blind youth. Could it ever have worked with Collum? Maybe, she thinks sadly. Maybe he’d have grown up working as an actor in the New York theater. Not so famous that he’d lost all idea of who he was. So much pain would have been avoided. Hers, his, Gingerean’s, the children he abandoned. But that is not what had happened.

  Delaney had thought that to be in love was to run and travel and move—the cowboy way that Shy had embodied. The way that Davey’s restless ballads had described:

  “Journeyin’ nights in the flickerin’ lights.”

  “Leavin’ on a fast train, far far away.”

  “Lonely highway, skies so gray”—and so on.

  But maybe, Ms. Ewington is saying, the true sign of love is not running. Maybe it is to stay where you are.

  “Then why did my mother run?” Delaney asks her, after the baked apples are served. “Was she nuts or something?”

  “I fear you’re right,” says Jude. “When a woman cannot stop cleaning and cooking and washing and wearing the outfits and the very uncomfortable heels, she may well be nuts, or something.

  “At least your father, for all his hair issues, is a fine man and stayed put. When you come home tonight, you will find him waiting for you. He called me when I was in the kitchen, and wondered where you were.”

  “Really?” says Delaney. She sounds reassured.

  Step by Step and Shlep by Shlep

  As for Slam, the news of Heidi’s flight with Collum came as welcome relief. Not only was he happy for Heidi, but his own life had been purged of a lingering woe. For decades, he’d had to hear his wife mope and wail about the man who got away. Whenever he, Slam, did not do exactly what she wanted (stand at attention, get an erection), Jude would bring up that blessed “boy” of hers, the perfect one, the one who turned into a huge movie star, the very icon of a hero.

  Oh, only he knew how to love, how to feel, how to cry.

  Their parting all those years ago was “tragic,” Russian-novel sized, and Slam had been sick to death of hearing about it. But Jude now told him that she had had her chance to f
lee to Tahiti, and she’d passed. The fantasy was over.

  Slam had forgiven his wife, who seemed calmer than she had ever been. And Jude had forgiven him. Not that he rubbed it in, but he couldn’t let her think she was the first person to have invented extramarital dalliance. A few years ago, he confided, there had been a woman in Italy who released all his tensions (building a business, appeasing a wife, raising the son with bad grades, and the other a misfit) . . .

  “Her hands could crack chestnuts,” Slam said, and he and his wife laughed at the phrase, and the general oddness of life.

  “So that’s what you go for, huh?” she said.

  “Not really,” he replied, shuddering. He actually didn’t like women very much at all. They were murky.

  Jude spent the next few evenings up in the family attic, where, deep in the back, she kept an old milk crate as a “time capsule.” It overflowed with her journals, homework, and letters, all written during the year of Collum Whitsun. She had not looked at it for decades. Now, among her papers, she found one of her father’s poems, balled up at the bottom of the crate. He had written it in the hospital after his first stroke, and the penmanship was legible but shaky.

  The poem was addressed to her:

  No learning out of ordinary time,

  in ordinary days,

  as simple as a rhyming rhyme

  our ordinary ways.

  Day by day and step by step.

  Heart by heart and shlep by shlep.

  We roam.

  To find our home.

  Jude stroked the paper, as she would have stroked his hand, trying to release its kinks and wrinkles and woes. Her father was gone, but his words had remained, and now she began to understand them. He was trying to come to terms, she thought, with the ordinary rhythms of life, and how they were better than hysteria and excessive passion. The kind that she and Collum had brought to him like terror at the dinner table. The kind that so often possessed Aaron himself, causing him to suffer all his life, and to fall ill at the end of it.

  “Heart by heart and shlep by shlep/We roam/To find our home,” Jude recited self-consciously to Slam. “I know it’s sort of Dorothy’s red shoes,” she added, “but—”

  “As in, ‘there’s no place like home’?”

  “Yes,” she acknowledged. “But it’s also part Ulysses. My Dad is saying that you have to wander, but don’t let yourself get lost. He never lived to see us married, but we did marry and we made a family. I think he would have been pleased with what we’ve built together.”

  A few days later, Jude S. Ewington sent this message to Collum Whitsun:

  It may have been better if our lives had never gotten tangled together. We were charged ions that yanked each other. It felt so important, didn’t it?

  Time did stop, then and now. We stood outside ourselves. Our bodies soared and our souls, for a moment, were freed. It seemed so real, so much realer than anything else.

  But you know what? It wasn’t real at all.

  Is mad love the epic adventure? Is ordinary life banal?

  I think it is the other way around. Going on, moving forward.

  The ordinary: That’s epic enough.

  I’ve never been able to be alone. It’s painful not to have a soul mate.

  But however much the truth hurts, it’s the truth, and what I need.

  There was no answer. Later that day, Collum Whitsun’s account was closed, and all anyone could reach was the fan page of Colm Eriksen, a man who didn’t actually exist anymore.

  Jude puts on the flannel nightgown that she loves, the kind with the ruffled neckline. Her husband wears a T-shirt and pajama bottoms that tie with a string. Each goes to bed with a good book made of paper and ink, their reading glasses perched on their noses. They put their books down and chat a bit. Joey was doing better at school, and Davey was still seeing Delaney, but had mentioned that another girl seemed to like him, and another boy, a senior, seemed to like her. Davey thought he might even want to go back to boarding school with Joey next year. It was good to get away sometimes, he told them. Both of them, mom and dad, are proud of him, relieved and optimistic.

  Everything was fine, the two of them agreed. Satisfied, they kiss each other goodnight, a peck near the lips. Then they turn, yawn, and stretch, entering the depths of a good, untroubled sleep. Jude is more at peace than she has ever been before, even as a girl in her own parents’ home.

  After decades of roaming, she takes a well-deserved rest.

  Just One More Step

  And after that restoring rest, she rises. The pillow-top king-size bed is cushy, and over the last few weeks Slam has even spoken of their moving to a larger house with bigger bedrooms, a real pool and stone decking. But Jude would stay where she was as her husband moved on and up. Something lived inside her now that she would not abandon.

  Judy Pincus stands by the mirror and sees herself with honest, loving eyes. She looks at her changing face, the skin and bones that alter with each year. Time seemed to be moving faster now, and she was hurtling forward, just as she had when she’d met that lonely boy with the shaggy locks and blackened eye, when her heart had first opened. Even at this late date, even if she’s scared, she will never give up on finding what she still needs. Down under, she senses the presence of someone she’d never been alone with, someone she now longed to know—the girl, no longer young, who’d never left her.

  Acknowledgments

  Afterword

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Once again I owe a heartfelt thank-you to my brilliant, elegant, and unassuming publisher, Ellie McGrath, and to her partner, husband, and cofounder of McWitty Press, Paul Witteman. After a valiant battle, Paul passed away on New Year’s Day, 2013, leaving the world a legacy of boundless love and curiosity, and an extraordinary daughter, Kate. As with my previous two books, In the King’s Arms and The Watchmaker’s Daughter, I consider this one to have been godparented by both Ellie and Paul, and I am proud of this rare provenance.

  Thanks again, too, to our visual dream team: Jenny Carrow and Abby Kagan, the cover and interior artists, respectively, who make these books so outrageously good-looking. The sensitive edits of Chris Peterson are also much appreciated.

  A big hug to my dear friends Lynn Schwartz, Debra Berman, Anne Bookin, Bonni-Dara Michaels, Susan Weinstein, and Tammy Williams. My deep admiration to Jan Henrik Olofsen, who embodies the brave soul of the wounded child and is able to translate these wounds into travel, creativity, and love. While his own upbringing was sometimes jarring, Jan is the epitome of patient parenthood, which—like so much else—he turns into an art form. My brother, Emanuel, is also a maven in this field: gifted in the art of resilient living and a wonderful dad to his daughters, Jenny and Michelle.

  As ever, I’m grateful to my husband, Paul, and our children, Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe. They show me the true meaning of loyalty and love, and when I come out from “down under,” their light guides me home.

  Afterword

  In describing this book, I’ve often alluded to a certain person in the “real world,” an actor whose powerful work I’ve always adored and whose intelligence and integrity I’ve never doubted.

  What I see in people like this is passion in its broadest sense. They show up, they struggle, they strive. They paint with broad, dripping strokes on great canvases. They love with all their hearts, sometimes to bursting. They create beauty and wreak havoc, often at the same time. Sometimes, of course, they crash—and when they do, the world rushes in to stare at the massive crater they’ve created. The spillage and the slowly drifting flotsam make fascinating front-page news. The press takes snaps, tapes rants, broadcasts the bald spot, and shows off the spittle-pelted lens. An entertained “public” stares at endless loops of degradation, appalled and tutting. But no one, I am sure, feels more appalled than these emotional kamikazes themselves, these brave hearts who send themselves into the world, naked and alone.


  The troubles experienced by talented, complicated souls have inspired some aspects of this novel. I am attracted to ups and downs, to complex people who self-destruct. I am a willing witness to the brokenhearted child that often lies behind the rise and fall of such people. Not all of them fully self-destruct. Some rise to extraordinary heights (staying up there is the hard part; the air is thin). In the case of both Collum Eriksen and the star he may sometimes resemble, I have no doubt of resurrection, and wish for it. I love such people, fictional or real.

  I’m the child of war-torn Holocaust survivors, and therefore bear a certain intergenerational legacy of trauma and pain. I probably went to law school to learn how to make the world “fairer,” to heal it. Over the years, I’ve worked pro bono as an advocate for foster kids and have seen the lasting effects of abuse on young children. Fear begets fear, anger, and despair. At the same time, love—that elusive goal—can be an omnipotent healer. Like flowers, children turn to the light and grow toward it.

  To understand is to forgive. I both understand and forgive the players in this novel—and I hope the reader comes to feel the same.

  Reader’s Guide

  1.What do you think this book has to say about the quest for “true love”?

  2.What truly sparks Jude’s decision to reach out to her long-lost boyfriend?

  3.One theme in the book is loyalty: to parents, to old flames, to one’s own traditions. How is Jude loyal or disloyal? What challenges does she face?

  4.The depiction of Collum Whitsun is complicated. How does his traumatic upbringing affect your opinion of him?

  5.Do you see similarities between Jude’s upbringing and Collum’s?

  6.How does the parallel story between Delaney and David add to the texture of the novel?

  7.The author uses a lot of humor in the book. What do you think this says about the drama she describes? Can a book this entertaining also be serious? Can you think of other books that have used this combination of tones?