by Miriam Sved
The federal election campaign is about to begin: the broadsheet, when she spreads it across the table and sits to drink her coffee, is full of pictures of that baby-faced bureaucrat everyone seems so excited about – even Zoe has casually mentioned that she is considering compromising her socialist principles to campaign for him; she said he is ‘harnessing the youth fury’. She said this when her father was present, so God knows whether it was for Russell’s benefit, to stir him up – the two of them have settled into what looks to Illy like quite a comfortable sparring relationship about politics. There is nothing comfortable in it for Illy, who these days maintains an oblique squint towards anything politically inflected, and towards her own Liberal-voting drift. Her Tribeca loft self would be horrified; her daughter is horrified: more horrified, she has noticed, by Illy’s mainstream political ennui than Russell’s active and noisy conservatism. Zoe managed to work it into the awful conversation last week: how she should have expected bigotry from anyone who could vote for John Howard. So easy for the young to be brave, with no established order to defend. Illy washes the uncomfortable flash of her daughter’s voice away with a sip of coffee and, defiant, closes the broadsheet and turns her attention to Russell’s paper, the tabloid.
She has just found journalistic sanctuary in an article about a fundraising calendar of guide dogs when Eszter appears in the kitchen doorway, looking even smaller and rounder of shoulder than usual in her bedjacket. Illy forces herself to stay seated, not to spring up to help her mother to a chair (displays of physical assistance annoy Eszter, or at least they do coming from Illy – all help has to be smuggled in, doubling the effort needed).
‘Good morning, Mama,’ she says. ‘I hope you slept well?’
‘Eh.’ The old woman shrugs hugely, a shrug of overarching resignation to hardship, and shuffles towards the coffee pot, where Illy has laid out her favourite mug and the sugar bowl, to forestall unnecessary movement. The act of pouring the coffee is still fraught with wobbly-wristed danger; Illy exercises more restraint to stop herself from going to help. She turns the page of her newspaper to appear occupied, although she wasn’t done with the guide dogs.
Eszter and her coffee-with-three-sugars make it to the table, most of the liquid still on board. She takes a large slurp and pulls the broadsheet towards herself, turns its first massive page, drinks again and begins to trail one of her talon nails down the newsprint as though speed-reading, her head tilted at a thoughtful angle. Illy, mock-reading her own lesser paper, takes in each small movement as a block of evidence, data to support an evolving lifelong theory about her mother: a theory she still can’t quite articulate in its generality but whose current manifestation consists of not mentioning the notebook. Eszter turns another page and doesn’t mention the notebook. Takes a sip of coffee and doesn’t mention the notebook. Takes a hanky out of her sleeve, blows her nose and doesn’t mention the notebook. True, Illy is not mentioning the brochure. But Eszter started it.
Illy gets up and puts four pieces of bread in the toaster (easier for Eszter to accept readymade toast than prospective toast). She is waiting for the toast to pop when Zoe makes a surprise appearance in the doorway.
‘Good morning, Nagymama.’ Illy’s daughter, glowingly dishevelled in a slightly gothic-looking shift, goes to her grandmother and gives her a quick kiss on the cheek. This level of impromptu elder-respect is almost impressive enough to cancel out the fact that she doesn’t acknowledge Illy’s larger presence at all. And what is she even doing up? Because Illy has been sidestepping the guilt-plagued mental territory of her daughter, it didn’t occur to her until now that Zoe’s night might have involved bringing someone home. Russell and Illy maintain an open-door policy with their adult children, but if Illy hadn’t been so busy avoiding dangerous subjects with her daughter for the last week she would have asked her to hold off on overnight guests while Nagymama is with them. She is pretty sure this would have been a reasonable enough request – or would have seemed it if the conversation last week had gone another way. Maybe reasonable enough to be self-evident: maybe Zoe wouldn’t dream of introducing such a volatile variable into the house with her widowed grandmother. Illy has somehow lost the instinctive sense of her children and what they are capable of, what either of them is likely to do. Lost the knack of knowing them.
In any case, no-one tall or sinewy follows her daughter into the kitchen, none of the semi-clad figures of Illy’s anxious imagination. (Illy is probably perverse to think they would; probably a prurient bigot, as her daughter suspects.) Zoe makes herself a mug of black coffee (when did she start drinking it black?) and takes it to the dining table, roots around in the curling entrails of the newspaper and pulls out the arts magazine. It seems that she will not be acknowledging her mother at all this morning. Illy must have crossed the line yesterday. Still standing by the toaster, she watches her mother and daughter reading their newspapers and not talking to her. Zoe could learn a lot from the older woman. Zoe turns the pages of her magazine with wrist-snapping violence and still hasn’t so much as glanced in Illy’s direction. Eszter, meanwhile, sips her coffee and nods her head slightly as if fully absorbed in what she is reading. So much more subtle and ultimately infuriating in her nuanced passive aggression; a guerrilla fighter to Zoe’s sumo wrestler.
Zoe sniffs loudly.
‘Do you still have that cold, darling?’ Illy asks, suddenly feeling fond and almost amused by her daughter’s truculence.
Zoe looks up from her magazine – glares, really – and says, ‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ The toast pops. ‘How about I make you some breakfast.’ Getting jam and marmalade from the fridge.
‘No.’ Zoe turns another page of her magazine with a meaningful snap. ‘Thank you.’
You see, darling, Illy could say to her daughter, you’ve backed yourself into a corner here. You committed to your hostility too quickly rather than waiting for your opponent to make their move. Take a look at your grandmother.
She spreads two slices of toast with marmalade – horrible bitter stuff – and says, ‘Mama, I accidentally put marmalade instead of jam on this toast. They’ll go to waste unless you eat them.’ And puts the loaded plate in front of her mother.
‘I don’t eat anything this early,’ Eszter says, ‘I don’t eat a thing,’ picking up a piece of toast and taking a bite.
Illy loads her own toast with jam and sits back down with her tabloid (a judgemental glance from Zoe?). She turns back to the page with the guide dogs and tries to re-immerse herself, but she can’t concentrate, the two generational bookends of women at the table are too noisy in their silence. Ridiculous. Illy pushes the guide dogs away, straightens her shoulders and takes a bracing mouthful of coffee. We are all adults here.
‘What are your plans today, Zoe?’ she asks brightly.
Her daughter looks up with an incredulous lift of her eyebrows, as if she had forgotten her mother was there, or was capable of speech. ‘Not much,’ she says. ‘Working on the print series for the circus. And we’re going over to Tali’s place to prepare for the rally.’
Tali, Illy thinks. She is one of them.
Eszter looks up at her granddaughter, one large sheet of the newspaper held off the table, about to turn the page and not mention the notebook. ‘What is the rally, darling?’ she asks.
Zoe’s high-planed face seems to soften and warm when she turns to her grandmother. ‘It’s a big protest we’re holding tomorrow, Nagymama,’ she says. ‘Outside the building in the city where all the global leaders are going to be for this big capitalist meeting, APEC?’
Eszter nods. ‘I know about this one. Who do you do the protest with?’ It is characteristic of Illy’s mother to sweep aside the political and home in on the personal. It makes Illy nervous.
Zoe says, ‘I’m in a left-wing organisation?’ Voice rising at the end of the sentence with gossipy excitement. At least she doesn’t say th
e organisation’s name, which sounds to Illy’s ears histrionically self-important. ‘Me and a group of my friends have all been active members for a couple of years.’ Her eyes flick towards Illy, who is on guard and regretting her decision to disrupt the safely evasive silence.
‘Who is this friends?’ Eszter asks, stepping straight into the marshy swamp-land.
‘Oh, just a few people I know, mostly from the women’s circus. There’s Tali and Lee and Ruth and Arlo. And my friend Sal. And a few others. We’re a really close group.’ Definitely speaking with an eye on her mother. ‘More than friends, really,’ she says. ‘We’re comrades. Soulmates.’
Illy sinks her teeth into the toast and tries to chew through an unhelpful and slightly hysterical urge to laugh. Soulmates? If it wasn’t so anxiety-inducing, it would be terribly embarrassing. Surely Illy was never so painfully self-important as a young person. She feels jumpy with nervousness at the trajectory of the conversation. In an attempt to head it off, she swallows her toast and says, ‘And what are you actually protesting?’
Zoe looks at her as if she is unspeakably dense. ‘The APEC summit?’ That upward inflection at the end of the sentence turning caustic like the flick of a blade.
‘I know it’s the APEC summit.’ Trying to keep her own voice pleasant and neutral. ‘But, well, you can’t really protest a meeting, can you? The fact of a bunch of people sitting together in a room. What is it about the summit that you don’t like?’
Zoe considers her mother across the table with an expression of bemused disbelief. ‘This isn’t just a meeting, Mum. This is the most powerful, damaging capitalists in the world getting together to scratch each other’s backs. We’re protesting the war in Iraq, the destruction of the environment, the exploitation of workers in the third world. Globalisation.’ She presents the word with emphatic relish like a talisman, heavy and unarguable. Illy sees the little band of young people that she met for the first time at her daughter’s circus performance a few months ago: blue-haired Tali and the large girl with the partially shaved head whose name she can’t remember and the Asian one with the initials (SJ? RJ?) whose presence at a women’s circus both confused and clarified the genderless rod of her face and body. And Sal, of course, Sal with the tattoo in her ear (her ear?). This ragtag band of … comrades (the word freaks is there but she doesn’t conjure it, she sees it coming from a distance and tries to ward it off, she takes no responsibility for it), they want to stop globalisation. Illy’s mind goes to her children when they were young enough to blame her for the weather, the blisters on their feet, the annoyance of blowflies – when they thought these realities of the world were changeable – and again she almost laughs. (What a strange self-sabotaging mood she has woken up in; perhaps the old man’s death is affecting her more than she realised.)
She hopes her face gives nothing away when she says, ‘That’s good then.’
Zoe rolls her eyes and blows air out her mouth with force.
‘What?’ says Illy. ‘What?’
In answer Zoe gets up and starts making a lot of noise with physical objects: thumping a bowl down on the counter and jangling cutlery out of the drawer; she even manages to make muesli pour loudly. Eszter turns a page of her newspaper, which Illy knows for a fact is being stared right through as every part of the old woman’s senses tune in to the family conflict. If only Eszter weren’t here, Illy feels that she would be able to unravel the quick-knotting ball of hostility with her daughter, she would think of the right thing to say. This argument is not really about global politics. But all the things Illy doesn’t want her mother to know or even get a whiff of surround the conversation like landmines, paralysing her, leaving her stuck in an ineffectual culvert of the argument.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to make you some eggs?’ she says limply, as Zoe sits with her muesli.
Zoe rolls her eyes again, raises her hands into the air and lets them fall back to the table, a gesture of helplessness that conveys the fundamental retrograde offensiveness of eggs. She says, ‘Forget it, Mum. Go back to your marmalade.’ Putting a nasty warp on the word that strikes Illy as unfair since it’s not even her marmalade. ‘Don’t worry about, you know, the destruction of the natural world. As long as there’s enough toast on the table.’
‘What does Illy do to the natural world, darling?’ Eszter asks, just as Russell comes into the kitchen, his large head rumpled and red.
‘Who did what to the natural world?’ he says. His feet are bare: Russell’s habit of padding barefoot around the house is anathema to Eszter, whose own feet haven’t seen open air since some time in the first half of the last century. She keeps buying Russell pairs of slippers, which he gives to the local charity shop.
Illy puts her hand in the air. ‘Me. I destroyed the natural world.’
A noisy sniff from Zoe, who gets up and clanks her breakfast bowl into the sink, muesli uneaten.
Russell’s arrival, despite the provokingly bare feet, releases some of the tension in the room, at least for Illy. She has a reflex certainty that Zoe will not broach the content of their last conversation with her father around. (And why should Zoe’s perfectly urbane father be a greater inhibitor than her geriatric grandmother? It strikes Illy as contradictory, but she feels the truth of it in the room’s shifting air currents.) Zoe is also less likely to get nasty about her revolutionary politics in her father’s presence. Russell, it often occurs to Illy, wades through family life with all the waves spontaneously receding to gentle ripples at his approach, so that the view must be of calm water all around. It seems very unfair and she sometimes tries to explain to him the difference between his oceanic vantage and hers, but just now she would prefer to drift in his calm wake, so she pushes the news section of the paper towards him and says, ‘Sit. I’ll get you a coffee.’
Russell sits and opens the tabloid. ‘Good weather today,’ he says. ‘I might swim.’
He will not swim, he never does, but he will bask in the virtuous suggestion of swimming all day.
Illy puts a coffee in front of him, once again feeling that slightly resentful reassurance in his presence, how easily he travels through the world. When she first started dating him (when he unexpectedly chose her to date) she had dreaded introducing him to her parents, the collision of his burnished Anglo clarity with the musty old-world clutter of their house, the lack of space between people and the awkward fullness of unspoken things in the air. But Russell coasted through the first meeting without appearing to notice all the tchotchkes or her father’s ominous silence or the spiky edges of her mother’s questions. And of course they had accepted him. Everyone accepts him.
He turns a page of the newspaper and says, ‘I guess the damn summit is still making traffic a nightmare.’
She looks at Zoe, sure that this reduction of the capitalist overlord cabal to a traffic nuisance would elicit a barrage of sarcasm if Illy had said it. Zoe doesn’t look up from her magazine. Eszter blows her nose. Illy feels the apparitional presences of the notebook, the brochure and Sal-with-the-ear-tattoo recede into a corner of the room, watchful but allayed. The house purrs.
The peace lasts for most of her cup of coffee and half a piece of toast. Zoe has started doing the cat-stretching accompanied by squeaking noises that often precede her bursts of movement, and Eszter is on her second vessel of the horrible marmalade, when Josh makes a rumpled arrival at the door of the kitchen. He blinks around at his family like a travel-weary visitor from outer space.
‘Morning, darling,’ Illy says, the Russell-infused peace solid around her.
Josh doesn’t return the good morning; he runs a hand through his hair (which bounces immediately back into place), looks around the kitchen, appears to take stock of something and says, ‘So, you don’t have to worry about risking any of your precious money on me. Nagymama totally understands my research and she’s going to help me get to MIT.’
He walks to Es
zter and folds himself in half to kiss her on the forehead. Then he turns and exits the kitchen, all four of them staring after him. They hear him tramping back up the stairs and the thud of his bedroom door.
Illy turns to her mother. ‘Mama? What was that about?’
The old woman doesn’t respond or meet her eyes.
Illy musters all her grown-up authority. ‘Eszter? What did you say to Josh?’
Eszter gives an exaggerated shrug, waves a hand in the air and mutters something in Hungarian that Illy can’t quite follow. Something about making bacon out of a dog?
Russell is looking at her with a bemused expression. Before she can mentally sort through her level of evasion with her husband (whom she has not told about Josh’s request for money), Zoe gives a final squeaky stretch and says, ‘Oh well, better love you all and leave you – Sal and RJ and the others will probably already be at Tali’s.’
Illy blanches slightly at the loaded names, but Russell is snapping his fingers at their daughter in that irritating imperious way he has. ‘Don’t forget,’ he says, ‘be home for dinner. We have to discuss plans for clearing out the big house, everyone pitches in.’
The big house is Eszter’s home in Bondi Junction, which is in no way big but has retained the honorific from when Zoe was small and they lived in a cramped Newtown semi. There is a frozen moment, everyone staring at Russell. ‘What?’ he says. ‘What?’ And to Illy: ‘Didn’t you talk to her about moving to the care place?’ Turning to Eszter: ‘It’s a great place. Don’t worry, we’ve checked it out. Real quality. And you can’t rattle around that dark old house forever. And the housing market’s crazy at the moment.’ He turns back to Illy. ‘I’d better shower. I was going to take the whole day but I have to nip into the office to check something.’
He pushes his chair back and pads out of the kitchen, leaving his coffee mug on the table.
