by Miriam Sved
Of course I knew Ildiko had not showed him, or anybody, the problem. I was not conscious of any shame.
He gave a small shake of his head, and I turned to my bag on the seat beside me, pulled out the small notebook and pencil I travel with, and began to outline the conditions for four- and five-sided polygons.
He was slower to grasp the implications than I would have expected. At first he seemed subdued and didn’t respond with his usual manic energy for work, but when I showed him the final condition for the five-sided figure, the ninth point that guarantees the structure, he pulled a pen from one of the pockets of his coat and drew a line bifurcating it. He looked at it for a moment and said, ‘We might take it apart and consider it as cups and caps for convex polygons of many more sides.’ And I knew I had him, he was looking out towards a vastness of possibilities, the meaningful connections these structures would make. He began to work then, dashing off ideas in my notebook. Our faces were close together as he sketched more and more figures on the paper and started adding points and breaking them down into the substructures he could see. I suppose if I was going to kiss him it might have been then, with our hands brushing each other over the paper. But I felt very close to him in the bubble of intimacy that the work was building around us, and I didn’t want to disturb that equilibrium. Just to have him go on speaking to me as an equal, occasionally looking up at me with what I thought was a new respect and admiration. It was enough.
We worked all the way to Keleti station. By the time we disembarked and went our separate ways nothing more overt had occurred than the touch of our hands over the notebook and the long strange look we had shared before that. He handed me down from the carriage with a resurgence of uncharacteristic gallantry, and everything seemed changed. I had crossed a threshold, tipping us both into some new order, although I didn’t know what the world now might look like. I had given him what I had and he had taken it. I knew he would have a generalisation for the upper limit problem before long.
Sydney, 2007
Illy stops reading the notebook on the first page and drops the book on the bed as though it has stung her. She gets off the bed and walks purposefully away from it, out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where she fills the kettle and stands watching as the water begins to roil, staring blankly and waiting for her pulse to settle.
Partly the shock is her mother’s younger voice addressing her so directly (who was she writing to?), mostly some larger, amorphous unease. She has never heard of most of those people in the first page of the book. She has spent a lifetime wishing and occasionally asking for information about her mother’s early life, and there it is, laid out for her, blithe and full of youthful drama – and Illy is afraid of it.
With the kettle still boiling she goes back to the bedroom and stands in the doorway, considering the small book on her bed. Tantalisingly close to her mother’s secrets. There is a watery weakness in her stomach, in her legs, as of imminent dissolution.
She dresses quickly, keeping her back turned to the bed, and grabs her handbag. Moving towards the front door she passes her mother’s room and feels the radiating hostility of Eszter’s presence there. Russell was probably right: she will come to terms with the retirement home idea. They are only thinking of her wellbeing. A neuron-quick ripple of hypothetical scenes: knock on the door, confront her mother, What’s in the notebook? Who were you writing to and why the mystery? Why now?
The bulwark is too solid, all those daily accretions of silence. Illy doesn’t stop; she scurries past the guest room. Once she is out of the house her mother’s book is surprisingly easy to leave behind: her fear of it is inarticulate, no words attached, like the memory of some disaster from a dream.
She bends her mind towards all the things that need to be done. So much has been neglected during the last few weeks: there has not been any food in the house and they haven’t had a proper cooked meal in forever. She drives to the supermarket and stalks the aisles, focusing on dinners for Russell; her husband is a foodie who can’t cook, the worst kind. While she has been so busy and distracted with her father’s dying he ‘cooked’ a few times, mostly variations on scrambled eggs. He will appreciate a return to her regular standards, no longer having to pretend to be anything other than domestically incompetent. She pays for her groceries, loads up the car and goes to the florist, where she takes her time and picks out a beautiful orchid for Di, her best friend, who has been a rock these last few months and did as much to make the funeral go smoothly as Illy herself. Then the post office for a parcel of books that has waited there for weeks, and the car place to have the rear indicator light bulb changed, and after that she feels justified in stopping at one of those rank-smelling little beauty parlours to have her face brought under control: eyebrows, upper lip, the patch under her chin that she can’t pluck properly herself.
Each task completed gives her a comforting sense of control, like strapping her unruly life into corsetry limb by limb. But also, as she approaches the end of the to-do list, there is a peripheral foreboding, the errands trickling away from her and home looming, with her mother glowering in the guest room or perhaps by now haunting the whole house, going from room to room looking for ways to make herself ‘useful’: cleaning, moving ornaments and kitchen implements around to turn up neglected patches of dust so that Illy is subtly disorientated and aware of her own lax housekeeping.
And the notebook. But she is still not ready to think about that.
Finally, when she has picked up the car and bought some aloe vera for her stinging lip, she drives to a little cafe not far from home, gets takeaway coffee and realises she has nowhere to take it, no justification for the purposeful stride of a woman with a styrofoam cup. She sits with it in the car for a moment, gives herself a no-nonsense little shake and heads towards home.
She doesn’t make it all the way. There is a park at the end of their street – postage-stamp size with a set of swings and a tiny fountain that has never run. She is close enough to see the upper floor of her house from here, but she pulls into a spot facing away from home, looking over the park. She used to bring Josh here all the time when he was little; he liked to take bread to feed the ‘ducks’ (pigeons). She wonders briefly where Josh is today. At home, locked away with his computer? Or out with the new friend he is so enamoured with: Max, the unsettlingly smooth Eurasian boy who seems to have unmoored Josh’s sense of direction. She used to be able to run through a mental checklist of her family like a rosary, ticking them off in their separate spheres of wellbeing. These days they are all booby-trapped.
She tips her head back against the seat. Try to unwind now, Di had said to her after the funeral. Take a mental holiday. The last few weeks have been strung tight with demands and with an almost unbearable sense of anticipation as her father finally, finally stopped eating and receded from the husk of his body. It is a hard truth that he was more likeable this way, as a placid shell, than during the months of thrashing anger and half-remembered spikes of personality; but he was not easier to care for, and Eszter needed almost as much looking after. It is not surprising that she is wound so tight now. She could use a mental holiday.
But in the pit of her gut she knows that this feeling of dread is more than just a product of stress. The notebook; that radioactive little book, offered up now of all times to undermine any fragile equanimity she might have been able to muster after her father’s death. She knows, feels, that there is some specific significance for her to find: like coming across a key and realising you are standing in front of a locked door that has been part of your house for so long that you had ceased to notice it. The shock of her mother’s younger, buoyant voice in writing, the confessional tone. The shock of her father’s name among so many other unfamiliar ones. And her own name – Ildiko – attached to a woman Illy has never met or even heard of.
There is some test for her here, for Illy; she can feel it. Something her mother wants her to find in or
intuit from the notebook, possibly something to fix. These are the usual terms of engagement. She will have to keep reading for answers.
She closes her eyes and tries not to think about it, tries to enjoy the feel of the spring sunshine through the windscreen. When she opens her eyes after a few seconds there is a face peering in at her, leaning close to the car window.
She is not frightened, although the face, a woman’s, could objectively be frightening: in that dreamy state where everything seems like just a tissue-y projection of self, Illy registers the tattoos first, before any flicker of familiarity. There is a long, thick lizard winding up the woman’s arm, and an explosion of colour all over her shoulder: Illy sees waves and flames and a blue bird rising up towards the collarbone. Her eyes follow the design with no real-world sense of urgency or embarrassment, and it is only when they get to the woman’s ear – a painted seashell in red and brown and green – that she realises she is looking at Zoe’s girlfriend. The ‘primary’, Sal. In some functional corner of her mind she knows that she must be quite out of it, she is probably getting sick or something – Russell had a bad cold last week – in order for this realisation not to move her in either thought or action for some time more, perhaps three or thirty seconds. The two women consider each other through the closed window.
When Illy finally lowers the glass, Sal is smiling: just a slight upturn at the corners of her mouth and eyes. ‘Hello, Mrs Hughes,’ she says.
She has a nice voice, Illy thinks. Both gravelly and gentle. But the ear tattoo.
‘Hello. It’s Sal, isn’t it?’ she says.
Sal nods. ‘Sorry, I should probably have left you to yourself. But when I saw you with your eyes closed like that …’
‘You thought I’d died of a heart attack?’ She tries to sound breezy. ‘I’m ancient enough, it could happen any time.’
‘No,’ Sal says without any hint of breezy. ‘You just looked quite sad somehow.’
Illy looks away: down at her lap, then at the windscreen, focusing on a familiar blotch where a long-dead bug had left an unwashable legacy.
‘Sorry,’ Sal says again. ‘Like I said, I probably should have left you to it. But now that I haven’t, would you mind if I come in for a minute? It’s a bit cold out here.’
What are the layers of social training and indoctrination that make it impossible for Illy to rebuff such a direct request? As though Sal is anything other than an unwanted and uncomfortable element in Illy’s world. Sal and everything she stands for.
‘Sure,’ she says, reaching to move her handbag from the passenger seat to the back.
Sal goes around to the other side of the car and gets in.
‘You’re not dressed for the weather,’ Illy says, nodding at the girl’s lack of sleeves. Her top is some kind of flimsy ribbed cotton, militant green. The pants are that rubbery material, the only thing less comfortable than leather. PVC.
‘No, well, Zoe and I are going to a club tonight. I should have brought a jacket but it’s some kind of toughness test to defy the weather.’ She sounds perfectly deadpan. Is it irony? Illy doesn’t associate any sense of irony with rubber pants. (Stop it, she tells herself. Stop being so judgemental. So old.)
‘That sounds like fun. The club, I mean, not the weather-defying.’
Sal smiles.
‘You can go on into the house if you like. Here, I’ll give you my keys so you don’t have to ring the bell.’ She reaches into the back seat for her handbag, happy with this idea, which is friendly by any standards and comes with the additional benefit that Sal will be able to slip into the house and hopefully not alert Eszter to her existence – her heavily inked, question-begging existence. (Oh, just imagining Eszter’s keenly assessing eyes on this strange young woman makes Illy’s pulse speed up with anxiety.)
But Sal is shaking her head. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘That’s very nice of you. And sort of interesting in relation to various things Zoe has told me. But I can’t go into your house.’
‘Why not?’ Holding the keys limply towards Sal, who stares at them and seems to be weighing something up.
Eventually she says, ‘We have an arrangement, Zoe and I,’ and for a horrible moment Illy thinks they are about to launch into the whole story with the primaries and secondaries and contracts. But Sal says, ‘I always text Zoe from the park before we go out and she comes down and meets me here, on that bench,’ pointing to the familiar green seat from where Illy used to watch Josh toddle around the dry fountain. ‘Zoe doesn’t think I should come into the house.’
Not necessary to spell it out so brutally; Illy is quickly following this information down various dark paths. It should probably be comforting: it turns out she needn’t have worried about her daughter bringing the circus home for dinner. But she is not finding it comforting, especially with the young woman beside her, looking at her a little too intently as Illy comes to some new ideas about her daughter’s life. Zoe is sneaking around. She thinks she has to hide things. Illy knows all about compartmentalisation, about the need to keep some realities from bumping up against others. She has a sudden, vivid memory flash of the first time she snuck out of the house when she was a kid, to go and smoke in a park with her best friend Wendy and two slimy characters from the boys’ school. She was very young – fourteen? fifteen? – and with the sliding scurry out her bedroom window she remembers thinking, You made me, and a spiteful satisfaction in the conviction that her parents had driven her to it. She would have been a good girl if they’d given her the chance, if they’d made it worth her while.
She shakes the memory away: it is nothing like the situation with her grown-up daughter, with whom she and Russell have always been permissive and … she would like to think open-minded. She wanted badly to be an open-minded parent. Still does.
Sal is watching her with that focused kind of intent, as if trying to gauge something about her, and Illy feels a sudden surge of resentment, almost anger. Before she can think about it too much she says, ‘Actually there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. Can you tell me what you’re doing with my daughter?’
Sal shows no obvious discomfort. ‘I assume we’re not talking about tonight here?’ she says. ‘Like, what club are we going to?’ She raises her eyebrows, which are thick and mobile. ‘No. You want to know what my intentions are, as a suitor.’
It is such an old-fashioned word, but there is nothing obviously mocking in her tone.
‘If you want to put it like that,’ Illy says, feeling the soggy disadvantage of her position: her age and stolidly boring respectability, and the things that Zoe must have said to Sal about her. Old-fashioned. Judgemental. Perhaps bigoted. Surely not – but maybe – homophobic. She says caustically, ‘I gather you’re quite the suitor.’
Sal tips her head back and laughs – it is unexpected (a nice, full-throated laugh), and there doesn’t seem to be anything forced about it. She says, ‘Thank you, I suppose. That’s quite a beguiling picture of myself. But I think you have the wrong end of some stick.’
Illy tries to keep her face passive and waits.
‘For one thing, I’m not doing anything with Zoe, like a one-way agency situation. She’s a completely free party and she has plenty of doing in her, I promise.’
She stops, and for a moment Illy thinks she is done, perhaps rejecting the interrogation. But she goes on, ‘If you want to know what we’re doing – and I assume what we’re talking about here is the non-monogamy – I think we’re just trying to be honest with each other. We’d both prefer not to live in some constructed social order that we can’t step outside of, and we trust each other enough to be open about what we want and need. Neither of us wants to be boxed in.’
Freedom, she is talking about freedom. Illy remembers it from a different time. It was horrible: a whirl of scene-changes, boyfriends and jobs and half-furnished rooms, too many options; she was relieved and grateful when
Russell plucked her from it and anchored her. Wasn’t she? She finds that she would prefer not to be having this conversation within slinging distance of her own suburban box; it underlines the knowledge that she is everything this young woman is forming herself in opposition against. This slightly alarming but, she has to admit, compelling young woman. Unexpectedly, she wants Zoe’s girlfriend to like her.
Feeling herself at an intractable disadvantage, she thinks she should wrap this scene up, find a way to nudge Sal out of her car so they can both go on with their days and their separate lives. Instead, staring straight ahead through the blotch on the windscreen, she says, ‘My father just died. Zoe probably told you about it. He was very old and he was losing his marbles for a long time before he died.’
‘She told me,’ Sal says without hesitation. ‘But she couldn’t really tell me what that must have been like for you. It must have been awful.’ She says this matter-of-factly, without the usual straining towards sympathy, the syrupy note Illy has come to expect from these encounters about grief.
‘My father was a difficult man,’ Illy says. ‘Not just in the last couple of years. Always. In some ways when he got sick it was easier; at least it was understandable. You could say, Well, it’s not his fault, it’s the dementia making him act like this. He was so obnoxious, I once saw him reduce a young nurse to tears, calling her a fat idiot and some other things, and afterwards I was comforting her and sort of apologising for him, saying he was just lost in the illness and he didn’t know what he was saying and so on. And I remember while I was talking to her I was wondering if Papa was actually perfectly lucid and just using the illness as an excuse to show the rest of the world what he really thought of it. Because he was always like that. I mean, he used to be quite upright and polite with other people, but never with me and my mother. It was as if we’d done something to him, wronged him in some way that I couldn’t even remember, and he was bent on making us sorry for it. He would fly off the handle about the smallest things, everything had to be arranged just the right way, perfectly quiet when he was working and dinner on the table at six and the TV turned up to the exact volume he preferred. I don’t think my parents even liked each other. My mother, both of us, we spent our lives tiptoeing around him.’
