by Miriam Sved
She stops, still staring straight ahead, aware that what she is doing here is deeply embarrassing, and that if she were to see herself clearly right now she might die of the shame.
Sal says slowly, ‘It would be pretty understandable after all that if you have some relief about him dying. You don’t have to feel guilty for that.’
‘Yes, there is relief. I’m okay with that.’ She closes her eyes. ‘But there’s something else.’
She waits to see if she will go on. With her eyes shut and Sal silent beside her she might be alone in the car. Just thinking aloud. ‘I was never told much about my parents’ lives before the war and how they came to Australia. I knew my father was part of this brilliant group of mathematicians, they both were. I always wanted to know more, to know anything really.’ She breathes, waits. Goes on. ‘My mother has given me a notebook, it seems to be some kind of journal from that time. I’ve only read the first page but there’s lots of personal stuff in there, maybe everything I ever wanted to know. But suddenly I wonder if I do want to know. The young people, this group of mathematicians, I don’t recognise any of them. I don’t even recognise my mother, it’s as if she was a different person. She was in some kind of love triangle. And the scenario the book describes is not what I always thought.’
She stops because she doesn’t know how to describe the sense of dread she got from the first page of the notebook. It is melodramatic, disproportionate: as if she has opened a door onto a scene of adult depravity that she will be in trouble for spying on, that she wishes she hadn’t seen. It is ridiculous; these are things that happened almost seventy years ago. Whatever happened. She can’t go on with it.
The silence has just started to stretch into a strange shape when Sal says, ‘Zoe has told me about your family and the maths. About how brilliant her grandparents were, and that her brother seems to have inherited it. I think she feels very inadequate about it.’
Illy looks at her, jolted. Zoe is such a forceful presence, so sure of her contours in the world, the idea of her feeling inadequate about anything does not sit naturally. Then a flash of maternal guilt: if anyone should have been on guard against that particular inferiority complex, it is Illy.
‘I hate maths,’ she says, realising as she says it the depth of the statement. She doesn’t just hate it with the usual kind of aversion born of droning teachers and scary exams, and it is not just that she has a lack of facility for the subject that should have been her birthright, although that is part of it, tied up in the shrinking horror that it inspires in her. It was always there, mathematics: in her house, a fourth presence lurking around her family, causing trouble. You’d think it would have been a point of connection between her parents: the thing they shared, that had brought them together and bonded them. But it wasn’t like that. Illy was very young when she noticed that any allusion to maths, any story on the radio or on TV, even her own primary school textbooks, would throw her father into a bad mood. He talked about his youthful ambitions with bitterness and a kind of defensiveness, as though he was still guarding some hoard of brilliance that the world might take away from him. She knew – had grown up knowing – about the prestigious fellowship that he’d been given: it had got her parents out of Europe but failed to translate into a sparkling career when, for some reason, it wasn’t renewed after the first two years. She knew that her mother had walked through a terrible fire to get into her doctorate. There had been scenes, an explosive recalibration of the surly status quo that her parents’ marriage seemed to have reached in the last couple of decades. It is the one thing she knows that her mother stood up for in the long marriage: her right, when she was already old, to re-enter the cloistered, walled city of mathematics. Fucking maths.
Illy, to her horror, finds that her face has started to leak. As always it begins not in the normal and relatively dignified way with her eyes, but with her nose; a banking-up and then loosening of all the glands behind her cheeks, the barrage of snot and tears that she realises too late she is unprepared for: no tissues or handkerchief anywhere nearby. She sniffs violently against the overflow, her face quickly becoming slick. Her face has always betrayed her like this, the scourge of break-ups and weepy movies, defying any attempt at composure.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, looking around desperately for anything she might be able to use (they used to keep a box of tissues in the car, didn’t they?), holding off the last-ditch recourse of her sleeve. ‘I’m really sorry about this.’ She gives a little laugh through the tears, which comes out high-pitched and slightly hysterical, making her seem even more unhinged. She gestures hopelessly at her traitorous face. ‘I don’t even know why I’m …’
Sal nods, self-contained and unembarrassed, as though she’s quite used to being trapped in cars with lunatic middle-aged sobbers. Illy gives a heave and feels an abating of the pressure behind her face; the worst of it has spent itself quickly, but, as though she has passed some threshold of embarrassment and exposure beyond which there are no more barriers, she says, ‘I can’t explain it but I feel like this book, this journal, might just crack me open.’
There is some festering wrongness at the heart of things, it burrows deeper when she reaches for it with her conscious mind, a fleeting stink. Her long-trained impulse to unearth, to scrabble around and snatch at whatever morsels of information and truth she can find, competes with this new fear: that something she finds in her mother’s past might spread outwards and infect everything she loves. Unable to convey this, she says, ‘You know Josh, Zoe’s brother, the mathematical prodigy? He wants to drop out of university. He seems sort of obsessed with these new friends of his who I think might be drug addicts. He always used to be so dependable, so … settled. And now suddenly, when he’s not even a teenager anymore, he’s supposed to be an adult, he’s regressing into some sort of fantasy world. And Zoe,’ she doesn’t stop to breathe or think, ‘I knew Zoe was unhappy at home, I knew things weren’t perfect between us, but now I find out she’s sneaking around and hiding parts of her life from us, and it makes me feel that I’ve become exactly the person I didn’t want to end up being, this awful authoritarian figure. And my husband, Russell.’ Here, finally, she stops on the precipice. She’d been about to spew out intimate details of her marriage, things she hasn’t even told Di for the embarrassment. That it has been … she doesn’t know how many months since she and Russell had sex. (Could it be over a year? There was an unexpected incursion onto her side of the bed that she thinks must have been in winter – some association with flannel pyjamas – but was it this winter?) That she sometimes wonders if Russell might be having an affair, and that the more shocking part of this is she’s not even sure if she cares. Maybe one of the universally female support staff at his bank, the cadre of assistants and administrators and one or two juniors (the rest of the place being universally male). Russell is a big deal there now, group executive, and she can see when she squints and takes him in fresh that he is not an unattractive man in his suddenly middle-aged incarnation, still with his flop of thick brown hair, nice crinkles around his eyes that she sometimes compares, resentfully, with the effect of her own jagged crow’s-feet. No, she wouldn’t blame any of those women for accepting the offer, and the sting in this hypothetical betrayal seems completely conceptual: she would know herself to be hurt and betrayed, but would she feel as if she had lost anything? The crazy thing is that objectively, according to almost all the KPIs, she and Russell have a good marriage, she’s sure of it. They hardly ever fight, they communicate openly; they can still make each other laugh. It is not even some impression of harmony that dissolves at close range; their closest friends, their neighbours, everyone would attest to it. This should be comforting, but suddenly it adds to the bottomless feeling, as though Illy is hovering over a void only she is aware of, nothing in the world is solid, nothing genuine.
She sits up straight and tries to shake this maudlin self-indulgence away. It is not like her: Illy is n
ot a wallower or a navel-gazer. She is busy and pragmatic, competent; a solid person. It is the girl’s fault, this sudden dissolution. Sal, sitting self-contained in the passenger seat; her legs are crossed and angled towards Illy but she is not looking at her, she stares out across the park. No sign of embarrassment or discomfort at the inappropriate disclosures from her girlfriend’s mother. Thank God Illy stopped before the worst of it came out, but she has blurted enough that she knows the shame hangover will be terrible. It might hit as soon as she gets out of the car or it might be tomorrow or even next week, but there is no escaping it. This thought makes her feel slightly reckless.
She looks Sal up and down, assessing. The girl is lanky, a loose-jointed puppyish impression of limbs too long for her frame, but there are well-developed muscles beneath the cloak of ink on her upper arm – all that circus work, climbing ropes and swinging off ribbons and so forth. There is something disarming about her face; it should be pretty but her eyes are so deep-set and dark, her jaw just a little too strong. And there is something else about her, an intangible kind of steadiness and receptivity, as though nothing would throw her off balance. Again, maybe it’s all that dangling precariously at the circus. Or maybe Illy is just projecting something on to her, because of what she knows about the girl, her … unconventional lifestyle. Zoe told her that Sal has a girlfriend in Queensland she has been with longer than anyone, almost six years. They have a relationship based on writing to each other, which they do at length and to mutual satisfaction, but when they are in the same room as each other they will come to blows within hours. She has another secondary in something called the leather scene, which is a ‘part of herself’ she keeps separate. Illy would like to put a clinical label on this breaking up of the self into little storage units, but at the same time she would like to prove something to Sal, and through Sal to Zoe. That she has not always been this solidly unitary version of herself. She has had other selves. That what they are doing is not so different from what has been done before, and perhaps every generation thinks they invented freedom.
She says, ‘When I was your age I was living in a share house in Newtown. A squat really, I don’t remember anyone paying rent. We had electricity but no hot water. I was sleeping with one of the boys who lived there sometimes. He was beautiful and I liked him a lot but I remember I couldn’t stay the night with him, or with anyone. At three or four am I’d feel this urge to escape and I’d creep back to my own room. That was okay, nothing was supposed to be permanent back then, we weren’t supposed to own each other. I didn’t really know where I was going in my life. I wanted to be an artist but I could never finish anything and I kept changing my mind about what I wanted to create. I felt like it was sort of my destiny to be a failure and to disappoint my parents in all these different ways. There was a lesbian couple who lived in the house for a while, Nora and Abbie, and they tried to convince me to be gay, that my problem was men and the patriarchy.’ She sneaks a quick look at Sal. ‘I didn’t think that was my problem, but it wasn’t that I minded the idea of women. I mean, I thought I might one day, if I met the right one. I remember thinking, How do you know? How are you so sure?’
‘It sounds like you were a bit lost,’ Sal says.
‘No, but that’s the thing.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I know, rationally I know that I was a mess. Everyone, especially my parents, thought my life was just chaos. But now when I think back …’ There is a gulf here, a sense of finality in crossing over to the end of this sentence, as if she might not be able to get back. She keeps her eyes closed and steps. ‘I think maybe I was happy. Maybe actually for the only time in my life. You know that stupid phrase your happy place?’ She doesn’t wait for Sal to answer. ‘My friend Di says that to me sometimes, when she thinks I’m getting too wound up. Go to your happy place. She probably thinks I’m going to a wine bar or a beach in Bali or something.’ She laughs flatly. ‘But the happiest I remember being in my life was on those early mornings, when I crept back to my own room after making love with Carrum. Sometimes I’d pass one of the others in the hallway, crisscrossing as we moved between the bedrooms. It was chaos.’
‘So what happened?’ Sal says.
Illy opens her eyes. ‘I met Russell. He didn’t live in that world; he was different from my other friends. And he seemed to want to take me away from it. It was like he saw something in me. He was so driven, so sort of self-directed, he knew what the world was supposed to look like and his place in it and he wanted me there with him. I guess he was a way out of the chaos. I know that’s how my parents saw him.’
They are quiet for a minute, then Sal says, ‘I don’t think it sounds like chaos. Maybe it looked like that to your parents because they didn’t understand it.’
Illy gives a little snort. ‘It turns out they should have understood it. The things in that notebook …’ But she can’t finish this thought; there is no taxonomy yet for what she’d started reading in the notebook. She is the one who doesn’t understand.
‘They had their own chaos?’ Sal says, like a therapist giving a little nudge, and the wrongness of this rears up before Illy: this feeling of being therapeutically nudged by her daughter’s freaky girlfriend. It feels suddenly like she has been tricked.
She says, ‘Sorry, I really don’t know why I’m going on at you like this.’
Sal shrugs; no polite demurrals. Illy feels a wave of something like horror. The ear with the tattoo in it is on Sal’s other side, facing the passenger door where Illy can’t see it – the ear emerging from the choppy wedge of her hair on this side is neat and unspoiled. But still, Illy has spilled her guts to the ear tattoo girl.
‘I’d really better get home,’ she says, sliding up straighter in the driver’s seat and putting a suggestive hand on the key in the ignition.
‘Okay.’
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to just come in?’ Illy gestures behind them towards the cream-coloured house.
‘Nah,’ Sal says. ‘We’ve got our system, Zoe and I. Anyway, I quite like sitting in the park while I wait for her.’
‘Okay. Well.’ She feels that some official wrapping-up is required, like at the end of a therapy session. Good work, see you next time. But while she is still formulating the right tone for this Sal gives a little two-finger salute, gets out of the car and strides off towards the park bench. She has a very erect walk; it makes Illy think of that posture trick with the imaginary piece of string pulling up from your head. She starts the car and does a U-turn towards home, which is an absurdly short drive.
The house has a pensive look with all the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun. Pulling into the driveway she has to resist the urge to think of some new errand and turn the car around again.
Inside it is the same as this morning – a stillness that seems almost eerie after the shuffling crowd of yesterday’s wake. No noise from the kids’ rooms upstairs and Eszter’s door is still closed. She takes the shopping bags to the kitchen, puts the perishables away and leaves the rest on the bench, not giving herself time to think too much before she goes to the bedroom where the notebook waits for her on the bed. The last thing Sal said is there at the edge of consciousness: They had their own chaos? But it is important right now that she not dwell on the scene in the car with her daughter’s girlfriend.
She props herself against the pillows with her mother’s notebook. The smallness and drabness of the book doesn’t fit with the spectre it has cast on everything. She opens the cover and lets her eyes run quickly over the first page, shocked again by the effect of her mother’s younger self talking directly to her, and of her father’s name out of context among all the other unfamiliar ones. Don’t think about what it means yet, just keep reading.
Once she has given in to it she reads fast and hungrily, although the Hungarian slows her down a bit – she has lost some familiarity with the sharp twists of the language and has to keep unwinding sentences into their plodding Eng
lish construction in her head. The parts about maths are obstructive too, but there are fewer of them than she’d initially thought: she is surprised and strangely touched to find that her mother seems to have been almost as tortured about the subject as Illy feels. But the most surprising, the most amazing thing about her mother’s account is the people. People who were important to Eszter, in so much detail: her mother’s early life like a stick figure drawing suddenly transformed into a full-colour movie. Eszter had a crush, at the same time as she had a fiancé. More than a crush really; she seems to have been actually in love with this Pali. A love triangle. And a best friend: one who – the thought slips charged and seditious through Illy’s mind while she reads – seems perhaps to have been a little in love with Eszter. Illy has never known her mother to have any friends at all.
She reads about the problem with the dots – Ildiko’s problem that she shared with Eszter – and flips to the loose pages at the end, looking at them with new interest now that they are imbued with human drama. Eszter named her only child after this woman. Illy stops her mind from skittering forward into anxious speculation about Ildiko’s future; her past future.
