by Debra Oswald
The first time Celia had properly kissed a boy she’d been almost eighteen, wedged beside the cleaning-supplies alcove at the back of an ice-skating rink. She remembered that the moment felt good, a heady sensation despite, or maybe because of, the bleach fumes from the nearby buckets. But her overriding response was relief that this boy she had been pining for was willing to kiss her.
Celia used to worry she was too much for people. Through her teens and into her twenties she feared she was too intense, too ardent, and this would frighten men away. She assumed she would always, inevitably, be the one who wanted a man more than he wanted her. So, her strategy was to conceal how strongly she felt, withhold the full force of her emotions rather than let them loose onto some guy who would likely flee in horror. In her romantic life, such as it was, she always felt precarious, on the edge of being exposed, and always slightly ashamed.
Then Marcus came along, and it wasn’t like that. Not on the evening they were introduced and not for one moment afterwards. Within days of meeting, he declared himself with such unqualified fervour that Celia knew she could reveal the full strength of her emotions. (Afterwards they used to joke about the two of them ‘unleashing’ themselves on each other.) And right from the start, she felt astonishingly relaxed and safe to show herself, because it was this man, Marcus.
Maybe it was a matter of timing – by then Celia was twenty-four, more confident, making her way at work. In the previous few years she had buried both her parents, a process that had left her tougher, more sure she could wrangle the world on her own. Maybe that was part of it. But meeting Marcus was more fateful and surprising than any logical explanation – she’d found someone who could match her feelings in a way that was thrilling and at the same time deeply calm. Lucky. She had always appreciated they were lucky.
At Zoe’s age, Celia would never have dared kiss and grope a boy in front of her parents in glaring daylight. And she would never have gone for a guy as wild as Kieran. Probably Zoe was throwing this silly infatuation into the air as a show of independence, expecting her mother to forbid it, provoking Celia to challenge her. Zoe knew how her mother would react. She most surely knew.
Celia stayed under the shower, letting the water run longer than she normally would, and consulted the Reasonable Woman about how to regard today’s events. It would all be fine, surely. She could even welcome the romance, the festival of kissing, as a sort of practice run for Zoe – a chance to rehearse with a boy who would only briefly flit through her life, without the risk of making a fool of herself in front of her friends. Celia could see the appeal of that. And Kieran would be moving on soon enough, so there was little danger this would escalate into something more troubling. If anything, she should be more concerned about the boy having his heart broken, being toyed with by a curious teenage girl. In fact, probably the best thing would be to let things run their course.
Even so, she should say something this evening, something brief and direct and calm, avoiding inflammatory wording.
Celia turned off the shower – she’d used up enough precious water – and wrapped herself in a towel. She didn’t often wear dresses, but since it was Christmas Eve she flipped through to the far end of her wardrobe and chose a bright paisley-print dress. She tossed her sweaty work clothes into the laundry and then waited for her daughter to emerge from her room.
When Zoe finally wandered into the kitchen, her hair was still damp from the shower and she was pulling her fingers through the tangles like a rough comb.
‘Do you want me to start on the meringue?’ she asked.
‘Uh, yes. That’d be good,’ Celia said. ‘You do that and I’ll poach the chicken.’
On Christmas Eve, Celia and Zoe always prepared a chicken salad and a pavlova as their contribution to the Christmas Day spread at Roza’s house.
She was surprised by the matter-of-factly domestic tone Zoe adopted, as if nothing unusual was going on. It threw Celia off balance, and for the moment, she figured it was best to say nothing, to let things go until the air around them settled.
For the next hour, the pair of them worked side by side in the kitchen, preparing food, poaching chicken, whisking egg whites with sugar, sharing the limited space between the benchtop, the fridge and the stove, moving around each other with the wordless efficiency of two people who had shared that kitchen for a long time.
Celia should mention Kieran soon, broach the subject somehow. She wondered if Zoe would say something, but she said nothing, other than remarks or questions about the cooking tasks. The longer this went on, the harder it felt to choose the words or find the moment. It was astonishing the way two people could be in close proximity and not talk about the thing that was thudding inside both their brains.
So Celia let the minutes unspool, until eventually it seemed impossible to blurt out a comment or ask a question. And by then she had let herself relish the simple pleasure of this Christmas Eve routine with her daughter. She didn’t want to spoil it. So she said nothing.
In every year, there were obstacles scattered through the calendar – Marcus’s birthday, the anniversary of his death, their wedding anniversary – dates Celia could get snagged on. She had developed rituals to mark such occasions and avoid being obliterated by them. She kept those observances to herself. No need to burden Zoe.
Early on, Celia had expected 25 December would be one of those jagged dates, but as a little kid Zoe had loved Christmas-time with such simple delight, it had proved easy to enjoy it with her. It helped that the workload on the farm in midsummer kept Celia too busy to dwell on visions of what should have been.
Over the years, Celia and Zoe had assembled their own Christmas traditions. On 18 December they would work together to drag a potted conifer in from the back porch and decorate it with ornaments Celia had inherited from her grandmother. On Christmas Eve, Zoe would mix up the seasonal ‘cocktail’ she had created as a nine-year-old – juice, crushed ice, mint leaves and small chunks of fruit, served in an etched-glass punchbowl the two of them had spotted together in the Narralong op shop.
Christmas Day usually involved a few hours of work, then during the midday break there would be a phone call to Freya, Zoe’s Sydney aunt. Freya’s kids had been just old enough last year to have a turn on the phone, chattering to Zoe. Late in the afternoon, Celia and Zoe would share an early dinner with Roza and Joe’s family.
Jesus played no role in the celebration, not even in a perfunctory way. Religion had never been part of their life. Every Sunday when Zoe was little, her school friends would be dressed in their for-best powder-blue Courtelle dresses, lace-trimmed white socks, black patent shoes and flowery hairclips, then sent to church and Sunday school. Zoe never asked why she didn’t go, in the way kids don’t question the givens of their childhood. At the primary school, there had been scripture classes that mostly involved the gluing of cotton balls onto sheep and colouring-in of shepherds on roneoed sheets still reeking of inky chemicals. Those activities didn’t spark any theological discussion at home.
When Zoe started at the Catholic high school, Celia kept her mouth shut and didn’t directly challenge the religious instruction from the nuns, wary of forcing her child into an outsider position. Zoe had played along with the school scripture stuff – she was a dutiful, willing kid – and when she experimented with a bit of earnest prayer at bedtime, Celia decided not to comment.
Then, one day in her second year of high school, Zoe came home and announced, ‘I don’t think any of it is true.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Celia. And from then on, the two of them would talk in a relaxed, curious way about the various things people believed, including the version of religion the school was pitching.
Zoe checked the pavlova base in the oven, then lifted it out onto the bench.
‘It’s done, I think,’ she said. Then, in a mock-mystical voice, she quoted the instructions from the recipe in their old cookbook: ‘The meringue should be cooked at the temperature of a mountain hillside to
wards the end of summer when a light breeze is blowing.’
Every year, the two of them would send up that ridiculous otherworldly line in the cookbook. This year, Celia laughed a bit too enthusiastically, grateful her daughter would joke with her about the pavlova recipe, counting it as a sign that nothing significant had changed.
All evening, Zoe was sweet with Celia, but holding her at bay – as if she were clasping her mother’s arms affectionately but in such a way that it maintained a gap between them. Any connection felt fragile, and Celia was careful not to spoil things.
Since Zoe had turned eight and grown too old for the Santa Claus pantomime, mother and daughter had exchanged presents on Christmas Eve, a tradition they liked to call ‘being European’. Really, it was a practical matter, given that mornings during harvest times were always pressured and busy.
After cooking and eating, they followed their usual Christmas Eve routine and switched on the telly for the Carols by Candlelight telecast. They lit a dozen red and white candles around the living room and then both sat cross-legged on the floor to unwrap their presents.
Zoe gave her mother two gifts – an Iris Murdoch novel she’d asked Freya to post from Sydney; and earrings, red jasper set in silver, that she’d bought from the slightly hippy shop in Evatt’s Bridge.
‘What a fantastic choice. I love them,’ Celia said and put the earrings on straight away.
Celia always gave her daughter a stack of books. This year there were novels by Ursula Le Guin, E.L. Doctorow, Jane Austen, Chaim Potok – an odd mix but she was confident Zoe would devour them all happily. Another parcel contained an embroidered straw beach bag stuffed with a striped purple towel and other beachy items. This gift was meant to demonstrate Celia’s enthusiasm about the plan for Zoe to spend the next Easter holidays with her friend Mandy’s family at their caravan on the coast.
Celia’s main present for her daughter was the riskiest. She’d seen the dress in a shop window on a trip to Young, and the urge to see Zoe wearing it was strong enough to make her spend more money than she normally would.
When Zoe peeled the sticky tape from the wrapping paper, the dress slithered into her hands – pale-blue silk printed with loose skeins of flowers tumbling down.
‘Mum. It’s so lovely,’ she whispered. ‘But it looks expensive.’
Zoe had always worried about their finances, even as a little kid, and as always, Celia fibbed to put her at ease. ‘It was on sale. I hope it fits.’
Zoe ducked into her bedroom to try on the dress. She had never been especially modest about her body, even in her teens, but in the last year she had stopped wandering through the house naked, or even in underwear.
‘It fits, I think,’ said Zoe when she reappeared in the doorway.
The dress gathered softly at the shoulders, with a scooped neckline, then the silk skimmed over her waist and hips to fall like liquid into the loose folds of the skirt. She was breathtaking in the dress, just as Celia had imagined.
Celia couldn’t speak for a moment, looking at her, and then, before she could say a word, Zoe darted forward to kiss her mother on the cheek.
‘I love it. Thank you,’ she said.
Celia felt Zoe’s warm body against hers, and then the sleek fabric of the dress slid under her hands as Zoe darted away, back towards the hall.
‘I’d better take this gorgeous thing off and hang it up,’ she said. ‘I feel so tired suddenly. Might go to bed.’
‘Yes, do that. We need plenty of energy for tomorrow.’
Celia stayed on the floor for several minutes after Zoe left. But sitting there was only delaying the start of the hours she would spend lying in bed wondering if she should have said something.
Christmas Day.
As a child in Hungary, Roza had always enjoyed Christmas-time – even growing up in a Jewish family, she could enjoy the street decorations and the music and the food. She was proudly an atheist (and indeed she found it difficult to respect a person who could still believe in any kind of god, given the world they lived in), but she could ignore the religious nonsense in order to throw herself into a festival about food and generosity and gathering of family.
Of course there was the peculiar seasonal dislocation in Australia – celebrating Christmas in the hot middle of summer, surrounded by plastic holly and toy reindeer, with people exchanging cards depicting Cotswold villages draped in snow. But Roza was surprised to find she liked this oddness and reversal. It meant she could reinvent the occasion as a fresh thing, shedding its connections to the old world, crusted over with bad memories, and inject her own meaning into it.
She loved the idea of bounty, sharing a table of special food, taking pleasure in planning the dishes, negotiating with locals, buying fresh cherries from one neighbour, ducks from another, cream from the dairy farm on the way into town.
This Christmas, as well as roast duck with cherries and a variety of salads, she had prepared stuffed peppers, even if only Celia and Josef enjoyed them. She made túrós tészta because the children loved the cheesy noodles. There was always a potato dish so rich that her son declared it to be ‘a heart attack in a baking tray’, though that didn’t stop him eating flattering amounts of it. And even if Josef needed to deal with his pudgy-belly issue, these were special festive dishes, not eaten every day, and not a thing to fuss about. Every year, Roza most enjoyed making hamantaschen – triangular biscuits filled with raspberries or chocolate or apricots – which her grandmother had taught her to cook.
By the time Joe, Heather and their two sons arrived at Roza’s house on Christmas Day, it was half-past four. In Roza’s opinion, it was an uncivilised time to have dinner but Heather insisted on this arrangement. She wouldn’t contemplate missing out on Christmas lunch with her parents. One year, in an attempt to make things easier for Josef, Roza had accepted an invitation to Christmas lunch at Heather’s parents’ home, and was served a meal involving desiccated, overcooked pork, waterlogged vegetables and a brick of a pudding served with a whipped ‘topping’ from an aerosol can. She only attended the event that one time.
Roza would’ve been happy to celebrate with her son’s family on Christmas Eve, in European style, but Heather declared this not to be ‘proper Christmas’. Roza would not want any person to say she was obstructive, so she went along with Heather’s timetable, which involved driving out in the afternoon in order to tick off the seasonal duty to her mother-in-law, then get her boys home to bed nice and early.
Roza was always intrigued, as well as disturbed, to see what dishes her daughter-in-law brought to the Christmas table. Heather chose to cook from packets of processed components – she regarded this culinary practice as ‘modern’ and ‘sophisticated’ compared to Roza’s antiquated, peasant habit of cooking identifiable fresh ingredients.
For Christmas, Heather went in for torturing the food into shapes. This year there was a bright-green jelly mould with chunks of vegetables trapped inside, surrounded by a wreath of lurid yellow Cheezels. Some kind of tinned fish had been mixed with artificial substances and what appeared to be a can of pineapple chunks, then formed into a fish shape. Heather was clearly most proud of an object shaped like an igloo made from ‘Deb’ dehydrated potato, with a sausage-meat interior. The reconstituted mashed potato formed a dry grey crust like an unfortunate skin condition, and the stuffing gave off a greasy smell like dishwater left in a sink too long, the smell of resigned misery.
In theory, there could be something playful about a mother preparing food in fanciful shapes (such as an igloo) for her children on Christmas Day. But Heather wasn’t that mother. She didn’t cook to delight or nourish. She cooked for the admiring comments when she boasted of her culinary achievements later to her social-climbing friends.
Heather placed this year’s monstrosities on the sideboard.
‘Remarkable,’ said Roza, which Heather took to be a compliment.
Josef, however, threw his mother a warning look – Watch your tongue.
�
�Boys, show Grandma what Santa put in your Christmas pillowcases,’ suggested Heather.
‘Yes, please. Show me,’ said Roza, and the two boys dragged in a laundry basket filled with their gifts – a board game called Mouse Trap, a Spirograph set, books and beach toys. Roza made a fuss of each item, asking questions and letting the boys chatter about them. Very quickly their chatter turned to the much more exciting presents they had also received that morning – scooters, remote-controlled car sets, walkie-talkies, an arsenal of plastic weapons and a fleet of Matchbox cars.
Roza exchanged a look with Josef as his two sons reeled off the long list of extra Christmas booty they’d left at home. Knowing that Roza disapproved of such material indulgence, Heather only allowed Hamish and Fergus to bring a selection of their more educational gifts to their grandmother’s house. Joe had argued against Heather spoiling the children, but he never won that battle.
These days, Roza consulted Josef about what she should buy her grandsons. This year, with his advice, she gave Hamish a couple of Airfix kits to make World War I planes. She suspected it was a tactic by Josef to spend time with his TV-fixated elder son, just the two of them engaged in a task together. For Fergus, Roza bought a set of watercolours, brushes and quality art paper, because the seven-year-old reportedly loved painting and drawing. Roza figured this was also wishful – Josef would like to imagine his son was an artistic child.
Heather always gave Roza clothes, invariably matronly and hideous. These garments were made of synthetic textiles created by chemical companies out of their petroleum dregs – fabrics that would make a human being sweat like a sow swaddled in plastic wrap. Why any person with a choice would wear such fabric next to their skin was a mystery. Possibly Heather offered these garments as an unsubtle hint about how she would prefer Roza to dress. Or perhaps the woman was unobservant enough to think her mother-in-law would actually like them. Roza wasn’t sure which explanation was more dispiriting.
