Take It Easy

by Pat Rosier

  By now Isobel had looked carefully around the room. The therapist had lit a candle when she came in and sat down. The candle was on a table with a lot of other small things, shells and pebbles and little toys and a glass paperweight with a flower captured in the middle. In the far corner from where she was sitting was a pile of big cushions and opposite her was the chair where the therapist sat and behind Isobel was a clock on the wall, she guessed so the therapist could tell when the time was up without having to look at her watch. That was smart, Isobel thought. And there was a desk with papers that was untidy, which she thought was strange because the rest of the room was very neat. And a box of tissues. And a metal rubbish bin with rust-marks around the top for the used ones. There was a net curtain, too, so that anyone walking down the path outside the window couldn’t see in. And a heater, which wasn’t turned on, and pictures on the walls that were swirly colours without any recognizable things or people in them, and some books that she couldn’t quite see to read the titles of.

  ‘What’s happening now, Isobel?’

  ‘I’ve been looking around the room. Why did you light the candle?’

  ‘Because lighting it helps me to focus on each person who comes in.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Of course, a new person every hour talking, talking, talking. How could she bear all that talking? Perhaps the candle burnt away the words once they had been said, so they didn’t hang about the room, the last person’s words getting mixed up with the next person’s.

  Then their time was up. Isobel was relieved. It was ten to the hour. Time to blow the candle out and have a pee before the next talking person, Isobel thought. They made another time in a week, even though Isobel wasn’t sure why. As she drove out of the tiny car park back into the rest of her life, where she was grown up and responsible and competent, she thought that it was rather nice to talk to someone kind, knowing you had fifty minutes and that was all but you didn’t have to worry or even think about whether they were upset or angry or anything else. She supposed it was quite easy to be kind in that circumstance, but that didn’t stop her liking the kindness.

  Now she’d actually been to the therapist Isobel thought she really should tell Iris. She’d wanted to, but knew Iris would have questions she couldn’t answer. Why now? What’s wrong? Why didn’t you say you weren’t sleeping? And she’d leap to conclusions if Isobel so much as mentioned her exchange with William whatsit. And she would not be satisfied with, ‘I don’t know yet,’ or, ‘I’m trying to find out,’ or ‘I don’t want to talk about it yet.’ It was a relief to arrive back at Parliament Buildings, park her car, and get involved in the urgent request waiting on her desk.

  Isobel’s drive home involved creeping through rush-hour traffic. She turned up the Bic Runga CD in defence against the noise in the Hataitai tunnel, determined to tell Iris everything, starting with meeting William-who-recognised-her. But when she got home she found a note saying Iris had gone to meet with Rape Crisis’s national president, who was unexpectedly in town, before their meeting, and there was lasagne in the fridge. Barney’s lead was curled neatly around the note, so the dog hadn’t had a walk.

  ‘Okay, first things first.’ Barney’s quiet, pleading ‘feed me’ eyes vanished into tail-wagging spaniel-ear-flapping ecstasy the moment she picked up his lead. It was a lovely late summer evening, still and warm, clouds and buildings reflected in the harbour, and she breathed deeply, enjoying the air and the view, letting Barney off his lead to run away and back, away and back. On the way down the hill, Barney on the lead again, tugging towards his dinner, Isobel watched a wind willy skitter across the water towards her and felt it ruffle her hair.

  Isobel, Ginger and Barney ate in their separate spots in the kitchen. When she had loaded all their dishes into the dishwasher Isobel sat down again at the kitchen table, opened her briefcase, flicked through a bundle of papers that needed reading and took out a black diary, opening it at 1 January 1999. It was a large diary, one day to a page, left over from last year – last century, as it happened – lovely, empty pages except for the date at the top and a tiny month calendar at the bottom. Unclipping her pen from its special place in her bag she ran a hand over the paper. The idea to write rather than talk had come to her when she saw the diary in a pile on the staffroom table. ‘Stationery cupboard cleanout – what’s not gone by morning goes in the bin,’ said the note on top.

  This was not a report on the shortage of rooms, or advice to a committee chair, to be tap tap tap tapped out on a keyboard; for this she wanted the sensation of the pen between her thumb and fingers, to feel her hand sliding across the paper, and to see the controlled bleeding of the thin line of ink traveling across the page. She closed her eyes, listening for the memory of the therapist’s kindly voice, then opened them and began to write.

  We weren’t a bad family. We didn’t have much money but my parents managed the money we did have very well. No going to school in the winter without shoes and socks even when it was hard to get shoes because of the war that finished two years before I went to school. In the summer there were sandals. My mother made all us girls’ clothes and her own. Cotton dresses in summer, with loose waists and ties that made a bow at the back. In the winter pleated skirts in woollen material with the pleats sewn onto white fluffy bodices without sleeves and a hand-knitted cardigan over the top with buttons that did up to the neck. Awkward, fumbly things those buttons were, my mother’s or my sister’s impatient fingers pushing them through their knitted holes. Our mother made my brother’s grey summer shorts and shirts too, but not the winter ones, not the long-sleeved grey shirts with cuffs at the wrists or the long grey serge shorts with the deep pockets I envied.

  We ate good nourishing food. Baked beans was not a meal to my mother. Dinner had to be meat and veg and not rice because my father didn’t like rice. Sometimes we had roast rabbit except when we had roast rabbit my father had a pork chop because he couldn’t stand rabbit he had so much of it during the war, or maybe it was when he was a child. He was the only one who ever had a pork chop. And oranges, there were always oranges, one a day. And brown bread. And of course the vegetables my father grew in the garden. There were always the vegetables my father grew, in the row of vegetable beds down one side of the back yard, but my mother spent a lot of time in the garden weeding and tying things up. My father dug and planted and heaped the potatoes and turned the compost and dug it in and my mother looked after things and kept them tidy, like she did in the house.

  My mother was in charge of everything in the house; clothes and food and cleaning and children and sewing and writing letters. She didn’t like cooking and we never had visitors to dinner, well hardly ever, and then it was only family, and my mother got extra busy and cross while she got everything ready, especially if my father’s mother was coming, and my father stayed out of the way. When the visitors were there he would join in and after they left he would go to his shed and my mother would clean up and I suppose us children would help her.

  My sister would complain that I didn’t help enough and would get all upset about me being the youngest and getting away with things she and my brother didn’t get away with when they were my age. I wished I knew what I was getting away with but when I asked her she would say something smart and walk off.

  When I was about seven I started stealing money from my mother’s purse. I would use the money to buy sweets and eat them on the way home from school. I couldn’t hide things at home because of sharing a room with my big sister, so I would steal the money in the morning and buy the sweets after school. It took a long time to walk home, maybe half an hour, through a path we called the shortcut and then around a few streets. I only remember walking home by myself, not with my brother or sister. Sometimes I walked part of the way with a girl who lived in a street close by but not very often. I had a leather school bag, with a single strap that went over my shoulder and seams on the outside that made cracks on the inside corners where crumbs got stuck.

  I had a fr
iend, a boy. He was sickly, and lived over the back and was younger than me so he wasn’t in my class at school. I never walked home from school with him, maybe his father picked him up in their car. His father was old, retired from being a barber, which I thought was funny because he was completely bald, but when I said so I was told off. We didn’t have a car. Or a fridge, at first. When it was really hot my father would tie a cage up in the big tree in the back yard, with a muslin cloth over the top and a tray of water at the bottom with the muslin in it, and the water would rise up the muslin, like osmosis in plants and keep the butter and the milk cool so it didn’t go off so fast.

  When we did get a fridge my mother made ice cream but it was never smooth like the ice cream from the shop, it was gritty with tiny bits of ice all through. We ate it with cooked rhubarb from the garden or stewed plums. The fridge was big and noisy in the kitchen and made it harder to get to the bench at the back of the kitchen table where us three children sat for meals. My father had built the bench under the window that looked out to the neighbour’s over a narrow strip of garden that would later, when we got our first car, become a driveway.

  There was one time when I stole half a crown from my mother’s purse and kept it in my school bag all day. After school I went to the shop across the road from the front gate of the school, just before the beginning of the short cut, and bought five sixpenny caramello chocolate bars. I was sure the lady in the shop was going to ask me about having so much money and buying so much chocolate so I had a story ready. I don’t remember the story, just that I had one ready. She didn’t ask. On the way home I ate all five chocolate bars, screwing up the wrappings and stuffing them in hedges. I didn’t enjoy the last one. My mother wanted to know why I wasn’t hungry for tea and I hadn’t made up a story for that so I just said, ‘I don’t know,’ and, ‘I feel a bit funny,’ which was true, and she worried a bit and I went to bed early.

  Isobel stopped writing. Something was scratching at her mind for attention, something about caramello chocolate. Her triumphant ‘Yes!” roused Barney for a moment. It took some minutes to find it, the school exercise book from the housebound years in her early twenties when she had carted home books to read from the library a dozen at a time and read every one. Phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs, would leap out at her and she would copy them into the exercise book. She flipped through the pages, noticing how careful she had been with dates and names and page numbers. As if she were collecting references for a university essay. And look how her handwriting had changed over thirty years; it was smaller now, and faster with the letters less carefully formed, but still the indistinct ‘r’ that mirrored the sliding way she pronounced it. She had to concentrate to make a proper ‘r’ sound, rolling her tongue on the roof of her mouth, as she did when she used her modest Maori vocabulary.

  Here it was, on the third page, the entry that had reminded her about the notebook. Another time she would come back to it and see what else she had written, but for now she copied the one entry into the more substantial diary.

  Faces in the Water by Janet Frame, 1961

  “But I liked to eat Caramello chocolate because I was lonely. I bought twelve cushions for sixpence.” page 12

  Isobel shut the old book quickly. She didn’t remember ever deciding to keep it. It have must been one of the few things she took to Sydney. The notebook seemed alive, alive with that time she hardly ever thought about. ‘Not now, not now,’ she said out loud and returned it to the bottom shelf of the big bookcase, where she kept what old family photos she had. Iris had boxes of photos, all carefully sorted and labeled, stowed in the cupboard above the big double wardrobe in their bedroom.

  One thing I really wanted to know was how to have fun. Fun seemed like something that happened in other families. Nothing awful ever happened in our family, and fun never happened either. Sometimes my mother or my father would laugh and sometimes I would ask what they were laughing about but they only ever said things like, ‘You wouldn’t understand.' I was prepared to try very, very hard to understand but I couldn’t get started.

  I don’t remember my sister teaching me how to read, but I don’t remember not being able to. In books I found out about children who lived in vicarages and wore wellingtons and mackintoshes and ate high tea, or lived on the prairies and wore jeans and sweaters and ate hamburgers and corn, but not about children like us.

  I had a fantasy for a while that I was a foundling, that I had been mixed up with another baby at the hospital when I was born, and that I really belonged in a different family, a family living in a big house with stairs and an attic and lots of people coming and going and they all paid attention to me and said, ‘What a clever question!’ and told me things and showed me things and played games and we had fun. The child I had got mixed up with in my fantasy was having an unhappy time in this other family because she wanted to be somewhere where there were not so many people and it was quiet and she could read all the time. It was a pretty tragic mix-up.

  There were some times that I thought should have been fun but they weren’t. Once we had a whole family to visit, some people my mother and father were friends with before they were married, and they had two sons, Bruce and Roger, who were older than my big sister, and big, like men. We were playing a game, of cards I think, in the living room and I can’t remember how it started but Bruce and Roger were tickling me and I was laughing because I couldn’t help it but I didn’t like it at the same time and they kept on and on tickling me and I kept laughing because I couldn’t help it and when they stopped I didn’t like them any more.

  Another time was when we got up early and went mushrooming with a friend of my father’s who had a car and we drove out into the country until we found a paddock of mushrooms. Picking them made our fingers go black. I felt carsick. We took the mushrooms home and my mother cooked them for breakfast and I didn’t like them. My mother said, ‘Wasn’t that fun,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ but I was lying.

  My friend the sickly boy and I would swap stamps. We both collected them. He took it very seriously and he also took some of my stamps when he thought I wouldn’t notice. We used little stickers that you lick and fold in half to put the stamps in stamp books with different countries on different pages. Some of the stamps were beautiful but the ones that were rare were usually plain and dull. We had a catalogue with prices in and we would look up all our stamps hoping to find that we had one that was worth a lot of money.

  There’s a photo of me and the sickly boy and my brother and his sister around a play table holding cups and things from a children’s tea set and I suppose we were having fun then. It’s a very small photo, black and white, with tiny scalloped edges. There aren’t any photos of me as a baby because it was the war and there wasn’t any film.

  ‘Isobel!’

  She jumped at hearing her name.

  ‘I’m home, honey.’

  ‘Hi darling,’ Isobel called out, catching her hand in the diary as she closed it. ‘I’m in here’. Now she would tell Iris, now!

  ‘There in a minute, urgent loo.’

  ‘There wasn’t any film,’ Isobel said quietly to herself, and was putting the diary in her brief-case when Iris hugged her from behind, saying, ‘What’s that?’ Isobel opened her mouth to tell her but Iris had slumped in a chair, head on hands. ‘Remind me,’ she went on before Isobel could respond, ‘to never go on another committee.’

  ‘Tough meeting?’

  ‘Oh, just the usual stuff, not enough money, struggling to find women to do the next training so we can fill the roster — volunteering for Rape Crisis isn’t pulling them in any more.’

  ‘Poor you, you’ve hung in for a long time ….’

  ‘I know, maybe it’s time to go. I would like a shot if there were others to… oh, let’s not talk about that again.' Iris leaned across the table and grasped Isobel’s hands. ‘Sorry, I cut you off. What is that black book you’re writing in, anyway?’

  Iris was quiet while Isobel told her, then sa
id she wanted to think about things for a few minutes and went out, closing the door gently, but with a definite click. Isobel re-opened the diary and looked down at the pages of her own writing. ‘Scrambled,’ she thought, ‘like eggs. Scrambled thoughts.’ She circled her pen in the air, holding it as her mother had held a wooden spoon, across her palm, guiding it between thumb and forefinger. Then, opening her hand, she let it fall. Ginger, asleep in her usual place in the bills-to-pay box on the shelf at Isobel’s shoulder, stood, stretched, turned twice and settled back into a sleeping ball, her grey and black tabby tail drooping over a cardboard edge. ‘You’re wrecking that box,’ said Isobel, knowing it didn’t matter.

  Iris looked up from the television screen when Isobel opened the door, and patted the space beside her on the sofa, muting the newsreader in the middle of his preview of the next bulletin.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend I don’t mind when I do,’ Iris said, but she said it gently. Their arms touched as Isobel sat down and neither moved away. ‘You’ve been hiding this journal-thing away …….’

  ‘I only found it today!’

  ‘And how long would you have taken to tell me if I hadn’t come upon you shoving it guiltily into your briefcase?’

  ‘I was about to ……’

  ‘AND you sneaked off to that therapist ….’

  ‘Once!!’

  ‘It’s not how often, you dope, it’s that you didn’t TALK TO ME! On the television pasmodic advertising images gave way to the opening titles of The Practice. Iris held her finger over the mute button. Isobel stared blankly at the screen.

  Iris sighed, leaned her head on Isobel’s shoulder, which unclenched in relief, and said, ‘Let’s just watch this, eh? A spell of other people’s misund — whatevers’, snuggling in and summoning back the sound of the programme.