by Pat Rosier
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Chapter 03
A fierce southerly wind had blown a macrocarpa tree across the road and the backed up traffic meant Isobel was late for her second appointment with the therapist. Iris had wished her ‘good luck — if luck is what you need’.
‘You do what you have to do,’ Rhonda had said over lunch earlier in the week. ‘Iris might niggle a bit, but she truly wants what’s best for you — you the person, and you the couple. I know that, and so do you, really.’ Isobel had to agree. ‘And,’ Rhonda had added, ‘hiding away from things is not a good strategy for anyone, and certainly not for you and Iris.’
‘But you know how I hate secrets …’ Isobel had begun, then reddened at the look on her friend’s face. ‘I know, I know we were friends for three –
‘— Five!—‘
‘Really?’
‘Yes! Really!’
‘Five years, then, before I told you ….’
‘Exactly.’ Isobel smiled over Rhonda’s shoulder at the woman eavesdropping from the next table. A great thing about old friends, she thought, is that you confound nosy parkers by talking in shorthand.
As soon as she was seated in the clients’ chair, aware of the clock ticking away the minutes behind her, Isobel passed over the diary-journal and the therapist held it in her hand without opening it and asked if Isobel wanted her to read it now. Isobel decided, suddenly, she didn’t want her to read it at all, and took it back and put it away in her briefcase. They sat there for a while, not saying anything, until finally the therapist said,
‘What would you like to talk about today?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Isobel. She couldn’t think why she’d come back.
‘Last week you talked about your mother being cross because you had done something wrong and not knowing what you had done that was wrong.’
Good memory, Isobel thought. Or good notes and good use of that ten minutes before the hour. She nodded, and tried to think of something to say.
‘Tell me about your father. Did he get cross with you?’ Isobel could not detect any trace of impatience in the therapist’s voice.
‘Twice. He shouted at me twice,’ she heard herself say. The therapist was looking at her, nodding that small nod she had.
‘I can’t remember what one shouting was about but the one I can remember was, “Shut the bloody door!” I don’t know what surprised me most, him shouting or him saying “bloody”. It was winter and we were all sitting around the open fire in the living room after tea and I kept going in and out. He said I was “letting the cold in”, so at least I knew what I had done wrong that time.
‘He never ever hit us. I didn’t know until I was grown up how unusual that was. Once a friend and I thought about everyone we knew and realised we were the only two people we could think of who had never been hit when we were children.' Her voice faded out. The therapist was looking interested, but she couldn’t think of anything else. ‘One time …’
‘Did your …’ They had started talking together. The therapist stopped, firmly, and indicated to Isobel she should continue.
‘My mother never threatened us with, “wait ‘til your father comes home,” either,’ she said, ‘but there was one time that she tried to get my father to do something about me. She caught me stealing some money from her purse, it was in the morning before school, and she took me into their bedroom where my father was still in bed, he must have been on night shift, and she told him what I had done and waited for him to do something. And he talked about “letting them down” and “knowing better” and my mother took the money back and that was an end to it. They never told my brother and sister. I kept on stealing money from my mother’s purse but I was more careful about it.’
‘What did you do with the money?’ Of course, the therapist hadn’t read the diary.
‘I bought lollies and chocolate after school; and ate them on the way home.’
‘Did you offer them to other children?’
‘No. I never told anyone.’
‘No one at all. Not even to show off or make friends?’
‘No.’
They sat in silence again. Isobel knew she was supposed to keep talking or to cry or both and she couldn’t see any point in either. She wouldn’t come any more. It would be better to just write everything. She stood up.
‘’You’ve been helpful,’ she said. Without coming to the therapist Isobel would never have thought of the writing. The therapist told her, in that same kind voice, to make another appointment any time she wanted. Isobel bent down and blew out the candle herself, walked out the door, and closed it behind her. As soon as she had paid the receptionist, writing a cheque for a full session rather than trying to explain, and was out of the shelter of the porch, rain slashed at her face and the wind tried to rip off her coat as she ran to her car.
One of the many things Isobel liked — loved — about her partner was her capacity for full, clear, immediate feelings, even if she, Isobel, still sometimes found it hard to respond.
‘Happy?’ Iris would ask as they walked hand in hand on the beach, or lay together after making love, or turned to each other in their doorway after farewelling friends. And then she would be dissatisfied with Isobel’s affirmative response. After a number of attempts to explain that her apparent lack of conviction arose from uncertainty about the nature of happiness, what it was, how you knew when you felt it, Iris stopped asking, and Isobel took more risks in saying what she was — probably — feeling. They stumbled through their first year and a half together until, in May 1991, they bought the Hataitai house that had become their and Chris’s home .
‘I’m happy,’ Isobel said that night when she had explained as best she could that she was exchanging visits to the therapist — expensive visits, but that wasn’t why she wouldn’t be going any more — for writing her early life into the diary. They were both on the sofa, Iris’s feet in her lap. ‘Happier than I have been at any other time in my life. I think that’s why I’ve been so shaken up ….
‘And of course it’s nothing to do with being reminded of …..’
‘Of course it’s to do with that, but it’s not just that.’ A small part of Isobel wasn’t certain, really, but she was certain she wanted to gnaw at a bigger bone if ‘gnawing’ described what she was going to do.
‘Can I see it?
‘What? Oh, the thing I am writing. Do you want to?’
‘Yes, of course, this is about you, of course I want to read it.’
‘I just need to write it for myself and then see,’ Isobel said after a slight pause, reminding herself of Rhonda’s advice. She was stroking Iris’s ankle and along her foot. ‘I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings.’
Iris changed feet. ‘Yes it does hurt my feelings! I’m left out! But hey, patience, keeping my nose out, that’s my cutting edge, so it should develop my moral character no end.’ Isobel stopped herself from saying, ‘All right then, I’ll show you as I go,’ and maybe asking that Iris not talk to about it when she had read it; it was not in Iris to not talk about something.
‘I don’t know that I ever did anything to deserve you.' Isobel’s stroking hand was sliding further along Iris’s leg.
‘I love you too, even if you….’
‘Shhhhh.' Isobel stopped her with a finger on her mouth, and leant into a long kiss.
They went to bed early and made love. Lying awake afterwards, listening to her partner’s breathing, Isobel thought about the paradox of an almost-secret easing them into the fullness of their long-shared intimacy. An intimacy that expressed itself in small rituals that began and ended each day, that was always present, but for periods of time would elide into the demands of work and life, intimacy that was within reach but not always in her grasp.
There’s something mean and narrow about being respectably poor. Our neighbours, the ones my mother didn’t approve of, had more fun than us. They got drunk and had fights and played rowdily and had dirty houses and messy sections wi
th toys and tools and even old cars lying around and got into trouble. But I suppose getting beaten up and being hungry and worrying about your father coming home drunk and your parents rowing isn’t fun from the inside.
We were so respectably boring and good. My father worked hard both in his job and at home. He was a shift worker then. He came home for all his meals, about twenty minutes on his bike at first, then less when my mother had saved the family benefit for us all for three years and he bought a car. When he biked he would have only twenty minutes to eat his lunch or his dinner so it would have to be ready right on time and we would all eat quickly and my mother would have it all tidied up and away and the dishes done by us kids in no time at all.
I liked school, except for phys ed which I hated. I was about as bad at it as anyone could be. There was never even one time when I successfully did a forward roll and I was hopeless on any kind of equipment, like a bench. I didn’t have any idea how to make my body move when it wasn’t upright with my feet on the ground. The thought of jumping onto or over something made my feet and legs so heavy I could barely lift them. I hated running, too. If they had kept records for the number of times one person was last in a race I would have had it, for sure. I could throw and catch a ball so long as I didn’t have to run at the same time.
Naturally I was always the last person picked to be in a team. And everyone else seemed to know how to play the game and what the rules were but not me.
I got interested in tennis once. Somehow I had acquired a tennis racquet and I remember playing a few games on the courts at school. But you were expected to play on Saturday mornings and I didn’t know how to ask my parents, so it never happened. Everyone else got better and I didn’t. I didn’t mind very much, it would have meant having a white uniform to play in and I couldn’t have asked for that.
Why didn’t I ask for things? I wanted to go to a birthday party once, for a girl who was nearly a friend at school and I asked my father to drive me there because it was on the other side of town and he said, he was working in his shed, if I wanted to go I should get myself there. That’s what I was trying to do. I went away thinking maybe I’d ride my bike, but either it wasn’t going, or it was too far or something. So I never went to the party. I minded about that, and I didn’t even like the girl much.
So I gave up asking and just waited to see what would happen. Mostly nothing did.
Isobel put down her pen. Was what she was writing true? Perhaps she was being unfair to her parents. But then, what did it matter? She wasn’t going to show anyone. Except maybe Iris. The urge to write and write it all into this book as though she was teling someone was compelling. Why would she try to talk herself out of it? And why had she been such a passive child?
Sometimes in the school holidays my mother would buy a sally lunn when she went to the shops. A big bun, white and soft with white squishy icing and coconut on the top. Sometimes the icing was so thick you didn’t need to put butter on the slice you could just spread the icing over. We always had brown bread, never white so sally lunns were like white bread only better. I always wanted more than I was allowed to have. My brother got the biggest bit from the middle because he was a boy.
When we shelled peas that came from the garden we would sit on the back steps to do it and my father would tell us we had to whistle while we shelled them. One day I realised why he said it like a joke and why my brother and sister were silly about it. You couldn’t whistle if you were eating any of the peas.
We would sit on the back steps to peel pickling onions too, and get paid threepence for every jar we filled. Then my mother would put cloves in and fill the jars with vinegar and put on a round cellophane top that she wet in a saucer of water, and pull it tight and hold it down with a rubber band. When the cellophane dried it was really tight and smooth with a dip in the middle. The jars sat on a shelf in the washhouse for a few months and when they were opened the little onions were brown and vinegary.
Iris was in the other room watching Bad Girls on television. She had a life now to enjoy, Isobel thought, she could be getting on with that, not dragging out these old, inconsequential memories. She read what she had just written. Nothings, she thought, small nothings, little events, signifying nothing. It was all nothing, that was the point, really. A whole childhood of nothing. No, no tears, she told herself, no feeling sorry for yourself. She sat for several minutes, still and silent, her mind blank, then she got up and rummaged through a shelf of books. There it was, I Is For Isobel. Iris had come across it in a second-hand bookshop, and bought it because of the title. As a teenager Isobel had resented having a name that started with ‘I’. ‘I’ was everyone’s letter; everyone was ‘I’ to themself, so as an initial ‘I’ made her everyone and no one. When she asked Iris if she minded having a name that started with ‘everyone’s letter’ Iris had said that was ‘terribly Gertrude Stein’ and then had had to explain that Gertrude had written a book called ‘Everybody’s Autobiography’ and Isobel intended to read that one day, but hadn’t so far.
In the end she had read I Is For Isobel and enjoyed the story of that Isobel, an Isobel who wasn’t allowed to say it was her birthday and hid in books and didn’t know how to behave, ever. Isobel could relate to that.
Did she agree with author Amy Wittig that miserable self-images were the result of inventions, embroidered images of the past? On first reading those words she had thought not; her own childhood misery and loneliness was real, it was there in the core of her, always there, a dull empty place. Nothing to embroider. Funny, it hadn’t occurred to her then that her mother had done embroidery. She had kept some of the finely worked pieces, almost as neat on the back as the front, when her mother died. Turning to the final sentence of the book, Isobel read once more, ‘Oh yes, she thought joyfully, I met someone.’ `It was herself that Isobel-in-the-book had met, finally, and thus become able to convert the fearfully self-critical ‘word factory’ she carried in her head into published writing.
She put I Is For Isobel back in the same place on the shelf she had taken it from, straightened the books around it carefully, went back to the table, sat down, and picked up her pen again.
At primary school all the rooms were in a long line. A set of concrete steps as long as the whole building led up from the sealed playground to a verandah and then the classrooms. From the verandah you could look across the sealed area, marked for basketball, to the grass fields for rugby and sports days. At the far end of the fields was the swimming pool. Learning to swim, or at least stay afloat and not panic, was compulsory. The class lined up to walk across the grass to the pool, every child clutching a towel with togs wrapped inside. On the way back the towel and togs would be soggy and cold, then laid out on the grass, towel first, togs on top, to dry in the sun and be gathered up after school to be taken home and brought back the following day. A lot to forget. Socks were the worst, I was glad we always wore sandals by the time swimming started. Nothing though was as shameful as coming out of the pool and not finding your knickers. Never mind if they fell on the floor and got wet, you put them on anyway.
I don’t remember ever being able to open my eyes under water and I never liked wet hair on my face, I always pushed it off as soon as my head was out. Being last out of the changing shed after swimming was something else to avoid so I got a lot of practice at dragging my clothes on over my wet skin.
My school memories are vague until Standard Six. Which became Form 2 and now it’s Year 8, or maybe 7. For the first time my teacher was a man. I liked him, he wasn’t exactly kind, and could be very stern but he didn’t blame people for things they didn’t do and always tried to find out what had really happened.
One time he set us all to work at something and then talked to about eight of us one by one outside at the end of the verandah by the cloakroom. I had to go and answer some questions. I have forgotten what the questions were and I never knew what the trouble was anyway. Now I think it was probably smoking or stealing but then I had no idea.
I really wanted to know but if I’d asked anyone that would have been letting on I didn’t know.
That year I started getting my period. I had some idea what was happening; at least an older sister is useful for that. My mother just showed me whereabouts in the hall cupboard the packet of sanitary pads were kept and gave me a belt and said something like, ‘You might need these soon.' The belt had elastic and two shiny satiny, half-round parts, each with a safety pin, in a horrible pinky peach colour. At least I knew what to do with it and I didn’t think I was bleeding to death or anything when it started for the first time. But no one had told me about the achey, dragging feeling on the first day. When I told my mother it hurt she said not to take too much notice, which was good advice, really.
Getting periods was easier than getting breasts. I was so embarrassed at having breasts and didn’t know what to do about them. My sister and my mother wore bras but neither of them talked to me about doing that. I can remember first getting one but not anything else about how or when, and it was such a relief. I had been tying some torn sheet around me and pinning it in place when I went to school so I didn’t wobble.
It was about this time that a new boy, Oliver, came to school. I thought he was handsome. I guess I had a crush on him. The girls were often talking about boys and who they ‘liked’ at that time. I was never part of the conversations but I overheard them. One day, on the concrete steps at the front of the classroom, Oliver and another boy were talking about a girl Oliver liked. I must have been hanging about eavesdropping too obviously because Oliver turned around and said to me, ‘And it’s not you.' I was mortified. I think I said something back, but I don’t remember what, and I don’t think I ever looked at Oliver again. I still thought about Oliver a lot, and I still thought he was handsome, but I made sure he never caught me looking at him. And I don’t remember that I ever found out who the girl was that he liked.
