She waits.
When the phone vibrates, she jumps. What’s your name?
Georgia, she replies.
John.
That night she falls asleep with the phone on her chest and her hands in the air, trying to remember the signs.
*
Jolene stands at the kitchen sink doing dishes, late for the M-HICS meeting. Mothers of Hearing Impaired Children. These days, her daughter won’t look her in the eyes. Jolene can’t remember when it got this bad, just that it’s been bad a long time. Glued to her iPhone, messaging someone on the other side of the world, or the other side of the room, Georgette bears no relation to the fat toddler that threw her arms around her mother’s neck and told her she loved her to the North Pole and back. She’s even changed her name: Georgia, of all things. That redneck state. Georgia texted this new information to her mother last month because she no longer speaks.
Jolene reaches for a frying pan that’s been soaking. She should go to the meeting. The other mothers are always so sympathetic, especially when it comes to teenagers. She could tell them how Georgette’s become proud of her disability. Everyone’s proud these days – gay and proud! Transgendered and proud! Indigenous and proud! And that’s fine, really it’s fine, but deaf and proud? Jolene scrubs at burnt egg.
She finishes the dishes, checks the mirror for any food in her teeth, writes a note to Georgia that she’s going to M-HICS and puts it in front of her daughter’s phone. Georgia takes the paper and gives her mother a half-wave without looking up. Jolene steps into the hall, pauses. She knocks at Mary’s door instead.
In you get.
Georgette – Georgia. Fuck. Jolene closes her eyes and tries not to cry.
In you come. Mary says and Jolene lets herself be pulled passed the threshold.
He came over earlier today, John, and, I mean, besides the fact that my teenage daughter can get a boyfriend and I can’t …
Is that what you want?
I want to be normal. They were signing and I know they were talking about me. I could feel it.
Teenage girls talk about their mums. Beer?
Tea. Mint tea, please.
Don’t they drink in America? You could learn to sign.
She should’ve gone to the meeting. Mary, you don’t get it. All those appointments, all the waiting rooms with toys that smelled like vomit and books with half the pages missing, all that fucking speech therapy? It would negate everything.
Would it?
She wants to go to a deaf school. Do you know the rates of literacy among the deaf?
Georgia can read.
I know she can read. I taught her to read. When did she get this angry at her own daughter? Jolene takes a deep breath, sinks to the floor.
Mary joins her on the blue carpet. She holds Jolene’s face with one hand, and draws a finger slowly down the centre of her forehead, her nose, her mouth, stops at her chin. You’re a good mum, she says. Let’s not talk.
*
At fifteen Georgia comes home with purple hair and black nails. They sit at the dinner table. Some things are still normal: dinner at 6.30, Modern Family on the TV at seven. Jolene stares. She hates the hair, loves that distant creature on the other side of the table. Jolene reaches out and places a hand on top of her daughter’s, and, to her surprise, her daughter doesn’t pull away. Georgia looks her in the eyes, and then out the window at the streaky April sunset. She points.
Jolene doesn’t turn to see pink clouds. She stares at Georgia, clings to her hand, which is soft, still a child’s. Jolene would like to hold her hand all evening, all night and all of the next day; she would like to lift her teenage girl and put her on her lap and tuck her head – purple hair and all – under her chin, and rock her back and forth. Georgia pulls away, writes on a bit of paper, I’m moving out.
Jolene blinks.
John’s family – they’re all deaf, she writes. I feel at home there.
Jolene tells herself not to panic. You’re not deaf, she hears herself say, but even as she says the words she knows she’s wrong. Do you know how small the Deaf community is?
That’s my decision, Georgia scrawls and then stands.
What happens next is a haze for Jolene. Georgia puts on a bulky backpack, hugs her mother and walks out the door. Jolene feels her stomach leap. She yells her child’s name. But Georgia doesn’t turn.
Overland
Something Wild
Jo Case
He is handsome, in the way men are at his age when there’s nothing really wrong with them. His dark hair is not thinning, or even grey. His stomach doesn’t push against his faded black t-shirt. He may be a dad, but he doesn’t yet remind her of hers. Worth noticing, in this company.
‘I guess we’re sitting with you,’ he says, pulling out the chair beside her.
‘I guess you are,’ she says. ‘I’m Kristen.’
‘Steve.’ He flashes off-white teeth. ‘I like your t-shirt.’
It’s a pop-art cartoon of a black-bobbed woman declaring she’s hitting the road after killing her parents. Kristen bought it at a concert, and the stitching has dissolved at the collar. She wore it every weekend when she was nineteen, but these days she wears it to bed. She’s washed it for the first time in a fortnight, especially for tonight’s dress-ups. She’d forgotten, when she put it on, that the whole point of being here is to present herself as a fellow grown-up, to get along with the others. She realises now – too late – that dressing in her teenage cast-offs was a bad idea.
‘Me too,’ she says. ‘I like my t-shirt, I mean. My son Ethan likes Green Day, so I suppose he’d like yours.’ Like her, he’s dressed all wrong. Though maybe it doesn’t matter so much for a man. The two men at the bookshop where she works dress just like him every day, right down to the Converse sneakers; if the women wear jeans, they’re paired with a silky shirt or fitted top. She didn’t notice the distinction until the day she wore Ethan’s Batman t-shirt to work, for a laugh: loose on him, it fit her perfectly, though it pulled tight under the arms and strained across her chest. Her boss pointedly asked her to work in the back room all day, pricing stock.
Steve laughs, in a way that signals he’s less charmed by her joke than by her short skirt. Kristen recrosses her fishnet legs, hooking a Doc Marten boot on the outside of the table leg. The woman beside Steve touches his shoulder and leaves her hand there, as if by accident. Like most of the women in the room, she’s wearing a grown-up interpretation of tonight’s theme: Something Wild. Black-lace dress, leopard-print heels, crimson lipstick. ‘This is my beautiful wife, Meredith,’ Steve says, leaning in to the woman. ‘My better half.’ It is an offering, an apology. He laughs again. His wife’s mouth bends in a smile, but her kohl-rimmed eyes refuse to be charmed or placated. She is not, in fact, beautiful, though she is trying. Careful make-up fails to hide the wrinkles like quotation marks at the corners of her eyes. Kristen is comforted by details like these, collects them as armour against the daily indifference that is, to her surprise, wearing her down.
*
She almost admires the woman’s hostility. She knows she deserves it. After all, she is flirting with her husband – partly because she’s bored, but mostly to hold his attention. Ethan’s been in Prep nine months now, and, apart from Cathy, this is the most interested another parent has been in her. Kristen doesn’t care about decluttering, or different ways you can use lemons, or bulk-buying groceries at Aldi. It means nothing to her that the house across the road from the back entrance of the school sold for almost $70,000 more than the listed price at last week’s auction. The rented apartment she lives in with Ethan is full of clutter: her clothes and books, Ethan’s toys, pieces of paper covered in drawings or shopping lists. She does her grocery shopping on her bike, while Ethan’s at school, cramming what she can into the baskets and her backpack. And her savings range, over the year, from $500 to nothing. She will never, in her whole life, afford a house in this neighbourhood. (She’ll probably never afford a house at a
ll.) She has no interest in these conversations, as well as nothing to say. Yet she still feels excluded from them.
*
‘Steve, darling, let’s get a drink,’ says the woman, smoothing her dress towards her knees as she stands.
‘Would you like us to get you a drink?’ He dips his chin at Kristen.
She thinks about saying yes, just to see how his wife reacts. But instead, she shakes her head and watches as they blend into the dim light of the bar.
*
Her cheek is crushed in a lipstick kiss; she looks up from her phone.
‘You must hate me,’ says Cathy, taking the empty chair at her left, the one without Steve’s jacket on it. A black bra strap escapes from one sequinned cap sleeve. Her hair hangs into her eyes and down her back, dark roots bleeding into blonde. Cathy is always like this: parts of herself trailing, as if catching up to the rest. Her house is the same. Dirty plates and glasses in a conga line to the sink; the couch a mosaic of abandoned clothes, Lego pieces and half-read magazines streaked with nail polish. Cathy’s chaos makes her own seem organised. More importantly, Cathy shares the language of exasperating exes and shared custody – from school jumpers that always seem to be at the wrong house, to weekends confronting eerily silent bedrooms. Kristen erases the text she’s halfway through – the one where she threatens to go home within the next ten minutes. She reaches up and tucks her friend’s bra strap back under her sleeve.
‘Don’t be dumb,’ she says. ‘I’m just glad you’re here.’ She doesn’t say that forty minutes late is a new record.
*
‘Having a good night?’ Cathy asks her. She doesn’t want to know the answer; she wants reassurance. She knows Kristen didn’t want to come in the first place. And she knows how she feels about this crowd. Kristen opens her mouth to reply, then closes it again. Meredith is back. She stands behind her chair, one hand resting on the steel arch of its back: poised for flight. Between Kristen and his wife, Steve anchors himself at the table. Kristen watches his denim legs disappear under the tablecloth.
‘She’s not drinking, so I doubt it,’ he says, answering for Kristen. He extends a hand as Cathy hitches her handbag up her shoulder. ‘I’m Steve, and this is my wife Meredith.’
‘Oh, hey, nice to meet you. Haven’t seen you around school before, are you new?’
‘I don’t get into the school much,’ says Meredith. ‘Steve does the pick-ups most days. From after-care.’
‘Lucky you to have someone so helpful.’ Cathy picks up Steve’s wineglass. ‘My ex is always busy, you know. Work comes first. Always has.’ She tips the glass to her lips.
‘Hey. You know that’s my drink?’ Steve says. Kristen stifles a laugh. Last Monday, at the bakery after drop-off, she ordered a coffee and Cathy drank it. She didn’t say anything, she even paid for it.
‘I am so sorry.’ Burgundy liquid spills on the table as Cathy shoves it back at him, leaving a stain like an inkblot. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Keep it,’ he shrugs. ‘We should get a bottle for the table to share anyway.’ He looks at Kristen. ‘Are you in?’
‘Sure,’ she says. Meredith looks at them all with dismay; sharing a bottle changes them from strangers who happen to be seated together to an active group. Kristen wonders if Steve is deliberately trying to annoy his wife, doesn’t realise he is annoying her, or doesn’t care. She is deciding, too: does she feel sorry for her?
*
Kristen wouldn’t be at this primary-school fundraiser if not for Cathy, who went through mother’s group and kindergarten with the others. Cathy understands comparisons with kindergarten teachers and can empathise about rising interest rates. Her kitchen may be messy, but she has a mortgage on it and can talk about tiles with some authority. She’s regularly invited to Friday coffees at the bakery down the road from the school, even if she’s no longer included in the dinner parties where the guests arrive in pairs. She says the dinner parties don’t bother her, but says it so regularly that Kristen can tell it does.
*
‘They don’t hate you,’ Cathy said, over red wine at her dining room table last week, while their sons played Lego under it. ‘They don’t know you.’ It made a kind of sense at the time. Of course she should make an effort! Of course she was imagining things! Of course she would come to the fundraiser! But after forty minutes where no one would meet her eye when she looked at them, forty minutes spent playing with her phone in an effort to seem busy, she knows that they really do hate her. At best, she’s invisible. Maybe it’s because she’s ten years younger than the rest of them. Maybe it’s because she and Ethan’s father are divorced (okay, never married and separated – but she says divorced because it seems more respectable). Maybe they think it’s catching. Or is there something else about her – something indefinably wrong – that they can all sense, and know to avoid?
*
Cathy talks and Meredith endures it, responding with pursed lips and repeated ‘hmm’s. Kristen wonders sometimes if her friend overplays her absentmindedness: if behind her seeming incomprehension, she’s just doing what she feels like and pretending not to notice the response. She watches the teacher’s table across the room. She’s heard that the teachers are planning a surprise group performance from Cabaret later in the night, and their costumes back up the rumour: the deputy principal, who doubles as the school’s drama teacher, is wearing a corset trimmed with red ribbon, black hotpants and fishnet stockings. She seems as comfortable in her outfit as if it were her pyjamas. Ethan’s teacher, one of the few men on staff, is wearing a suit and suspenders, with a trilby. (Is he supposed to be a gangster?) He sits stiff-backed next to his boss in her underwear.
*
‘You can’t go past a good schnitzel, can you?’ Steve heaps cauliflower and potato in lumpy cheese sauce next to the glistening breaded chicken on his plate. Kristen lifts the lid of the casserole dish nearest her, leaking steam and revealing peas, green beans, sliced carrot and broccoli. This is what she gets for her $70 ticket? She craves leftover chilli con carne – or even grilled cheese on toast – in front of the television. The playlist shifts to the Spice Girls. So, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want …
‘Oh, this is classic,’ laughs Steve. He sings a line before forking chicken into his mouth. ‘Don’t you love it?’
‘Yes!’ says Cathy. She squeals and sings a line. If you want my future, forget my past … Meredith shrugs.
‘Classic rubbish,’ mutters Kristen. She’s never heard a man enthuse about the Spice Girls before, at least not about their music. Ethan’s father was a fan of Ginger Spice. And of Charlie from Hi-5. And, in a long-cherished childhood crush, of Noni from Play School. She’s noticed that men – at least the men she knows – compulsively comment on the hotness of children’s program presenters, as if reminding themselves of their masculinity. It’s the same with girl bands.
‘How can you say that?’ asks Steve, clutching his chest. ‘The Spice Girls were hot. Especially Baby Spice.’
‘If you’re into the little-girl thing,’ says Kristen. She gulps from her wine. ‘They’re all awful, but the hot one was Ginger, surely?’ She repeats what she’s heard her ex say a million times before. ‘The Union Jack corset, the Wonder Woman boots.’
Meredith cuts her schnitzel into tiny triangle wedges, her eyes on her plate. Cathy sings.
‘Okay, you’ve convinced me,’ says Steve. He picks up the bottle and refills Kristen’s empty glass.
*
She rests her chin on her hand and leans in to laugh at his stupid jokes, feeling in control for the first time all year. Is this how Ethan feels when he acts up at school, telling jokes that make his class laugh and his teacher angry? He’s found it almost as hard to fit in here as she has. ‘He’s not a bad kid,’ the deputy principal told her, the last time she was called into the school office. ‘But he needs to learn the word no. He needs to know when to stop.’ Seeing herself through the teacher’s eyes – young single mo
ther with unbrushed hair and retail job – she was too embarrassed to defend herself, to explain that Ethan hears no (and obeys it) all the time at home. He doesn’t listen to the teachers because he doesn’t like or trust them like he does her. What can she do about that?
‘I loved the Spice Girls when I was at uni,’ says Cathy. ‘I always wanted to be Posh Spice, because I liked her clothes.’
Meredith looks up from her mobile phone and puts it her handbag. She dabs a serviette at her mouth, erasing imaginary crumbs.
‘If you’ll all excuse us, we’re being beckoned from across the room,’ she says, hooking an arm into her husband’s. ‘Come on, dear.’ She wields the word as a weapon.
‘I’ll be there in a sec,’ says Steve, turning his smile on his wife.
‘Come on,’ she repeats.
‘The little woman needs me,’ he says to the table. And he gives his wife a purposeful pat on the arse as he stands to join her.
*
‘Marriages like that that make me grateful I’m single,’ whispers Kristen across the table, but Cathy doesn’t laugh.
‘What are you doing?’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’
Cathy looks at her for a long moment. ‘Nothing,’ she says eventually.
Kristen is glad she doesn’t have to answer, because she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t even like Steve, though she is attracted to him: mostly because of the wine and the fact that it’s been months since she’s even kissed someone. She watches him across the room, deep in the fold of the other parents, and wonders what it would be like to have his mouth on hers, his hands under her clothes. She’s been trying to do the right thing for so long: working amicably with Ethan’s father to share custody, even though she hates him for leaving; working a job that bores her, because it gives her the flexibility to take Ethan to school and pick him up; even coming here tonight to try to make friends with people who look down on her. She’d forgotten the thrill of doing what she feels like, just to see what happens.
The Best Australian Stories 2015 Page 15
