by Thea Astley
Vinny gazed up the hill, alive with her worry, knowing in the darkest and tiniest place in the forests of her mind that the thing wasn’t, couldn’t be true, and yet fearing, dreading that it might be. The clash of possibilities made it worse. One of the Pratten boys ran down the back steps and slammed into the outside privy. She could see old Mrs. Pratten wobbling under the fruit-trees at the side of the house, and faintly, faintly, the heartiness of a radio programme wrapped up the morning and its problems like a jujube in Cellophane …
Her mother had met her at the back door that afternoon in May, concerned and fussing.
‘Are you all right, love?’ she had asked.
‘Yes,’ Vinny answered, puzzled.
‘You didn’t feel different, did you? Not sick or anything?’
‘No. Why?’
Her mother took her inside gently. This tenderness was unnerving. She led Vinny into the bedroom and showed her her pyjamas. Vinny looked at them with a peculiar feeling of panic.
‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened?’
Her mother pressed her child’s thin arm between her hands.
‘Please, love,’ she said, ‘don’t worry. It’s all natural. I should have explained before, only I forgot. Mothers do forget how old their babies are getting.’ She ventured a half-smile, trembling with the guilt of her neglect. ‘I was frightened all day you might have been worrying what was up with you. I only noticed when I was taking the clothes out to wash.’
‘I never noticed anything,’ Vinny said. ‘I felt all right.’ She resented having to feel different, to adjust herself.
‘It happens to all girls when they reach your age,’ her mother said, explaining insufficiently.
‘What does?’
‘This. This does Vinny. You can’t have babies unless this happens. All this means is you’re a normal girl and you’ll be able to have children of your own one day.’
Vinny contemplated the floor. She felt ashamed. She could sense her mother’s embarrassment and she felt embarrassed on her behalf. But her mother was talking on. She urged her daughter to the bed and sat beside her, fiddling with the yellowed fringe of the quilt.
‘Every month it happens,’ she said. ‘Perhaps not now for a while but later. You’re only starting to grow up.’
Vinny was startled at seeing her mother’s mouth jerk with feeling.
‘Does it happen to everyone?’
‘Everyone.’
‘Don’t they mind?’
‘No. Why should they? It’s part of being a woman.’
‘I hate it,’ Vinny said. ‘I hate it. I’d rather not be normal. I wish I were a boy.’
‘Now don’t be silly, lovey.’ Her mother was concerned because she had omitted to prepare her youngest child for the shock of puberty. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s natural. It’s like seasons in your body. A sort of ripening.’ She fumbled around the idea and then gave up, timid of her own imagery. ‘And, anyway, it stops again when you’re forty or thereabouts.’
‘Can you have babies then, after it stops?’
‘No,’ her mother said. ‘Not ever.’
‘Well, I wish I were forty.’
‘There,’ her mother said, and patted Vinny’s arm awkwardly remembering she had felt the same way thirty years ago. ‘There. You won’t feel like that always. Even next time you won’t mind so much.’
But the next time had not yet come to Vinny’s immature body, and after a while, indeed, she had forgotten all about it. The day became a signpost, but one so distant she could no longer see it clearly.
The conversation of that day flickered across her mind in a tentative manner as she sat now kicking the door unrhythmically, hating and enjoying at the same time the long screech of its unoiled hinges. Certain of her mother’s words assumed a looming importance when taken from their context. What had happened then proved she was normal, that she could have a child. This realisation made her feel so ill she bent forward to squeeze her stomach into a sense of firmness rather than this horrible feeling of emptiness. She could not analyse fear; she knew nothing of its processes in the body, that these visceral disturbances were a natural sequence to a day of shock and continuing unease of mind.
She tried to line up the incidents of the previous twenty-four hours and, after reviewing them, to see their folly; but all her efforts were reduced to Betty Klee saying over and over, ‘You’ll have a baby’, and Pearl Warburton silently consenting to the statement. If only she knew how you did have babies. Feeling that surely Pearl must know, she could not believe anyone could make so serious a statement out of pure malice, and concluded consequently there must be truth in it somewhere. Oh, all the horror of the possibility clutched her! The shame. That was it more than anything – the agony of the shame of the heads turning, your own eye dropping, of the unknown quality of bearing another body within your own, the sheer high-pitched terror of having to chart such strange country.
She found to her amazement that the tears were running freely down her face. When she had rubbed them off with the sleeve of her blouse she mournfully opened her school-bag. All the familiarity of the interior, the corners plugged with crumbs, the name ‘Vinny Jean Lalor’ painted across the inside of the lid, flooded her with a further uprush of self-pity. She unwrapped her lunch, and the bread packing the cheese and lettuce into thick wedges grew moist as she nibbled slowly and without hunger along their edges.
Time loafed along.
They were sweeping up at the farmhouse now, and the older Pratten boy was driving the family milker back to the western paddock with the rest of the little Jersey herd. Vinny scrambled to her feet and fidgeted around the outside of the barn, sheltered by the whips of willow woven across the morning. Already she was becoming bored: the hours were slow to crumble away and she was keenly conscious of wishing the day were over. However, even as she wished it so, she remembered that often in her short life had she longed for a lunch-hour to end, a schoolday, a week of schooldays, a term. Perplexed, she wondered if others ever felt this way. She couldn’t imagine it, for all her contemporaries were constantly being assured by adults on school speech-days that childhood was a wonderfully happy time, a period of interest; how lucky they were to be young, the politicans and the church ministers told them confidently, with all their lives ahead of them.
She wished she had found a friend the way the other girls had. It was all very well loving Mrs. Striebel, she considered resentfully, but with her she could not stroll, arms encircling, heads close in glorious secret whispers, sharing the sweets and giggling together at the pictures on Saturday nights. If she had someone she could talk to about this present horror, that would be the biggest help of all. It was not being able to discuss it that made it so dreadful.
On impulse she slammed her bag shut and went downhill, deciding to go to school after all. She could tell some story, say her mother was sick. Mr. Moller was pretty easy-going and after he’d asked for her absence note a couple of times he’d probably forget all about it. She wondered if the others would persist in their persecution, yet, intelligently enough, she thought that would be better than sitting there thinking about it.
When she reached the gates the grounds of the school were empty, but from the infants’ section she could hear Miss Rowan in priestess frenzy presiding over rote spelling. Through the senior-room window Mr. Moller’s shaggy grey head and shoulders were visible as he stood behind the class. Now and again he disappeared from view as he bent over a pupil’s book, and Vinny imagined the neat red-ink marks he would be placing upon exercises, the trim underlinings, the occasional sarcastic comment in the tidy handwriting. She went to the rear of the school and had a long drink at a bubbler. Her mouth was very dry and even after the drink there was a strange thick feeling in her throat. Braced like a diver, she plunged into the actions required of her – the hanging up of the hat, the limp excuse t
o Mr. Findlay, too busy to listen properly and egotistic about knowing his scallywag mark, the timid knocking on the class-room door. It was almost a relief to see the grins signalling across the room when she appeared, to sense the rustle of interest as she went to her place after handing Mr. Moller her late slip from the office. She kept her head lowered and her eyes fast upon her text during the lesson that passed slowly as a church service, though there were only fifteen minutes of it left.
After the room had emptied for lunch, she hurried outside, but not fast enough to avoid her enemies, who were upon her in a wild dream of voices, of questions, digging into her privacy. She tried to push past the little group, but Pearl Warburton caught her arm.
‘You tell her, Betty,’ she said.
‘No, you.’
‘No,’ Pearl stated firmly, and then she giggled. ‘No. You must tell her.’
‘All right,’ Betty Klee sparkled maliciously. ‘First of all though,’ she said to Vinny, ‘why were you late this morning? Not sick, were you?’
Vinny’s face was blotched with fear. She trembled a little and kept swallowing at the dryness in her throat.
‘My mother …’ Her voice trailed into a limbo of lost utterances.
‘Your mother?’ Pearl seized on the phrase. ‘You haven’t told your mother? Bet she’ll take a piece out of you.’
‘I wouldn’t dare tell mine if I was going to have a … you know.’
The Welch girls simpered. Eyes looked meaningly at eyes.
‘My mother was sick.’ Vinny started to shove her way through the knots of girls on the veranda. ‘Let me down. I want to have my lunch.’
‘Got to keep your strength up,’ Betty Klee said. ‘Think of baby.’ She caught Vinny’s arm. ‘Not so fast. Do you know where Tommy Peters is today? You seen him?’
‘Maybe they were getting married or something,’ Rhonda Welch suggested.
‘No. They couldn’t have done that,’ Betty Klee said. ‘They couldn’t possibly have done that, ‘cause Tommy’s in real trouble.’
Vinny was interested. She could not help it. She wanted desperately not to be, but her love and her hatred tangled each other like tree and parasite vine, and she kept her eyelids lowered quivering over the questions in her eyes and stood in a waiting silence. Betty Klee gave her an irritable little shake.
‘Tommy’s gone to Gympie,’ she said. ‘He bust his father’s truck late yesterday arv. He took it without permission and skidded on the wet road into a whacking great tree. It’s a real mess now and he wasn’t game to see what his dad said, so he hitched a ride up on Sid Ewer’s van and said he was going to get a job.’
She paused to watch the effect these shreds of violence might have upon the other. They flickered a colourless lightning ominously through Vinny’s mind. It’s because of the baby. Can’t give you anything but love, baby, babee, babeeohbabee … She jerked viciously away from the restraining arm and swung past them, past Rhonda Welch who saw fear scribbling its furrows on Vinny’s face.
‘Ooh-er!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Ooh-er! Bet I know why he was glad to go!’
How quickly the others seized the point. Betty Klee gobbled the feed line and spat it back nastily.
‘Didn’t want to see baby Tommy. Bet he staged the whole thing.’
Vinny found herself crying, unable to stem the rage and shame that poured from her eyes. A violence of emotion took her away from them and she was free at last in the yard, hunted and doubtful where to turn. Finally the rabbit she had become crept to a lonely place near the woodwork block and sat there in the warm sunshine that had broken through the clouds. She sat there for the remainder of the lunch-hour, a geometry book open on her lap. And she did not read a word.
They left her alone for the rest of the day.
Home took her in with a union of safety and non-safety to the steady things, the reliable bladebone stew, the dried apricots soaked overnight and stewed ragged in too much sugar, the sweetened white sauce in the brown jug. All the things that had given the security to home for years and had gone unnoticed, now blazed their unalterable ordinariness across the fear-filled blank of her sky. She felt despairingly she could no longer touch or taste or enjoy these things in ever the same way again.
‘You’re not eating,’ her mother said. ‘You must be a bit off-colour. You haven’t eaten properly since you went to Brisbane.’
‘She’s in love,’ Royce said between enormous bites. The words were chewed up with the bread. ‘Yeah. Know the symptoms. Good ole Vinny’s got a sweetie.’
He hacked at her ankle jovially with his foot and couldn’t understand it at all when she suddenly burst into tears.
‘You’re always at her, Royce. Let her be. What’s up, love?’
Vinny could not reply. Perhaps she was ill. She certainly didn’t feel like eating. She felt more as if she was going to be sick. She rubbed her fists into her eyes with a final action and got up from the table.
‘I think I’ll go to bed early,’ she said.
But instead she went to the front sitting-room they hardly ever used now and rooted round amongst the old books on the shelf behind the door until she found the one she wanted. It was a plump medical tome for family use, suitably pruned of anything liable to stimulate unhealthy adolescent speculation. But it did so, all the same, with a minimum of factual information; and though all the family had been forbidden to read it as children, nevertheless it had been well thumbed by them at one time or another. Vinny slipped it under her cardigan and crossed the hall like a thief.
When she had got into bed she went quickly down the index to ‘Pregnancy’ and turned to the section named. She was the only one who had not yet made use of the book, and now she read avidly, morbidly – but was not helped. The only thing it achieved was to give her a deepening dread of what might be happening within her, it did not tell her how conception actually took place. It was one of those soft-pedalled, broad outline books that omit half the relevant symptoms of even the more pedestrian complaints and keep all their human structure diagrams completely asexual. Her search, in fact, did nothing but accentuate her fear. It in no way relieved it. In spite of herself she read fascinatedly on, touching lightly on puerperal fever and post-natal haemorrhages. She felt deeply knowledgeable about the entire process of parturition except for that one important factor.
So much for that, she reflected bitterly. Tomorrow would be Thursday and she had lived through Tuesday and Wednesday. But time in this instance would be no softener. Time would bring the ultimate shame only closer. She slept finally, and she slept badly, opening the doors of one queer dream after another, gobbled up by situations that were terrible in their shapelessness. In the morning she felt as if she had not slept at all, her mental and physical fatigue crushing her under an immense weight. At first she lay drowsily, all thought of her problem gone, yet with a puzzled non-comprehension of her exhaustion; but as consciousness widened her eyelids and her mind it sprang on her tiger-fierce, more overpowering by its contrast with that one moment of untensed being.
It was worse that day.
They made signs as well as comments. Betty Klee kept patting her stomach and thrusting it forward whenever she passed Vinny, so that she could have died of shame. All the senior school seemed to know; they giggled when she looked at them, and every pair, every trio, every quartet, she was sure, was discussing her and her agony.
The nagging worry, the fear hardly left her now. If it paused when she became involved in French translation or a geometry rider, the engulfing way in which it raced back was frightening. She felt really ill. Fear, loss of sleep, and hardly any food for two days were beginning to force a physical reaction from her. In the lunch-hour a sudden nausea forced an attack of dry retching that continued for nearly ten minutes. When it was over and she had the spasms under control she was too ashamed, too frightened to emerge from the lavatory, in case the accusing
and meaningful eye of a classmate met hers. She sat there for the rest of the lunch-hour, pressing her foot hard against the door when anyone tried to open it, sweating heavily in the heat and becoming weaker and weaker.
She thought the lunch break would never end. As soon as the bell rang she wobbled to the lines, white as chalk, swaying slightly from dizziness. The others were watching her, but she was too ill to care; and, in addition, the fact that she felt so sick proved finally to her that what they said was true. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a baby. She was going to have a …
Fear is the unexpected shape in the dark, the face across a room, the voice behind one’s back. It was all these things to Vinny, who shrivelled inwardly to something smaller than nothing at all – at least that was how it felt. The thing was true, proven. She was to be a mother. In her body now she carried another that was growing inexorably every minute, every hour, bigger and bigger. She pulled her stomach muscles in with hatred and anger as she shuffled with the rest of the class into school and, edging to her desk, stumbled and almost fell. She knew Mr. Moller was watching her as they all stood until he gave the order to be seated. Momentarily her face raised its pallid disc to his, and he was shocked by the deadness of the expression.
