by Thea Astley
Grandfather, Bonnie told me, was always a loomingly silent man who only came to verbal life during biblical disasters like fire or flood or dusty exchanges at stock salesyards. I pleaded for family history. Bonnie doled it out in bits and pieces that I put together until the jigsaw, still with parts missing, covered my mind. When the girls reached puberty grandmother had packed away their correspondence school books and sent them off by train to a boarding school on the coast, a no-nonsense establishment tucked into the hills behind Brisbane. Four years later, their education interrupted, they would be brought back inland again, grandfather chair-bound on the homestead veranda with a stroke. “Da capo,” musical Bonnie had said, recalling their understudy years as stopgap drovers. The girls’ early skills were put to ferocious use and their mother wept to see her pretty darlings who had sailed acne-free through adolescence grow weather-beaten before they had even investigated their youth. She complained to grandfather, tossing in words like “parties,” “dances,” “fun,” phrases that went “having to work like men!”
Grandfather croaked from his spy-post, “Where’s that equality you’re always talking about?”
Grandmother ignored that and the year Marie turned eighteen threw a party. I can describe it as if I were there. It was one of my bedtime stories, the stuff of legend.
Imagine: It is mid-December. The homestead cracks in the heat. For hours after sunset the cooling roof will chatter mindlessly in the way I still remember. For six years there has been no rain and the dust spins up from arriving cars to sift its delicate beige arabesques into every room, coating the already drying bunches of eucalypt leaves grandmother has arranged artistically in jars. Who came? I pester mother on the edges of sleep. And mother, conscious of the drama of hiatus, pauses as she looks down on her only child and says, Well let me see. Let me see. She supposes over twenty, counting girls from town and neighboring properties, five older boys home from school for the holidays, three middle-aged shearers who had come in to Drenchings to spend their checks, a widowed lawyer from Jericho Flats and a bank clerk. She has omitted a vital piece of color. With lots of teeth, I squeal, and flat feet. Mother tucks this extra information in with the sheet curling round my face and I dream into that party. I reproduce that party for myself now.
The bank clerk was accompanied by a drum kit—snare, bass, hi-hat and ride cymbal. They were his entree, mother guessed, I guess, to more festivities than his flat feet and teeth deserved. When Bonnie or Marie took turns at the Bluthner, he would beat up the party with a semiprofessional touch, making the ornaments in the room rattle responses to the floorboards bouncing under the feet of the dancers.
This story is told with pictures. Here’s one of that very party, mother at piano under the sagging streamers, grinning at Cyril who has paused in his drumming to take a pull at a large jug of beer placed strategically on a side table. Even if mother had not told me she liked the drummer, I could have deduced that from the smile, the angle of her eye which is requesting something I am about to discover on turning the page or waiting for the next installment of my bedtime folktale. Yes, mother liked the drummer and she didn’t mind that his feet were flat, finding the dazzling prominence of teeth gave him a boyish open look.
“Give me a turn,” Bonnie demands, indicating the drums, the drumsticks.
Cyril is washing down asparagus rolls and little flecks of green cling to his teeth. He thought I was joking, Bonnie told me, or crazy. A conservative boy, she said. He found the idea of a woman playing drums—well, gruesome. Gruesome? Like his awesome dentistry, Bonnie said. She always had a flair for hyperbole.
I see them, I see them. He submits to such a pretty face, to such a smile. At the far end of the room grandmother is watching, dazed by the dangerousness of touching hair as the bank clerk instructs Bonnie on how to hold the sticks, how to control the beat. She sends Marie to intervene and Marie saunters to the piano and edges her sister away. Lady drummer, she giggles under her breath.
At this point my mother always inserts a drop of feminist philosophy. I can quote her verbatim to this day. “If there is something unladylike about hitting drums with sticks, then how would you describe dagging the backsides of sheep?”
Bonnie moves into Cyril’s place. Marie sulks and begins a jazz waltz. Bonnie ignores the crowd chaffing her, the irritated glares from grandfather, her mother’s twittering. She plays. She plays the grins of the dancing guests and Cyril’s toothy guffaws. She plays her sister’s petulance and her parents’ embarrassment and she has never been so pleased with herself. Why? I ask mother, sliding into slumber. Why were you so pleased? I was a natural, mother tells me. Dear mother. Just a natural, Belle.
Maybe, for moments, she was. But she never got any better.
There were not, Aunt Marie told me at other bedtimes, many parties at Perjury Plains. With grandfather pinned to a walking stick and unable to do much except in a roaring supervisory capacity, it fell to the three women to keep the place solvent. Grandfather was always reluctant to offer employment to outsiders when he could make full use of what lay to hand. By working from sunup to sundown, the three of them, aided only by casual labor, strained their way through two more seasons, and after dinner each evening would ask each other how long they could endure, antiphon for mother and girls, the chorus of which was supplied so endlessly by grandmother’s lament that young women should be so trapped. Bonnie replied saucily after a particularly strenuous day, “I’m beginning to believe you.”
“You really want to go, don’t you?” grandmother asked fearfully.
“Of course we do,” Bonnie said. Marie said.
One weekend they packed rebellious suitcases and were driven to the railhead by the bank clerk who proposed to each of them in turn as he saw an envied life-style vanishing from his life. Broad acres. Broad verandas. He seemed to have no concept of the realities of rural slavery. Mother and Aunt Marie fervently declined his offers of marriage but thanked him kindly and stood in the doorway of their carriage with buoyant tearless faces. There is a photo of this, too, taken by the bank clerk who smuggled the snapshot to grandmother a week after they had gone. They told him they didn’t want to be farmers. Or farmers’ wives, for that matter.
“But what will you do?” he asked.
They told him there would be something. There would always be something.
There was. They found office work in Brisbane within days and male admirers, as my mother coyly put it, within weeks. There was at that time a clutch of lonely American GIs on R and R leave from Korea. Bonnie was courted by a trumpet player from San Diego, a cheerful gumchewer who was within weeks of being drafted home, and trapped in Brisbane by clerical error. Did you like him? I would ask, as I was to ask myself years later. Did you? Like him! Bonnie was scoffing, I was crazy about him. The obvious depth of their mutual obsession and the Brisbane heat made Aunt Marie irritable and she foretold disaster. Once I discovered a photograph of the gumchewer grinning on a Gold Coast beach with a high surf behind him. Your father, Bonnie explained briefly and shoved the picture to the bottom of the pile from where, furtively, next day I pulled it out to examine my genetic history. He was a good-looking young man with a flopping forelock and the widest smile I had ever seen. I slipped the photo back where I could easily find it again and again. Why should this simple action have made me feel the first stabs of emerging conscience?
They marry.
Bonnie had recovered her authentic prettiness along with the air-conditioned change of occupation. Her only doubts were those flung at her by Marie. In the smoldering Brisbane weather, Huck (I believe his name was Huckford, mother says primly then bursts out laughing) pulls every compassion stop to speed the process before he departs. Grandfather wires from Drenchings, Don’t be a damned fool, and the postmistress sniggers as she taps it out. Two days before Huck is due to fly out they are married. Grandmother just makes it to the coast and Marie, who had dispensed with her own gumchewer in one luminous row, is an unwilling bridesmaid.
I must insert some dialogue, filtered through family oral tradition.
“But what does he do, dear?” grandmother asks Bonnie later as they stand sobbing and waving through international airport glass.
“He’s a trumpet player,” Bonnie says between sobs.
“Yes, yes. I know that. But what does he do for a job?”
“That. He plays trumpet.”
“I don’t believe this,” grandmother says. She checks with Marie to see if it is some horrible joke.
“Flugelhorn actually,” Marie says, happy to add no comfort.
“Why don’t you both come home?” their mother asks. “The place just isn’t the same without you.”
The plane is a vanishing speck. Bonnie’s face is so wet with grief her makeup runs. Her eyes are tugged out, as it were, by vanishing love, and one arm still semaphores useless farewell. In the terrible heat the three women cling to each other and Marie whispers into her mother’s ear, “You don’t mean that. You know you don’t mean that.”
And grandmother whispers back, but loudly enough for them both to hear the blasphemy, “I hate the place too.”
Waiting for the official permit that would allow her to join the almost stranger waiting for her across the water, Bonnie is nagged by misgiving despite the fact that the metaphor of what she had done in haste has a spurious attraction. The actuality, when she lies sleepless, barrages her with unknowns. She also flies out in tears.
Reunion with her trumpeter, now demobbed and living in a low-rent trailer park outside San Diego, is a matter of dubious bliss. After the first sexual frenzies wore themselves out in a matter of months, Bonnie found herself left alone a great deal as gigs took Huck up and down the west coast, sometimes as far away as Seattle. At first she used to travel with him and sit, an alien with an impossible accent, at a stage-side table prolonging her gin and lemon through set after set and finding her attention wander from the packed and smoky bars to the dried-out paddocks of home, the remembered insolent thumb of Mt. Zamia expressing what she was beginning to feel. She knew that the moment Huck lifted his instrument to his lips he forgot her. Maybe he would have trouble recalling her name.
I mention mother’s pilgrimage in some detail to suggest a paradigm for my own. Her severance from the familiar must have had some turbulent effect upon what she was and what she became just as the fearsome cutoff delivered to me at age seven (Mummy, mummy, I’ll die if I have to leave Perjury Plains!) when the boarding-school gates closed me off for terms like lifetimes from the things I knew and loved, bred in me a too-early self-sufficiency, a stifling of normal emotion, a tendency to hanker for the past.
Is this a meretricious explanation? I don’t know. I can only write what I think it might be.
Right from the first, Bonnie told me once, she had begged Huck to have the band squeeze her in in some capacity. Could she play piano now and again? They told her as kindly as they could that she wasn’t good enough. Drums? she suggested. How about drums?
At this point mother would parody Huck’s accent: God, sugar, you want us laughed outa every joint?
I admit, Bonnie said, that I became a whimperer. I whimpered in public places while drinkers at nearby tables watched. Huck began leaving her behind but as the whimpers persisted he was irritated into doing something and as a soother managed to bribe the drummer into promising her a few lessons. But when?
She hammered. She nagged. More parody: For Chrissake, Bon!
She won in the end. The band drummer got her seated just right and fixed up her hands much the same way as the flatfooted bank clerk had done in Drenchings and leant round her and demonstrated rolls and brushwork and fancy rhythms and said “You try, baby,” and she did and her hands froze up.
Froze? I wonder.
I was nervous, Bonnie would tell me in a huffy self-justifying way. Real nervous. I needed them to play along with me. I told them.
“I need you to play,” Bonnie said and all the band rolled long-suffering eyes at each other so she let her face screw up into subservient grief which walloped them. They all swung their instruments into position and the keyboards man started in on “Stars Fell on Alabama” despite Huck’s loyal hisses that it was too hard while Bonnie’s tears plopped on the snare drum. She laid down the sticks, and the drummer said, “Don’t you worry, Bon. Don’t you worry none. I’ll give you lessons when we get back from L.A. and you’ll be the best goddamn lady drummer on the west coast.”
“She’ll be the only goddamn lady drummer,” Huck said bitterly.
But the band kept its jokes muted, even kindly, and when they came back from tour, Huck even bought his wife a secondhand drum kit he picked up cheap at a garage sale in La Jolla, and the sax player let her store it in a shed at the back of his house, so she could practice without driving the trailer park crazy, and for the next couple of months Bonnie went round there every few days and learnt to read charts and rap out basic rhythms.
“Mah pacifier,” she told Huck, parodying again. “Ah need it.”
And,
“I’m pregnant,” she also told him at the commencement of her first American fall.
Perhaps this was my problem—being conceived in a trailer park ten thousand miles from what was ultimately to be my birthplace, my sensual landscape. If I were to draw up a balance sheet of personality profit and loss, that would have to go down in debit along with the idiosyncrasies of mother.
Am I merely looking for excuses?
Although Huck’s response pretended jubilation (and here’s another minus) Bonnie spotted the wry stretch of his usually smiling mouth that showed fractionally before he managed joy sounds. He barely earned enough money for two.
He hid his face against her in the warm middle of a hug. He joked that she should keep up that practice on drums. He said they would need every gig they could get. And he did a little finger-beat pattern on her stomach.
That was the first and only touch of my father’s hand for thirty years.
On the band’s next trip away up the coast, mother told me (did I need to hear all this so young?) Huck stayed longer than he had needed, ringing Bonnie on the day he was due back with what sounded like a lie. Or a softened version of the facts. Bonnie took a cab over to the saxophone player’s place and, finding no one there, began a muffled practice on the drums until someone in the house next door flung up a window and began shouting, “Stop that racket, lady! Please stop that goddamn racket!”
Instead of being offended, Bonnie was enraged. Spleen did wonders for her. She found herself a job in a roadside diner before her pregnancy began to show. The hours were so formidable, the shiftwork so frequent, she and Huck practically never met and when they did it was only to bicker. The relationship staggered on through vigorous morning sickness, through the baby’s (my!) first uterine movements and, although Bonnie felt lost, unable to join the closed club of band talk, no longer welcome on their trips, she was saving most of her salary, the purpose behind her skinflinting unformed and lying at the back of her mind like a shadow fetus. She refused to give a name to it. Yet one evening, four months after she started the job and was just beginning a slight pregnancy waddle, everything came to a head.
“You’re a godawful drummer, honey,” Huck told her after listening to her tap away at “Georgia on My Mind.” Not angrily, that was the terrible part; not even resentfully; just so matter-of-factly she was overwhelmed by the truth of it. “You’ll never make a go of it.”
The next weekend after she had seen the band off in their van, its blazoned sides, ROCKWARBLERS, obliterating itself in a blue haze of exhaust fumes, she packed her clothes, her trousseau underwear that no longer fitted, her photographs of Perjury Plains with her parents standing on the homestead veranda as the ultimate still-life, and rode a bus up the coast. She had just enough money for her plane fare back to Australia.
Where else but home?
“Feckless,” her father told the runaway bride.
Bonnie had wept, strangely enou
gh, at the sight of Drenchings’ main street where nothing had changed. In the distance across the plains, Zamia’s impudent rock thumb, purple-creviced in the cool lemon morning, displayed the same pattern-threat she had known all her life.
“This one might be a boy,” her mother said.
II
And another start.
I was born a month early on a late afternoon of the shearing season. So Bonnie tells me. Grandfather treated the whole business like a lambing. With rather less concern, she added. Mother was making a ten-pound fruitcake for the men and had bent to place it in the oven when the pains started. Perhaps it was the bending. Grandmother only just managed to intercept grandfather as he absentmindedly dialed the vet.
For months my wails dominated rooms, hallways, verandas. Time passed. I sat up. I crawled. I stood. I tottered forward lurching between chairs and cheers. I learned words. “Don’t say that,” grandma warned while Bonnie screeched with laughter. “That’s an awful word.” Singly. Then in pairs. “Don’t say that either,” grandma said. “It’s awful! You’re not to go near the sheds.” Then whole groups of them while mother washed cleaned cooked. “I give up,” grandma conceded. “She needs a nice school.”
Aunt Marie returned home. The young salesman she had married soon after Bonnie flew to the States left for work one morning and rang later that night from somewhere in New Zealand. “I’m sorry, dear,” he told her long-distance. “But I was so bored.”
Wounded Aunt Marie played heartbreak numbers on the old Bluthner with lots of heavy pedal work and too much sway and eye-rolling as she worked out her damaged pride. It didn’t take long. “I was bored too,” she told Bonnie.
“Let’s party, then,” Bonnie suggested. “Let’s celebrate celibacy! Let’s go!” She bought another drum kit to replace the memory of Huck’s gift and each weekend became a daze of bad music.
