My brother and I were told to set the dining table. We got our father’s placemats from the cupboard and set five places at one end. We placed the cutlery as neatly as we could, setting each fork on our best linen napkins.
Our mother was fastidious about manners and etiquette, and my brother and I were taught early how to set the table properly, with the starter and main course forks on the left, knives on the right, the soup spoon to the right of the knife, the dessert spoon to the left of it. ‘You eat your way in,’ my mother told us. Glasses were to be placed above the knife. Bread and butter plates to the left of the forks. Knives turned with their serrated edge towards the plate.
Sometimes my mother’s rules were hard to keep track of, since it often felt like our family lived like there were no rules. Ironing was for idiots who didn’t have anything better to do with their time, but if we didn’t put our knife and fork together at the end of a meal, our mother would say sharply, ‘Excuse me,’ with a rise of her chin to point to our plates.
This evening’s setting had all of that as perfectly straight and correct as we could.
The whole thing was weird. Even I knew it. My mother had cooked a lamb roast. We never ate together as a family – usually my brother and I ate our meals lying on the floor flat on our stomachs, in front of the television, watching Bewitched or The Brady Bunch. So what was this about?
If the dining table were narrower, and we could have reached, my brother and I would have been kicking each other underneath it, but as it was we sat in our high-backed chairs and watched wide-eyed as the tension brewed. I remember worried looks between Becky and my father. At some point she put her hand on my father’s tray and he manoeuvred his palm onto the back of her hand. Right then, with that gesture, I saw something snap in my mother.
I knew she could turn on a dime. We were in for trouble.
I looked over at my brother and opened my eyes wide and lifted my eyebrows as high on my forehead as they would go so he knew something was about to go very wrong. By now we were both trained to our mother’s moods, but even though I was younger, I seemed to have a better sense of when she was about to unravel. Perhaps because he knew her before the trouble, my brother was more inclined to ignore and forgive these switches.
When he signalled back that I was overreacting, an annoyed look and shake of his head like he had a fly buzzing in his face, I got mad. I knew this as clearly as if she’d made an announcement about what was in store for the happy couple.
I started counting the ivy leaves on the wallpaper above my brother’s head, trying to distract myself from the coming storm. I used many such techniques to escape the fights clouding those years. They were like drinking a glass of water backwards when you have the hiccups or counting sheep when you can’t sleep. I taught myself to concentrate hard on something, on this occasion not losing track of my place in the pattern. For a moment, the tension faded out.
Our father was at the head of the table, sitting in front of a recently hung, life-sized portrait of himself, which had been painted by one of the artists he and my mother represented. With the painting positioned against the dark green foliage of the wallpaper, I liked to imagine he’d been painted in a wild jungle, on safari.
Becky sat to his right. Our mother, playing hostess, was seated to his left, in front of the swinging door to the kitchen.
I wonder whom the happy-family charade was aimed at? In any event, the charade was over when our mother got up, leaned across the table, gathered everything in a sweep of her arm, and smashed it to the floor.
Our mother’s next move reminded me of a schoolyard game of dare we used to play. She picked up the carving knife and began stabbing it down onto our father’s wheelchair tray. I watched as she gouged holes in the wood, waiting for the knife to go into the back of his hand. It seemed to take place in slow motion, but when she was done stabbing his tray, she took the knife to the canvas of our father’s portrait. When she finished slashing it, the corners draped down like the sails of a boat becalmed at sea.
All this can’t have lasted very long at all, but when it was over the dining room looked like the cage of a crazed animal. The lamb bone seeped its juice into the carpet amidst the broken glass and crockery. The silverware we’d so carefully placed was strewn over the floor. Even my brother was screaming. I wanted to tell him, ‘I told you so,’ but I was screaming too.
Someone called the police. I’m not sure if it was Becky or a neighbour who heard the trouble. It was certainly not our father, who could only sit in his chair yelling at everyone to stop screaming. I don’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I do remember my mother paying us no heed once she knew the police were coming. She got busy trying to put the room back together, presumably so it was in some kind of order before law enforcement turned up asking questions.
Our father told my brother, ‘Take your sister to her room,’ and that’s what he did, holding me by the shoulders and ushering me out like I was a feeble patient in a hospital being taken to have a nasty procedure. When we got there, I told him I wanted him to sleep in my room that night. There was no mattress on the spare bed, since it was out in the gallery for my mother, so we untucked the sheet and blankets from the end of my bed and he climbed in there. Head to toe.
It wasn’t long before we heard sirens out in the street. Shortly after a young officer from the local precinct knocked on my bedroom door.
‘You kids okay in there?’ she asked, poking her head in. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’
Hugh said she could come in and then the light went on and she was standing next to my bed.
‘Can you tell me what happened tonight?’ she said gently. ‘Are you two sure you’re okay?’
We told her that our mother lost her temper but we were fine and it wasn’t all that bad. She asked us if we were scared.
‘No,’ we said in unison, like the trained puppets we were.
A family friend arrived while the officer was talking to us and it seemed as though they’d come to an agreement about what would happen next without even speaking. It was like a baton handover. As soon as our family friend arrived, the officer left. The next thing Hugh and I knew we had blankets around our shoulders and we were in the back of a car driving to our family friend’s house. Once we got there, we were shown to freshly made beds in the spare room.
We stayed there for a few days. The family had two girls, one my age, the other a bit closer to my brother’s age. They had a pool and we swam and dive-bombed for hours on end. We played out endless re-enactments of Bonnie and Clyde, which we watched on the big television in their rumpus room. The idea of a rumpus room was new to me and my brother. It was amazing to be allowed to take over an entire space with toys and games and not have to clear the floor to make way for a wheelchair.
The adults tried to act like everything was normal and we were just having a sleepover. No doubt they discussed our situation in worried tones when we were out of earshot or had gone to bed.
If anyone asked how I was doing, I said, ‘I’m fine.’ I was at the time. We were with friends, swimming in their pool and playing games in a rumpus room. No one was yelling. That was more than fine to me.
Becky and our father moved out. I’m not sure where they went to first, maybe they stayed with Gran and Grandfather, but eventually they ended up in North Adelaide, right near another large area of parkland. Our mother moved back into the house and took over our father’s room, and for the most part we lived with her.
My brother and I went back to being not so fine, not that we’d have told anyone even if they’d asked. We were a couple of co-conspirators in our parents’ game. A child’s loyalty to a parent is a given. It’s a sacred rule at the core of being a kid. We were still of the age that our sense of self and security was so tied up with our parents’, we couldn’t possibly have separated the two.
But a parent’s loyalty, it turns out, is not a given. It felt like my father had a whole new life to look forward to with Becky a
nd, when they left, it wasn’t just us they left behind. The gallery was in our backyard, so there was no more work for him there. He and Becky had to build a new life for themselves.
Our mother’s initial joy about the situation never returned. Soon it was presented to the world that Becky had broken up their happy marriage. The saviour became the homewrecker.
Many years later, when I asked my mother what happened that night when everything went sideways at dinner, she said, ‘Everyone loves their jailer.’ I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but my mother acted like it made perfect sense.
It turns out Muttee’s declaration on my parents’ wedding day that she’d have been happier if my mother were marrying a dog was not so misguided. She knew my mother wasn’t cut out for the life of a long-term caregiver.
My father was consistent even in his faults. He was hard to categorise, but he was pretty predictable, or at least I knew what to expect from him. If I cleaned the windows but left even one smudge, he’d point it out. It didn’t matter if I’d already packed the newspaper and vinegar away and was on my way out the door to play, I’d have to bring it all back to rid the window of its blemish. Everything was to be done properly. ‘If you just did it right the first time,’ he’d say to my protests.
But my mother was not so easy to predict or surmise. You could make a truthful statement about her one moment, then she’d turn around and the exact opposite would be true the next.
Becky had the personality for life with my father. That’s not to say she was meek or subservient, she was neither of those things. But she was malleable, in a way my mother never was, and, most importantly, Becky didn’t need to compete for attention.
My mother was empathetic. No matter what else in her psychology drove her to it, she could never have married my father were she not. She often helped people in the street who were down on their luck, or sent my brother or me with meals to a neighbour who was going through a difficult time.
She once helped a blind man who’d got lost on his way home and they struck up a friendship. She sometimes cooked for him and in return asked him to help her with odd jobs around the house. She understood it would be valuable for him to feel like the help-giver sometimes.
My mother found out that he could see brightness, so when he came over to mow her lawn, she laid white tea towels at the edges of the grass. She then guided him to the mower, which he powered up with three strong pulls of the starter cord once she’d placed it in his hand. When the mower started humming, he made his way slowly forward in a straight line until he saw the light reflected from the first white cloth. The tea towel was his cue to make a turn. Once he completed the fourth edge, my mother moved the tea towels into smaller concentric squares until the entire lawn was clipped short.
Sixteen
Despite all the proof to the contrary – the wheelchair, the lifting machine by the bed, the fact that I had not once in my life been picked up by my father – I didn’t really believe he couldn’t walk. I thought he was being lazy, that he simply liked all the attention and us doing everything for him.
My daytime suspicions were fuelled by recurring dreams of him running. These night-time visions of my father’s long legs running towards me, his arms outstretched, were so vivid that not only was I disappointed and genuinely surprised when in the morning I found him lying perfectly still in his bed, I was mad.
I was eight when I came to the firm conclusion that my father wasn’t a cripple, he was a fake. I devised a plan to get to the truth. Even then, I was not one to not take action. It seemed perfectly clear that someone had to take charge and, since everyone else was too busy with their own business, I took matters into my own hands.
I decided the only thing to be done was to set my father on fire.
The idea came after someone at school told me about a man in a wheelchair who was miraculously cured of a spinal cord injury when a fire engulfed his home. The tale had it that when the rubber tyres of his wheelchair began to melt and the chrome buckled, and he couldn’t wheel himself any further, he simply got up from his wheelchair and walked out of the house to escape the flames. It was my call to action. I figured my father would be able to do the same thing; he only needed sufficient motivation.
When I told him the story about the man in the fire, and how I planned to set his new home with Becky alight so he’d walk again, he made her hide all the matchboxes. He knew I was deadly serious. Meanwhile, I searched for matches, dreaming of roaring heat so hot that my father would have no choice but to stand up and walk away from that damn chair.
If Becky was worried about me setting the house on fire, she never let on. She was not a disciplinarian, nor was she ever critical. She grew up with the American idea that everyone deserves a ribbon, so even if she was mad, she somehow managed to turn her criticism into praise.
Becky was the eldest of three brothers and a sister. Her parents moved to Australia from Minnesota at the height of Nixon’s presidency, when Becky was nineteen. Becky’s father was a softly spoken social worker who loved to sing. Her parents were disgusted by the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and wanted to be as far away from Nixon’s mess as possible. Adelaide was about as far away as you could get.
Her mother was a pianist and the children grew up singing together around the piano. They were religious progressives. My father couldn’t tolerate religion. He thought it was the cause of a lot of the world’s ills and didn’t dampen his arguments on Becky’s account. In the end Becky stopped going to church, but she never lost her faith.
My father was ruthless in that regard. Rather than accommodating Becky’s beliefs, he argued. Some of it may have been for his love of a good debate, but I think it was also about controlling what she did with her Sunday mornings and whether it was appropriate to leave him behind to do something on her own. My father was done with being left behind. He’d learned his lesson from his first family, who left him behind almost as a matter of course.
For Becky, it wasn’t about leaving him behind, it was about nourishing her soul. But he couldn’t see it like that and Becky didn’t push back. She’d been appalled by how we all treated our father. She was right. We were shameful.
Early on in their relationship, Becky worked at a school for disabled children. There encouragement and reward, rather than discipline and smacking, were the guiding interventions. She dealt with me that way too.
One day I went to the school where she worked. I’d never seen anything like it. My father may have been in a chair like many of the kids in the room, but he did not dribble, or scream, or rock himself furiously back and forth. You’d think I would have been ready for it, but I wasn’t, and I was very glad when the end of the day came.
Becky taught me to ice skate at a local rink. She enrolled me in gymnastics at the nearby YWCA and drove me there in her little VW Beetle every Saturday morning, cheering me on as I jumped and somersaulted my way through the class. When it was just the two of us, she let me steer the car and change the gears. She could sew and mend my clothes and made me outfits from patterns she had sent over from America. She tried to teach me to sew, but I had no knack for it, so we made popcorn balls with butterscotch syrup instead.
All the while, my mother’s blinding hatred for Becky and my father grew. Eventually, some of her judgements wore off. When I was at their place, rather than spending time with them, I took to tending an old horse that had been abandoned by its owner in the parkland near their new home. I bought hay for it with my pocket money, brushed its matted coat and pretended it was mine, until the park sent it off to the knacker’s yard because its fees hadn’t been paid.
I really liked spending time with Becky, but I couldn’t tell my mother that. I believed I had to take sides, so I never told my mother about all the fun things we did at Dad and Becky’s. It would have been treachery.
At Christmas, Becky wanted to take us carolling. In America, it was a Midwestern tradition, but in Ad
elaide, it was unheard of. When my brother and I complained to our father that we didn’t want to go, he told us he didn’t much like the idea either, but we were all going and ‘that was that’.
It was awful standing on the porches of people we didn’t know, ringing doorbells, watching their horrified faces when they opened the door to see what was waiting to greet them: two scrawny kids and a woman standing beside a guy in a wheelchair, singing ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’. I felt like I was part of a travelling freak show.
Becky grew up singing in the church choir and sang loudly and confidently. My brother and I tried to hide behind our father and mumbled the words, wanting to sink into the ground and longing for the ordeal to be over. But house to house we went, until our obvious misery got us sent home and my father and Becky continued around the neighbourhood, shocking the neighbours all by themselves.
My father had very dry, irritated skin. I think it was a symptom of his condition, probably something to do with his poor circulation. Sometimes he’d instruct me to scratch an itch. I thought it was funny. He’d direct my hand, saying, ‘Higher. Higher. A little to the left.’ And then when I’d hit the spot, ‘Stop! Right there!’ and he’d let out a sigh of relief. It reminded me of scratching a dog when it had an itch it couldn’t reach with its hind legs.
But my services were rarely called upon after they somehow discovered that apple cider vinegar was a remedy. Every morning Becky soaked a number of cotton balls in the liquid and rubbed it vigorously on his face and into his scalp.
Sometimes he asked me to get out the vinegar and repeat the procedure if there was a flare-up and Becky wasn’t around. I didn’t much like doing these things for him but I hid my distaste as best I could by joking that he smelled like salad dressing, which was exactly how he did smell. The scent of apple cider vinegar still reminds me of my father.
Diving into Glass Page 9
