The Trauma Cleaner

by Sarah Krasnostein

  ‘Go for it,’ she replies, saying that it might give me a different perspective on things, which would be valuable.

  ‘Is there anything you would prefer me not to tell her?’ I ask, admiring how mellow she sounds.

  ‘I don’t care. I really don’t give a rat’s arse,’ she says, too harshly.

  So I contact Linda and go sit in her kitchen and listen to her talk about Pete, her ex-husband and the father of her children. Like her sons, and unlike Sandra, his surname is still her surname. Linda speaks entirely without animosity although she remembers to the cent, forty years later, the amount of money she received each week from the government to try to feed, clothe and shelter herself and their two toddlers: an amount of money that was always a blanket too small, so that something paid for meant something forgone.

  She’s in her mid-sixties now, still working, and she inadvertently mentions something to me that indicates she worries about her superannuation. She returned to work much later than she wanted; every time she tried to leave the boys at child care the older one would vomit with anxiety.

  ‘Simon was vomiting every day. It was only a trial to get him used to it,’ she explains. ‘The welfare, in them days, used to come and check on you all the time. They said, “What are you doing?” and I said, “I need to get money. I’ve got to go back to work.” They said, “What do you think we give you a pension for? So you stay home. One parent has already left. They need you here with them.”’

  In Linda’s kitchen I meet Pete, the bearded, smiling golden god, the husband, the father, the friend, in the photo albums she has stacked high. These are the photo albums that went missing one day and that she found squirrelled away in the garage by her teenage sons, who had sat there in secret, looking for answers in the books of their father. I see the wedding and the red-accented bridesmaids and groomsmen, the small house in Benjamin Street. I see Pete renovating the front with Linda’s dad. I see the christenings, the Christmases, the baby sprawled naked on Pete’s chest and how father and son beamed at the camera. I see the toys donated by the Salvation Army and the smiles of each boy holding up an Ernie and a Bert.

  And though Linda feeds me warm custard tarts and proudly shows me photos of her grandchildren—though Linda is excellent at putting one foot in front of the other—when I ask to use her bathroom and forget which door she said, I choose one only hesitantly, as though I might walk through it and into a molten river of pain that would sweep me away forever.

  Sandra calls the next day to find out how it went. She acts, again, blasé but I can tell that she is steeling herself. I report back that I’m now able to fill in a few blanks. For instance, she did have a wedding reception after all. It turns out she did all the cooking for it, got fresh scallops from the fisherman next door and everything turned out beautifully. ‘Hmmm!’ she marvels. And: ‘I can’t remember, but that sounds about right…’

  I tell her that she did attend the births of both of her sons. And that Ailsa helped Linda only a little, and then abandoned her completely when she became pregnant to her new partner, six years after being left. ‘Mmmm,’ she says. And then there is a uniquely strange sound, at once extraterrestrial and intimate. Sandra is crying.

  She didn’t mean for them to go through any of this, she says. There is so much she cannot remember, she says, so much she has lost. And though she still knows so little of the narrative, perhaps the facts are secondary to the feeling of it, coursing, now, down vestigial pathways I had thought long atrophied. For one wisp of a moment, the sounds she is making come down the line in an ecstasy of sorrow, and the image I’ve had so many times—of a majestic ghost ship doomed never to make port, pelagic, forging through every latitude on wind and tide, fearless because empty—evaporates. Then she sniffs, and tells me about the new office premises she is about to sign the lease on and how much she adores her new car.

  Simon’s text pops up on Sandra’s phone like a kiss behind the ear. He would love to see her, is overjoyed that she made contact, has been looking for her forever. He respects her courage, is looking only towards the future. The reason he didn’t respond sooner was that the letter went to the wrong house. After more than two months of waiting for his reply, another of Sandra’s girlfriends took matters into her own hands and, without consulting Sandra or knowing why Simon had not responded, tracked down his contact details and called to inform him that ‘his father’ was trying to get in touch.

  Simon was receptive and enthusiastic, luckily. He holds no grudges. Nathan not so much. Sandra’s younger son was not included in her letter because he did not come looking for her. So she is intent on respecting that fact, which also dovetails with her own hesitance, given he was so young when she left.

  Waiting for the weekend she will finally meet Simon, Sandra is on top of the world. At the same time, however, this excitement has disturbed the soil in which she has rooted herself so neatly. The happy anxiousness she is now experiencing feels the same for her as acute anxiety, and it has left her exhausted. She is nervous about what will be said and what will be expected of her and how this will all pan out moving forward. She has great trepidation about the many difficulties and awkwardnesses and expectations that may arise should she, suddenly, be reintegrated into family life.

  These worries are not alleviated after her initial meeting with Simon and his partner, even though it goes wonderfully. Nor after she meets her beautiful grandchildren. These worries are there, in the background, though her tone is lighter when she speaks about her family (‘It’s just so loving.’). These worries lurk at the back of her mind when she spends the weekend at Simon’s home and when his family come to her house and when he starts not calling as often as she would like and when she has no clear answers to the question of how much she should mix in when family problems arise and how much to bring up the past and what the future will look like.

  About this, I am initially not only unsympathetic but pretty delighted. Many of these problems are all the same problem and that problem is the messiness of love and of family. And why, I ask her, should she be exempt?

  But months pass and it becomes clear that any relationship with her sons will take much more time and also, probably, professional help to work through the deep wounds of the past. This state of affairs has inflamed the enduring subterranean shame, the defensiveness that she has carried about leaving her children. Both of those children are now very different men with similar faces; it is the face of their father: folded down the middle, just between the eyes, where the individual pains have shoaled together, blocking out the light.

  Sandra’s sparsely populated personal life is not perfect but it is perfectly ordered and relatively peaceful. This has been the compensation for the pain that she suffered with her family of origin, as she told me in one of our first conversations.

  ‘You still love them, you still want to be accepted, everyone needs to be loved and blah blah blah blah blah…but in some respects, I appreciate it now, because it’s made me tough, it’s made me resilient, it’s made me think, “I don’t give a fuck.” And I don’t need to have family. I have my sister-in-law and my brother, who I didn’t really have that much to do with when he was alive. My sister-in-law used to push for us to have contact, but it’s just that I’ve never had them, so I don’t really need them. I have good friends, who I appreciate, but if they did the wrong thing by me’—she clapped her hands loudly—‘I wouldn’t bat an eyelid to turn around and say, “See you later!” I don’t have that bonding that I need to have people in my life.’

  When Sandra wrote, in her first letter to Simon, I do not regret leaving you and your brother and your mother as I was so unhappy with myself and my life at the time and I had to do what made me happy, I believe she was not talking about ‘happiness’ per se but the fact that she had passed a ‘clinical threshold’ in which persistent uncertainties about her gender had become a struggle so intense it felt like the most important part of her life.8 But the more contact she has with her sons,
and the more we discuss her feelings about this reconnection, the more I come to believe that the point was not just inelegantly expressed; it was insufficiently felt.

  ‘Has this affected your will?’ I ask in reference to her small estate.

  ‘No,’ she replies. ‘I’ve already told them that my will has been finalised. It’s all going to the university to fund scholarships in my name.’

  At this, it silently pops open inside me, like the boot of a car into which one might fit the universe: anger.

  So loudly does it scream, this anger that I haven’t felt towards her before, as it hurls itself against the locked door of her emotion; this anger which screams that it isn’t about the money but about the act of connection and concern, of care and responsibility that it would represent to her children, or to Linda. So loudly does this anger scream inside me—this anger of, and for, the abandoned child—that I forget—for weeks, I forget—my one task: to listen for the truer sound.

  My anger is Sandra’s Scotch. It is her wine, her sleeping pills, her years of speed and ‘mandies make you randy’, her denial, her forgetting. These are the ways we numb the pain of vulnerability, but emotion cannot be selectively numbed.9 If we are too good at it for too long we will numb our ability to form true connections, with ourselves and with others, which is the only thing we are here for—if we are here, glued to the same crumb busily suspended in infinity, for anything at all.

  Social researcher Brené Brown explains that we need ‘excruciating vulnerability’ in order for meaningful human connection to occur. That is, we have to overcome our fear that we are not worthy of such connection and allow ourselves to be truly seen.10 Sitting in, and with, our vulnerability we can move towards empathy—feeling, not merely for, but actually with, others—and form true connection. Or sitting in, and with, our vulnerability we can move away from empathy and towards shame—that deep fear that if we are truly seen, we will be found undeserving of human connection. Which is to say that shame ‘breeds fear, blame, disconnection’; it ‘absolutely unravels our relationships and our connections with other people’.11 And shame was, repeatedly, the only type of vulnerability that Sandra was allowed to have.

  When they denied her food and soap and love, when they tied her to the clothesline the better to beat her, when they shut the door on her once and forever, Ailsa and Bill moved her towards disconnection. The members of the Victorian Government who passed and preserved laws against ‘homosexuality’ and wearing women’s clothes moved her towards disconnection. The members of the Victorian community who supported those laws, actively or with silence, moved her towards disconnection. The Victorian police officers of the 1970s who threatened her, the men who paid to beat her and to fuck her, her rapist and her girlfriend’s killer and the bureaucrats who voided her marriage all moved her towards disconnection. The people who, even now, legislate and police and ‘pick’ her gender, move her towards disconnection.

  So you see, despite the great and wondrous energy that Sandra manages to generate, she requires the lion’s share for herself, just to keep breathing. She cannot conceive of emotional or financial generosity towards her children or Linda in the ways I wish to see. And yet she has given me the means to understand her reaction: compassion. As she has said: ‘I think it’s a drive for me that everyone deserves it because I deserve it as well.’

  Compassion, Brené Brown explains, is the expression of ‘a deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to each other’ by the bonds of shared human imperfection, of suffering and of love and of goodness. If we make the vulnerable choice to connect with empathy—to be vulnerable, excruciatingly so, in order to access that in me which has suffered as you are now suffering—we bring compassion alive by communicating that bond, so others know they are never alone.12

  From her parents’ garden to the nuns’ convent, from the massage parlours to the funeral parlour to the dark homes where people with hardly any human contact wait to die, Sandra has spent her life enthusiastically being of service to others. There is deep love in Sandra but, despite all the desperate strangers she has so greatly helped over her lifetime, it has not yet begun to be truly expressed.

  How do we form true connection? By being terrified to tell our story and by doing it anyway.13 When Sandra agreed to speak with me she was finally, and for the first time, ready to tell her story. But by that point, she was no longer able to remember it. So I have done my best to give it back to her. And my choice to view her darker aspects in their full context is not merely the just choice of perspective; it is a tool for daily living, a gift of worthiness and belonging that I give not just to Sandra.

  Sandra, you exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People; you belong, you belong, you belong.

  Sandra’s house in Frankston is about an hour’s drive from the house where she grew up, but the distance is more appropriately measured in astronomical units because, really, it is further than driving to the Sun. The light in her small home is always beautiful and, rather than perfect tidiness, the overwhelming impression given by the space is one of healthy harmony. The tamed clutter (a kitchen corkboard pinned with cards and flyers, dog brushes in a basket under the coffee table, the tchotchkes crowding the cabinet in her bedroom) functions like vines in the margins of manuscripts, attesting to the life of the orderly text within.

  The sense of harmony is equally a function of the various styles she has effortlessly wedded in each room; there are tartan pillows and Chinese vases, an open French provincial sideboard stocked with colourful ceramics, an intricately wrought silver dining table for six, framed lithographs of tweedy Victorian gentlemen, heavy wooden sculptures on sleek marble stands in the foyer, a standing liquid silver loop that looks like a Brancusi. There are birds in her space: painted, stuffed, hewn from wood, etched in glass. There is a vintage-style French poster of an ad for cognac above her couch, a Marilyn Monroe print keeps watch over her desk and by the door she keeps two tiles featuring classical Indian portraits so fine they appear to have been painted with an eyelash.

  I will go on. The harmony in Sandra’s home is also a function of the way the space feels: the energy of it, if I may say that without hating myself. In addition to the sunlight that suffuses the whole house like chamomile tea, washing over your eyelids in a way that makes you yearn for a little nap, there are beautifully arranged flowers both artificial and real, pleasingly plush carpets and deep sofas to sink cosily into. There are overstuffed chairs with footrests and fluffy hand towels and woven baskets full of Donna Hay magazines. There is perfumed hand soap, cable TV and a clean fridge covered in magnets with impressionist art reproductions and snappy slogans like Queen of Fucking Everything and How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up.

  I will go on. The harmony in Sandra’s home is also a function of the fact that when you stand in her foyer with its framed photos, it is 2016 but it is also 1989 and you are smiling at George smiling at Sandra and, nearby on paper as he was in life, admiring Craig’s good looks. When you walk from her bedroom towards the kitchen, as she does each morning to make her coffee, her baby sons smile out from their silver frame and it is 1974 again and she herself smiles out from between her older sister and her baby brother and it is also 1958.

  I will go on. The harmony in Sandra’s home is most of all a function of the fact that, while life is inescapably messy and discordant, its beauty is in the end a question of proportion. Sandra can tell the Story of the Green Lounge Suite a thousand times and never lose the triumph of that couch—so long that two of her could lie on it full length to watch The Bold and the Beautiful together—which she bought before the house was even completed and which she placed in storage while she waited anxiously to move in. She wasn’t sure if it was the right size, but ‘when it come, it was just like Hallelujah’—she snaps her fingers—‘it just fit into place. I was so blessed.’

  And this is everything, really. Though her health has stabilised for now, Sandra never breathes with ease and she lives w
ith a significant risk of developing liver cancer. If she is caught anywhere silent for too long, the Old Fear comes lumbering, comes swiping down at her with its dark paws, comes knocking her down and around. Sandra has chronic insomnia and bouts of vertiginous insecurity; she is quick to love, quick to give and, when she feels she has been wronged, quick towards the rage and rejection that are the converse of that defensive sweetness. Sandra has financial worries and family worries and subterranean pain that surges inside her like a great ocean in the earth’s deep mantle. She is hypervigilant, which robs her unjustly of energy she could use better elsewhere. She has spells of deep exhaustion and deep distraction, lungs that clench on her like fists and skin that rips like paper; she has a memory that has betrayed her, erasing the good with the bad.

  But the opposite of trauma is not the absence of trauma. The opposite of trauma is order, proportion; it is everything in its place. It is one long green couch in a sunlit corner, looking like it was built for the space and waiting for you. It is an act of wilful seeing, a conscious choice about perspective. A bronze jaguar head guards a bedside table in Sandra’s guest room, its veneer melted off by the fire that swept through her rental unit with George. That is not why she keeps it. That is not its story, that is just something that happened to it once. She displays the jaguar now for the same reason she purchased it originally: she likes the way it looks. Here, in this home, in this light, the worst parts of Sandra’s past still prowl but they are forced to concede room to the good memories and the new plans and the life lived and living which take up much of the space now.

  Sandra’s unit extends out onto the back deck where she lost that toe. The deck is protected under its own glass roof, but just enough breeze blows through to remind you that, while you can knock down walls and change your addresses and the topography of your face, there is also much you cannot control. There are plants there and chairs with waterproof cushions and speakers through which she can play CDs and sip her Scotch while listening to Celine or Whitney or Madonna or Mariah or Babs or Bette. But regardless of what is playing and what noises it is drowning out, the deck is dominated by an eight-foot-tall Classical-style figurehead of a woman mounted on one wall.