Reading Madame Bovary

by Amanda Lohrey

  When I get home there isn’t time to read the mail. I dump my shopping on the bench and switch the hot plates on – still with my handbag over my arm – because they take an age to warm up on this old stove. And I think of when I used to cook an interesting meal nearly every night, only now I haven’t the time and the kids wouldn’t eat it anyway (‘Yuk, not curry!’) and I spend two hours cooking something mediocre that nobody likes and then feel let down, and on bad nights hate myself for not making more of an effort, for not being innovative and surprising, and Frank doesn’t like pasta and Ben can’t eat dairy foods because of his allergies but the only dessert he likes is ice-cream which he can’t have, except the tofu variety which he hates (‘Yuk’), and some nights I just give up. They can have a toasted bacon sandwich and a banana or go to bed hungry.

  I think of my grandmother, Audrey, who worked cleaning floors for six days and on Sunday cooked the household to a standstill. I used to watch her at the stove, a bad-tempered fairy godmother, conjuring up clouds of cholesterol. Eggs and bacon and fried bread for breakfast, hot jam tarts for morning tea (puff pastry loaded with butter, I’d watch her cut the rich yellow knobs into the dough and then roll out the layers), roast lamb and baked everything for lunch with steamed sultana pudding or suet jam roll with cream and custard. After lunch I’d feel so full, so terribly heavy that, even though only nine years old, I would have to go and lie down in the spare room until, around 3.30, I’d be summoned for afternoon tea. Scones and sponge cake, and sardines on toast … We’d catch the train home before tea proper; God knows what they ate then. Audrey all day at the oven and the pine bench by the sink, little and plump with short dark hair and a perpetual frown of concentration. She lived to be seventy, my grandfather until eighty-one. How is this possible? Was cholesterol different then? On our Sundays my children seem to eat nothing at all. If I won’t weaken and give them pies and chips and pizza they sulk into an unholy fast. And the fat man in the dirty echoing tunnel sings ‘wasting away – wasting away’. Huh! When they were little I’d lie awake at night and work through, in my head, what they’d eaten for the day. Especially Rebecca. Half a green apple here, a quarter of toast there, some butter on a spoon, a knob of raw carrot, a small bowl of plain white rice. Would she make it into the next morning? Would she survive the week? Now I’m too jaded for this evening review: they’re still here, even if they do bring home their lunchboxes with more or less what I put in them, except for the fact that their sandwiches look as if they’ve been drop-kicked around the schoolyard and the pieces reassembled for my benefit (‘Why can’t we buy our lunch?’). And then there are those nights when Frank looks dolefully at his grilled fish, sans sauce of any kind. We used to have ginger and chilli, his eyes say, and fennel and coriander. We used to have lamb with apricots and sour cream and roasted almonds (‘Yuk!’ the children cry). I can’t bear his reproaches, my eyes stare back at his. ‘Cook yourself,’ they say. But Frank is more or less unreconstructed – sausages and chops are his entire repertoire, and then under protest. I made the mistake of trying to impress him with my culinary arts before we were married and I’ve been paying for it ever since.

  Frank helps me clear away. There’s something Edwardian about his gesture of lifting the tablecloth off, opening the back door and flicking the cloth outwards to loosen the crumbs. It’s one of his unfailing gestures after a meal. Tonight he’s in a hurry, stuffing his white Kung Fu outfit into his old Puma kit bag as he strides out the door. I call to Rebecca to come and take her herbal remedy for her eczema. I call three, four times, I am exasperated, I storm into her bedroom to find her, for once, quietly drawing a map; some homework. She looks up at me, calmly.

  ‘Yes, mother,’ she says, with grey, insolent eyes.

  By eight I seem to have been in perpetual motion and still not to have done the washing-up. The dishwasher is broken and yet to be fixed. Frank does the washing-up on the nights that he’s home but these are increasingly few. (I have exempted the children from washing-up in term time on condition they do a minimum of one hour’s homework.) A working woman must be ruthless about the house: where have I heard this?

  Frank is anally retentive. The washing up must be done immediately after dinner or he becomes anxious. I like to sit over the table and relax, and talk, but Frank takes your plate away while you are still chewing on the last bite. This is the driven trivia of marriage; it is the insupportable resentment of the anal-retentive male who must have petty order, petty control. What would happen if we left the dishes overnight? The cockroaches and the ants would scamper across the mucky plates, copulate in cups and shit on spoons. So what? In the morning the house would still be standing; the trains would still pull into the station; Frank would not be lying in the bath with his throat cut.

  I cannot stand his grim, frantic tidying up. It’s not as if he could just do it. No, he has to do it as a wordless judgement on me; his martyred reproach. Frankly, Frank, it would be a turn-on for me to go to bed with the dreck of dinner strewn across the kitchen. Frankly, Frank, this would say abandon; this would say relinquishing of control, Frank; kiss of death to the superego, Frank; mess, cockroaches, cunt, spit and dribble, nipple in mouth and hair in teeth. Who wants to fuck with the glare of a clinical kitchen in their head? Frank?

  Not me.

  Afterwards, I don’t know what to do. I could iron. I should bake a cake for school lunches. Instead, I sit at the table and flick through Business Review Weekly and Vanity Fair. I like to read at the kitchen table, don’t ask me why. My mother used to like to take a nap on the kitchen floor, on the large rectangular brown mat she had in the centre of the room by the pine table. It was a sunny kitchen, warm, the hard surface was good for her back, she said. She’d take a cushion from the chairs, for her head, and lie for forty minutes, placed so that the sun came in through the window and warmed her back, and she’d doze, half in dream, half in reverie. Sometimes when I came home from school I’d find her there, in a ladylike version of the foetal position, eyes closed, hands placed just so, sometimes still in her apron. ‘If you’re tired, Mum, why don’t you lie on the bed?’ I asked once. ‘Because then you go into a deep sleep,’ she replied, ‘and that’s when you get bad dreams. In the late afternoon.’

  It’s just after nine when Frank gets in. He looks brighter; this martial exercise always seems to perk him up. He’s a big man. When he was young, when I first met him, he had a buoyancy around the chest which I found irresistible. Now, often, he looks tired around the chest, caving in. Do you study men’s bodies? I do. Why not? They study ours. Frank pats my hair, something he does when he’s in a good mood; casts a quick glance at the sink (trying to look and see if the washing-up is done in a way that doesn’t look as if he’s looking and I won’t notice), takes in the clean sink, and reverts to what is on his mind from his class.

  ‘Grant thinks I should take another test,’ he says.

  ‘Another test’ is the next step to the black belt.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he says. ‘You going to be long?’

  I look up from my Vanity Fair. ‘Not long.’

  Frank hates to go to sleep alone. He likes me to come to bed at the same time as him, which annoys me. Another way of keeping me under control, colonising my time. Nevertheless I tend to drift in there, not long after him. I marvel at how quickly and cleanly he can go to bed. One minute he’s dressed and up; the next he’s in bed, looking as if he’s been there an hour. I have to check the doors and windows, check the kids, take off my make-up, shave my legs, retouch my toenails, remember at the last minute to get the meat and bread rolls out of the freezer for the next day. Something, always something …

  Outside, the thick, sticky air is beginning to move. That ominous and stirring wind that ushers in a thunderstorm is blowing into our claustrophobic little courtyard. I hear the loud splat of the first heavy drops against the roof and look out the window at that weird exciting glow; rosy, energising. The sky is a warm charcoal grey and then suddenly the ligh
tning, the startling, forked flash above the trees. It makes me want to rush out onto the veranda and be a part of it. There is something so cosy, so enlivening and optimistic about a thunderstorm. I can’t think why they use it as a frightening backdrop in horror movies. On a hot, humid night it’s a wet and fiery joy. It makes me feel connected to the earth.

  Soon I will have the satisfaction of lying in bed in the heavy rain, in a house I own and that I work to pay off. I will feel the solid walls around me; the warm, mellow street light through the window; the new guttering that I know won’t leak; the dog on the mat, sighing; my king-size bed, my Guatemalan throw-over, my photos of the children. And I will be lulled by the steady clatter of the rain on the tin roof, the whispering drip from the guttering.

  Frank is propped up in bed, naked. The hair on his chest is still dark. I wonder when it will go grey and whether it will still turn me on. His neck is just a shade too thick, which looks all wrong in a shirt and suit but good when he’s like this, a torso framed by the sheet, just him and the sheet. Swaddled in the sheets. Frank the big baby. He is twisting the hair on his chest into dark tendrils and anxiously reciting aloud the names of his martial arts moves.

  After I’ve settled in between the sheets he hands me a printed sheet. ‘Test me out,’ he says.

  We work to the bottom of the list. ‘C’mon,’ I say. ‘Give it a rest.’ This isn’t how I imagined foreplay would be, ten years on, conducted in Chinese. He’s such a worrier; he knows it all backwards. The pointless repetition.

  ‘I’m tense,’ he says. ‘Bite me. Bite my back.’ He lies on his stomach and I lean over him and make a circle of bites around one shoulder. ‘Harder,’ he says. ‘Give me pain.’ I see the little red marks of my teeth, up close. He exhales, heavily. Stretches his arm out and pats me on the knee. ‘Good girl.’

  Lights out, and we both lie, silently, wondering if we’ll go on with it. It’s around this time that Ben wakes: he’s psychic. We know that if we start, soon we’ll hear him cry out with bad dreams. Our parents fuck and we have bad dreams. Our parents don’t fuck and we have bad dreams. We, the parents, remember only the bad dreams that intervene. With every lewd, sly, suggestive initiating gesture we hesitate; we wait for the demons to activate. For me it’s particularly off-putting; not so much for Frank (testosterone has tunnel vision) but for me, if the children stir, or murmur in the dark, it’s the end. And of course, I can’t make a noise. How many lovers’ cries are strangled by the thought of the nursery and the light sleepers under ten?

  Frank sighs. ‘Have you made a booking?’ he asks. His voice is low and hoarse in the dark. He is tired.

  ‘No,’ I whisper. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’ I switch on the light.

  ‘Damn,’ he says, for a multitude of reasons, and I switch it off. Then I fumble in my handbag which I keep always by my bed, in case of burglary, and feel for my notebook. My notebook is stoked with lists. Lists are the fretwork of my day, how I hold my life together. I draw out my list for tomorrow and in the dark I scrawl, at the bottom of the page: Ring Russell Hotel.

  Dream

  I have a dream about my son, Ben. He is seven years old, a difficult age. I dream that he is shrinking. I’m looking after him and he’s growing smaller and smaller and I’m running around in a panic, but he just keeps shrinking and then, finally, he’s only a few inches high. But it’s alright. He looks up into my face and smiles. He forgives me. It’s alright because he always forgives me.

  When I wake I think back to when the children were toddlers, when I was at home and I would walk them over to the playground and the bright yellow swings. I remember those hot, still afternoons when there was a strange calm in the park.

  I remember my daughter in the backyard, on the trampoline. I remember standing in the kitchen, chopping Chinese cabbage on the board; pale green and white frills under my German cleaver. I feel that someone is watching me. I look up and out the window. My daughter is jumping on the trampoline, looking back at me. She jumps and jumps and turns and falls to her knees and bounces up onto her feet and turns and looks over at me, then turns again, and jumps, her legs wide and high in a scissor jump, and looks back. I wave. Just as I wave, she turns away. Her look fluctuates with each jump, each turn, each bounce and spring. There is something in her look that is perplexed, angry, self-contained, blithe, pre-occupied, a half-smile. My little dancer: remote, buoyant; up, down; up, down; up, down.

  Jump, turn away.

  Jump. Wave. Turn away.

  Around four in the morning, Ben wakes again. He cries out. I get up.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask, sitting on the edge of his bed.

  ‘I had a bad dream.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I dreamed I was in the supermarket, or somewhere like that, shopping, and I looked around and couldn’t find you and I went outside and in the street there were all these women who looked like you from the back, they were wearing coats like yours and had black hair and I called out ‘Mum!’ but when one of them turned around she had a witch’s face.’

  I hold his hand and press the inside of the palm, gently, at regular intervals, until I can hear his light snoring.

  Roald Dahl has a lot to answer for.

  And now I am wide awake. I go out into the kitchen to read but there’s nothing there and in desperation I reach for the remote control left lying on the table and switch on the small black portable television that sits atop the fridge. There’s a sudden blare of sound as hastily I adjust the volume to barely audible. The ABC is showing a documentary on famine in Ethiopia. It reminds me of when I was having breast-feeding problems with Rebecca and I was sitting up, night after night, trying to get her onto the nipple, and feeling sorry for myself. One night, as she nuzzled beside my ample breast, I watched a similar programme in which a young woman stared out at me with black, despairing eyes. Her breasts were grey and shrivelled and the emaciated baby in her arms was dying.

  I looked down at my sleeping child. I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

  I am a First World Person.

  Who are we?

  Last night after work I passed three beggars on my way to Wyn-yard Station. One of them sat on the edge of the footpath, right on the corner as the peak-hour traffic crawled behind him, just inches from his stained army surplus pants, held up with string. His head hung down, he did not look up, he did not make eye contact. He held a piece of cardboard, on which he had written:

  Please give

  I am starving

  I was in a hurry. I walked on towards my train, just as I had hurried past the other two beggars who also squatted on the grey bitumen at knee height to the throng of passing commuters. Why didn’t I stop and empty my pockets? Why didn’t we all stop and beat our breasts and cry, ‘Who will look after these men?’

  In bed last night I couldn’t sleep. ‘We are so self-absorbed,’ I whispered to Frank. ‘We don’t do anything to help anyone. What do we do? We rush around, but what do we do, really?’

  Frank was drowsy. ‘I coach the under-10 football team,’ he murmured. ‘I’m doing my bit to keep manliness alive.’

  ‘Don’t be flippant.’

  ‘Go to sleep, Kay.’

  Go to sleep Kay. Go to sleep Kay.

  I can’t sleep.

  Who are we? I think. Why are we here?

  Why did I walk past three beggars? Not one, Frank, but three.

  Like everyone else, I walked on.

  Core values

  One evening Rebecca announces at the dinner table (for once, no-one is at a class and we are all eating together) that she has been elected delegate from her class to a special student forum.

  The forum has been set up so that the students can join the staff in drawing up a new behaviour code of Core Values.

  ‘What values?’ Frank asks.

  ‘Core values.’

  ‘Core?’

  ‘Yes, core.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Bec rolls her eyes like h
e’s a moron. ‘You know,’ she says.

  At the special parents’ meeting (Frank is away) I learn that the school has embarked on revising its discipline code in the interests of Quality Assurance. Students and pupils both are being asked to draw up a list of Core Values such as Truth, Honesty, Responsibility, Kindness and so on.

  Some parents oppose the idea, though they are strangely inarticulate in their efforts to say why. One woman laughs and says: ‘In my day the bishop came in and gave us a pep talk.’ This sounds so witheringly archaic that we all feel uncomfortably out of step.

  A week later I ask Bec how her work with core values is coming along. ‘Okay,’ she says, with quiet aplomb. ‘Anna Stuart Jay gave a talk today in assembly.’ Anna Stuart Jay is the school captain.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said someone had called one of the Koori girls a black tart on the bus the other day. And when she was reported she said she hadn’t done it when she had, so she violated the core values of Truth and Honesty.’

  ‘You mean, she lied.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No, you didn’t …’ I check myself. She is eleven years old. Lately it seems that I am always nagging her about something. I will take this up with the principal. Wait until I tell Frank – Frank the purist about language. He will sigh and shake his head.