Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls

by Danielle Wood

  But although the feeling was leavened, it did not disappear entirely.

  ‘Okay then. Well, what do you want to see first?’ she asked, manufacturing an extra degree of enthusiasm that had failed to arise naturally.

  ‘Whatever pleases m’lady.’

  She chose the martini dress, slipping it off its polished timber hanger and stretching out the waistline between her hands. It was tiny. There was no way. She pulled at the fabric again, but there was no give in it. Oh well, she thought, he would soon see what happened when you bought a woman clothes without having her try them on first. With the amount he must have spent, they would surely exchange. But when she slipped the green dress over her head, the fabric fell easily down over her rib-cage, tucked in to her waist, and flowed over her hips as if it had been made to fit no other body than her own. She twirled in the mirror, piled her hair on her head with her hands and twirled again.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, although what she was thinking was I’m beautiful, and the mirror reflected her delight and surprise.

  Justine’s friends came down on cheap flights for a long weekend and she met up with them for lunch in the city.

  ‘Oh my God, Justine, you look fantastic!’

  ‘You’ve lost so much weight. In a good way. You look amazing.’

  ‘I hardly recognised you. You look so chic.’

  ‘What have you done to your hair?’

  ‘Where did you get that dress? It must have cost a mint!’

  ‘Look at your nails. Are they fake?’

  ‘You’ve definitely been going to the gym.’

  ‘They’re not what I think they are. Are they? Are you kidding? They’re real? They are real Manolo Blahniks and Henri bought them for you himself? You didn’t even pick them out?’

  ‘What, he pays for everything? And you don’t even have to pay him back? There’s got to be a catch. Is he kinky in bed or something?’

  ‘Speaking of kinky, do you know what Manolo Blahnik calls that little line where your toes press up against each other? He calls it “toe cleavage”.’

  ‘He’s a shoemaker. It’s his business to be a foot fetishist.’

  ‘Are they comfortable? I don’t think I could walk in them. I’d never be able to go anywhere, I’d just have to sit around looking decorative.’

  ‘He bought you two pairs? What are the other ones like? Go on, describe. Every detail. Please tell me they come in red too.’

  ‘Talk about falling on your feet.’

  ‘Where do you find a man like that? I’m moving to this city. That’s it. Definitely.’

  ‘A man who buys you clothes. And shoes. And clothes and shoes like that. You hang on to that man, Juz.’

  A Word from Rosie Little on:

  The Shoe Goddess

  Either you are, or you are not, one of the Shoe Goddess’s chosen ones. And, as it happens, I am. What does this mean? Well, let’s say that I have visited a shop and seen a pair of shoes that I like, but left without buying them. If the Shoe Goddess wants me to have these particular shoes, then she will whisper to me, for several days ‘the red shoes, the red shoes, the red shoes’ (if, in fact, the pair in question is red — which often, in my case, it is). She will whisper for about a week, by which time I have usually got the message and returned to the shop to pick up the shoes, knowing that they are cosmically destined to be mine.

  I have learned, though, through bitter experience, that if I fail to follow the divine guidance of the Shoe Goddess, I will be punished. The very next time I spy a pair of adorable shoes, the Shoe Goddess will intervene to ensure that they are available in every size but mine. Or, she will simply abandon me to my own judgment and allow me to buy a pair of bad shoes that are some combination of uncomfortable, unflattering and far too expensive. If, on the other hand, I listen to her words of wisdom, I will be rewarded. Perfect shoes will be on sale, or the last pair in the shop will be in my size. I must have pleased her tremendously once, for she directed me to a shop that sold very cheap sample shoes, each and every one of which was size six and a half. Can you imagine, an entire shop full of shoes in nothing but your own size? Bliss!

  But, you know, there are always those who take things too far. When all’s said and done, shoe fetishism is an ism, and we all know how people can lose their heads over those. You might think that Imelda Marcos was a true devotee of the Shoe Goddess, simply by virtue of the vast number (some say 3000, but she has only admitted to 1060) of pairs of size eight and a half shoes found in her Manila mansion after the coup of 1986. But I doubt that the Shoe Goddess approved of her at all. Personally, I don’t believe that the Shoe Goddess wants anyone to own more pairs of shoes than they can wholeheartedly love at one time. And she certainly wouldn’t want shoes to be confined for months and months on end to even the nicest or most cleverly designed of shoe racks. She would be conflicted about shoes being held captive in museums, too, for while she would argue that people should have the opportunity to admire the great shoes of history in three dimensions, she would, in her heart of hearts, rather that they were out being worn down to nothing on the feet of women who loved them.

  Justine had been living with Henri for three months when he announced that he had to go overseas on business. She half-expected that he would leave her with a ring of heavy keys and a prohibition against entering the smallest room in the house. But he only gave her a copy of his itinerary and told her not to forget to arm the security system when she went out.

  One weekend while he was away she took his car, a sleek black creature with wide leather seats and arm rests, and drove all the way home. She couldn’t listen for long to the cymbal-clashing discordance of the orchestral music he had in the CD player, so she switched over to the radio, losing and finding stations as she left the city behind and crossed the state border, heading inland. She turned up the volume and sang, uninhibited, inside the dark-tinted windows; bought thickshakes from the highway drive-throughs and threw the empty cups on the passenger-side floor.

  She arrived a little earlier than she had expected on a sunny afternoon following a morning of rain. Nobody was home and the daisy-spattered back lawn was steaming. Justine left her high heels on the porch and jumped off the edge, plunging her feet into the breathing green. Sherry woke from her old-dog dreams under the apple tree and shambled over to be patted. Justine caressed the soft fur at the old collie’s throat and remembered how she was as a pup, setting and stalking before making a mad barking dash at kids running through sprinklers. It made her think of the paddling pool that was probably lying, deflated, under the house, and of little fat hands sticky from the meltings of red icypoles. She crouched down and spoke to the dog in a playful growl. Sherry did her arthritic best to answer the challenge, hunkering down into the set pose, elbows on the ground. Then Justine wrestled her to the ground, where they were both content to lie, for a moment, panting in the sun.

  When she got too hot Justine retreated to the porch, brushing ineffectually at the grass stains on her cream linen pants. She peered down through the trees to the bottom of the garden and saw that her father had taken down the old swing set that had been a present for her fourth birthday, and planted out a vegetable garden in its place. It made her feel partially erased. But she was pleased to see her oldest boots, their leather bleached and cracked, still in the tumble of outdoor shoes beside the back door. She was sure they were hers. Until she put them on and felt how they slopped around on her feet, their elastic sides not even close to hugging her ankles. Stay-at-home Jill must have had a pair exactly the same. And Justine’s own boots must, after all, have been thrown away.

  Henri came home from overseas with a large white box tied up with pale blue ribbon.

  ‘I think it’s time we had a party,’ he said, placing the box on the bed and kissing her neck as she unravelled the loops and bows. She threw open the lid of the box to find a party dress in the same dainty pearlescent blue as the ribbon.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, lifting the perfectl
y folded dress out of its box by its shoulders and holding it against her body while her mirror-self did the same.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘You like it then?’

  ‘Oh, Henri.’

  She loved the length and the shape of the sleeves, the neckline and gently tapered waist. She loved the name on the label; a name she had only ever seen written in the pages of the most expensive of fashion magazines and had no idea how to pronounce. She loved every single thing about the dress, except:

  ‘I’m not going to be able to fill these out,’ she said, despondently, once she had calculated the amount of bosom required by the gathering at the bodice.

  ‘When will you learn to trust me?’ Henri asked.

  Justine took off her clothes and stepped into the watery cool of the pale blue silk, expecting to be disappointed by puckers in unfulfilled fabric. But as Henri manoeuvred the zip up the length of her back, she felt her breasts bloom into the softly gathered cups.

  On the night of the party, it was as if the house had dressed up too, and it felt to Justine slightly strange, slightly remote, as if she were seeing it for the first time in a tuxedo and starched shirt. She had that special, but faintly useless, feeling in her own body, too; her newly polished fingernails too easily spoiled to touch things, her coiffure too unsteady to move her head too far to either side. She didn’t know where to put her hands, or indeed herself, as Henri’s guests began, in the early evening, to arrive.

  The women were not young, but they were beautiful and dressed to be stroked in furs and feathers. The men guided their women through the hallways firmly, with fat and signet-ringed hands. For a laugh, Henri had brought the mannequins down from the attic. He had put them together with mix-and-match limbs, and found wigs only for some. But they were each dressed in party frocks — of indigo, scarlet, saffron, aquamarine — that were nearly as beautiful as Justine’s own. On plaster-cast forearms Henri had balanced the caterer’s platters. Some of the mannequins stood in corners, or within the frames of French windows, offering up the delicate nibbles; others were stationed beside linen-draped tables, gesturing invitingly towards sparkling forests of brimming champagne flutes.

  Justine stood at the edge of a group of guests, listening, waiting for any of the speakers to join her to the conversation — by way of eye contact, at least. But with their glances they made a spider’s web, and Justine could only watch it grow in complexity with each fresh exchange. She drifted away and tried several other groups, hovering on their peripheries until the embarrassment of her apparent insignificance became unbearable. She looked over to where Henri held court, his chest proud and puffed and covered by a waistcoat of the same claret colour as the fluid in his glass, but she did not want to go and simper at his side. She would show him that she could manage, that she could make herself useful. And so she went into the kitchen and took the plastic film from the top of a fresh platter of hors d’oeuvres.

  She moved, purposefully now, between conversations, platter in hand, but the guests either waved her away as if she were an insect, or seemed not to see her at all. She made two complete circuits of the rooms into which the party had spread before giving up. She leaned on the wall just to one side of the open fire and popped a shrimp into her mouth, bursting its curled body between her teeth. Henri was looking at her from across the room, and suddenly she understood exactly what it meant to be caught in someone’s gaze. She felt herself to be held there for a moment, trapped. Then she was released, Henri’s eyes travelling to the ebony-skinned mannequin, who was bald but dressed in scarlet, standing with a plate of cheeses in her arms. He smiled and flicked his eyes back again to where Justine stood, identically posed. His smile broadened and she felt, first in her neck, and then simultaneously in her elbows and her knees, a stiffness that was creeping, seizing, cramping, aching. Before it reached her feet, her hands, Justine dropped the platter and ran. For the door. For her life.

  Justine is living at home again now. Most evenings Jill brings home movies from the shop for Justine to watch, but she’s seen everything in stock. In the afternoons their mother tucks a crocheted blanket around Justine’s immobile legs and wheels her out onto the porch. Justine hates it, the horrible parody of it, her mother sitting with her as if she were a toddler, turning the pages of picture books prescribed by the woman from the rehab clinic.

  ‘Say “duck” darling,’ her mother says, pointing. ‘D-uck.’

  ‘Uck.’

  ‘Like this, love: d-uck.’

  ‘Uck.’

  ‘Not quite, sweetie. D-uck.’

  When Justine gets tired, her eyelids fall closed with a faint click.

  ‘Don’t get frustrated, lovey. I know you’re trying. You’re improving so much. Just have one more go and then we’ll give it a rest. Have a try. D-uck.’

  ‘Daaaaa-ck.’

  ‘Oh, clever girl! Well done. That’s right. Duck. Oh, you’re doing so well.’

  This is what her mother says, but Justine can see her wondering how it is that they have been so reduced, down to words of one syllable. And Justine has no means by which she might explain.

  She had been found early in the morning after the party, face down in a garden bed freshly planted out with pansies, less than two blocks from Henri’s house. In the days that followed, the owners of the pansies told her mother their side of things, a hundred times.

  ‘I said don’t touch her,’ the woman said. ‘I said that’s the way you get stuck with a needle. I thought she was a druggie, you see. But he doesn’t listen to me.’

  ‘I thought it was too late,’ the man said. ‘When I put my hand on her arm she was all hard and cold. I rolled her over and she was stiff as a board.’

  ‘Then I had a good look at the dress,’ the woman said. ‘And I knew she must have come from a good home.’

  Even now, two years later, Justine holds the same pose, both arms bent ninety degrees, the fingers of each hand locked together in neat salutes. And still the doctors stick to their story and call it a stroke. They just ignore the things that don’t make sense. Like the almost synthetic texture of Justine’s hair, which no longer seems to grow. And the fact that her feet, two sizes smaller than they were when she left home, are arched and angled downwards, toes crimped together and pointed, as if in permanent acceptance of a high-heeled shoe.

  ART

  Eden

  On the first day, Eve began. Well, it wasn’t actually the first day. It had been four and a half weeks since they moved, but she had needed that time. She deserved a little holiday, and boxes didn’t just unpack themselves into a new house. But now that she felt rested, and everything had been put away, she was ready to begin.

  First, she would need breakfast. She couldn’t begin on an empty stomach. And since it was such a significant day, she felt, breakfast should be somewhat celebratory. One of the farewell presents from the girls in the office was an apron printed with a picture of Michelango’s David. She put it on, wishing they could see her now: ducking out to the shed in her gumboots to get an egg from underneath one of her own hens. She made pancakes, stacked them with maple syrup and banana slices, and took her plate out onto the veranda.

  It was on this veranda that Eve had fallen in love with the place. The real estate agent, a chestnut-haired woman whom Eve was fairly sure was on Valium, had brought them out onto it to show them the view. ‘Paradise,’ she had sighed, parking her tortoiseshell glasses on top of her head and gesturing to the thoroughly unexceptional rural scene before her. In one direction there were rugged-up horses in a field of apple-tree stumps, and in the other an orchard of gnarled trees that dropped economically unviable fruit onto the grass. But to Eve, it was Paradise, this old pickers’ hut flaking its green paint into a valley an hour’s drive from the city. She loved the ruffles of sweet william along the driveway and the letterbox that perched in the forked branches of an old peach tree. Inside, the hut was daggy and funny, with chequered linoleum lifting in all the corners and incongruous, o
stentatious light fittings. But after the sale of the city apartment, they’d been able to buy it outright and still have enough left over to buy a nice car for Adam, to take the sting out of commuting.

  It was still dark in the mornings when he came into the bedroom to bring Eve a cup of tea just before he left for work.

  ‘Today’s the day, hey?’ he had said this morning, and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Yep. Today. Today, I begin.’

  Eve finished her pancakes and washed the dishes. In the shower, she shaved her legs and noticed that her toenails were quite long. When she got out, she trimmed them with clippers. Then filed them into a nice shape. And since they were such a nice shape, it seemed a shame not to paint them. And so she did, in a shade of polish called Rose Madder Lake, which was exactly the same name as that of pencil number twenty-one in her set of Derwent Watercolours. Rose Madder Lake. It really ought, Eve thought as she applied a second coat, to have been the name of a famous synchronised swimmer. She sat for a while with her feet in front of the fan heater. And smiled when she realised that she had just begun. No-one could say that she hadn’t painted anything today.

  On the second day, Eve decided, she would begin properly. But what to wear? Everyone knows that there is no sense beginning a new gym campaign without a series of new lycra outfits; or horse-riding without jodhpurs and a nice velvet hat; or ballet classes without pointe shoes and a tutu. And Eve knew that she could not begin, seriously and formally, as a painter until she was dressed as one.

  She had given away all her office clothes as a kind of insurance against going back and this had left her with a wardrobe full of smart casuals and party clothes. Back when she was only a hobbyist, dabbling with her paints in the sunroom of the city apartment on weekends, she used to wear Adam’s old T-shirts and track pants. And they wouldn’t do anymore.

  There was a small town about twenty winding kilometres away. It had suffered a fatal blow ten years back when the arse fell out of the apple industry, but was being kept on life support by the hippies who came in once or twice a week from their shacks in the hills. It had no bank or post office, but it did have a café that made reasonable chai, and an op shop. Eve calculated that she could be back home inside an hour and a half.