Too Many People
Jansey filled out her name on the ACT Department of Community & Family ‘Personal Safety and Self-Defence Class for Women’ application form in large, bold capitals (‘JANSEY LONG’), noting for the trillionth time what a stupid name she had, and by extension, what a stupid mother she had (‘MRS DEBORAH SANDS’ née Schimek), so that before she’d even got to line two, the address, she was performing stress-relieving tummy-breaths like Bijou, her physiotherapist, had taught her at neck class (‘from the diaphragm, Jansey, from the diaphragm: inhale, one, exhale, two...’), where she’d been sent by her GP after the ibuprofen failed, to learn to control her cramping rhomboid.
She didn’t even know she had a rhomboid until a month ago when her mother’s fourth marriage disintegrated (Deborah was controlling – surprise – so Graham Sands was spending two lunchbreaks in every five at the Best Western Terrace Motel, on the corner of South Gippsland Highway and Camms Road, where he was discovered in flagrante delicto with Tania, the front office manager at Cranbourne Cement & Roofing), a minor detail Jansey gleaned from an email her mother dispatched, touching on a variety of topics including the weather and how nice it must be up north this time of year; a seemingly trivial observation Jansey rightly interpreted as code for ensuing visit.
In the moments before checking her messages Jansey knew she shouldn’t do it. She was just wasting time between packing, stunned she had managed to incorporate so much stuff into her tiny flat (three years of Vanity Fair and People magazines, a drawer full of cosies for her teapot collection, her teapots), wondering where it would all fit at Brendan’s, if it would fit. This was the real reason for her mother’s visit, she assumed, to eyeball the boyfriend. God, she regretted sending that change-of-address notice. Only ten more minutes for the Diet Coke to metabolise and she would never have had that what-the-heck moment and included the woman on the list. Well, at least not for the standard-issue announcement – a photocopied picture of her and Brendan holding hands beneath a childlike drawing of a house, crowned by a linked thought-bubble spelling out ‘cohabitation’ along with the phone number and address. But then she was beginning to understand life was like that, a random set of apparently insignificant happenings that could all line up and boom, before you know it, totally fuck with your composure (or land you in Sydney for a couple of days to rendezvous with your mother, which for Jansey amounted to one and the same thing).
‘Will there be much yelling?’ she asked as she handed the completed form across the desk. Jansey pictured a room full of awkward women, the too-skinny and the lumpy-thighed, all swaddled in unflattering tracksuit pants and oversized out-of-commission windcheaters, standing around in a circle holding hands shouting ‘No’ in unison at their top of their lungs. She didn’t mind the idea of yelling, she could see the sense of auditioning a few new phrases for the repertoire, but somehow practising seemed like a waste of resources (she preferred to reserve any literal shouting in case she might actually need it one day to repel an assailant or to attract a good Samaritan’s attention).
The attendant had thick, black-pencilled eyebrows and wore too much foundation. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, her lazy eye sliding down Jansey’s gaze like ice-cream from its cone on a hot summer’s day. ‘I can leave a message for the teacher if you want?’
‘Oh, no, that’s okay,’ said Jansey, perhaps a little too quickly. She regretted sounding curt, but knew the phrasing of such a note could be nothing less than entirely problematic.
Back in the Corolla she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and squeezed her shoulders together, forcing herself to count down from twenty as she slowly released them. It always made her feel better, this exercise (when she remembered to do it), and after a couple of jean-popping exhalations she decided her mother’s visit wasn’t going to be so bad. It was only two days. Anyone could survive two days. They’d visit Darling Harbour, catch the Manly ferry, have lunch in Chinatown, maybe take a stroll along Circular Quay and up through the Botanic Gardens. It would be fun. ‘Piece of cake,’ she said, turning her head to check her direction as she backed out of the parking space, and then she lifted her foot off the clutch too fast and stalled while the car was still in reverse.
When she got home she found Brendan on the couch in the lounge room watching telly. Oprah Winfrey was interviewing some kid about his collection of vacuum cleaners and the boy was up in front of the studio audience demonstrating his favourite model, an upright bagless self-propelled. There was a dirty cereal bowl on the coffee table beside the box of Rice Bubbles and the milk.
‘Check this out,’ said Brendan. ‘He’s only six.’
Jansey watched as the boy vacuumed under and around Oprah’s chair, then took off to the edge of the studio to show his way with corners. She thought he had good technique. The studio audience gave him a standing ovation. At the ad break Brendan turned it off.
‘You’re home early,’ Jansey said brightly, trying to compensate for her disappointment. She’d been looking forward to a couple of hours to herself, time to futz around in the bedroom figuring out which clothes to pack, skim-read Vanity Fair, take a bath.
‘I thought you might want some company,’ said Brendan. ‘How’s your day?’
‘Oh, good,’ said Jansey. ‘Nothing much. I dropped off the library books.’
She knew she should tell him about the self-defence class – it wasn’t as though he’d object to her going, he’d probably think it was a good idea – but she wasn’t in the mood for one of his earnest discussions (and certainly not about the relative merits of jujitsu versus karate), territory Brendan too easily gravitated toward, particularly when he was anxious. ‘I thought you had a meeting,’ she said, changing the subject.
‘I rescheduled.’
‘Ah.’ She stood in the doorway nodding, then decided to make a cup of tea. ‘You want a cuppa? I’m putting the kettle on.’
Brendan got up and followed her into the kitchen. ‘Janse, you know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. It’s not like you owe her anything.’
Jansey’s shoulder still ached. She lit the gas under the kettle, then reached for the Nurofen which, although substantively useless, had graduated from its position on the first shelf in the bathroom cupboard to the more accessible mantel immediately above the kitchen sink, beside the aspirin and Panadol. She loosened the childproof seal and rattled three milk-white caplets into her hand. ‘I know I don’t, but it’ll be okay,’ she said, then she threw the pills down the back of her throat, swallowing them without so much as a sip of water.
Sydney parking was always a nightmare. Jansey didn’t bother torturing herself, but pulled into a garage complex that brazenly advertised its extortionate rates in fixed half-hourly increments.
‘Do you have a reservation?’ the restaurant manager asked.
‘Yes, it’s Sands,’ said Jansey. ‘But she’s already here.’
Jansey had picked out her mother as soon as she walked through the door. She was sitting at a table by the far wall reading the menu, her bubblegum-pink chiffon shirt so low-cut her cleavage was almost visible from the street. Although she was now officially-separated-soon-to-be-divorced, Jansey guessed her mother was still going by Sands, her most recent married name, to avoid reverting to Schimek. It would be her fifth time. In high school she had been called schmuck, of course, then various anti-Semitic epithets throughout teachers’ college, right up until she’d tied the knot (though she maintained that the Longs never really relinquished their suspicion of her Hebrew heritage even though she’d changed her name to theirs, had dyed her hair blonde, and had successfully taken to drinking vodka on the rocks). When Jansey was born, Deborah Sands was adamant the child be registered as Catholic.
‘Ahoy there,’ said Jansey in a sing-songy voice as she leaned forward to give her mother a kiss.
‘Hello, darling, let me look at you,’ said Deborah, pulling away.
‘You shouldn’t wear horizontal stripes,’ said Deborah Sands.
‘Why not?’ asked Jansey. She could feel the effects of the Princes Highway pressing on her neck and shoulders. She shifted her feet and readjusted her posture to a position Bijou called ‘neutral’.
‘They don’t suit your body type,’ Deborah Sands said.
‘What’s my body type?’ asked Jansey, sitting down.
‘Don’t be silly, Pansey. You’ve always been short-waisted, like your grandmother. She ballooned right out after Poppa died.’
‘Come on, Mum.’
‘Ssh, not so loud,’ said Deborah Sands, touching her finger to her mouth, her eyes darting about the room to see if anybody heard. ‘No need to give away trade secrets.’
It was amazing. Exactly seven hundred and forty-two days since they’d last seen each other and all Deborah Sands cared about was concealing her age from a bunch of uninterested strangers at Poseidon’s seafood restaurant. Jansey examined her mother’s face. She thought she might have had some work done around her eyes, but basically the woman was just as she remembered, all mascara and lipstick and professionally whitened teeth.
‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ said Jansey.
‘Some of us are lucky,’ Deborah Sands replied.
Jansey decided she needed to use the bathroom. She excused herself and headed for the mermaid door opposite the kitchen, where she sat with her jeans down around her ankles and squeezed her shoulders, using her diaphragm to inhale on one, exhale on two, breathing slowly and evenly, while she squared her feet against the geometric pattern of the black and white linoleum tile and tried not to cry. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen ... Just once she wished it wouldn’t be like this. Just once. When they visited with Brendan’s parents, his mother was always so charming and doting and she’d make ginger fluff sponge and would cluck over them and Brendan would bitch about her later, the way she wouldn’t let him do anything for himself. Jansey was winding herself up, rapidly preparing to trip off into a heady pool of self-pity by replaying the only scene of maternal physical affection she could think of – when she was seven years old with the flu and her mother rubbed her back for what felt like hours (though it was probably only five minutes) – when someone rattled at the door.
‘I’m busting,’ the woman called.
‘All right. I won’t be a minute,’ said Jansey, annoyed but fully aware she’d been relieved of a bout of pathos she was almost above enjoying. She pulled up her pants and flushed the toilet even though she hadn’t relinquished a drop.
When she came out she could see there was another person sitting at their table. ‘There she is,’ came the familiar voice. It was the same cloying fake English accent Jansey had known all her life, her mother’s best friend since high school, Linnie. Like Deborah, Linnie had also married the first man who proposed to her, but, in an extensively gossiped-about departure from convention, she had taken herself off to London first (at barely eighteen, the day after her last exam), where she quickly hooked up with Stanley (the son of the inventor of a commercially successful self-cleaning oven), a short, florid British fellow who conveniently died within months of their nuptials and left her half his money. Were it not for this fortunate turn of events, she and Deborah Sands might have built a friendship based on genuine affection. As it was, they seemed to need each other very much, Deborah because Linnie had everything Deborah wanted, and Linnie because she knew it. ‘Mum tells me you’ve found yourself an accountant?’ Linnie shouted as Jansey approached.
‘Oh Pansey, I meant to tell you, Linnie came along for the trip,’ said Deborah Sands.
‘He’s a policy adviser,’ said Jansey, glaring at Linnie, who had helped herself to some bread and was using Jansey’s knife to butter it. ‘And he’s doing an MBA.’
‘Right,’ said Linnie, eyes on the bread. She took a bite. ‘Makes a good living, I bet. So is he going to marry you?’
‘Linnie!’ said Deborah with an exaggerated roll of the eyes. ‘I told her not to say anything,’ she announced in Jansey’s direction. ‘I told you not to,’ she said to Linnie.
‘What’s the big deal?’ said Linnie. ‘I just want to know what’s going on. You don’t mind, do you, puppet?’ A fleck of tan sourdough crust was stuck to the corner of her left upper lip.
‘I think it’s meant to be poppet,’ said Jansey.
‘That’s right, I’m mixing it up with crumpet.’
‘Isn’t that gorgeous?’ Deborah said to Jansey. ‘The English and their expressions.’
Outside a group of buskers had taken over the road, young women and men in lurex bodysuits, their faces painted, carrying sticks and juggling balls. Traffic stopped as they ran between the cars, juggling in pairs across the bonnets.
‘I love Sydney,’ said Linnie. ‘Where else in the world would you see that? You’ll have to come up to the hotel later,’ she said to Jansey. ‘The suite’s enormous and we’ve got a fabulous view.’
‘Yes, you’ll have to come up,’ said Deborah. ‘It’s huge. We can see right across the harbour.’
That night Jansey called Brendan as soon as she got back to her hotel. ‘Don’t ask,’ she said when he questioned her about her day.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, what did you have for dinner?’
‘Pasta and salad.’
‘Me too,’ said Brendan. ‘What kind of pasta?’
‘Pesto,’ said Jansey.
‘Me too,’ said Brendan.
‘It’s kismet,’ said Jansey.
‘Speaking of peculiar things, a letter came for you today. Well, I think it’s for you. A registration receipt for a women’s self-defence class?’
‘You opened it?’
‘It was addressed to me,’ said Brendan.
‘What do you mean, it was addressed to you?’
‘It had my name on the envelope.’
‘But it’s mine,’ said Jansey, her voice orbiting the ceiling rose. ‘Why’d they address it to you?’
‘I don’t know, Janse. It’s not my fault.’
He was right. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long day.’
‘That bad, huh?’
‘Linnie’s here too.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Brendan.
Jansey snorted. ‘I wish I was.’
After a fitful night of half-dreams and hot sweats, Jansey acknowledged her wake-up call with a slow growl of thanks, temporarily unsure whether she had the flu, a hangover, or both. Somehow she had managed to kick all her bedding onto the floor. She stood up and almost tripped over the pillow as she headed for the shower.
As she dried her hair Jansey imagined Deborah and Linnie getting themselves up and ready in their hotel suite. Jansey would never have accepted an invitation to stay with them, but it riled her that the suitability of her accommodation hadn’t come up. Linnie had seemed perfectly contented with Jansey’s brief explanation that she was staying in a nice, smaller hotel just around the corner, as though the proximity was akin to comfort, which she supposed in terms of their needs, it was (not suiting them to have her any closer than they needed her to be, but well within the vicinity just in case).
These kinds of thoughts weren’t helpful. Jansey knew this because she’d had similar convers
ations with herself many times before, most recently at approximately four am when she had told herself, as authoritatively as is possible in the middle of the night when you’re completely out of your mind with lack of reason and rest, that the personnel at the ACT Department of Community & Family probably were incompetent, that they were hopeless in fact, completely bad, but that it didn’t matter to her because she wasn’t going to take it on. In the scheme of things she didn’t care. She was bigger than that, much bigger, so much so that she was simply going to let it go and get some shut-eye.
Still, in the light of a sleep-deprived morning she reached for the phone. She knew it was as good as smacking herself in the head, but circumstances being what they were she couldn’t help herself. ‘Why did you send my boyfriend my receipt?’ she said when she finally got somebody real on the other end of the line.
‘Surname, please?’ the voice requested.
Jansey was sure it was the lazy-eye lady. She spelled out ‘Long’ and was put on hold again until the receptionist located her details.
‘That’s the way we do things,’ the woman eventually answered.
‘But I paid with my credit card. Everything’s in my name.’
‘Doesn’t matter. That’s how the computer’s set up. There’s a main person for each household. One family, one listing.’
‘But that’s absurd,’ said Jansey. ‘We’re not a family. We might not even know each other.’
‘That’s how we do it.’
‘So you’re telling me no matter who enrols at that address, you’re going to send the information to my boyfriend?’
‘Yes, Miss. That’s how the computer’s set up. Can I help you with anything else today?’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jansey, who was aware her face now resembled one of those ridiculous dried-apple carvings you find in souvenir shops in Tasmania. ‘Even accepting what you’re saying, why the hell is Brendan listed as the head of our family? Why isn’t it me?’
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