by Alice Pung
“Remember when we were at school, how poor gappy-toothed Gracey was always copying us?”
“Oh, Gloria, how do you get your hair so straight and perfectly parted in the middle? Do you iron it?” Mrs White was mimicking Katie’s mum. “That was her in Form Three.”
Mrs Newberry continued, turning towards me now, as if imparting sage advice. “No, I told her, ironing ruins the hair. It leeches the moisture out of it. It is very bad for the ends. I told her that as a filamentous biomaterial primarily composed of keratin protein, the best way to make her long curly hair straight was to give it a reverse perm, a treatment that would relax the protein structure. Two parts conditioner, one part bicarb soda, one part methylated spirits.”
“Mum, you are such a bullshit artist,” said Brodie affectionately.
“It’s perfectly safe, I told her, if you can do the limbo. Preheat your grill to 150 degrees,” Mrs Newberry continued. “Lay your hair out on a baking tray . . .”
My heart started to beat faster.
“Get down on your knees and tilt your head back, then shove the tray into the oven. Have a bowl of water nearby to cool your face. Remember, Gracey, I told her, it is very important to have that bowl of water nearby.”
“Ha! Especially if your hair catches fire!” laughed Mrs White.
“I can’t believe the girl was stupid enough to try it,” concluded Mrs Newberry, while Chelsea’s mum was almost crying from the hilarity of the story. Even Mrs Leslie was laughing.
“Was she okay?” I asked.
“What?” The women seemed to have forgotten about me, and Mrs Leslie turned my way. “Yes, yes, she was fine. She just got her hair singed at the ends. Her hair was so long that the grill was nowhere near her face. We knew she had attempted it because the next day at school her waist-length hair was gone. She had a Little Orphan Annie perm instead. Very cute.”
But I could tell she meant the opposite.
“If someone tells you to jump off a bridge, Lucy,” instructed Mrs Newberry, seeing the look on my face, “do you do it? Do you understand what we mean by that family being not quite right?”
“You’re just saying that because she ended up with Lachie,” laughed Mrs White, but she stopped laughing when Mrs Newberry swivelled and gave her a searing look.
“I thank my lucky stars every day I did not end up with that bastard,” she said, “and I would prefer you never mentioned him again. The only reason she got Lachie was she dropped her pants and I didn’t.”
“No way!” exclaimed Amber with glee. “Katie’s mother was a skank?”
“Queen slut of them all,” said Mrs Newberry, “eventually.”
“Unfortunate indeed,” said Mrs Leslie. “But you must never, ever mention this to Katie, because her mother passed away when she was just a toddler.”
“That prank was almost as good as the one we pulled on Mrs May!” laughed Mrs White. “Oh, that was classic. Do you remember that, ladies? Do you know about this one, girls?”
I watched the eager eyes of Amber, Brodie and Chelsea, who were like cats hearing the blade of a tin opener.
“You mean when you hid the oven timers, Mrs Leslie?” I asked.
“Oven timers?” Mrs Newberry turned towards Mrs Leslie. “What did you tell June Moon?”
“Lucy,” Mrs Leslie corrected her.
“Yes, yes,” she murmured. Then she turned to me. “What exactly did Dianne tell you about Mrs May?”
“That, umm . . . that all of you hid your oven timers in different parts of the Home Ec classroom, and that they went off at different times.”
“What? Lame! Lame! You didn’t even tell her the good part!” accused Mrs White.
Mrs Leslie shook her head slowly, mortified.
Mrs Newberry turned towards the other girls. “We greased the floor with Vaseline,” she said slowly. “We greased it nice and thick, and we worked our way backwards out of the room. Then we greased the door handle. When it was class time, we said to the old bat, ‘You go in first, Mrs May.’
“‘As I should,’ she retorted and marched in, expecting us to follow. We hadn’t greased the entrance, so it was only when she was halfway into the room and we heard her slip that we shut the door on her. Bang!” Mrs Newberry clapped her hands together like a gunshot. “The oven timers were a sweet enhancement Dianne thought up,” she explained. “Because cowardly Dianne here thought we shouldn’t go through with our Vaseline plan.”
Amber looked at her mother reproachfully, as if her killjoy ways were still evident.
“But you will be pleased to know that we incorporated your mother’s little embellishment as well, so while the old bat was down on the floor, the oven timers were going off, one every two minutes, until they reached a deafening crescendo.”
“Didn’t you all get into deep trouble?” Chelsea asked in awe.
“Of course not. We had a fall girl: Gracey Gladrock!”
Of course, I thought. Who else?
“Fortunately, she was also rather poor at Home Economics, which meant that, more often than not, her pies were the ones dropped on the floor. So she had good reason to pull a prank like that. Also, she was going to have to leave the school at the end of the year anyway. We just helped hurry her along.” Mrs Newberry pondered. “As I recall, I think they were even both at hospital at the same time – Gracey to have her baby, and the old bat recovering from her hip surgery.”
This was shocking to me. I thought that women like this, especially in houses like this, would sit and discuss art history or antiques or literature, Linh. Like my father, I had believed that educated people were gentler and kinder than the uncouth and unlearned masses – but now I wasn’t so sure.
At two-thirty on the dot, the doorbell rang and I knew it was my father. I followed Mrs Leslie to the front door.
Dad was standing there in his work uniform, a frayed shirt and navy overalls with “Victory Carpets” printed across the pocket. “Thank you for letting Lucy come over to study,” he told Mrs Leslie. “We very much appreciate it.”
“Study? Oh, no!” laughed Mrs Leslie. “Oh, no, no, no! Lucy’s been having a little fun. She’s been teaching us how to make your wife’s delicious rice-paper rolls. Come and join us, Mr Lam?”
“No, thank you,” replied my father, looking through to the dining area of the open-plan house, where everything was white and beige. “No, I have to be heading back to work.”
“On a Saturday?” asked Mrs Leslie, incredulous.
“Yes.” My father did not explain that he was not heading back to the factory, but home to help my mother sew. He did not want to admit this because sewing was not a manly pursuit.
“We could drop Lucy off,” said Mrs Leslie. “She is welcome to stay here as long as she likes.”
“No,” I said. “It’s very kind of you to invite me along, Mrs Leslie, but I really have to get home.”
“But wait – don’t go yet. I have something for you!” She went back into the house. I thought she was going to pack me a Tupperware container of leftover rolls to take home, but instead she emerged with a monumental bunch of flowers, bigger than my torso, wrapped in tasteful bark and brown paper and tied with twine. All the flowers were native plants with furry, bulbous heads and pointy leaves.
“Wow, thank you, Mrs Leslie – these are beautiful,” I lied.
“All Australian stock,” she laughed, as the others came to bid me goodbye.
In Dad’s car, I had to sit in the back because the front seat did not fit both me and the flowers. I couldn’t leave them in the back because they would roll around and smear yellow pollen all over the seats where my father sometimes placed completed rush orders for Sokkha.
“So, no study today, huh?” my father asked, and I was glad to be in the back where I could not see his face.
“No, Dad. She insisted I come over and teach them how to make rice-paper rolls.”
“That’s a good thing.” My father still had the ability to surprise me. “Those girls like an
d respect you a lot. They probably also can’t cook!”
The latter was true; definitely not the former. Oh, my father, he was still in love with the idea of me joining the three graces, just as Mrs Leslie was. It was as if they were trying to arrange a marriage.
“But what will we tell Mum?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, we’ll all work late tonight because tomorrow is Sunday. As if she will ask you about what you’ve been studying, eh!”
I looked down at the flowers and noticed a card. I pulled it out and opened it, and as I did, I saw $50 nestled in the fold. I looked at the front mirror. Dad still had his eyes on the road. I put the note back in the envelope, and put it in my pocket. I would deal with it later.
*
I came home, and that was when we had our big fight, Linh. You and me, that evening, after my visit to Amber’s house.
I needed to tell you all about Mrs Leslie and Amber and my time at their tense estate.
So, that’s what’s been up with you, you muttered, sitting on the bed in my room. I waited for you. You had the Lamb in your lap. “I didn’t know you were going to come,” I replied, because really, I didn’t. You had a habit of dropping in when I least expected. And every time you did this when my dad was around, he’d get pissed off. Luckily for you, Mum could stand you.
You write me these long, god-awful letters, but never see me anymore.
“I’ve been busy lately. And my letters aren’t awful.”
For months your letters have been filled with wankery like “bulging arsenal of multilingual profanities”, “sordid liaisons” and – my favourite – “flippantly audacious”.
So that was what this was about.
I couldn’t help it if I was trying to practise another language, I wanted to yell, because that was what this amounted to. You were just trying to mock my efforts because you thought it wasn’t “me”. And don’t blame me for “flippantly audacious” – that was Brodie!
But you didn’t even give me a chance to explain, to tell you about my terrible afternoon, to turn it into a funny anecdote, to show you what I thought of these ladies and their daughters. You just let loose.
Oh my God, you said, those girls are worse than Katie. What you are doing with them? If they were at Christ Our Saviour, we’d put them in their place. But you do nothing. I know you’re avoiding me because you’re ashamed of the ugliness inside you. So you just sit there sipping their little Italian soft drinks and enjoying their “culture” because they accept it.
“They don’t accept me,” I protested. “The Cabinet put up with me because of Mrs Leslie.”
I didn’t say they accepted you, you told me in no uncertain terms. I said they accepted the ugliness inside you.
You always told me the truth. By now you were leaving, but before you did, you had to have one last stab: By the way, your mother thinks those flowers are ugly.
“Get out now!”
When you left, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see you again.
The next day was a Friday, so after school I took the Lamb to the Sunray Shopping Centre. We stayed away from the basement level, which was where all the people my age hung out, because I didn’t want to run into you. I fed the Lamb a small tub of potato and gravy from Kentucky Fried Chicken; a quarter of it spilled down the front of his overalls and got caught in the buttons. He chuckled with glee, the little grot, and stuck a finger in his buttonhole.
Then I took him to the Postman Pat carousel, which had three seats – one shaped like Pat’s mailbag, one like his mail van and one like his black and white cat. You had to put a gold coin in a slot to make the seats move up and down for two minutes but Mum would never let us operate it – she said you might as well throw away money. Luckily, the Lamb thought that sitting on one of the special seats was the ride.
I placed him on the black and white cat, even though he wanted to sit on the mailbag, because there was already another kid there, a little girl with a tutu and fairy wings over her pink tracksuit.
“Git lost – we was here first.”
I looked up and saw a dinner-plate sized version of the little girl’s face, massive and scowling. Her mother.
“Have you got a dollar?” Before I had a chance to reply, she said, “Coz I’m not putting in a dollar for you too.”
To her, people like us existed to supply people like her with the cheap and lurid-coloured Chinese takeaway food they loved so much, or the $2 T-shirts they bought from Kmart every few months. In fact, the Postman Pat carousel had probably been made by people who looked like me. Maybe that’s why the seats were so small – to seat pert little bums like the Lamb’s, not the wide load of her poor junk-food-fed pup.
And it was then that I understood my attachment to Laurinda. I was wearing my uniform, and this woman – who lived on welfare and fast food – would never be part of that world. She thought that people like us were going to steal her kid’s job in the future, just as she thought we were trying to steal a free ride now.
It was cowardice that made me leave the carousel, not contempt – the contempt came later. In that moment there was only a flash of anger. I knew what you would have done, Linh, what you would have said. But you weren’t there. So I could only do what I could do. I took the Lamb off the carousel, and he started to grizzle, and then cry.
In the past, stuff like this would have got me all wounded and teary, but now it didn’t matter. Now I felt better than them, the whole lot of them in Stanley. You may not have minded being stuck there, but I was different. Now I could see a future where I didn’t have to fight such petty battles all the time.
As I felt the woman’s power over me shrink, I also felt something expanding in me – not empathy, but condescension. Before, I had accorded any adult automatic respect because that was the way I was brought up. But Laurinda had shown me that just because a person was an adult, it didn’t necessarily mean you had to respect them.
Now I understood that these people were bogans, and being a bogan was not a point of pride. It was disgusting, in a squint-faced, cement-mixer-voiced way, that a grown woman would buy herself cigarettes from Safeway and a moment later decide to deprive her child of a ride on a Postman Pat carousel just because another kid was also sitting on it. That was the kind of petty mentality they had, the sense that everyone else had it better.
“Don’t worry, Mr Lamby,” I said. “We’ll find you something more fun!”
I took him to Toys “R” Us and let him ride on all the scooters and three-wheeled tots’ bikes they had. I bought him a Push Pop. I gave him a spin through the air as we walked towards the bus stop. He was so tired his head rested on my shoulder, drooling on my blazer, but I didn’t care.
*
On the train back, some blonde girl was using her boyfriend’s lap like an armchair, and his chest like a pillow. Remember how we used to look down on girls like that, Linh? The skanks who got with the first St Andrew’s boy who looked at them?
This boy was all angles, and he had an Adam’s apple like an origami corner, but his hair was dyed the colour of salted caramel and he had warm brown eyes. The girl’s hands were clutching the sleeves of his denim jacket, her face burrowed in his shirt the same way a sick person would burrow their face in their bedding.
From the back, you’d think she came from the warmest, sandiest beaches of Bondi. She lifted her face from her boyfriend’s chest to get some air. Her eyes were swimming-pool blue and rimmed with black kohl. They lasered down at my uniform and settled on my droopy socks with their over-stretched cheap nylon hem, then quickly rose up again. Then she flashed me a smile.
She had spotted me straightaway, but it took me a while to recognise her beneath the peroxide and contacts. “Tully?” I tentatively asked.
“Hi!” she exclaimed, and introduced me to her boyfriend. “This is Alonzo.”
“Hi,” I said to him.
“Hi.”
She smiled up at Alonzo. “This is my friend I was telling you about – the reall
y smart one who got into Laurinda.”
“Oh, Tully, don’t be stupid. You’re the really smart one.” I was aware of how ridiculous that sentence sounded only after it came out.
“But you’re the one who got in! Alonzo, I swear this girl was one of the smartest girls in our school.”
“Tully is going to be dux of her school,” I told Alonzo. “I’m mediocre. I’m just going to fade away.”
“Dux of a shitty school,” murmured Tully. “And only get into a crappy uni through a povvo scholarship where they bump up your score out of charity.”
“Aw, come on, Tully.”
“You know it’s true!”
Since Alonzo was there, I couldn’t offer Tully any polite consolation, or express my guilt about getting the scholarship, or even praise her Filipino boyfriend’s cuteness. I wasn’t sure how much she had revealed about herself, or even what kind of person she wanted to be with him, and I didn’t want to blow it for her by mentioning her studious ways if he thought she really was the bad girl she was pretending to be.
But in the space of a few moments we had assessed each other and understood just how different our lives were going to be. Tully had resigned herself to doing VCE at Christ Our Saviour, with the Spanish girls whose parents would cheer at their TAFE hairdressing graduations, and the Vietnamese girls whose mums and dads wanted them to marry the young accountants in Sunray. The moment she didn’t get the Laurinda scholarship was the moment Tully felt her chance had passed. Smart people won things, and went places, and got out of Sunray. And she was still here.
Everyone thought that I was headed for bigger things, but I wasn’t trying to make Tully feel better when I told her that I was mediocre. At Laurinda I was average, at best. I had no outstanding talents.
She shifted about on Alonzo’s knee so that she would be more comfortable, although she was so thin that she was probably sitting on bone. Tully had always been skinny, but now she looked like she’d just stepped off the boat. And I could not stop staring at her creepy electric-blue eyes.
“How are Yvonne and Ivy?” I asked.
