That’s my mother you talk about, Danny boy, careful.
“Lucky the whole fucking place didn’t go up,” he says. He’s looking up at the pictures hanging. Some of himself when he was young on horses.
“Well, it wouldn’t have been ideal,” he says. Who talks like that? He pretends it’s funny but he’s not easy with it, I can tell. All I know is Ruthie dreams of these trees burning down and cracking on this big house roof like great big matches, photos of her riding on the beach and out hunting poor bloody foxes, and all the walls and bookshelves melting down, the fridge with the nut loaf I eat and her old rings and bracelets in their little leather boxes. She saw me take her jewry once but she understood, she don’t go to balls and parties no more, she just watch me take her value things, climb thru the manhole and keep them safe up in the roof.
She turn again and see me silent through this window glass like I’m the real son while the other one laughs all nervous in the corner. Leans against the desk and whispers to his girl, then he stops as tho’ he seen me too but I don’t move. Just feel my own smile creep along the flywire.
MY MOTHER STANDS up from her chair like a twig in her nightgown, looking out the window, her mottled sunspotted hands push about her lips. Then she turns to me. “Do you have everything you need?” she asks, rubbing at a blotchy terra-cotta cheek, her small bird face and small bird eyes. I point to the receiver, let her know I’m talking, but she doesn’t care about phones, walks right by me to the kitchen. I watch her hover over the ancient microwave, pressing buttons, waiting for her wheat bags to heat.
“I’ll call you when I get up there,” says Isabel and then we’re silent for too long.
“Have a fun trip,” I say. “Sorry about how I drove to the airport.”
“Maybe I should come out and drive you around,” says Isabel. I watch my mother, wheat bags in hand, wafting past me into the dark hallway, a sarcastic good-night wave over her shoulder as she heads up the hall, drifting to the left and nudging the old church pew. She told me it feels as if she’s spinning when she lies down in bed, calls her condition leftside neglect when it’s probably strokes and vertigo. Isabel no longer on the phone, just the dog perched among the sitting room pillows, watching something out the window.
I wheel my suitcase up the hall, catch a glimpse of Aunt Emma Charlotte’s portrait streaked with possum piss. It gives her a thin damp smile. My mother didn’t ask me who was on the phone, as though my life beyond here is not worthy of mention.
Through her closed bedroom door I can hear her radio blaring—3AW talk and oldies, the throaty roll of Burl Ives from her rickety bedside table. I no longer sleep in the shearer’s quarters, with its tongue-and-groove ceiling festooned with dusty horse-show ribbons, but in here. The Senator’s Room. The light unveils the familiar ornate molded roses on the fourteen-foot cobwebbed ceiling, a fresh rent where chunks of plaster have fallen, a dark hole up into the ancient slate roof. The room is named in honor of a series once filmed here, still decked out as the master suite of the television senator’s house: the blue floral wallpaper, the only wide bed in the place. My parents’ two single beds were once parallel parked in here, separate and unequal, in a house where men have found it hard and women have struggled on their own.
I heft my bag up onto the re-covered chaise and wonder which came first, my mother’s unwillingness to share her bed because she realized what she’d married, or that she didn’t share herself and he went elsewhere? First to sleep in the campervan and then with Elsie, out in his dead mother’s cottage on the lip of the bush?
It’s hard to imagine my conception here, thirty-five years this last November, my mother looking up into the cobwebs, a vague disgust in her eyes, or maybe just wondering what all the fuss was about. The irony of parents still strangely in love, even now, a love so fraught with disappointment it manifests as acrimony. A pattern I pray I’ll not repeat. Not with Isabel. I hope I’m not her compromise. I should call her back and say good night.
On the mantel a sepia photo shows my mother swinging wide at a polo ball, her body clinging like a monkey’s to the side of a horse at a flat-strap gallop. Beside it leans a picture of my father in New Guinea, standing on the beach with the others. I try not to look at him there. My childhood clock on a small, varnished table beside the bed, its hands set dead parallel at 9:15; branches scratch the corrugated veranda roof, up to the ceiling where possums gnaw the electrical cables. A vague smell of burning, as if the whole house is quietly smoldering.
Out in the dark I hear horses; one begins to canter, followed by the thunder of elderly geldings galloping up to the old pine plantation, pummeling the sandy earth. I climb into the Senator’s bed, the same cream-colored sheets washed and wound through the wringer, the vague smell of mothballs but also of wheat. Against my leg is a wheat bag, heated and carefully placed by my mother, even though the summer night is warm.
I try to sleep but lie awake, remembering the look in Sharen Wells’s eyes, the kind of stricken ferocity that has never quite left my mother’s. I hold the warm wheat bag against me and listen to the burr of my mother’s talkback radio, the groans of the cypresses; I imagine slipping into bed beside Isabel, her luxurious linens and silken skin, both feminine and boyish, her strength and fragility, and a childhood of her own. But I don’t dream of her.
“Reggie . . . son?” calling out in the night like an idiot when he’s probably up some tree or camped out in the bush. Just hope he’s not prowling the town giving folks the willies, like they say his father used to. Just pray that bastard Walker doesn’t find us this time coz I got nowhere to go and that Mitsubishi was a heap anyway. Even when it worked. I saw Daniel and Ruthie looking at it, that sad look in his fancy man’s eyes. Didn’t know what to make of me, did he? I kind of like that. The way he’s taller than Earley and half the age.
“Reggieeeee.” I shouldn’t be out here in the bracken in these new Uggs. Got ’em fresh off the steps from yoga class in Cranbourne, walked in barefoot then left early. Took my pick of the slip-ons at the door, didn’t I? Forgive me Jesus, you know I can’t help it. But you never did nothing for me, did you? Just gave me a son who scares me sometimes, and a husband who scares me worse.
MONDAY
I wake sweating in the night, light-headed, stare up at the molded leaves and roses in the ceiling, the hole in the plaster where there was once an attic. A dream where it was crammed with rows of wooden coat hangers, old leather handbags hanging from hooks that turned into small curing pigs. Is someone staring in the window? Sit up but there’s nothing, just the image of my mother’s head over the rung of that bathroom chair, looping through my mind. Playing with death like she’s found a new friend. Half-dried rose on the end of the bed. How the hell did that get there?
I feel as if I’ve been backed over, waiting here for the first sign of morning. Isabel driving up the coast, or maybe she’s taking the Ventura Freeway, the Valley after the rain. We could have been holed up in the canyon for Christmas Eve, Isabel making clove oranges, or painting ornaments with gold leaf while I bought turkey and vegetables ready-made from Bristol Farms, boysenberry pie from Greenblatt’s. We’d pretend I made it from scratch, tell stories of this place, romanticize what we could make of it some day—an organic farm, an origami farm, country restaurant, retreat house, eco-friendly subdivision.
When I next wake it’s morning, a hint of yellow sky slants through cypresses. But even in daylight it’s dark in this house. My mother letting Pip out onto the veranda, the sound of him trotting along to pee on the woodpile.
She knocks on my door. “Are you having Christmas without me?” As if I’m pleasuring myself or something.
“Christmas is Thursday,” I tell her.
“Oh.” She lets Pip in and I hear her trundle back to bed. Wonder what Isabel will be telling Mona, how I drove like a mad thing or didn’t say good-bye on the phone. A car coming up the drive has me up and looking out the window. A Camry station wagon with a train of dust behind it.
My father. He parks it under the hedge and clambers out with agonizing difficulty, his face like a twisted sandwich, the station wagon sagging so close to the ground. Shocking to see how one leg is now visibly shorter, his bad hip receding. A time he could run fast as my mother, but that was thirty years ago before he fell from old Billabong and broke his hip the first time. Now she calls him “Hoppity-go-kick.” Ordered off his own land for just wanting to be with a woman he could touch. If there’d only been one.
WHEN I GET to the kitchen my father doesn’t see me. Straining to reach for muesli and wheat germ from the tallboy, his eyes on the kitchen TV. Good Morning Australia still with that compère girl, Moira. He seems besotted with her elegant face on the screen. His face is rutted as a quarry, holes in his green windcheater, and an abundant shock of almost white hair. How much he loves it when a woman smiles.
As I grab a glass from the sideboard he turns. “I’d have put on clean trousers if I’d known,” he says, a square-jawed smile of his own. He places the cereals down on the table and limps over to hug me. I try not to stiffen, let his head rest awkwardly in my chest like he’s the boy. His spine bony in my fingers, sinking into itself, his hair slightly greasy. He smells of musty hay.
“Your mother wouldn’t tell me when you were appearing,” he says.
“I thought you were away,” I say, retreating.
Heading to the fridge he catches sight of Sharen’s letter on the table, searches back at me to gauge what I know. I try to soften my glare.
“I thought me and Sharen had an understanding,” he says, folds the letter and stuffs it up among envelopes in the mantel, above the old wood stove.
“Did you hear what she did to her car?”
He throws his chin up as if it’s kind of amusing. “Silly girl,” he says. “Thought I’d knock up some breakfast for Ruthie,” he says as if leaving the bed of one woman to set up breakfast for another is normal. He plucks a jar of kumquat jam from the fridge. “Then I’ll head out to assess the damage.”
I don’t tell him to keep an eye out for the glinting remains of his mother’s armoire. Let the scorched trumpet-leg chairs be a bonus. The burnt remnants of the Munnings. I wash my face at the kitchen tap, to cleanse myself of these people with the fresh icy water. Cupping my hands I drink water piped straight from the roof to the tank, the roof veined with moss, the water absorbing fungus and lead as it flows over the lichen and slate. An American thought, the obsession with hygiene. I fill a glass to take to my mother; wrigglers squirm in it like microscopic eels. I imagine them converting inside me, mosquitoes blossoming in the bloodstream. My mother must be full of them, and yet the water tastes pure as dew.
While my father sections a pink grapefruit, slathers it with sugar, I pull Sharen’s letter from the mantel. “Let’s talk about this,” I say, but he’s staring out past the television, through the pocks of the fly-screened window. Some shirtless kid lopes along the bottom of the Boy’s Paddock, right along the fence line with a whip or a stick and those three black horses following him, not chasing, but spaced out evenly as if he has them trained, their trots extending as if it’s some parade.
“What the fuck is that?” I ask.
“Sharen has a boy.”
THE BOY DISAPPEARS as if in a dream and I’m left standing up, eating Weet-Bix drowned in milk, topped with Manuka honey, watching out the smutched window, through the cobwebbed flies. Now there’s just a single Murray pine scratching up at the sky, the heat of the day already on the verge of shimmering, the fences stretching away to the bush. What kind of boy?
A fierce light punctuated by the distant hump of Sharen’s car, a purple scar rimmed with black and the dot of my father gimping down toward the windmill. I watch him shuffle, a short, stooped creature, on the way to inspect what he’s wrought.
“Are you ready?” My mother in the kitchen doorway startles me. Somehow up and dressed, her nightgown tucked into her jeans and still she looks thin as a picket, leaning precariously on the counter as if she’s just tipsy, a Fair Isle cardigan over the top of everything. “Let’s go down the town.” Her hair sticks up one side like a seawall. “What have you done with my list?”
There’s no evidence of a list, just Sharen’s letter she takes from the table. “That was addressed to me,” she says, stuffs it in her bag.
She attempts to hold down a crest in her hair, but she still can’t seem to raise her left arm properly—her hand suspends oddly as though balancing a platter. The dog stands by her, ready to go, as the arm descends limply. “The New Idea will be at the newsagence.”
A slight slur—she means newsagency, doesn’t she? Or is it “newsagent’s” here? I suddenly can’t remember. A prune-colored mark on her forehead where she must have hit the chair when she fell. I find myself eyeing the shape of her face. It doesn’t sag.
“We need to get the mail, don’t we Pip?” She speaks as if only the dog would understand.
I put down my sogging cereal. “Can we talk about your fall in the bathroom . . . remember?”
She moves farther into the kitchen as if on tracks, secures herself on the lip of the sideboard, and pulls the dog leash from its hook. She’s wearing her hearing aid—it signifies business. She selects a faded sports cap from the pile of them on the ledge beside the egg cartons, reaches for her blue dilly bag, and steadies herself again. She fossicks in the drawer. “Then we’d better get going before I have another one.”
Gently, I place my cereal bowl in the sink. “Wouldn’t it be better if we went in later on?”
Jauntily, she straightens the bag poised over her shoulder and glares out from under the sports cap, its World Equestrian Games logo from Stockholm, from our last big trip overseas. “Have you found the list?” In Sweden she hoarded food from the breakfast buffet, stashing lunch and sometimes dinner in the folds of her coats and pockets, refusing to pay for tickets on the underground, burrowing beneath the turnstiles as if she was twelve, her coat loaded with croissants and muffins, sachets of butters and small jars of marmalade, plastic knives. Apprehended by a subway guard, she advised him in English to get a real job, ran so fast he couldn’t keep up in his military boots. She was only sixty-five then, back when there were Christmases she still played cricket in the garden, the fastest bowler in the family, hitting “sixes” out toward the carpet-weed that now marks the dried-up pond. She had that kind of body—she didn’t have me until she was forty-six, back when women didn’t do that. She told me she never wanted a child until she had me, that she was too busy with horses outdoors. That I was quite the surprise.
The key for the post office box in her fingers, she counts the coins from her old vinyl change purse. She prefers change to the bright Australian notes she stows in their thousands in her leather hatbox in the linen closet. Satisfied with her funds, she hooks out her arm to be escorted. “Come on,” she says. “It might be our last.”
I feel the weight about the edges of my own face as I take her scrawny arm and follow her out past the meat-safe, her movement slightly stilted over the capeweed lawn. The ponies in the Pond Paddock lift their heads, alert at the sight of her. Her little skewbald Patch walks up to the gate.
“I’m a bit stringhalty,” she says, announcing it to the animals. “Hocks have gone a bit spasmodic.”
We pass the maidenhair fern and the septic tank where the grass stays green all summer. She veers me away from the Prius, her face contorting as if appalled by such extravagance. “They already reckon you’re from out of space,” she says, and I’m unsure if she meant to say it that way, but out of space is exactly how I feel, the world closing in on me and wafting away at once.
She spies the Camry. “Where’s your father?” she asks, as if he’s my fault.
“He’s gone to sort things out,” I say it as if that’s always been his strong suit.
“Let’s take his car then.” His car that’s actually hers.
At the dusty back of the Camry, she hands over the dog leash and stands free, attempting an
exercise, a calisthenic effort to swing her arms, but her left one just wilts, her sleeve like a long empty sock. “The extent of my damage,” she says.
I resist a desire to help her as she makes an effort to walk straight, determinedly picking her way along the side of the car. Her Levi’s worn like a teenage boy’s, her footfalls uncertain. I imagine her crawling around in her room to get dressed, feeling her way down the hall to the kitchen, and then standing erect at the threshold.
At the passenger door, she halts abruptly. Against the cypress trunk rests a stick, rough but tapered. It’s been whittled. “Look who made me a walking stick,” she says, wandering over to examine it.
“Who?” I ask, but get no answer. It looks as if it’s a garden stake, the sort she’d use to right a sapling. I hope her mind’s not been affected; I don’t dare ask her the day of the week as I barely remember it myself. A day lost in the air, the line drawn down through the Pacific, jagged and arbitrary. Landing three days shy of a midsummer Christmas.
I open the back door for Pip to jump in but he’s sniffing over at the tree, then yelping up into it with a pitch so high it’s barely audible. His front legs scuffle up the trunk as if he wants to climb.
“What you got up there, Pip?” I ask. The tree I hid up in as a kid, on a platform I made where two branches fork and I couldn’t be seen. The twin Jack Russells, Digby and Tudge, used to obsess over possums up into those branches, before the night they went out hunting and met up with a pack of wild dogs.
“Leave him alone, Pip.” My mother’s tone is fierce and the dog looks back at her, prick-eared, confused. Called off. She leans on the stake as if it’s a crook, her expression severe as though her facial nerves have been restored. Then she slants into an effort to walk to the car. “Get in,” she orders and the dog canters to her, cautious, obedient, jumps in the back.
Wedding Bush Road Page 4
