“Don’t be melancholy. Listen, I found this poem for you,” she says. “A Rumi one.”
I forgot she was there for a workshop called Rumi and Ecstatic Dance, how she started reading Rumi in Spanish and then others I hadn’t heard of, Mirabai, Rilke, and the Lebanese one. “Listen to this,” she says and there’s rustling. “It’s perfect . . . This being human is a guest house.” She’s speaking slowly but it sounds as though she’s in a tunnel. “Every morning a new arrival. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they are a crowd of sorrows.”
“That’s beautiful,” I say.
“Even if they are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of furniture.” She pauses for effect. “Still, treat each guest honorably. She may be clearing you out for some new delight.” Then silence.
My mother slams a kitchen cabinet.
“See, it’s no coincidence, the furniture, that woman. Maybe you’re just supposed to be kind.”
The phone cord on the end of its leash, I move to the kitchen door. My mother’s halved a grapefruit for us, cutting sections, the small enameled knife with the curved blade. She’s not eating without me.
“I miss you, Señor Daniel,” says Isabel.
“I miss you too, my belle,” I say. “Thanks for the poem.” My tone sounds reedy, thin. I sit on the arm of the chair under the dim standard lamp and try to get back inside myself. Think of her birthday at the Immaculate Heart in Montecito, up near Santa Barbara. We made love in a small monastic room with paper-thin walls while the nuns in their habits observed the great silence, and then we looked out the window.
“What would I do?” she asks.
I pick up a tiny photo of my mother in jodhpurs leaning against the hood of a car. Her diary on the desk, her cursive letters. Daniel Arrives. December 21. She’s crossed off that day and now two of them since. Today is still blank.
“What do you mean?”
“If I was there?”
At the monastery, in the great hollow quiet, a sketch of Mary smiling from the wall, holding the baby, and I never wanted a child until then.
“Keep me out of trouble,” I say. “Or at least sane.” I look out through the curtains, the leadlight windows. My father coming back up the drive with the hitch in his step. “Save me from these people.”
“Even if they are a crowd of sorrows . . .”
My father stands on the crest of the drive, his full head of hair blowing across his face, pushing it back almost boyishly, surveying the farm as if it’s all still his. Then he turns to the house but it looks as if his legs are buckling. He’s staring up at the sky.
MY FATHER SEEMS shaken but he won’t say why, leaning against a garden fork that’s been planted in the lawn. He watches up at the slope of the roof, the slate tiles and the archipelagos of lichen. The heat already shimmers off the chimneys. “Sometimes I think I see old Uncle Worry,” he says.
I look at his pink-rimmed eyes, their whites scorched with rivers of brown. “He must be dead twenty years.”
“That’s what concerns me,” he says then casts it off as a joke, gives himself a shake. “I’m moving pretty freely this morning,” he says. “Got the horses up.”
The dinner gong sounds angrily. “Daniel, will you ever come and eat your muesli?” my mother bleats down the path.
“Could I come in with you?” my father asks. “I need to sit.”
“We can give it a shot,” I say and he allows a shallow laugh.
I put my arm through his. He seems to barely come up to my shoulder. My mother at the door with her hand on the gong, at the ready. “What are you two plotting?”
“Can Dad come in for breakfast?”
My mother’s lips clamp. “He’s not supposed to be in here.” She holds the door open, addressing me.
“He needs to sit down.”
“He can make his own coffee,” she says and walks back inside.
As I usher him through, my father’s eyes brighten. “Things are looking up!” he says.
“Jumped up corporal,” she says to him and then she starts at me. “My own poor mother warned me on that picnic blanket at the Melbourne Hunt. ‘He has a wandering eye,’ she told me. She didn’t mention hands.”
As my father sits down with his coffee, she leaves: the old rattle slam of the door. “She’s worse when you’re around,” he tells me, his knotty fingers around the mug, as if she’s my fault.
OUT THE SITTING room window, through the gauze of the fly screen, my mother’s in the Pond Paddock framed between two cypress trunks. With the boy. They look akin to something from a plein air painting. Her helper hefting a small pine tree up on his shoulder. My job. The old woman following in her gingham shirt. The word “chutzpah” rises from me, the boy’s narrow hands cradling the tree, like they cradled her callused toes. I watch them cross where the tennis court was, past the single rotted post where the net once stretched to the other post that has since disappeared. Where I’d play against her in the cool of evenings as the ibis landed in clumps in the high branches, nestling and squawking, tainting the bark with their guano. The fine red gravel tennis surface barely recognizable now; en tout cas, she always called it, all-weather, submerged by weeds and dust. Her strokes were clean and solid, shouting at my scratchy backhand: Lift your game, for God’s sake. Smiling as she sliced something by me or lobbed right over my head. I barely beat her before I turned sixteen. There was no outplaying her through cunning.
Now she herds the bare-chested boy to the gate, a rusty tree saw over her shoulders, the dog inspecting the rabbit warrens. Maybe the stroke has realigned her somehow, made her stronger, that boy as a project or replacement, or some strange mascot. But she’s not unlike the boy herself, both of them wiry, a similar height, both of them slatted by the shadows of the row of trunks. The paddock that had once been a forest of conifers before droughts and Christmases took their toll—just a few huge pines left in the distance, towering and yawing, aching to die. The pity of cutting the last young pine but at least she’s broken her moratorium on Christmas since the year she turfed my father out. She’s boycotted each Christmas since. What’s the point? she told me. All of you gone. It might as well be wartime.
She hangs the handsaw on the fence and instructs the boy. Her short gray hair seems almost blond in a streak of sunlight. They stand where the jonquils bloom in the spring, spawned by the first decent sunshine. She’s taking the tree from him. I rest my coffee mug on the sill, an instinct to tear out to help but she widens her stance and hefts the pine, the boy observing her from behind as she moves up the slope of the lawn. Then the boy stares up at the house, sees me. I’m not sure why I’m nodding.
My father still in the kitchen, drying breakfast dishes, mesmerized by a strange-looking Asian woman on SBS reading the news with a stilted British accent. Preparations for this evening’s Carols by Candlelight, Melbourne’s Christmas Eve ritual at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. The silhouette of my mother out on the veranda, pulling the living room fly-screen free. Taking the direct route.
“We still have doors,” my father says, cocky now he’s in the house.
“She’s bringing in a tree.”
I help her slide up the hard-wedged frame. The smell of pine needles breaking as she hoists the young tree inside, buried in it. The trunk grows tall as it emerges into the room.
“Watch out for my Wysocki,” she yells in to me, obscured by branches as the tree passes over her jigsaw table, the puzzle of children playing in snow. Pieces missing, as usual. If the puzzle had horses she’d frame it when done.
“I would have helped you,” I say.
She begins to clamber in through the window and I reach to give her a hand but she shoots me a look. For whom is she showing off? My father? That’s the part that somehow breaks my heart.
Inside, she averts her eyes, removing detritus from her shirt, and then checks that her hearing aid is still covered by her hair.
“Thought we’d stopped cutting down trees,” my father sa
ys.
My mother ignores him and I think of all those Christmases she’s been here in this big house alone, Earley off with Elsie in some restaurant, now me with Isabel and her homemade tree. Next year she says she wants an aluminum tree with a small rotating tree stand, color wheels, and retro lights mixed with her homemade ornaments. She says she likes the tinny smell of spray-on silver. I called her a huffer.
My mother sits herself down on her jigsaw stool, pretending she doesn’t need a breather. “I’ll get the butcher’s grass,” I say, the boxes of ancient decorations in the linen closet.
I step up on the wooden trunk full of bone china, reach for the cardboard case, the green plastic grass to wrap around the base. Everything still there, the basket of creased wrapping paper. She recycles strange things, socks as dusters, her hands inside them like puppets. Regifting was always normal here. When my grandmother’s memory was gone we’d rewrap the gifts she’d just given, present them back to her the same Christmas day, laying bets on whether she’d notice. If she did we’d stifle the laughter, my grandmother smiling politely. If she didn’t realize, the room filled up with a hushed sense of victory. It didn’t seem cruel to me then, just sport.
I think of the sterling silver bedside clock I brought with me for my mother this time, the same present left for Isabel, double-gifting for mother and girlfriend, I know. But I’d run out of shopping days and there they were—a pair of silver clocks.
On top of the carton of dusty decorations, I balance the butcher’s grass and a small frosted Santa with gray kangaroos in the sleigh. An old sleeping bag is laid out along the top shelf with a pillow. The pillow smells musty and sweet, creased with sweat. Does Reggie sleep in here too?
Back in the sitting room my mother perches, poised with a lit cigarette, as I set the Christmas paraphernalia on the couch. She hasn’t smoked since the doctor gave orders. “Why are you doing that?”
“I always smoke at Christmas,” she says, holding the cigarette up as a prize, supporting an elbow, not furtively as she used to, but boldly. A box of Craven As in her lap. The brand with craven in the name.
“Weren’t those discontinued?”
“They keep if they’re in a hard pack.” She nods down at the cigarette box and looks up as my father appears, maneuvering the familiar container of bricks he always uses as a makeshift tree holder. He grapples the barrel across the room, doesn’t look at either of us as he kneels, taking out bricks, his square hands working as they always have, his upper body still strong, but now all I really see is the strain in his face, the creasing of his eyes.
I unravel the green plastic grass. “Did you cut this tree on your own?” I ask my mother.
She coughs then breathes out a flute of smoke as if all the hard labor has been accomplished. “Just decorate it,” she says.
As I used to, I kneel and wrap the butcher’s grass around the rusted tin, once a feeder for horses, then used as a receptacle to drain the chemical toilet from my father’s old Airstream caravan, emptied down under the hedge. It appeared at my twenty-first birthday, full of rum punch on a table in the boot room. My father assured me it had been swilled out, but I was doubtful, advised my friends not to touch the punch.
As I release the tree it stands askew, so my father slides around on the floor, lodges a length of wood from the fireplace to right it. “Well done, Earley,” my mother says.
I fish the translucent Christmas star out of the carton, careful not to break the glass pinecones or the shiny clip-on birds with holly in their beaks, and my father raises himself up by his arms so briskly that I realize he has the upper body power of a paraplegic, compensating for his legs. He shifts an armchair over, secures it while I climb up on the cloth of the arm, and affix the five-pointed star by its loop to the top of the tree.
My mother takes a deep drag on her annual cigarette. “Gates, can you go and buy some cooked chooks and ready-made salads from that place near Brunt’s in Cranbourne?” Their play is over; she’s called him Gates. Memories of gates he left open and horses out on the road.
My father looks suddenly forlorn, his knobby fingers fumbling with a ribbon on an angel. “How many are you having over?” he asks.
“Not sure,” she says. “Perhaps I’ll ask your friend Sharen. She loves to get inside this house.”
“She’s probably having it with the Genonis,” my father says as if he thinks that’s funny.
“And where will you be?” asks my mother.
My father turns to me for support.
“You’ll be with Elsie,” I say. “Won’t you?”
“We go to the Chinese up in Hampton Park,” he says bravely. “With her sister.”
My mother butts the half-done cigarette on the sole of her shoe. “We can have a Chinese Christmas here,” she says, gesturing widely with her good arm. She slides the stubbed-out remains of her cigarette back in its box.
I sit on this narrow cot in this damp cabin and glance at the small silver clock he gave me. I’ve set it to Australian time and I keep trying to imagine him there on that farm I’ve seen in photos, where it’s already tomorrow. Already Christmas in that bleak house. Hot and dry while out this window the rain sweeps in from the Pacific and wipes the view away. I hoped I’d be relieved to be free of his moods but the yearning feels like hunger pangs when everything is supposed to feel so enlightened up here, but I’m getting unstrung. The Turkish eyes of Oresh, the yogi dervish who’s going to teach us to whirl. I’m afraid if he knocks I might not say no, just to spite myself. Those Turkish boys understand me. “Like the birds of the sea, men come from the ocean—the ocean of the soul.” Rumi knew about transcendent men, spiritual and curious, but I don’t want some doe-eyed, elastic yoga boy. I need my craggy Australian, the one who’s attached to the earth. If only I hadn’t let him go slip away into that farm world. The world he didn’t invite me into when I’ve shown him where I’m from. The Bronx, mi abuela, a glimpse inside her priestess room, her Madonna del Pianto, Lady of Tears, the statue of Jesus with dollars pegged to his hands and dogs at his feet. I knew it would be awkward, but still I took him—I wanted him to know.
Now I try to create a traveling altar, light a candle beside my photo of Amma, incense smoking from the wooden bowl and the white lily I picked floats in the water glass. The heater pants in the corner like a sick puppy as the rain comes down in black sheets. Tomorrow we’ll be dancing with sitar and drums, chanting our way through Christmas, and for some reason I’m dreading it. I drove five miles north up the highway in search of phone reception but his voice sounded so odd and conflicted, and he didn’t catch the significance of the poem. He didn’t even seem able to absorb it; all preoccupied as if he’s been possessed by that place. Then on the drive back, in the spray of headlights I noticed that tree by the road where the colored vintage dresses were hung with the prayers pinned to them, where Daniel stopped the car and we walked down. But the branches of the tree were now strung with Christmas lights and wedding gowns writhing white in the dark, blowing out toward the cliffs; some had ripped free. I watched what looked like a veil fly up into the rain and then a giant deer crossed the road in front of me, stood in the middle of the blacktop in the dark and stared. Right into me, as if it was a warning.
I want to head back out with my flashlight and find a land line but the office is closed and what would I say? “I thought you wanted to marry me?” That same alien ring tone and probably the message. “This is Tooradin Estate, the home of Ruthie Rawson.” His mother’s accent so strong at first I thought it was a joke. And who would put the name of their house on a telephone message. White people, my grandmother would say, but Daniel’s never felt that white, not American white. The way they fall in love but won’t take you home to meet their mothers. Still, here I am alone, whispering: “Don’t lose yourself.” Repeating. As if a prayer might bridge the distance. “Please don’t lose yourself.” But I’m not sure who it’s for: me or him.
CHRISTMAS DAY (THURSDAY)
I sit
at the head of the table, the spread of the cold collation before me, and tear a last piece of the succulent white meat free. The red-nosed snowman, candelabras, a gutted chicken. I watch my father carve the second bird, the sun arching in through the window behind us; he’s a stooped silhouette framed by the old velvet curtains, faded from orange to dust. In a long-sleeve shirt with a grim, unfestive woolen tie. My mother and Sharen in the kitchen as if they’re friends, when it suits, or maybe enemies, colluding to edge Earley round the bend.
The light from the twin window motes in on an empty tablemat, an extra setting. “In honor of Granny Rawson,” my mother announced with a smile that edged along her lip. Places set for the dead. But she never treated Earley’s mother with anything but ridicule, counted her as too finespun for here, or worse, discounted her as not so bright. “Should have stayed where she’d been born,” she said once, “among the dainties.” Next she allowed as how it was actually a setting for Elsie. “Just in case.” The maudlin Elsie who refuses to set foot in here for any occasion, not while my mother’s alive. And my mother who’s even done place-names, her ballpoint scrawl on cut-up greeting cards. But not one for Elsie. Just an unexpected Sharen smudged on shiny yellow. The dusty plastic orchids drooping from the Royal Doulton vase. Everything as it once was, save for that creased yellow card and Sharen’s laugh amid the clatter in the kitchen.
Heat sifts through the propped-open door to the end of the veranda, a door rarely used. A hundred degrees on Christmas day. I can barely remember what that means in Celsius. Burl Ives singing “Jingle Bells” from the record player in the living room, my mother and Sharen tending the Christmas pudding like sisters. The echoes of the dishes being extracted, the steamer on the back of the AGA stove. I think of the coins she’ll have buried inside the pudding mix, old shillings and pennies when I savored the taste as a boy. Traces of copper and silver cooking into the richness, brandy and breadcrumbs, grated nutmeg, raisins and almonds. The excitement of biting down onto an unyielding sixpence.
Wedding Bush Road Page 10
