A Girl in Three Parts

by Suzanne Daniel

  “Bye, Matilde,” I say hurriedly. No one else has a grandmother around.

  Boarding the bus, I quickly work out that the younger kids are all up front and the older ones have claimed the back half of the seats. I’m looking for a spot that’s free and appropriate when my heart suddenly snap-freezes. I hear Matilde behind me: “Keep moving, Allegra; there are empty seats for us farther down.”

  I’m not imagining it. Matilde has actually got onto the bus. The high school bus. There are forty cool kids, my grandmother, her brown handbag and me…the biggest First-Form Dropkick in the entire history of Sydney Girls High before I’ve even walked through the school gates.

  A girl about my age is sitting alone with a black case that is taking up the seat next to the window. Matilde gestures and the girl slides across, lifting the case onto her lap to make room for the old lady I’m pretending I don’t know.

  “Here, Allegra. Opposite, here is an empty seat. Sit down safely before the bus moves off.” Unfortunately it must be clear to everyone that the old lady certainly knows me.

  “This is Allegra, my granddaughter. It is her first day at the selective school.”

  Then, leaning over, she confides to the girl, as though she were another grandmother, “She has the nervous stomach.”

  The girl looks across at me and says to us both, “I’m Annabel…Renshaw. It’s my first day too. My stomach is fine.”

  “And what instrument do you have there in that case?” asks Matilde, pea-sized impressed.

  “Oh, this one is a viola. But I also play the flute.”

  “The viola and the flute. This is good. I will change seats with Allegra so you can sit next to her. She plays the piano…very well.”

  Annabel Renshaw seems relaxed about that. I’m not relaxed. I move but cannot speak. Apart from the nervous stomach, I now have the threaded throat, the shamed shins and the blushing brain.

  A few stops along, Matilde announces: “I must leave you now, Allegra. Have a productive day with your studies. Goodbye, Annabel.” She gets off the bus and walks back in the direction of home.

  “I thought your grandmother must be a teacher at the school when she first got on the bus,” says Annabel.

  “Nah, she just thinks she’s my secret bodyguard,” I manage to say.

  To my relief Annabel laughs, out loud, in a sharing-a-joke way, not a mean way. Then she starts chatting so steadily that my stomach settles slightly and my humiliation is soothed.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  High school is better than I expected, and by the end of the second week, I get word from Patricia.

  Dear Ally,

  How are you???? I’m in the library and meant to be working on my essay for english about Charlotte’s Web which is a stupid kid’s book about a pig that talks to a spider and the spider is trying to save the pig and writes stupid mesages in her web. I’m in the lowest english class so the books i have to read are litel kids books and I don’t even feel like I’m in high school. You probbly read this bloody book when you were about 6. Any way I’m not working on the essay, becuase im writing to you and becuase a pig talking to a spider is dumb and I don’t know why when they think you are stupid they make you feel more stupid by making you read these stupid books.

  Apart from all that my high school is pretty good and the best part is I get to do dress making with Mrs. Oaks on wensday afternoons for my electave. We are making a poncho and when we’re finished we’ll make a circuler skirt. They have this room with a whole row of sowing machines and we get to use them and can work on them at lunch time if we want to finish something off.

  Even though I’m still hopeles at reading and spelling I got into the second top class in maths and Miss Sutherwaites told me after I got 82 percent in our last test, that another mark like that and I might find myself in the top class. Pretty good hey????

  Mums got a job at the gas station so I walk there after school and do my maths homework until she nocks off. Dez who owns the place said that when I turn 14 I can get a job there too, I think he likes mum. Actualy I know he likes Mum. So before then I’ve been babysitting for our neighber when she gets a mygrain which is not that much but I get 50 cents an hour witch I put in the hippy van tin. The kids are a real handful but I do drawing with them and tell them stories and let them ride on my back and that settles them down a bit.

  How do you like your high school???? I bet you’re in all the top classes.

  Have you made friends yet with anybody????

  There is a cool chick here named Deb. She’s funny and she has her own horse that she keeps at her cousen’s farm. She said I could come out with her one day and she’ll teach me how to ride that horse, some of the other kids in my class are ok too.

  Guess what??????? Mum says that we are going to come to Sydney again maybe at Easter so then me and you could get to see each other. Maybee you could sleep over at Wendys with me this time???? So Ally do something that makes your Nana proud so she says yes!!!

  Theirs the bell so I have to go to PE.

  See ya!

  From your best friend,

  Patricia

  I miss Patricia badly. The girls at my new school wouldn’t be interested in sewing or babysitting or working in a gas station. Annabel Renshaw writes short stories in her spare time, mostly science fiction with female protagonists who save the planet. I’ve read over some of them and they do seem pretty good. She plays her viola in a mixed-youth orchestra group and wants to be a barrister, whatever that is. She tells me that her father is a barrister—one of the best at the bar—and that her mother—like any spirited woman—is a women’s libber.

  “There’s more to life than waiting on your husband,” says Annabel toward the end of geography. “Mum and her friends are big fans of Germaine Greer. I found a copy of her book stuffed under the lounge cushion after one of their coffee mornings.”

  And with one thick eyebrow raised, as though she’s about to classify me, Annabel asks: “So, Legs, are you a women’s libber?”

  Thankfully, the bell rings.

  Joy doesn’t wait on her husband—probably because she doesn’t have one. And even if she did, it’s more likely that he’d be waiting on her. I think she could be a spirited woman, so this afternoon while making the mint tea at Number 25 I decide to ask Joy if she’s a women’s libber. I’m hoping there might be a hint of what a women’s libber is, exactly, wrapped up in her answer.

  “Well, yes…yes…I’m proud to say that I am, Ally.” Joy’s voice drops half an octave like she’s taking an oath. “It surprises even me, but as it turns out, I am…I am a women’s libber.” She reaches across the corner of the kitchen table and pours the mint tea between our two pottery mugs. Joy doesn’t usually pour the tea.

  “What actually makes someone a women’s libber?” I ask, sipping my tea.

  Joy settles in, the way she does when she’s about to go through her emotions: “Life has a way of shaping you, darling,” she says. “You’re born into certain circumstances, which you just accept—blindly at first—and often for quite some time, but then things happen that prompt you to start to think and, God forbid, start to question.

  “And when you’re finally given the chance to connect the dots with the experiences of other women, you realize that you’re not the only one thinking these thoughts or questioning the world in this way.”

  Maybe Joy thinks she’s answering my question, but I’m still pretty hazy about what being a women’s libber actually involves.

  “When I was growing up, I simply accepted that men were in charge: in charge of society and in charge of me. My father was a decent enough man, quite loving really, but he was very much the head of the house and he told us what to do, where to go and what to be…well, actually…more precisely…what not to be. My poor dutiful mother just accepted it as the wa
y of the world, and my dear sister Joan was very pretty, but not what you’d call exactly bright.” Joy gives me a small wink.

  “But I…I always wanted more, and I secretly dreamed that marriage would be a delicious escape from the rule of my father. When in fact”—she cools her tea with a steady blow through Just Plum–colored lips—“I only exchanged one form of control for another, with the new twist of also being told what to think!”

  “What happened to your husband, Joy?” I ask, unleashing my wondering about Rick’s dad, my grandfather.

  “Well…Frank started out as a good solid fellow, pet, but he was never my choice for a husband. My father was so taken with his job and his family that he encouraged—well, more accurately, insisted on—our engagement being announced before Frank left for the war. But unfortunately he came back a broken man before it ended….” Joy looks slightly sad, but surprisingly, no tears are flowing.

  So I venture to ask, “Did he ever hurt you, Joy?”

  “Not physically, thank God, but when a man is a wreck he’s bound to sabotage the lives of those around him. He was incapable of love, simply incapable: giving or receiving it. And he constantly made me feel the fool, which I put up with for a long while in exchange for the bills being paid. But as time went on, he became impossible to please: unbearable, controlling and completely unlikeable. The cancer didn’t help things, of course, but really, he was as good as finished before it took hold.” Joy adjusts her long wooden beads.

  “I don’t dislike men generally, darling….Oh no, I wouldn’t say that at all. I’ve rather liked a number of them over the years.” She takes a long sip and appears to be remembering the ones she has liked over the years and all the reasons she liked them.

  “Men can be tremendous fun, and some are generous and kind and use their strength in positive ways. Some actually respect women’s minds,” she says, pushing up the gray curls on the left side of her neck with a cupped hand.

  “But I’ve come to realize, especially in this last year, that many of them are not that way. And even if they never lay a hand on the women in their lives, they all seem to want to lay down the law…they want to control women, and quite frankly, I’m jack of that, pet, and I’m not the only one.”

  Joy pulls a book from the drawer at the end of the table. It has a woman’s torso on the cover, hanging from a bar, all hollowed out without any arms or legs.

  “I was invited to join Liberty Club by my old school chum Helen Hayes. She gathered us together as a consciousness-raising group after her divorce when she went back to university to finish her arts degree. She’d read The Female Eunuch in Women and Philosophy, and she urged us all to do the same. You can read it too, pet—when you’re a bit older,” Joy says, patting the book. “I thought at first that the group would be a good way to broaden my horizons: you know, new friendships, interesting conversations, a night out, really. I certainly wasn’t thinking about empowerment, darling.” I want to ask Joy what empowerment is exactly, but she’s on a roll, barely stopping to take a breath.

  “And when we got down to it and I started to hear the other women’s stories, I realized that I too had been oppressed…all my life.”

  “What does oppressed mean?” I manage to slip in.

  “Well, for me it meant not being able to make my own decisions or direct my own life in any way at all: I was always under the control of a man. I was made to feel inadequate, hopeless and dependent. But after talking to other women it became clear that I wasn’t bad or mad for feeling resentful about this. A lot of them were feeling the same.

  “Then Wendy joined Liberty Club, and she brought with her a new and urgent perspective. She’s witnessed so many women—young and old and at every point in between—not just oppressed but living with constant violence, victims of crushing brutality. The scales were lifted from my eyes, darling. I had what you could call an awakening. I realized that through the Sisterhood we had to change the agenda.

  “The brave Suffragettes won women the vote early this century, and some property rights too, but that’s not enough. We need to do more. Women’s isolated problems and individual miseries are rarely isolated, or individual. So, darling”—Joy leans forward and places her hand on mine—“the most important thing to understand about women’s liberation is…the personal is political.”

  If that’s the most important thing to understand, I’d better let my grandmother know: “I don’t really understand that bit at all, Joy.”

  She pauses, then goes on to explain, “Women have always blamed themselves for their unhappy circumstances, pet, when in fact their diminished lives are not the outcome of their individual choices but are part of systematic oppression: men are holding all the power in society, and holding it over women. We need to challenge this. And we need to press on and campaign for other rights, too: equal opportunity, equal pay and childcare to make it all possible.” Joy’s voice is marching now. “We need to overturn this age-old notion of women being inferior to men. Put an end to this servitude. It’s only through true equality that women will ever be in control of their lives and free of violence.”

  I’m thinking of the Liberty Club meetings I overhear on warm nights through my open window, when bubbles of energy and feathers of conversation float into my room. I’m picturing the ladies with their notepads and pens, cigarettes and flagons of wine, their music and linked arms and sometimes their dancing. I’m remembering the little girl in the dirty yellow pajamas in Joy’s garden kicking me hard in the back of my heel and telling me about her father hitting her mother on the bathroom floor, and Joy’s crisping burnt face after she copped a blow from Patricia’s fake dad who went mad with boiling water after another bender.

  That part of my heart that stores jigsaw pieces in not-sure-where-they-go categories is placing them down now, one piece after another after another. A picture is starting to take shape.

  There’s no more tea in the pot and Joy gets up, I think at first to reboil the kettle, but she goes to her medicine cabinet in the cupboard above the fridge and gets out a little glass bottle.

  “I’m interested in change mostly because of you, Ally. Yes, my little Liberata, you! I want you to be able to decide your own course and steer your own ship and be in control of your own life. I want you to live in a world where you are empowered to be the very essence of yourself and to live that essence and feel free to express that essence. I want you to have opportunities and to work in fields that excite you and to have your own purse, to achieve financial freedom. To love and be loved, but mostly to be valued as a whole person full of potential.” Joy is catching the large tears falling from her left eye as they roll to the high point of her cheekbone. I don’t fully understand why, but my eyes are starting to water too. That seems to encourage Joy’s tears further. She brings her arm around my back to my face, holds her glass bottle against my cheek and catches a few fresh drops of tears from me.

  So it seems that Joy is definitely a spirited woman and a women’s libber and that I might have something to do with it.

  Matilde is calling out for me from Number 23. It’s almost six o’clock and time to go in for dinner: it’s paprikas krumpli tonight. I leave Joy busy dating and labeling the new colored-glass bottle containing her old and my young tears: SEALING SISTERHOOD.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Matilde has made a gift on her Singer for Sister Josepha. I think it’s to thank her for teaching me the stuff for that exam that got me into Sydney Girls High. She passes me the gift, wrapped in brown paper, with instructions to drop it off at the convent tomorrow on my way home from school.

  “If you are invited to go in, do not stay long, Allegra,” she says. “You do not want to impose.” She hasn’t told me what the gift is, and I haven’t asked. What could you possibly give to a nun?

  “Oh, Allegra, what a lovely surprise,” says Sister Josepha when she opens the convent front door. “C
ome in, come in. Tell me all about how things are going at your new school.”

  Back again in the convent with Sister on the tapestry couch, eating Shortbread Creams, everything looks pretty much the same as last time, only there’s a new picture of Jesus on top of the television set. But in this one he’s not pointing at his red heart or carrying a cross or holding out his bloody nailed hands. He looks kind of cool, like someone you could bump into at Bondi Beach.

  “Are you enjoying the challenge of Sydney Girls High, Allegra?” asks Sister.

  “Yes I am, thank you, Sister,” I say, thinking that the Jesus on top of the telly could be a surfie.

  “And what would you say is your favorite subject?” she asks.

  “I kind of like them all,” I respond, thinking that maybe the new Jesus could be a pop star, or even a Riffraff. “Science is good. English is probably my best one.”

  “Any thoughts on what you’d like to do when you leave school?” she says, catching my eye looking at Jesus.

  “Matilde really wants me to be a doctor…but I’m not so sure I could do that.”

  “Allegra, I’m sure you could do that,” says Sister. “Or anything else you put your mind to. You have been blessed with a wonderful intellect. What’s important, dear, is that you choose for yourself what you want to do.”

  “But I need to choose something that will make Matilde proud, and something that pleases Joy. Matilde wants me to be a success; you know, so I can earn good money. I think she wants me to have a job that people respect.”

  “It’s a funny thing, Allegra,” says Sister, offering me another Shortbread Cream. “People think respect comes from success, fame or fortune, when in fact the most admired quality at the end of the day is kindness. Because kindness, dear—kindness—is the best indicator of a person’s well-being. Yes indeed, kind people are those who truly take pleasure in their time on earth.”